VW's Jumbo new offering is titanic to live with and genuinely amusing to drive, but is it a condescending German prank on America?
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Upon meeting an elderly recently immigrated German friend of my mother's for the first time yesterday, she exclaimed He looks German!... and so tall! Both of these compliments were relatively true, but certainly not extremely. I am more German-looking than not, perhaps. Supposedly, I am half a product of a very large family whose elders are only one and two generations from German royalty – my legal last name is on a state sign in front of a small black castle somewhere in Der Vaterland. I slacked through two years of high school German language classes – Frau Rosa once took me aside to ask you’re not going to shoot up the school or anything, right? (Sorry Frau & peers.) Though my much-older half siblings grew up mostly in the town of Schweinfurt, I have never actually set foot in Germany, yet I’ve come to identify with and admire its culture enough to (perhaps unjustly or inappropriately) feel comfortable joking about Deutsche peculiarities as vain self-mockery.
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Despite all of this (carefully nationalism-free) affection, the real truth of myself is an American one. I have long since broached the point of no return: no matter how hard I might try, I would never be able to mold the Me another perceives in such a way that I’d become observably German-native. I’m just a midwestern boy with a Germanic name on his paperwork, and therefore have more in common with Volkswagen’s newish entry into the dramatically different full-size Sport Utility Vehicle segment. The Atlas bears a remarkably good name (annoyingly, literally everyone's reviews seem to begin with a comment on how decipherable the new name is for Americans) – especially among new automotive products introduced to market in recent memory. Honda’s Clarityshould be clever alongside the definitively 21st-century Insight marque, but violates an unfortunately universal law in the industry: never name a car for a state of being (Introducing the New 2020 Honda Ambiguity [Insolence, Fugue, Debacle, Setback]) ~especially~ one so obtusely irrelevant to the product itself. Insight comes from a chat with a colleague over coffee, but Clarity is a metaphysical, zealous plane that sounds our ever-inadequate platitude alarms in a very unsettling manner. Um... Is Honda doing okay? It not only ends up irritating and off-putting: after Hannah’s season of The Bachelorette, it’s just dumb, lazy, and foul.
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After decades of trying to force Yankees into models that many found too small, VW has figured it out: Big-ass SUVs are what Americans want, and the Atlas is designed around the biggest asses you can imagine.
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In contrast, the fucking Nissan Kicks ages so swiftly and uncomfortably that it’s pitifully tacky before it even hits the lot, which is particularly disappointing considering the most cleverly bestowed Juke name was. One marvels at the situation Nissan has found itself in: young American black men love our brand, but they also love shoes! Atlas, though, is on par with Honda’s Odyssey inspirationally, though a smidge more grounded through the distinctly Earthen science of topography, just as it should be. Originally billed as a replacement for VW’s Routan minivan, the three-row Atlas is Volkswagen’s newest bid for the Panic Room-loving American parent demographic. Therefore, it’s crucial for us to examine it thoroughly for any signs of condescension from the Germans and their brand “whose business in the US is built on providing small, fun-to-drive cars like the Golf, the Beetle, the Jetta, and the Passat.”
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From our perspective, what we have here is a German take on the American family SUV. A Ford Explorer by way of Wolfsburg, if you will. Well, sort of. The Atlas is actually built in Chattanooga, Tennessee alongside the Passat sedan.
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Unavoidably, the most notable, remarkable, and extraordinary item to note about the Atlas is simply that it is fucking fat. Just about any review you watch or read will mention this. Even CNET calls theirs “a very broad boy.” After I first read the number – 5997 lbs. – I was never able to escape it throughout the entirety of my time with it. Three tons is unbelievably, inexcusably, violently, hopelessly heavy. Hopelessly not because it stands out in its segment, but that it does not. Obesity is still a problem in America, but it's our automobiles now. While we continue to worship safety and fuel economy together, we skew the triangle (the other side is performance) further and further, and yes – a good portion of the blame can be placed on our obsession with SUVs. I spent 2018 driving a 1976 Lincoln Continental Mk. IV around – the second-longest two-door car ever sold at 228.1 inches from its pointed nose to its massive ass. Despite being a full thirty inches longer than the 2019 Atlas, my 460-powered mammoth yacht weighed some 700 pounds less, and it was filled with real wood. I'm no expert in physics by any means, but I can tell you that every pound has expounding effects on the energy required to move, turn, and stop a vehicle, which just about sums up the ultimate formula to pulverize efficiency. When our friends at the IIHS say that “fuel economy can be improved without sacrificing safety,” they are just... fundamentally wrong, (though technically correct.)
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I'm not entirely sure why the Atlas weighs so much, but its mass is inevitably a major variable in just about every facet of its experience as a product. The best potential hoot to be had from it as a driving device should be sought by ordering it to shuffle briskly on curving country blacktops in Sport Mode with all the assists (save for lane-keeping) on. Not to be too crude, but it's fun to make the fat fucker run. Through your ass, you can feel the suspension squirm and struggle to redirect all 266 lb.-ft. of VR6 oomf between 4 wheels beneath an entirely separate war against the physics of such top-heavy body roll.
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Scrambling is definitely the correct verb. Pleasantly light steering in Comfort Mode (where I'd advise you leave it in virtually any situation) combined with a supple-ish ride from multilink suspension provide a trace of a past luxury sentiment not unlike the energy exhibited by my old Connie through and through. It's all about the sensation of power. Not in the horse sense, but in the satisfaction achieved from the manipulation of maximum mass with minimum effort. Comparatively, the level of actual ego-stroking is of course quite miniscule, and unfortunately, it is the numbness that is most noticeably left over with very little gain.
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Also unfortunate: I did not end up making the opportunity to truly test whatever offroad capabilities the Atlas may posses in any sort of formalized test. My example came with Hill Descent Control and Hill Start Assist, and I was able to find a small hill just steep enough to trigger the former. I cannot say I'd put my money on the Atlas winning the Dakar as it is, but we now know it can handle wet grass on a mild incline. What about county road gravel? Realistically, these are the two extremes 99% of Atlas' will ever face in their usable service lives. I found an entirely quiet section of back rock road and walked through the steps to disable all of the traction and stability control assists before stomping on the throttle, but was unable to provoke any significant wheelspin. In an episode of Autoline After Hours, Michael Loveti (Vice President, Product Line Mid/Full-Size, Volkswagen Group of America, Inc.) confirms the drivetrain really isall-time all-wheel-drive, (though the dual exhaust ports in the rear are unfortunately fake,) and that the Atlas is actually based on the MQB platform, which is astonishing. Prospective buyers should definitely have a listen.
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This theme of “thoroughly German, yet somehow distinctly Americanized” occurs over and over and over and over again in the Atlas' story. Its horizontal lines match both the Jetta and Ford's Explorer. In that way, surely it is a success. I cannot imagine a better execution of its marque's directives as stated by Mr. Loveti than what I drove.
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Cover the Volkswagen logo and you might think the Atlas was made by someone else. The hard lines and boxy shape are a sharp departure from the rest of the VW lineup. But look at its competitors here in the states, especially the Ford Explorer. It’s almost like Volkswagen tried to build its own Ford with the Atlas.
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Even though it has been on the market for only a year, the Atlas had become VW's second-most-popular car in the German automaker's lineup in March 2018, showing that the American car-buying public's thirst for crossovers and SUVs remains unslaked.
In the splitting of already fine hairs, it's the new Telluride that makes a stronger case over the Atlas, thanks to its price advantage, its plush and thoughtful appointments, and its slightly more comfortable third-row.
Freedom through security. In truth, neurotypical people are naturally driven to minimize risk, yet also to romanticize the sick, inhibitionless madmen – to envy them both internally and externally (in a most restrained way.) Collectively, our authority in (or mastery of) risktaking remains pathetically irrational. If we were to itemize our ability to asses risk into a sixth physical sense, it would rank just as poorly against the rest of the world's creatures (or perhaps neck-and-neck with those of the squirrel or the deer.)
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So many struggles of the too-often-cited “Human Condition” are grounded in the incompetence of this sense. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that risktakers in general are a very special topic amid The Middle Class – those who occasionally find themselves atop just enough excess to call it “capital.” This equates in day-to-day life as only the most potent – yet almost entirely inert next to the cushion of multi-millionaires – subject, catalyst, and indicator of dire fret. By far the most widespread affectation of this petty affliction spreads like divine wrath over the upper forty percent of this Middle Class. Thus, we must ask ourselves how safe doth the Atlas make me feel?
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Inside
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My Atlas’ interior was finished in Titan Black Leatherette, which sounds both grandiose and a bit like a kink. “Volkswagen is known for good build quality and tight-feeling interiors,” writes Danny Geraghty for Auto123, “but I found I was encountering just a bit too much hard plastic, making for a somewhat dated feel.” Perhaps my loaner was less worn in because neither I nor my girlfriend found anything wrong with the Atlas’ interior quality – even after bombing gravel roads to the point of sustaining a left-rear puncture, we did not encounter any annoying squeaks or rattles. She spent an entire afternoon sleeping in the passenger’s seat reclined and described it as “comfy.” For The Car Connection, Senior Editor Andrew Ganz writes:
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It’s not much to behold, with a chunky shape as conservative as they come that is not offset by a distinct lack of flair inside. Instead, the Atlas is quietly competent and exceptionally good at carrying seven humans—even seven adults.
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Standard with the SEL trim is Volkswagen’s “Digital Cockpit” instrument panel, which I like much more than I expected to, though its color options are already dated and unfortunately unchangeable. Ageability is an inevitable issue with these sorts of bespoke graphic design decisions automakers are making now, but at least you’ll be able to tell your friends that your Volkswagen has a digital dashboard “just like the Rolls-Royce Phantom,” which is, of course, the ultimate Queen of timelessness in the industry. Perhaps it’s telling that the only layout I found acceptable for the digital dash was the one with simulated analog needles for the tach and speedo, and how often do you really use a compass in day-to-day driving? For that matter, how useful could a digital compass in the speedometer’s center hub really be in an “offroad” situation? It’s a bit petty, but I also really despise the typeface shared across the instruments and infotainment system. It’s just… bad.
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Outside
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In Platinum Gray Metallic, the Atlas looks authoritative enough in a very ordinary way. Unless you’re on the lookout for one, you’d hardly notice it, and you certainly wouldn’t expect what you see to cost as much as it does. That is why I’d prefer any one of the other exterior finishes, especially (in order): Pure White, Tourmaline Blue Metallic, Pacific Blue Metallic, and Fortana Red. The real wonder is how VW managed to execute a seven-seat SUV with its existing design language. Though the Atlas is by far Volkswagen’s largest vehicle, it fits neatly within their lineup.
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Road Rage
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My only authentic Road Rage experience in some 5000 miles of rideshare driving occurred on All Hallow's Eve when I stopped – no more illegally than usual – on the opposite corner from a popular downtown Mexican restaurant called The Nap with hazards and all courtesy interior lights shining. The car immediately behind me hesitated no more than necessary, but the Biggest Big Infiniti behind them (a QX80 – the Atlas' competitor) just... stopped. There was honking and frenzied, hoarse screaming of what the fuck are you doing? and such.
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I responded with pleasantly amused but relatively-encouraging glances at the impersonal black mass of the Infiniti's windshield through my mirrors. I rolled down the Atlas' driver's side window and politely gestured that they go around me, but failed to coax any movement whatsoever from the ugly behemoth through at least two full cycles of the nearby traffic light. There must be some aquatic authority in the bulbous black ass of the QX80, for no one behind it seemed willing to pass either. The driver waited significantly longer than you'd imagine before emerging, huffy. She was wearing a classic poofy black North Face vest some sort of slate gray turtleneck. Nothing below these were stimulating enough to retain any memory of. Uggs?
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How positive are you that the truth has absolutely zero consequence: contrasted silver-beige eyeliner and little eye contact, dirty-ish straight blonde hair over a spray-tanned face, exhibiting zero anxious tics or hesitation. She was obviously the New Matriarch, and she was obviously much more of an authority on traffic law than I. As she approached, she scanned the street as one naturally does when they enter a busy one... except it was completely empty, thanks to her blockade. She first informed me that I was “not supposed” to be stopped there. I tried to listen and respond with as much sincerity as possible as I realized all at once that my behavior had genuinely perturbed this woman – that her choice to leave the huge hideous warmth of the guppy wagon to speak as humans to one another required great courage.
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I inserted the next logical question which I'd been screaming telepathically: can you not get around me? I began to pity her when I then saw in her face the distinct possibility that going around as a concept had not occurred to her whatsoever. She stuttered a wee bit in retorting “I could go around, but I don't want to get a ticket.” Here, one of the most fascinating avenues of suburban psychology is explored: Guppy Mom is not being ingenuine with this expression, nor has she had an untoward experience with law enforcement, ever. Guppy Mom did know her excuse was bullshit – nobody has ever been written a traffic citation for carefully circumventing an obstacle in the road. Given the opportunity to interrogate this kernel of entirely uncompromising obedience to utterly delusional traffic law superstitions, I think we'd simply discover a life of unnaturally positive interactions with LEOs. We must conclude, then, that the source of her fear was either myself or the Atlas.
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Granted, to her I am still a Young Man, and am therefore instinctively programmed to believe myself more informed than literally everyone – even the very foundational architects of modern civilization. Her Stucco Highness may have felt a representative of these builders (edgy take: she is in fact their servant.) Her own folks surely complain regularly about their distaste for disrespect, and my gig-economy, Austin Powers-looking ass was somehow disrespecting the order laid down by her would be (entirely fantastical) forefathers. Though her expression of her quaint fear of such “ugliness” (if you will) is hard-headed, an ugliest decision of hers (or her kin) idled behind me, its giant seafood-looking mouth gaping, unhinged. It'd almost be more redeemable if it was a hardcore, chronic mouthbreather. (The QX80 is actually powered by a comparatively oldschool V8.)
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Freedom from fear is the sum desire of all the most primitive compulsions we share. Ultimately, the only efficient and reasonable response to Mrs. Guppy's kind in such a situation is to very kindly oblige, which I did, of course, with great respect and great pity. In the months since this encounter, I'd been wondering what was missing from the outline of this Atlas review. I recently realized that it is this analysis of fear as a factor for the American carbuyer.
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Though it has been disproven over and over again for decades, consumers often cite safety as their primary motivation for buying full-sized SUVs. Mrs. Guppy's Great Guffaw led me to realize why this particularly disconnected supposition/folktale continues to thrive so uninhibited by the truth: the brand image, physical presence, and actual driving sensation must communicate and “feel” safe – these are far more integral to buyers' perception of a product than the testable reality. Even the people of the world's most Christian nation do not have faith – they trust not unless they see with their own eyes; feel with their own asses. They entrust their souls to the Word of the Lord, but not their lives to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. (I recently gave both of mine to NHTSA for All Eternity.)
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The Collegiate Take
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The two or three nights I spent Uber/Lyft driving around my college town shuttling Halloween party traffic in the Atlas were expectedly uneventful. I had to create a preset text message to send immediately upon connection with a rider to communicate as succinctly as possible that I was not going to be arriving in the Jetta Sportwagen on my profile but instead in the Atlas, and to transparently try to make sure that was okay. (No, drivers are not supposed to do this and you should reserve the right to bail on a ride should you find yourself opposite my own position in this situation because nobody refused me.)
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Hello! Just a heads up: My Jetta is in the shop so I'm driving a gray 2019 Volkswagen Atlas
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(It's VW's largest SUV and has 7 seats.)
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License: FATLAS
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If this is inconvenient or uncomfortable for you, please let me know.
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Thank you!
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I made a point to try and ask most of the riders if they had any thoughts on the Atlas without sounding like I was just desperately fishing for compliments on my own car, but I don't remember any significant thoughts being imparted whatsoever – certainly nothing negative. Folks here are just too polite – they won't speak up no matter how many times you insist that you do not own the car. We experienced this phenomena years ago when we tried to interview people on the street regarding the horrid Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet. Regardless, there's no reason to expect young people to have anything to say about the Atlas – it is neither extraordinary nor cheap.
[Atlas] was designed and built specifically for American families, and buyers and critics alike are letting us know that we’re hitting the mark with this seven-seater SUV.
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It's immediately evident from the outside that the Atlas is the most Americanized product in Volkswagen's lineup – indeed, in its entire history. For Car Magazine's review, Ben Barry notes “the square-jawed front, Jeep-like wheel arches, and the suggestive utilitarianism of the stampings in the bonnet and roof” before remarking on just how much more you can spend on the Porsche Cayenne's cousin, the beloved Touareg.
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Ultimately, the Atlas is far from a dynamic, agile machine, but it feels comfortable and unintimidating to drive, and perfectly at home on US city streets and the slower-paced driving of California highways.
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Efficiency, the Other Fixation
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Surprisingly, the Atlas carries a rare and precious jewel of automotive history under its broad, satisfying hood. The VR6 “zig zag” arrangement is actually one of Volkswagen legend – defining icons like the Corrado. As Dan Prosser explains for Evo magazine:
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‘VR’ stands for V-Reihenmotor, which translates to V-Inline, describing both vee and inline cylinder layouts. That is, of course, contradictory. The unit is actually a very narrow-angle V6, displacing 2861cc, with two offset banks of cylinders at 15 degrees to one another. Unlike a conventional V6, but exactly like an inline six, there’s just one cylinder head. The result is a six-cylinder engine that’s both much narrower than a typical V6 and shorter than a straight six. In fact, it’s more comparable in size to a four-cylinder than a six, which meant it could slot easily into a Golf floorpan. A creative and borderline ingenious engineering solution.
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The Atlas' 3.6L VR6 makes 276 hp and 266 lb-ft. of torque. Though other reviews cited highway mileage figures of 23-25 mpg, I was able to coax a whole twenty-eight miles-per-gallon on a live Periscope stream without air conditioning or cruise control through a two-way simulated 20 minute commute, through which I suffered for the hard data. My average before resetting the odometer for that feat, though, was 14.7mpg. “Good range and miles between trips to the gas station are criteria I look for in a good car, and the fuel-gulping Atlas rates low in this department” may be the blandest statement of all time, but MotorTrend does have a point – with the same 18.6 gallon fuel tank shared between the four and six cylinder models, the latter realistically has 250 miles of range between fillups, which is pitiful for a modern vehicle in just about any segment. Crossing one State is not enough.
It's a straightforward conversion from Atlas to Atlas Cross Sport. In the name of perceived sportiness, out goes that most minivan of things: the third row of seats.
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Normally, I'd be disgusted with such a thing, but from where I'm sitting, the Cross Sport appears to be what the Atlas should've been all along. The third row seats in my example wasn't any more comfortable than that of a 10-year-old minivan, so removing them for the sake of the second makes perfect sense. According to Car & Driver, the 2021 Atlas will “adopt” the Cross Sport's styling, though there are some technologies – like road sign recognition- which are exclusive to the Cross Sport.
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Instead of getting 20.6 cubic feet of cargo space behind the third row in the Atlas, you get 40.3 behind the second row. Fold that down and it becomes 77.8 cubic feet to work with. And that’s from an SUV with the same wheelbase as the upcoming 2021 Atlas at 117.3 inches, yet it is 5.2 inches shorter and 2.2 inches lower to the ground.
Once we got the steering fixed, my opinion of the Atlas did grow sunnier, though it's still not perfect. Maybe it's not fair to compare the driving experience to my previous long-term vehicle, the slightly smaller Mazda CX-9, but in my opinion the Mazda still sets the ride and handling bar for the competitive set. Setting the Mazda aside, if you hop behind the wheel of one of the newer competitors like the Kia Telluride, there's a noticeable disparity in the refinement in ride quality and body control in the Atlas... Volkswagen should have made the GTI of three-row SUVs, not just another minivan alternative.
The 2018 Volkswagen Atlas does little wrong, but it's light on personality and a little low-rent inside—and it guzzles fuel. It's worth a look, but mostly rivals do more for less.
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Volkswagen’s first substantial entry into the SUV market is well-named, relatively well-endowed, fairly bland for its price tag, and very, very heavy. Also, Start/Stop is still unbearable – thanks Obama – but the Atlas is not a scam.
Volkswagen traditionally tuned its suspensions closer to the European ideal, firm but well-damped, which incidentally made even non-enthusiast Volkswagens more pleasant than average to drive (with a few recent exceptions). But Volkswagen made a conscious decision to soften up the Jetta for American tastes, beyond what softening Volkswagen traditionally applied, and it seems like this philosophy scaled up to the much larger Atlas. Maybe the soft ride impresses on test drives, but a firmer setup would likely make life nicer for occupants over the long haul.
Screens and software subjects big & small discussed within my most moderate 35,000 words ever.
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Believe it or not, the cyclical cold season has once again come to pass! Oh, the W̘͖̯E̟̹À̫T̯̫͓̪̮͓̼H̝E̪͇̰̘̖͍ͅŔ͍̖̱̟̪!! If the past two days on Twitter were any indication, it is indeed time for a year's-end retrospective on what has been published on this Web Site. Given the extent of the attention I've devoted to bilge.world this past year – both technically and editorially – I thought it would be nice to chuck in a bit more in the pursuit of whacking myself on the back. I understand that 2020 has been one helluva catastrophic marker of linear time for just about everyone on Earth – as I write this on its last day, the inexplicable news of MF Doom's death has just surfaced and has already hit my adjacent communities remarkably hard.
I had forgotten *a lot* more about CSS and HTML than I originally thought. glad I ended up comfortable enough to find myself with a completely original stylesheet before the end of the year, I suppose. pic.twitter.com/4QwlbEJECU
The earliest archive.org capture of this particular Writeas blog dates back only to May 1st of this year, but its stylistic contrast with the site's current version is immense. I believe I was using Max Henderson's Anxiety theme virtually stock, albeit with some color rearrangements. By the 29th, I had already arrived upon the colors you see today. “You Know I'm Blogging” was just a meta update to say howdy after such a long drought, but “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” actually proved popular (for me) among my newly-connected Fedi crowd, especially, thanks to an annotated share by Writeas on Twitter. Honestly, it was entirely worth it just for the accomplishment of exposing my platform peer Dino Bansigan to Alt+D. Writeas Community Manager CJ Eller and I began corresponding, which led to an interview regarding writing tools, managing fiddly compulsions, and the wonder of Markdown.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list.
I had wanted to write about The Langoliers – Stephen King's flop of a made-for-TV movie/extended Twilight Zone episode – for a long while. It was probably the first program I watched as a child that genuinely disturbed me and always returns to my thoughts by barren-ish experiences. I had planned to watch the whole three hours all the way through and write whatever came to mind, but I only made it halfway or so in “Craig Toomey's Coronavirus” before I ran completely out of steam. I dropped what I had without revision, to this day. Perhaps one day I shall return...
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In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn.
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These two sentences begin the sixth chapter of my indefinitely-postponed novel, Blimp's Burden, and are almost certainly my best writing, ever. My vanity simply wouldn't allow them to go forgotten, so I published the chapter as an excerpt on The Psalms. It may seem an intimidating wall of text, but give it your attention and you'll be amused, I think.
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Summer
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The general, distinctly 21st-century wisdom regarding one's content popularity seems to be something like you never know what's going to blow up. I experienced this phenomena quite severely for the first time in my writing life after posting “Google Is Not God of The Web” on HackerNews right before going out-of-touch for some 13 straight hours amidst a local BLM protest. I did not intend to write a baity title, nor did I expect anything to come of sharing it, there – I only did so simply because the thought crossed my mind. Honestly, it is probably the least-considered content I'd ever published on The Psalms – I only put it up when I did because I knew all of my energy was about to be absorbed for an entire weekend or more. I only started the thing because I felt it important to raise a small voice in reminder that tech media had started using language when discussing code/online development which had begun to assume the existence of a single, objective standard of measure for good web design. (Fuck your bootstrap baloney, The Drywall Website was a realparadigm shit.)
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And yet... That single goddamned post would end up accruing more pageviews than all of my writing on the web, combined (I suspect.) Tens of thousands of words were written in hundreds of comments, which I did my best to parse in a for the hell of it substack email:
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Out of everything I’ve shared on Bilge recently, it’s hilarious that this particular post – on which I spent a cumulative total of perhaps 25 minutes writing and made less effort than ever to edit – became probably my most widely-shared work of all time.
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Once again, I am thankful for the readership and correspondence, I just really fucking wish it had been on literally anything else I've written about technology.
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In retrospect, it really is bonkers that I was excited about yet another vague promise to re-imagine email in the days surrounding the launch of Basecamp's HEY, but I feel it's important to nurture what paltry genuine enthusiasm remains about technology and the future, so I decided to respond to the service's homepage prompt, asking interested visitors to write in with their own thoughts on email. I spent a morning clacking out “Email and I: An Abridged History,” which I hope will one day serve as a part-foundation for a thorough, composed extension to my Why I Write About Technology series. This would be The Psalms last relevant work for a few months, while I played around with an experimental WordPress website and dove into fuckin' school for the first time in seven years.
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Fall
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I returned in late September with a partial recount of what I'd discovered: “Indulging Once More in Digital Excess.” After exploring the concept of Digital Gardens, buying my first pro-ready desktop PC in 10 years, playing with Big Boy Adobe software for the first time, and reading a delightful book documenting the history of word processing, I arrived upon the term Software Historian with which to partially describe myself. It doesn't mean all that much at the moment, but will no doubt be explored imminently on this Web Site.
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Addressing “The Social Dilemma's Dilemma” and “Software Thanksgiving” in detail would be awfully redundant, but I would at least note how they represent diametrically opposed perspectives through which to discuss this stuff. Going forward into 2021, I think it's important that I hold short on the progress I've made in moderating my voice since 2018. Digestibility is not a virtue I am at all interested in, nor is it an appropriate one in which to invest any more effort. Any non-radical argument will inevitably prove enormously unoriginal, which makes for a huge waste of all our time. For the moment, that's all the editorializing I've done.
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Three Point Oh
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Somewhere along the research process for one of my school essays, I came across the concept of academic revision tracking and peer review via Git. Having dipped my toe back in academia, any such circumvention of its penchant for the most archaic practices possible was naturally intriguing. Just wait until I show these goons how to use hyperlinks. Perhaps inevitably, I was launched into the Git-Gone Bender I'm still riding simply because I finally had ample reason to actually understand it. In just two months, I've created and forked a total of nearly 80 repositories on my new GitHub account. Though I'd created one for each of my web properties ages ago, I had absolutely no idea how to actually make use of them, so they were all quickly abandoned. In the past two weeks or so, I think I've actually begun to get the hang of the system's core intricacies, best exemplified by The Psalms' Repository as it stands.
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The “automated” Project Board I set up has so far been a very impressive replacement for the simple todo list. It tracks and categorizes Post Ideas in their various stages in my process: Mulling, Documentation (research,) Drafting, and actual Publication. Technical “Issues” regarding the CMS and/or the Repository, itself, have also fit in these categories well, so far. Just today, I discovered that one can simply tag Issues by their number to describe Commits, which form an impressive revision-tracking changelog when aggregated together. I also figured out the general idea behind Milestones and set The Psalms' first one for my 27th birthday, next month. The goal is to have figured this all out well enough by then that I'm no longer randomly stumbling upon entire featuresets multiple times in a workday. Thinking in Public – as my friend Tom Critchlow and his crowd say – is what I'm trying to do here, I think. Obviously, this really means that you are more than welcome to hop the fuck in at any time, in any manner you'd prefer. If Git is still no more than a conundrum for you – as it was for me just weeks ago – I would suggest the directory for In-Progress Drafts as a starting point.
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requesting support on how to "leverage discussions" to talk about pee pee and poo poo. #GitHubUniverse
GitHub Actions are still more or less a mystery to me, but I am unbothered – The Psalms' seems to be producing green text instead of red, now, in the midst of whatever I set it up to do. I poked around the livestreams for “GitHub Universe” a few weeks ago, when dark mode and GitHub Discussions were opened up to more users. At the moment, I cannot imagine a single application for forums in the context of my blog's repository, but I turned them on, anyway. It's very possible that all of the documentation-generating functions of Git are entirely unnecessary in this case, but – as I entrust GitHub with the eternal task of archiving such work – it is my hope that it will help me add further structure to my process.
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If you've found yourself in possession of a .edu email address and are interested in GitHub related experimentation, see this list of discounted/free dev programs/services for students, which includes a free subscription to “GitHub Pro.” (Apparently, equivalent to a $4/month service.) Adobe has similar discounts, as you’re probably already aware, which have allowed me to pursue my goal of learning InDesign. So far, I’ve created a sort of commemorative 404 page for The Drynet and a font showcase of Georgia for my mother. As much as I’d love to continue discussing the current state of Adobe apps, I’ve realized 1) I am quite distinct from a professional user, which is why I genuinely find GIMP more useful than Photoshop, for instance, and 2) given the length of my to-write list considering my current pace, I don’t know if I’d manage to get around to it in this lifetime.
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Between now and the 11th of this month, I will be migrating worthwhile posts from the experimental WordPress site (WTF) here and closing its hosting account. I haven’t been compelled to actually do anything with it in months, and the handy redirects, alone, are not worth the upcosts, however fair. Some content – including the corresponding posts for my Adobe experiments will not be imported from WTF here. I’m also going to rely on the Web Archive for publishing the rest. Notable discoveries so far include “Through an iPhone 4’s Lens,” which is a reminder of how revolutionary that particular handset was, and a few extra-Psalms pieces of content I’d like you to experience, like this Notion gallery of my single jaunt into drawing, # DavidBlueDraws. Best of all is my friend Tevin’s episode of Extratone’s defunct flagship podcast. In the years since, he’s become quite the prolific Twitch streamer. (I’ve watched enough and know Tevin well enough to say that he’s particularly entertaining in this medium.)
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Coming Soon
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For better or worse, all of these new exploratory avenues have so far led directly away from the business of actually writing, but – in my best self-estimation – I suspect I’m mostly done with fiddling, now, and ready to start thinking on the page, again. Predictably, I’ve let my upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max Review turn into quite a monstrosity over the past two months. It turns out, years of lapsed attention toward iOS development resulted in my feeling more out-of-the-loop than I expected, which I was compelled to remedy, naturally. If you’re so inclined, you can follow the minutia attached to my review process via this dedicated Snapas gallery, this shared iCloud album, my personal YouTube channel , and this Twitter collection.
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SO... I’m really starting to see the magic now. I just took this and it’s 2AM... utterly dark outside. I managed to force my car mount to couple with a tripod and set the exposure to 30 seconds. pic.twitter.com/FMLGrFzgy2
As per my newfound use of GitHub, I’ve played around with various ways of documenting this journey, specifically. First is this Wiki page (which I shall do my best to remember to keep updated) listing the entirety of my writing history on iPhone and iOS. (It’s uh... A bit underwhelming, if I’m honest.) I’ve also just begun a dedicated repository for iOS-related documentation and resources, which will soon include a full, sensically-indexed list of iCloud share links to my entire Siri Shortcuts collection (I hope.) Immediately following the review, I intend to publish here a post dedicated to functions Apple has failed to properly document, which I expect to be the most widely-useful content on this domain. To see some of the suggestions I’ve received so far and/or to add your own, see this mildly-successful thread I posted in r/iOS.
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When I have finally tired of talking about handsets once more, I hope to return my attention toward some other overwhelmingly-ambitious monstrosities like my academic paper proposing federated, open-source social networks in favor of the Big Boys, my report on the experience of returning to academia for a semester in 2020, and my evaluation of Notion as perhaps the next Big Step in the evolution of notetaking software. Perhaps before tackling projects the size of these, I intend to compile another listicle of handy tips for newcomers to Writeas. As I linked before, you can now view the entirety of The Psalms’ status in as much detail as you’d like via its Project Board on GitHub. As always, you can delight me by directly engaging on Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and/or via email. Let’s hope 2021’s equivalent of this review doesn’t take me until February to publish!
The Psalms (alternatively/interchangeably entitled Bilge) is a monobyline World Wide Web Blog written by 𝒟𝒶𝓋𝒾𝒹 ℬ𝓁𝓊ℯ (good morning!) observing and selectively amplifying the characters, organizations, and stories surrounding the most abrupt, profound, and spectacular communicative renaissance in the history of the human species.
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Less abstractly, its beat is wholly digital, namely in tools (software, services, and methodologies) and culture (music, film, podcasts, and media) from a distinct lens established at good distance from California.
For better or worse, my voice as represented in The Psalms has continued to be saturated with self-referential and occasionally self-disparaging/deprecating qualification. If I am indeed an authority on myself, I would suggest that these are essential tools rather than crutches, and note that I have made some progress in excusing myself for them out of the (perhaps cliché) realization that “life” – and especially truth – can be infinitely complicated, and therefore worthwhile thought on just about anything is inevitably going to be (sometimes aggravatingly) tedious in its complexity.
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I am not a paid journalist and I don’t break stories. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t if an opportunity happened upon me, but it is not where I’m at my best.
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What does The Psalms cover?
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Primarily, this blog exists to amplify undercovered developers, musicians, writers, curators, and media professionals, most often through the process of analyzing their work.
Anyone truly curious about the answer to this question, for whatever reason, should read my very-autobiographical essay “Why I Write About Technology” from 2018, though my perspective has changed quite significantly in the time, since.
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I’m going to take further cue from Casey Newton’s about page format and list a few important assumptions of mine about consumer technology in bullet form:
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The delivery of technology media to the mainstream has lessened its ability to truly write critically about the big tech companies it now shares office buildings with.
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The Open Source/Open Web community continues to struggle with their brand image (if you will) in both old and new ways that needlessly alienate (and sometimes obfuscate) some of their most important contributions from the average user. Technology media has failed in their responsibility to address this issue.
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Women have had a more than equal share in building the digital age and have yet to be recognized for it.
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Black people have important contributions of all sorts to technology that have yet to be recognized.
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The software development community is a source of insights in many aspects of life other than technology. It is also often hopelessly blind to others.
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Technology media has failed to discuss consumer technology’s presence in the lives of working class people, to their own detriment.
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The narrative surrounding consumer technology has been allowed by technology media to shift from products toward organizations and figureheads, perhaps inevitably.
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The power dynamics found in the stories of Software History have thus far been underutilized in technology media’s critical eye on the same elements in today’s narratives.
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How do you get your information?
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Very likely from the same sources you do. As a “self-taught” technology writer, my go-to sources are constantly changing over time. Recently, I have been actively making cold emailing a habit whenever I set upon a given subject, which has produced good results so far. I will more often than not mention any particulars regarding how I found a specific piece of information, reference, web page, etc. in the post itself. Handily, my various Raindrop feeds should prove particularly useful in answering this question in infinite detail. On the social side, my public Twitter Lists should perform the same function.
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How can I interact with The Psalms?
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Emailing davidblue@extratone.com and/or engaging me on Twitter/Mastodon are the simplest ways of getting in touch, but for those interested and/or uncomfortable with those, there are infinitely many more:
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Because The Psalms is integrated with the annotation service Hypothesis, users can literally post public annotations/page notes via the pullout bar on your right (apparently this isn't currently working unless you have the Hypothesis extension installed in your browser.)
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GitHub users can engage with The Psalms Repository. (In theory... This has yet to be tested, so I'd very much appreciate you giving it a try if you've got time.)
If you don’t know the story, please Use Your Googler; I am the last source you should be receiving your first commentary from.
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That so disclaimed, let us reflect on the fascinating — if somewhat universally disturbing — position in which we find ourselves. (Or, should I say — …you find yourselves.)
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Two options: a ruthless, ridiculously-overqualified and progressively — appropriate flagship of a Democratic Party candidate, opposite an out-of-control, offensive joke of a destructive force that has been directed inward, toward his own Republican Party.
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The only plausible hesitation for the former’s candidacy being a fundamental misunderstanding of the office’s necessities, and of the dangers of the “honesty” popularly idealized in the latter.
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At least they are opposites, so I’m interested enough to write you.
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“The Great Debate” was an ultimate test — not of television — but of the American intellect, and it failed. From the outset of democracy’s greatest leap in perceptive democratization, superficiality claimed victory over policy.
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Today, we are to extrapolate in the journey we’ve taken in the 56 years hence, into — by any standard of measure — another world, entirely. Most importantly, into one with such gigantically-swelling intellectual disparity that it cannot possibly be monitored accurately, even moment-to-moment. The continued feasibility of Donald J. Trump’s candidacy is alarmingly conducive to the fact.
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Note: Donald Trump will not be President of the United States as it has been understood. If he is elected by process, he will be promptly impeached, or the function of the office itself will be reexamined.
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My bias is here: I genuinely believe sociopathic traits make for effective leaders, and am unable to respect anyone without control over their public persona. Trump’s defining acceptance of his undisciplined whirling relegates him — for POTUS, especially — to nothing more than an amusement. He is incapable of the duties that define the position as I know it. (e.g. a commemorative visit to Hiroshima, or participation in the G20 summit.)
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In such spirit, I — perhaps one of the least-qualified political commentators with any sort of voice — have a question to ask of you: are you ready for the first ironic President of the United States of America?
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Perhaps you’d counter, though, with something like: are *you* ready for the first *authentic* President of the United States of America?
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No, America, I am not. And — forgive my patronization — neither are you. I know you feel profoundly devoid of an expressive leader. You, the most hardworking pillars of this society — I know you’ve craved a voice in the game for a very long time, but Mr. Trump’s is no nearer to your own than Mrs. Clinton’s. In fact — in the inescapable game that is the Presidency — she is the better representative simply because she posses the ability to assume any sensical power whatsoever.
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The only insight I have to offer you is that honesty has not, does not, and will never have a place in the White House as long as it stands. This truth is neither good nor bad — it simply is.
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I would plead you to acknowledge the complexity of political maneuvers — regardless of your own moralism — and the truer nature of the role you will ask one of these individuals to fulfill.
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I would ask you to imagine which of the worst of the two you’d rather hold the nuclear briefcase — the tactful, or the primal?
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But — if nothing else — I would suggest you ask yourself if you’d really like the same mouth that formed these words about women to deliver your next State of the Union.
A commitment to share my thoughts where developers actually want them, and an invitation for other reviewers/users to join me.
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I have written more than my fair share of words about software, as I have loved, despised, and been utterly perplexed by it. This year, my return to the iOS community has perhaps inevitably turned apps into an addiction of sorts. This particular platform is so utterly chock full/stocked up of creativity at a scale immeasurably greater and more accessible than the whole of those throughout computing history, combined. For someone like myself, it is all too easy to allow oneself to wander down a virtually endless path of intriguing, very self-indulgent play, especially now that third-party sites like Departures.to have managed to add discoverability to TestFlight beta distributions, allowing those non-millionaires among us opportunities to use test releases of applications we would’ve otherwise had to pay for. This has been exclusively to my benefit – I can only imagine what 15 year-old me would have done with such power.
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In my recent endeavor to focus on making my work more useful to others, I've reflected on something I've heard from nigh every developer of the apps I've reviewed: Ah yes, your blog looks really cool but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE REVIEW MY FUCKING APP on the FUCKING STORE. Read: your commentary is appreciated, but your five stars would almost certainly more economically beneficial.
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As you can see from the image embedded above, I have personally fallen very behind in doing my part for those apps I've celebrated, here. A vague intention to get around to it eventually clearly is not working, so I've decided to give myself a deadline: August 15th, 2021 – precisely one month from today. By this date, I will have sifted through my commentary on apps in this setting and adapted the most useful of it (per app, obviously) into a manner appropriate to appear on an App Store Page, and I would like to formally-ish invite other tech writers/app reviewers to join me.
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so! I found a way to actually find the apps you’re looking for on the App Store! the search function in this dev-facing tool *ACTUALLY WORKS*!!! https://t.co/XrsStvXq57
I'm terrible at community organization, which certainly does not exclude events, so I very much welcome any feedback you might have, as well as any collaborative contributions you'd be interested in making. As I see it, I have a few essential considerations to offer.
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First, the page in the screen capture above – which can be found in the App Store App ⇨ Account (your profile picture in the top-right corner) ⇨ Account Settings (the tapable element at the very top with your profile picture and information) ⇨ Ratings and Reviews – is broken as hell, along with the rest of the Account Settings menu, notably. This is important because I insist we all complain about it on all available channels, considering it's been broken for several months, at least.
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Second, you should almost certainly use this “new” dev-facing tool when searching the App Store, considering that it actually works in a trustable way, unlike the user-facing tool in the app.
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tech writers, app reviewers, interested iOS users, I would like to formally invite you to APP STORE REVIEW DAY - a shared personal commitment to sharing commentary on apps where it actually matters most for developers. https://t.co/hfLooBwCCa
Since the standard online palette of event organization software are all so easy to use, these days, I've established event pages for this event on multiple platforms, linked in the list below, which I will update as per any suggestions/requests for equivalent pages on other services. Of course, it's certainly not a requirement that you join/engage with any of them.
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One could could certainly just add the date to their own calendar (conveniently with this .ics file,) remain entirely silent about the thing on social, and still be participating. Those interested in further engagement, however, can Chat Me Up on Extratone's Discord, the Teams event chat, Telegram, etc. I also plan to reshare most of this post as a thread on Twitter.
As we face the horrendous, utterly inexcusable state of Discovery on the App Store/Apple's general fuckery regarding the independent developers mostly responsible for making its platforms a worthwhile space, I hope I've created something of value in whipping up this “event.” If you have thoughts on how I might do so more effectively, once again, please do reach out.
Us drivers of cars with manual transmissions tend to look down on those who drive automatics. It’s like an exclusive club. Only the extremely talented, gorgeous-looking, and legendary athletes of yore are allowed in.
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Well, that’s bullshit. So those of you that know the “standard” can keep your mouths shut and bask in the quiet satisfaction that you’re saving the planet.
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The truth is, for those of you that don’t know, driving “stick” is totally simple. Once you understand the basic concepts of how the transmission and clutch work together, you can figure it out with no real instruction at all. So with that in mind, I’d like to tell you that automatic transmissions just….suck. Really.
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Mind you, I’m not talking about Dual-Clutch Transmissions, SMGs (Sequential Manual Gearboxes,) or any of that fancy stuff that has only recently become somewhat popular in the mainstream (affordable) auto market. I’m talking about automatics with a torque converter, that magically inefficient device that has carried America’s laziness in driving for the last 50 years.
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Now before I go on, I suppose I owe you a technical explanation. Let’s start with the basics. First off, a transmission is the device that separates the engine from the wheels. With both automatic and manual transmissions, “gears” are used to vary the ratio between the engine’s crankshaft and the drive shaft going to the wheels. It’s essentially a buffer between the engine’s relative consistency and the inconsistent world that you drive in.
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But that’s not quite all there is.
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Traditional transmissions require an interruption in power from the engine to shift these “gears,” and to come to a stop at a traffic light, in your driveway, or on the side of the highway to pick up a hooker. In manuals, this is typically accomplished with a clutch, a device that could most simply be explained as two plates that are pressed together to couple, and brought apart to become independent. A clutch is normally coupled, it’s when the clutch petal is pushed in that the plates separate, and the transmission is isolated from the engine. Automatic transmissions use a type of fluid coupling to accomplish the same task, called a torque converter.
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The advantage of the latter is that, when paired with an automatic transmission, the driver only requires one input to get the car moving and vary its velocity, and that is the accelerator pedal. A manual transmission requires three inputs, on the other hand. (Accelerator pedal, clutch, and gearshift.) In my mind, the torque converter has some huge disadvantages in a world where millions are spent to save 20 lbs. on one car design.
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Have you ever noticed that cars equipped with manuals are usually noticeably more fuel efficient than their automatic counterparts? Some of that could be attributed to the greater control that comes with manuals, but most of it is from the torque converter’s main design flaw. A clutch can be completely disengaged and completely engaged. So, with a healthy vehicle, there is 0% of the engine’s power moving to the transmission when the clutch pedal is depressed fully. Likewise when the clutch pedal is allowed completely out, the clutch essentially becomes a shaft, and 100% of the engine’s power is being fed to the transmission.
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A torque converter couples via fluid, however, meaning there is never a solid mechanical connection between the engine and the transmission. (Unless the transmission is equipped with a lock-up clutch, which is essentially a clutch that locks the torque converter mechanically when it is no longer required to dump the engine’s energy into friction. These are becoming more and more common, but the majority of vehicles on the road are missing them.) This means that a traditional torque converter is never 100% efficient.
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Also, a torque converter is never completely disengaged. When sitting at a traffic light, the driver typically lightly applies the brakes to hold the car from moving forward. Have you ever considered what you’re doing? The engine is basically dumping energy into the torque converter in the form of friction. It is literally no different from holding the gas and the brakes at the same time.
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What the hell? How is that accepted in a world where Al Gore and Prius’s exist?
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Oh wait! As United States citizens, we’re lazy as shit!
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84% of cars sold in North America are equipped with an automatic transmission, as opposed to 20% in Europe.
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You could make the excuse that we love automatics because of all our stop-and-go traffic, and yet, as a citizen of the Midwestern U.S, I see automatics MUCH more often than I see traffic congestion.
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The real answer is that we just don’t want to bother with a clutch pedal and a gearshift when we could be texting or doing makeup.
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Luckily, the great minds of our time have come up with solutions that adapt to us so that we don’t have to adapt to them. (As always.) Probably the simplest is the aforementioned “lock-up clutch,” which eliminates the inefficiency of the torque converter by mechanically coupling at high speed. But that doesn’t exactly solve the problem of sitting over a nice gas to friction converter at traffic lights.
-Well here’s a tip. When you stop at a traffic light, bump your shift lever one up into neutral. It shouldn’t require that you hold a safety button to go back and forth between Drive and Neutral. This prevents that unnecessary friction. Combine that with a lockup clutch, and you’re basically driving a manual!……Except without the enjoyment.
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You could call this a rant on one of the most successful inventions the modern automobile has ever seen….because it is. And I doubt you’ll hear anyone else complain about it. But there really are flaws in the design that I wish consumers would figure out. Before all this hybridism, eco-mindedness, and hippie-crazed green malarkey, maybe we should eliminate the evil energy-wasting beast that is the torque converter.
Opera's no-connection mascot is the cutest branding on any current web browser. Fight me.
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Yesterday, I finished moving out of the situation I’d been living in for ~6 weeks in the basement of a southeast Portland home near the western base of Mt. Tabor. You'd see it just across from the flat Washington Mall-ish grass rectangle that provides daring suburban explorers their most worthwhile reward for reaching the top. It resembles one of many local residential templates which I was completely unequipped to understand when I arrived in the area last year. You'll never observe any of its inhabitants outside doing any of the things people do when they are unaware of – or unconcerned with being observed. Walking by an afternoon front yard “family gathering” (young white parents and their one or two children) is a prospect of haste. Introducing new movement to the vicinity after the sun has gone down stirs a disruption from deep within its energy. Everyone in this town is afraid. I say it’s an unnatural way to live, but I’m just a fucking bumpkin.
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As you may or may not have observed, the vast majority of my working being lives on the World Wide Web, which requires, fundamentally…. An internet connection. In most any other present-day first world circumstance, these are infinitely available, but I discovered – after the moving process was entirely completed, of course – that my tenants did not actually have an in-house connection of their own. They explained to me that their neighbor – an “IT professional” for IBM – had offered to let them use his WiFi network, and they’d found the arrangement sufficient. However, because IBM is The archaic marque of digital fascism (disclosure: they are also my sworn blood enemy,) it wasn’t altogether a surprise when they told me that his offer did not extend to “guests.”
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I considered that a defined period of WiFi fasting at home could make for an interesting experiment – perhaps even a needed mental reset – and I couldn't reasonably afford to acquire my own dedicated 4G hotspot, anyway. The reality became a relentless paranoid battle for any trickle of access – sometimes for a dozen bytes per second; for just the most basic digital communications like SMS and email – which led to more superstitious hypotheses about precarious antenna orientation, progress bar hallucinations, out-of-control frustration, and hopeless fixation with refresh commands than I remember from 2nd generation cell networks in the Midwest, 10 years ago, or even domestic dial-up, and truly revealed the extent to which I'd taken connectivity for granted.
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My observations of my own behavior throughout this drought are worth more than their mild amusement: even this petty disparity (I was never more than two or three yards from nearly-whole signal at the top of the outside stairs) re-sensitized my perspective to the abstract concept of network unreliability which I'd been entirely spared since prepubescence. Though 4 billion human beings now regularly interact with the World Wide Web, their connections span a mathematically gargantuan spectrum of speed and reliability. In urbanizing myself as an adult, I have unconsciously latched on to the entitled ideal that internet access is a public service and accepted dramatically-increasing dependence on services that engorge greater and greater volumes of bandwidth without any explanation but their lack of incentives for efficiency. I reflect on my relationship with technology every day, yet I still became an oblivious data glutton in mind-bogglingly little time.
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The current state of connectivity in the United States, alone is quite alarming under 5-year-absent examination. Mobile carriers are still merging and the compartmentalization of all ISP customers between prioritization tiers continues to be tested, less encumbered by regulatory safeguards than ever. I don't know my politics on this issue, nor do I have any specific solutions, but I'd point to the work of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, and express only that I hope the pace of the technology's progress is greater than the growth of its merchants' imaginations and the scope of their greed so that the sheer volume of plenty overcomes even the shortest-sighted, and humanity as a whole continues toward a more just distribution of connectivity. What I am in a position to share are the revelations about our current infrastructure, software services, and hardware devices I could only have discovered from such an experience.
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Variables
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I remember standing on top of a John Deere combine's 15ft-high roof in order to successfully make a telephone call 10 years ago – one of thousands of behaviors which were more abruptly and universally required for a few years and subsequently more abruptly forgotten than any other such united tick in American history. This blip of shared technological adversity also led to an unfathomably vast collective mythology surrounding incredibly tedious manipulation of our archaic handsets in varying degrees of desperation for just one bar.
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My Sprint plan includes unlimited 4G LTE data for my iPhone 8 Plus with a 10GB tethering limit – which performed so admirably in the lonely role of my thin tether to the rest of the world that I am obligated to actually use the phrase like a champ, but the quality of its connection is dramatically impacted by the studio apartment's depth. From the space's geometric center at stomach-level, the handset indicates “1x,” meaning CDMA 1x, which is technically a data connection, but certainly not in any usable sense for the network applications of 2018. The native Twitter app, Apple Mail, Snapchat, Instagram & Facebook, Safari, Opera Mini, Firefox, Chrome, and all others I tested in this condition would simply timeout – giving up after a minute or two of repeated attempts before declining to continue, each in their own minor variations. An interesting anecdote: in a pertinent reflection our human ballooning expectations for connectivity at all times, the language of our creations across both iOS and desktop applications has recently become noticeably less accountable and more accusatory. Instead of saying “____ can’t connect to the internet,” many of the browsers will declare an absolute: there is no internet connection, or just straight up blame the user: “you are not connected to the internet.” (Emphasis mine.) No apologies... No regrets.
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Dude, no wifi? Where the fuck are U?
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Directly above my head’s place on the bed, the phone could be propped on the sill of the East-facing window on a clear-skied day, enabling it to scrounge up and loosely establish enough contact to receive calls and text messages, claiming 1-4 3G “bars,” and a single in 4G at night, though one overcast Northwestern week basically did it in completely. If we were actually doing something to noticeably increase our old Nokia boxes’ bandwidth bids on those early networks by turning them every which way to find “better reception,” it’s completely futile on current devices. (I’m fairly sure I remember a network professional explaining this to me when LTE was first gaining traction.) It was immediately apparent that orientation had no effect, but the handset’s bearing certainly did… Most sensitively so. I realized quite early on that I should endeavor not to spend too much time standing in different positions throughout the space attempting to will on a browser loader bar above a story I’ve probably read already. Intstead, I committed to the very first position that indicated any correlation whatsoever with a better connection: atop the biscuit tin on the metal rack nearest the outside door.
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It’s been three months, but I’m still using my tired old Hewlett-Packard 6930p backup machine, so I was very skeptical about the odds we’d be successfully reliably pairing its ancient network adapter – now worth just $9.99 – with that of A Cellular Phone 10 years its junior without struggling significantly with range or reliability, especially considering that it cannot run a single one of its vast library of proprietary drivers on Linux. You’d at least assume they’d need to be practically touching each other to maintain a smooth marriage, yet the only compromise I had to make on the local end was to bring them near to each other as they paired. Afterwards, I could return the phone to its tin and work on the laptop from the kitchen table, 12-15 feet away. (Curiously enough, the 6930p itself shipped with hotspot capability by way of the SIM card slot behind the unit’s main battery.)
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Quantifying the speed of a mobile data connection as you would a dedicated WiFi network is incongruent because the former trades in a much less consistent packet stream. That’s the extent of my knowledge, but it’s easy to visualize: a signal that can travel a mile or two in big globules bound to be intercepted in splashes upon the device’s little antennae, versus your home network’s local, evenly distributed sauna of irradiated mist. It’s much less definite, to say the least, and I can’t actually comprehend the sort of voodoo that’s required in order to expand and maintain the networks as they are, nor would I ever wish to burden myself with such knowledge.
As the industry endeavors once again to reconcile the cultural and financial incentives of streaming digital music, one independent platform has wavered little from its 10-year-long mission to bring the business to the unsigned artist with elegance and integrity.
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If you’ve ever thought to yourself wow, Bandcamp has looked basically the same forever, you were entirely correct – now for a tenth of the century, at least – and you’ll be hard-pressed to find another Silicon Valley technology company toting a venture-funded origin story with such casual, yet robust long-standing user relationships underneath an unwavering, bullshit-free commitment to their product. Even under the most ludicrous scrutiny, the company’s rudder is flawless and its course true. What at first glance you’d swear to be an unsolicited conclusion to an obscure examination could very reasonably be described as cheesy, stubborn, dweebish, pious, or just generally boring, indeed, yet the respective accuracy of each of these adjectives are no more than the byproducts of the very same operational ethics which we’ve suggested, requested, demanded, and begged the rest of the world’s computing capitol to re-adopt, enforce, or at least ponder for a beat. The volume of the masses’ exponentially-increasing attendance of late is only overcome by its hysterical shouting match, so let us pipe down for a while, now so that we may be precise as we dig deeper into the methodology which has finally led to a profitable, drama-free outlying technology organization without the need for a single drop of analogous sweat over its brand upkeep. By arranging the company in its infancy to so precisely and elementally align with the needs of its customers, the original troupe of Bandcamp Bums ensured profound and lasting simplicity in the single overarching priority for those in every single role behind the quiet perpetuation of Bandcamp dot com: selling goodmusic.
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The platform indiscriminately provides both individual artists and labels with a clean, cozy, charming, smartly-designed and technically competent storefront with a wide-open storage allocation, optimal search engine optimization and a widely-trusted point of sale experience in exchange for 15% of any sales that should come in – significantly less than other channels; half what Apple Music will take. In examining Bandcamp’s history, its impact on independent music, and its viability as an alternative streaming service, we shall excavate the truth behind the derisive cynicism directed its way by the titans of the tech and music press. Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
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To catch our starting gun, we must first travel to Face The Music 2016 in Melbourne – as far as one can possibly get from The Valley – alongside Bandcamp’s super-worldly Chief Curator, Andrew Jervis to observe his interview for a live audience.
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Bandcamp has always grown extremely organically. There’s never actually been any advertising that we’ve done; there’s never any advertising on the site, and there never will be. We haven’t really tooted our horn very hard.
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In fact, just about everything from the shrewd idealism of those who beget its conception to the on-the-nose care in their person-to-person customer service is so adamantly inverse of the tech industry archetype which the global End User community at large are presently discovering at twice the speed of sound there should at least be some conspiratorializing going around. Where I come from, launching a desolate business to little mainstream success with persistence and dignified determination is (or should be) regarded as a telltale sign that one is running a front (according to the television, anyway,) but exploration of this plausibility yielded nothing in Bandcamp’s case, even after I took the risk of incrimination and begged a certain Boston-based future funk producer to accept my ginormous bribe and include any sort of pharmacological substance with his summer beat tape. He wouldn’t even send antihistamines.
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As uncomfortably as it lands on the soul, no moniker describes Bandcamp more comprehensively than “an online record store.” As far as Ethans go, Bandcamp’s CEO and founders’ public attaché Ethan Diamond is as good as they come: it’s quite telling that he is the only Silicon Valley CEO who’s remained intellectually grounded enough with the rest of us in order to retain any skills in nuanced forms of verbal communication like… humor. The closest the company has ever come to promotion? His awkward, sub-20-minute presentation at the XOXO Festival 2014 offered an impressively succinct introduction to their greater mission considering the unmistakable agony in his body language.
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“We worked out of the public library for the first four years of the company's existence,” he admits. Impressively, Bandcamp was operated entirely as a “virtual company” until 2015.
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Either Bandcamp just happens to be the single Silicon Valley company where the executives are unanimously so fucking fulfilled by their work without exception that they aren’t compelled to leave it long enough to stumble upon the inevitable coastal colleague with a connection to something like The Internet History Podcast, or technology journalism has definitively lost all reverence for actual innovation in favor of the emotionally-charged Innovation Myth, now relinquished almost entirely to the narrative control of its own protagonists. Perhaps it was inevitable that Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos would become immortalized as “those who make things happen,” but our ability to quantify value as consumers tends to scurry rapidly away behind our backs when they’re turned by the constant distraction of these mostly inert figureheads. As their personalities have stolen the story, the people in industry with their hands on real product have all but completely disappeared from the frame, and all of the work remaining at the End User’s eye level was abandoned by aspiration long ago and replaced with the unfulfilling mechanism of A Quick Buck. Though now we are proceeding into a similar frame – only because our subject cares more about their mission than claiming recognition for it and might just be the first such company run by a cast who become sincerely defensive at the suggestion of a cash-out.
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“Bandcamp’s philosophy has always been very different [from] a lot of the companies we’re surrounded by,” reflects Jervis. “We are not a ‘let’s-raise-money-and-burn-through-it’ type of company.”
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I know that your mind has been trained by years of engagement with the digital media of a rapidly-globalizing, venture capital-obsessed society to block the passage of this sort of language across your conscious threshold at risk of life-threatening overexposure to the Medium Dialect and its churnalising neoliberal cyberchode scholars of the Personal Brand; I know you’ve read the exact same quote from how many entrepreneurs in how many worthless, masturbatory business magazine profiles, but I swear on my one-of-a-kind Estonian Hilary Duff pullout that Jervis speaks without irony or deception. how many fucking churnicles have abandoned you, but this time, it’s actually sincere.
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On The Web
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Though Bandcamp was technically the first comprehensive library-modeled music streaming service in existence, the topical conversations between both technology and music journalists and industry executives flooding both podcast and news feeds at the moment orbiting the “Cord-Cutting” phenomena as it’s washed over television, cinema, and music are rooted in the same building blocks as the core technology behind the delivery of all of these conversations as well as their subjects, funny enough. As long as my subgeneration has known it, The Web has been a source of sound in some manifestation, but the example with the most perplexing history was also the first. Today, one of five tabs in the main menu of my iPhone’s native music app contains the text “Radio” beneath an “antenna with waves” graphic which opens a service once called iTunes Radio that was absorbed into – and restricted to subscribers of – Apple Music as of 2016, confusingly. However, both “iTunes Radio” and “Apple Music Radio(?)” – along with any and all audio streaming services (mentioned and not) – are fundamentally nothing more than different UX design interpretations of the “simple” practice of streaming an audio file, which made its debut at the turn of the century in the form of “Internet Radio.” Astonishingly, the protocol – still referred to by at least one person on Earth as “Webcasting,” no doubt – has survived nearly 20 years, and even the youngest of us have likely encountered it in unusual situations.
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Ironically, the majority of Internet Radio broadcasts remaining on the air are nothing more than live duplicates of the traditional radio wave-bound products from the physical stations your car’s head unit receives. Even the current desktop version of iTunes maintains support for streaming “audio files over the internet,” though a glance at Apple’s dated support page for the process suggests it hasn’t crossed anybody’s mind for at least half of that history. In 1994, the publicly-funded radio network Voice of America became the “First [radio] on the Internet” when it began – after an introduction by Al Gore, no less – “offering digitized audio versions of selected newscasts and other program segments in 15 languages on its public internet server on Monday, Aug. 15,” according to former engineer Chris Kern. However – since we’re already this deep into internet history – a distinction must be established between streaming static files and streaming live audio. The first relies on pre-recorded audio files uploaded to a publicly-accessible server – in Kern’s original case, “via anonymous FTP and the Internet Gopher protocol,” which continues to be the elemental process behind every audio file streamed across the Web (including those on Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) more or less because it ain’t broke.
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Semantically, “live” digital audio streaming in its aforementioned “purest” form is more or less exclusive to Internet Radio. Obscured aside from the traditional station simulcast, Web-only Internet Radio stations have their own of “the Internet’s quiet success stories,” filled with quaint experiences and an endless cycle of death proclamations which continue to be disproven, anywise.
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On June 27th, 1999, The Seattle Times ran an especially worthwhile introduction to the concept that likely represents the only major newspaper’s mention of SHOUTcast (the first and likely last name in DIY Web DJing) in the history of the printed word within a work of truly phenomenal tech reporting on Mark Mataassa’s part. From the past, one will find his chillingly spot-on foresight and well-considered observations are bestrewed with mind-boggling hilarity when they look.
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Dialing in to the Net through a 56 kilobit-per-second modem, as I am, this seems like a ridiculous waste – or at least misallocation – of resources.
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I'm using a $3,000 machine, tying up a phone line and seriously compromising my computing power for an experience that in sound quality, simplicity and dependability can't compare, truthfully, with the $9 Emerson clock radio an arm's length away.
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And yet Web radio is one of the hottest ideas going in the ever-hot world of Internet startups and acquisitions: In the past few months, America Online and Yahoo! each have purchased fast-growing Web music sites, rock-music trendsetters like Rolling Stone and MTV have gotten into the business, and technological improvements – from Microsoft's newest browser and Real Networks' newest player to the latest MP3 enhancements – are closing the quality and accessibility gaps.
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The combination of developments is not only changing how computers (and radios) are used, but offering a glimpse of a future when audience demographics are sliced ultra-thin – to the person – and everybody has the potential to be a radio broadcaster as well as listener.
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I only have a few experiences with Internet Radio of my own, but they’re all rampantly more memorable than one would expect. The now in-stasis NWIRE project was by the most relevantly intriguing and savvily-curated home for a diverse host of electronic musicians I’ve ever come across – it was my second default browser tab for most of 2017, when I’d even listen to the odd-hour broadcasts overseen by just the automated library-perusing bot for hours. On episode 16 of Drycast, I recounted the absurd tale of my surprise morning encounter with a Norwegian station’s live broadcast from some European breakcore club, which was likely responsible for the most fun I’ve ever had working in retail.
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Extratone’s former Tech Editor is partial to a station called Radio Swiss Jazz, which appears to be thriving in comparison with most visible broadcasters, and unapologetically emits a bizarre amalgamation of tunes both chart-topping and Seriously Obscure across every conceivable genre (including Marching Music,) and continent of origin. Between every few charts, the brief commentary and station identification has provided our own private mystery: Was that one pre-recorded? This guy was on yesterday, but has since shed his accent? However, these tiny temporary mysteries are Internet Radio’s only remaining value for us, and I suspect the same is true for all but the most laggard laggards. For as long as I’ve been coherent enough to disseminate between much of anything, very few of its visible offerings have offered anything groundbreaking or fresh, perhaps out of negligence (one can very easily arrange leave a machine running SHOUTcast to shuffle through a given library of music and/or podcasts indefinitely,) frustration, or economic necessity.
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Crucially, the truly most critical consequences and contributions provided by the pioneers of Internet Radio to our current digital streaming experience were centered within intellectual property legislation and advertising-supported business. Unfortunately, this juncture marks our complete departure from my wheelhouse, but thankfully, a few sacred accounts of one of technology’s foremost confusing clashes with the ill-equipped, technoilliterate monoliths of the American justice system do indeed remain. As early as 2002, the ineffable Doc Searls reported on a document authored by the Library of Congress’ Copyright Royalty Board called “Determination of Royalty Rates and Terms for Ephemeral Recording and Webcasting Digital Performance of Sound Recordings” for Linux Journal in an encyclopedic breakdown of its implications ironically entitled “Why Are So Many Internet Radio Stations Still on the Air?” I would hope my comprehension is sufficient to declare that this was no Cambridge Analytica: only a few years subsequent the technology’s inception, operators within the Internet Radio business faced serious and immediate fines for their pre-enforcement distribution of copyrighted material stretching four years back – the severity of which the Doc suggested would “surely bankrupt many of the individual broadcasters that have been pioneering this marketplace for the longest time.”
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Unlike the commercial radio stations we hear on the old-fashioned airwaves, Internet radio stations' primary market relationship isn't with advertisers; it's with listeners. In many cases, the listeners are the primary source of revenue. This business model is similar to that of noncommercial (public) radio, only the market relationship is much more direct and efficient. Internet radio stations don't need to stop programming to hold marathon whine-fests begging listeners to call phone volunteers and pledge money to qualify for a mug or a t-shirt. Listeners simply click on a PayPal or an Amazon link, and after a few more clicks they've made a payment.
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By March, 2010, just 374 stations were aggregated in Google’s Internet Radio Directory, and my own quick sample from its list unfortunately indicated that most are now silent, but SHOUTcast has yet to be abandoned after all this time and we can safely suppose the core architecture of the internet will remain recognizable enough to support it until after we’re all dead, rendering the necessary tools indefinitely ready and accessible should new projects in NWIRE’s vein come along (I know of no better fate I could wish upon the protocol.) From Internet Radio’s pioneer days, we must skip over a whole era to close in on Bandcamp’s origin in the very brightest peak of Web 2.0.
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Again, we find ourselves in 2008 and nobody knows what an iPhone is, but the same classic rock-worshiping, upper-middle class, white collar Early Majority who first loved Internet Radio are now rapidly and delightedly distributing links to something called “Pandora dot com” between AOL and Hotmail inboxes. True luxury music reproduction comes in the form of Beats headphones motivated by a 320GB iPod Classic. Budding audiophiles and backpacker dweebs illegally torrent lossless .FLACs to play over their Christmas-gifted studio monitors with WinAmp, which they’ve set up to impeccably “scrobble” their history with every played track to their Last.fm profiles. Everybody else is still buying music from iTunes. (Those who cannot afford to buy the music they intend to add to their libraries transition to the music nerd classification as soon as they’ve sought out a way to obtain it free.) “Streaming” comes from subscription services like Rhapsody (now Napster,) which are too buried in Digital Rights Management controversy to feel sustainable. MySpace Music has just begun to fade away – next year, in “the Twitter era,” SoundCloud will definitively replace it as the go-to creator network – and Pandora’s immediate future is bright – they’ll make a big move on brand-new mobile streaming experience when they launch their iPhone OS app in July, but the limited performance of the handset’s EDGE network will render it a poor alternative to onsite .mp3s for years to come.
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In January, to minimal acclaim, Oddpost’s Ethan Diamond launched Bandcamp, the startup with programmer friends Joe Holt, Shawn Grunberger, and Neal Tucker to be “a sortof WordPress for musicians” – an easily-created, well-designed landing page to showcase one’s digital music files. As Holt laments in an interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for your music had long been “a pain in the ass.”
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“You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.”
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As an address to all of their shared complaints about the experience of online music distribution up to that point, early Bandcamp was an astounding piece of engineering. The quaint, unsurprisingly crate-digger-looking Ethan Diamond – who’s more or less remained the singular public face of the company since the very beginning – began a brand tradition of transparently music-nerdy correspondence with his first post on the Bandcamp blog, explaining the solutions the team had come up with in greater detail.
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We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
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The launch garnered very little attention from tech or music publications of the time, but Andy Baio’s interview with Diamond provides a substantial, technically in-depth picture of just how revolutionary and necessary it was. Most of what has continued to make Bandcamp such an essential tool was present at the very beginning: server-side stats and metadata (a unique architectural undertaking, no doubt,) track and album-oriented pagination, and a robust, easily-embedded Flash player.
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Study Diamond’s first “screencast” alongside a video tour of SoundCloud from the period and you’ll notice just how much more functional, future-proofed and dignified Bandcamp appeared in comparison. As apprehensive as I am to be caught arguing for minimalism over good design, it’s made perfect sense in the use case of this one platform, which knew exactly what it was from birth, along with what it would always be, apparently, which is such a bizarre reversal of the archetypes and the relentless common narrative we know from The Valley’s legends. Ethan first shows the consumer’s experience – none of which has changed after a whole decade aside from quality-specific track purchases – before delving into the artist-side UI, beginning with the statistics tool, which included playback and search insights to a depth that was (and still is) unheard of from a free service. Then, he demonstrates the publishing process from upload to playback: adding album art, setting a release date, and pricing its purchase. Aside from their removal of the old waveform visualizer (I couldn’t find any record of an announcement of this decision, official or otherwise,) Bandcamp has changed absolutely nothing of what’s shown in Diamond’s tutorial. In the next few months, they would add custom page design, email address capture, and support for custom domains. By October 2008, they’d made enough waves to be picked up by CNET, for whatever that was worth. Apparently, Facebook Music was a legitimate property as well, but I do not remember anything about it at all—pondering an alternate reality in which The Social Network became the dominant online music streaming platform leads to a bizarre comparison of Neil Diamond and Mark Zuckerberg which I can’t imagine being altogether productive. Suffice it to say, the two founders’ visions differ greatly.
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Musicblogocide
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Contextually, it’s also important that we dwell for a moment on the legal and financial hullabaloo surrounding music sales during Bandcamp’s first formative years, and the federal government’s losing battle to interpret, enforce, or replace intellectual property law for the information age. As the Web had grown exponentially more capable and accessible as a means of audio file distribution, it had become absolutely saturated with blatantly DRM-circumventing .mp3s and .wavs. For years, the quickest way to follow up on a check it out sort of music recommendation was simply to search Google for its track name followed by “.mp3.” If the first go didn’t yield success, even the most rudimentary application of cryptography – like substituting some variation of “nsilmtic.rar” to find a download for Nas’ Illmatic, for instance – was a sure bet for one’s second try, which would often return several copies just laying around Google-indexed WordPress media libraries, though results hosted on Mediafire were a preferable alternative. This was the establishment into which my first adolescent digital music discoveries were borned, and I’m still convinced that 99% of us participants were completely without malice. I’d argue heartily that music’s brief escape from the tireless grip of the record industry as its only medium stumbled into digital form would be clearly shown to have a net gain for the whole of American recording artists if you could measure and plot it, including the past, present, and future use of peer-to-peer sharing.
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2010 would prove to be The Year of Reckoning for the fraction of DRM-violating traffic on the visible Web, at least. Though it’d be virtually impossible to quantify, is it only reasonable to assume that many siteowners made some real money from the ad impressions that directly resulted from their unauthorized hosting and Mediafire-embedding, but let’s consider how minuscule even the most outrageously liberal overestimate would be, side-by-side with the billions in additional revenue YouTube has raked in from the same music since assuming their place as the de facto platform for quickly summoning just about any work of audio that’s ever taken digital form. It was in February of that year that Blogger (another Google property) deleted six music blogs from its platform in response to complaints about allegedly DMCA-violating .mp3s. The Registryinsisted the collective finger be pointed at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, itself.
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“It would seem the music bloggers aren't versed in the ways of DMCA claims and counterclaims. But you can't blame Google for that,” they concluded, after one of the blog’s founders expressed some of the most personally-dramatic words mine empathy has yet faced as quoted in The Guardian.
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“It's just sad because we were documenting young people's music from all around the globe. For a lot of people, it was music they wouldn't have been able to discover elsewhere.”
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In hindsight, “blame” is an even more useless avenue of one’s attention than usual, especially when one party (Google) was 100% exempt from any consequences all along. The alarming takeaway is not the DMCA’s deftness, but that Google had the freedom to wait for a parallel business incentive before deciding the law applied to them.
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Frankly, we should all have realized long ago just how fucking futile it is to attempt to control any file traffic. Every desktop-class browser ships with the capability to capture any streamable media on the Web with a handful of keystrokes – it’d take a maximum of 20 minutes to bestow upon even the most casual user the knowledge they’d need to keep every single track, YouTube video, and Twitch stream they’d ever watch, 100% legally without a single third-party service/extension interaction, but the crucial question remains to what end, exactly? It’s easy, but it’s not exactly a fun way to spend an afternoon. The only two rationales that’d justify capturing streamed Web files at scale are 1) the totally bonkers inclination that any given property/ies is likely to disappear from the entire World Wide Web, ever or 2) the increasingly rarefying expectation of prolonged time away from internet access.
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As Bandcamp has stood so obdurately still, the mainstream music streaming sphere has expanded titanically around it as if enveloping the Indie platform in a surrealist timelapse within the eye of a ruinous tech industry cyclone, which would explosively expand the market into a ghoulish, filthy monstrosity beyond anything we’d recognize from the rule of the WinAmp Hipster, long ago. Today, the coolest and most rabid daily music listeners I know all have Spotify memberships, joining 70 million others globally as of January. For most, it’s how they prefer to swaddle their lives in a constant soundtrack – at work, in the car, at school, then at home on the television. For many, it’s how they “explore” new music outside of peer and social recommendations... or, that’s how the narrative was supposed to go, anyway. Those folks I know who actually create music, however, are rarely seen using Spotify—even after they’ve endured untold horrors in order to publish their own music there—because the real story of its track record as a place to “Discover” new artists, genres, or sounds is completely abysmal. When 2017’s streaming data began coming in this past January, a popular feature by Galaxie 500’s Damon Krukowski was run by the definitively terminal music magazine of broad notoriety—Pitchfork—entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which he began by citing some very alarming statistics.
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“More than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks [on Spotify.] Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.”
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Why? A brazen disregard for necessary meta information, for one.
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“Look now at how badly their applications already serve entire genres of less popular music. Spotify lists recordings by song title, album title, or featured artist name. But that information is so limited it leaves out even the other performers on a recording, a crucial aspect to classical and jazz.”
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Alarming for those of us who intend to create or consume any music separate the Top 40, anyway, which one should feel justified expecting from most people, most of the time. Last month, The Carters released an album on which even Beyoncé identified the problematic service by name. “Patiently waiting for my demise ‘cause my success can’t be quantified,” she rapped, “if I gave two fucks about streaming numbers woulda put Lemonade up on Spotify.” The unfortunate issue with this single denouncement of the industry’s current direction is that its source is adamantly guaranteed a place for her work within Spotify’s top 10 percent for the rest of her career’s lifetime (and probably far beyond.)
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[I could now take the time to complain that she’s also entirely abandoned the city she owes for her career’s creation in its darkest hour, but let’s just plan on coming back to the subject at a later date, when we’ll be sure to touch on how terribly Drake also treats Houston (and women.)]
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Unsurprisingly, the apathy is far from mutual. From the Swedish company’s perspective, the digits themselves should’ve been dearly and universally beloved from the beginning, and their exponentially ballooning hubris became so inflated by 2014 that they launched a WordPress blog dedicated entirely to promoting and discussing their data called Spotify Insights, proclaiming themselves—naturally—to be “the world’s favorite streaming service,” championing the growing diversity in their demographics. Though Beyoncé is mentioned only twice upon a search of its archive as it stands today, it’s with fanfare: “10 Female Artists Women Listen To The Most on Spotify” declared her the third most popular female artist among women, globally, and “Single Ladies” the number one female-streamed track in the world (assuming I’m interpreting its language correctly.)
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We’ve established that Spotify has comfortably planted itself at the polar opposite end of the business spectrum from Bandcamp, yet for the sake of an oblivious adjudicating layman’s understanding, you’d have your work cut out for you explaining the difference between them: both are online marketplaces with gigantic libraries of digital music which a listener can browse, download locally, or stream from using Web browser or the mobile applications offered by each, respectively—and they can do from just about anywhere, for as much or as little as they wish. And—as the music industry and its satellites shall always remain for the rest of humanity’s reign—both are overwhelmingly associated with young people. There, the crucial divide should probably ring a bell—it’s been a constant between cultural generations for as long as culture, itself has existed.
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There are those among us who’s adolescent adoration of music is still completely valid as a very powerful component of hormonal development, yet doomed to quickly sizzle into casual listening or worse by the time our post-secondary Senior year rolls around. And then, there are those on whom the curiosity clings devotedly on: the cool high school punk band-forming types our culture loves to romanticize, who’ll inevitably end up bald and bespeckled with a pre-dawn community radio block. These Musicians, Crate-Diggers, and capital-A Audiophiles have historically overlapped in synonymous functions across a love triangle of dweebish intolerability, though it’s become especially easy as of late to forget that DIY recording is by no means a recent development—its financial and technical barrier-to-entry has simply plummeted thanks to the developmental progression of Digital Audio Workstations and a growing industry of consumer-oriented audio equipment. For succinct insight into this dynamic, let’s refer to the pre-dialogue context in Chuck Klosterman’s GQ interview with “the second- or the third-best rock guitarist of all time”—Zinc Blimp legend Jumbo Page.
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The only thing Page really wants to talk about [is] the sound of the music, and how that sound was achieved. He can talk about microphone placement for a very, very long time. Are you interested in having a detailed conversation about how the glue used with magnetic audiotape was altered in the late 1970s, subsequently leading to the disintegration of countless master tapes? If so, locate Jimmy Page. If a different musician obsessed over technological details with this level of exacting specificity, he would likely be classified as a “nerd,” as that has become a strange kind of compliment in the Internet age. People actually want to be seen as nerds. But that designation does not apply here. Jimmy Page does not seem remotely nerdy.
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Bandcamp’s core architecture was handbuilt from the beginning to handle the “hard part” for creators “so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy,” which it, alone pioneered on the Web, becoming the best metadata management utility for all time, but also committing to a traditional interpretation of music mediums that can feel old fashioned in 2018. Despite having been around for a directly comparable length of time, SoundCloud has maintained its relevance among friends in my network as the more socially-focused platform for keeping up with work from their peers thanks in large part to its exclusive, timestamp-oriented comment function, which allows for ultra-specific shortform feedback between fellow creators and fans. This is how the company has chosen to grow its community, which has lent especially to its strength in the most “nerdy” independent scenes: hip-hop and electronic music. The experience is busy by design and the divide between listener and creator is next to non-existent—by now, the difference is universally irrelevant. External sharing has also become a major strength since the inception of SoundCloud’s Web audio player, which was unlike any other embeddable we’d ever seen at the time. Over the years, it’s become the most universally-supported means of embedding a track or playlist elsewhere, though the space has quite recently began blooming with a few much slimmer Open Web offshoots like Vocaroo, Clyp, and Instaudio.
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While I can casually throw these names around for you in the same sized font, the gulfs between the properties they denote are completely inexpressible in words. Because Spotify went public in Q1 of this year, they released their first earnings report in April: 170 million active monthly users, $1.33 billion in total quarterly revenue, and $5.7-$6.2 billion in expected total revenue for 2018. I’ll spare you the entire Forbes piece it would require to comprehensively demonstrate just how cavernous of a disparity canyon the industry represents. Early projects like Pandora were docile, ad-free, and sincerely curious about the curatorial potential of music streaming services – *let’s use this cool new tech to play music for anybody with a Web browser if only because it’ll be a blast* – yet in that sense, they’ve all failed entirely. All except Bandcamp, anyway.
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“We started as a service to help artists sell their music and merchandise directly to their fans, but then as the site grew—it’s now at about 12 million tracks and 1.5 million albums [as of 2014]—we evolved into also being a destination for music Discovery,” he explains, partially anticipating the foot-to-the-floor transition to streaming which has indeed shook the industry the hell up over the years since. The company's solution is minimal, elemental, yet uniquely alternative as only theirs could be: an idealized digital interpretation of a music collection, which had actually launched a year before XOXO as part of “Bandcamp for Fans.” That release notably introduced the ability to “follow” both artist and fan accounts, the now-iconic “supported-by” section on release pages showing customers’ avatars and optional comments, and public wishlists. “I think it’s great to use a streaming service for music Discovery—they can be really really good for that,” Diamond concedes, before reiterating one of the several variations of Bandcamp’s founding premise that composes his core argument: “if you actually care about music, and you care about the people who make it, and you want them to keep making it, the best way to do that is to buy directly from them, or to use services that allow you to directly support them.”
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Instead of the “firehose”-like experience of a contemporary activity feed, “you’ve got a collection of albums and tracks that people were passionate enough to spend money on.” For my personal use, Ethan lit up a long-dormant incandescent bulb in my skull. My use of Bandcamp had long been to purchase and download music files, only—never to stream it—and there’s been good reason for this. While Bandcamp has formally supported playback on iPhone and iPad in-browser since July 2010, actually using it for any substantial amount of playback has always been a souring endeavor. Considering that it’s persisted to this day, we must concede that it is part of an intentional design rather than just an irritating flaw: multitasking between apps or even browser tabs will prevent continuous playback of an album, as will locking the device. In order to move from track to track fluidly, one must keep the page with the in-use Bandcamp player front and center. For three years, this was the only way to stream Bandcamp on mobile, but such capability was far from reliably expected by even the earliest adopters, then—3G data networks were worse than you remember, anyway—and then in 2013, the Bandcamp app was launched on iOS and Android, providing a sufficient fix in my book at the time. (I’d rather any externally-embedded players I may engage with in an album review or artist profile be limited to a single track, anyway.) However, the app itself remained quite mediocre for years, which was a tangible disappointment given how revolutionary their desktop experience had been when the company launched,but not necessarily a substantial deterrent to the sort of user they were attracting.
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I made a point to spend a lot of time engaging with Bandcamp’s service as much as possible – naturally, this included a trip back through my neglected, digitally dusty Collection, which proved a way more emotionally provocative experience than I anticipated. Ethan’s simple truth didn’t really sink in until I realized that this list is made up exclusively of my real favorites, and there’s not a single track that is not inextricably and intoxicatingly tied to a specific era(s) of my life (yes, even that one Blank Banshee album... I was 18, okay?) It’s absurdly powerful—not something I could engage with for any extended time without becoming saturated with nostalgic gut stuff. (Listen for my upcoming special celebratory episode of Extratone Radio to hear the best music I’ve found through Bandcamp.) It hadn’t occurred to me that I would retain ownership and streaming rights to all music I’ve purchased—including for a $0.00 sum, as I did for at least half of the works you see—even after an artist chose to delete or hide it on their own page. (Though they are not retained in my public collection, of course.)
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The Discovery Debacle
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Pursuing an objective definition of “music Discovery” might appear foolish – an individual’s music taste is perhaps the most broadly angst-steeped realms of overwhelming subjectivity in modern American culture, after all – but its the pungent poignancy of our fundamental human relationship with sound, itself which makes the history of Discovery’s digitization so important (and fascinating.) If I were to ask you what you believe should be the single most important function that must be reliably performed by any “music Discovery” device – whether it be an application, Web service, magazine or even a crate-digging habit – the single factor which would render whole vague concept inert, irrelevant, and/or completely destroyed, how would you answer? How would you interpret the question?
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It’s important we do well to take a considerable moment to cultivate a special wariness of the eggshells beneath our feet in this arena. Debatably at least a minim more than one’s taste in film, Americans from Generation X on forward until the end of time (I suspect) will hold “their” music as perhaps the most integral support upon which their identities are built throughout every stage of their lives. The intense sensation of ownership that propels this phenomenon within our culture leaves an especially sensitive passage ahead of us.
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As a wide-eyed teenager and infantile audio producer, I explored the idea of anti-music in my own entirely Bandcamp-supported project while I searched – aided tremendously by my expert best friend – for the edgiest, least sensical sounds and scenes on which to publicly attach on my identity in an opposing of “Discovery’s” extremes with fandom: an obsessive, entirely-detached last-ditch skirmish between the cultural reality and my delusional pubescent need to be unique. This process appears to be a universal requisite in modern youth in one form or another, but it’s important now that I emphasize this confession: I was an especially ostentatious little backpacker fuck, but I’ve continued to find my shame well worth achieving a specific balance for music’s purpose in my life, and I’d anecdotally endorse its potential to relieve cognitive dissonance at great scale. There’s only so much fun to be had blasting breakcore cassettes at deafening, distorted volumes solely to bewilder rural overnight convenience store clerks on their smoke breaks in the wee hours or the bruteforce seizure of the speakers’ Bluetooth connection at a frat party just to play harsh noise or anime-sampling Hardstyle while demonically shrieking – eyes rolled back – and lighting various parts of oneself ablaze before one realizes that 1) it’s they who end up looking like the idiots for aggressively breaching a group’s fun with inappropriate tunes (yes, no matter how interesting, rare, or underrated they may be, Chadley;) 2) by ferally manifesting, you’ve deligitimized yourself, which 3) can seriously damage any future attempts to accomplish the fundamental drive to share the gospel of music’s variety out of your own rubish frustration with the differences between you.
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The real, sweetest truth is that 100% of all music has value potential because of the medium’s broad influence on the human psyche. Pop music is amazing right now; the signature trap sound we devalued with Datpiff jokes made us all look like fools when it unconsciously transcended our “irony” and burrowed its own huge partition in our sincere hearts. After my pitiful attempt to reject and distance myself from my own rural roots by scoffing at country music for years, I’ve made a beautiful peace with the childhood memories and the historic excellence of Shania Twain and The Dixie Chicks in their mastery of both wholesome joy and crippling nostalgia (I’ve even cried to Taylor Swift.) Yes, it’s been entirely reasonable all along to enjoy the straightforwardly slothen pleasure in belching “Sweet Home Alabama” pounding cheap pissbeer on a foul pontoon boat on the Lake of the Ozarks, leaving my penultimate irony to confess that I’ve only found true and serene identity through music after learning how to stop insisting so violently upon the worldly, one-of-a-kind superiority of my “taste.”
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That said, it’s still bewildering how content we are to abruptly abandon the substance music had to our teenage selves out of misconstrued justifications for our classic fainéance – actively choosing to subject our public ambiance to thousands of replays of “the best” records in favor of dipping even the most cowardly toe into unfamiliar waters, even when the opportunity cost is inherently halved – only to then have the audacity to evangelize our dilapidated conceptions of “good music” to our children as we demonize the music of their generation, depriving them of a very essential rite of their cognitive development. I can think of little more reductive, repugnant, reckless, or racist crusades as a model figure than indoctrinating your child with an inherent distaste for their own culture, and nothing more deeply alarming to hear from the mouth of someone born in the 21st century than shit like “Queen was better than any rapper will ever be,” or “real musicianship will die forever with Eric Clapton.” It’s unfair and unnatural: imagine if your high school classmates had consistently turned up their scrunched nose at the living whole of rock & roll, declaring Scott Joplin to be the last musician they could stand.
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Consider if the industry-wide customer experience standard for the musical ambiance in 1970s American eating and drinking establishments was entirely comprised of works by John Phillip Souza, and the most prevalent cultural revolution manifested itself something like the following: In countless popular films set in the time (and the stories told today by your parents of their youths that informs them,) a group of popular high school boys – generally three longtime childhood friends and a single addition from the previous summer with an Army Dad and a moderate bad boy aura that’s made him one of the school’s notoriously attractive students and the somewhat-abusive leader in the pack. After spending some time trying to convince the other three (the crucial moment for his case being the bad kid’s rare moment of sincerity trope) of its guaranteed social, sexual and financial ROI, they seal their agreement to start a band with a four-way saliva slap. Imagine if in the progression of this exhausted old tale, it remained entirely classic (and boring) when it faded to a “THREE MONTHS LATER...” ceiling shot of the four the in full, gleaming, performance-spec get-up of the presidential marching band in their garage, and it was revealed that they’d they practiced “The Star Spangled Banner” every night just to make the girls swoon in the film’s resolution with an encore of “America the Beautiful” at an unsanctioned (and very patriotic!) house party.
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Suffice it to say that it’s absolutely fucking bonkers how often I encounter “Sweet Home Alabama” (and other tunes I’ve already heard hundreds of times throughout the first third of my existence, conservatively) dripping down from the overhead speakers in all manner of big retail stores, where it’s inappropriate and unwelcome. Even from the generous assumption that every single one of them is an objective masterwork of composition, the amount of affection the American music listening audience has for the same 500 singles is on par with our rampant gun violence in terms of our unanimous tolerance for ridiculously illogical habits. I’ve been sitting in a cute, moderately trendy coffee shop on the corner of the major avenue of access to my cute, moderately trendy Portland neighborhood for an hour now, and I’ve recognized every single one of the tracks played just a bit too loudly on the stereo. I’ve been sick of them all since Middle School. That one Bow Bow Chicka Chicka thing… How very charming.
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“The 70s, the 80s… the one-hit wonder channel!”
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Contrary to the popular hipster narrative we’ve just defeated, it’s not the popularity of the lineup that makes these experiences so distasteful, but their regularity. It doesn’t take a doctor of psychology to observe that tireless exposure to any given work of art inevitably erodes its value, yet we continue to expend resources saturating most mundane spaces in our society with an unyielding regurgitation of the same brackish pop culture symbols as if we’re trying to either induce a canonical vomit, intentionally obliterate the Yelp! reviews for a distant future museum’s “North America Enters the 21st Century” exhibit, or both. After failing my best attempts to elaborate with historical analogy citing a past event, I’m afraid we must pivot to a science fiction-esque nanonarrative containing obnoxiously speculative hypotheticals, instead.
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Imagine: It’s 2036 – four years after we found out we are not alone in the universe when a significantly more advanced civilization makes formal first contact with humanity by sending a party of diplomats, anthropologists, and explorers (who were actually getting ready to go in 2016 before getting word of the Trump presidency and deciding we weren’t quite ready just yet) who land their space egg right in front of the United Nations’ New York City headquarters and expressing something to the tune of hey so um… we noticed you guys moved in and we just wanted to stop by and say hi, entirely altering humanity’s self-perception and future trajectory (see: works by Gene Roddenberry) yadda yadda. The visitors expressed a wish to begin a cultural exchange project with us, and it’s just now coming to fruition… I have only moments ago made history in the eyes of the entire world when I walked through the front door of a Target store in suburban New Jersey leading a hovering hyper-intelligent silicon-based sphere of agender mist (roughly comparative to a basketball in size,) who’s already both impressing and shaming me tremendously as we move by the in-store Starbucks. From above us, Semisonic’s “Closing Time” is belched upon my life’s proudest moment and my guest requests we pause to discuss it, to my profound horror.
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“The sound from the reproduction devices embedded above us...” the android translator trails off for a moment. “It is the same noise that was distantly reproduced 51 hours ago in ‘Miami’ as I conversed with Ambassador Phillip Defranco about ‘the setting sun’ on the ‘beach,’ coming from a small open air structure which he defined as ‘a surf shop,’ which was occupied by a young male who appeared to be moderately agitated, moving about in jagged strides as he wildly smacked the foundational surface with ‘a broom.’ The Ambassador explained the youth was likely nearing the end of his allotted period of daily occupational labor.”
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Blood is flooding my cheeks as I listen with a building dread to the robot’s interpretation, awash with all manner of embarrassment for my species.
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“Is the purpose of this noise reproduction of a logistical nature, or is it perhaps a common ritual within business and/or working class culture?”
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Now, it’s your turn to be the human representative in this pico science fiction: you’re now obligated to confirm the alien anthropologist’s hypothesis and explain that “Closing Time” is but one piece of recorded music among billions of diverse expressive works across millennia. You must reverently describe how the “universal language” of math within melodious composition has long been a hefty buzzword in the pop culture conversations about interstellar communication and our longtime search for extraterrestrial intelligence from the future-thrilled 90s—S.E.T.I.’s glory days – when we felt pretty damned good about space. The historic launch of the United Nations’ “greetings on behalf of the people of our planet” etched into The Golden Record aboard Voyager I and Jodie Foster’s novel portrayal of a S.E.T.I. scientist in the iconic Carl Sagan-sourced 1997 science fiction drama Contact are among the globally-celebrated Best Hits of humanism (not to mention the organization listed on your paystubs,) and they weigh a billion tons on you, now—in the most significant moment of your entire life, bar none – as you explain on behalf of your species to real extraterrestrial intelligence the reality of how negligent it is actually is of the culture the Record claimed to treasure. The worst part, though? The entire experience is accompanied by a nasal-as-hell Semisonic soundtrack.
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Aren’t you frustrated? You should be, but it’s not over yet: inevitably, your round fictional companion of note is going to follow up their query with some seriously burning meat.
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“Just a half-generation ago, your utopian dream of a globally-connected world – in which everyone would be empowered to saturate and culture themselves with new ideas and forms of expression – was the defining aspiration of your society, and yet you’ve definitively achieved Total Connectivity, now, and caused the overwhelmingly opposite result: you’re all intolerable shitheads who every passing solar orbit become less and less capable of anything but regurgitation of the same foul bullshit. Y’all fucking wack. I’m out. ”
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And there, that filthy little ball would have us all. Friends, colleagues, human siblings of mine, it’s long-past time we expect better from ourselves as music citizens of the world. Even the longest living of us are endowed with very little opportunity to absorb anything more than an infinitesimal fraction of all there is to experience, and we’ve all been carelessly and embarrassingly chucking it to the weeds. If it this all seems excessive, there’s no need to feel attacked, but for Pete’s sake… please stop claiming you “like music” because it’s misleadingly inaccurate and I’ll promise never to use the phrase “music citizens of the world” again, in exchange.
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Distribution & Curation
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You, your friends, and I are missing out on way too much cool shit and we’re going to continue addressing possible causes and solutions to this ongoing catastrophe without asking for a single moved finger on your part because we are fucking saints. Let’s come back to ground and consider a casual real-world use case for a streaming service which I’ve observed.
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It’s just after 1PM on an especially beautiful Summer day in 2018, and you’ve decided with your two best friends that an impromptu hot dog barbecue in your little apartment’s parking lot would be a great way to spend the afternoon. You get on Facebook Messenger – no time to bother with the formality of creating an event – and begin to bother your group of art school friends. In a few hours, you’ve set up chairs in a circle around the borrowed fire pit, gathered meat tubes, marshmallows, and beer, and your guests have begun to arrive. The next step: retrieve your cordless Bluetooth speaker from inside to place it atop a log nearest the scene, re-pair it with your smartphone, and ___?
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Let’s acknowledge that music has incredibly diverse purposes of value in human life—of course I realize this—and ultimately, nobody can dictate those fulfilled for another individual by any given track, album, artist, or genre across time and setting. Even splittercore-obsessed serial killers and body modding cybergrind disciples are doomed: inevitably, they will one day let their guard down and find themselves singing along with “Goodbye Earl” on the radio way off key, smiling like a doofus. Even if one hates humanity, they will eventually be forced to acknowledge that The Dixie Chicks came very close to its penultimate manifestation.
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I understand that it’s not always time for something new for everyone, but you’re missing out on music’s most worthwhile function by far if you never seek anything fresh, and—if you still find yourself unwilling to bother, even—carrying around even the slightest bit of anecdotal knowledge about what’s going on in music with you can be invaluably culturing to your image when socializing with youths and alien intelligences, alike. There is a spectrum of enthusiasm (or pretentiousness, depending on one’s own subjectives) for music that is far more culturally consequential than the practice of partaking and/or patroning any other artform. Settle comfortably on any point – extreme or not – and you’re at serious risk of being uncool. Nobody wants Anthony Fantano showing up to their party, but if you live too long confusing the Beach Boys with the Beatles – as I have – folks start to behave as if there’s something wrong with you. If it helps, let’s suppose this to be the real reason behind my need to discuss Bandcamp – perhaps its relative lack of aged or worshiped-at-scale work justifies it all.
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By this nature, its effort is designed to bracket the enthusiast as wholly as possible, but the value most in need of its experience has become its comparatively extravagant hospitality for the dabbler. The “Discoverinator” (I would’ve voted for calling it “Genre-Fucker”) is simply the most ingenious tool available anywhere to filter music by genre, subgenre, location, and medium. Or at least... It’s too gorgeous not to be. Thanks to its recent visual redesign, I don’t even care if it’s useful—it’s just a beautiful thing to play with on both the Web and the iOS app (though I’d bet they were each crafted separately.)
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Front and center on the homepage is the Bandcamp Daily – a showcase of features, lists, albums of the day, and artist interviews from various staff and guest contributors which I’d most certainly judge befit of a standalone publication – and the Bandcamp Weekly – an extraordinarily-produced podcast like no other with special mixes, guest appearances, and commentary which the company’s Chief Curator Andrew Jervis has been honing since 2013 over 289 episodes as of this morning. Its player functions both in-browser and on the iOS app unlike any I’ve ever seen, with a list of embedded tracks that pop out when they’re actually spinning on the show so that you can engage further with them, if you wish. It’s difficult to describe, but it feels visually like you’re listening to a playlist in Bandcamp’s normal player, except tracks are intermixed and faded between one another beneath the host’s commentary, so the audio itself must be pre-rendered. Regardless, it’s nearly as extraordinary an achievement in Web design as the program itself is in curatorial music broadcasting. I’m no addict to the genre, but I have yet to Discover another similar product which I can binge episode after episode for hours without becoming bored or irritated as I can the Bandcamp Weekly’s.
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To fill in the parking lot party blank with a single streaming solution for the sake of our young, art school-attending, likely more musically-literate than average summer barbecue guests—how viable is Bandcamp? Truthfully, it’s only slightly more suited now than it was in its earliest infancy for obediently filling a space with ambiance. We could ponder whether or not its design discourages absentminded playback only consequently, or perhaps condescendingly from the high, white tower of hipster elitism on which you’ll occasionally hear it accused of perching, but UX design is the most ridiculous sphere within which to intenspeculate in lieu of verification (gazing at you with the timeless grace of a thousand moons, Medium,) so lets hold off to seek out an interview with a Bandcamp representative.
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SoundCloud would be a bit closer to the mark—it can be configured to simply keep going after you’ve finished a track, regardless of where you may be within the interface (excluding the embedded player, of course)—but it’d be much safer to spend the smidgen of extra time required to find a manmade playlist. Letting it loose will quickly land you on some seriously dubious (and probably embarrassing) nerd shit. As I understand it, YouTube has long been the go-to houseparty music player because of its universality, Chromecast support, and (obviously) visual component for accompanying music videos, so its new, ad-free YouTube Music service has a lot of potential, in theory, but we’re outside in this scenario and our smartphone is our only playback device.
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Startlingly, the Web’s given best answer to this situation is still Spotify in all of its culture-diluting gluttony. Internet radio? Yikes. You can still find a gem of a stream every once in a while, but they’re usually unreliable and probably abandoned, so the catalog won’t last you more than a few hours before you’ll start to hear repeats. You could search out the internet stream of your favorite radio station—a student radio station, even—but those offering the most entertaining programming are unlikely to have a suitable playlist on a summer afternoon. So—forgetting its overwhelming financial funneling toward its top 10% and everything else for a moment—why not just give up the pretense and use Spotify? Again, for most of my friends, it works just fine to play Cat Stevens, Run DMC, Gorillaz or The Rolling Stones, but I have yet to figure out a combination of keywords to keep it on target within even the most rudimentary parameters. Such ill-restraint becomes especially dire—necessary, really—when I queue up “Cannibal Ox Radio” for the office and R Kelly ends up playing, 20 minutes in. Using personally-targeted artist bans is probably too subjective to ask of such a service in the spotlight, but how about an option to filter out white rappers? (I hope you didn’t blink because that’s by far my best contribution in tech writing yet.)
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The truth is, I’d probably end up calling upon Apple Music as I’ve been an on-and-off subscriber since its release, but have yet to meet a single fellow user. The girth of its catalog is reportedly still nearly 25% larger, its UI is significantly more cohesively integrated with iOS (which hasn’t always been a given from Apple with its music software, mind you,) yet it costs me precisely the same $9.99 a month as Spotify Premium would. If I did know somebody else who used it, they’d be able to see my public profile including my playlists and activity, just as my followers on Spotify can, and I can create “Stations” for artists that function similarly to Spotify’s endless adaptive playlists, but—crucially, for myself—after the app’s redesign for iOS 10, the integration of Apple Music music with my own iTunes library is completely seamless. With unlimited data, I’ve selected the option to refrain from storing music locally, which further diminishes the distinction between “my” music and the music I’ve paid for the rights to stream. Fundamentally, the end result is that I pay ten bucks a month for “ownership” of all the music on iTunes proper.
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While I might personally play Bandcamp Weekly episodes in such a context and gladly accept whatever results I’d get, I’d only do so acknowledging the subsequently increased risk of some vest-wearing fuck I’ve never met springing out of the bushes to accost me about Weird Allan. However, I am neither cool nor musically literate, which makes me particularly vulnerable to misusing algorithmic Discovery—the practice in which artificial intelligence has become most widely-deployed which continues to prove itself to better deserve the term “automated wallowing,” or “robotized ear rot.”
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Ironically, Damon Krukowski’s aforementioned “responsibility” essay on Pitchfork openly cites Liz Pelly’s burning-hot and 100% essential analysis of algorithmically-generated playlists for The Baffler notes the publication’s own substantial relationship with Spotify, including a Webby Award-winning advertorial series called Inside Discovery, which the two collaborate to produce that’s “meant to boost awareness of the ‘Discover Weekly’ feature.”
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The series shows Pitchfork editors (and favored musicians) gushing about their love of streaming—the immediacy! The deep back catalogs! One editor says it helps him keep track of his listening habits, while another rejoices at not having to dig through crates at record shops anymore. Yet another likens Spotify to walking around a music festival, discovering something new at every turn. What does it mean for “the most trusted voice in music” to celebrate an algorithm as preferable to its own crate digging? What does it mean when the tastemaking humans endorse data-driven machines? What does it mean when the algorithms become cool? Virtually every music publication now relies on Spotify media players to embed songs within online articles, and Websites like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone regularly celebrate their playlists with listicles: “Ten Albums To Stream Now.” “The Five Playlists You Need to Hear This Summer.”
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We love bespoke Open Web projects, so exploring Inside Discovery’s (surely bespoke) experience induced the same pathetic sort of I wish business just incentived building nice things disappointment which has become my default, bitchy mood, and blaming as a further let down to immediately land on Mitski’s playlist, to whom I’d just been reintroduced (by Pitchfork, admittedly) after happening upon her performance at Pitchfork 2017 (which is organized, admittedly, by Pitchfork.)
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Upon a brief review of these once-petty desires and the new, apocalyptic solutions which we are burning barns full of cash to develop, it would appear that the overwhelmingly defining feature of those which are at all viable remains to be the interference of a human being, and why wouldn’t it be, still, when manual music aggregation remains so desperately cheap? I’d wager heavily that there’s at least a single editor within Apple Music who’s spent serious time embedded in the Berlin techno scene considering how regularly the prime “Techno” playlist is updated with new work of a moderately-industrial bias.
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“The downside to automated music Discovery is that we’re encouraged to develop a taste profile and stick to it,” opines somebody on Pigeons & Planes, complimenting Pelly in their profile of former BBC Radio 1 host, Zane Lowe, and his new job curating an Apple Music playlist?
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The truth is, the stories that come to us that smell the strongest of philanthropy on the surface are often actually about some dusty, Y2K-lookin’-ass nerd with powerfully tedious grievances and too much time on their hands. The whole world knows the details by now of how Mark Zuckerberg’s horny social ineptitude led to Facebook’s conception, but we must both keep in check the bad habit we share – the whole present-day reading world and I, that is – of dwelling entirely too much on the most “negative,” soul-agitating tales in what we perceive to be the pursuit of necessary ingredients for concocting a better solution. Bandcamp’s story is predominantly comprised of smart decisions, sincere transparency, and savvy ideas which are best examined in contrast, I’m afraid, with all that’s being done wrong everywhere else.
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Are my favorite punk bands now Bandcamp bands? Are they suddenly wanting to conform to a kind of Bandcamp aesthetic? I don’t think so. Not yet. But if that does happen, something might be lost — a sense of these bands defining themselves as they want to, which is sort of the Bandcamp promise in the first place. People can use help navigating the riches of Bandcamp. But its estimable editorial project opens an interesting question: When does help turn into tastemaking?
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The Creators
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You missed it, didn’t you—the ten-year anniversary of Bandcamp’s launch? Ashamed, I realized last month that I did, too. Ashamed, because I owe a lot to to the platform’s unwavering commitment to the distribution and curation of work made by just about all of my favorite artists—within and outside of my social network. Throughout 2015, I hosted a number of conversations with exceptional, future-looking creators on Drycast which I am especially proud of. On one early episode with an exceptional total of seven music makers, I observed in a beat that “all of us have Bandcamp accounts,” before the week’s guest, Samantha Carter, suggested that she’d found her page especially financially rewarding, and originated the concept of the “Bandcamp Sugar Daddy” (which I personally ship 100%.)
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“It's something I take for granted,” said my friend yzome – a truly one-of-a-kind electronic producer who’s far-traveling composition is probably the closest Digital Audio Workstation equivalent of Extreme Use Testing—when automotive manufacturers effectively torture new prototypes with the most inhospitable conditions on Earth until they break. However, it’s not a PR stunt in yzome’s case—he’s just very good at doing what he does after doing it for nearly 10 years—and his end product requires a hell of a lot more than any one genre would ever presume, but it more than delivers back on the investment with significant interest.
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When he appeared on Drycast in January 2015, we failed to achieve any descriptors more sophisticated than “alien sounds,” but perhaps that’s all they need: the inner worlds into which yzome invites us are of manic, unpredictable arrhythmia which poses an unapologetic, yet magically lighthearted challenge to any cohesive theory. It’s very rare that his proudly-ungenreable exploration of the fringes does not demand the listener’s full attention, yet it always manages to be inoffensively aggressive like nothing else, which suggesting promise for the possible upheaval of a long-upheld natural law among electronic dance music: yzome doesn’t need to be a shithead to challenge the listener intellectually.
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Play YVETTE for any boomer you know with that classically impenetrable disgust for all electronic music, and you’ll witness firsthand how special yzome’s particular innovation truly is. No, they’re not going to be sexually liberated, or anything—it’s still going to be alarming—but you’ll notice that the swift and overwhelming fury which sample and break-heavy dance music has always awoken within them has been miraculously circumvented. Instead of immediately storming off, they’ll be paralyzed in an existential fugue state from which they may never quite fully emerge. I’ve seen it firsthand. It’s witchcraft.
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There is no other across the (especially-wide) electronic spectrum who can so loudly go so far, so fast without any insincerity, whatsoever. His arrangement seems mischievous and all over the place, but really listen and you’ll hear rips of recognizable patterns playing peekaboo in willy-nilly bursts that reveal his dynamic mastery of the dance music space through Breakcore, Juke, Footwork, and Techno sampling. All of this is to say, really, that yzome’s music represents a level of boundary-pushing which only a niche audience tends to truly appreciate, yet is undoubtedly worthy of an elegantly-presented host like Bandcamp.
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“Like thank god I don't have to look for a label to release this. It's seen as a legitimate platform (by people who might actually care about what I’m doing, at least,) which I think is less offputting than uploading things to Mediafire or whatever else. It’s populist and boutique at the same time.”
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Populist, yet boutique. Can we really be expected to exceed this summation? Well, nobody’s said much at all in the mainstream press, but what has been said is 1) unusually misplaced in the spaces of those least likely to find it relevant and 2) way more insightful than you’d expect.
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“Bandcamp has an independent-artist identity because of practicalities: Independent artists from Web-centered subcultures need it most,” observed an especially savvy online aside from by Ben Ratliff—jazz and pop critic for The New York Times—asking “Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?” So why aren’t we talking about it? The other important takeaway: founder Ethan Diamond told Ratliff that “the company has never spent money on promotion.” This is largely why I’ve invested so much time and affection into this piece—gratitude is not often sellable incentive for mainstream coverage.
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The truth is, the continued obscurity of Bandcamp’s story despite all it’s done comes down not to any malpractice by the company (in fact, it would likely be more visible had it fucked up more,) or even to its prevalence in the careers of big industry names (whom I will address in detail shortly,) but because it simply operates too magnanimously for its customers to be taken seriously as a newsworthy business, which is problematic and personally infuriating. In November, 2015, Bandcamp made mention in The New Yorker via the openly diminutive context of Car Seat Headrest’sorigin story, describing it as “a charming alternative,” and “a casual, low-risk approach.” Granted, it’s worth noting that the platform did not address its lack of “editorial guidance” until a year later, with the launch of the excellent Bandcamp Daily blog, but I think you’ll agree it’s in poor taste to argue against the legitimacy of a music distribution platform because it’s too democratic. Perhaps it’s still just beyond reasonable expectations to get a top-of-the-foodchain music writer’s head wrapped around the idea that such products on The Internet can easily—even optimally—service both hobbyists and professionals.
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Last year, Bandcamp was responsible for $270 million in payments to artists like Jlin,the genius commonly associated with Footwork (certainly Chicago’s most underreported and popularly underrepresented movement,) for pushing its expressive boundaries both in theory and geography further than any other, and who’s so far produced two of the most “aggressively beautiful” records you’ll find anywhere in the process.[i] Type her name into any search engine and her Bandcamp page is always the first result, yet Cntrl-Fing for “Bandcamp” will yield 0 results from her interviews with The Fader, FACT Magazine, Pitchfork, The Seventh Hex, Passion of the Weiss, PopMatters, Crack Magazine, DUMMY, The Guardian, The Quietus, BOMB Magazine, Ableton Blog, The Creative Independent, Rolling Stone, SPIN, No Fear of Pop, self-titled magazine, Circulation Magazine, The New Yorker, Cyclic Defrost, Mixmag, or melting bot, and only one in Interview Magazine. To be clear: I am not arguing that Jlin—a black female music artist—should be profusely thanking Bandcamp—a service founded largely by white male programmers—for hosting her most visible page but rather that the more independent of these publications, especially, should mention its role in her story or—at the very least—be hyperlinking to her Bandcamp page first, for both her’s and their readers’ sake—Bandcamp’s cut of album purchases is half of iTunes. From the user experience perspective, it’s absurd that those of these pages including embedded music players chose to use SoundCloud’s—which is more resource heavy (yet of noticeably lesser streaming playback quality) and visually disruptive—instead of Bandcamp’s.
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The two services were launched the same year—that fateful 2008—but comparing them is complicated. They are clear opposites in at least one principal: how they’ve defined their mission. Bandcamp has changed less throughout its history than any other Web service that comes to mind (see below,) but SoundCloud has struggled with identity issues, to their vastly-superior success (in terms of user statistics, anyway.) The New York Timesreported in June, 2011 that they’d reached 5 million users, citing their decision to expand focus beyond “popular music” to explain the milestone. “We’re building a sound platform that’s not just about music,” said Alex Ljung – a SoundCloud co-founder and the company’s chief executive at the time – and its present landscape certainly reflects a diverse offering of uses, but ultimately, any . Today, both SoundCloud and Bandcamp have premium subscription plans for artists which are at least perceived to be competitive with one another—SoundCloud Pro and Bandcamp Pro, respectively—along with free base experiences, which we’ll compare first.
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Free Bandcamp Account
- Uploads: quantity unlimited, size of each file limited to 291mb.
- Distribution: unlimited streaming, up to 200 free downloads per month.
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Free SoundCloud Account
- Uploads: total of 3 hours uploaded at any given time.
- Distribution: unlimited streaming, unlimited downloads.
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Both offer access “basic” statistics for their tracks at this tier which most of the creators I know consider more than enough—the usefulness of any playback/download stats is negligible when you’re publishing within tight niches—and each has had about 5 years to fine-tune their free offerings so that they feel as complete as possible. If you’re planning on publishing a podcast on SoundCloud, you’re obviously going to have to upgrade your upload limit even beyond Pro ($8/month, 6-hour upload limit) to Pro Unlimited ($16/month, unlimited uploads,) though I would suggest a plethora of alternative methods before you got that far. Unfortunately, they would not include a free Bandcamp account. While there arepodcasts on Bandcamp, they’re completely separate the platform’s aspirations and without support for the basic requirements of podcast distribution (namely, RSS feeds.)
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Bandcamp’s Pro option is $10 a month and includes a custom domain, batch file uploading, private streaming (for press and/or fans) plus the ability to disable free streaming (requiring listeners to actually buy the music to enable any playback,) ad-free video hosting (which nobody uses, to my knowledge,) extended fan interaction tools, and a broader statistics suite that includes Google Analytics support. SoundCloud’s Pro and Pro Unlimited options are complimentary, but a full-time independent artist could justify maintaining Pro accounts on both services or neither—one does not necessarily replace the other, but the contrast in their chosen presentations has led to a divide in the cultures of the two communities so stark it could be a punchline and/or simplified to say that SoundCloud is for rap and Bandcamp is not.
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It’s not entirely shocking, then, that SoundCloud’s story has been more present in the greater conversation than Bandcamp’s. Frankly, its largest issues are directly related: compared to SoundCloud, Bandcamp’s community is White As Fuck (a claim I can only make on behalf of my own observations and those which a select few creators have seen fit to express to me over the years, considering that the company has yet to release any demographic information about its creators) which is a glaringly fundamental obstruction to the project’s broader mission to help music culture “thrive.”
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From a future historian’s perspective, the battle for the definitive name in independent digital music distribution has already won, largely thanks to its relationship with Chance The Rapper, who’s quickly become a “cultural influencer, thought leader, global star,” and one of my generation’s upmost celebrity champions. Obviously, there is little sense trying to determine whether SoundCloud earned his partnership or landed their popular association with his name as long as the artist maintains it publicly, while continuing to give new meaning to the phrase “serially likable.” Thus far, his mythical power to exude purity has felt virtually 100% airtight Last year, his second album Coloring Book made history when it won the first streaming-only Grammy for Best Album. In my personal favorite moment in recent popular culture memory, the fashionable-as-hell young man accepted the accolade by looking the whole industry establishment in the face and proclaiming “this is for every indie artist—everybody who’s been doin’ this mixtape shhhh...tuff for a long ass time... shouts out to every independent artist out there; shouts out to SoundCloud for holding me down.” Obviously, such significant, sentimental, and sincere sentiments are never expressed about tech companies by beloved darlings of the art world like Chance—especially not for Earth-encompassing awards show audiences.
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After last year’s massive layoff, it was Chance’s assurances that “SoundCloud is here to stay” which the public took to heart. Even if the company is destined to fail within the next year (it appears to be as yet missing much of a verdict,) and it’s all still destined to fold at any moment, at least it’ll have the distinct pride of doing so having maintained his publicly-expressed respect and confidence, which is a damned fine legacy in my book. Meanwhile, Bandcamp has only made a few small tweaks to its basic infrastructure, and added new features very deliberately, which haven’t resulted in a single memorable controversy. Aside from Amanda Palmer, perhaps, there has never been a single band or artist who’ve been known as “from Bandcamp,” leaving our only pitch to be something like Independent Online Music Platform on Track to Complete 10th Year Serving Small-Time Artists, Continues to Look Pretty Good.
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Considering the significance of these contributions, it’s of a special wonder that they were made not by a non-profit organization, academic movement, or government endowment, but by a for-profit, California-based tech company that’s continued to thrive and innovate great content, entirely apart from mainstream coverage.
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The Future
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It might seem a bit much on the surface, but in many ways, Bandcamp has spent the past 10 years showing us what a for-profit, Web-based, culturally-edging independent platform Can be, even in the Valley.
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Though Bandcamp has embarked upon unusually sparse explanation of its editorial directive in the Daily blog and Weekly podcast, but regularly consume either for any length of time, and you’ll notice a particular savvy for Discovering technically-progressive Afrocentric projects: “Black Experimental Music.”
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On last week’s episode of the excellent New York Times podcast Still Processing, co-host Jena Wortham “I’m thinking a lot about ways in which new culture, new cultural products, new cultural creators come to light in ways that sidestep these traditional means and don’t have to go through the traditionally very white, very male, very cis, very hetero hoops to prove worthiness.”
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So, our greatest hope for the decentralization of the music industry in the 1990s ended up transforming before us to become the most effectively divisive Discovery barrier ever known to man because of its psychological influence sub-threshold at unprecedented scale over time, in parallel with so many other like horrific monstrosities we’ve discovered in anguish to be mutants of those final salvations from our atrocious history which we’d been so relieved to believe in. Surely, the turn of the millennia was destined to be our final turning point – the moment we’d finally use our new technology to discover a truth (or maybe just a really good clue,) that’d immediately unite our species in a deafening, worldwide aha moment when it would reveal a general abstract of whatever the fuck our deal was that was preventing our silent, dutiful, and 100% harmonious collective effort toward a utopia like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s, in which anyone is absolutely free of obligation or desperation from birth to pursue… whatever with their time.
Purposing a disciplined effort to reflect on those tech products which have remained too fair and/or too good to catch the attention of the alarmists in us, recently.
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I've never been a big fan of holidays, nor do I think Thanksgiving should be a federal one, given its shitty, undebatably imperialist origins, but these opinions are entirely inconsequential. Regardless of how I feel, Thanksgiving will remain as pervasive as ever in the spaces around me, so I thought I'd change things up this year and actually participate in a substantial way. I did my best to travel back to a vastly less complicated self, letting all of the crud that's accumulated atop my love of computers in the past twenty years: wokeness, adtech, Obama wearing VR glasses, etc... When I thought the Native Americans were glad to see white people because they gave them guns and horses and assumed people made things because good ideas were the apex of currency. When I was able to respond to new software discoveries by screwing around aimlessly without wondering if they'd been stolen entirely from a handful of talented developers lacking in the resources and know how required to protect their ideas in the face of Microsoft's ruthless Embrace, Extend, Extinguish crusade.
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Forgive yourself for a moment and return there with me. Or perhaps somewhere else, if you need – wherever and whenever you last remember feeling genuinely enthralled with The Future of Computers. (Perhaps it was yesterday! If so, Gourd bless you. Never change.) Let's take ourselves back to kindergarten, before we knew anything about the rapid cyclical consolidation and monopolization within the technology industry that had already established itself as a trend, by then, when all we knew of the software we interacted with was contained within our most visceral reactions: I like Ask Jeeves because I like red and I like Jeeves. I vaguely remember when Google (the search engine) first broached the general awareness of my elementary school's computer lab. I'm fairly sure I even remember the sort of feelings that were elicited the first time I actually set eyes on the Google.com homepage: it looked so modern, then, compared to the rest of the web. (After two decades, it currently looks like shit.) Upon the first first query, it was immediately clear that Google was superior to any of the other search engines we'd been using.
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This sort of encounter – with a service that significantly alters one's perception of a given set of tasks – is precious in our lives as users.
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A few examples from my own using life which come to mind:
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The first time I witnessed a Skype call.
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Downloading and using the beta Evernote client on the school machines in Junior High.
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The first album I uploaded on Bandcamp.
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Discord's first public release.
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The “moment” I first put a name to Markdown. (I'd been using bits of the syntax for years before I actually read the word.)
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And most recently, exploring Notion as personal catch-all documentation software.
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The atmosphere of elation about the future on which I so often lament has been replaced by wariness for most of us – from Californian software developers to tractor-hacking farmers. Now, the conversation is saturated with CEO appearances before legal committees, corporate memo leaks, and somber interviews. Of course, I have unquestionably contributed more than my share. In fact, I wish I could be twice as critical in twice the written volume, and I believe the tech media industry to be far too culturally-embedded within Silicon Valley to be nearly critical enough. For this holiday, though, I think a respite from the negative is worthwhile and essential. I know it is for my personal sanity, at least.
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A week ago, I shared this Google Form and asked you to reflect with me on the “really great” software/services you have encountered in your using life built by “technology companies who's business ethics align toward the benefit of us users and who's products are well-priced (or free!)” As of the time of this writing, nearly 80 responses have been recorded on the form, itself, and several more via comments on Hacker News. I deeply appreciate your participation! They're far from predictable, too – I've ended up learning a lot. The very first submission was for Logos Bible Software, which has quite a fascinating history. I feel like those less-secular of us go unexposed to theological software without participants such as the human who submitted this one (thank you, human!,) and end up missing out on an entire segment of software development. Having studied The Good Book in a very much analog fashion through Lutheran school, I wonder in retrospect how software solutions could've changed the experience.
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I have never received this volume of feedback in my prompts before, nor have I ever really seen a reason to close any of them to responses, so I'm going to take a blind shot at the dartboard and plan to close the form on New Year's Day, 2021. Until then, please feel free to respond in any way you'd like and/or view all the live answers in this very bad spreadsheet full of these very good responses. (My apologies – I have absolutely no idea how to use Google Sheets.)
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ⓣⓗⓐⓝⓚⓢ
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I originally intended to go into relatively extensive detail for each of the entities on my own Most Thankful For list, but I do have to actually stop somewhere, so the commentary on these isn't remarkably insightful or educational. It is genuine, though, which is worth something, I hope.
Yes, I have tirelessly promoted my essay about Bandcamp's holiness for years now, but I have done so with good reason: here is a for-profit technology company which is building a one-of-a-kind product that invests directly in independent artists. I spent a whole summer scouring The Web looking for a single misstep or controversy and found absolutely none.
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Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
Before OBS (Open Broadcaster Software,) streaming video was an absolute mess that usually involved paying for or pirating some proprietary software. Remember Ustream? Good God...
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OBS is the streaming video equivalent of Audacity and GIMP: an extremely powerful, infinitely-malleable set of tools that allow one to take full advantage of their hardware to capture and/or stream video and audio.
Typora is an infinitely-customizable markdown editor spanning all platforms that's managed to become my primary word processor (and I'm someone who demands a lot from word processors.) It's immensely powerful in all the important ways – my use over the past two years has stress tested it with both enormous (100,000+ words) and extremely complicated (100+ images and embeds) documents. It's able to export even these chunkos to any format you can imagine instantaneously and never crashes.
Typora is a Markdown editor with left sidebar file sorting, very much like Bear (several available themes can make it look actually identical, in fact,) but without its native iCloud-based file syncing. It is cross-platform, open-source, and definitely more powerful, though.
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The Typora theming community has been especially on-point, as of late. In the screenshot embedded above, it's wearing the Slate variation of H16nning's Gitbook theme, which is by far the most beautiful configuration I've yet to see the editor in.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program – which just celebrated its 25th anniversary last week – is one of the most powerful tools in its space and perhaps the number one exemplary example of open source software to cite when explaining the concept for the first time. I have used it my entire creative life for all manner of tasks and evangelized it plenty, but it wasn't until I returned to college this Fall and took advantage of Adobe's student discounts that I had an opportunity to thoroughly explore its proprietary nemesis, Photoshop.
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What I found was indeed a very powerful piece of software, albeit as arrogant as ever in its stubborn commitment to the original keyboard shortcuts set by default and other legacy artifacts, though not one I would compare to GIMP, necessarily. This shouldn't be breaking news: as far as I know, there are billions of posts comparing the two going back to the beginning of the written word. My personal conclusion: I can accomplish much more, much faster with GIMP in every single one of my own use cases.
I was browsing some FOSS-related article aggregation page a few weeks ago when a post caught my eye: “Audacity exceeds 100 million downloads.” In reflection, I realized in that moment that perhaps no other single piece of software has been so thoroughly present in my “workflows” across all sorts of projects through the years, largely because of its God-sent Truncate Silence feature, which I have used to remove silence from audio files for as long as I've been working within the medium, basically. Every podcast episode I have ever published has passed through Audacity for this reason and others, as have voiceovers, high school punk band demo tapes, personal voice notes, and more.
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the world would actually be perfect if audacity's truncate silence feature could be autotied to video timecodes.
Until OBS came along, Audacity was where all recorded audio started for myself and my creative friends. It was Audacity that captured (and caused, technically) the death of my friend's soundcard in audio form during the recording process for Hamura, the first Drywall album, back in October of 2011.
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Fucking around in Audacity through the years has led to some halfway creative results on my part, including “SLOWED 'N' THROWED” Hilary Duff tracks and legacy Windows sounds remixes. I still use it for every episode of End User and have recently created a macro for remastering Drycast episodes. (A big feat for me and reflective of Audacity's ingenuity.) As far as I know, there are zero competitors, proprietary or not, which can replicate Audacity's particular usefulness as an audio utility.
Shortly after I discovered NeoCities last Spring, I signed up to be a Supporter for $5/month, not necessarily for the additional storage or bandwidth, but because the project immediately sounded like one I was personally obligated to uplift. Parimal Satyal's essay “Rediscovering the Small Web,” along with the design of the website which delivered it, inspired me to make another attempt at building an HTML site by hand. So far, davidblue.xyz obviously borrows heavily from his CSS, but looking at the code itself was vastly more pleasant than one would expect. Recently, during the course of writing an academic research essay, I found myself listening to interviews with its founder, Kyle Drake and reading articles from its debut in 2013, which prompted me to take even further advantage of my account.
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Last week, I moved my inactive automotive blog (dieselgoth.com) from a Writeas blog to a purely-HTML NeoCities website with disturbingly little friction. (I challenge you to spot any differences.) After discovering a backup of the original Drywall Website deep within my old files, NeoCities was the only reasonable host on which to archive it. After I'd finished uploading, I fell down what the youth call a “rabbit hole” of discovery, mesmerized by what I found on page after page of NeoCities' site browser. I did my best to save the best finds by following them within the sites dashboard and have since set up a Best of NeoCities GitHub repository with my absolute favorites among them archived thanks to wget.
Trust me when I tell you that some of the best web design, ever can be found on NeoCities. What's even better: after my deep dive, I was pleasantly surprised by strangers commenting on what I'd found! Replying in a timely, substantial, and genuine manner seems to be a hallmark of the community: my (rather verbose) question regarding the well-manneredness of publishing such an archive without permission in the community Discord I discovered just this morning was almost immediately met with encouraging replies.
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A Post you should probably expect soon: “NeoCities is 2020's Best Social Network.” Going forward, I'd like to digitize my poetry collection on NeoCities in the near future while continuing to otherwise brush back up on HTML and CSS – both of which I am also very thankful for, come to think of it.
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Thank you again for your correspondence! May your Imperialism Day be a positive experience!
This is an excerpt from my novel project, Blimp's Burden, about a jaded software engineer who’s new, ridiculously-eccentric boss presents a future which forces him to reckon with his mishandled grief. To support the novel's creation with art, funds, etc, please email me.
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Listen to the entirety of the chapter read aloud by Siri Voice 2 below.
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In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn. From the main gated lane of The Nice, Huge Estate, Lenny Lather slid through the muddy barrier and started bouncing West on the blacktop, brogues squeaking every third step. The overcasted clouds were having trouble deciding whether or not to let down their rain – as they had been all day – and the old, heavy early-March mist softened the yellow glow of the tall, buzzing streetlamps so much that he couldn’t help but intermittently wipe his eyes, for the spreading light convinced his mind that his eyelashes must’ve been wetted.
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Theodore Pith’s big old house was now burrowed between two mismatched neighborhoods – the bleaker Easterly, which was too new for its alien trees to have recovered from the brutality of its development’s clear-cutting and contained within one of its central featureless backyards an unidentifiable creature which made all through the night the most unimaginably ghastly, disturbingly human child-like shrieking; the opposing Westerly’s trees further enough along in their regrowth – ten or twenty years perhaps – to appear more of the planet Earth to Manhattan-bred Lenny Lather, who still found the colorless destruction of suburbia unendingly upsetting, especially when coming down. In the interest of his regular withdrawal’s mitigation, he had already established two short, repeatable tracks and a longer, several mile-long loop which skirted him sufficiently around the East’s center to avoid hearing the shrieks in all but the stillest nights. Never in his years – on these walks he was especially reminded of just how many there were – had he been able to feel such absolute ownership of his surroundings. The eroding Earth slipping away from the hem of the warped, stained wood fences; the sidewalks, cracked, bent, sloped helter-skelter, often muddied in the troughs and joints – generally laying haphazardly in layers after having been steadily tossed about by the glacial forces of their intermixture with clay, precipitation, and the tumultuous temperature-dependent torture of the two – these were his, entirely, in the right hour. Between two and five in the morning when the earliest risers would blearily revive their dewy automobiles from long, silent hibernation, the whole world – everything in his sight and more at any moment – it was all his, without a single worthy challenger.
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In the right hour, the roads were completely and totally abandoned – for the New Yorker, an unfathomable absolute – and all humanity was at rest. In the right hour, Lenny Lather was the appointed guardian of the worn domesticity of a small nation, though the lonely occupation was astoundingly lax, for in the miles and miles of empty streets he had already traversed in his nightly holidays from the World of Pith, he had yet to encounter a single unexpected factor or minutely threatening presence. Since shortly after his December arrival, he’d walked through even the most frigid mornings. Of course, the stillness had then been even more otherworldly, and Lenny was curious to see how his new most private domain would change with the seasons. Though the auxiliary guest room which he now called home was no smaller or less hospitable than the master bedroom of his late Hudson Yards flat shared with his late Wife, it proved to be a poor respite from Theodore Pith, who treated him – when they were “home” at Nice, Huge – as the puppy he never had, and expected his participation to remain entirely vulnerable to his any whim. Granted – in their shared abuse of amphetamines, cocaine, and assorted other stimulants – Lenny Lather was vastly more prepared for the games than any circadian guest could’ve possibly been. At first, the ten-foot door of his dawn-facing room had closed without latching, but with the warmth and moisture brought with the Midwestern Spring, the most secure state in which the engorged wood could be forcibly arranged still left a half-inch crack, and Lather’s last chance of privacy was lost.
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The latest favorite pastime of Nice, Big’s Master necessitated a willing, capable driver, and – as keeping a single Butler (much less an entire household staff) was proving extremely difficult for him – Lenny Lather was the sole pick of the draft. In the earliest hours of one Tuesday morning in February, he’d been pleasantly dosing and drooling on his laptop after an evening of obsessive, incoherent notetaking when the huge door had been kicked ajar by a deep black, blindingly shiny oxford with excessively violent force. Attached to the shoe in an equally blinding penguin tuxedo, towering bowler hat, and cartoonish fake mustache was the Great, Blown Pith.
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“Hope you’re not busy,” he’d said quite loudly to the lolling Lather, leaning and tilting his head into the lamp light, which had dislodged his monocle and briefly occupied him with untangling its chain.
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…
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“You’re not busy, are ya?!” he’d shouted, tapping the shiny brass lion’s head of his shiny black cane against the vanity… then swatting it with a flicking wrist… then clubbing it with a full, two-handed homerun swing – taking huge, vaguely cat nose-shaped gouges from the surface of the wood. The splintery wood chips had rained down upon the hunched Lenny; he’d stirred with one found its way in his open mouth – he’d chewed it slowly and swallowed it, but he still had not awoken. Nevertheless, Theodore Pith’s coked-up enthusiasm couldn’t possibly have yielded to common decencies like his guest’s nighttime peace.
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…
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“SHOOT, LENNY,” he’d screamed in his companion’s ear, having traversed the room to his bedside.
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“I SURE HOPE YOU’RE NOT BUSY RIGHT NOW!”
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…
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Finally, he’d resorted to tickling Lenny’s nose with the ornament, which had reeked with the urinal smell of metal polish – the sudden, overwhelming delivery of which to the writer’s olfactory nerves finally causing ample alarm in his nervous system to justify bringing him abruptly back to his life and deluded host.
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“I need a favor. The Duesie’s warming up. We’re going for a ride.”
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Unable to form a linguistic response, Lenny Lather had obeyed Theo’s frenzied, repeating instructions and stumbled into the matching suit he’d brought over his arm – wondering with marginal, arrested clarity at how well-tailored it was for him. He had not the soundness of perception to protest when Pith had whipped a deep black, blindingly shiny bowtie around his already-congested esophagus, nor when he’d adheased the huge, itchy matching fake moustache to his upper lip and nearly pulled the matching Tower of Bowler all the way down over his ears. He had been unresponsive when he’d been sat on the bench under the agonizing fluorescent lights of the laundry room, affixed with deep black, blindingly shiny matching oxfords, and asked if he smoked and how well he could say guffaw.
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…
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“Just wait… you have no idea… you have no idea how much fun this is going to be.”
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Lenny Lather had not… could not have made a sound through the confusing nonsense of his waking pre-Great Depression dream, but when the old servant’s door had been opened before him and set the heartless, single-digit Winter wind upon his very soul, he had all at once arrived in the world, laughing and whooping together with Theodore Pith.
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“Jesus Christ!” he’d screamed as they’d hobbled to the stable, where a devilishly dark red Model J Duesenberg had sat shivering in a rough idle, staring out the retrofitted garage door with its basketball-sized lights as if it was, indeed, a flesh-and-blood steed that had just been frightened awake by a thunderstorm, but the sky had been as clear as it would’ve been from an asteroid – as it is only on the coldest nights – and almost comically dominated by the setting, gluttonously luminescent moon. Theodore had then grabbed a screwdriver from the workbench and bent down to remove the license plate – which had said BLOOD in big black bold block letters – and its containing frame. By the time he had settled into the frigid red leather of the exposed, roofless driver’s seat, Lenny Lather was full-to-bursting with adrenaline and laughing out huge streams of breathy steam. From behind him in the cabin, Pith had been guffawing plumes, too, as he’d briefly ignited his cocaine-sprinkled mustache instead of the bratwurst-sized cigar between his teeth. The smell of burning human hair had accented his explanation of the old car’s transmission and its direct path from source-to-nose for Pith had required a brief, unplanned intermission as it induced without warning his violent heaving – still part-guffawing – hanging half out of his beautifully-upholstered suicide door.
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As he had spewed – expertly sparing the swoop of the gleaming waxy fender – Lenny had found a pair of deep black, blindingly shiny gloves and – after less grinding than you would imagine, to his credit – first gear, setting the whole dastardly circus in motion.
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“Where to, Sire?” Lenny had asked, nose lifted to an untenable altitude in a pitiful approximation of an accent that’d never actually been used before by any person or persons in all of history, struggling for breath.
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“Left at the gates, Barnsward, old chap,” Theodore had replied in a contrasting fashion after again sitting upright from his heaves and taking a breath, ironing out – if anything – the flatness of his perforating Ohio Ds and Ps, resulting in such a culturally destructive racket that it had set both of them in uncontrollable, cloudy fits lasting long after Lather had swerved the great length of the car from the gravel to his abandoned asphalt retreat. The two had continued their banter down that soul-suckingly flat vector, one-upping each other’s etymologic barbarity against the savage thievery of the heatless wind.
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“Now to star-board, Budleigh, my good fellow!”
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“Right-o, as you say, sir!”
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“Down to the pu-hb for a spaht of brahn-dee with me mae-its!”
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“Oncemo-ar right, pip pip!”
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“By jah-lee, there we are!”
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After the entirety of Northern European history had been decimated and subsequently forgotten, the Duesenberg named BLOOD had turned its orange, googley-eyed stare and narrow whitewalled hooves up the reflective, freshly-painted access of the new 24-hour grocery in the no-man’s-land between the cookie-cutter stares of the neatly-rowed Easterly neighborhood and the droning respiration of Interstate 43, two miles distant. It was 2:12 in the morning and most of the greasy-haired night stocking shift had been halfway through their third smoke break, circled around a store-used picnic table 50 yards from the far sliding airlock doors. The first to spot BLOOD had been the second shortest of the lot, whose weary scrutiny along the truest radian to the West from under his sweaty beanie in her entrance she had crossed, and the depth of her red as he first spied it had caused him vertigo – as if he would fall in – and cast upon the shorter-than-average length of his being an all-consuming existential doubt. The tallest and loudest of them had faced squarest the white faux-brick wall of the box building and was at that moment engaged upon a spirited rant about where and where’nt and when a vapist ought to buy his Suck juice between long, gasping Sucks from his super-shiny Suck box. Of course, the arrival of a customer even at such a late hour did not warrant notice at a huge, broadly-servicing operation like theirs, but as BLOOD had crept through all four reflective yellow-checkered pedestrian crossings, closing without a flinch, and the details of her occupying caricatures had become more and more numerous, she had stolen the attention of the huddle, one-by-one, and elicited from each the rarest under-breath profanity of true, unmolested wonder.
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“Jesus Christ,” had said the shortest.
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“Holy fuck,” had said the youngest.
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“Gee whiz,” had said the oldest.
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And the Sucking tallest, having realized he’d lost his audience, had been the last to turn and follow their eyes BLOOD’s way as she had halted coolly in front of the purely white glowing concrete leading into the closest customer entrance, and had – without the gradual exposure over the length of her approach that his peers had been afforded – dropped his Suck box and exclaimed at the sudden, undiluted immensity of the spectacle, simply, “FUCK!”
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The Sucking’s FUCK and the splitting shatter of his Suck against the glass of their smoking table had reached the two arrivees – albeit in a muted way – and through the onset of their frostbite’s early stages even further stoked their already-uncontrollable boyish giggling. Theodore Pith had paused briefly to affix his monocle as firmly as possible in his eye socket and stuff down his spasmic guffaws with a few lip-smacking puffs of his then successfully-lit cigar before swinging his right door open.
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“Stay here and wait at the ready, my good… my best Bagsy! I shan’t be a twinkle,” he had declared, clicking it lightly shut again and turning on his heels toward the pale light of the store, twirling his cane in dramatically shortened strides so as to reproduce the oversped effect of a silent motion picture, puff-puffing away. As the doors had sensed him and indiscriminately whirred aside, he had turned to the smokers – most of whom had still been reeling, grabbing for their hair – and bobbed the bulk of his big black bowler toward their communion with his gloved black fingers by the brim.
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“Tally-ho, my boys!” he had shouted, sending Lenny Lather’s wide open face toward the floor of the idling car as he doubled over himself in the first spontaneously asphyxiating, tear-lobbing laughter he’d yet to experience in the 21st century. As Theodore had entered the masterpiece of the boxed store’s bleakness in his cane twirling, head swinging, cigar puffing shuffle, he had made sure to stay his instinct to sneak for a swift, full-chat dart, instead, and the on-duty leather-faced embodiment of tedium’s wrath beneath his lone lit lane light had looked up from his People Magazine just in time to see the heel of a deeply black oxford and the last shiny inches of flowing black coattails disappear behind the potato sack endcap of the far Aisle 1. He’d hesitated, chin against palm, holding his next glossed page perpendicularly erect between his tightened thumb and index finger for a long few seconds of fantastic stillness – had hastily attempted a diagnostic of his present senses – before a locomotive-like segmented tube of cigar smoke had risen from against the light tiles and unsoiled trimming to intersect his line-of-sight where it met the darkened deli, recessed in the far wall from his hunch, the motion startling him into his own throat-clearing, counter-rounding, key-jingling, excuse me-shouting march toward the lumpy potato sacks and the climbing dissipation of the most unbelievable violation. As he had jingled, he had reflected on the few occasions in which he’d ever smelled tobacco smoke in his store: all incidental, most very brief, and many followed by a lengthy, unreasonably self-deprecating apology. To just walk in his Temple of Domestic Fulfilment during this most Serene Time of Silent Service, spewing orange nicotine on his premium, Food & Drug Administration-blessed body and blood offering to the middle class was surely in ignorance, but could have even been in spite. Regardless, the transgression was worthy of the most merciless wrath, and he had been selected as its willing, capable vessel. In just the fifteen seconds it’d taken him to jingle his way to Aisle 1, he’d thought himself and his leather into flash-broiling, fast-rising fury.
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Perhaps the least expected sight that could have possibly greeted this Apostle of Appraisal on the far side of Aisle 1 – as he rounded the potato sack endcap and filled his excuse me lungs in preparation through his nose – was the labored lifting of the 125-pound eldest child of the new, Parisian-trained, full-time, certified cheese artisan – whom the store had just won out of 175 competitors in a region-wide raffle of her pilot program – by the dashing, swinging, and smoking real-life manifestation of a young Rich Uncle Pennybags, yet shock did not long halt the Keys & Leather.
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“Sir! Excuse me!”
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…
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“Excuse me! Sir!”
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Theodore Pith – having reevaluated the girth of his intended booty – had propped his shiny black cane against the sill of the refrigerator and popped each slack bottom up off his oxfords from his shins before squatting over the massive Holy Wheel of the Artisan where it lay displayed on a sturdy bespoke plinth.
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…
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“Sir! You need to put out that cigar… the cigar – put it out immediately!”
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Keys & Leather had the odd inability to both shout and shuffle at the same time, so he’d only made it to the pomegranate juice by the time Pith had mustered enough momentum to swing the cheese child into a high enough pendulum to carry it stably facing forward under his chin with his two hands spaced evenly on the Great Wheel’s bottom.
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…
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“Sir! I’m going to have to ask you to put that down… That is a four thousand dollar item… If you want to buy it, we need to go about-”
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“…now, see here!” Pith had replied with great effort, in the midst of weighing in his mind the worth of the cane as a casualty, then of the monocle, too, which had fallen out while he was weighing, and of his own physical intelligence, and whether or not it was capable of retrieving the cane by its brass lion’s head handle via the top of a flicking foot without losing his balance. Keys & Leather, meanwhile, had been tortured at great length witnessing – in Theodore’s gravitational struggle – the Cuban’s ashes knocked all over the precious round Immanuel; the artisan’s Beloved, Chosen son of cheese – a nauseating sensation of loss overwhelming all hope of his store’s defense. The Terrible Theodore had at once noticed his hesitation and arrived upon a plan to leave no prop behind. He had leaned forward with the girth of the wheel and closed the remaining few feet between them, advancing with the huge mass of Nazarethian dairy to bear it all down upon the unsuspecting Leather, who in his grief for the prized wheel was far too slow to deflect its incoming mass.
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“Now, see here, chum!” Pith had forced from the furthest possible extremis of his best mob mouth as he transferred his burden all at once to its most concerned party, who collapsed against the multilayered tables that made up the fresh cookie display, with the weight of the wheel on his belly. As the stunned Leather struggled to separate himself without further soiling the only item in his store that sold for double a month’s paycheck, Theodore had replaced his monocle and returned for his cane in a single stride, which he’d then used after a return step to the pile of chocolate chip, almond nut, and fuming night manager to rap loose with the snout of the terrible brass cat Leather’s white knuckle-tight grip on the wheel with a lampoonish haha! before rolling the freed cheese toward the door in a villainous cackle.
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“Man, come on,” the defeated Leather had yelled halfheartedly from his pile of sweets, struggling against the awkward, slippery boxes for enough footing to stand. His efforts, though, were interrupted after a time by the abrupt mute of Pith’s cackling in the second swooshing of the front sliding doors – he had missed his last chance of pursuit. It had all been in vain – he’d failed to guard the crown jewel of the whole suburb. As he had given up the chase and the cheese and slumped once more against the ruined pile, the ridiculousness of the crime against him nearly cracked a smile, but soon was deterred by the very real thought of explaining what had happened to his General Manager when she arrived in just five hours. After a moment, there, covered in cookies, dust, ashes, and shame, he had quietly begun to sob.
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After he had regained control of his diaphragm, Lenny Lather had been amused, outside, by the varying velocities in which the smokers of the night shift gave in to their curiosities about the presence of the seven-figure collectible and its purpose in waiting at its now healthier idle in front of their grocery store in the loneliest time of a Tuesday morning. The first and the bravest had been the one who first spotted their intrusion – the shortest – if only because he had remained entirely convinced for the duration that BLOOD and its two, period-dressed occupants were nothing but an apparition of his dead Grandfather and Great Uncle like others he’d thought he’d seen before, and – though he’d been terrified by the clarity of this realest visit yet, he’d been irritated more than anything, and wanted to know “why the hell can’t you just leave me alone?!” The others behind him had been staggered in the proximity to the waiting car they had achieved – the lesser and most cowardly being the largest – the Sucking evangelist – who had been waiting for the great automobile to leave so he could forge the exchange of his broken Suck box for a new one from the back. In the delirium of his exhaustion and progressing frostbite, Lenny Lather had thought the image of the men where they were would make for an interesting, organic graph on the nature of courage – their positions simply representing their unaltered datapoints, and had been considering how best to deal with or respond to the nearer, deluded one, who had by then come close enough to the elegant, professionally polished front-right fender to reach out and touch it with his unwashed hands, and appeared to be taking the matter under serious consideration. He’d been seconds away from finally deciding between his idiotic ideas for a joke response when by far the largest wheel of cheese he’d ever seen had come rolling out of the opening doors onto the concrete, followed closely behind by Theodore Pith who’d still had three-quarters or more of his cigar left to smoke and apparently switched to cheap mob clichés in his brief absence.
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“Haste, Don Lenny!” he’d yelled, re-opening his closest cabin door to chuck his cane in first. He’d then straddled the great wheel to position it against the step before making a scene of grunting and huffing against its side with his full weight. Again, the bewildered smokers had fallen silent – they did not recognize the ridiculous delicacy because it was special inventory and could only be handled by the Holy Artisan herself. Lather had started revving the huge old straight-8 to answer Pith’s urgency, who had found himself fresh out of phrases after the wheel had finally succumbed to its capture and rolled into the footwell.
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“Make haste, make haste, my boy!” he’d shouted, diving theatrically into the covered back seat, head-first, to which his icing chauffer had responded by revving the behemoth and briskly popping her clutch, which had lurched the pair into the last, getaway stage of their late grocery heist. As BLOOD’s razor-edged hood ornament had sliced through the night by the dumbstruck smokers, Theodore Pith was unable to think of anything to shout at them as he passed but for “bada-bing, bada-BOOM!”
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Though the Lake Geneva Police Department was shown the security footage of that first theft by management, the theatricality of their matching getup had inadvertently obscured their identities, and the organization’s extreme deficit of imagination had left them stumped by the lack of license plates on the car, despite the free and effortless ability of just about any casual enthusiast of early American luxury automobiles and/or lackadaisical disciple of the Concours religion to immediately identify BLOOD by name from the grainiest image, if consulted. If anything, their incompetence rewarded Pith and Lather’s continued focus on the products of the same store’s cheese artisan, as intelligence on the state of her latest flagship incubation was freely available with no more effort than it took to simply stop by her display amid regular shopping trips. Twice in two weeks, they stole both of her replacements for the biggest child without any significant alternation of their method, which frustrated her and the management nearly to the point of crises, and quickly lost all potential for fun in a third attempt – their kicks were in their absurdity, not their effectiveness, and neither of them cared much for the cheese.
In the midst of arranging Feebles for print, I stumbled upon an author and “book designer” engaged in launching a community for self-published, independent writers. I'm not going to specify names because I have no interest in shitting on his company, nor “what it stands for.” I don't want to shit for you at all, actually, just note a few still-underrealized realities about the sheer ludicrousness of the word business as it stands. Let's say you've got some manuscripts you've been sitting on for a few years, and you're introduced to the concept of self-publishing by an evermore earnestly-curious man on the radio named Audie one day. He and his interviewee (the owner of a self-publishing service) seem to say, curiously, that because an author's profit-per-unit can potentially be “four to five times more” than if he/she is published traditionally, self-publishing has now shed completely its aura of desperate amateurism.
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But – whoa, Nelly – writing to sell books, and writing books have perhaps never been further apart. And gee – you certainly didn't write to sell; selling hadn't occurred to you at all for a very long time, but from just one search, you find Our Friend, back from his own experiences as an author and editor, qualified and insistent that you can make money selling creative works of fiction.
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And Jesus Christ… All that said, I must admit to you that I've just finished Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, and was unable to commence this “review” without wondering aloud for you how Kilgore Trout – perhaps Kurt's favorite creation – would feel about this Friend's business.
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It was actually my Aunt Ayn who taught me to write, so Vonegutt was a mediocre Ray William Johnson-associated YouTube band until after high school, when “lots of people” started telling me to “read Vonnegut, man,” even though I cannot recall any specific events or recommenders. For whatever reason, though, I'd bought a copy immediately after a friend mentioned it, recently, and found him (in this particular work, at least) to be awfully sane for my taste, yet particularly resonant. Though written to make me think it was all a big one-draft ramble, Kurt's a bit too curt for it to be believed, I think. Auntie Rand would've double-taken his beratement of “in nonsense is strength” if she'd made it that far. I hope she did, because I found the image of her taking in his occasional hand doodles to be very amusing.
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Dwayne Hoover is awfully absent – and therefore, a very versatile storytelling device, though not in a lazy sense. We're repeatedly notified about an imminent convergence. Eventually, it's explained that the endgame involves Dwayne exploding into a violent revengeful tantrum against all the lifelong enemies of his subconscious. Including “people with brown skin.” Can I just bring up Ayn Rand again? I hope it's okay.
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Kilgore Trout is the most dangerous villain I've ever experienced. He has little to lose, and – like Vonnegut, it would seem – finds his observatory position in the world to be immensely amusing. His last amusement, even. Remember Ellsworth M. Toohey, the corrupter? I think they would've gotten along, funny enough.
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Yes, and Hoover would be Peter Keating, the corrupted. I'm reaching, yeah, but when do I not? Their immediate difference is the lack of malicious intent in Trout, of course. He is an aimless science fiction writer, who gives Dwayne a volume simply to shut him up. Neither villain is believable, per se, but both were written to be personifications of ideals; vehicles of metaphor.
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I think Rand could've quite easily become Vonnegut, were she to stick around much longer, but perhaps I believe so only because I've experienced a quantifiable transition from her sort of thinking (vaguely) to his (perhaps less vaguely.) An incorruptible commitment to absolute was Ayn's most potent conviction. Growing up as a white cis male, I was aching for a method of simplifying the world which I knew more and more to be infinitely complex. Inevitably, with age, I think a limitless appetite for the complexity must form, lest one spend the rest of his/her life fighting the singular truth in a miserable fortress of seclusion and amphetamine abuse.
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The key to Breakfast of Champions' genius is its utter lack of angst. Aside from his brief definition of a being – “an unwavering band of light” – Kurt had little interest in writing a manifesto, yet his perspective in his curious commentary manifests a much more profound critique of American society than Rand ever could've from her hole.
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As such, I think it's wisest to leave a rudimentary whole measurement of a writer to Aunt Ayn, but perhaps a particularly relevant spectrum in this case is clarity of sight. Rigid idealism has its place in literature, no doubt, but it's an awfully boring one without a writer's feet on the ground.
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How does this all relate to self-publication? Well, Our Friend, it turns out, offers preset novel “templates” to members of his writing community, into which one can “plug in” characters, setting, and basic plot elements to a degree of his/her choosing. And his YouTube channel is stuffed with all sorts of tutorials on formatting and – more disturbingly – how to create sellable cover art with Photoshop. Naturally, it includes instruction on stock and rights-free images.
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Though I've yet to read one, it doesn't take much imagination to comprehend the inevitable product. From Our Friend's vlogs, I can suppose a heavy focus on the adolescent market. What makes the whole concept noteworthy in my mind is the why? I'd like to think that I have a fairly-realistic grasp on the potentialities of writing for profit, and am obligated to wonder why one would “compromise” his/her “creative integrity” by publishing literature to sell, of all things.
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As I understand it, the methodical approach to authorship being encouraged is applicable to literally any other field, creative or not. It's curious and impressive, frankly, as their sales potential seems to be vastly superior to anything I'll ever bother to publish, but I must weigh in because of one quantifiable detriment: saturation.
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Someone is spending their money on these works – probably for their kids. I'm not a parent, but I'd be tremendously ashamed to discover that a book I'd given as a gift to anyone had been manufactured in this manner. Not just in the sense that most light literature is manufactured – written in hearty observance of academic rules of storytelling – but literally mass-produced with a goddamned intellectual stencil.
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Without sounding like I'm complaining... My singular self-published poetry collection is probably of significantly less whole-value to the majority of readers, but I can't help but think the effort put into its hand-drawn cover art and meticulously-arranged typography would make it a more comfortable investment, if anything else.
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This brings us to a distinctly-academic mainstay which I have always taken issue with: “consider your audience.” I first encountered this proverb in the context of a composition studies course, mind you, where its consideration in the essay medium makes unequivocally good sense. If we agree that an essay is defined by an uncompromising commitment to its effectiveness in making an argument, audience awareness is essential. If you were asked to decide on one primary purpose of writing in general, though, would it not be identical?
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Why didn't Kurt Vonnegut or Ayn Rand simply write essays? Well, the latter wrote many, but their sales have always been all but invisible compared to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. (Both of which resemble essays more than fiction, at times, but I'll spare you that conversation.) Did they consider their audience? Certainly not in the way my first Google result articulates it:
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Ensure that your documents meet the needs and expectations of your readers.”
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Ooo boy. To me, that translates a little too easily into “write what your readers want to read.” And maaaan... If there's anything that experience and Donald Draper have taught me, it's that people have no idea what they want, especially from art. And that's a reasonable mentality, isn't it? Perhaps even an exhaltable one. I know that predictable stories are my number one turnoff, personally. If I expected to exist for an eternity, I'd absolutely indulge every single creative work I could find, but I do not, and that realization (as I stated in my last Freq Check,) has propelled an underlying preference in all of my consumption decisions: what I have not (before) seen.
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Obviously, then – if you take my word for it – Our Friend's endeavors are in direct ideological opposition to my own, which would make him my arch nemesis, if 21st-century industry were a bit more theatrical. But – like most heroic protagonists – I'd be much more interested in “turning” him than censoring him, were we ever to engage. In fact, I'd probably end up defending his and/or his constituents' right to sell their trash if CreateSpace or other self-publishing services called it into question.
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Overwhelming content volume can be entertaining; Drywall was my own foray into that uniquely contemporary experiment. It's the sheer ease of publication, though, that makes “good” literature more precious than ever. Admittedly, a glance at Amazon's current top ten bestsellers list indicates that I am undoubtedly out of touch as far as the market is concerned. I know that my mother and sisters have mysteriously reverted back to print from the Kindles which they used for a few years, and that audiobooks make me supremely uncomfortable. I also know that reading a book – whenever I bring myself to shut out everything else – is an unrivaled vehicle of cognitive serenity.
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A significant mission for Extratone lies in an upcoming reactionary movement to culture's “circus stage” (by way of the Internet.) We determined the event's inevitability on Drycast, a year ago, and have made occasional efforts to posit more thoroughly on The New. It must involve a reduction in content consumption, fundamentally, which will constrict because of an increasing demand for more explicit purpose in all media. We are not to be the alternative, necessarily, but the intermediary arbiter of the enabling discussion, hopefully with the outcome of increased awareness. What is and is not relevant? Why am I consuming this?
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As the end of Breakfast of Champions draws abruptly closer, Vonnegut mentions his schizophrenia, which is – as you probably know – fundamentally characterized by loss of the ability to determine what is and is not real, and primarily treated with antipsychotics. Interestingly enough, extremely high doses of amphetamines (which Ayn Rand did use heavily, by the way. I wasn't making that up) can actually induce psychosis, which could crudely be described as cognitive noise. I could've missed the intended function of their works, but for me, they illuminate a distinct relationship between the abstracts of truth and relevance which, for the moment, seems particularly necessary.
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Two opposing reflections of Americana; both helpful in preparation for its future.
I've been devoting significant attention to this blog recently, and I hope it shows. Reading now contains a list of recommended email newsletters as well as an ongoing list of my all-time favorite reads on The Web. I also added Podcast for End User and a dedicated Subscribe page. I've added Open – a list of some of my favorite Open Web projects and Social – a list of my social links. About has also been updated with new branding and more current hyperlinks. Typography and colors have been unified and updated to Version 2.3, and my theme has been officially listed for those of you willing to engage in the sincerest form of flattery. Also, look at that favicon! Thank you, CJ!
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Furthermore, I took the time to import some old work:
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“Bandcamp: Streaming's Secret Savior“
-A magnum opus of a 13,000+ word essay on why Bandcamp should be the future of music streaming services.
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“Mark Fuck and the Goofy Godheads“
-An old, hilarious rant about Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk that – if I may say so – still rings awfully true today.
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“The Matchsellers' Inheritance“
-A local bluegrass band releases an album that proves they are not just what they appear to be.
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“The Case for Chuck Klosterman“
-A deep dive into whether or not the voice of one old White Portland Dad should be culturally considered.
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“Kilgore Trout on CreateSpace“
-A critique of self-publishing culture (immediately after self-publishing myself) disguised as a review of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
“Illiteracy in American Media“
-A short academic essay about how little the illiteracy issue is covered in American media.
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This blog has now surpassed Extratone in number of email subscribers, which I deeply appreciate. Though you're not paying – yet (hehe) – let me once again encourage any/all feedback you may have. Send me an email!
The genius of one Chuck continues to perform to the refreshing benefit of scholars in American culture.
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Thanks to an episode of Peter Kafka'sRecode Media, I've just now discovered that former New York Times Magazine Ethicist, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and longtime men's interest media-affiliated sports and music columnist Chuck Klosterman pronounces his surname kloa-ster-men instead of klaw-ster-men as I have been, shamefully – even within earshot of other human beings on a handful of occasions. I am willing to submit myself for punishment for these transgressions under the single condition that I be allowed to call him Cuck Klusterfuck the next time he ends a spoken sentence with “or whatever” in an interview – an unfortunate habit he's maintained for years. If my own byline had any pedigree in the world of literary criticism, I would now collect his penance simply by including those hateful, 90s stoner-kid buzzwords in every quote, unedited, but it most certainly does not. I've searched moderately hard for any reason to bother contributing any criticism of books or their authors and returned with very little. I've read The Broom of the System and White Girls this year, yes, but I'd have to be a Fuck Boy to write anything about David Foster Wallace, and Hilton Als’ elegant, genre-busting masterpiece is so far beyond both my societal rights and perceptive capacity that I wouldn't dare utter a single editorialized peep about it – aside from a log line-length recommendation – even under immediate threat of certain death.
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Given my recent voluntary relocation to Portland, Oregon and the word-y pursuits on which I choose to spend all of my money and energy, I should adore everything about Chuck Klosterman and in turn he should be completely invisible across the under-30 demographic, yet I’ve found a special originality in his voice since first exploring it and I think it might be worth requalification. A good friend of mine once dug his first novelDowntown Owl out of a bulk box of bargain books she’d bought as a preteen, long ago and became an enthusiastic fan of his perspective and a harsh, but fond critic of his persona. It was her copy of his second that I read first: The Visible Man – ultimately a surprisingly-original take on the psychologist of a gifted outcast tale that classically exemplifies the easy-to-digest yet thoughtfully-exploratory reputation of his craft. Thanks to her library card, I was able to follow it up immediately with Chuck’s latest, most topical work – an anthology of past essays written for publications like The Guardian, Grantland, and GQ entitled X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century, which proved an impossibly entertaining, even more polished execution of The Quaint Chuck’s Explanations in non-fiction form, beginning at onset with refreshing brevity in its introduction.
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I’m not fully accredited by either side of the professional equation (sportswriters think I’m too pretentious and music writers don’t think I’m pretentious enough,) but I’m able to write about whatever I want, as long as it actually happened.
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Using “pretentious” even when just vaguely and loosely expressing other readers’ thoughts about your work is the first of many miniscule technical infractions against convention laid down in X’s arrangement which proves to act toward the benefit of its experience. If you substitute car nerds for sportswriters, I’d personally identify with this picoautobiography in a big way, but more importantly as a reader I had never encountered anything written about sports which I would describe as pretentious, per se, and that realization could very well have birthed enough curiosity to land the sale, had I been skimming in a bookshop, which I would’ve eventually been pleased with.
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Now, during what we should hope to be the first dawn of a new microera of sincerity, we must recognize how valuable it is for Klosterman as an observer to be comfortably engaged with his subjects, emotionally, and confident in the value of his commentary in middleage without the need to insist upon his eccentricity, as so many cringey, culturally-daft Dads do, these days. He uses keywords in his writing and spoken publicity that should dismiss him immediately as one of these – a nostalgic, out-of-time dork – but are instead somehow magically manipulated to serve him in articulating reasonable, even profoundly-innovative insight. As I have explored his bibliography and his publicly-expressed thoughts, I have been caught up and hinged on a single supposition: Chuck Klosterman is the only white, 46-year-old bearded Portland Dad you should be reading. Do mind that I am in no way exempt from this lens, but it’s still my job to determine his viability as an intellectual – a “thought leader,” even – for those of us who were conceived around the same time he was wrapping up his collegiate sentence at the University of North Dakota.
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For a solid hunk of the American reading audience, a quick, elemental vector of quality and mastery we look for in an essayist is the ability to “transcend” their subject matter for even the most presumptuous and conceited among us, usually to deliver a more abstract sentiment to leave with. Here, Klosterman’s significant career experience is irrefutably evident – in X, he achieves this transcendence organically with a fluidity unlike anything I’ve read before. We can already check a single box: convincing even a young professional twenty-something to shell out for a physical hardback of contemporary non-fiction requiring any sort of academic effort to consume is going to be nigh-impossible, even though X actually happens to be the best-looking specimen of print product design I have ever handled across cover, type, and layout. It’s been difficult having to convince myself to give this copy back.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I must take special care to emphasize just how highly I regard Peter Kafka as editor and interviewer extraordinaire within the Media beat – well-proven to be capable of hitting consistently hard on both novel and old guard industry personalities with refined, seemingly unimpeachable stone-faced skepticism. However, this Chuck Klosterman interview for Recode Media is an uncharacteristically disarmed display of serious admiration: he introduces X with an outright confession: “It’s great. I bought it. I bought a signed copy,” which is an unexpected oddity (though not an unwelcome one – I’m glad Peter enjoys his life.) Their conversation dips briefly in personal history (Chuck and his wife moved to Portland from Brooklyn for its proximity to family) before plopping down upon the substance of his clearly superb and matter-of-fact interview technique. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a conversation between Kafka and any previous guests with whom he was quite so obviously alike in general disposition.
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The only reason I’m able to ask you these questions is because I’m a reporter and I can ask you questions now that I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable asking you if we were friends, so I’m not going to pretend that we are and I’m not going to create some fake thing where we’re going to have a relationship beyond this conversation. I’m just going to ask you the things I want to know about and I hope that you respect the fact that I’m just being straight with you. I find that that works much better.
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From the broadest possible pop cultural lens, Chuck's most spectacular and widely-circulated work, demographically (I assume) is his 2015 interview and cover story for GQ with Taylor Swift – then “the most popular human alive.” Yes, it really is worth dwelling on the image: this guy... this very Dorky Dad, just hanging out with the most highly-demanded teen idol who's ever lived, sitting awkwardly next to her in the backseat of her car as she maniacally panics to accept a call from Justin Timberlake. When one Chucks such a distinguished contrast upon such a high-profile contemporary medium, the weight of the potential scrutiny becomes palpable, but Klosterman anticipates and braces for this (very risky) business in the only manner he can: acknowledging it over and over and over again in the second paragraph of his every interview appearance.
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It doesn’t matter if it was complimentary or insulting necessarily. It would seem as though I wasn’t taking her seriously as a musical artist, and the idea is that I do. That’s why I’m writing about her is because I do think she’s a meaningful, significant artist. It’s not worth the risk of having the story then get shifted by other people who perhaps just perceive themselves as somebody who’s a watchdog for certain signifiers or certain elements of the culture and that their job is to be on the watch for this. If your story then gets moved into that silo, that’s all it’s going to be remembered for... It’s a touchier thing now. It’s a more dangerous thing.
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In the print itself, the cover story is prefaced by a very short but uncomfortably-telling complaint about changing expectations for culture writers. One might reasonably suggest that Klosterman regards the practice of calling out or remarking on “creepy misogyny” as “dumb” – nothing but the byproduct of changing “times.”
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Something you may notice in the following 2015 feature on Taylor Swift is that I never describe what she looks like or how she was dressed, even though I almost always do that with any celebrity I cover... If I did, it would be reframed as creepy misogyny and proof that I didn't take the woman seriously as an artist. It would derail everything else about the story. It would become the story.
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But… is it? Note how desperately close his language comes to the common white guy whining about feminism classification without actually fitting the bill. Right…? It doesn’t? Surely, it must be certified Awake through some combination of keywords or format I’m unfamiliar with or unable to visually register because Klosterman’s ass would have long been grass, otherwise. These 224 words are X’s most contentious, which you could call impressive, all things considered – he appears to care enough about his public image to curate it somewhat diligently. When a motherhood blogger published an open letter in 2013 citing three very ableist uses of the R-word in his work, it only took him two days to respond: “I was wrong. You are right.”
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More than any other writer of his demographic, Chuck Klosterman has a close, wary relationship with the everchanging contextual boundaries of public expression. He knows when to be transparent with his feelings on progression, and he's careful to avoid what could be “problematic” for the sake of functioning better as a writer (I assume.) For Slate's I Have to Ask podcast, he managed to speak extensively about these mechanisms for nearly an hour without bellowing anything definitively cringey.
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I can’t say it’s better or worse. It’s just different, and because it’s different, it makes me feel uncomfortable, but there’s actually like an adversarial relationship with the history of anything, and that somehow that history is seen as oppressive. And you shouldn’t even know about it. It’s better to live in now.
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A quick jaunt from pretty horrendous to almost-ideal, then. If we are to place our faith in Chuck as our last bearded champion, we must hope that last sentence is sincerely intended to be his lens to the changing world. Granted – even if it is the truth – it’s not as if persistent acknowledgement of one’s position can miraculously wash away any systematic patriarchal dynamics involved in authoring (or reading, for that matter) a high-profile feature of a young woman on cover of a magazine which explicitly seeks most to speak to “all sides of the male equation,” (are you sure aboutthat, Condé Nast?) especially considering how unlikely it would've been for me to read anything about Taylor Swift outside of this very white man's anthology. Fundamental themes of power and control are threaded throughout both his fiction and non-fiction, which is especially prevalent in the Macho Big Boy cultures of the athletics and music industries. In profiling Taylor Swift – the undisputed apex of the latter in 2015 – Klosterman provided a firsthand account of the grueling maintenance of a public and private personality under tremendous strain from said factors as they were magnified to the max by the most extreme celebrity.
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Here we see Swift’s circuitous dilemma: Any attempt to appear less calculating scans as even more calculated. Because Swift’s professional career has unspooled with such precision, it’s assumed that her social life is no less premeditated.
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I’m right there with Chuck: I’ve even found a fundamental pillar in Power and Control relationships supporting my own fiction experiments: how we attain them, how we lose them, and how best to make use of them – all of which had apparently been quite problematic for Taylor Swift for most of her adult life, though we wouldn’t be allowed to really comprehend how deep her inner turmoil had drilled until it overwhelmed even her expertly-designed self-control four years later, boiling over entirely with such unexpected violence that all of America’s pseudorural glam-pop-country-glossy-chode-hipsters let out a simultaneous, dangerously-alarmed holler of OH FOR PETE’S SAKE that was actually heard and recorded from the overflying orbit of the International Space Station.
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It’s somehow different when the hub of the wheel is Swift. People get skeptical. Her famous friends are marginalized as acquisitions, selected to occupy specific roles, almost like members of the Justice League ('the ectomorph model,' 'the inventive indie artist,' 'the informed third-wave feminist,' etc.). Such perceptions perplex Swift, who is genuinely obsessed with these attachments.
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No, it’s not only worthwhile as an exercise in superbly athletic self-awareness – the Taylor profile is profound. I’d recommend reading and treasuring it with or without the rest of the anthology because bizarre intersections like these are rare to come by from anybody else. Short, sharp, and occasionally somewhat petty notions are what Chuck Klosterman does best and most originally. Thanks to a digression of Kafka’s beginning with “you and I are about the same age…,” he arrives (by way of REM, believe it or not) at a significant statement about youth and identity.
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It seems strange to me to be into music for its coolness outside of high school. That seems like that’s the only time when you’re a young person and you’re using art basically to create a personality because you don’t have a real personality yet.
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Klosterman is debatably exempt from the traditional academic abstract of “objectivity” for the vast majority of his notable work because of its stated primary subject: his “interior life.” Perhaps the success of his voice could be at least partially attributed to his development of an existential muscle – a perspective unique enough to entertain, yet no less recognizably Midwestern with which he’s been able to reflect particularly clearly on the profession in tandem with the experience he’s accumulated over the course of his career.
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You know, when you’re young, you’re a real emotional writer if you’re a writer… If I was a young person now, I would be incredibly attracted to the idea that when you’re 22 you can be a national writer, which was impossible when I was 22.
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In a way, Klosterman does surmise that it was indeed its objectivity that media lost, and that writing is no longer a “one-way relationship,” but a sort of ridiculous dance in which “many people feel the reason they’re consuming media is to respond to it… that it’s not for the content.” I would remind old Chuck that there are very few functioning adults outside of academia or retirement in the United States who spend much of their time reading anything solely for the sake of absorption, and the disparity between those who were and weren’t was exponentially greater in the past. The story of American media is defined by its cycles of waning and waxing democratization, but many of the more traditional avenues in the business have bet on the “two-way relationship” to keep them relevant.
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My own favorite chapter of the collection is a 2500-word personal essay constructed for Grantland to answer a single incongruity: “Why is watching a prerecorded sporting event less pleasurable than watching the same game live?” Some form of this question has at least mildly troubled every American since the 1960s, including myself, and Klosterman manages to provide an entertaining and concise analysis of this plight through his own wisdom. In its short preface in the volume – which was written “in 2008, in Europe, when [Chuck] was pretend depressed” is the story of his encounter with a house-painting stranger, to whom he explains the meter for success in his opinion-manufacturing profession, as he sees it: “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.”
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Last weekend I was in a hashish bar in Amsterdam. It was post-dusk, pre-night. The music was terrible (fake reggae, late-period Eric Clapton, Sublime deep cuts.) I was sitting next to a British stranger with a shaved head and a speech impediment. Our conversation required subtitles, so I imagined them in my mind. He told me he had lost three family members within the past year: his mother, who was sixty-six; his uncle, who was fifty-six; and his sister, who was forty-six. He said he'd just turned thirty-six. He asked if I saw a pattern developing. “Yes,” I said. “But only numerically.”
-I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a housepainter. He asked me the same question about myself. “I manufacture opinions,” I said.
-“Really?” he asked. “How do you know if you’re any good at that?”
-“By the number of people who agree or disagree,” I said in response. “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.”
-“That’s interesting,” said the bald British man who could barely speak. “I guess house painting is a totally different thing.”
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Rarely are situations or discussions that begin with back in my day actually constructive in any sense, but Chuck Klosterman appears to be the exception. If you’re willing to indulge him, you may find yourself reassured. He now writes from a remote cabin (with WiFi,) was tortured – like all of us – in sifting through and compiling his old work for X, and finds its index to be his favorite part.
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Exploring the index from a book you created is like having someone split your head open with an axe so that you can peruse the contents of your brain.
I haven't watched A Charlie Brown Christmas in at least twenty-five years, solely because I can't emotionally reconcile the final scene.
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You’ll notice that his entire answer to the live television debacle is – again – entirely about control (or the lack thereof.) In fact, his relationship with and desire for control also contributed to his choice of profession.
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Part of the reason I became a writer is because it was this completely controlled reality where I could do this thing by myself where you’d go out and you’d do the interviews and stuff, but then you’re back by yourself, transcribing and then writing. Then, when the story is done and you send it off, that’s the end. Now that’s the middle. Now it’s like, when the story is published, it’s the middle of the process very often because the consumer feels differently now.
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While Klosterman’s voice is pleasant to someone like me, neither it nor himself necessarily belong to The People. In his X review for Paste Magazine, B. David Zarley proclaims essays to be “a love letter to a moment,” concluding that Chuck is “’effectively narcissistic,’ proving that culture essays can teach us something about ourselves and the people around us.” For The Washington Post, Justin Wm. Moyer notes “it’s hard to think of another writer who could make a 30-page, deeply reported essay about a North Dakota junior-college basketball game interesting,” suggesting that this new collection marks Klosterman’s ascendance from critic to philosopher. From what I’ve read to date, I would counter that he has always fulfilled the term to the extent of its usefulness in the 21st century and is even now beginning to redefine it. Last January, he braved the “dystopic” Google Gates to speak critically for a crowd of Googlers, describing them as “an umbrella over the entire culture,” and urging caution and reflection in the coming future to keep them from doing “something bad.” His engagement with them – especially during the Q&A – is a fascinating insight into the Greater Google Mind, and I would encourage any invested parties in Chuck Klosterman’s role as a philosopher to watch the talk in full. I was unfamiliar with “the boat-sails-wind analogy” before I read James Murphy’s interview for LCD Soundsystem’s “last album.”
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Your life is a boat, the sails are your emotions, and drugs are the wind. When you're a kid, your boat is small and your sail is huge, and drugs are like a hurricane.
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Control x Time = the Klosterman beat. I suppose this must be what other entertainment writers are referring to when they accuse Chuck of nostalgia trafficking, but I can’t be so sure. Though I’d like to think my own snout for the stuff is especially well-tuned, I am undeniably from a different planet – even auditorily. All but one or two of the musicians interviewed throughout X were entirely unknown to me by name, which Klosterman’s voice managed to make even more compelling – not to mention the included stories of athletes and the sports industry, which include stories of the human ego, paranoia, and complex drama that always manage to transcend their setting when articulated with such dexterity.
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I’ve never before written a book review of any sort – nor am I defensibly qualified to compare culture writers – but with good ole’ Chuck, I dove much further in order to tackle one very important question: should Klosterman be recommended reading for anyone under 30 above or alongside bestsellers like George Saunders or groundbreaking essayists of color like Hilton Als? In many a case, I must conclude by saying, simply, that something of value would be forgone if we shunned Chuck, even if his insight is old news to all but the most rudimentary yokels. I have little to offer women or people of color, but I’d bet X would prove itself worth a library trip for any idiot white guys in their lives who may be falling far behind. I don’t know of any other voices who are in a better position to introduce these issues, nor any who are quite so practiced at handling them delicately. While Jenna Wortham-level readers will gain little to nothing from this examination or the ecology of its subject (and will likely find themselves pausing momentarily for a deserved jest before moving on and returning to their high-level plane of complex neoliberal commentary,) but most of their less-aWoken fathers should find in Chuck a man they can truly trust, who manages to consistently distill and articulate the need-to-knows of the most complex pop culture and pop science conversations without using any of the academic language found in most institutional discourse which daddy finds too condescending and superfluous to bear. Those readers who’ve absolutely fucking despised my voice so far in this essay should give Klosterman a go – I take as much time as I can muster to fiddle with and season the words in context like this work because I basically *enjoy* the bullshit, yet I’ve found both X and But What If We’re Wrong? remarkably refreshing and impressive exercises.
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[These are] the cultural conditions in which I was raised under and which I pursued journalism under. That was part of the thing that drew me to the idea of being a reporter was I was like, this is something I can do, I think. My ability to detach my personal emotions from what I am investigating, while not perfect, I can do this. And now it turns out that the opposite is what’s desirable. I think it’s really going to change the kind of person who goes into media going forward.
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Reading Chuck Klosterman is going to be perturbing, but true sincerity is almost always uncomfortable. Comprehensively, his nonfiction represents perhaps the most important possible behavior to encourage from both the critic and his readership because it incubates and exudes sincere curiosity and a genuine interest in learning to listen. From the perspective of quantified societal contribution, I’d argue that Klosterman’s craft is a significantly more honorable and worthwhile pursuit than greater academic literature in its unique and entertaining treatment of subjects the establishment tends to pulverize into minutia. Unless he’s broke and/or bookish, buy X as a gift for your Dad and at least give it a try when he’s done. If nothing else, at leastread the Taylor Swift interview, okay? If he doesn’t enjoy the book, I’m always available if one or both of you need to blow off some steam: give me a call at (573) 823-4380. (Normal text messaging / talktime rates will apply.)
The Psalms is proudly hosted by Write.as – a new sort of blogging content management system built atop Markdown and maintained by a company which explicitly shares my commitment to a better, Open web.
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A somewhat-outdated version of this site's theme is listed among others in Writeas' official themes list. The full, up-to-date CSS and JS can be found below and on in this GitHub repository, which I created in November, 2020 as an experiment in using Git to track editorial changes. (That means you can see current in-progress drafts!)
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Download the entirety of this blog in EPUB format here.
Download The Psalms 3.0 color pack for a limited time here.
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Code
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The Psalms’ GitHub Repository also hosts the technical documentation for its Write.as theme. Download the latest “release,” here and/or view the raw CSS here.
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Drafts Theme
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If you happen to be a user of agiletortoise’s infamous Drafts app on iOS and/or MacOS, I have just released a quite-uncanny theme on the new Themes Directory emulating The Psalms’ reading experience which I am quite pleased with.
Resurrecting the Compaq Computer Corporation with my COMPAQ Portable.
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In September 2018, I bought perhaps my most prized possession: an original COMPAQ Portable. Unfortunately, it's succumbed to the common keyboard failure of the breed and I have yet to repair it.
Digitizing the Soluble Protestant: Apple & The Megachurch Industry
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Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
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Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
I was interviewed by Write.as Community Manager CJ Eller about writing software, Extratone, blogging, and self-curation.
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So I am super curious that you mentioned Markdown as something that saved you from fiddling your life away. Can you go more into that?
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I started an online magazine four years ago originally on WordPress. I thought I knew something about web development, but honestly I did not. It ended up becoming a fixation on trying to make something technically different from what I'd seen done with WordPress, which detracted heavily from my Editorial duties over the years. I'm on the OCD spectrum so I just couldn't let it go. I spent thousands of hours fiddling with different themes and formatting within those themes, and what I ended up with was a mess. I would make changes that would break old posts, so I'd go back and fix those, only to make more changes days/weeks/months later and have to go back again. I'd known vaguely about Markdown, but it wasn't until it was mentioned in the WordPress dev Slack that I really considered it seriously as a way out of what I'd been doing. I realized that its inherit limitations were actually very good for me – that I needed a limited system to constrain my workflow to keep myself on task. Finally, in late-2018, I started to convert our old content to Markdown and essentially haven't looked back since.
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Did it take a while for you to accept Markdown's limitations? Was there a turning point for you? Did you look for a Markdown plugin on WordPress to help after making the change? I imagine there's something like that out there.
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There are third-party plugins, yes, but I believe the new WordPress editor now supports “markdown blocks,” which is sortof handy for those who want to continue in that direction. The turning point was probably when we ran out of money and lost our account with our hosting provider. I was left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. I'd already started moving that direction within WordPress (largely because of the Gutenberg editor project,) but losing the site in its entirety was what I really needed to push us into a more modern, progressive CMS. Honestly, Markdown is capable of everything we actually need and nothing more. I'd like to think I was able to realize this from the beginning.
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So you're left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. Talk to me about the process then of finding that modern, progressive CMS. Did you have a vague idea of what you were looking for? I imagine getting those backups ready for whatever you were going to choose as another process entirely.
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I actually decided to ditch the backups and just move forward with a different Editorial direction (the project has since been more or less put on hiatus.) I knew Markdown had to be involved and that I never wanted to look at anything like WordPress' dashboard ever again. I played around with a local Ghost instance but just didn't feel anything for it, if that makes sense. I'd already moved my personal blog to Write.As months before and eventually realized that it was just what Extratone needed – so far, I've only imported my own contributions and the most recent work from others.
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Could you explain what you mean by feeling something for a piece of software? I noticed this in your recent post on your personal blog and what I enjoyed about it so much. There's an enthusiasm about the software you do recommend that jumps through the screen. I want to use Bear after reading your post.
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I'm glad to hear that! I suppose it dates back to my upbringing on a farm in rural Missouri, where I felt a real affection for – and attachment to – our tractors, combine, and such. When one cares about their work, I think it's inevitable for them to be emotionally invested in the tools they use to accomplish it every day. During my brief stint in IT in the beginning of 2019, I saw a lot of users struggling with outdated and ridiculously unintuitive software throughout their entire workday and it made me really appreciate the idea of “good workflow.” I'm not really a developer, but I believe software can always be better because I've seen it. As an End User of sorts with not much cash, I feel like my main contribution back to developers should be celebrating their good work. This is an idea I feel I do not encounter enough in day-to-day life.
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As someone who also had a brief stint in IT, I totally agree with the struggles people go through because of outdated & unintuitive software. But IT also made me realize how much of software is personal — someone will want a solution that's unintuitive to you but is intuitive to them. You learn a lot of empathy from that.
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I am intrigued by your last point there — why don't you think you encounter the idea of celebrating software developers enough in day-to-day life?
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I suppose specifically I mean I don't see enough celebration of good development. It's hard to challenge the personal workflow of anyone, yes, but I hope folks will continue to want to better their lives with new solutions. As I mentioned in my Tips post, Microsoft Word is a great specific example of software that simply should not be used anymore – especially in composition for The Web. Not that Word is celebrated, necessarily, but its alternatives are not. It should be noted that I have no specific authority in this matter other than years of experience with – and enjoyment of – playing around with software. I just think that End Users deserve better than they get, and awareness of new/different software is a huge part of the problem. Making average people aware of better solutions should be the primary function of special interest tech journalism, IMO.
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Great point about Microsoft Word. I don't even remember the last time I seriously used it — high school maybe? And like you said, discovery can be an issue to the adoption of these alternative tools. So are there any common patterns you've noticed as to how you've come about these software alternatives that you now use? Patterns that someone could adopt?
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It's not that I slave away, but it does take a lot of time to discover them. The simple answer is: I drink a lot of caffeine and hyperfixate on the internet. I'm not sure it's something the average user should want to adopt, but if they do, they should be on Mastodon. They should be googling “alternatives to...” regularly, and they should worship Free and Open Source Software. Accepting that you never have to settle for one piece of software is probably the beginning. For lack of a better term, I just love playing around with software. That's not something I would advocate for my old clients or other End Users – I would rather find out myself and then present a list of alternatives in an entertaining way. I hope that's an appropriate and sufficient answer hehe.
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No that's great! The acceptance of never having to settle for one piece of software is at once valuable and challenging to adopt. If you keep switching you could be a sort of software vagabond who throws their data into a rucksack to head to the next viable platform. I've always had trouble trying to find the proper balance between playing around with software & learning a tool well enough that it can be useful. How have you personally navigated that? I could imagine your foray into & out of Wordpress as an example.
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It's always a challenge when trying new things. I obsess over different ways to accomplish tasks. I've probably signed Extratone for 15 different newsletter services (including Buttondown today) though I haven't actually written a single edition of our newsletter in nearly two years. I think it's only recently that I've been able to look at these habits from a reasonable perspective. As in, I am now able to finally differentiate between playing and being productive, but it took some 15 years. Self-awareness of one's actual progress is key. Asking questions like why am I actually doing this – for profit or for play? Differentiating between these two is something someone like me will always struggle with, I think.
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The distinction between playing and being productive can be quite blurry. I sometimes find that playing around with a piece of software can lead to a productive use of it. How about you? Did you start with the idea of creating Extratone first and then tried to find the right software to fit the job? Or did you start playing around with Wordpress and then the idea of the digital publication took form soon after?
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That's an insightful supposition. I actually tried to launch an online magazine before Extratone with virtually zero editorial focus along with a standalone podcast that I'd been hosting on WordPress for years. I originally began playing around with WordPress sites in my early adolescence, so you could say it all culminated in the idea. It took maturity to realize that I actually wanted to build a platform for other voices rather than continue to invest in my own. I'd like to believe that was all enabled by the playing hehe.
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So what lead you to the conclusion of building a platform for other voices? Especially curious from the maturity angle. Because you still have a personal blog, so it doesn't feel like you've completely neglected your personal voice. But would you consider that as not the same investment of time & effort that you'd put into something like Extratone?
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I should be clear that I have not accomplished what I set out to do with Extratone. After a fairly big personal trauma in 2015, I had a bit of an existential crisis and realized that I had surrounded myself with so many talented (in a particularly relevant way) online friends who were producing all sorts of incredible content – music and videos, mostly. I realized that I was better at editing and other platform duties than I was at writing, and that perhaps the online communities I was astride could be provided a single banner to give themselves. In that sense, I haven't figured out how to do what I set out to yet. Ideally, my byline would be completely gone from Extratone, so I've more or less put it on hold until I figure out how to accomplish that. Turning it into a somewhat profitable media company is still my biggest long-term life goal.
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The curatorial characteristic you describe is underrated, even though the “everyone is a curator” idea is jammed down our throats all the time. There's something about this curation on a person-to-person level that still has lots of room for experimentation. On that subject, do you have any examples of communities, sites, or models that guide where you'd want Extratone to go?
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My citable aspirations in that regard have been somewhat superficial, I'm afraid. From a technical perspective, I really admired what Joshua Topolsky was trying to do with The Outline – which just closed this month, actually. They built their own CMS including a bespoke advertising delivery platform which really looked great but they just couldn't figure out a sustainable editorial focus. In my fantasy world, I have the connections and digital media insight of Topolsky and know how to apply them in a way that supports our community because I don't see any one brand popping up any substantial umbrellas over the electronic musicians I know. (It wasn't until “too late” that I realized Extratone's sole editorial focus should have been electronic music all along.) I read a lot about media but I'm pretty picky as far as hero worship goes when it comes to my own professional goals. I once promised that Extratone would never run ads, so I could see some sort of non-profit classification working out in our future. I believe I could be an excellent curator – I'm just not quite sure how to get there yet.
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I think you're a great curator — had to ask that question of influence because I think you have a unique curatorial presence on the web. Just saw you tweet about tractordata.com. Who else would recommend that? Love it. That's why I thought Are.na would be right up your alley.
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So you emphasized “our community” there — what do you define as your community in that broader context?
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Well thank you! That's a question I'm still struggling to define. Electronic music is about as far as I've gotten. I met most of my talented friends on Twitter over the past 10 years or so and have tried to contain them in a list before. There are innate challenges in defining such a creative community – I have done my best to label without being constricting, but it's definitely difficult trying to figure out how to provide a flag which everyone feels comfortable flying. I still think the best I've done to articulate what I'm trying to say was for Extratone's About page. Most of the folks I'm talking about are used to hustling their own brand so it's been a real challenge working on the right way to reach out.
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A flag which everyone feels comfortable flying — that's a great way to put it. What I find interesting about your internet presence is that you defy the idea of flying just a single flag. Along with Extratone you have multiplepodcasts, multipleblogs, and now you're starting a Motorsports & Tech dedicated Mastodon instance.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about how important it is to have many online buckets to put your ideas in. One just feels too limiting, especially if it's solely linked to your legal identity. How do you think about this matter of identity & expression with your own online presence?
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That's a very good question. I can't take credit for mastd.racing, actually – I'm not sure who created that server but it's administered by an account called RaceControl. You've arrived at another one of my biggest challenges. Consolidating my interests has always been a problem, especially on The Web. Age has definitely helped narrow them down a bit, but I still can't help myself sometimes. I think it's ended up alienating a lot of my followers on social because I have a hard time posting just within my niche(s). I'm not so sure how to feel about this, honestly. One could argue that I should post whatever I want, whenever, but consider your audience is also a concept I can no longer ignore. If anything, I need to learn to let myself be limited a bit more by those buckets. Once again, Extratone is a good example of this – I should've never published app reviews there, but I did. We're all learning, I suppose.
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Do you feel like you have to even learn to limit yourself on your personal blog? It seems like a personal blog can act as the release valve — a way of getting around cornering yourself into the niches that Extratone and other projects require. You can freely write about pens and Picard without feeling constrained to a single subject.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list. Since we've begun talking I've begun building my blogs bookmark folder back up and following the #100DaystoOffload challenge, which I find immensely impressive. I can't say I'm quite up to it, personally, but I definitely plan on opening up the taps a bit more. (I also don't want to flood read.write.as with too many joke posts ya know hehe.)
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That's awesome! You're reminding me of the interesting relationship between writing & tinkering when it comes to blogs. They both feed into each other in a strange way. Before, when my blog was on Wordpress, I didn't care about tinkering around — writing was my sole focus. When I moved to my new blog, however, I found myself shift towards creating apps that extend my blog and messing around with its CSS. So it's interesting that you've gone the opposite way, publishing more instead of solely tinkering.
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What has awoken the urge for you to tackle those items on your personal “to-write” list? To open up those taps a bit more? Because I can see the publication mindset, being somewhat of an authority, getting in the way.
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That is interesting. I'm wondering how many people are in each of our camps. I hate to be so topical, but the pandemic and being home constantly has definitely contributed. I've also begun to learn to let things go, which is an essential skill. Being able to actually kill work when it needs to die is the real secret. I just built up the strength to delete the rest of my 2019 list a few weeks ago.
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I wonder also! And hey, no problem bringing up the current situation. I think it's making me write more also.
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Want to drill into that practice of letting go as an essential skill for blogging. As a final question for this chat, how have you gone about the decision of keeping ideas that you've had for a long time and when to let them go? It's been something I've been struggling with for recently as ideas for blog posts start to pile up.
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Self-curation is definitely tough. Generally, it's very hard to let things go – especially when I've progressed at all significantly into research/first drafting, but I know when to kill something if I reread and am unable to immediately see where I was going. I've noticed that trying to rekindle interest or momentum in a topic is unusually not a worthwhile use of time in my case. If I can't get my rhythm back fairly early in, I am very unlikely to, ever. That said, I think it's also important to forgive yourself for investing time in something that won't work out – otherwise, you will settle for less than what you originally intended and release something you won't be happy with.
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Thank you so much for your time! I really enjoyed this!
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Forgive and forget! That's a great point about rekindling an interest being a sign of letting go of an idea. I've done that too many times. This has been a blast to chat virtually David — really enjoyed your thoughts and am looking forward to future blog posts and installments of Extratone!
Yes, I am still managing to waste my time digging up and re-arranging some very old content, but I just couldn't resist. Somehow, it didn't occur to me until yesterday evening that I could sort through the original video files of my old vines fairly easily in fucking Google Photos and blast them through iMovie for iOS into a full montage relatively easily.
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Some of these are very cringey...
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Yes, I'd love to finally get around to my ultimate romantic editorialization on that most dearly departed social network, but things are way too jumbled right now, obviously.
An update on all I’ve been doing instead of what I actually intended to do.
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There will always be plenth of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. – Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think“
You have a desire for indulgence in your home and family, Co-Star has just told me in my weekly, email newsletter-delivered horoscope. “Venus conjunct to natal Moon” indicates this part of yourself will transform into something else, and goes on to say something truly stirring: *the way you relate to your past is changing*. I continue to be amazed by how influential the potential of the computing hardware present in my life at any given time can be on my habits. In the two weeks I’ve had my first moderately powerful desktop computer in over ten years, I have found myself using new image & video editing software, installing local WordPress stacks, finally experimenting with Git, somehow generating 20 draft posts on a fresh experimental WordPress site, and putting my whole back into my new Notion account, including – among others – projects like my “Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.” All the while, there has been a pull toward a more deliberate, focused sort of digital existence: reflection on Kevin McGillivray’s Word of The Year concept, digital gardening, and a few other like discoveries have culminated in a newfound, unironic use of the term “Creative Wellness” to describe a set of ideologies which I believe I should strive for in order to improve my intellectual wellbeing.
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In tandem with the fact that I have gone back to school, this has all crucially resulted in very little actual writing, which may or may not be conclusive evidence toward the classical minimalist technology argument that less capability results in more focus. On that note, remember when the Game of Thrones author appeared on Conan’s show and mentioned that he still writes exclusively using WordStar 4.0? This happening has been vaguely in the back of my mind since I encountered it during the relatively brief, basement apartment-dwelling era in Oregon when I first discovered WinWorldPC and got into running a bunch of DOS VMs, trying out every download from that blessed site which sounded even remotely interesting. Before I go on, let me just include a transcript of the entire anecdote I’m referring to here, because it’s actually much shorter than one is led to believe:
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Conan: These novels that that you write are can be over a thousand pages long. They're massive tomes and apparently you write them all on a computer, but unlike most authors, you're not worried about a computer virus. I mean an author who writes a thousand-page book their greatest fear is a virus invades and destroys a chunk of their book you don't worry about that. Why?
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Martin: No I have a secret weapon – I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the internet with and that I get my email on and I do my taxes on and that computer and then I have my writing computer which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.
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Conan: A DOS machine. How old is this program?
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Martin: A DOS machine. You remember DOS? I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system.
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Conan: Did you make this computer out of wood? Did you carve it? I'm curious why you decided to stick with this old program.
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Martin: I actually like it. I mean, it does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital – if I wanted a capital, I would've typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key. Stop fixing it!
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Conan: You yell at computers a lot. What about spellcheck?
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Martin: Oh, I hate spellcheck. Especially when you have the realm of [???], it's [???].
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That’s it! A less than sixty second exchange. I did not remember just how much coverage it received on digital news sites. Embark on a Google search for “george rr martin wordstar,” and you’ll discover a ridiculously long list of brief stories including the YouTube embed. A book I’ve just recently discovered and begun – which I am extremely excited about – is Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and its introduction begins by mentioning The George Thing, which surely indicates that it is the most significant mention of word processing software in popular culture for at least a decade:
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The clip was posted to YouTube and from there embedded in innumerable tweets, Facebook feeds, and blogs. Some commenters immediately, if indulgently, branded Martin a Luddite, while others opined it was no wonder it was taking him so long to finish the whole story (or less charitably, no wonder that it all seemed so interminable). But what was it about these seemingly obscure details that people found so compelling? Part of it was no doubt the unexpected blend of novelty and nostalgia: Many fans would be old enough to remember WordStar for themselves, and the intricacy of its interface seems somehow in keeping with Martin’s quirky persona, part paternalistic grandfather and part Doctor Who character. WordStar thus becomes an accessory to his public image, like the black fisherman’s cap he is frequently photographed wearing. But it is also clearly much more than that. Martin’s passion for the program is unmistakable...
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The book, itself, was also more widely reviewed than one would expect, where it was deemed genuinely unique. I related quite hard to the preface’s first few sentences:
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Track Changes began, as many books do, with a question: What was the first novel written with a word processor? Being an English professor interested in the history of writing as well as computers, I thought it was the sort of thing I should know, but I didn’t.
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Discovering the volume was a result of a personal determination in the last week to give in to my latent obsession with word processing/text editing software, which also led to my creating a Notion table of every word processor I’ve ever heard of. Thanks to my desktop PC acquisition, found myself virtual machining a bit again, though some of the programs I’m particularly interested in trying have inexplicitly disappeared from my personal library and been removed from WinWorldPC, probably due to (mostly absurd) copyright claims. Most versions of WordStar are still available, though, and I’ll confess I still have a desire to learn how to use its cult keyboard shortcuts, as evangelized by Robert J. Sawyer in an essayalso discussed in Track Changes, which specifically shits on WordPerfect more explicitly than I remembered. I keep returning to the idea that I should try writing the stuff I normally work on – like this post, for instance – in these software, but file transfer is a bigger and bigger obstacle the older the OS you’re running: VirutalBox’s “Guest Additions” – which allow clipboard sharing/shared folders/other interoperative network functions – are not compatible with DOS or any Windows editions before 4.0. There are workarounds, but I haven’t found any reasonably within my current abilities.
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Truthfully, though, emulating twenty-year-old software seems a bit unnecessary when contrasted with the fact that Markdown, Typora, and Writeas were supposed to be my saviors from distracted writing. A compulsion to comment on a recent note-taking app comparison published in The Information reminded me that I still haven’t written an in-depth review of Typora, which I plan to prioritize in the near future, especially since it may finally be officially releasing, according to recent activity on Twitter.
Another result of my reintroduction to academia is that I can now afford a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to student discounts. This has been life-changing in a manner which I should probably be a bit ashamed of, but once the desire to make full use of my subscription (by trying every single program it licenses) subsides, I really do intend to become proficient with InDesign – a learning experience which I will surely at least attempt to thoroughly document, here.
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Digital Gardening
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I think it was Tom Critchlow’s Digital Gardening blogchain that first exposed me to the term and his static site-generated wiki project that introduced me to the concept of personal wikis, not so long ago, though the desire to organize and/or archive personally-relevant information through the format has actually been rattling around my head for the better part of a decade. When I discovered that one could install MediaWiki – the platform Wikipedia, itself is built on – I created the shortlived Drywall Wiki, once upon a time. Since I last wrote you, I also purchased the extratone.wiki domain and played around once again with the platform. Typora even offers exports in MediaWiki’s bizarre proprietary text format! For better or worse, though, I don’t see anything becoming of the project for the moment I suppose it feels like somewhat of a risk, investing a lot of time I probably shouldn’t have into documenting all of my Twitter jokes. For the moment, I think my Notion account will have to serve as my personal wiki.
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The most inciteful argument I’ve read among the Digital Gardens discourse revolves around value as it is created within our personal online writing spaces. Two of the many infinitely-quotable essays within this space: Mike Caulfield’s “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral” and “Stock and flow” from Snarkmarket. The former references Vannevar Bush’s infamous “As We May Think” essay (which I’ve finally gotten around to finishing and its description of a “memex,” which many cite as a disturbingly-apt prediction of the World Wide Web. Caulfield, however, disagrees:
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So most people say this is the original vision of the web. And certainly it was the inspiration of those pioneers of hypertext. But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all . Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.
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Reading back from a lens including this commentary, I immediately understood. The memex concept is far more intimate than the web has become (or perhaps ever was – I wouldn’t know.) “Stock and flow” defines creative value in two disparate types of media:
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Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
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Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
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To be honest, I personally cannot imagine undertaking the task of explaining this differentiation to anyone in my own life, but if the reactionary movement within The Web back to a focus on valuable content is, indeed, underway, perhaps such conversations are bound to shortly become more and more natural. For my part, I have attempted setting up an experimental site on Github Pages using Jekyll in the past few days with partial success: as soon as I tried to specify a custom theme, I apparently broke it, at which point I realized that I had homework to do. As much as I hate to admit it, Kev Quirk’s posts regarding WordPress’ practical simplicity over SSGs earlier this monthrings somewhat true. As things currently stand, WordPress’ permeability throughout The Web is an advantage for those who just want to publish something as simply as possible. My counterargument to both Kev and myself: Writeas is a wonderful compromise in terms of substance and image among one’s super e-enabled, Mullenweg-disgusted peers. It’s very much pure Markdown, but it’s far more accessible, cross-platform, than SSGs due to its shear simplicity.
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One component which Digital Gardening would seem to offer others that I have never particularly struggled with is the freedom to write whatever I feel like writing. If anything, I have struggled in the opposite sense, existing in a state completely unhindered by consideration of the value my work may or may not offer anyone else. Perhaps the most substantial addition I’m capable of making to the Digital Gardens conversation, then, is best quoted from the first chapter of the advice book I have finally begun writing for young men, For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss:
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If there is one idea of mine you ever engage with – in this book or otherwise – it is best distilled in this single sentence: you do not *actually* want to attain a state of true apathy, trust me. It is extremely unhealthy, miserable, and alienating. I have existed for an excruciatingly long time trapped in a state of being truly unable to care about anything in the face of a great, varying effort to do so. It is very far from the immunity imbued in terms like carefree – in reality, it is manifested in extreme depression. It is less immunity than it is distance from an essential part of life.
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In terms of one’s blogging, I am glad for those who will/have/are finding a new freedom of expression, but hold this as a serious caution regarding the other extreme. Should you ever approach it, remember that considering one’s audience – as academics love to prioritize – really is important, eventually.
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Curation
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At this point, I’ve used a channel in Extratone’s Discord as my ongoing reading list for several years essentially without change. Earlier this month, though, I discovered Raindrop – a bookmarking service with public collections that (so fars) feels much more aligned with my own needs than Pocket – and pretty much immediately signed up to begin paying for it and set up a bot to crosspost from my new Reading List collection, there to the same Discord channel via the collection’s RSS feed. Raindrop’s browser extension – along with Notion’s, come to mention it – is actually usable in day-to-day browsing. As much as I love Reading.am, the prospect of its longevity worries me considering the most recent post in its development blog dates to 2016. Writing a dedicated “Little Review” of Raindrop is on my (ever-lengthening) todo list, but at the moment, I would especially emphasize my Digital Magazine Collection, which is the result of thousands of hours of web exploration and genuinely worth significant value for most anyone, I think.
With the combination of my public Notion workspaces and public Raindrop collections, I hope to make my curatorial endeavors both more accessibly beautiful and more intimately available. In terms of a dedicated discussion of Notion’s interworkings and culture, I think I have quite a bit more exploring to experience before I’m sufficiently qualified, though my notes are already quite extensive (and publicly accessible, thanks to… Notion!) In general, I continue to be astounded by the amount of tools/services/applications I have not yet heard of, despite how long I have labored to become an authority on Writing Tools.
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Workflow
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In my endeavor to more intentionally design my workspace – to actually dedicate a space for working, originally – I originally very much intended to set up dual displays for my desktop, but the desk I settled for (an old family piece from the early 1900s?) does not have enough surface area to position two displays, regardless of how thin they’ve become since I last had one. Combined with a limited budget and a concern that two displays might actually result in further distraction instead of less, I instead went for a single, 27” LED affair. I’ve also been making full use of Windows 10’s desktop switching feature and have found it surprisingly easy to make a habit, especially thanks to the Ctrl+Win+Lateral Arrow Keys keyboard shortcuts.
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On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I’ve by now worked out a personally-optimized remap (thanks to the keyboard manager tool included with PowerToys, about which I have far too much to say in some future post.) I had a conversation with a few Mastodon friends two weeks ago convincing me that my methodology of forcing myself to learn shortcuts by integrating a cheat sheet into my desktop backgrounds may actually be an original idea and useful to other users.
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In terms of writing spaces, I have actually been composing the less serious stuff I’ve been writing within WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, which is not an admission I would’ve expected to be making, just a year ago. A dedicated post about this, too, is fucking coming, but suffice it to say that with a fairly-substantial PC and a better hosting provider (DreamHost over GoDaddy, in this case,) composition has become far far smoother – improving enough to make it a viable space within which to pound away original stuff for the first time. Writing essays for academia has encouraged my return to Microsoft Word, once again, on which I’ll blame the fact that I am currently composing this very bit in The Old Bitch. A desire to once again hack together a set of personalized Word templates has led to the birth of two such files which I am proud enough to share on my Notion drive. Eventually, I would also like to take the time to completely redesign the “Ribbon” in Word – something which I’ve literally never seen anyone else do. (I spent a substantial amount of time trying to find a library for MS Office customization files, to no avail, though you can find my own customization file as it stands on the same Notion page linked just now. Let me know if you’re able to successfully import it.)
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A confession of vanity: I suspect the only reason I haven’t yet stopped composing within WordPress is that I figured out how to change the typeface to Adobe Caslon (across both the editor and the front-facing site, naturally,) thanks to my newfound access to Adobe Typekit. Yes, apparently I really am that shallow. For those Office 365 users among you, I highly suggest you look up how to enable the Classic Office sound theme. Unlike Make Use Of, I find them both adorable and genuinely useful as auditory feedback. You may also be interested in my discovery of some fairly-Woke additions to Word’s autocorrect options and the subsequent bitchy controversy their introduction spawned.
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The Read-It Website
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If you know me at all, the following admission probably seems unbelievable: I have been using Reddit. I created a new subreddit for Extratone – which I do not necessarily expect to be populated any time soon – and r/SoftwareHistory after discovering that it didn’t yet exist, which I definitely do not expect you to populate, but would be delighted if you did. As with seemingly everything else I’ve covered, I also intend to write about how Reddit’s recent feature additions and redesign may actually make it a redeemable space on The Web, which should prove interesting. Clearly, I have become more than willing to accept the moniker of Software Historian whenever/if ever my authority achieves the appropriate volume to deserve to be christened so.
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Obviously, none of the developments I’ve shared in this post indicate any improvement in my productive output, but I hope to learn soon how to settle into a fairly-consistent (and hopefully much more original) writing process.
Why Extratone has used Discord instead of Slack for our team chat.
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Back in 2015, I hosted a pre-Extratone culture podcast called Drycast with musician friends from all over the net. To record remotely, we originally used Teamspeak 3 – a gamer VoIP staple. When I discovered Discord, I thought we'd found podcasting heaven. Originally, the free plan included 128kbps audio in its voice channels, which was nearly twice what we were getting out of our paid Teamspeak server. If I were still podcasting, Discord's just-released server video feature would undoubtedly prove invaluable for live streams.
According to a poll I ran on Twitter, 2/3rds of all people on Earth are thankful for Discord's existence. This is not surprising considering what every Discord user is still offered without spending any money at all: community spaces with audio/video and text chat capability, organizable by Twitch and YouTube-integrated roles with a plethora of different permission options, instantly and easily shareable by customizable temporary or permanent invite links through an application that's about as cross-platform as one can get (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, or simply one's web browser.) Those of us that remember IRC, Ventrilo, and Teamspeak should all consider Discord a tremendous gift.
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Never before have so many VoIP, video, and text chat features been offered together, or in such a beautiful package. “What we really did was create an all-in-one voice, video, and text chat app that replaced this constellation of tools that people would use,” said CEO Jason Citron in an interview with CNBC. Technically in terms of these details, Discord has no competition. Slack offers text and voice chat with its paid plans, yes, but nothing close in terms of video – especially considering Discord Go Live, its fairly-new streaming feature, which allows users to stream game video directly to 10 other users in the server. With some jury-rigging, it's possible to simply screen share this way, which is an essential sell for business video communication applications like Skype.
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Does anyone else have a discord server where you're the only member and you use different text channels to plan your weekly schedules lmaoooo
“Discord and Slack have many similarities, but Discord is the superior tool,” says esports team Ardent United. “Discord has voice channels, which allows us to easily chat with our supporters and other team members. Discord also allows us to set user roles and permissions which makes moderation extremely simple.” It's not just gaming companies, though. Decentralized cloud platform Sia also moved their community to Discord:
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Its intended audience is gamers, but many large communities have switched from Slack to Discord, including development communities like Reactiflux and Unreal Slackers. It includes an unlimited number of users, unlimited file uploads (with a per-file size limit), unlimited message histories, and really great moderation and spam filtering features.
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Slack is often praised for its integrations, but it shares support with Zapier – a dedicated web integration service which more or less integrates them equally.
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Slack works with a long list of tools, including Google Calendar, Zendesk, Salesforce, Wunderlist, and dozens of others. If you're looking for an integration that isn't immediately obvious, you can always turn to Zapier for help, because Slack is a supported service. Zapier is an online service that creates integrations between other apps and services, without you having to know any code to make it happen.
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For sharing detailed post embeds, there's also Discohook, which I just discovered. Productivity company Chanty's blog wrote perhaps the most in-depth comparison of the two services (emphasis theirs):
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At their core, Discord and Slack and very similar. Both are team chat apps with a similar interface. Both apps have team communication organized in channels. The biggest difference between the two is their target audience, and of course, their specific features.
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Ultimately, one must decide how relevant the services' respective target audiences are to productivity. For a not-for-profit media organization like Extratone, Discord's features-for-price ratio is simply too rich to pass up. If you'd like, stop by our server or try out our server template.
In all likelihood, you have heard of Electronic Mail, but I’ve noticed that much of our audience (and 18-25 year olds in general) have been consistently estranged from it, despite its prevalence in news media. Perhaps it’s not immediately evident as the coolest thing, but if “staying informed” and grass roots-ing brands are still as hip as they appear to be, email newsletters should soon become so groovy that you’ll begin leaving the house for a down-the-street coffee shop just to be seen reading them.
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Welcome to the wonderful world of aggregation.
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In many ways, email newsletters are the antithesis of (and medication for) Facebook’s school of ruminate aggregation. You know – the doctrine that will forever be remembered as the original intellectual catalyst for the downfall of human civilization. The skimming and the jumping… how many Facebook users could I fool by simply sending featured images, headlines, and abstracts for social cards without any hyperlinked destination? Could I manage to get Donald Tump elected President of the United States by way of Scrolling Hypnosis, alone?
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Staying informed is a habit of time-honored traditions. Gramps has stopped by Bill’s General Goods every weekday morning for twenty years with a handful of change because The Sleepyville Monitor is a part of his identity – dependent upon- and accountable to his trust. We’ve continued into 21st century news media as if a digital equivalent of his readership would be so difficult to fathom that legacy publications are best-off forcing the standards of print onto the web instead of investing in research/experimentation, which is why the fucking New York Times still sends your handset away to a separate mobile version of their site – a horrible remnant of browsing from the oughts that’s rarely seen on blogs, these days, much less on properties of titanic news powerhouses.
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For whatever reason, most of the industry has behaved as if Grandpa’s sort of routines no longer exist in day-to-day life, but – if anything – our Automated Hell is vastly more saturated with them, no? Unless you’re sequestered away in a diligently self-made Email-Free Zone, you’re receiving shit daily. I, myself, am considerably proud of my ~60,000 unread emails, and I’ve conceded to the vast majority of the popup opt-ins I’ve encountered since shortly after our launch because I rarely found myself visiting/reading undesirable web.
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“I don’t email” is a sentiment I hear from young people often, which is perfectly fine. I don’t vote!
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If it’s true that “nobody wants that,” nobody should be participating in the democratic process. Yes, I’ve experienced the no patience for more than 300 words phase of life, and I understand wholeheartedly the desire to retreat forever from it all. I would much rather exist in an old, open farmhouse with a wife, a garden, no internet, dusty old literature, and two ancient Bentleys than spend all my time crafting mirages in a black mirror, but neither cowardice nor negligence are options for us, right now. This country doesn’t have room for any more.
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That’s not to say that you should be expected to read 6 hours of news a day – it’s the media’s (our) job to maintain our own accessibility, and for this, daily/weekly newsletters are an unbelievably effective method. The meta-aggregators in today’s industry are often paid exclusively to ease your digestion, both independently and by mastheads.
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Dave Pell is a superb gateway from the former – an aggregation legend. His daily correspondence – called NextDraft- is more often than not the ideal front page of the day.
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I’m asking those of you youths yet without your own reading habits to trust my taste – if not my authority – and explore some options from my own inbox.
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Ultimately, you just can’t replace a legacy die-hard-news shop for a good political briefing. The POLITICO Playbook is the most time-efficient way to keep up with U.S. and World politics as you walk about your life, and many of The New Yorker’s newsletters are a great longform, much more visual compliment. For a slightly less-chaotic, but still relatively unproven alternative to the former, try Axios AM.
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National Geographic may seem a bit old guard, but has remained a consistently excellent photographic publication. Its print edition has no place but on the poll in tangible media subscription terms, but it has been quite depressing, as of late. Turns out, we’ve made quite a dystopia for ourselves, and their ability to encapsulate the world can be overstimulating, at times. If you’d like a bit more control – or are uncompromisingly digital-only – its web edition has matured quite competently, and is elegantly parsed by their newsletters. (You’ll need to create an account, if you don’t already have one.)
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It’s no secret that Medium has been on the decline, lately – and it’s always required a particular sort of tolerance – but The Daily Digest still delivers a few important essays, occasionally. And of course – there are options by regularity and topic, which you can fiddle with here when logged in.
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On the more innovative end of the industry, there’s The Outline’s newsletter, which – being the property of a more deliberate, gorgeous, open-web publication – is a bit underwhelming, but then again… why aren’t you just looking at the site, anyway? The Pudding’s output may be sparse, but – again – just… look at it. I can’t claim to have made much use of the information presented in their gorgeous visual essays, but it sure is fascinating.
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The Verge’s Command Line is often so clever, it can almost make tech news engaging. (Our very own The Tone is directly modeled after it, visually.) WIRED’s newsletter isn’t bad either – it’d be excellent if its parent website wasn’t so fucking broken.
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Then there’s War Is Boring- a tactical/tech news site? I recently discovered. “From drones to AKs, high technology to low politics.” I wouldn’t describe it as a primary read for me, but it’s still nice to see what the Big Boys are up to, once in a while. (I am mostly just waiting attentively for the U.S.S. Iowa to be put up for auction.)
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If you’re a filthy word nerd like myself, it’s likely you’ve seen a Tweet or two from the Haggard Hawks account – Paul Anthony Jones’ highly-educated musings on “obscure words, language & etymology facts.” After an excellent few years of playful indulgences, the project now has a whole DweebNet with a newsletter that always fascinates, if a bit dryly. What did you expect?
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The Poetry Foundation can also be easily convinced to send you their Poem of the Day, and biweekly newsletter.
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And finally… the meta media folks.
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Columbia Journalism Review’s always the prettiest to look at when it comes to coverage of industry, and their squeaky-clean perspective won me over quite quickly. They send their ultra-clean, editor-compiled Weekly Highlights every Thursday. The American Press Institute’s list isn’t a bad idea, either. Then, of course, there’s Harvard’s NiemanLab, which offers afternoon and Saturday morning emails. All three often cite the Pew Research Center, which offers its own palette of email lists, should you find yourself hungry for d a t a. Though, I do not, and I enjoy them.
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Landing on the “homepage” of even the most familiar online publications can feel daunting and impersonal, but having an authority on the industry (hopefully, with some sense of humor) parse the torrent and deliver it unto your personal inbox can ease the reading process into a much more intimate, sensical, enjoyable, and productive expenditure of your valuable time.
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For a publication of our scale, the routine of a newsletter can act first as a simple reminder of our existence, and mature into a way to reach out directly to our audience in a distinctly magazine methodology – one which pervades a real, consequential relationship with consumers.
Eugen Rochko has spent this year perfecting federated social media in Mastodon – his open source project. We spoke to him just hours before it became a global tech conversation.
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The saga of Twitter, Inc. has been rejuvenated in 2017 by Tump's antics, corporate drama, and an amalgam of user and non-user disquiet with its decisions, though its financial viability has been in prominent industry conversation for half a decade. Since its pre-2010 outset, many 'a' feature has accumulated on its original, still-iconic skeletal software, and – though the net is undoubtedly positive – a few have gone.
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Last Thursday, the company revised in bravado its poultrian default profile picture and its system of replies to exclude @s on all of Twitter's proprietary services, drastically changing two of its visual mainstays, and prodding a particularly lucent cacophony. Turn your ear, and you'll hear many familiar terms in the chants: limits, chains, strings, harassment, feedback, gamergate, nazis, etc.
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These conversations are important, but they've gotten awfully stale.
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If you listen a bit more carefully, you'll intercept a new one:
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Mastodon.
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It's the open source brainchild of Eugen Rochko, who's known colloquially as Gargron.
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He's had one hell of a week.
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Between the night of our first emails and our conversation, his flagship mastadon.social instance had doubled in users. Less than two hours after we said our goodbyes, his name was on The Verge's front page.
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Despite the urgency of it all, he graciously lent me his time just after breakfast on Tuesday to discuss himself and the story behind the project, while the most significant day of his life was building around him.
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“I'm perfectly fine with being called Eugene by Americans.”
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Though the ink's still fresh on his compsci diploma, he's clearly prepared for the American press.
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What's the story behind the project? Do you remember the specific moment when you decided to do this?
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Many years ago, I had a friend that was really into federated networks when they were a new thing. That was when identi.ca was first created – at the very beginning of my developer knowledge and career.
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A good portion of the stories written so far on his platform have framed it as an alternative to Twitter, which early Masto adopters refer to as “Hellbird,” or “the bird website.” Eugen isn't afraid to acknowledge his investment in the format.
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I was a heavy Twitter user and I wasn't happy with where Twitter was going, so I decided to check on how the federated stuff was doing in the meantime. I found it in a very sad state, but thought I could contribute.
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He began building on his own, with Tweetdeck's standard in mind.
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I thought 'if I'm going to do something, it needs to have realtime updates and it needs to have columns.' I started with a bare-bones prototype while still [at University] in May or April of last year. It had no user interface, only an API that I was using from the command line. And I thought 'okay, it works. that's great.' Then, exams came.
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Academics had to come before the project at first, but it soon supplied an ample post-graduation diversion. He focused his energy on building something more complete and eventually launched a Patreon page.
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I announced it on HackerNews, and that was the first public release of the project. That's when I got my first users who weren't my friends, and some who were new to federated networks.
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That was just over 100 days ago, and it gave way to his first feedback.
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I started working on the first feature requests, shaping the project a bit differently. People were a lot more focused on privacy features than I thought they would be, although in retrospect, it makes sense. The previous [federated] project – GNU social – did not really have a focus on privacy features, or anything built in by default.
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It compelled him to change things, and his work was well received.
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Over time, I kept working on new features, and waves of new users came when it went viral in certain circles. The first was HackerNews and Product Hunt. Aral Balkan – a Twitter user with over 30,000 followers – picked up the project, gave it a shout out, and even did a giveaway of his app. He had a lot of followers from Holland; the Mastodon timelines became mostly Dutch.
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Next was Marxist anime Twitter (including Extratone and I.)
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Lots of furries; lots of LGBT people. That's when I really focused on privacy features and making sure all blocks worked because these individuals needed a safer platform than Twitter could offer.
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Sidekick dashboard background processing jobs as of Tuesday morning.
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“As you can see, the first bump is HackerNews, the second is Aral Balkan, and then anime/Marxist Twitter.”
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And the last – now a bit out of date – is this week's spike, which is nearly double all previous waves.
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Are you responsible for all of the code?
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You can look at the GitHub page to see a specific breakdown of who contributed and how many lines of code, each. You'll see I'm at the top by a large margin, but there are [additional] people who've contributed interesting, good features & fixes, localizations, user guides, and documentation.
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What's the story behind the name?
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It's not particularly interesting. I'm a progressive metal fan, and I listen to Mastodon sometimes. They have a really cool name that refers to a really cool animal. It's a fluffy elephant! What's not to love?
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It's also the inspiration for Mastodon's mascot, which was penned by Rochko's YouTuber friend Dopatwo after he realized how urgently he required an error page.
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What does “federated” mean to you?
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The biggest problem with this term is that it's new for lots of people. People who've come across federated networks in the pastinstantly understand what it means and how it works, and people who are new to the concept have a lot of trouble before it clicks. But when Twitter first started, people didn't understand what 'retweeting' meant, so it's not a unique problem domain.
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I don't know where it comes from – maybe BitTorrent – but people seem to think that when something is 'decentralized,' everybody gets the same thing; that it's all synchronized one to one. In actuality, 'federated' means that people in different instances can talk to each other, but the content is different depending on the users there, what they do, and who they follow.
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Though instances are infrastructurally independent, they can communicate with one another. On a user level, timelines are still determined by who you do and do not follow across the entirety of all instances.
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What if Twitter comes to you in the near future with a job offer?
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[Rochko laughs.]
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If it was any other company, I would think about it. A job is a staple source of income, and – depending on the company – could involve doing something important, but I have zero faith in Twitter.
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Does this all mean that I finally get to live out my serif Twitter dream?
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Yes, I suppose on your own instance, you could change the stylesheet...
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So if I set up my own instance and started charging for its use, I'd be in the clear, legally?
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Yes, that's okay. The code is licensed under AGPL version three, which I picked because other projects in the same space are using it. The difference between AGPL and GPL is that [the former] forces you to contribute back to the appstream code repository if you make any breaking changes.
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For example, Eugen explained that WhatsApp originally used XMPP for its chat protocol, which meant that Facebook and Google Talk users could connect to it, too. However, the company progressively locked down the platform over time, leaving virtually nothing visible that was unique to XMPP in its current iteration.
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To prevent somebody taking Mastodon code, placing it behind locks, and stripping out the federation part to make Twitter II, I'm using this license.
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The thing to remember about free software is that 'free' means freedom of the user, not that it's zero cost. It's perfectly fine to charge for free software because developers need to live, too.
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I've seen a lot of multilingual 'tooting' these past few weeks. Can we expect an in-app translate function like Twitter's on Mastodon?
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I don't think I could put in a 'translate this toot' button because APIs from Google and Bing are quite expensive at scale. I'm not 100% promising this, but I can probably put something in where people can select which language they post in, and then just filter the timelines. That would at least solve the problem of being confronted with lots of French posts, without knowing any French.
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The only complaint about Twitter I remember that hasn't already been addressed here is the capability of editable 'toots.' Is that a possibility?
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That won't happen. There's actually a good reason why they don't do that. It's simply because you could make a toot about one thing, have people favorite it and share it, link it from other places, and then suddenly, it says 'Heil Hitler,' or something.
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It's a bit preposterous to continue the conversation as if Twitter and Mastodon are interchangeable entities. They exist in separate ideological and mechanical spheres, and will both continue to do so for a very long time.
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That said, the fundamental user interface design and current cross-community user saturation do warrant comparisons between their functions. More likely than not, you'll create a Mastodon account because a link found you on Twitter, use it because you prefer its type of ecosystem, and you'll stay after realizing that nearly all of your age-old qualms have been addressed, if not already rectified. While FOSS and Federated may seem at times like jejune ideologies, their advantages are especially tangible in this context. Should you find yourself needing to complain about something, you'll find an audience. Perhaps it'll be your command line.
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It's nothing but negligent to describe Mastodon as an alternative or clone.
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It's more like Twitter's son.
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It's leaner, quicker-to-change, much more flexible & democratized, and less corrupt. Though I didn't ask its creator what he intended to gain from all his effort, I think his commitment itself denotes a preoccupation with progress. Those of you who've been let down by the tools you've been given to control your words' exposure will find startling competence in your ability to determine per-toot privacy, or reserve your raucous photos and terrible memes from followers who are not necessarily complicit consumers. Naturally, it's also much less dependable, though a single instance outage will never leave you truly, completely silent. And the support will come.
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It's been a privilege to be observer and participant in the first lightening of a new online community. In the moment, we enjoy our lavender haze -when the spaces are filling primarily with users who are sincerely interested enough in discourse to have sought it out.
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Sarah Jeong's account of her Twitter exile is a good, long read if you're craving more specifics, and Eugen's Medium offers a more complete explanation of federation and its place in the industry, straight from the source. Apparently, he's just as articulate with words as he is with code.
Evernote, Dropbox Paper, and The History of Word Processing
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The recent history of the software and services we use to retain text, and how their development affects our behavior on the page.
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I have only once in my many using years been gripped by the fear of the Lord because of a software-related event. I was cruising my pitifully ugly Google News feed on an October afternoon in 2015 looking for the last little bit of material for the evening’s episode of Drycast, when I happened to spy the words “Evernote is in Serious Trouble.” I doubt I screamed or anything, but I definitely remember experiencing a very real, full-body shot of adrenaline because my entire creative life was contained at the time within the nearly 40,000 notes I’d amassed on my Evernote account since the service’s open beta in 2008. In fact, I was in that very moment using it for the live show notes and so began to wonder how I could possibly continue if Evernote were to be suddenly killed dead. For better or worse, though, the “unicorn” would indeed survive to see its tenth birthday this year, though it’s arguably been eclipsed by the notetaking, journaling, and word processing services its features predated and for which it was the most significant forerunner not so long ago.
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I’d been using the cloud-synced notetaking service for all of my composition and research gathering since Junior High, when I thought myself extremely clever with my cloud-syncing, iPhone-native notetaking app when I’d watch other students struggling to find a flash drive or log in to their email on school library computers. Since it worked with any browser and my password was memorable (before the brute force apocalypse and the need for password managers,) I could access my documents, mp3s, and images from anywhere, which was actually a pretty big deal — especially as more research and notetaking was required in high school.
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Yes, 10 years later, we are swamped with infinite duplicates of documents from our personal clouds, which are now inescapable and plenty — they follow us around from our pockets, purses, and backpacks and rain notifications down upon us for single punctuation mark peer edits, unnoticeable modification conflicts, or sometimes just for the hell of it. There are now what seems like infinitely many available ways to enter, edit, and publish text from wherever you happen to be, and most of them are free, but very few are actually pleasantly executed tools — all of which can all be said of most types of software now. Since tech publications (and even tech bloggers now,) aren’t doing software reviews anymore because you won’t click on them, the task of comparing between the lot so that you might be spared having to mess around with all of them to find out for yourself — the function of consumer journalism — has fallen to myself, alone because the Fear of The Unclicked is not known to me.
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To assist me in bearing this terrible burden, you can allocate 1–3 minutes to take the survey I created about the text-entry tools you use to determine which tools people use at different points in their writing process and across several uses. It would be very much appreciated.
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Feature Fucked
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Reading this via printed PDF, your hypothetical 100% offline grandmother — the successful children’s book author who needs word processing but doesn’t require connectivity because she doesn’t do research or correspond with anyone — might ask well whatever was the matter with Microsoft Word? Surely I don’t need more than that! Technically, she’d be correct in a major sense: Word has been able to sync via Microsoft OneDrive between PC or Mac with iOS or Android for a while now, but I wouldn’t vouch for the latter for any use other than reading or very lightly editing a document because the relationship between the mobile apps and their desktop counterparts is inevitably strained. Because Microsoft Word is such old software, it’s filled with some obscure functionalities I’m sure even its creators have forgotten. Over years and years of development, these tools have been stacked on top of one another so that actually mastering the labyrinth could be a college major in and of itself.
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Basically, you can tell your grandmother that Microsoft Word is a huge old bitch, but it’s still the industry standard for formatting and publishing works at the end of the line. As you can see from our survey results, 58.1% of you use “legacy” word processing software to finish up your first drafts (as of May 30th,) which makes you more modern than even a slightly-older population, I’d wager.
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While we’re on the subject of the old hag, it’s worth pointing out how ridiculously behind the times its open source “alternatives” are. OpenOffice’s last major update was the release of version 4.0 in July of 2013, and it’s not correctly scaled for the small, high-DPI displays sold at just about every price level, nowadays. It was okay when I couldn’t afford to pay for a license in high school (and saw no reason to,) but it now looks sort of awful, especially considering that the version of Office (and therefore Word) to which I’m comparing its screenshots is actually also from 2013.
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The other, “fresher” open source option of the moment is called LibreOffice Writer, and its suite has been attracting a fair amount of praise — I think “every bit as good [as Word]” is taking things a bit far, but its sixth version looks significantly better than OpenOffice on my machine, at least, and generally operates more smoothly as well. That age-old banner of Open Source won’t matter for much longer, though, if all kinds of software continue to be abandoned and substituted with Progressive Web Apps for no damned reason. Considering how much time some of us have already spent in front of Word, it’s no wonder we’re spoiled: even my 5-year-old edition of Microsoft Office syncs with the app on my iPhone (with some pleading,) and looks extremely crisp. As far as paid featured desktop-class alternatives, there’s just one more: WordPerfect, which I have never used or heard anyone else mention.
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The Hybrids
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When it was conceived, Evernote pioneered the recipe that now serves as the foundation of the feature development in today’s notetaking and journaling applications, as evidenced by CEO Phil Libin’s unapologetic use of the term “life-logging” in 2009, which sounds bizarre in retrospect because we’re now well-accustomed to easily “snapping geotagged photos” (smartphones had always included location data in their photo files’ meta, but Evernote was the first app to give a user access to the data on their device,) “making voice notes,” or and organizing text notes via advanced categorization and metadata-enabled searchability. These features are essentials in the apps you could accurately describe as “life-loggers” available for download now. Snapchat’s “Memories” especially come to mind, and I’ve long argued that we should blame (or praise) Evernote for beginning the era of eternal memory.
In contrast with Evernote’s relatively busy design, DayOne has been the best-looking app of any kind on iOS for years. It shipped with the same sort of extensive categorization, but it’s only ever been available on iOS, Android, and OSX — probably because Windows simply doesn’t look good enough. Should you wish, it will add detailed metadata from the moment you begin each journal entry including precise-ish GPS coordinates, an overview of your location’s weather at the time, whether or not you were moving, what song you were listening to, and your step count for the day (now from the Health app.) You have the option of viewing your journal chronologically, by location on a map, or in a social-esque activity feed, and yes — its search function can be filtered by any of these datapoints.
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In 2015, Bloom added iCloud syncing and multiple journals, further closing the functionality gap between the two apps on paper, yet plenty of users continue to tether between the two using IFTTT (including myself for all my Twitter favorites, just to compare.) Within the somewhat forgotten niche of the “life-logging” utility, DayOne is superior and serves well the self-obsessed user who find the little details of their life to be extremely interesting. Last Spring, they introduced the option to purchase a stylized physical book of a user’s journal from within the app. As it is currently priced, the 2,674-page book I previewed today containing every single Tweet I’ve favorited in the past 5 years displayed in a delicately-formatted layout would set me back over $365, and would have to be split into 5 separate books (as per the maximum of 400 pages each.) Since I find my life very interesting, I’ve made a note to myself to proceed if/when I ever have that sort of money to throw around.
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For the 67.7% of you who use digital notetaking or word processing software when you “want to remember something,” DayOne is the best option available because of its search function and satisfaction-of-use. Though Evernote was once the only app that could “handle everything everything in your head,” it’s a different experience entirely — tailored for work applications, if anything, since DayOne’s growth spurt. The company, itself hasn’t exactly been managed cleanly, either with layouts in 2015 and a privacy scandal in 2016, but then again, what billion-dollar company doesn’t have its controversies?
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Despite having imported my huge catalog of Evernote entries into DayOne, the former often gets stuck, and it’s retained the most irritating habit of all the software mentioned in this column. Because synced entries in Evernote are not live-updated like those in Google Docs or Dropbox Paper, it’s possible to modify or add to a note on one device while it’s open (and static) on another, which is addressed by either duplicating the most recent entry and filing it in the default “Conflicting Changes” folder, or pasting the duplicate of the entire contents above the “old” content in the note, separated by a horizontal line. I’ve yet to figure out the behavior that triggers which fix, but I don’t particularly care — I’ve decided to restrict my Evernote use to my desktop, absolutely. If I haven’t articulated it well enough for you to form a visual, just trust me: it’s very, very annoying, and it should’ve been addressed years ago.
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It was my stepfather who told me about Evernote and signed me up for that beta. Both of us were then the sort of people who experienced extreme satisfaction in archiving and categorizing stuff (which is probably the most straightforward way to define nerd,) but he was especially and absolutely enthralled with its Web Clipper function, which allowed the user to save webpages with “context” — both the metadata (source URL, date) and contents in “the text, images, and links” via their Firefox extension, which was revolutionary from our perspective, and certainly beat the hell out of stuffed, ugly bookmark folders or printed-to-pdfs. However, Web 2.0 was a younger, then and significantly more lithe — the average web page is now 10 times larger (disclosure: “average web page” is a somewhat misleading term, though I think we can probably agree that it’s too fucking big, regardless,) and it’s long past time for us to accept that this technology is no longer a reasonable solution to saved images.
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Though development on the Web Clipper appears to have continued — it’s now on Version 7.something — the vast majority of the pages you’d want to save on the web (except for Linkedin, apparently,) show Evernote’s age as it attempts to clip them — often taking several minutes to yield the product, which is always broken as hell. Don’t take my word for it, though: another one of Evernote’s less-discussed features technically makes it a publishing platform because I can share a note from my account with you, the world, via this public link. It’s a clip I took a year ago of Wired’s profile of Jad Abumrad, and you’ll notice that it isn’t completely unreadable, but it is ugly and broken. Even after last year’s update, it’s still clumsy, slow, and virtually unusable without a stellar data connection.
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Archive obsessives, I know that Evernote could have become part of your system and over time, you may have built a gargantuan library within it — the perfection of your tagging system’s efficiency and your categorical format’s consistency making it such a treasure that you might think of it in times of duress to calm yourself. I’ve allowed myself to continue using it exclusively for notes in my novel project, so I do understand that it may represent tens of thousands of hours of your time and that losing it would cause you tremendous grief, but… it’s time to let go and better your life by exploring the selection of alternatives and their superior capabilities.
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As you’d expect, software has changed a lot since 2010, and the choices available for word processing are now abundant and relatively diverse. As for web clipping, in particular, I would suggest your new browser Vivaldi and its super capable full-page capture feature, which I’ve used for everything from snapping a 25.1 MB, 30,000 pixel-high PNG capture of all Extranet data in text form to the photo specimens we submitted to Fonts in Use, to crisp snips of full words. For comparison, here’s what it captured of that old Wired post on Jad. You’ll notice that while the image is relatively large, none of the article itself has been lost (aside from the featured image, on Wired’s end,) and the resolution is fine enough that you could still crop out quotes or smaller shots to share if you discovered something later. This ability of Vivaldi’s still feels like magic to me, and there are plenty of other reasons to use the browser, but I’ll save that discussion for a later date.
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I could cite plenty of pseudoidealistic reasons to never use Google Chrome, Google Docs, Google Keep, or any other Google product, really, mostly because they all look like shit, their browser is swallowing the internet, (along with their “accelerated mobile pages” project,) and just about everything the company was built on — along with what they plan for the future — is completely (and sometimes even explicitly) opposed to The Open Web, good design, and humanity as a whole. However, I fully realize that idealism doesn’t mean shit when you’re just trying to get the job done, so let’s talk about Keep and Docs.
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Google Keep is part notetaking service and part streamlined, modernized, hassle-free execution of Evernote’s Web Clipper. If you’re already using Chrome or you’re desperate enough for the ability to clip web pages without switching windows for whatever reason that you’d change your browsing habits entirely, you can add its extension to the top task bar — right next to Evernote’s — and use it any time you feel that old archivist itch. The extension will very quickly and smoothly clip the title and URL, along with whatever of your own text/tags you feel like using, but it will not attempt to capture any of the web page’s content (Google already has it somewhere, anyway.)
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Like all of its kin, Google Keep is particularly savvy with integration: you can immediately send your clip to a Google Doc, set a reminder, add a collaborator and even draw on any entry. Its party piece in this Tactile Era of touch-enabled laptops and keyboard-equipped tablets is its ability to digitize handwriting or “grab image text,” a novelty technology called Optical Character Recognition, which has been tickling our most stale fantasies for centuries, now. Though I’m sure it’s genuinely appreciated in a handful of especially quaint use cases, somewhere in the world, there’s never going to be an at-scale application for this sort of thing. I know my handwriting is bad, but if Keep can’t “grab” it reliably, there’s not much sense in using it at all for me, though Google’s Academy for Young Algorithms will certainly make sure to save every one of my motions to capitalize on my time (or yours.)
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Microsoft OneNote is as clunky, busy, and buggy as Google Keep is quick and uninspiring, but that’s probably because it’s much much older than I remember. To demonstrate its web clipping function, I clipped the OneNote portion of PCMagazine’s Microsoft Office 2003 review and exported it into a PDF, which isn’t a straightforward process, but is it useful? No. Because it’s a PDF, it’s almost unreadably low-resolution, yet manages to weigh 1.2 MB. My (cropped) Vivaldi capture of the same page is 988 kB and nearly impossible to tell apart from the live experience, so why are we bothering with OneNote at all? Well, according to Preston Gralla for ComputerWorld (the last tech site still publishing worthwhile software reviews):
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It bristles with note-creation tools for drawing, recording audio and video, scanning images, embedding spreadsheets and reviewing the edits of others (although the abilities of those tools differ somewhat depending on the platform). In fact, its note-creation tools are more comprehensive than Evernote’s.
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And we begin to see OneNote’s place as the feature-heavyweight of synced notetaking applications.
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The organization-minded will appreciate OneNote’s basic structure. You create individual notebooks; within each notebook, you can create section groups that contain multiple sections. Each section has individual pages, with each page a separate note. It’s ideal for organizing content with a logical structure.
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Then again, dearest Preston goes on to express his adoration for Evernote Web Clipping shortly afterwards and he did so just last year, so I won’t really claim to know what’s going on with him (he’s a legacy tech journo.) In my experience with twenty-somethings and younger, the more committed an artist or writer is to their craft, the less interested they are in its tools, but it’s the young ones who need great tools the most before they’re able to settle on and pin down their process. There was only a single writer (3.2%) surveyed who answered “when I want to DIGITALLY record something to remember, I use…” with “the ‘compose’ function (to publish immediately and/or save for later as a draft) of a web-based text sharing service (Twitter, Tumblr, Medium, WordPress, Facebook, etc.),” and one other answered “another text-entry field on my device where it will be saved for later,” which four users (13.3%) said they use to “Brainstorm” digitally.
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By Question Set 3, the two alternative answers were dropped and for “Outlining” digitally, 45.2% of surveyees use legacy word processors, 35.5% use cloud-based notetaking apps, and 19.4% use the default notetaking program installed on their device. In omitting alternative options earlier and including web-native CMS editors later, I inevitably shepherded answers within a moderately-wide berth of where my own assumptions would lead their process. It’s interesting that for the last prompt, “to make the last modifications to my final draft, I…” a whole 35.5% reported they would still be using a cloud-based service instead of a legacy word processor (58.1%) or CMS editor (6.5%), which would suggest that the functionality of these new e-enabled methods of composition has become truly important, indeed.
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Though it’s not necessarily unreasonable, it astounds me to consider how many Online users actually compose original drafts of huge works exclusively within publishing and blogging services like Medium, Tumblr, or Reddit, even. We currently cohabitate a literary sphere with impossibly massive works of fanfiction that far surpass anything God or The Classics established in the past, and it’s a wonder how many sour habits have crept into the writing world as a result. For the sake of the experiment (and my own education,) I posted some of my recent work on Medium and found its composition UI much improved from what I remember and comparable in many ways to those of more recent dedicated document editing/notetaking services, but there’s still whole set of abstract, less-than-technical reasons not to publish on Medium, much less compose there.
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Briefly: instead of “defining a new model for media on the internet,” CEO Ev Williams and company ended up creating an isolationist community with hellishly-skewed priorities in craft. Virtually all of what’s actually born on Medium is of a certain soulsucking, less-than-productive quality (notable exceptions include Ryan Dell, Dave Pell, and work from marginalized voices that would not otherwise be written or published.) Though their founding principles of ad-model disruption are redeemable and entirely sincere, I’m sure, their result doesn’t actually solve anything at all, especially after last year’s layoffs and refocus.
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As for Tumblr and Reddit, I’m afraid I’ve never been capable of truly understanding either, but I did blog extensively about cars for the first time 5–6 years ago on the former when it was one of significantly fewer fee-free options for digital publishing, and even then the experience was already casting doubt on the true necessity and existence of blogging platforms like WordPress — especially for web development-abhorring peons like I was at the time. Now, its iOS app is gorgeous, and its editor has ended up rock-solid and surprisingly versatile, yet the state of its community, also, leaves one with little reason to publish aside from a sortof isolationist desire to contribute to the community itself, for Tumblr’s sake.
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This is where WordPress should outshine everything else as a pure, open-source Content Management System for any and every use by any and every folk with server space, so I thought I’d try out my own fresh, ultra-connected install to see how its experience has changed. In word processing terms, its iOS and Windows clients are lightyears ahead of where they were a few years ago, but to take full advantage of them, one must allow WordPress’ own software access that’s not Open Web at all. For light, minimalist personal blogs, a WordPress site offers much more control over one’s intellectual property than Medium or Tumblr, but it’s also significantly less independent than it once was. A quick inspection of my little experiment reveals that 5 out of its 6 content sources are from Google or WordPress properties, leaving only one for my actual server. This means I can accomplish a lot using just their apps, and my work will be distributed among “billions of posts” across WordPress dot com (to be found by absolutely nobody, I suspect,) but the post editor within the CMS itself has never functioned quite so versatility as it does right now. And yet, neither WordPress nor any of the software I’ve covered thus far achieve much progress toward an ideal, comprehensive word processing solution.
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That’s why I’d like to talk about Dropbox Paper, which has been my own browser’s homepage and primary text editor since its public beta went live in August of 2016, and it’s very hard not to dote on considering that it is definitively the single most useful software addition in my whole computing life. It’s a live-updating exclusively web-based (for now) service with an emphasis on collaboration, just like the industry-standard monstrosity that is Google Docs, but it’s been designed from the ground-up to perform best the operations you need most from a word processor in 2018, which doesn’t include advanced layouts, fine-adjustable paragraph and/or letter spacing, Excel integration, or voice dictation, but simply… typing and re-reading and editing. You’d be surprised what a handy productivity catalyst can become of a simple white, live-updating space without distraction available no matter where you are or what device you’re in reach of.
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Virtually all of my “process” is now conducted within Paper, and I’ve never before experienced such an unconscious assimilation of use. I write about software because I’ve used a lot of it and I’ve been able to count on my ability to find fundamental mistakes/designed ignorance in most everything. Dropbox Paper, however, is so keenly perfect for my own needs that I slipped unconsciously into total, daily dependence upon it without noticing the transition at all, which has never, ever happened before. Notes can begin from blank Text/Title fields to Brainstorming, Meeting Notes, and Project Overview templates. In April, the team introduced the ability to “templatize” any document, which I’ve yet to explore but will no doubt make full use of for show notes when Futureland is revived. There are also Evernote templates, yes, but you cannot create your own, and downloading them is an unnecessary pain in the ass.
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Landing on the root, you’ll see Folders, Starred Folders, Starred Entries, and Shared Documents all displayed chronologically by modification date. Instead of tags, categories, or “notebooks,” Dropbox Paper’s folders are its singular method of categorization, and they are astoundingly sufficient, even when editing multiple documents simultaneously or digging through professional and personal entries within a single account — all thanks to its search function, which is super-swift and superior to any other service because of its profound simplicity. It’s one of many experiences which laughably shame past efforts in the design of these tools: without any customizable search filters or metadata and by sifting only through title, content, and author, any note in Paper can be found instantly no matter how dated or obscure. I doubt I’ve yet to top 1000 entries quite yet (there’s no easy way to count, and why should there be, really,) but on several occasions I’ve found years-untouched, untitled documents within seconds — a process which has never been brisk or convenient in Evernote.
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Though Dropbox Paper wasn’t necessarily designed for composing 5000+-word longform, it’s by far the best tool for the vast majority of the pre-publishing process (to a reasonable extent, of course — I wouldn’t use it for a screenplay or novel manuscript.) It’s rare for me to utilize its mastery of collaboration, these days, but there’s frankly little reason to go anywhere else — including Google Docs — considering that Paper documents can be bound by the same viewing and editing permissions: by individual entry or folder, marking live modifications with clean, color-coded initials in the sidebar, by email or rogue URL for editing, commenting, and/or reading. (The comments interface is the best I’ve ever seen by a wide margin.) Users can be assigned and “pinged” for tasks using “@,” and it’s reasonable to assume that permissions won’t ever present an issue for my own use considering they haven’t already. To a limited extent, notes can be easily “published” via shared links yet remain editable in realtime, making Paper perfect for obscure-but-public reference documents like our style guide and redirects catalog.
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From the onset of use, you’ll marvel at how fucking fast and smooth the in-browser experience is regardless of your device’s age or dimensions. Surprise surprise — the iOS app works just as smoothly and is laid out vaguely like a Twitter client. “Browse” — the chronological timeline of documents — occupies the leftmost bottom button as “Home” — the main timeline — does in Twitter’s app, and “Notifications” is likewise the same icon (practically) in the same position in both, and the items themselves are even grouped with rich card-looking content previews. Perhaps these nods to my Twitter muscle memory have contributed to my own unusual bias, but I suspect it shares components with a particular demographic of professional writers. As I understand the day-to-day activities of a feet-on-the-pavement reporter, Dropbox Paper is a necessity in a ridiculously all-encompassing sense. With its Slack integration, super high-usability design, collaborative modularity, ultra copy-and-paste-friendly text, smooth hyperlink behavior, light weight, and ultimate compatibility, it should be evangelized as a no-brainer option in journalism. Fuck a Bic & steno.
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Web Clipping may be completely alien to its vocabulary, but you can drag and drop documents in just about any format for a beautifully-embedded preview. Conveniently, they won’t even count against your Dropbox upload quota: “Dropbox Paper doesn’t place a limit on the number of docs you can create, and includes unlimited version history regardless of the Dropbox plan you are on.” Naturally, this is subject to change in the future, but I’m 95% positive that Paper has yet to refuse any of my uploads because of their size or format, and many of mine are extraordinarily huge.
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There is a perfect power to Paper which I can only beg its stewards to leave unmolested for as long as possible. If I was a billionaire, I’d immediately purchase it from Dropbox and leave everything to the company — revenue, janitorial development, user data, etc. — except the right to make any significant feature or functionality additions to the user experience, as I have never before felt this way about a single service or program… ever. I’m not sure if I should keep quiet or incessantly kiss ass, but my interest undoubtedly lies in preserving Paper as it is. If you’re left doubting my own testimonial, there are a billion throwaway “Ditch Google Docs for Dropbox Paper” posts across the B and C-list technosphere. Gizmodo’s, for instance, notes Paper’s superior formatting freedom, intelligent footprint, incredible embed flexibility, and… independence from the terrible Google God.
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Right now, one’s choices in notetaking apps for iOS are almost too varied. There’s Zoho Notebook, which claims itself to be “An App Store 2016 Best App of the Year” (falsely, it would appear.) I recall installing it on my 6S Plus, then, after spying some screenshots of its multicolored notes, but I failed to find room for its use. When the (completely useless) Files app was added with iOS 11, I played around with it for a bit and somehow ended up setting Zoho as the default application to open PDFs which inadvertently launched my 8 Plus into an infinite loop of “Open __ in __?” prompts that eventually required deletion of Notebook in order to view them at all. I tend to especially adore these programs in their early, innocent versions when they smell most of innovation before their creators are inevitably brought back to our filthy reality when their VCs start expecting money. Zoho Notebook should have bewitched my affections, but my short trial was clunky and disastrous and those beautifully-colored layouts weren’t quite worth the trouble, so they were missed — to no consequence at all.
Bear lets you tag notes by adding a hashtag to a word anywhere in your document; you can add as many as you like, and then browse them later from the left rail. You can export your notes as PDFs, rich text files, HTML documents, or even JPEGs. And it supports ultra-nerd automation, so if you use an iOS app like Workflow [now Shortcuts] you can create shortcuts to your notes.
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DayOne’s own markdown support and exporting capabilities surely make it Bear’s predecessor. JPEG exports are a nice touch and they reflect awareness of what power notetakers like Newton actually do with their software. If I had not already chosen to depart OSX, long ago, I would seriously consider downloading the app on both platforms and paying its monthly $15 membership fee to try out syncing, but I suspect Google’s moderate but noticeable influence on their design would quickly prove to be a turn-off, personally. I had a go at Bear’s free iOS experience and saw little functional difference from DayOne — if anything, text didn’t look quite as sharp — but its reported integration with Siri Shortcuts is intriguing. (Apple acquired Workflow last year, absorbing it into its upcoming iOS 12 release as Shortcuts.) I’d suggest you give it a try — especially if your desktop-class machine is a Mac — and for your sake, I would hope they choose to utilize the power of the modern browser with a web interface in the future. “As a writer, I work in text, and text ought to be simple,” Newton opined, likely with more brevity than I’m capable of in this discussion.
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Much of anything has yet to be written about these offerings in 2018, but I must insist both regular and intermittent writers alike give Dropbox Paper a try. I suspect you’ve less “privacy” to “lose” than you would in Google Docs, and its sublime function as a writing tool extends from workplace collaboration to shared grocery lists with your SO and long, image and hyperlink-saturated works like this one. It’s very difficult to break — even by pasting fragmenting code or Zalgo text; it’s never out of date, and always a short, teeny pageload away even across the worst of connections. As someone with an unhealthy obsession with his written work, I can tell you that its UI is by far the most anxiety-relieving I’ve ever used. As an alternative to Google Docs, I would point out that 1) Docs supersedes Paper in sum features significantly less than you’d think and 2) for the one or two weird formatting challenges it fails to complete, neither Microsoft Word — the old bitch — nor Docs are going anywhere, and Paper exports to both of them directly.
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The Future
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Curiously enough, I was required to use every single method of text retention of which I am capable in the course of writing this piece, as I tripped over my laptop’s charging cable — a physical connection, yes (and with substantial leverage) because Apple won’t allow other computer manufacturers to make use of “their” ingenious magnetic charging solution which they’ve included as “MagSafe” on MacBooks since 2008 — perhaps inevitably ruining the port and leaving me with only my iPhone and pens. I filled a few folded sheets of paper with my LAMY Safari (which is good, but overrated,) and felt quite ridiculous in the process. Thanks to my fiancé’s generosity, I type this bit now on her Panasonic R440 Electric Typewriter, which must still be considered a legitimate means of writing text in 2018 if only because of Instagram poetry. According to its rather dubious listing on Amazon, this model dates to September 4th, 1973, which is remarkable considering its spellcheck and auto-margin functions (neither of which I could actually figure out how to use.) If there is anywhere to be caught clacking away on a typewriter out of preference (I’d hesitate to call even my own situation one of necessity,) in 2018, it would undoubtedly be Portland, yet I am still extremely embarrassed to be the source of all this racket and would immediately perish if any of my neighbors bothered to track it down.
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Even this very sophisticated example of the typewriting species is limited by one’s supply of both ink and erasing ribbon, though either can still be found for sale, remarkably. I am even less able to easily correct mistakes than those I wrote by hand because I feel a significant pang of pain via my mechanical empathy every time I use (or accidentally misuse) the function which whites out text with a sickening clunk. There’s something about this process which makes it feel more taxing, costly, and timeconsuming than any other, but perhaps with time and extended use, my embarrassment, empathy, and hesitance would fade and I’d become a cruel, loaded God of shitty prose, but I have no intention of finding out. I’ll willingly concede that restored or refurbished typewriters can be absolutely gorgeous, and there’s probably some validity in the “distraction-free writing environment,” but I’d suggest that anyone who’s pounded out any significant chunk of copy knows that one must find a groove of absolute focus within a word processor in order to complete work with any efficiency or cohesion, anyway. I’m as connected as any of you, yet these days, I always end up hyperfocused on Word, Dropbox Paper, and/or research in my browser to the exclusion of anything else on the machine, whether or not I intend to do so. I’m no authority, but I can’t see a functional place for a typewriter in 2018.
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Portlanders, surely, are vain enough to avoid leaving such disastrous drafts laying about, though now’s a good time to note that one can now scan their typewritten document into a word processor using native software on their smartphone, nowadays, if they’re so unreasonably inclined. Using iOS default Notes app, I could scan this physical draft into Portable Document Format with just a few steps, but doing so would contribute to the ridiculous perception that Adobe’s ancient, clunky standard is the ultimate end of the line for any and all digital publishing. Yes, it’s ridiculous to consider “25 years” of development led to PDF 2.0’s release just last year, to nobody’s glee outside The Fucking Adobe Blog (which I do believe is running on Medium, hilariously.) Yet throughout my existence, it’s been the go-to half-step between text’s digital and physical forms. The liason, if you will.
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Perhaps one could argue that this role in our collective academic Western word processing lives is profound (though no mentally functional human being wants to meet them,) which would inevitably lead them to criticize Adobe’s longtime occupation of it, but to examine the next significant step in the development of word processing is (this moment, at least) extremely hellish and alarming. This “Virtual Reality prototype,” for instance, surpasses even The Soul Ledger as the most distressing online video of all time.
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Just 32.3% of survey respondents claim they print “at least one draft and use a pen or pencil to make notes/mark corrections by hand,” not including the additional 6.5% who “print at least one draft but make all corrections digitally,” leaving 61.3% who presumably do not physically print at all throughout their writing process. Our survey is broad, rudimentary, and not entirely scientific, yes, but I would bet these numbers would contrast significantly with those from respondents exclusively in academia. For myself and my colleagues, there remains “something” that can only be attained by physically manifesting written work, perhaps in requirement of tangible manipulation in order to thoroughly comprehend large bodies of information. As I’ve passed 100,000 words within the rough draft of my novel project, no amount of skimming on any sized screen has enabled me to catch the typos and inconsistencies which become immediately obvious as soon as I have the most current printed manuscript in my hands. I doubt even total immersion into one’s work via some VR-capable word processor would do much to assuage this discrepancy — or much at all, for that matter, aside from casting writers into their own special hell. Surely, only the most self-loathing of them would voluntarily choose to be so dunked. (Read: drowned.)
If you’ve been keeping up with the web at all in the past two years, you’re no doubt at least somewhat familiar with the terms “Mastodon,” “Diaspora,” or “federated social.” Extratone readers may remember my interview with Eugen Rochko last April — the day when his federated social “clone” made its way around the front pages of the major technology and tech media websites. Though the piece itself was designed and written quite disastrously (genuinely sorry about that — it was easy for me to get carried away when I had no idea what I was carrying,) Eugen is a great communicator of his ideal, which you’ll find to be as aligned with a FOSS future as you’d think it would be.
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I signed up for mastodon.social in the February of last year, yet I suppose year sof o find myself going back to Twitter looking for what I only get on Mastodon, these days: diverse, sincere, talented, and extremely curious users from all over the world backed and deeply co-habitated with an inclusive developer culture filled with smart problem solvers who just want to contribute something grand. It’s not exactly easy, yet instances and variations on the ActivityHub project, itself have begun springing up at a pace I can’t keep up with. There’s the open-source federated blogging CMS Plume, along with the gorgeous and very promising Instagram-esque PixelFed. Additionally, Diaspora is gorgeous and fully-functional now.
If you’ve been keeping up with the web at all in the past two years, you’re no doubt at least somewhat familiar with the terms “Mastodon,” “Diaspora,” or “federated social.” Extratone readers may remember my interview with Eugen Rochko last April — the day when his federated social “clone” made its way around the front pages of the major technology and tech media websites. Though the piece itself was designed and written quite disastrously (genuinely sorry about that — it was easy for me to get carried away when I had no idea what I was carrying,) Eugen is a great communicator of his ideal, which you’ll find to be as aligned with a FOSS future as you’d think it would be.
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I signed up for mastodon.social in the February of last year, yet I suppose year sof o find myself going back to Twitter looking for what I only get on Mastodon, these days: diverse, sincere, talented, and extremely curious users from all over the world backed and deeply co-habitated with an inclusive developer culture filled with smart problem solvers who just want to contribute something grand. It’s not exactly easy, yet instances and variations on the ActivityHub project, itself have begun springing up at a pace I can’t keep up with. There’s the open-source federated blogging CMS Plume, along with the gorgeous and very promising Instagram-esque PixelFed. Additionally, Diaspora is gorgeous and fully-functional now.
Baptisete.Gelez.xyz, the current public test instance for the upcoming federated blog CMS, Plume.
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- The Psalms
- https://bilge.world/
- A narcoleptic yokel on software and culture.
- Mon, 26 Apr 2021 03:09:35 +0000
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- iPhone and Music: For Artists, Curators, and Enthusiasts
- https://bilge.world/iphone-ios-music-apps?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Music on iOS
Reporting from deep within the iOS cult on essential apps/methods for real-life music people.
Listen to this article read (with some bugs) by Siri Voice 3 below...
audio controls
source src="https://github.com/extratone/bilge/raw/main/audio/TTS/iPhone%20and%20Music%20-%20For%20Artists%2C%20Curators%2C%20and%20Enthusiasts%20TTS.mp3"
/audio
As you may or may not be aware, I’ve spent all of my 2021 so far diving real deep into iOS, considering all that has changed since “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.” I’ve tuned in to the output of explicitly Apple-adjacent publications both old (MacRumors, Apple Insider, 9to5 Mac, etc,) and new (Apple Scoop, MacStories,) which have all metamorphosed in huge, mostly-redeemable ways just as their primary subject has. I have my own pubescent stories of Mac occultism, but I do not consider my relationship with the brand to be an essential part of my identity, as so many do and have. Apple, Inc’s story is spectacular and infinitely-relevant so long as they remain “the most valuable company in the history of the world,” as I so love to describe them. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am often compelled to bring up the humongous contrasts in the historical context of the company - to scream infinitely many variations of the observation that Apple was basically the fucking indie, premium-tier consumer tech manufacturer owned by the Creative Class for the first half+ of their existence, and have somehow maintained that Think Different™ brand narrative as they have definitively become the Big Blue of their time.
From my perspective, the responsibility for the wellbeing of this utterly-delusional, occasionally very dangerous sentiment actually lies fairly squarely on those of us who consider ourselves better than all of that because of our Debian workflows and their ancient command line utilities. (For the record, this is also 100% delusional as things stand in 2021.) One thing I think we can all acknowledge, though, is that Apple’s image has been inextricably bound with musicmaking, throughout, far more than any other even remotely comparable tech company. Naturally, the business still loves to bring this up all the time in big, glossy gestures. The topical example of note would be the only worthwhile content I’ve yet to encounter on Apple TV+: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which documents the highlights of the young, beloved musician’s prodigious ascension. For what it’s worth, I appreciate some special insights I gained thanks to the film, which I do not actually consider at odds with the truth of its super on-brandness for Apple.
An interesting take I found from 2017 from a new favorite voice on the business end of tech reporting: “How Music Drowns Apple’s Innovation” by The Information’s Jessica Lessin portrays Apple’s relationship with music distribution and the music industry as a sort of compulsive distraction from its ambitions in serving video content, namely. Lessin points out the everpresent reminders of this obsession:
And so it is no wonder that Apple’s first forays into original video content fall under Apple Music. It’s worth noting that the first series the company announced—“Carpool Karaoke” is literally about singing; “Planet of the Apps” features rapper Will.i.am as a judge.
I think I can speak for the majority of my audience when I suggest that the targets of Lessin’s cynicism would be more than welcome, if they were The Whole Truth. Indeed, the most valuable company in all of history retaining an “emotional” attachment to the welfare of music creators might be described as charming or more. As is often the case on The Information, the comments from readers often offer noteworthy insight. In this case, Kevin Swint - who has apparently worked as an executive for both Apple and Samsung, according to his profile on The Information - responded with an important consideration: “…it's possible that Apple's behavior around music has more to do with the company's overall tendency to stick with its past successes a bit too long rather than music really being a core part of its DNA.”
In terms of business, that’s all I have to contribute, and I shall do my best not to evangelize Apple Music (or more likely, disparage Spotify as one of the most destructive cultural forces of our time,) here. However, I would like to respond to a particular Jimmy Iovine quote from the original Apple Music announcement amid the 2015 WWDC Keynote:
There needs to be a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery… and if that place could actually accommodate and support the artists who make the music, not just the top-tier artists, but the kids in their bedrooms too, provide them all with a home and a way to engage with their audiences, that would be pretty great.
Boy, this service Iovine describes sounds an awful lot like Bandcamp, no? The suggestion that Apple should have purchased Bandcamp is a very scary one, from my perspective, but I am reassured by the likelihood that the notion did indeed occur to someone at Apple, Inc. at some point in the past, and was quickly discarded, for whatever reason. I promise not to mention Bandcamp again in this Post, aside from its own two iOS apps: for listeners and for “Artists/Labels” as creator/curator tools.
I’m going to be focusing largely on the iPhone-bound experience, here, though I did borrow my mom’s MacBook Pro for a weekend to explore the state of music on MacOS and (accidentally) played around with Apple Music on The Television (a surprisingly beautiful experience.) On that note, I’ll hurry up and get specific…
iframe allow="autoplay ; encrypted-media ; fullscreen " frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;background:transparent;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/213-music-part-2-music-discovery-playback-and-utility-apps/id1227872143?i=1000516779249"/iframe
Apps
Assuming you’re already an Apple Music user, it’s very possible that you’ve been deprived of the “true” experience on the service provided by the variety of actively-developed but woefully-undercovered app store entries that integrate directly with Apple Music. One of the most glaring discoveries I’ve made so far in my iOS deep dive, this year, has been the absolutely horrific state of Discovery on Apple’s App Store. If you’d thought to search the top charts under the store’s Music category, you wouldn’t find any of the gems I’m going to highlight, here. The credit for exposing me to their existence, in fact, lies with MacStories - a hard-hitting, well-established Apple-adjacent media company piloted by Federico Viticci. At this very moment, their app-centric podcast, App Stories, is in the midst of a special mini-series devoted to Music on iOS/Mac, from which this Post draws upon heavily. For better or worse, they represent the definitive authority on this subject (among many others, naturally,) though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend their various publications be added to the reading lists of any but those most invested in iOS.
MusicHarbor on iPhone
MusicHarbor
There is something uniquely concrete about a purely-chronological feed which we’ve lost in the past 5-10 years in favor of algorithmic curation, generally. The next item in this particular feed, in fact, includes my attempt to explain why Twitter’s hard-chronological Lists feature has sheltered me from the anxiety of the service’s main timeline, now ordered by proprietary (and obscured) formulas. I’d been aware of that dynamic in my own Twitter consumption for years, though. I certainly did not anticipate the impact of the music release equivalent of a chronological timeline as provided by MusicHarbor - an app for iOS and MacOS that acts as a frontend for one’s music library across both Apple Music and Spotify.
It's hard to remember how we (Apple Music) got here without embarking upon some gargantuan A Complete Visual History of Apple Music-like document, but it must be said that Tim Cook's "next chapter in music" has become a sad afterthought. As far as I understand it, the "streaming war" between Apple and Spotify has long since gone definitively to the latter in statistical terms, which I'd suggest to be an overall positive outcome for Apple Music subscribers, generally. The self-perception within the heavy music consumer crowd of "niche," "underground," "obscure" cultural minority should - in theory - push those who believe themselves destined to be different away from Spotify into the handy care of Apple, the absolute champion of this particular self-deception. To be honest - though I write this for all listeners, sincerely - I have found myself in a sort of utopian echo chamber of my own design in music culture terms. My days of waiting through 4+ hours of local openers before rap shows are far behind me, and I consume and engage exclusively with music I find personally redeemable.
My Apple Music library has become quite fragmented after I lost my entire physical music collection along with the external drives containing my accumulated digital music library in 2017. Still, after more or less starting anew this past December and casually, deliberately adding digital files back into the accursed, ancient iTunes desktop application and restoring some (outdated) versions of my handful of shared curatorial playlists thanks to SongShift (which we'll glance on later,) MusicHarbor currently lists 1433 artists represented across my Apple Music and (very sparse) Spotify libraries. I know this because of a very simple Siri Shortcut I modified which returns a text list of all Artists in one's MusicHarbor library in Quick Look. (Here is my result as of this moment in GitHub Gist form.) According my App Store receipts, I first downloaded MusicHarbor on March 26 - 20 days ago - which is mentionable because of how much I've accomplished with very minimal time investment in terms of curating my own music library thanks to MusicHarbor. As you'll note in the 3rd of the 4 screenshots embedded above, I was able to delete System of a Down from my library - a single function which alone justifies the app's one-time $5.99 "Unlock Everything" fee, to my sensibility. I've also been able to begin following all the artists represented in a few of my favorite playlists with a handful of taps - a task which would literally require hours in the native Apple Music app of old (when one could actually follow artists, there.) On that note, it's time to cite the primary MacStories article you should read, entitled "How I Keep Track of New Music Releases," regarding Apple Music's performance as a release tracker:
The ‘New Releases’ section is tucked at the very end of the For You page and laid out as a horizontal carousel that requires a lot of swiping; you can view the ‘New Releases’ page as a grid, which has sections for different weeks, but, in my experience, it only aggregates highlights for new releases from some of my favorite artists. The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.
Here, Federico Viticci is riffing off a newsletter issue written by music blogger Jason Tate, in which he describes the service's missing tracking functionality as "the single most frustrating part of Apple Music." Though these points in the conversation are both almost two years old, MusicHarbor remains the ultimate means of tracking new music releases chronologically on Apple's platforms. Though I am personally just three weeks in, the confidence this app has given me in the certainty of its chronological release feed is quite profound. Its integration with one's calendar to track upcoming releases is a bit much for my own needs, but I know personally enough invested curators for whom it'd be a godsend to mark it no small addition.
MusicHarbor on MacOS
MusicHarbor’s only downside is entirely excusable/understandable, in context: it’s a bit clunky. For the sake of this work, I set up a shared Apple Music playlist so I could further demonstrate all the new music I discovered in MusicHarbor. Adding whole albums to this playlist with a single tap feels powerful because it is - I’ve no idea what sort of developer wizardry is involved in such an action, but the Wait Wheel doesn’t feel like too much to endure. Adding a release to one’s library - the other in-MusicHarbor accumulative function - is a bit quicker. It’s important to remember that this piece of software was/is created and maintained by a single human being, though I would expect nothing but improvement, going forward.
Adding to MusicHarbor Playlist
That’s all I have to report on MusicHarbor, for the moment, but I’ll add further MacStories praise from their 2019 MacStories Selects app rewards:
What makes MusicHarbor special – and, ultimately, the reason why we all use the app here at MacStories – is just how much developer Tanaka understands what someone who wants to know about new music releases is looking for.
Albums for iOS
Albums
On the other end of the spectrum, exploring new digital manifestations of The Music Collection, is Albums, which actually functions as an entire replacement frontend player for Apple Music. Reviewed much more recently by MacStories, it really is best-described as “opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists.” Considering that I installed the app just a week ago and have focused most of my attention on MusicHarbor in that time, I’ll leave most of the commentary to John Voorhees. All I can say, really, is that I see an extremely powerful application, here, for a fairly specific use case: someone who’s listening is largely occupied by albums they already “own” in Apple Music and treasure deeply. The ability to set an individual record’s “Immersive UI Tint” down to the hex (in “Album Settings”) is as in-depth a tool of adoration as I’ve ever seen in a digital music service. Combined with Albums’ presumptuous takeover of actual playback from the Apple Music app, I think I can rightfully say that it was built for the extremely serious music consumer.
My favorite part so far: the app knew well enough to offer me THE ZRO BUTTON. Telling, I think.
The ZRo Button - Albums App
Others
Since it’s already quite clear how much this Post draws from MacStories, I’ll let their review of Soor stand on its own (I couldn’t quite justify spending $6.99 just for review purposes.) In the episode embedded above, they also mention Denim - a playlist cover creator I am not personally all that impressed with. There’s also MusicHarbor’s sibling, MusicSmart, which manages the tricky but essential task of adding the metadata retrieval Apple Music should have included all along. The rest can be found in the episode’s show notes. I’m not done with them, but the rest are what I would differentiate as services…
Services
iframe width="100%" height="150" src="https://embed.song.link/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsong.link%2Fivyhollivana&theme=light" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen sandbox="allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-presentation allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"/iframe
Odesli/Song.Link
One of the bewilderingly undercovered digital music sharing tools of our kind, Odesli has been my preferred method of sharing tracks/albums/EPs since I first discovered it in 2018. It is not specific to iOS but it is essential for competent music sharing, anywhere, these days, in its magical ability to correctly intersect any given piece of music’s links across all streaming services, known and unknown. To be honest, I thought everybody would be using it by now, but it’s continued to develop with minimal attention aside from Siri Shortcuts developers. Thanks to Odesli’s Public API, dozens of Music-centric Siri Shortcuts have emerged over the past few years, resulting in one of the most useful Siri Shortcuts integrations to be found for real, reasonable human beings. Here’s where Apple-adjacent media and I part ways…
While current common conversation might point you to Federico Viticci’s MusicBot hyper-Shortcut and/or @gianflo6’s 600 action-strong Song.Link Shortcut, I (perhaps expectedly) would point you to my own, 17-action Shortcut which spares you any selections and simply opens the Song.Link URL of the track currently playing in Apple Music (while also copying said URL to the clipboard.) It’s not that MusicBot isn’t massively impressive and still useful, but it represents a class of super/hyper-Shortcuts which (from my perspective) far-overreach beyond the intended use case for Siri Shortcuts and end up immediately bewildering/alienating potential new users. Truthfully - as Federico singularly acknowledges - they are full applications built atop a less-than-ideal platform designed for relatively simple, repeatable automations. I’ll spare you further opining on this idea until another, potential Post, and instead demonstrate my personal solution.
https://imgur.com/gallery/eblzlbD
In the clip above, you can see I was working on this very draft when LoneMoon’s “kawAii @F” started playing. Naturally, I was compelled to share it on Twitter, so - without leaving Drafts (my writing app) - I called the type-to-Siri prompt by holding the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and simply typed “sl” (I renamed my Shortcut for this use,) running the Shortcut, which opened the track’s Song.Link page in Safari - very much an optional step, mostly just to make sure the match is correct - and copied its URL to my clipboard, from which I could share it anywhere. Since the advent of widgets in iOS’ Today View, I’ve also kept a button for this Shortcut in one of four precious slots in a box at the very top. For those willing to play around a bit, it should be fairly straightforward to configure the end bits to your liking, but it should work out of the box for even those least interested in Siri Shortcuts/automation in general.
SongShift Playlist Transfer
SongShift
As I confessed before, it is only thanks to SongShift that I was able to recover anything of my original, prized, deeply-considered Apple Music playlists. The standalone MacStories article on this one is a bit dated, but I don’t see much change in function in that time. For most people, SongShift’s free service is simply the best way to transfer a playlist between music streaming services. If you find yourself genuinely sold by the features offered by SongShift Pro, I suspect you know more about playlist manipulation than I could ever learn you by diving in any deeper.
Lastfm on iOS
Last.fm (I s2g.)
Yup… Believe it or not, Last.fm is still fucking scrobbling after 19 fucking years (almost to the day,) and its iOS app still fucking works. What’s most bizarre about this truth is that I did not encounter mention of Last.fm for years until I started noticing it as an integration option in the settings menus of these premium iOS apps. Is this some sort of conspiracy? I’m not sure, but I suppose I might as well insist you follow my ancient account, if you’re still using it.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"alright folks fucking ADD ME ironically or not. this profile is older than all of the cells in my body. a href="https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK"https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK/a/p— ※ David Blue ※ (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1383168815131893763?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"April 16, 2021/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
I should also note that not only is the Last.fm iOS app still working, it’s working well, from all appearances, anyway. Though the service no longer includes hosting, itself, it’s apparently still a prime player in the world of playback tracking.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pSDCbXGIovM
Music Creation
DAWs
What if you actually want to “make” music with your iPhone? We’ve seen iPhone television ads for years featuring amalgamations of musician-looking types playing instruments with cables attached to their handsets, but is the iPhone now a reasonable platform for any sort of serious sound capture? The short answer is no. Who am I to proclaim such an absolute? None other than the motherfucker who’s been messing around with mobile DAWs for 10 whole years. I even “released” an “album” on Bandcamp made exclusively with Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS and inspired by the dangerous life of the contemporary raw milk smuggler. I wouldn’t call it “music,” per se, or an example of what a real electronic producer could pull off in the app, but it does represent its capabilities in the hands of the average user, using mostly default loops.
https://soundcloud.com/dieselgoth/wurlie-jam
While Apple does publish an Apple Book entitled “Everyone Can Create Music” about GarageBand on iOS, it is specifically directed at iPad-bound use. Any serious DAW user uses keyboard shortcuts, which I admit I only discovered recently in GarageBand for iOS. The official documentation is - once again - for iPad, specifically, but most of them still work on iPhone.
FL Studio Mobile - the original third-party iOS-bound DAW - is still going, apparently. While I did, indeed purchase the original version on my iPhone 4, I remember absolutely nothing about it, suggesting I was over my head, even then. There’s also Auxy, as covered recently in this App Store Story and Reason Compact. I’ve played around with these more recently - since they’re both available in their most primitive forms as a free download - with little to report.
Capture
Disappointingly, Apple’s own Music Memos - as demonstrated by Chris Welch from The Verge in the embed, above - is currently in the process of being officially sunsetted and is now no longer available for download on the App Store. As that article notes, users are instead directed toward GarageBand or ye olde native Voice Memos to record high quality audio. However, if you want to take advantage of the stereo audio recording capabilities included in iPhones after the 11 Pro, you must either use the native Camera app to capture video (and extract the audio later,) or Dolby On - Dolby’s own iOS app for recording which - if I’m completely honest - will do nothing but utterly frustrate anyone trying to capture the truest digital audio possible.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GhAknEKy9Ig
As part of my iPhone 12 Pro Max Review, I’ve accumulated quite a few audio files in various formats testing its capture abilities and stashed them in this folder on The Psalms’ GitHub Repository. Probably the most relevant of these, though, is embedded just above. If you’ll forgive my pajamas, ridiculous piano faces, and general rustiness with the instrument, it demonstrates the “Audio Zoom” feature found in the iPhone 11 Pro and up, which I’ve found to be unfortunately underdocumented by Apple, itself. I added my own inquiry to this post on the official Developer forums asking about it, but don’t really expect anything back. According to “What is Audio Zoom for smartphones?” published on the site DxOMark:
The main technology behind audio zoom is called beamforming, or spatial filtering. It allows changing an audio recording’s directivity (that is, the sensitivity according to the direction of the sound source) and shape it in any way necessary. In this case, the optimal directivity is a hypercardioid pattern (see illustration below), which enhances sounds coming from the front direction — that is, from the direction in which your camera is pointed — while attenuating sounds from all other directions (your background noise).
My testing has suggested that the best means of recording unfiltered-as-possible stereo audio with an iPhone is to record video at 1x zoom with the native Camera app and extract the audio from the video file. In the Bandcamp track embedded below, I “mounted” my 12 Pro Max right above my old upright’s soundboard and extracted audio directly from the video file with Audacity. It was then amplified slightly, saved to a FLAC file and uploaded directly to Bandcamp. Of course, it’s worth qualifying that - while I have extensive experience with audio - I have neither professional training, nor any professional monitoring equipment.
https://davidblue.bandcamp.com/track/-
That said, the biggest objection I’ve heard from audiophiles regarding audio capture and manipulation on handsets, generally, has to do with their hardware’s extremely limited capabilities when compared to any sort of professional desktop soundcard. Given the greater argument I've come to regarding the state of consumer tech as best exemplified by smartphone design - that we've come to expect far too much of single devices, and the resulting jack-of-all-tradeness summing their real-life capabilities has become a severe detriment instead of a feature - I must echo, again, that adding "studio" audio capture, manipulation, and production capabilities to our goddamned cellular phones doesn't help anyone. To any user truly hoping to accomplish these things, I say just go home and boot up your damned desktop.
Mushish - Apple Music Web Player
Other Considerations
The final episode in AppStories' three-part miniseries on music was just published today, though I suspect - for my audience, anyway - that its coverage is mostly out-of-scope on this topic, largely for financial reasons. Apple's first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow at noon, my time, and is entitled "Spring Loaded," which - combined with its 4/20 joke date - suggests to me that we'll finally see the release of the APPLE GUN™ alongside iWeed™, but little to nothing in the way of music.
In the midst of my brief research into The Greater History of Apple Music, I discovered the existence of iTunes Ping - which I somehow missed entirely, along with my Twitter friend Jon Male. I also discovered articles from the company's decision to kill its successor "Connect" from Apple Music, which was reportedly "rarely used." Notably, this removal also took away what little power Artists had over the narrative surrounding their music on the service. I can see the business justification for all of this (barely) except for removing the ability for users to follow artists.
The latest Apple Music feature - a "channel" for music videos - also makes zero sense to me, but the launch of Apple Music on the web absolutely does, especially for Windows and Linux users, who are now officially freed from iTunes (the software) and allowed to use a much more modern Apple Music experience. I prepended "officially," there, because third-party Apple Music web players have existed as long as the service has allowed the required integration. First, there was Naveed Golafshani's - which is no longer live - but Brychan Bennett-Odlum's Musish is still live and working, as you can see from the screenshot embedded above. Other than the ability to select between two stream bitrates, I can't seen any remaining advantages to using the latter over Apple's own web player, unless you harbor spite toward their handling of the whole thing, which would be entirely understandable, from my perspective.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1359364473253937153
As someone who grew up in the mp3 era with a first-generation iPod Shuffle and iTunes, living and dying between iTunes Store gift cards, Apple Music still seems like one hell of a magical deal. In effect, it allows access to all of iTunes for a flat monthly fee. Or at least it would* had I never become acquainted with professional independent musicians who've published, there, and have to contend with tedious realities like the process by which one can add those beautiful lyrics to Apple Music tracks, and who's only real means of control/engagement on the service has been removed with virtually zero prospects of a replacement. If, indeed, Jessica Lessin was correct about Apple's obsession with music, it has resulted in very little for any class of music makers, and left even its listeners to seek out and find third-party solutions like MusicHarbor to perform even the most basic personalization one expects from a modern music streaming service without even bothering to amend their App Store's discovery process to illuminate them, or even write a fucking App Story. Despite this, one-to-three-person app teams continue to work on new solutions, to these and other problems...
#music #software]]>
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Reporting from deep within the iOS cult on essential apps/methods for real-life music people.
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Listen to this article read (with some bugs) by Siri Voice 3 below...
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As you may or may not be aware, I’ve spent all of my 2021 so far diving real deep into iOS, considering all that has changed since “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.” I’ve tuned in to the output of explicitly Apple-adjacent publications both old (MacRumors, Apple Insider, 9to5 Mac, etc,) and new (Apple Scoop, MacStories,) which have all metamorphosed in huge, mostly-redeemable ways just as their primary subject has. I have my own pubescent stories of Mac occultism, but I do not consider my relationship with the brand to be an essential part of my identity, as so many do and have. Apple, Inc’s story is spectacular and infinitely-relevant so long as they remain “the most valuable company in the history of the world,” as I so love to describe them. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am often compelled to bring up the humongous contrasts in the historical context of the company – to scream infinitely many variations of the observation that Apple was basically the fucking indie, premium-tier consumer tech manufacturer owned by the Creative Class for the first half+ of their existence, and have somehow maintained that Think Different™ brand narrative as they have definitively become the Big Blue of their time.
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From my perspective, the responsibility for the wellbeing of this utterly-delusional, occasionally very dangerous sentiment actually lies fairly squarely on those of us who consider ourselves better than all of that because of our Debian workflows and their ancient command line utilities. (For the record, this is also 100% delusional as things stand in 2021.) One thing I think we can all acknowledge, though, is that Apple’s image has been inextricably bound with musicmaking, throughout, far more than any other even remotely comparable tech company. Naturally, the business still loves to bring this up all the time in big, glossy gestures. The topical example of note would be the only worthwhile content I’ve yet to encounter on Apple TV+: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which documents the highlights of the young, beloved musician’s prodigious ascension. For what it’s worth, I appreciate some special insights I gained thanks to the film, which I do not actually consider at odds with the truth of its super on-brandness for Apple.
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An interesting take I found from 2017 from a new favorite voice on the business end of tech reporting: “How Music Drowns Apple’s Innovation” by The Information’s Jessica Lessin portrays Apple’s relationship with music distribution and the music industry as a sort of compulsive distraction from its ambitions in serving video content, namely. Lessin points out the everpresent reminders of this obsession:
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And so it is no wonder that Apple’s first forays into original video content fall under Apple Music. It’s worth noting that the first series the company announced—“Carpool Karaoke” is literally about singing; “Planet of the Apps” features rapper Will.i.am as a judge.
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I think I can speak for the majority of my audience when I suggest that the targets of Lessin’s cynicism would be more than welcome, if they were The Whole Truth. Indeed, the most valuable company in all of history retaining an “emotional” attachment to the welfare of music creators might be described as charming or more. As is often the case on The Information, the comments from readers often offer noteworthy insight. In this case, Kevin Swint – who has apparently worked as an executive for both Apple and Samsung, according to his profile on The Information – responded with an important consideration: “…it's possible that Apple's behavior around music has more to do with the company's overall tendency to stick with its past successes a bit too long rather than music really being a core part of its DNA.”
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In terms of business, that’s all I have to contribute, and I shall do my best not to evangelize Apple Music (or more likely, disparage Spotify as one of the most destructive cultural forces of our time,) here. However, I would like to respond to a particular Jimmy Iovine quote from the original Apple Music announcement amid the 2015 WWDC Keynote:
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There needs to be a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery… and if that place could actually accommodate and support the artists who make the music, not just the top-tier artists, but the kids in their bedrooms too, provide them all with a home and a way to engage with their audiences, that would be pretty great.
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Boy, this service Iovine describes sounds an awful lot like Bandcamp, no? The suggestion that Apple should have purchased Bandcamp is a very scary one, from my perspective, but I am reassured by the likelihood that the notion did indeed occur to someone at Apple, Inc. at some point in the past, and was quickly discarded, for whatever reason. I promise not to mention Bandcamp again in this Post, aside from its own two iOS apps: for listeners and for “Artists/Labels” as creator/curator tools.
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I’m going to be focusing largely on the iPhone-bound experience, here, though I did borrow my mom’s MacBook Pro for a weekend to explore the state of music on MacOS and (accidentally) played around with Apple Music on The Television (a surprisingly beautiful experience.) On that note, I’ll hurry up and get specific…
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Apps
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Assuming you’re already an Apple Music user, it’s very possible that you’ve been deprived of the “true” experience on the service provided by the variety of actively-developed but woefully-undercovered app store entries that integrate directly with Apple Music. One of the most glaring discoveries I’ve made so far in my iOS deep dive, this year, has been the absolutely horrific state of Discovery on Apple’s App Store. If you’d thought to search the top charts under the store’s Music category, you wouldn’t find any of the gems I’m going to highlight, here. The credit for exposing me to their existence, in fact, lies with MacStories – a hard-hitting, well-established Apple-adjacent media company piloted by Federico Viticci. At this very moment, their app-centric podcast, App Stories, is in the midst of a special mini-series devoted to Music on iOS/Mac, from which this Post draws upon heavily. For better or worse, they represent the definitive authority on this subject (among many others, naturally,) though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend their various publications be added to the reading lists of any but those most invested in iOS.
There is something uniquely concrete about a purely-chronological feed which we’ve lost in the past 5-10 years in favor of algorithmic curation, generally. The next item in this particular feed, in fact, includes my attempt to explain why Twitter’s hard-chronological Lists feature has sheltered me from the anxiety of the service’s main timeline, now ordered by proprietary (and obscured) formulas. I’d been aware of that dynamic in my own Twitter consumption for years, though. I certainly did not anticipate the impact of the music release equivalent of a chronological timeline as provided by MusicHarbor – an app for iOS and MacOS that acts as a frontend for one’s music library across both Apple Music and Spotify.
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It's hard to remember how we (Apple Music) got here without embarking upon some gargantuan A Complete Visual History of Apple Music-like document, but it must be said that Tim Cook's “next chapter in music” has become a sad afterthought. As far as I understand it, the “streaming war” between Apple and Spotify has long since gone definitively to the latter in statistical terms, which I'd suggest to be an overall positive outcome for Apple Music subscribers, generally. The self-perception within the heavy music consumer crowd of “niche,” “underground,” “obscure” cultural minority should – in theory – push those who believe themselves destined to be different away from Spotify into the handy care of Apple, the absolute champion of this particular self-deception. To be honest – though I write this for all listeners, sincerely – I have found myself in a sort of utopian echo chamber of my own design in music culture terms. My days of waiting through 4+ hours of local openers before rap shows are far behind me, and I consume and engage exclusively with music I find personally redeemable.
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My Apple Music library has become quite fragmented after I lost my entire physical music collection along with the external drives containing my accumulated digital music library in 2017. Still, after more or less starting anew this past December and casually, deliberately adding digital files back into the accursed, ancient iTunes desktop application and restoring some (outdated) versions of my handful of shared curatorial playlists thanks to SongShift (which we'll glance on later,) MusicHarbor currently lists 1433 artists represented across my Apple Music and (very sparse) Spotify libraries. I know this because of a very simple Siri Shortcut I modified which returns a text list of all Artists in one's MusicHarbor library in Quick Look. (Here is my result as of this moment in GitHub Gist form.) According my App Store receipts, I first downloaded MusicHarbor on March 26 – 20 days ago – which is mentionable because of how much I've accomplished with very minimal time investment in terms of curating my own music library thanks to MusicHarbor. As you'll note in the 3rd of the 4 screenshots embedded above, I was able to delete System of a Down from my library – a single function which alone justifies the app's one-time $5.99 “Unlock Everything” fee, to my sensibility. I've also been able to begin following all the artists represented in a few of my favorite playlists with a handful of taps – a task which would literally require hours in the native Apple Music app of old (when one could actually follow artists, there.) On that note, it's time to cite the primary MacStories article you should read, entitled “How I Keep Track of New Music Releases,” regarding Apple Music's performance as a release tracker:
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The ‘New Releases’ section is tucked at the very end of the For You page and laid out as a horizontal carousel that requires a lot of swiping; you can view the ‘New Releases’ page as a grid, which has sections for different weeks, but, in my experience, it only aggregates highlights for new releases from some of my favorite artists. The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.
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Here, Federico Viticci is riffing off a newsletter issue written by music blogger Jason Tate, in which he describes the service's missing tracking functionality as “the single most frustrating part of Apple Music.” Though these points in the conversation are both almost two years old, MusicHarbor remains the ultimate means of tracking new music releases chronologically on Apple's platforms. Though I am personally just three weeks in, the confidence this app has given me in the certainty of its chronological release feed is quite profound. Its integration with one's calendar to track upcoming releases is a bit much for my own needs, but I know personally enough invested curators for whom it'd be a godsend to mark it no small addition.
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MusicHarbor’s only downside is entirely excusable/understandable, in context: it’s a bit clunky. For the sake of this work, I set up a shared Apple Music playlist so I could further demonstrate all the new music I discovered in MusicHarbor. Adding whole albums to this playlist with a single tap feels powerful because it is – I’ve no idea what sort of developer wizardry is involved in such an action, but the Wait Wheel doesn’t feel like too much to endure. Adding a release to one’s library – the other in-MusicHarbor accumulative function – is a bit quicker. It’s important to remember that this piece of software was/is created and maintained by a single human being, though I would expect nothing but improvement, going forward.
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That’s all I have to report on MusicHarbor, for the moment, but I’ll add further MacStories praise from their 2019 MacStories Selects app rewards:
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What makes MusicHarbor special – and, ultimately, the reason why we all use the app here at MacStories – is just how much developer Tanaka understands what someone who wants to know about new music releases is looking for.
On the other end of the spectrum, exploring new digital manifestations of The Music Collection, is Albums, which actually functions as an entire replacement frontend player for Apple Music. Reviewed much more recently by MacStories, it really is best-described as “opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists.” Considering that I installed the app just a week ago and have focused most of my attention on MusicHarbor in that time, I’ll leave most of the commentary to John Voorhees. All I can say, really, is that I see an extremely powerful application, here, for a fairly specific use case: someone who’s listening is largely occupied by albums they already “own” in Apple Music and treasure deeply. The ability to set an individual record’s “Immersive UI Tint” down to the hex (in “Album Settings”) is as in-depth a tool of adoration as I’ve ever seen in a digital music service. Combined with Albums’ presumptuous takeover of actual playback from the Apple Music app, I think I can rightfully say that it was built for the extremely serious music consumer.
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My favorite part so far: the app knew well enough to offer me THE ZRO BUTTON. Telling, I think.
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Others
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Since it’s already quite clear how much this Post draws from MacStories, I’ll let their review of Soor stand on its own (I couldn’t quite justify spending $6.99 just for review purposes.) In the episode embedded above, they also mention Denim – a playlist cover creator I am not personally all that impressed with. There’s also MusicHarbor’s sibling, MusicSmart, which manages the tricky but essential task of adding the metadata retrieval Apple Music should have included all along. The rest can be found in the episode’s show notes. I’m not done with them, but the rest are what I would differentiate as services…
One of the bewilderingly undercovered digital music sharing tools of our kind, Odesli has been my preferred method of sharing tracks/albums/EPs since I first discovered it in 2018. It is not specific to iOS but it isessential for competent music sharing, anywhere, these days, in its magical ability to correctly intersect any given piece of music’s links across all streaming services, known and unknown. To be honest, I thought everybody would be using it by now, but it’s continued to develop with minimal attention aside from Siri Shortcuts developers. Thanks to Odesli’s Public API, dozens of Music-centric Siri Shortcuts have emerged over the past few years, resulting in one of the most useful Siri Shortcuts integrations to be found for real, reasonable human beings. Here’s where Apple-adjacent media and I part ways…
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While current common conversation might point you to Federico Viticci’s MusicBot hyper-Shortcut and/or @gianflo6’s 600 action-strong Song.Link Shortcut, I (perhaps expectedly) would point you to my own, 17-action Shortcut which spares you any selections and simply opens the Song.Link URL of the track currently playing in Apple Music (while also copying said URL to the clipboard.) It’s not that MusicBot isn’t massively impressive and still useful, but it represents a class of super/hyper-Shortcuts which (from my perspective) far-overreach beyond the intended use case for Siri Shortcuts and end up immediately bewildering/alienating potential new users. Truthfully – as Federico singularly acknowledges – they are full applications built atop a less-than-ideal platform designed for relatively simple, repeatable automations. I’ll spare you further opining on this idea until another, potential Post, and instead demonstrate my personal solution.
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In the clip above, you can see I was working on this very draft when LoneMoon’s “kawAii @F” started playing. Naturally, I was compelled to share it on Twitter, so – without leaving Drafts (my writing app) – I called the type-to-Siri prompt by holding the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and simply typed “sl” (I renamed my Shortcut for this use,) running the Shortcut, which opened the track’s Song.Link page in Safari – very much an optional step, mostly just to make sure the match is correct – and copied its URL to my clipboard, from which I could share it anywhere. Since the advent of widgets in iOS’ Today View, I’ve also kept a button for this Shortcut in one of four precious slots in a box at the very top. For those willing to play around a bit, it should be fairly straightforward to configure the end bits to your liking, but it should work out of the box for even those least interested in Siri Shortcuts/automation in general.
As I confessed before, it is only thanks to SongShift that I was able to recover anything of my original, prized, deeply-considered Apple Music playlists. The standalone MacStories article on this one is a bit dated, but I don’t see much change in function in that time. For most people, SongShift’s free service is simply the best way to transfer a playlist between music streaming services. If you find yourself genuinely sold by the features offered by SongShift Pro, I suspect you know more about playlist manipulation than I could ever learn you by diving in any deeper.
Yup… Believe it or not, Last.fm is still fucking scrobbling after 19 fucking years (almost to the day,) and its iOS app still fucking works. What’s most bizarre about this truth is that I did not encounter mention of Last.fm for years until I started noticing it as an integration option in the settings menus of these premium iOS apps. Is this some sort of conspiracy? I’m not sure, but I suppose I might as well insist you follow my ancient account, if you’re still using it.
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alright folks fucking ADD ME ironically or not. this profile is older than all of the cells in my body. https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK
I should also note that not only is the Last.fm iOS app still working, it’s working well, from all appearances, anyway. Though the service no longer includes hosting, itself, it’s apparently still a prime player in the world of playback tracking.
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Music Creation
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DAWs
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What if you actually want to “make” music with your iPhone? We’ve seen iPhone television ads for years featuring amalgamations of musician-looking types playing instruments with cables attached to their handsets, but is the iPhone now a reasonable platform for any sort of serious sound capture? The short answer is no. Who am I to proclaim such an absolute? None other than the motherfucker who’s been messing around with mobile DAWs for 10 whole years. I even “released” an “album” on Bandcamp made exclusively with Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS and inspired by the dangerous life of the contemporary raw milk smuggler. I wouldn’t call it “music,” per se, or an example of what a real electronic producer could pull off in the app, but it does represent its capabilities in the hands of the average user, using mostly default loops.
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While Apple does publish an Apple Book entitled “Everyone Can Create Music” about GarageBand on iOS, it is specifically directed at iPad-bound use. Any serious DAW user uses keyboard shortcuts, which I admit I only discovered recently in GarageBand for iOS. The official documentation is – once again – for iPad, specifically, but most of them still work on iPhone.
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FL Studio Mobile – the original third-party iOS-bound DAW – is still going, apparently. While I did, indeed purchase the original version on my iPhone 4, I remember absolutely nothing about it, suggesting I was over my head, even then. There’s also Auxy, as covered recently in this App Store Story and Reason Compact. I’ve played around with these more recently – since they’re both available in their most primitive forms as a free download – with little to report.
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Capture
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Disappointingly, Apple’s own Music Memos – as demonstrated by Chris Welch from The Verge in the embed, above – is currently in the process of being officially sunsetted and is now no longer available for download on the App Store. As that article notes, users are instead directed toward GarageBand or ye olde native Voice Memos to record high quality audio. However, if you want to take advantage of the stereo audio recording capabilities included in iPhones after the 11 Pro, you must either use the native Camera app to capture video (and extract the audio later,) or Dolby On – Dolby’s own iOS app for recording which – if I’m completely honest – will do nothing but utterly frustrate anyone trying to capture the truest digital audio possible.
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As part of my iPhone 12 Pro Max Review, I’ve accumulated quite a few audio files in various formats testing its capture abilities and stashed them in this folder on The Psalms’ GitHub Repository. Probably the most relevant of these, though, is embedded just above. If you’ll forgive my pajamas, ridiculous piano faces, and general rustiness with the instrument, it demonstrates the “Audio Zoom” feature found in the iPhone 11 Pro and up, which I’ve found to be unfortunately underdocumented by Apple, itself. I added my own inquiry to this post on the official Developer forums asking about it, but don’t really expect anything back. According to “What is Audio Zoom for smartphones?” published on the site DxOMark:
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The main technology behind audio zoom is called beamforming, or spatial filtering. It allows changing an audio recording’s directivity (that is, the sensitivity according to the direction of the sound source) and shape it in any way necessary. In this case, the optimal directivity is a hypercardioid pattern (see illustration below), which enhances sounds coming from the front direction — that is, from the direction in which your camera is pointed — while attenuating sounds from all other directions (your background noise).
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My testing has suggested that the best means of recording unfiltered-as-possible stereo audio with an iPhone is to record video at 1x zoom with the native Camera app and extract the audio from the video file. In the Bandcamp track embedded below, I “mounted” my 12 Pro Max right above my old upright’s soundboard and extracted audio directly from the video file with Audacity. It was then amplified slightly, saved to a FLAC file and uploaded directly to Bandcamp. Of course, it’s worth qualifying that – while I have extensive experience with audio – I have neither professional training, nor any professional monitoring equipment.
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That said, the biggest objection I’ve heard from audiophiles regarding audio capture and manipulation on handsets, generally, has to do with their hardware’s extremely limited capabilities when compared to any sort of professional desktop soundcard. Given the greater argument I've come to regarding the state of consumer tech as best exemplified by smartphone design – that we've come to expect far too much of single devices, and the resulting jack-of-all-tradeness summing their real-life capabilities has become a severe detriment instead of a feature – I must echo, again, that adding “studio” audio capture, manipulation, and production capabilities to our goddamned cellular phones doesn't help anyone. To any user truly hoping to accomplish these things, I say just go home and boot up your damned desktop.
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Other Considerations
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The final episode in AppStories' three-part miniseries on music was just published today, though I suspect – for my audience, anyway – that its coverage is mostly out-of-scope on this topic, largely for financial reasons. Apple's first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow at noon, my time, and is entitled “Spring Loaded,” which – combined with its 4/20 joke date – suggests to me that we'll finally see the release of the APPLE GUN™ alongside iWeed™, but little to nothing in the way of music.
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In the midst of my brief research into The Greater History of Apple Music, I discovered the existence of iTunes Ping – which I somehow missed entirely, along with my Twitter friend Jon Male. I also discovered articles from the company's decision to kill its successor “Connect” from Apple Music, which was reportedly “rarely used.” Notably, this removal also took away what little power Artists had over the narrative surrounding their music on the service. I can see the business justification for all of this (barely) except for removing the ability for users to follow artists.
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The latest Apple Music feature – a “channel” for music videos – also makes zero sense to me, but the launch of Apple Music on the webabsolutely does, especially for Windows and Linux users, who are now officially freed from iTunes (the software) and allowed to use a much more modern Apple Music experience. I prepended “officially,” there, because third-party Apple Music web players have existed as long as the service has allowed the required integration. First, there was Naveed Golafshani's – which is no longer live – but Brychan Bennett-Odlum's Musish is still live and working, as you can see from the screenshot embedded above. Other than the ability to select between two stream bitrates, I can't seen any remaining advantages to using the latter over Apple's own web player, unless you harbor spite toward their handling of the whole thing, which would be entirely understandable, from my perspective.
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MKBHD’s first tech purchase with his own money was an iPod Touch. mine was the original flash drive iPod Shuffle… this is what I mean when I say “I feel old.” it’s not that I’m actually elderly - it’s just strange finding out so often I am older than people I look up to. pic.twitter.com/rbCupcU0R5
As someone who grew up in the mp3 era with a first-generation iPod Shuffle and iTunes, living and dying between iTunes Store gift cards, Apple Music still seems like one hell of a magical deal. In effect, it allows access to all of iTunes for a flat monthly fee. Or at least it would had I never become acquainted with professional independent musicians who've published, there, and have to contend with tedious realities like the process by which one can add those beautiful lyrics to Apple Music tracks, and who's only real means of control/engagement on the service has been removed with virtually zero prospects of a replacement. If, indeed, Jessica Lessin was correct about Apple's obsession with music, it has resulted in very little for any class of music makers, and left even its listeners to seek out and find third-party solutions like MusicHarbor to perform even the most basic personalization one expects from a modern music streaming service without even bothering to amend their App Store's discovery process to illuminate them, or even write a fucking App Story. Despite this, one-to-three-person app teams continue to work on new solutions, to these and other problems...
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- https://bilge.world/iphone-ios-music-apps
- Mon, 19 Apr 2021 21:06:46 +0000
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- Tweetbot 6 for iOS Review
- https://bilge.world/tweetbot-6-ios-review?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Tweetbot Resurrection
In the bleak face of Twitter’s centralization, Tapbots refuses to give up on its mobile client.
Listen to this article read by Siri below...
audio controls
source src="https://github.com/extratone/bilge/raw/main/audio/TTS/Tweetbot%206%20for%20iOS%20Review%20TTS.mp3"
/audio
Were it just I who came to you with only my voice on this cold night, proclaiming the imminent release of a whole numerical version of a third-party mobile Twitter client in 2021, you really would have no choice but to send for the laws, for you’d be left no consideration other than my comprehensive descent into absolute insanity. 825 days ago, I told you lots about the history surrounding the development of Tweetbot 5, which I confidently described as “likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS.” After spending the past few months diving deep into iOS in preparation to review and reflect upon Apple’s current flagship handset, my eyes have been opened to the exponentially-increasing pace of the whole environment’s metamorphosis during the course of my lapsed attention. In the name of progress, I’ve done my best to make a point of looking back, too, yet something astonishingly personally relevant managed to slip past me until just last week: there is a sixth version of the Tweetbot app. At this moment, it is listed on the App Store as an “Early Release” version, though its predecessor can still be downloaded by those who’ve already purchased it in the past, like me. This is an unusual practice - usually, pre-release versions of iOS apps can only be distributed through Apple’s developer beta testing infrastructure, though Testflight. Notably, Tweetbot developer company Tapbots was apparently required to take down Tweetbot 5’s store listing 30 days before releasing Tweetbot 6.
https://soundcloud.com/compaqclub/macstories-on-tweetbot-6
I can’t remember exactly why - though I suspect I was just fucking around on my phone before bed, bleary-eyed - but the implications of this next numeral passed me by the first time I saw and downloaded Tweetbot 6, two weeks ago. Perhaps it’s because the app didn’t appear to have any new features - in fact, it’s technically got less than 5, though those that have been removed - user-specified URL shortening, image hosting, and video hosting services - haven’t worked in a good while anyway. As my old fav, The Verge noted in their coverage of 6, blame for these omissions rests solely on Twitter, Inc., itself, who’s continued to hold its API development inordinately close-to-chest. I didn’t bother to find out about this, though, because my first assumptions upon poking around the new app - especially after encountering its new subscription requirement in order to use any of its substantive features - was that its developers had ceased any actual time investment into the app long ago, and that 6 was a new version in number and rudimentary visual updates, only, shoved out in hopes of peaking old, loyal users like myself enough to get us to download it, at least. In the disappointment I’d already expected, I closed and immediately deleted the app.
I’ve paused everything else to write you on this, though, because the story is actually much bigger. Had I investigated any further that first time, I would have discovered an odd amount of buzz coming from even the most mainstream of tech media in a simple search. (Yes, I am ashamed about it.) You’re still reading, but perhaps - as I was, originally - you are doing so from an appropriately-jaded, well-read perspective on software, generally, in 2021. Perhaps you’re looking at the search results, yourself, and wondering if you’re dreaming. Dedicated coverage of a fucking third-party Twitter client iteration??? At this point in history? What in fuck? I’m fairly certainly neither of us are, though: fucking Tweetbot made headlines on Engadget, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacStories, iMore, MacRumors, and others. No, it’s not 2010 again. In fact, The Verge, at least, has never given up on Tweetbot. If my long term memory had been functioning, I would have remembered noticing its spot in “12 great apps for your new iPhone in 2020:”
Twitter is a vaguely terrible way to spend your time these days, but if you (like me) can’t tear yourself away from the social media service / entryway into hell, you’ll want Tweetbot, which actually makes using Twitter far less painful. Tweetbot shows you the tweets of the people you follow, in the order that they tweeted them. There are no ads or promoted tweets, powerful mute filters to block out unwanted noise, and (thanks to Twitter’s unfriendly API changes) no notifications to constantly ping you to come back to the app.
Here’s to Chaim for exposing me to a perspective I never would have otherwise considered: Tweetbot’s lack of push notifications as a positive. If you’re wondering, no, this new app does not ~yet~ include any additional notification integration, and it’s not clear whether or not it’s on Tapbots future roadmap for the app, or where. As for the reality of integrating Tweetbot 6 into your current Twitter use, I stand by my argument that deleting the native Twitter app isn’t really an option if you plan to ever view your notifications on your phone. The popular assumption (I assume) if you’re still reading is that you are a “poweruser,” meaning details about my own configuration are probably irrelevant. If by chance you’ve just downloaded Tweetbot for the first time, you should take the time to disable notifications for Tweetbot entirely, but leave them on for the native Twitter app, even if you decide to banish it to your App Library. Before I began any work on this review, I made sure to swap in Tweetbot 6 where the native app had been in my dock for several years, now. I originally pushed the native app all the way to page 6, but immediately found this extreme. Instead, I put it in the bottom-right corner in my second screen, as you can see in the screenshot below (which also serves as proof, if you needed it.)
Tweetbot vs Native Twitter Proof
I should also note how much my own engagement on Twitter has diminished in the past 3-5 years. Not to manifest tiny violins - in turn, my engagement on (and investment in) Mastodon has increased exponentially, and it’s of a much higher quality. I bring it up for context’s sake: I can afford to prioritize Tweetbot in my Twitter use because of how few daily notifications I get - a number which is unusual for someone who uses Twitter as much as I do. Inevitably, my own use is once again going to factor heavily in this work, as is the significance of my relationship with Twitter, generally, in my life. If you didn’t already know, I’ve met basically all of my friends since high school through Twitter. As of this moment, my private “Friends” Twitter List includes 149 accounts, and I’ve spent more than 10 years, now, reading almost every single one of their Tweets. I have been as critical of the service as anyone, but - whether or not either of us are willing to acknowledge it, wholly - I believe the intimacy of this arrangement to exceed that of any in-person relationship I have ever had. Reading the random thoughts of these people seconds or minutes after they’ve popped into their heads for all this time has been an experience unique to the format Twitter pioneered, if not to the service, itself. I have no choice but to acknowledge that I am deeply invested in not just Twitter, but Twitter’s less-than-visible Lists feature, emotionally and intellectually. When I hit my follow limit, several years ago, Lists also became my single means of acquiring new connections on the network. If it were to be removed, I would lose this ability, entirely, as well as any reasonable means of communicating with any of my friends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO-ZSD-vymc
Perhaps you understand, now, why I have written and Tweeted so extensively about Lists. You should also understand just how miraculous the possibility of Tweetbot’s new future now seems, personally, unless you’re new to all of these ideas and don’t feel like reading that big olé Tweetbot 5 review of mine (which is fine.) Before I go into the history of Tweetbot, let me first share the single most telling feature in Tweetbot of Tapbots’ belief in using Lists and share some evidence of others’ present day belief in Tweetbot. Shamefully, I’ve spent several years - tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours - using Lists in Tweetbot, oblivious to its upmost Lists integration: “Use Lists as Timeline.” Had I actually bothered to look at the support docs at any point, I would have discovered this long ago, which would have almost certainly made my given year. If you use Tweetbot and Lists, for the love of Gourd, please take a look. Here’s what those docs currently say, in full:
One long time Tweetbot feature is the ability to use any of your lists as your main timeline. To do this, all you have to do is hold down on the “Timeline” label in the navigation bar (in the timeline tab) and a menu populated with your lists will appear. Select one and that will become your current timeline. You can switch to another list or back to your main timeline any time by performing the same action.
Even after reading this multiple times, it still was not obvious to me what it was talking about, and I was unable to find precisely zero visuals on The World Wide Web of this action taking place, so I recorded and uploaded the video embedded above. Good God, how I wish I’d been a more detail-oriented young man! I’ll be privatizing my self-punishment from here on out, though, so bear with me.
Lists Integration | Tweetbot 6
The discourse surrounding Tapbots’ recent announcement has already reached a higher decibel count than I would have ever expected, so it’s obvious there are plenty of users who still love Tweetbot, and you already know from the beforelinked stories that The Verge has also stood firmly by it as the preferred Twitter experience. It takes a wee bit of digging, though, to discover the subtle bets on both Tweetbots and Lists from no less than Apple, Inc., itself. In the official Apple Shortcuts Gallery, a curated list entitled “Twitter Better” includes “Open Twitter Lists” at number 1. In 5th position is “Open in Tweetbot,” and “Open in Twitter App” (3rd,) is configured by default to first ask you to choose between Tweetbot and Twitter’s native app, despite its title.
Tweetbot Bets in Shortcuts
As for App Store rankings, the fact that Tweetbot 5 was forcibly removed from public listings makes it impossible to meaningfully judge recent popularity of Tweetbot on iPhone/iPad. Its MacOS-based sibling, though (called Tweetbot 3,) was the second most popular paid app on the Mac App Store as of February 6th, 2020. That’s the day I borrowed my Mom’s MacBook Pro for a short while to check up on MacOS Big Sur, when I downloaded the current version (3.5.2, if you wanted to know) of Tapbots’ desktop Twitter client and messed around with it enough to tell you that it’s as wonderful as ever. (Had I not switched back to Windows as my primary desktop OS a decade ago, I would use it every single day.)
Tweetbot 3 for MacOS Version 3.5.2
I suspect most active Twitter users in 2021 would be even more surprised to discover Tweetbot’s remaining, discreet hold on today’s Twitter experience than I was, assuming most of them joined more recently than myself and those I regularly interact with. For the sake of this Post, I reached out to Tapbots with an interview request about “Tweetbot’s roadmap, Apple’s requirement that [they] remove 5 from the App Store 30 days beforehand, and why [they’ve] decided to take this (risky, imo) bet on making our lives better,” though I don’t expect a reply, which is fine. They did respond to my support request regarding hardware keyboard shortcut support very quickly, saying they’ll look into it. (Without being verbose, I’ll just tell you that if a near future update to the app fixes the F and ⌘ + R shortcuts, I will shit out my whole ass.)
All Tweetbot Themes
The Business at Hand
Before I dig into the controversy and hypotheticals surrounding what Tweetbot 6 might become, let’s take a moment to qualify it vs all of one’s options to interact with Twitter on iOS currently (as in, Feb 11, 2021 at 19:24.) It’s almost certainly premature to do so, but skeptical readers would note, I’m sure, that its listing on the App Store is “early release” in name only, that I have just spent money on this specific version, which should therefore render inert the normal exceptions a review would make for beta or pre-release software. If you’ve somehow come across this Post before reading anything else about Tweetbot 6 and simply want to know what is new for this version compared with 5.5.3 (its predecessor’s most recent release,) the frank answer as it stands is not much. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, here, but the YouTube videos and tech media articles I could find dealing with the subject of additions, specifically, were all either misleading, entirely wrong, or both.
Account Settings | Tweetbot 5 vs Tweetbot 6
While 6 lists one more option (for a total of 9) under Themes in the Display section of the app’s Settings menu, none are substantive variations of the same themes you’re familiar with from 5. “Future Light” is just a more turquoise variant of the “Default” blue UI theme in 5. In fact, the singular change in the Display menu is the addition of “San Francisco Rounded” under the Fonts selection. Below, you can see side-by-side screenshots of the Tweet Detail view in Tweetbot 5 vs. Tweetbot 6, with the regular SFUI font on the left and rounded variant on the right (text size slider set to max on both apps.)
Tweet Detail | Tweetbot 5 vs Tweetbot 6
To be honest, I can’t really tell the difference between the typefaces in this view, but have used the new app enough to know I prefer the latter. More topically exemplified in that image is Tweetbot 6’s new support for social cards, which the Tapbots boys have executed in a startlingly beautiful way that puts Twitter to shame and makes one feel like you’ve taken them for granted these past few years. Also in that vein and more than worthy of the same accolades is Tweetbot 6’s support for Twitter polls. They’ve never looked so good.
Poll Support in Tweetbot 6
Somewhat on-trend, the app also includes two new icons, but - if we’re being 100% frank - they’re a paltry, dated-looking afterthought and Tweetbot deserves (needs, even) better branding. If I were allowed a singular compulsion to impress upon its developers, I’d make them put out a public call for new art. I’m all but dying to see what the community would come up with.
So, if you were wondering what the fuck Tapbots have been doing these past 3+ years, you should now have the basal bullet points of your answer. The Greater Truth about this gosh darned Twitter app (and why its long-respected developers are now asking you for a whole dollar a month,) though, requires a broader look.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DE1YHcoPxMk
Slow & Steady
For as long as I can remember, both the MacOS and iOS versions of Tweetbot have always possessed a more-or-less undefinable (perhaps Apple Development- specific) quality that’s noticeably set them apart from their direct competitors. I didn’t fully understand why they “feel” so much more “right” until I started making my way through this list of all the interviews/podcast appearances by Tapbots’ iOS code wizard, Paul Haddad, who comments in variations the same argument for a very deliberate developmental pace. The first time, with a MacWorld journalist on some steps outside WWDC 2013, I assumed he was just tossing some self-deprecation around to casualize the interview:
Frankly, we’re slow at doing stuff.
Yes, you are, Tapbot… From a returning user’s perspective, it’s hard to understand what in Gourd’s name they’ve been doing. I listened and read through every Tapbots interview I could find - all but one with Paul, who has through the years continued to come across as a sensitive, well-read, even wise professional developer with a healthy, professional outlook on the work of his little (relatively) weathered company and its place within the warp speed nightmare that is the mobile software industry. I suppose I was expecting to find an explanation for what I saw initially as a minimal regard for Tweetbot’s history, in contrast to 6’s announcement. I wouldn’t find it, though, because in truth, I was sure I already knew it: Twitter made it clear over a decade ago - just after they’d purchased Tweetie and slapped their own name on it - that they had no intention of competing in the client space, so third-party developers were no longer welcome.
Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.
I’ve spent enough time in The App Space (read: Phone Dude Hell) to expect a lot of melodrama, largely without judgement, considering how generally awful the big vendors have made the whole situation. The business legality of the story was spiked into the mainstream conversation last year by controversy encouraged by Basecamp following some pretty toxic, retaliatory correspondence from Apple regarding their plan to subsidize their new email service, HEY. Frankly, I’ve found such stories - about clashes between big software companies over mediocre, uninspiring, and sometimes just downright bad software - ridiculously exhausting and less and less interesting, lately, as I’ve realized that the most innovative, quality work I have experienced has basically all come from the tiniest teams. The most groundbreaking projects and products I’ve bothered to show and tell, here - Unichar, Zalgo Generator, Bear, Toot!, Mastonaut, Mast, etc. - were all built by individual developers except for Shiny Frog’s Bear. (Their team currently numbers 16, by my count.) Each one of those hyperlinks eventually leads to a form of my same rant: why the fuck won’t tech media talk about genuine innovation anymore.
iframe allow="autoplay ; encrypted-media ; fullscreen " frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;background:transparent;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-jardine-and-paul-haddad-tapbots-founders-talk-21/id1164554936?i=1000388739028"/iframe
As I read and listened through Tweetbot’s history for this work, it occurred to me that I might be neglecting to acknowledge an age old divide in development philosophy across platforms. In the singular instance both Tweetbot devs appeared together in a podcast interview - a Founder’s Talk episode from 10 whole years ago - Paul Haddad addressed the when is it gonna be done question in a comprehensive and particularly illuminating way:
I personally hate that question because, you know… it just will get done when it gets done… We’re definitely slow. We go over every screen, every detail over and over again until we get it right. That takes time, which is why we don’t talk about upcoming projects.
Every screen, every detail, over and over again. This sort of deliberateness (which I have personally been working on appreciating, as of late) is actually - as I have come to realize - Tweetbot’s defining feature, especially going forward. Out of all the third-party Twitter clients to come and go, Tweetbot has been overwhelmingly singled out as the favorite because of how aligned it is with the traditional priorities of the Apple space: thoughtful, deeply-considered robustness. Pardon the cliché, but it is the only one that has always felt native - as if it could have been published by Apple, itself.
Everything Happens So Much
The iOS Poweruser Community has been “allowed” to drift away from these principles since iOS 12, especially, and its Pandora’s box-like integration of Siri Shortcuts (Workflow, by another name.) You may or may not be aware of the jailbreaking community’s continued efforts - I was certainly surprised to discover that the r/Jailbreak subreddit has nearly 600,000 subscribers, which outnumbers all but the eldest subreddits in the Apple sphere, including r/iOS, r/iOSBeta, and r/Shortcuts (one of the primary hubs for the Siri Shortcut tinkering community) by a huge margin. Since iOS 14’s addition of sanctioned custom widgets, Twitter and Reddit have been host to a fairly-steady stream of personalized iOS “themes” representing varying degrees of tedium/obsession/madness. One “fringe”-ish avenue I’ve explored quite thoroughly is the adjacent community of public beta tests via Testflight, which allows willing App Scrubs like myself to download beta/pre-release versions of iOS apps. As of this moment, no less than 25 of the 227 apps installed on my iPhone 12 Pro Max are Testflight beta versions (both numbers far higher than normal because of my in-progress review.)
Third-Party Twitter Client Telegram Poll
Essentially, it’s now easier than ever to run incredibly janky software on your iPhone or iPad, remaining well clear of a warranty violation, yet the apps that stick out most boldly in the mind (at least for myself) are unfailingly apart from any sort of experimentation. Bear, for instance - the writing app I evangelize to every iOS user and have continued to describe as “the most beautiful piece of software I have ever seen” - just allowed registered beta testers access to its in-progress “Editor 2.0” on iOS, which Shiny Frog describes as still in its “alpha” stage, yet even I have as yet been unable to trip it up whatsoever. This is the league Tweetbot pioneered, in many ways. For the record, both Tweetbot 6 and Tweetbot 5 have been demonstrably more reliable for me in the past few months than Twitter’s native app, which has been crashing multiple times per day on my devices for quite a while during regular use. I’m accustomed to crashes, so I can’t say with 100% confidence that Tweetbot has never crashed, but it certainly hasn’t since I first downloaded 6 and began this review, despite my deliberate attempts to probe its every possible function.
Not only is Tweetbot 6 reliable as hell - it’s also stupid frugal. Currently, its App Store installation weighs in at 10.9 MB, while Twitter’s app is more than ten times heavier, at 116 MB. I realize Sizes On Disk are further from your mind than they’ve ever been in this age of outright computing gluttony and you probably couldn’t care less about my personal encounter with bandwidth famine in late 2018. In fact, I find it particularly telling that Tapbots has continued to prioritize such efficiency in their development despite operating under less financial, technical, and social pressure than ever to do so.
Various - Tweetbot 6
Future of The Bot
Let’s say you’ve somehow made it this far without either satisfactorily resolving your confusion about Tapbots’ decision to implement subscriptions, why they’ve decided to continue investing their time in third-party Twitter clients, whatsoever, and/or some other App Quandary, and you’re still expecting David Blue of all people to articulate some pivotal element of this story that’ll put your intellect at ease. Perhaps you’re still looking for a comprehensive picture of what using Tweetbot as one’s main Twitter client looks like in 2021. Let’s change it up a bit, toss in some fucking bullet points, and list a few fundamental truths:
If you intend to view your Twitter notifications on iOS at any point, completely deleting the native Twitter app is not an option. (Notably, it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon, if ever.)
“Shopping around” for a third-party Twitter client leads the at all attentive user back to Tweetbot, exclusively. With the potential exception of Fenix, all other Twitter apps on the App Store are fucking bunk and will cost you as much or more as Tweetbot 6’s new subscription.
If you use Twitter Lists regularly, you’d be an idiot not to start your Tweetbot subscription right this fucking minute.
All of these will probably remain true for the foreseeable future, unless I’ve totally misunderstood Twitter’s stated intentions for its API 2.0.
In the ~month since the Tweetbot 6 story first broke (a nice birthday present!,) no less than three newish Twitter features have made the news. Last week, it (apparently) committed to the worst possible user-side content monetization model concept out of the dozens that have dipped in and out of rumor for virtually the service’s entire history: “Super Follows” are slated to shade our collective experience with putrid freemium concerns. “Communities” sound in concept like a worthwhile and genuinely value-adding feature addition for actual Twitter users, but any substantial expectations of the company feel far too risky to invest in. All the while, Twitter Spaces - the audio-only Clubhouse-ish mutilation of Periscope’s corpse - has been silently bestowed upon a secret set of @s at an achingly slow pace. I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t even fully digested fucking Fleets, yet.
What does Tweetbot 6 really offer you, Twitter user, in 2021? Freedom from all of that bullshit.
It’s just occurred to me how much more anxious the movements of Twitter, Inc. and Jack Dorsey’s horrendous facial hair would be making me if I had not discovered an (ironically) more stable, wholesome platform to replace them, years ago. No, I will not discuss Mastodon beyond this remark, but readers invested enough to get to this point who haven’t heard of the federated, open source social network by that name would do well to consult this handy hyperlink. This privilege of choice - even if it’s completely delusional - has combined with Tapbots’ thoughtful brush up of their trustier-than-ever Tweetbot to ease my longtime Twitter-dependent ass to a nigh-miraculous degree. However, stepping back from it all, I realized Tweetbot’s new life bets even heavier on that single, defining feature which the company hardly mentions, and could conceivably restrict - maliciously or not - or remove entirely without real consequences to their business or public standing via tech media outcry. What if Twitter killed Lists? We’d all be fucked.
Upon this realization, I shot out of bed very late in a recent evening and went straight to fucking Trello, of all places, to sift through Twitter’s public development roadmap for any official word on their fate. I really did panic for a beat upon first reading the words “Replacement for Lists functionality” before realizing the actual intention of the card’s expression in the context’s syntax, which is probably about as positive as it could possibly be: a public suggestion that Lists will continue to be supported through 2.0, at least. The card sits in the “Nesting” column (which I assume to be the lowest priority group, chronologically,) right between identical cards for Bookmarks and Direct Messages.
https://imgur.com/gallery/A1zbhLq
The Grandma's House Method
Writing about Tweetbot 6 has been an illuminating personal experience, if you haven’t yet caught on. The timing of its release has proved awfully convenient, just predating the aforementioned catastrophe of disjointed features that has descended harder than ever before on Twitter’s own app, leaving it an absolute mess. When I initiated the symbolic swap maneuver documented at the very beginning of this review, I assumed I was going to find Tweetbot awkward to use as my primary in the present day, but have found the opposite to be true. The social network Tweetbot draws from is barely recognizable as the same property it drew upon originally, when its Lists-loving configuration was simply one of a dozen different interpretations of how one should interact with Twitter (by far the sharpest, I think we’d agree.) Tweetbots, in contrast, is virtually identical in principle, though the unwavering bearing of its development has resulted in the true definition of refinement. The result is the most beautiful way to use Twitter in 2021, no competition, and is also crucially the singular means of interacting with it on one’s “own terms” - as long as yours align with The Lists Method, that is - in an environment that feels predictable and fundamentally at your control.
As much as I have praised the Mastodon app Toot! as the most innovative social app available - and will continue to do so until I encounter something more original and ingenious - it’s perhaps the singular remaining cleverly playful Tweetbots feature which first opened my perspective to appreciate little Easter egg-like tricks. Indeed - even after all we’ve been through together these past ten years - you can still cycle through all of Tweetbot’s visual themes by two-finger swiping vertically in 6. Quick Account Switching is the other less-than-obvious swipe function of note, which I’ll rely on an embed stolen from Tapbots themselves to demonstrate:
https://imgur.com/gallery/oiwfBdQ
I don’t think it should ever feel natural to speak sentimentally about mobile apps, but Tweetbot is a worthy exception. If you glance over the respective comments sections of the articles and YouTube videos I’ve hyperlinked, you’ll pick up on this phenomena of legacy Twitter users chucking back some tragically nostalgic sentiments in response to the reminder surfaced by the Tweetbot 6 news of just how long we’ve been doing this. From my perspective, the other majority sentiment found there catalyzes the bizarre chronobending at play even further. I can’t believe how many folks continue to be flabbergasted by the idea of paying for software in 2021, but I’ve been literally begging Twitter to charge me a monthly fee in exchange for some greater curative capabilities for as long as I can remember. The whole of my gospel, again, is that Tweetbot 6 has personally made using Twitter a little bit better than bearable, so I have no other reasonable choice available: I’m paying the fuck up.
https://soundcloud.com/compaqclub/tweetbot1
See this post's corresponding GitHub Issue for related media, aggregated links, and other minutia.*
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In the bleak face of Twitter’s centralization, Tapbots refuses to give up on its mobile client.
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Listen to this article read by Siri below...
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Were it just I who came to you with only my voice on this cold night, proclaiming the imminent release of a whole numerical version of a third-party mobile Twitter client in 2021, you really would have no choice but to send for the laws, for you’d be left no consideration other than my comprehensive descent into absolute insanity. 825 days ago, I told you lots about the history surrounding the development of Tweetbot 5, which I confidently described as “likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS.” After spending the past few months diving deep into iOS in preparation to review and reflect upon Apple’s current flagship handset, my eyes have been opened to the exponentially-increasing pace of the whole environment’s metamorphosis during the course of my lapsed attention. In the name of progress, I’ve done my best to make a point of looking back, too, yet something astonishingly personally relevant managed to slip past me until just last week: there is a sixth version of the Tweetbot app. At this moment, it is listed on the App Store as an “Early Release” version, though its predecessor can still be downloaded by those who’ve already purchased it in the past, like me. This is an unusual practice – usually, pre-release versions of iOS apps can only be distributed through Apple’s developer beta testing infrastructure, though Testflight. Notably, Tweetbot developer company Tapbots was apparently required to take down Tweetbot 5’s store listing 30 days before releasing Tweetbot 6.
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I can’t remember exactly why – though I suspect I was just fucking around on my phone before bed, bleary-eyed – but the implications of this next numeral passed me by the first time I saw and downloaded Tweetbot 6, two weeks ago. Perhaps it’s because the app didn’t appear to have any new features – in fact, it’s technically got less than 5, though those that have been removed – user-specified URL shortening, image hosting, and video hosting services – haven’t worked in a good while anyway. As my old fav, The Verge noted in their coverage of 6, blame for these omissions rests solely on Twitter, Inc., itself, who’s continued to hold its API development inordinately close-to-chest. I didn’t bother to find out about this, though, because my first assumptions upon poking around the new app – especially after encountering its new subscription requirement in order to use any of its substantive features – was that its developers had ceased any actual time investment into the app long ago, and that 6 was a new version in number and rudimentary visual updates, only, shoved out in hopes of peaking old, loyal users like myself enough to get us to download it, at least. In the disappointment I’d already expected, I closed and immediately deleted the app.
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I’ve paused everything else to write you on this, though, because the story is actually much bigger. Had I investigated any further that first time, I would have discovered an odd amount of buzz coming from even the most mainstream of tech media in a simple search. (Yes, I am ashamed about it.) You’re still reading, but perhaps – as I was, originally – you are doing so from an appropriately-jaded, well-read perspective on software, generally, in 2021. Perhaps you’re looking at the search results, yourself, and wondering if you’re dreaming. Dedicated coverage of a fucking third-party Twitter client iteration??? At this point in history? What in fuck? I’m fairly certainly neither of us are, though: fucking Tweetbot made headlines on Engadget, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacStories, iMore, MacRumors, and others. No, it’s not 2010 again. In fact, The Verge, at least, has never given up on Tweetbot. If my long term memory had been functioning, I would have remembered noticing its spot in “12 great apps for your new iPhone in 2020:”
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Twitter is a vaguely terrible way to spend your time these days, but if you (like me) can’t tear yourself away from the social media service / entryway into hell, you’ll want Tweetbot, which actually makes using Twitter far less painful. Tweetbot shows you the tweets of the people you follow, in the order that they tweeted them. There are no ads or promoted tweets, powerful mute filters to block out unwanted noise, and (thanks to Twitter’s unfriendly API changes) no notifications to constantly ping you to come back to the app.
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Here’s to Chaim for exposing me to a perspective I never would have otherwise considered: Tweetbot’s lack of push notifications as a positive. If you’re wondering, no, this new app does not ~yet~ include any additional notification integration, and it’s not clear whether or not it’s on Tapbots future roadmap for the app, or where. As for the reality of integrating Tweetbot 6 into your current Twitter use, I stand by my argument that deleting the native Twitter app isn’t really an option if you plan to ever view your notifications on your phone. The popular assumption (I assume) if you’re still reading is that you are a “poweruser,” meaning details about my own configuration are probably irrelevant. If by chance you’ve just downloaded Tweetbot for the first time, you should take the time to disable notifications for Tweetbot entirely, but leave them on for the native Twitter app, even if you decide to banish it to your App Library. Before I began any work on this review, I made sure to swap in Tweetbot 6 where the native app had been in my dock for several years, now. I originally pushed the native app all the way to page 6, but immediately found this extreme. Instead, I put it in the bottom-right corner in my second screen, as you can see in the screenshot below (which also serves as proof, if you needed it.)
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I should also note how much my own engagement on Twitter has diminished in the past 3-5 years. Not to manifest tiny violins – in turn, my engagement on (and investment in) Mastodon has increased exponentially, and it’s of a much higher quality. I bring it up for context’s sake: I can afford to prioritize Tweetbot in my Twitter use because of how few daily notifications I get – a number which is unusual for someone who uses Twitter as much as I do. Inevitably, my own use is once again going to factor heavily in this work, as is the significance of my relationship with Twitter, generally, in my life. If you didn’t already know, I’ve met basically all of my friends since high school through Twitter. As of this moment, my private “Friends” Twitter List includes 149 accounts, and I’ve spent more than 10 years, now, reading almost every single one of their Tweets. I have been as critical of the service as anyone, but – whether or not either of us are willing to acknowledge it, wholly – I believe the intimacy of this arrangement to exceed that of any in-person relationship I have ever had. Reading the random thoughts of these people seconds or minutes after they’ve popped into their heads for all this time has been an experience unique to the format Twitter pioneered, if not to the service, itself. I have no choice but to acknowledge that I am deeply invested in not just Twitter, but Twitter’s less-than-visible Lists feature, emotionally and intellectually. When I hit my follow limit, several years ago, Lists also became my single means of acquiring new connections on the network. If it were to be removed, I would lose this ability, entirely, as well as any reasonable means of communicating with any of my friends.
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Perhaps you understand, now, why I have written and Tweeted so extensively about Lists. You should also understand just how miraculous the possibility of Tweetbot’s new future now seems, personally, unless you’re new to all of these ideas and don’t feel like reading that big olé Tweetbot 5 review of mine (which is fine.) Before I go into the history of Tweetbot, let me first share the single most telling feature in Tweetbot of Tapbots’ belief in using Lists and share some evidence of others’ present day belief in Tweetbot. Shamefully, I’ve spent several years – tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours – using Lists in Tweetbot, oblivious to its upmost Lists integration: “Use Lists as Timeline.” Had I actually bothered to look at the support docs at any point, I would have discovered this long ago, which would have almost certainly made my given year. If you use Tweetbot and Lists, for the love of Gourd, please take a look. Here’s what those docs currently say, in full:
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One long time Tweetbot feature is the ability to use any of your lists as your main timeline. To do this, all you have to do is hold down on the “Timeline” label in the navigation bar (in the timeline tab) and a menu populated with your lists will appear. Select one and that will become your current timeline. You can switch to another list or back to your main timeline any time by performing the same action.
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Even after reading this multiple times, it still was not obvious to me what it was talking about, and I was unable to find precisely zero visuals on The World Wide Web of this action taking place, so I recorded and uploaded the video embedded above. Good God, how I wish I’d been a more detail-oriented young man! I’ll be privatizing my self-punishment from here on out, though, so bear with me.
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The discourse surrounding Tapbots’ recent announcement has already reached a higher decibel count than I would have ever expected, so it’s obvious there are plenty of users who still love Tweetbot, and you already know from the beforelinked stories that The Verge has also stood firmly by it as the preferred Twitter experience. It takes a wee bit of digging, though, to discover the subtle bets on both Tweetbots and Lists from no less than Apple, Inc., itself. In the official Apple Shortcuts Gallery, a curated list entitled “Twitter Better” includes “Open Twitter Lists” at number 1. In 5th position is “Open in Tweetbot,” and “Open in Twitter App” (3rd,) is configured by default to first ask you to choose between Tweetbot and Twitter’s native app, despite its title.
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As for App Store rankings, the fact that Tweetbot 5 was forcibly removed from public listings makes it impossible to meaningfully judge recent popularity of Tweetbot on iPhone/iPad. Its MacOS-based sibling, though (called Tweetbot 3,) was the second most popular paid app on the Mac App Store as of February 6th, 2020. That’s the day I borrowed my Mom’s MacBook Pro for a short while to check up on MacOS Big Sur, when I downloaded the current version (3.5.2, if you wanted to know) of Tapbots’ desktop Twitter client and messed around with it enough to tell you that it’s as wonderful as ever. (Had I not switched back to Windows as my primary desktop OS a decade ago, I would use it every single day.)
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I suspect most active Twitter users in 2021 would be even more surprised to discover Tweetbot’s remaining, discreet hold on today’s Twitter experience than I was, assuming most of them joined more recently than myself and those I regularly interact with. For the sake of this Post, I reached out to Tapbots with an interview request about “Tweetbot’s roadmap, Apple’s requirement that [they] remove 5 from the App Store 30 days beforehand, and why [they’ve] decided to take this (risky, imo) bet on making our lives better,” though I don’t expect a reply, which is fine. They did respond to my support request regarding hardware keyboard shortcut support very quickly, saying they’ll look into it. (Without being verbose, I’ll just tell you that if a near future update to the app fixes the F and ⌘ + R shortcuts, I will shit out my whole ass.)
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The Business at Hand
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Before I dig into the controversy and hypotheticals surrounding what Tweetbot 6 might become, let’s take a moment to qualify it vs all of one’s options to interact with Twitter on iOS currently (as in, Feb 11, 2021 at 19:24.) It’s almost certainly premature to do so, but skeptical readers would note, I’m sure, that its listing on the App Store is “early release” in name only, that I have just spent money on this specific version, which should therefore render inert the normal exceptions a review would make for beta or pre-release software. If you’ve somehow come across this Post before reading anything else about Tweetbot 6 and simply want to know what is new for this version compared with 5.5.3 (its predecessor’s most recent release,) the frank answer as it stands is not much. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, here, but the YouTube videos and tech media articles I could find dealing with the subject of additions, specifically, were all either misleading, entirely wrong, or both.
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While 6 lists one more option (for a total of 9) under Themes in the Display section of the app’s Settings menu, none are substantive variations of the same themes you’re familiar with from 5. “Future Light” is just a more turquoise variant of the “Default” blue UI theme in 5. In fact, the singular change in the Display menu is the addition of “San Francisco Rounded” under the Fonts selection. Below, you can see side-by-side screenshots of the Tweet Detail view in Tweetbot 5 vs. Tweetbot 6, with the regular SFUI font on the left and rounded variant on the right (text size slider set to max on both apps.)
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To be honest, I can’t really tell the difference between the typefaces in this view, but have used the new app enough to know I prefer the latter. More topically exemplified in that image is Tweetbot 6’s new support for social cards, which the Tapbots boys have executed in a startlingly beautiful way that puts Twitter to shame and makes one feel like you’ve taken them for granted these past few years. Also in that vein and more than worthy of the same accolades is Tweetbot 6’s support for Twitter polls. They’ve never looked so good.
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Somewhat on-trend, the app also includes two new icons, but – if we’re being 100% frank – they’re a paltry, dated-looking afterthought and Tweetbot deserves (needs, even) better branding. If I were allowed a singular compulsion to impress upon its developers, I’d make them put out a public call for new art. I’m all but dying to see what the community would come up with.
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So, if you were wondering what the fuck Tapbots have been doing these past 3+ years, you should now have the basal bullet points of your answer. The Greater Truth about this gosh darned Twitter app (and why its long-respected developers are now asking you for a whole dollar a month,) though, requires a broader look.
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Slow & Steady
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For as long as I can remember, both the MacOS and iOS versions of Tweetbot have always possessed a more-or-less undefinable (perhaps Apple Development- specific) quality that’s noticeably set them apart from their direct competitors. I didn’t fully understand why they “feel” so much more “right” until I started making my way through this list of all the interviews/podcast appearances by Tapbots’ iOS code wizard, Paul Haddad, who comments in variations the same argument for a very deliberate developmental pace. The first time, with a MacWorld journalist on some steps outside WWDC 2013, I assumed he was just tossing some self-deprecation around to casualize the interview:
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Frankly, we’re slow at doing stuff.
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Yes, you are, Tapbot… From a returning user’s perspective, it’s hard to understand what in Gourd’s name they’ve been doing. I listened and read through every Tapbots interview I could find – all but one with Paul, who has through the years continued to come across as a sensitive, well-read, even wise professional developer with a healthy, professional outlook on the work of his little (relatively) weathered company and its place within the warp speed nightmare that is the mobile software industry. I suppose I was expecting to find an explanation for what I saw initially as a minimal regard for Tweetbot’s history, in contrast to 6’s announcement. I wouldn’t find it, though, because in truth, I was sure I already knew it: Twitter made it clear over a decade ago – just after they’d purchased Tweetie and slapped their own name on it – that they had no intention of competing in the client space, so third-party developers were no longer welcome.
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Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
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As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.
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I’ve spent enough time in The App Space (read: Phone Dude Hell) to expect a lot of melodrama, largely without judgement, considering how generally awful the big vendors have made the whole situation. The business legality of the story was spiked into the mainstream conversation last year by controversy encouraged by Basecamp following some pretty toxic, retaliatory correspondence from Apple regarding their plan to subsidize their new email service, HEY. Frankly, I’ve found such stories – about clashes between big software companies over mediocre, uninspiring, and sometimes just downright bad software – ridiculously exhausting and less and less interesting, lately, as I’ve realized that the most innovative, quality work I have experienced has basically all come from the tiniest teams. The most groundbreaking projects and products I’ve bothered to show and tell, here – Unichar, Zalgo Generator, Bear, Toot!, Mastonaut, Mast, etc. – were all built by individual developers except for Shiny Frog’s Bear. (Their team currently numbers 16, by my count.) Each one of those hyperlinks eventually leads to a form of my same rant: why the fuck won’t tech media talk about genuine innovation anymore.
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As I read and listened through Tweetbot’s history for this work, it occurred to me that I might be neglecting to acknowledge an age old divide in development philosophy across platforms. In the singular instance both Tweetbot devs appeared together in a podcast interview – a Founder’s Talk episode from 10 whole years ago – Paul Haddad addressed the when is it gonna be done question in a comprehensive and particularly illuminating way:
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I personally hate that question because, you know… it just will get done when it gets done… We’re definitely slow. We go over every screen, every detail over and over again until we get it right. That takes time, which is why we don’t talk about upcoming projects.
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Every screen, every detail, over and over again. This sort of deliberateness (which I have personally been working on appreciating, as of late) is actually – as I have come to realize – Tweetbot’s defining feature, especially going forward. Out of all the third-party Twitter clients to come and go, Tweetbot has been overwhelmingly singled out as the favorite because of how aligned it is with the traditional priorities of the Apple space: thoughtful, deeply-considered robustness. Pardon the cliché, but it is the only one that has always felt native – as if it could have been published by Apple, itself.
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Everything Happens So Much
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The iOS Poweruser Community has been “allowed” to drift away from these principles since iOS 12, especially, and its Pandora’s box-like integration of Siri Shortcuts (Workflow, by another name.) You may or may not be aware of the jailbreaking community’s continued efforts – I was certainly surprised to discover that the r/Jailbreak subreddit has nearly 600,000 subscribers, which outnumbers all but the eldest subreddits in the Apple sphere, including r/iOS, r/iOSBeta, and r/Shortcuts (one of the primary hubs for the Siri Shortcut tinkering community) by a huge margin. Since iOS 14’s addition of sanctioned custom widgets, Twitter and Reddit have been host to a fairly-steady stream of personalized iOS “themes” representing varying degrees of tedium/obsession/madness. One “fringe”-ish avenue I’ve explored quite thoroughly is the adjacent community of public beta tests via Testflight, which allows willing App Scrubs like myself to download beta/pre-release versions of iOS apps. As of this moment, no less than 25 of the 227 apps installed on my iPhone 12 Pro Max are Testflight beta versions (both numbers far higher than normal because of my in-progress review.)
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Essentially, it’s now easier than ever to run incredibly janky software on your iPhone or iPad, remaining well clear of a warranty violation, yet the apps that stick out most boldly in the mind (at least for myself) are unfailingly apart from any sort of experimentation. Bear, for instance – the writing app I evangelize to every iOS user and have continued to describe as “the most beautiful piece of software I have ever seen” – just allowed registered beta testers access to its in-progress “Editor 2.0” on iOS, which Shiny Frog describes as still in its “alpha” stage, yet even I have as yet been unable to trip it up whatsoever. This is the league Tweetbot pioneered, in many ways. For the record, both Tweetbot 6 and Tweetbot 5 have been demonstrably more reliable for me in the past few months than Twitter’s native app, which has been crashing multiple times per day on my devices for quite a while during regular use. I’m accustomed to crashes, so I can’t say with 100% confidence that Tweetbot has never crashed, but it certainly hasn’t since I first downloaded 6 and began this review, despite my deliberate attempts to probe its every possible function.
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Not only is Tweetbot 6 reliable as hell – it’s also stupid frugal. Currently, its App Store installation weighs in at 10.9 MB, while Twitter’s app is more than ten times heavier, at 116 MB. I realize Sizes On Disk are further from your mind than they’ve ever been in this age of outright computing gluttony and you probably couldn’t care less about my personal encounter with bandwidth famine in late 2018. In fact, I find it particularly telling that Tapbots has continued to prioritize such efficiency in their development despite operating under less financial, technical, and social pressure than ever to do so.
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Future of The Bot
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Let’s say you’ve somehow made it this far without either satisfactorily resolving your confusion about Tapbots’ decision to implement subscriptions, why they’ve decided to continue investing their time in third-party Twitter clients, whatsoever, and/or some other App Quandary, and you’re still expecting David Blue of all people to articulate some pivotal element of this story that’ll put your intellect at ease. Perhaps you’re still looking for a comprehensive picture of what using Tweetbot as one’s main Twitter client looks like in 2021. Let’s change it up a bit, toss in some fucking bullet points, and list a few fundamental truths:
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If you intend to view your Twitter notifications on iOS at any point, completely deleting the native Twitter app is not an option. (Notably, it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon, if ever.)
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“Shopping around” for a third-party Twitter client leads the at all attentive user back to Tweetbot, exclusively. With the potential exception of Fenix, all other Twitter apps on the App Store are fucking bunk and will cost you as much or more as Tweetbot 6’s new subscription.
-
If you use Twitter Lists regularly, you’d be an idiot not to start your Tweetbot subscription right this fucking minute.
In the ~month since the Tweetbot 6 story first broke (a nice birthday present!,) no less than three newish Twitter features have made the news. Last week, it (apparently) committed to the worst possible user-side content monetization model concept out of the dozens that have dipped in and out of rumor for virtually the service’s entire history: “Super Follows” are slated to shade our collective experience with putrid freemium concerns. “Communities” sound in concept like a worthwhile and genuinely value-adding feature addition for actual Twitter users, but any substantial expectations of the company feel far too risky to invest in. All the while, Twitter Spaces – the audio-only Clubhouse-ish mutilation of Periscope’s corpse – has been silently bestowed upon a secret set of @s at an achingly slow pace. I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t even fully digested fucking Fleets, yet.
-
-
What does Tweetbot 6 really offer you, Twitter user, in 2021?Freedom from all of that bullshit.
-
-
It’s just occurred to me how much more anxious the movements of Twitter, Inc. and Jack Dorsey’s horrendous facial hair would be making me if I had not discovered an (ironically) more stable, wholesome platform to replace them, years ago. No, I will not discuss Mastodon beyond this remark, but readers invested enough to get to this point who haven’t heard of the federated, open source social network by that name would do well to consult this handy hyperlink. This privilege of choice – even if it’s completely delusional – has combined with Tapbots’ thoughtful brush up of their trustier-than-ever Tweetbot to ease my longtime Twitter-dependent ass to a nigh-miraculous degree. However, stepping back from it all, I realized Tweetbot’s new life bets even heavier on that single, defining feature which the company hardly mentions, and could conceivably restrict – maliciously or not – or remove entirely without real consequences to their business or public standing via tech media outcry. What if Twitter killed Lists? We’d all be fucked.
-
-
Upon this realization, I shot out of bed very late in a recent evening and went straight to fucking Trello, of all places, to sift through Twitter’s public development roadmap for any official word on their fate. I really did panic for a beat upon first reading the words “Replacement for Lists functionality” before realizing the actual intention of the card’s expression in the context’s syntax, which is probably about as positive as it could possibly be: a public suggestion that Lists will continue to be supported through 2.0, at least. The card sits in the “Nesting” column (which I assume to be the lowest priority group, chronologically,) right between identical cards for Bookmarks and Direct Messages.
-
-
-
-
The Grandma's House Method
-
-
Writing about Tweetbot 6 has been an illuminating personal experience, if you haven’t yet caught on. The timing of its release has proved awfully convenient, just predating the aforementioned catastrophe of disjointed features that has descended harder than ever before on Twitter’s own app, leaving it an absolute mess. When I initiated the symbolic swap maneuver documented at the very beginning of this review, I assumed I was going to find Tweetbot awkward to use as my primary in the present day, but have found the opposite to be true. The social network Tweetbot draws from is barely recognizable as the same property it drew upon originally, when its Lists-loving configuration was simply one of a dozen different interpretations of how one should interact with Twitter (by far the sharpest, I think we’d agree.) Tweetbots, in contrast, is virtually identical in principle, though the unwavering bearing of its development has resulted in the true definition of refinement. The result is the most beautiful way to use Twitter in 2021, no competition, and is also crucially the singular means of interacting with it on one’s “own terms” – as long as yours align with The Lists Method, that is – in an environment that feels predictable and fundamentally at your control.
-
-
As much as I have praised the Mastodon app Toot! as the most innovative social app available – and will continue to do so until I encounter something more original and ingenious – it’s perhaps the singular remaining cleverly playful Tweetbots feature which first opened my perspective to appreciate little Easter egg-like tricks. Indeed – even after all we’ve been through together these past ten years – you can still cycle through all of Tweetbot’s visual themes by two-finger swiping vertically in 6. Quick Account Switching is the other less-than-obvious swipe function of note, which I’ll rely on an embed stolen from Tapbots themselves to demonstrate:
-
-
-
-
I don’t think it should ever feel natural to speak sentimentally about mobile apps, but Tweetbot is a worthy exception. If you glance over the respective comments sections of the articles and YouTube videos I’ve hyperlinked, you’ll pick up on this phenomena of legacy Twitter users chucking back some tragically nostalgic sentiments in response to the reminder surfaced by the Tweetbot 6 news of just how long we’ve been doing this. From my perspective, the other majority sentiment found there catalyzes the bizarre chronobending at play even further. I can’t believe how many folks continue to be flabbergasted by the idea of paying for software in 2021, but I’ve been literally begging Twitter to charge me a monthly fee in exchange for some greater curative capabilities for as long as I can remember. The whole of my gospel, again, is that Tweetbot 6 has personally made using Twitter a little bit better than bearable, so I have no other reasonable choice available: I’m paying the fuck up.
-
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See this post's corresponding GitHub Issue for related media, aggregated links, and other minutia.
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/tweetbot-6-ios-review
- Mon, 01 Mar 2021 22:00:51 +0000
-
-
- The Psalms' 2020
- https://bilge.world/2020?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[The Psalms 2020 WordCloud
Screens and software subjects big & small discussed within my most moderate 35,000 words ever.
Believe it or not, the cyclical cold season has once again come to pass! Oh, the W̘͖̯E̟̹À̫T̯̫͓̪̮͓̼H̝E̪͇̰̘̖͍ͅŔ͍̖̱̟̪!! If the past two days on Twitter were any indication, it is indeed time for a year's-end retrospective on what has been published on this Web Site. Given the extent of the attention I've devoted to bilge.world this past year - both technically and editorially - I thought it would be nice to chuck in a bit more in the pursuit of whacking myself on the back. I understand that 2020 has been one helluva catastrophic marker of linear time for just about everyone on Earth - as I write this on its last day, the inexplicable news of MF Doom's death has just surfaced and has already hit my adjacent communities remarkably hard.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1334355680078270464
Spring
The earliest archive.org capture of this particular Writeas blog dates back only to May 1st of this year, but its stylistic contrast with the site's current version is immense. I believe I was using Max Henderson's Anxiety theme virtually stock, albeit with some color rearrangements. By the 29th, I had already arrived upon the colors you see today. "You Know I'm Blogging" was just a meta update to say howdy after such a long drought, but "Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips" actually proved popular (for me) among my newly-connected Fedi crowd, especially, thanks to an annotated share by Writeas on Twitter. Honestly, it was entirely worth it just for the accomplishment of exposing my platform peer Dino Bansigan to Alt+D. Writeas Community Manager CJ Eller and I began corresponding, which led to an interview regarding writing tools, managing fiddly compulsions, and the wonder of Markdown.
I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list.
I dug deep in my long-overdue todo list for "Z̴͏a͞l͟g͝o͏ ̕G͟͝e͞n͞҉è̛ŗ͡a͝͞t̴o҉r͞ for iOS," which - along with my 2018 review of Unichar - I felt was a necessary celebration of digital text as a weapon, which is very dear to me. "Preferred Writing Instruments" was probably the singular analog departure The Psalms will ever see and my condensed commentary on Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Discovery, and the current state of Star Trek: Online should fulfill all need mention of science fiction, here, for a very long time. Given yesterday's news regarding Slack's acquisition, perhaps I should feel revalidated in my insistence that "Discord is Better Than Slack," but a developer friend of mine actually addressed my curiosity regarding why startups never mention Discord as a workplace option, despite its identical functionality: it's all about fuckin' enterprise security.
I had wanted to write about The Langoliers - Stephen King's flop of a made-for-TV movie/extended Twilight Zone episode - for a long while. It was probably the first program I watched as a child that genuinely disturbed me and always returns to my thoughts by barren-ish experiences. I had planned to watch the whole three hours all the way through and write whatever came to mind, but I only made it halfway or so in "Craig Toomey's Coronavirus" before I ran completely out of steam. I dropped what I had without revision, to this day. Perhaps one day I shall return...
In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn.
These two sentences begin the sixth chapter of my indefinitely-postponed novel, Blimp's Burden, and are almost certainly my best writing, ever. My vanity simply wouldn't allow them to go forgotten, so I published the chapter as an excerpt on The Psalms. It may seem an intimidating wall of text, but give it your attention and you'll be amused, I think.
The Psalms Stats by Post - 2020
Summer
The general, distinctly 21st-century wisdom regarding one's content popularity seems to be something like you never know what's going to blow up. I experienced this phenomena quite severely for the first time in my writing life after posting "Google Is Not God of The Web" on HackerNews right before going out-of-touch for some 13 straight hours amidst a local BLM protest. I did not intend to write a baity title, nor did I expect anything to come of sharing it, there - I only did so simply because the thought crossed my mind. Honestly, it is probably the least-considered content I'd ever published on The Psalms - I only put it up when I did because I knew all of my energy was about to be absorbed for an entire weekend or more. I only started the thing because I felt it important to raise a small voice in reminder that tech media had started using language when discussing code/online development which had begun to assume the existence of a single, objective standard of measure for good web design. (Fuck your bootstrap baloney, The Drywall Website was a real paradigm shit.)
And yet... That single goddamned post would end up accruing more pageviews than all of my writing on the web, combined (I suspect.) Tens of thousands of words were written in hundreds of comments, which I did my best to parse in a for the hell of it substack email:
Out of everything I’ve shared on Bilge recently, it’s hilarious that this particular post - on which I spent a cumulative total of perhaps 25 minutes writing and made less effort than ever to edit - became probably my most widely-shared work of all time.
Once again, I am thankful for the readership and correspondence, I just really fucking wish it had been on literally anything else I've written about technology.
In retrospect, it really is bonkers that I was excited about yet another vague promise to re-imagine email in the days surrounding the launch of Basecamp's HEY, but I feel it's important to nurture what paltry genuine enthusiasm remains about technology and the future, so I decided to respond to the service's homepage prompt, asking interested visitors to write in with their own thoughts on email. I spent a morning clacking out "Email and I: An Abridged History," which I hope will one day serve as a part-foundation for a thorough, composed extension to my Why I Write About Technology series. This would be The Psalms last relevant work for a few months, while I played around with an experimental WordPress website and dove into fuckin' school for the first time in seven years.
WTF
Fall
I returned in late September with a partial recount of what I'd discovered: "Indulging Once More in Digital Excess." After exploring the concept of Digital Gardens, buying my first pro-ready desktop PC in 10 years, playing with Big Boy Adobe software for the first time, and reading a delightful book documenting the history of word processing, I arrived upon the term Software Historian with which to partially describe myself. It doesn't mean all that much at the moment, but will no doubt be explored imminently on this Web Site.
Addressing "The Social Dilemma's Dilemma" and "Software Thanksgiving" in detail would be awfully redundant, but I would at least note how they represent diametrically opposed perspectives through which to discuss this stuff. Going forward into 2021, I think it's important that I hold short on the progress I've made in moderating my voice since 2018. Digestibility is not a virtue I am at all interested in, nor is it an appropriate one in which to invest any more effort. Any non-radical argument will inevitably prove enormously unoriginal, which makes for a huge waste of all our time. For the moment, that's all the editorializing I've done.
Blogging vs.
Three Point Oh
Somewhere along the research process for one of my school essays, I came across the concept of academic revision tracking and peer review via Git. Having dipped my toe back in academia, any such circumvention of its penchant for the most archaic practices possible was naturally intriguing. Just wait until I show these goons how to use hyperlinks. Perhaps inevitably, I was launched into the Git-Gone Bender I'm still riding simply because I finally had ample reason to actually understand it. In just two months, I've created and forked a total of nearly 80 repositories on my new GitHub account. Though I'd created one for each of my web properties ages ago, I had absolutely no idea how to actually make use of them, so they were all quickly abandoned. In the past two weeks or so, I think I've actually begun to get the hang of the system's core intricacies, best exemplified by The Psalms' Repository as it stands.
The "automated" Project Board I set up has so far been a very impressive replacement for the simple todo list. It tracks and categorizes Post Ideas in their various stages in my process: Mulling, Documentation (research,) Drafting, and actual Publication. Technical "Issues" regarding the CMS and/or the Repository, itself, have also fit in these categories well, so far. Just today, I discovered that one can simply tag Issues by their number to describe Commits, which form an impressive revision-tracking changelog when aggregated together. I also figured out the general idea behind Milestones and set The Psalms' first one for my 27th birthday, next month. The goal is to have figured this all out well enough by then that I'm no longer randomly stumbling upon entire featuresets multiple times in a workday. Thinking in Public - as my friend Tom Critchlow and his crowd say - is what I'm trying to do here, I think. Obviously, this really means that you are more than welcome to hop the fuck in at any time, in any manner you'd prefer. If Git is still no more than a conundrum for you - as it was for me just weeks ago - I would suggest the directory for In-Progress Drafts as a starting point.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1336374708753797123
GitHub Actions are still more or less a mystery to me, but I am unbothered - The Psalms' seems to be producing green text instead of red, now, in the midst of whatever I set it up to do. I poked around the livestreams for "GitHub Universe" a few weeks ago, when dark mode and GitHub Discussions were opened up to more users. At the moment, I cannot imagine a single application for forums in the context of my blog's repository, but I turned them on, anyway. It's very possible that all of the documentation-generating functions of Git are entirely unnecessary in this case, but - as I entrust GitHub with the eternal task of archiving such work - it is my hope that it will help me add further structure to my process.
Caslon Bilge Type Capture
If you've found yourself in possession of a .edu email address and are interested in GitHub related experimentation, see this list of discounted/free dev programs/services for students, which includes a free subscription to "GitHub Pro." (Apparently, equivalent to a $4/month service.) Adobe has similar discounts, as you’re probably already aware, which have allowed me to pursue my goal of learning InDesign. So far, I’ve created a sort of commemorative 404 page for The Drynet and a font showcase of Georgia for my mother. As much as I’d love to continue discussing the current state of Adobe apps, I’ve realized 1) I am quite distinct from a professional user, which is why I genuinely find GIMP more useful than Photoshop, for instance, and 2) given the length of my to-write list considering my current pace, I don’t know if I’d manage to get around to it in this lifetime.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wrhh8zDH-AA
Between now and the 11th of this month, I will be migrating worthwhile posts from the experimental WordPress site (WTF) here and closing its hosting account. I haven’t been compelled to actually do anything with it in months, and the handy redirects, alone, are not worth the upcosts, however fair. Some content - including the corresponding posts for my Adobe experiments will not be imported from WTF here. I’m also going to rely on the Web Archive for publishing the rest. Notable discoveries so far include “Through an iPhone 4’s Lens,” which is a reminder of how revolutionary that particular handset was, and a few extra-Psalms pieces of content I’d like you to experience, like this Notion gallery of my single jaunt into drawing, # DavidBlueDraws. Best of all is my friend Tevin’s episode of Extratone’s defunct flagship podcast. In the years since, he’s become quite the prolific Twitch streamer. (I’ve watched enough and know Tevin well enough to say that he’s particularly entertaining in this medium.)
iframe allow="autoplay ; encrypted-media ; fullscreen " frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;background:transparent;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/esporting-psycholiterates-favored-of-email/id1400636220?i=1000500606715"/iframe
Coming Soon
For better or worse, all of these new exploratory avenues have so far led directly away from the business of actually writing, but - in my best self-estimation - I suspect I’m mostly done with fiddling, now, and ready to start thinking on the page, again. Predictably, I’ve let my upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max Review turn into quite a monstrosity over the past two months. It turns out, years of lapsed attention toward iOS development resulted in my feeling more out-of-the-loop than I expected, which I was compelled to remedy, naturally. If you’re so inclined, you can follow the minutia attached to my review process via this dedicated Snapas gallery, this shared iCloud album, my personal YouTube channel , and this Twitter collection.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1344555610155712512
As per my newfound use of GitHub, I’ve played around with various ways of documenting this journey, specifically. First is this Wiki page (which I shall do my best to remember to keep updated) listing the entirety of my writing history on iPhone and iOS. (It’s uh... A bit underwhelming, if I’m honest.) I’ve also just begun a dedicated repository for iOS-related documentation and resources, which will soon include a full, sensically-indexed list of iCloud share links to my entire Siri Shortcuts collection (I hope.) Immediately following the review, I intend to publish here a post dedicated to functions Apple has failed to properly document, which I expect to be the most widely-useful content on this domain. To see some of the suggestions I’ve received so far and/or to add your own, see this mildly-successful thread I posted in r/iOS.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=uXIXjAWXVfQ
When I have finally tired of talking about handsets once more, I hope to return my attention toward some other overwhelmingly-ambitious monstrosities like my academic paper proposing federated, open-source social networks in favor of the Big Boys, my report on the experience of returning to academia for a semester in 2020, and my evaluation of Notion as perhaps the next Big Step in the evolution of notetaking software. Perhaps before tackling projects the size of these, I intend to compile another listicle of handy tips for newcomers to Writeas. As I linked before, you can now view the entirety of The Psalms’* status in as much detail as you’d like via its Project Board on GitHub. As always, you can delight me by directly engaging on Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and/or via email. Let’s hope 2021’s equivalent of this review doesn’t take me until February to publish!
meta]]>
-
-
-
Screens and software subjects big & small discussed within my most moderate 35,000 words ever.
-
-
Believe it or not, the cyclical cold season has once again come to pass! Oh, the W̘͖̯E̟̹À̫T̯̫͓̪̮͓̼H̝E̪͇̰̘̖͍ͅŔ͍̖̱̟̪!! If the past two days on Twitter were any indication, it is indeed time for a year's-end retrospective on what has been published on this Web Site. Given the extent of the attention I've devoted to bilge.world this past year – both technically and editorially – I thought it would be nice to chuck in a bit more in the pursuit of whacking myself on the back. I understand that 2020 has been one helluva catastrophic marker of linear time for just about everyone on Earth – as I write this on its last day, the inexplicable news of MF Doom's death has just surfaced and has already hit my adjacent communities remarkably hard.
I had forgotten *a lot* more about CSS and HTML than I originally thought. glad I ended up comfortable enough to find myself with a completely original stylesheet before the end of the year, I suppose. pic.twitter.com/4QwlbEJECU
The earliest archive.org capture of this particular Writeas blog dates back only to May 1st of this year, but its stylistic contrast with the site's current version is immense. I believe I was using Max Henderson's Anxiety theme virtually stock, albeit with some color rearrangements. By the 29th, I had already arrived upon the colors you see today. “You Know I'm Blogging” was just a meta update to say howdy after such a long drought, but “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” actually proved popular (for me) among my newly-connected Fedi crowd, especially, thanks to an annotated share by Writeas on Twitter. Honestly, it was entirely worth it just for the accomplishment of exposing my platform peer Dino Bansigan to Alt+D. Writeas Community Manager CJ Eller and I began corresponding, which led to an interview regarding writing tools, managing fiddly compulsions, and the wonder of Markdown.
-
-
I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list.
I had wanted to write about The Langoliers – Stephen King's flop of a made-for-TV movie/extended Twilight Zone episode – for a long while. It was probably the first program I watched as a child that genuinely disturbed me and always returns to my thoughts by barren-ish experiences. I had planned to watch the whole three hours all the way through and write whatever came to mind, but I only made it halfway or so in “Craig Toomey's Coronavirus” before I ran completely out of steam. I dropped what I had without revision, to this day. Perhaps one day I shall return...
-
-
In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn.
-
-
These two sentences begin the sixth chapter of my indefinitely-postponed novel, Blimp's Burden, and are almost certainly my best writing, ever. My vanity simply wouldn't allow them to go forgotten, so I published the chapter as an excerpt on The Psalms. It may seem an intimidating wall of text, but give it your attention and you'll be amused, I think.
-
-
-
-
Summer
-
-
The general, distinctly 21st-century wisdom regarding one's content popularity seems to be something like you never know what's going to blow up. I experienced this phenomena quite severely for the first time in my writing life after posting “Google Is Not God of The Web” on HackerNews right before going out-of-touch for some 13 straight hours amidst a local BLM protest. I did not intend to write a baity title, nor did I expect anything to come of sharing it, there – I only did so simply because the thought crossed my mind. Honestly, it is probably the least-considered content I'd ever published on The Psalms – I only put it up when I did because I knew all of my energy was about to be absorbed for an entire weekend or more. I only started the thing because I felt it important to raise a small voice in reminder that tech media had started using language when discussing code/online development which had begun to assume the existence of a single, objective standard of measure for good web design. (Fuck your bootstrap baloney, The Drywall Website was a realparadigm shit.)
-
-
And yet... That single goddamned post would end up accruing more pageviews than all of my writing on the web, combined (I suspect.) Tens of thousands of words were written in hundreds of comments, which I did my best to parse in a for the hell of it substack email:
-
-
Out of everything I’ve shared on Bilge recently, it’s hilarious that this particular post – on which I spent a cumulative total of perhaps 25 minutes writing and made less effort than ever to edit – became probably my most widely-shared work of all time.
-
-
Once again, I am thankful for the readership and correspondence, I just really fucking wish it had been on literally anything else I've written about technology.
-
-
In retrospect, it really is bonkers that I was excited about yet another vague promise to re-imagine email in the days surrounding the launch of Basecamp's HEY, but I feel it's important to nurture what paltry genuine enthusiasm remains about technology and the future, so I decided to respond to the service's homepage prompt, asking interested visitors to write in with their own thoughts on email. I spent a morning clacking out “Email and I: An Abridged History,” which I hope will one day serve as a part-foundation for a thorough, composed extension to my Why I Write About Technology series. This would be The Psalms last relevant work for a few months, while I played around with an experimental WordPress website and dove into fuckin' school for the first time in seven years.
-
-
-
-
Fall
-
-
I returned in late September with a partial recount of what I'd discovered: “Indulging Once More in Digital Excess.” After exploring the concept of Digital Gardens, buying my first pro-ready desktop PC in 10 years, playing with Big Boy Adobe software for the first time, and reading a delightful book documenting the history of word processing, I arrived upon the term Software Historian with which to partially describe myself. It doesn't mean all that much at the moment, but will no doubt be explored imminently on this Web Site.
-
-
Addressing “The Social Dilemma's Dilemma” and “Software Thanksgiving” in detail would be awfully redundant, but I would at least note how they represent diametrically opposed perspectives through which to discuss this stuff. Going forward into 2021, I think it's important that I hold short on the progress I've made in moderating my voice since 2018. Digestibility is not a virtue I am at all interested in, nor is it an appropriate one in which to invest any more effort. Any non-radical argument will inevitably prove enormously unoriginal, which makes for a huge waste of all our time. For the moment, that's all the editorializing I've done.
-
-
-
-
Three Point Oh
-
-
Somewhere along the research process for one of my school essays, I came across the concept of academic revision tracking and peer review via Git. Having dipped my toe back in academia, any such circumvention of its penchant for the most archaic practices possible was naturally intriguing. Just wait until I show these goons how to use hyperlinks. Perhaps inevitably, I was launched into the Git-Gone Bender I'm still riding simply because I finally had ample reason to actually understand it. In just two months, I've created and forked a total of nearly 80 repositories on my new GitHub account. Though I'd created one for each of my web properties ages ago, I had absolutely no idea how to actually make use of them, so they were all quickly abandoned. In the past two weeks or so, I think I've actually begun to get the hang of the system's core intricacies, best exemplified by The Psalms' Repository as it stands.
-
-
The “automated” Project Board I set up has so far been a very impressive replacement for the simple todo list. It tracks and categorizes Post Ideas in their various stages in my process: Mulling, Documentation (research,) Drafting, and actual Publication. Technical “Issues” regarding the CMS and/or the Repository, itself, have also fit in these categories well, so far. Just today, I discovered that one can simply tag Issues by their number to describe Commits, which form an impressive revision-tracking changelog when aggregated together. I also figured out the general idea behind Milestones and set The Psalms' first one for my 27th birthday, next month. The goal is to have figured this all out well enough by then that I'm no longer randomly stumbling upon entire featuresets multiple times in a workday. Thinking in Public – as my friend Tom Critchlow and his crowd say – is what I'm trying to do here, I think. Obviously, this really means that you are more than welcome to hop the fuck in at any time, in any manner you'd prefer. If Git is still no more than a conundrum for you – as it was for me just weeks ago – I would suggest the directory for In-Progress Drafts as a starting point.
-
-
requesting support on how to "leverage discussions" to talk about pee pee and poo poo. #GitHubUniverse
GitHub Actions are still more or less a mystery to me, but I am unbothered – The Psalms' seems to be producing green text instead of red, now, in the midst of whatever I set it up to do. I poked around the livestreams for “GitHub Universe” a few weeks ago, when dark mode and GitHub Discussions were opened up to more users. At the moment, I cannot imagine a single application for forums in the context of my blog's repository, but I turned them on, anyway. It's very possible that all of the documentation-generating functions of Git are entirely unnecessary in this case, but – as I entrust GitHub with the eternal task of archiving such work – it is my hope that it will help me add further structure to my process.
-
-
-
-
If you've found yourself in possession of a .edu email address and are interested in GitHub related experimentation, see this list of discounted/free dev programs/services for students, which includes a free subscription to “GitHub Pro.” (Apparently, equivalent to a $4/month service.) Adobe has similar discounts, as you’re probably already aware, which have allowed me to pursue my goal of learning InDesign. So far, I’ve created a sort of commemorative 404 page for The Drynet and a font showcase of Georgia for my mother. As much as I’d love to continue discussing the current state of Adobe apps, I’ve realized 1) I am quite distinct from a professional user, which is why I genuinely find GIMP more useful than Photoshop, for instance, and 2) given the length of my to-write list considering my current pace, I don’t know if I’d manage to get around to it in this lifetime.
-
-
-
-
Between now and the 11th of this month, I will be migrating worthwhile posts from the experimental WordPress site (WTF) here and closing its hosting account. I haven’t been compelled to actually do anything with it in months, and the handy redirects, alone, are not worth the upcosts, however fair. Some content – including the corresponding posts for my Adobe experiments will not be imported from WTF here. I’m also going to rely on the Web Archive for publishing the rest. Notable discoveries so far include “Through an iPhone 4’s Lens,” which is a reminder of how revolutionary that particular handset was, and a few extra-Psalms pieces of content I’d like you to experience, like this Notion gallery of my single jaunt into drawing, # DavidBlueDraws. Best of all is my friend Tevin’s episode of Extratone’s defunct flagship podcast. In the years since, he’s become quite the prolific Twitch streamer. (I’ve watched enough and know Tevin well enough to say that he’s particularly entertaining in this medium.)
-
-
-
-
Coming Soon
-
-
For better or worse, all of these new exploratory avenues have so far led directly away from the business of actually writing, but – in my best self-estimation – I suspect I’m mostly done with fiddling, now, and ready to start thinking on the page, again. Predictably, I’ve let my upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max Review turn into quite a monstrosity over the past two months. It turns out, years of lapsed attention toward iOS development resulted in my feeling more out-of-the-loop than I expected, which I was compelled to remedy, naturally. If you’re so inclined, you can follow the minutia attached to my review process via this dedicated Snapas gallery, this shared iCloud album, my personal YouTube channel , and this Twitter collection.
-
-
SO... I’m really starting to see the magic now. I just took this and it’s 2AM... utterly dark outside. I managed to force my car mount to couple with a tripod and set the exposure to 30 seconds. pic.twitter.com/FMLGrFzgy2
As per my newfound use of GitHub, I’ve played around with various ways of documenting this journey, specifically. First is this Wiki page (which I shall do my best to remember to keep updated) listing the entirety of my writing history on iPhone and iOS. (It’s uh... A bit underwhelming, if I’m honest.) I’ve also just begun a dedicated repository for iOS-related documentation and resources, which will soon include a full, sensically-indexed list of iCloud share links to my entire Siri Shortcuts collection (I hope.) Immediately following the review, I intend to publish here a post dedicated to functions Apple has failed to properly document, which I expect to be the most widely-useful content on this domain. To see some of the suggestions I’ve received so far and/or to add your own, see this mildly-successful thread I posted in r/iOS.
-
-
-
-
When I have finally tired of talking about handsets once more, I hope to return my attention toward some other overwhelmingly-ambitious monstrosities like my academic paper proposing federated, open-source social networks in favor of the Big Boys, my report on the experience of returning to academia for a semester in 2020, and my evaluation of Notion as perhaps the next Big Step in the evolution of notetaking software. Perhaps before tackling projects the size of these, I intend to compile another listicle of handy tips for newcomers to Writeas. As I linked before, you can now view the entirety of The Psalms’ status in as much detail as you’d like via its Project Board on GitHub. As always, you can delight me by directly engaging on Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and/or via email. Let’s hope 2021’s equivalent of this review doesn’t take me until February to publish!
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/2020
- Thu, 04 Feb 2021 22:50:45 +0000
-
-
- Concerning Discovery in Streaming Music
- https://bilge.world/streaming-music-discovery?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Dark Wrapped 2020 - Spotify
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking" - a function once relegated to magazines - has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” – applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now – can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
Premium Badges - Spotify
In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and – most controversially – the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns – if not its proposed solutions – should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
Responsible Curation
For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook – the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world – as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy – vague, at best.
iframe width="auto" height="auto" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/At_K4FVY198?controls=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen/iframe
In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”
You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
From its very origin, the team designed Bandcamp to make the process of publishing one’s music as easy as possible. In the first post on the company’s blog from September, 2008, Diamond details the results of their engineering:
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”
As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections – which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page – and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
---
[1] While Bandcamp set out from the beginning to make it easier for artists to publish music, getting music on Spotify has always been a grueling process.
[2] I fully intended to quote Kaitlyn Tiffany on how organizations only get tech media attention if a significant amount of capital is involved in some form, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ll certainly come back and add it if/when I do.
#software #music]]>
-
-
-
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
-
-
Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
-
-
For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
-
-
Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking” – a function once relegated to magazines – has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” – applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now – can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
-
-
-
-
In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
-
-
On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
-
-
She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
-
-
According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
-
-
“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
-
-
The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
-
-
In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
-
-
Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and – most controversially – the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns – if not its proposed solutions – should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
-
-
Responsible Curation
-
-
For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
-
-
Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
-
-
Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
-
-
Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook – the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world – as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy – vague, at best.
-
-
-
-
In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
-
-
In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”[^1]
-
-
You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
-
-
In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
-
-
Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
-
-
In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
-
-
Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
-
-
The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
-
-
Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
-
-
I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”[^2]
-
-
As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections – which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page – and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
-
-
Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
-
-
The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
-
-
-
-
[1] While Bandcamp set out from the beginning to make it easier for artists to publish music, getting music on Spotify has always been a grueling process.
-
-
[2] I fully intended to quote Kaitlyn Tiffany on how organizations only get tech media attention if a significant amount of capital is involved in some form, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ll certainly come back and add it if/when I do.
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/streaming-music-discovery
- Wed, 09 Dec 2020 06:00:29 +0000
-
-
- Software Thanksgiving
- https://bilge.world/big-thank?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Digital Leaves
Purposing a disciplined effort to reflect on those tech products which have remained too fair and/or too good to catch the attention of the alarmists in us, recently.
I've never been a big fan of holidays, nor do I think Thanksgiving should be a federal one, given its shitty, undebatably imperialist origins, but these opinions are entirely inconsequential. Regardless of how I feel, Thanksgiving will remain as pervasive as ever in the spaces around me, so I thought I'd change things up this year and actually participate in a substantial way. I did my best to travel back to a vastly less complicated self, letting all of the crud that's accumulated atop my love of computers in the past twenty years: wokeness, adtech, Obama wearing VR glasses, etc... When I thought the Native Americans were glad to see white people because they gave them guns and horses and assumed people made things because good ideas were the apex of currency. When I was able to respond to new software discoveries by screwing around aimlessly without wondering if they'd been stolen entirely from a handful of talented developers lacking in the resources and know how required to protect their ideas in the face of Microsoft's ruthless Embrace, Extend, Extinguish crusade.
Forgive yourself for a moment and return there with me. Or perhaps somewhere else, if you need - wherever and whenever you last remember feeling genuinely enthralled with The Future of Computers. (Perhaps it was yesterday! If so, Gourd bless you. Never change.) Let's take ourselves back to kindergarten, before we knew anything about the rapid cyclical consolidation and monopolization within the technology industry that had already established itself as a trend, by then, when all we knew of the software we interacted with was contained within our most visceral reactions: I like Ask Jeeves because I like red and I like Jeeves. I vaguely remember when Google (the search engine) first broached the general awareness of my elementary school's computer lab. I'm fairly sure I even remember the sort of feelings that were elicited the first time I actually set eyes on the Google.com homepage: it looked so modern, then, compared to the rest of the web. (After two decades, it currently looks like shit.) Upon the first first query, it was immediately clear that Google was superior to any of the other search engines we'd been using.
This sort of encounter - with a service that significantly alters one's perception of a given set of tasks - is precious in our lives as users.
A few examples from my own using life which come to mind:
The first time I witnessed a Skype call.
Downloading and using the beta Evernote client on the school machines in Junior High.
The first album I uploaded on Bandcamp.
Discord's first public release.
The "moment" I first put a name to Markdown. (I'd been using bits of the syntax for years before I actually read the word.)
And most recently, exploring Notion as personal catch-all documentation software.
The atmosphere of elation about the future on which I so often lament has been replaced by wariness for most of us - from Californian software developers to tractor-hacking farmers. Now, the conversation is saturated with CEO appearances before legal committees, corporate memo leaks, and somber interviews. Of course, I have unquestionably contributed more than my share. In fact, I wish I could be twice as critical in twice the written volume, and I believe the tech media industry to be far too culturally-embedded within Silicon Valley to be nearly critical enough. For this holiday, though, I think a respite from the negative is worthwhile and essential. I know it is for my personal sanity, at least.
iframe src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfPdoP8oKIG6UhpK515D4x6khPNJqJlHPYAYflwKSpuVsUDw/viewform?embedded=true" width="285" height="600" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"Loading…/iframe
A week ago, I shared this Google Form and asked you to reflect with me on the "really great" software/services you have encountered in your using life built by "technology companies who's business ethics align toward the benefit of us users and who's products are well-priced (or free!)" As of the time of this writing, nearly 80 responses have been recorded on the form, itself, and several more via comments on Hacker News. I deeply appreciate your participation! They're far from predictable, too - I've ended up learning a lot. The very first submission was for Logos Bible Software, which has quite a fascinating history. I feel like those less-secular of us go unexposed to theological software without participants such as the human who submitted this one (thank you, human!,) and end up missing out on an entire segment of software development. Having studied The Good Book in a very much analog fashion through Lutheran school, I wonder in retrospect how software solutions could've changed the experience.
I have never received this volume of feedback in my prompts before, nor have I ever really seen a reason to close any of them to responses, so I'm going to take a blind shot at the dartboard and plan to close the form on New Year's Day, 2021. Until then, please feel free to respond in any way you'd like and/or view all the live answers in this very bad spreadsheet full of these very good responses. (My apologies - I have absolutely no idea how to use Google Sheets.)
Software Thanksgiving Cloud
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I originally intended to go into relatively extensive detail for each of the entities on my own Most Thankful For list, but I do have to actually stop somewhere, so the commentary on these isn't remarkably insightful or educational. It is genuine, though, which is worth something, I hope.
1. Bandcamp
Yes, I have tirelessly promoted my essay about Bandcamp's holiness for years now, but I have done so with good reason: here is a for-profit technology company which is building a one-of-a-kind product that invests directly in independent artists. I spent a whole summer scouring The Web looking for a single misstep or controversy and found absolutely none.
Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
2. OBS
Before OBS (Open Broadcaster Software,) streaming video was an absolute mess that usually involved paying for or pirating some proprietary software. Remember Ustream? Good God...
iframe width="auto" height="auto" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EPZXkvl8cT0?controls=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen/iframe
OBS is the streaming video equivalent of Audacity and GIMP: an extremely powerful, infinitely-malleable set of tools that allow one to take full advantage of their hardware to capture and/or stream video and audio.
Typora - Gitbooks Slate Theme
3. Typora
There's a file entitled "My Darling, Typora" sitting in my essay drafts folder, currently, which describes this text editor as "the perfect writing software." (See its notes page on Notion for more.)
From another recommendation I wrote:
Typora is an infinitely-customizable markdown editor spanning all platforms that's managed to become my primary word processor (and I'm someone who demands a lot from word processors.) It's immensely powerful in all the important ways - my use over the past two years has stress tested it with both enormous (100,000+ words) and extremely complicated (100+ images and embeds) documents. It's able to export even these chunkos to any format you can imagine instantaneously and never crashes.
From a comment I made on The Information's notetaking software comparison:
Typora is a Markdown editor with left sidebar file sorting, very much like Bear (several available themes can make it look actually identical, in fact,) but without its native iCloud-based file syncing. It is cross-platform, open-source, and definitely more powerful, though.
The Typora theming community has been especially on-point, as of late. In the screenshot embedded above, it's wearing the Slate variation of H16nning's Gitbook theme, which is by far the most beautiful configuration I've yet to see the editor in.
4. GIMP
The GNU Image Manipulation Program - which just celebrated its 25th anniversary last week - is one of the most powerful tools in its space and perhaps the number one exemplary example of open source software to cite when explaining the concept for the first time. I have used it my entire creative life for all manner of tasks and evangelized it plenty, but it wasn't until I returned to college this Fall and took advantage of Adobe's student discounts that I had an opportunity to thoroughly explore its proprietary nemesis, Photoshop.
iframe width="auto" height="auto" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CezNvZ-TQlY?controls=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen/iframe
What I found was indeed a very powerful piece of software, albeit as arrogant as ever in its stubborn commitment to the original keyboard shortcuts set by default and other legacy artifacts, though not one I would compare to GIMP, necessarily. This shouldn't be breaking news: as far as I know, there are billions of posts comparing the two going back to the beginning of the written word. My personal conclusion: I can accomplish much more, much faster with GIMP in every single one of my own use cases.
5. Audacity
I was browsing some FOSS-related article aggregation page a few weeks ago when a post caught my eye: "Audacity exceeds 100 million downloads." In reflection, I realized in that moment that perhaps no other single piece of software has been so thoroughly present in my "workflows" across all sorts of projects through the years, largely because of its God-sent Truncate Silence feature, which I have used to remove silence from audio files for as long as I've been working within the medium, basically. Every podcast episode I have ever published has passed through Audacity for this reason and others, as have voiceovers, high school punk band demo tapes, personal voice notes, and more.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"the world would actually be perfect if audacity's truncate silence feature could be autotied to video timecodes./p— David Blue (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/766786796898357248?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"August 19, 2016/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
Until OBS came along, Audacity was where all recorded audio started for myself and my creative friends. It was Audacity that captured (and caused, technically) the death of my friend's soundcard in audio form during the recording process for Hamura, the first Drywall album, back in October of 2011.
iframe width="100%" height="auto" src="https://clyp.it/ycvt1wij/widget" frameborder="0"/iframe
Fucking around in Audacity through the years has led to some halfway creative results on my part, including "SLOWED 'N' THROWED" Hilary Duff tracks and legacy Windows sounds remixes. I still use it for every episode of End User and have recently created a macro for remastering Drycast episodes. (A big feat for me and reflective of Audacity's ingenuity.) As far as I know, there are zero competitors, proprietary or not, which can replicate Audacity's particular usefulness as an audio utility.
iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/516674979&color=%2300006b&autoplay=false&hiderelated=false&showcomments=true&showuser=true&showreposts=false&showteaser=true"/iframe
NeoCities Interactions
6. NeoCities
Shortly after I discovered NeoCities last Spring, I signed up to be a Supporter for $5/month, not necessarily for the additional storage or bandwidth, but because the project immediately sounded like one I was personally obligated to uplift. Parimal Satyal's essay "Rediscovering the Small Web," along with the design of the website which delivered it, inspired me to make another attempt at building an HTML site by hand. So far, davidblue.xyz obviously borrows heavily from his CSS, but looking at the code itself was vastly more pleasant than one would expect. Recently, during the course of writing an academic research essay, I found myself listening to interviews with its founder, Kyle Drake and reading articles from its debut in 2013, which prompted me to take even further advantage of my account.
The Drywall Website
Last week, I moved my inactive automotive blog (dieselgoth.com) from a Writeas blog to a purely-HTML NeoCities website with disturbingly little friction. (I challenge you to spot any differences.) After discovering a backup of the original Drywall Website deep within my old files, NeoCities was the only reasonable host on which to archive it. After I'd finished uploading, I fell down what the youth call a "rabbit hole" of discovery, mesmerized by what I found on page after page of NeoCities' site browser. I did my best to save the best finds by following them within the sites dashboard and have since set up a Best of NeoCities GitHub repository with my absolute favorites among them archived thanks to wget.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"LOOK AT THIS GORGEOUS WEBSITE! a href="https://t.co/nahoRCEkeE"https://t.co/nahoRCEkeE/a a href="https://t.co/mzEfhGygWz"pic.twitter.com/mzEfhGygWz/a/p— David Blue (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1328337497416458247?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"November 16, 2020/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
Trust me when I tell you that *some of the best web design, ever can be found on NeoCities. What's even better: after my deep dive, I was pleasantly surprised by strangers commenting on what I'd found! Replying in a timely, substantial, and genuine manner seems to be a hallmark of the community: my (rather verbose) question regarding the well-manneredness of publishing such an archive without permission in the community Discord I discovered just this morning was almost immediately met with encouraging replies.
A Post you should probably expect soon: "NeoCities is 2020's Best Social Network." Going forward, I'd like to digitize my poetry collection on NeoCities in the near future while continuing to otherwise brush back up on HTML and CSS - both of which I am also* very thankful for, come to think of it.
Thank you again for your correspondence! May your Imperialism Day be a positive experience!
ʰᵉʳᵉ
ᵃʳᵉ
ᵗʰᵉ
ᵈʳʸʷᵃˡˡ
ʷᵉᵇˢᶤᵗᵉ
ᵉᵃˢᵗᵉʳ
ᵉᵍᵍˢ
DryBuy
software]]>
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Purposing a disciplined effort to reflect on those tech products which have remained too fair and/or too good to catch the attention of the alarmists in us, recently.
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I've never been a big fan of holidays, nor do I think Thanksgiving should be a federal one, given its shitty, undebatably imperialist origins, but these opinions are entirely inconsequential. Regardless of how I feel, Thanksgiving will remain as pervasive as ever in the spaces around me, so I thought I'd change things up this year and actually participate in a substantial way. I did my best to travel back to a vastly less complicated self, letting all of the crud that's accumulated atop my love of computers in the past twenty years: wokeness, adtech, Obama wearing VR glasses, etc... When I thought the Native Americans were glad to see white people because they gave them guns and horses and assumed people made things because good ideas were the apex of currency. When I was able to respond to new software discoveries by screwing around aimlessly without wondering if they'd been stolen entirely from a handful of talented developers lacking in the resources and know how required to protect their ideas in the face of Microsoft's ruthless Embrace, Extend, Extinguish crusade.
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Forgive yourself for a moment and return there with me. Or perhaps somewhere else, if you need – wherever and whenever you last remember feeling genuinely enthralled with The Future of Computers. (Perhaps it was yesterday! If so, Gourd bless you. Never change.) Let's take ourselves back to kindergarten, before we knew anything about the rapid cyclical consolidation and monopolization within the technology industry that had already established itself as a trend, by then, when all we knew of the software we interacted with was contained within our most visceral reactions: I like Ask Jeeves because I like red and I like Jeeves. I vaguely remember when Google (the search engine) first broached the general awareness of my elementary school's computer lab. I'm fairly sure I even remember the sort of feelings that were elicited the first time I actually set eyes on the Google.com homepage: it looked so modern, then, compared to the rest of the web. (After two decades, it currently looks like shit.) Upon the first first query, it was immediately clear that Google was superior to any of the other search engines we'd been using.
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This sort of encounter – with a service that significantly alters one's perception of a given set of tasks – is precious in our lives as users.
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A few examples from my own using life which come to mind:
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The first time I witnessed a Skype call.
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Downloading and using the beta Evernote client on the school machines in Junior High.
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The first album I uploaded on Bandcamp.
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Discord's first public release.
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The “moment” I first put a name to Markdown. (I'd been using bits of the syntax for years before I actually read the word.)
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And most recently, exploring Notion as personal catch-all documentation software.
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The atmosphere of elation about the future on which I so often lament has been replaced by wariness for most of us – from Californian software developers to tractor-hacking farmers. Now, the conversation is saturated with CEO appearances before legal committees, corporate memo leaks, and somber interviews. Of course, I have unquestionably contributed more than my share. In fact, I wish I could be twice as critical in twice the written volume, and I believe the tech media industry to be far too culturally-embedded within Silicon Valley to be nearly critical enough. For this holiday, though, I think a respite from the negative is worthwhile and essential. I know it is for my personal sanity, at least.
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A week ago, I shared this Google Form and asked you to reflect with me on the “really great” software/services you have encountered in your using life built by “technology companies who's business ethics align toward the benefit of us users and who's products are well-priced (or free!)” As of the time of this writing, nearly 80 responses have been recorded on the form, itself, and several more via comments on Hacker News. I deeply appreciate your participation! They're far from predictable, too – I've ended up learning a lot. The very first submission was for Logos Bible Software, which has quite a fascinating history. I feel like those less-secular of us go unexposed to theological software without participants such as the human who submitted this one (thank you, human!,) and end up missing out on an entire segment of software development. Having studied The Good Book in a very much analog fashion through Lutheran school, I wonder in retrospect how software solutions could've changed the experience.
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I have never received this volume of feedback in my prompts before, nor have I ever really seen a reason to close any of them to responses, so I'm going to take a blind shot at the dartboard and plan to close the form on New Year's Day, 2021. Until then, please feel free to respond in any way you'd like and/or view all the live answers in this very bad spreadsheet full of these very good responses. (My apologies – I have absolutely no idea how to use Google Sheets.)
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ⓣⓗⓐⓝⓚⓢ
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I originally intended to go into relatively extensive detail for each of the entities on my own Most Thankful For list, but I do have to actually stop somewhere, so the commentary on these isn't remarkably insightful or educational. It is genuine, though, which is worth something, I hope.
Yes, I have tirelessly promoted my essay about Bandcamp's holiness for years now, but I have done so with good reason: here is a for-profit technology company which is building a one-of-a-kind product that invests directly in independent artists. I spent a whole summer scouring The Web looking for a single misstep or controversy and found absolutely none.
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Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
Before OBS (Open Broadcaster Software,) streaming video was an absolute mess that usually involved paying for or pirating some proprietary software. Remember Ustream? Good God...
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-
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-
OBS is the streaming video equivalent of Audacity and GIMP: an extremely powerful, infinitely-malleable set of tools that allow one to take full advantage of their hardware to capture and/or stream video and audio.
Typora is an infinitely-customizable markdown editor spanning all platforms that's managed to become my primary word processor (and I'm someone who demands a lot from word processors.) It's immensely powerful in all the important ways – my use over the past two years has stress tested it with both enormous (100,000+ words) and extremely complicated (100+ images and embeds) documents. It's able to export even these chunkos to any format you can imagine instantaneously and never crashes.
Typora is a Markdown editor with left sidebar file sorting, very much like Bear (several available themes can make it look actually identical, in fact,) but without its native iCloud-based file syncing. It is cross-platform, open-source, and definitely more powerful, though.
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The Typora theming community has been especially on-point, as of late. In the screenshot embedded above, it's wearing the Slate variation of H16nning's Gitbook theme, which is by far the most beautiful configuration I've yet to see the editor in.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program – which just celebrated its 25th anniversary last week – is one of the most powerful tools in its space and perhaps the number one exemplary example of open source software to cite when explaining the concept for the first time. I have used it my entire creative life for all manner of tasks and evangelized it plenty, but it wasn't until I returned to college this Fall and took advantage of Adobe's student discounts that I had an opportunity to thoroughly explore its proprietary nemesis, Photoshop.
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What I found was indeed a very powerful piece of software, albeit as arrogant as ever in its stubborn commitment to the original keyboard shortcuts set by default and other legacy artifacts, though not one I would compare to GIMP, necessarily. This shouldn't be breaking news: as far as I know, there are billions of posts comparing the two going back to the beginning of the written word. My personal conclusion: I can accomplish much more, much faster with GIMP in every single one of my own use cases.
I was browsing some FOSS-related article aggregation page a few weeks ago when a post caught my eye: “Audacity exceeds 100 million downloads.” In reflection, I realized in that moment that perhaps no other single piece of software has been so thoroughly present in my “workflows” across all sorts of projects through the years, largely because of its God-sent Truncate Silence feature, which I have used to remove silence from audio files for as long as I've been working within the medium, basically. Every podcast episode I have ever published has passed through Audacity for this reason and others, as have voiceovers, high school punk band demo tapes, personal voice notes, and more.
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the world would actually be perfect if audacity's truncate silence feature could be autotied to video timecodes.
Until OBS came along, Audacity was where all recorded audio started for myself and my creative friends. It was Audacity that captured (and caused, technically) the death of my friend's soundcard in audio form during the recording process for Hamura, the first Drywall album, back in October of 2011.
-
-
-
-
Fucking around in Audacity through the years has led to some halfway creative results on my part, including “SLOWED 'N' THROWED” Hilary Duff tracks and legacy Windows sounds remixes. I still use it for every episode of End User and have recently created a macro for remastering Drycast episodes. (A big feat for me and reflective of Audacity's ingenuity.) As far as I know, there are zero competitors, proprietary or not, which can replicate Audacity's particular usefulness as an audio utility.
Shortly after I discovered NeoCities last Spring, I signed up to be a Supporter for $5/month, not necessarily for the additional storage or bandwidth, but because the project immediately sounded like one I was personally obligated to uplift. Parimal Satyal's essay “Rediscovering the Small Web,” along with the design of the website which delivered it, inspired me to make another attempt at building an HTML site by hand. So far, davidblue.xyz obviously borrows heavily from his CSS, but looking at the code itself was vastly more pleasant than one would expect. Recently, during the course of writing an academic research essay, I found myself listening to interviews with its founder, Kyle Drake and reading articles from its debut in 2013, which prompted me to take even further advantage of my account.
-
-
-
-
Last week, I moved my inactive automotive blog (dieselgoth.com) from a Writeas blog to a purely-HTML NeoCities website with disturbingly little friction. (I challenge you to spot any differences.) After discovering a backup of the original Drywall Website deep within my old files, NeoCities was the only reasonable host on which to archive it. After I'd finished uploading, I fell down what the youth call a “rabbit hole” of discovery, mesmerized by what I found on page after page of NeoCities' site browser. I did my best to save the best finds by following them within the sites dashboard and have since set up a Best of NeoCities GitHub repository with my absolute favorites among them archived thanks to wget.
Trust me when I tell you that some of the best web design, ever can be found on NeoCities. What's even better: after my deep dive, I was pleasantly surprised by strangers commenting on what I'd found! Replying in a timely, substantial, and genuine manner seems to be a hallmark of the community: my (rather verbose) question regarding the well-manneredness of publishing such an archive without permission in the community Discord I discovered just this morning was almost immediately met with encouraging replies.
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-
A Post you should probably expect soon: “NeoCities is 2020's Best Social Network.” Going forward, I'd like to digitize my poetry collection on NeoCities in the near future while continuing to otherwise brush back up on HTML and CSS – both of which I am also very thankful for, come to think of it.
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Thank you again for your correspondence! May your Imperialism Day be a positive experience!
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/big-thank
- Wed, 25 Nov 2020 21:00:16 +0000
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- The Social Dilemma's Dilemma
- https://bilge.world/the-social-dilemma?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[The Social Dilemma - The Founders on Their iPhones
The pop culture discussion of tech's greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways.
For those of us who've written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/"ethical" conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it's particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn't know what the movie was about. I'm not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could've done better, in that regard.
First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell's casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man's screen, the film's depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as "ridiculous," as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
The Verge's official review of the film - written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey - is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge's audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media - grandmothers, retirees, etc. - who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about "privacy" - a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of "my data," regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which - while possible - is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"you don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses - you need only to want a better and/or different experience./p— David Blue (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1283173322822488064?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"July 14, 2020/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by - and directly promotes on several occasions - one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain... hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for "solutions" to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who've been building against the adtech-funded web for ages - some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization's website nor the film's webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
The Social Dilemma Newsletter Prompt
The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I'm here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you've followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn't still be reading,) you know I've advocated exhaustively for Mastodon - the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who's business model benefits both platform and artist. I'm still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn't immediately off-putting to "the average person."
iframe width="100%" height="265" src="https://clyp.it/oxpup2vm/widget" frameborder="0"/iframe
Poke around the film's official website a bit and you'll discover a variety of heavily-branded "resources" for "taking action," all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the "Take Action" vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall's tips for reducing your screen time, the "Data Detox Kit," which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a "Join Now" button, and - most ironic of all - a link to download the "Ad Observer plugin," in order to "share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable." In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the "Online Political Transparency Project" instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
The Social Dilemma Bingo
No, it's not a scam. Using The Markup's shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here's the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves... incompetence? I'm afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world - regardless of what they believe now, or then - that these folks should not be our first call when we're searching for "solutions." You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can't imagine you'd be correct... Under the heading "CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA," step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both – or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
You wouldn't announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
Now, I've always considered the ability to change a computer's name an immense privilege. My first "real" computer's name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus' name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that's completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone's common name to that of "your favorite television character" (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so...) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it's just that it's ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down "change device name" as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
Firefox for iOS Notification
A notification I received while literally typing this out.
I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an "Alternative Apps Centre" within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the "detox" seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it's hilarious that I can freely refer to "privacy" as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one' social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the "Supported by Mozilla Firefox" badges all over the website and asks me "well, what did you expect?" My answer: something "more" than promotion, I suppose.
I suspect this is another case of don't go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to "innovate" than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I'd somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who's notifications I'd probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I'd wager.) I suspect it's long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as "Email Addiction" goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR's greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email's footer. If you're really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform's archives feature - or don't - but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you'll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it's okay to announce on Facebook that you're taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823-4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I've discovered with you.
My own advice on "privacy:" don't worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the "privacy tools" you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you're an iOS user, you've already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step - if we're really honest with ourselves - is figuring out how you're going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
#software #film]]>
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The pop culture discussion of tech's greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways.
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For those of us who've written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/“ethical” conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it's particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn't know what the movie was about. I'm not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could've done better, in that regard.
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First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell's casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man's screen, the film's depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as “ridiculous,” as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
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The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
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The Verge's official review of the film – written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey – is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge's audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media – grandmothers, retirees, etc. – who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about “privacy” – a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of “my data,” regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which – while possible – is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
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you don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses – you need only to want a better and/or different experience.
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by – and directly promotes on several occasions – one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain... hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for “solutions” to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who've been building against the adtech-funded web for ages – some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization's website nor the film's webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
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The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I'm here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you've followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn't still be reading,) you know I've advocated exhaustively for Mastodon – the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who's business model benefits both platform and artist. I'm still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn't immediately off-putting to “the average person.”
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Poke around the film's official website a bit and you'll discover a variety of heavily-branded “resources” for “taking action,” all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the “Take Action” vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall's tips for reducing your screen time, the “Data Detox Kit,” which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a “Join Now” button, and – most ironic of all – a link to download the “Ad Observer plugin,” in order to “share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable.” In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the “Online Political Transparency Project” instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
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No, it's not a scam. Using The Markup's shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here's the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves... incompetence? I'm afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world – regardless of what they believe now, or then – that these folks should not be our first call when we're searching for “solutions.” You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
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Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can't imagine you'd be correct... Under the heading “CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA,” step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
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At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both – or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
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This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
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You wouldn't announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
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Now, I've always considered the ability to change a computer's name an immense privilege. My first “real” computer's name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus' name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that's completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone's common name to that of “your favorite television character” (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so...) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it's just that it's ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down “change device name” as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
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-A notification I received while literally typing this out.
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I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an “Alternative Apps Centre” within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the “detox” seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it's hilarious that I can freely refer to “privacy” as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one' social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the “Supported by Mozilla Firefox” badges all over the website and asks me “well, what did you expect?” My answer: something “more” than promotion, I suppose.
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I suspect this is another case of don't go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to “innovate” than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I'd somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who's notifications I'd probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
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Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I'd wager.) I suspect it's long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as “Email Addiction” goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR's greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email's footer. If you're really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform's archives feature – or don't – but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you'll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
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If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it's okay to announce on Facebook that you're taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823-4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I've discovered with you.
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My own advice on “privacy:” don't worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the “privacy tools” you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you're an iOS user, you've already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step – if we're really honest with ourselves – is figuring out how you're going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
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- https://bilge.world/the-social-dilemma
- Mon, 19 Oct 2020 20:10:47 +0000
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- Indulging Once More in Digital Excess
- https://bilge.world/digital-excess?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[So Much To Do, So Much To See
An update on all I’ve been doing instead of what I actually intended to do.
There will always be plenth of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. - Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think"
Everything happens so much. - Horseebooks
You have a desire for indulgence in your home and family, Co-Star has just told me in my weekly, email newsletter-delivered horoscope. “Venus conjunct to natal Moon” indicates this part of yourself will transform into something else, and goes on to say something truly stirring: the way you relate to your past is changing\. I continue to be amazed by how influential the potential of the computing hardware present in my life at any given time can be on my habits. In the two weeks I’ve had my first moderately powerful desktop computer in over ten years, I have found myself using new image & video editing software, installing local WordPress stacks, finally experimenting with Git, somehow generating 20 draft posts on a fresh experimental WordPress site, and putting my whole back into my new Notion account, including – among others – projects like my “Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.” All the while, there has been a pull toward a more deliberate, focused sort of digital existence: reflection on Kevin McGillivray’s Word of The Year concept, digital gardening, and a few other like discoveries have culminated in a newfound, unironic use of the term “Creative Wellness” to describe a set of ideologies which I believe I should strive for in order to improve my intellectual wellbeing.
In tandem with the fact that I have gone back to school, this has all crucially resulted in very little actual writing, which may or may not be conclusive evidence toward the classical minimalist technology argument that less capability results in more focus. On that note, remember when the Game of Thrones author appeared on Conan’s show and mentioned that he still writes exclusively using WordStar 4.0? This happening has been vaguely in the back of my mind since I encountered it during the relatively brief, basement apartment-dwelling era in Oregon when I first discovered WinWorldPC and got into running a bunch of DOS VMs, trying out every download from that blessed site which sounded even remotely interesting. Before I go on, let me just include a transcript of the entire anecdote I’m referring to here, because it’s actually much shorter than one is led to believe:
Conan: These novels that that you write are can be over a thousand pages long. They're massive tomes and apparently you write them all on a computer, but unlike most authors, you're not worried about a computer virus. I mean an author who writes a thousand-page book their greatest fear is a virus invades and destroys a chunk of their book you don't worry about that. Why?
Martin: No I have a secret weapon - I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the internet with and that I get my email on and I do my taxes on and that computer and then I have my writing computer which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.
Conan: A DOS machine. How old is this program?
Martin: A DOS machine. You remember DOS? I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system.
Conan: Did you make this computer out of wood? Did you carve it? I'm curious why you decided to stick with this old program.
Martin: I actually like it. I mean, it does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital - if I wanted a capital, I would've typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key. Stop fixing it!
Conan: You yell at computers a lot. What about spellcheck?
Martin: Oh, I hate spellcheck. Especially when you have the realm of [???], it's [???].
That’s it! A less than sixty second exchange. I did not remember just how much coverage it received on digital news sites. Embark on a Google search for “george rr martin wordstar,” and you’ll discover a ridiculously long list of brief stories including the YouTube embed. A book I’ve just recently discovered and begun – which I am extremely excited about – is Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and its introduction begins by mentioning The George Thing, which surely indicates that it is the most significant mention of word processing software in popular culture for at least a decade:
The clip was posted to YouTube and from there embedded in innumerable tweets, Facebook feeds, and blogs. Some commenters immediately, if indulgently, branded Martin a Luddite, while others opined it was no wonder it was taking him so long to finish the whole story (or less charitably, no wonder that it all seemed so interminable). But what was it about these seemingly obscure details that people found so compelling? Part of it was no doubt the unexpected blend of novelty and nostalgia: Many fans would be old enough to remember WordStar for themselves, and the intricacy of its interface seems somehow in keeping with Martin’s quirky persona, part paternalistic grandfather and part Doctor Who character. WordStar thus becomes an accessory to his public image, like the black fisherman’s cap he is frequently photographed wearing. But it is also clearly much more than that. Martin’s passion for the program is unmistakable...
The book, itself, was also more widely reviewed than one would expect, where it was deemed genuinely unique. I related quite hard to the preface’s first few sentences:
Track Changes began, as many books do, with a question: What was the first novel written with a word processor? Being an English professor interested in the history of writing as well as computers, I thought it was the sort of thing I should know, but I didn’t.
Discovering the volume was a result of a personal determination in the last week to give in to my latent obsession with word processing/text editing software, which also led to my creating a Notion table of every word processor I’ve ever heard of. Thanks to my desktop PC acquisition, found myself virtual machining a bit again, though some of the programs I’m particularly interested in trying have inexplicitly disappeared from my personal library and been removed from WinWorldPC, probably due to (mostly absurd) copyright claims. Most versions of WordStar are still available, though, and I’ll confess I still have a desire to learn how to use its cult keyboard shortcuts, as evangelized by Robert J. Sawyer in an essay also discussed in Track Changes, which specifically shits on WordPerfect more explicitly than I remembered. I keep returning to the idea that I should try writing the stuff I normally work on – like this post, for instance – in these software, but file transfer is a bigger and bigger obstacle the older the OS you’re running: VirutalBox’s “Guest Additions” – which allow clipboard sharing/shared folders/other interoperative network functions – are not compatible with DOS or any Windows editions before 4.0. There are workarounds, but I haven’t found any reasonably within my current abilities.
Truthfully, though, emulating twenty-year-old software seems a bit unnecessary when contrasted with the fact that Markdown, Typora, and Writeas were supposed to be my saviors from distracted writing. A compulsion to comment on a recent note-taking app comparison published in The Information reminded me that I still haven’t written an in-depth review of Typora, which I plan to prioritize in the near future, especially since it may finally be officially releasing, according to recent activity on Twitter.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"some gorgeous themes added to Typora's theme gallery recently. a href="https://t.co/oFXop0W9ZU"https://t.co/oFXop0W9ZU/a a href="https://t.co/mZ3OwAqrv6"pic.twitter.com/mZ3OwAqrv6/a/p— David Blue (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1307551063810158594?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"September 20, 2020/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
Another result of my reintroduction to academia is that I can now afford a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to student discounts. This has been life-changing in a manner which I should probably be a bit ashamed of, but once the desire to make full use of my subscription (by trying every single program it licenses) subsides, I really do intend to become proficient with InDesign – a learning experience which I will surely at least attempt to thoroughly document, here.
Digital Gardening
I think it was Tom Critchlow’s Digital Gardening blogchain that first exposed me to the term and his static site-generated wiki project that introduced me to the concept of personal wikis, not so long ago, though the desire to organize and/or archive personally-relevant information through the format has actually been rattling around my head for the better part of a decade. When I discovered that one could install MediaWiki – the platform Wikipedia, itself is built on – I created the shortlived Drywall Wiki, once upon a time. Since I last wrote you, I also purchased the extratone.wiki domain and played around once again with the platform. Typora even offers exports in MediaWiki’s bizarre proprietary text format! For better or worse, though, I don’t see anything becoming of the project for the moment I suppose it feels like somewhat of a risk, investing a lot of time I probably shouldn’t have into documenting all of my Twitter jokes. For the moment, I think my Notion account will have to serve as my personal wiki.
The most inciteful argument I’ve read among the Digital Gardens discourse revolves around value as it is created within our personal online writing spaces. Two of the many infinitely-quotable essays within this space: Mike Caulfield’s “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral” and “Stock and flow” from Snarkmarket. The former references Vannevar Bush’s infamous “As We May Think” essay (which I’ve finally gotten around to finishing and its description of a “memex,” which many cite as a disturbingly-apt prediction of the World Wide Web. Caulfield, however, disagrees:
So most people say this is the original vision of the web. And certainly it was the inspiration of those pioneers of hypertext. But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all . Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.
Reading back from a lens including this commentary, I immediately understood. The memex concept is far more intimate than the web has become (or perhaps ever was – I wouldn’t know.) “Stock and flow” defines creative value in two disparate types of media:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
To be honest, I personally cannot imagine undertaking the task of explaining this differentiation to anyone in my own life, but if the reactionary movement within The Web back to a focus on valuable content is, indeed, underway, perhaps such conversations are bound to shortly become more and more natural. For my part, I have attempted setting up an experimental site on Github Pages using Jekyll in the past few days with partial success: as soon as I tried to specify a custom theme, I apparently broke it, at which point I realized that I had homework to do. As much as I hate to admit it, Kev Quirk’s posts regarding WordPress’ practical simplicity over SSGs earlier this monthrings somewhat true. As things currently stand, WordPress’ permeability throughout The Web is an advantage for those who just want to publish something as simply as possible. My counterargument to both Kev and myself: Writeas is a wonderful compromise in terms of substance and image among one’s super e-enabled, Mullenweg-disgusted peers. It’s very much pure Markdown, but it’s far more accessible, cross-platform, than SSGs due to its shear simplicity.
One component which Digital Gardening would seem to offer others that I have never particularly struggled with is the freedom to write whatever I feel like writing. If anything, I have struggled in the opposite sense, existing in a state completely unhindered by consideration of the value my work may or may not offer anyone else. Perhaps the most substantial addition I’m capable of making to the Digital Gardens conversation, then, is best quoted from the first chapter of the advice book I have finally begun writing for young men, For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss:
If there is one idea of mine you ever engage with – in this book or otherwise – it is best distilled in this single sentence: *you do not \actually\ want to attain a state of true apathy, trust me. It is extremely unhealthy, miserable, and alienating. I have existed for an excruciatingly long time trapped in a state of being truly unable to care about anything in the face of a great, varying effort to do so. It is very far from the immunity imbued in terms like carefree – in reality, it is manifested in extreme depression. It is less immunity than it is distance from an essential part of life.
In terms of one’s blogging, I am glad for those who will/have/are finding a new freedom of expression, but hold this as a serious caution regarding the other extreme. Should you ever approach it, remember that considering one’s audience – as academics love to prioritize – really is important, eventually.
Curation
At this point, I’ve used a channel in Extratone’s Discord as my ongoing reading list for several years essentially without change. Earlier this month, though, I discovered Raindrop – a bookmarking service with public collections that (so fars) feels much more aligned with my own needs than Pocket – and pretty much immediately signed up to begin paying for it and set up a bot to crosspost from my new Reading List collection, there to the same Discord channel via the collection’s RSS feed. Raindrop’s browser extension – along with Notion’s, come to mention it – is actually usable in day-to-day browsing. As much as I love Reading.am, the prospect of its longevity worries me considering the most recent post in its development blog dates to 2016. Writing a dedicated “Little Review” of Raindrop is on my (ever-lengthening) todo list, but at the moment, I would especially emphasize my Digital Magazine Collection, which is the result of thousands of hours of web exploration and genuinely worth significant value for most anyone, I think.
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font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:550; line-height:18px;" View this post on Instagram/div/divdiv style="padding: 12.5% 0;"/div div style="display: flex; flex-direction: row; margin-bottom: 14px; align-items: center;"div div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; height: 12.5px; width: 12.5px; transform: translateX(0px) translateY(7px);"/div div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; height: 12.5px; transform: rotate(-45deg) translateX(3px) translateY(1px); width: 12.5px; flex-grow: 0; margin-right: 14px; margin-left: 2px;"/div div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; height: 12.5px; width: 12.5px; transform: translateX(9px) translateY(-18px);"/div/divdiv style="margin-left: 8px;" div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 20px; width: 20px;"/div div style=" width: 0; height: 0; border-top: 2px solid transparent; border-left: 6px solid #f4f4f4; border-bottom: 2px solid transparent; transform: translateX(16px) translateY(-4px) rotate(30deg)"/div/divdiv style="margin-left: auto;" div style=" width: 0px; border-top: 8px solid #F4F4F4; border-right: 8px solid transparent; transform: translateY(16px);"/div div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; flex-grow: 0; height: 12px; width: 16px; transform: translateY(-4px);"/div div style=" width: 0; height: 0; border-top: 8px solid #F4F4F4; border-left: 8px solid transparent; transform: translateY(-4px) translateX(8px);"/div/div/div/a p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;" a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CFDYTmuh-kg/?utmsource=igembed&utmcampaign=loading" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="blank"I know it may not seem all that significant, but this digital magazine collection actually represents a lot of effort - years of web exploration, both active and passive. Find it here: davidblue.wtf/magazines/a/p p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;"A post shared by a href="https://www.instagram.com/asphaltapostle/?utmsource=igembed&utmcampaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px;" target="blank" David Blue/a (@asphaltapostle) on time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2020-09-12T22:12:52+00:00"Sep 12, 2020 at 3:12pm PDT/time/p/div/blockquote script async src="//www.instagram.com/embed.js"/script
With the combination of my public Notion workspaces and public Raindrop collections, I hope to make my curatorial endeavors both more accessibly beautiful and more intimately available. In terms of a dedicated discussion of Notion’s interworkings and culture, I think I have quite a bit more exploring to experience before I’m sufficiently qualified, though my notes are already quite extensive (and publicly accessible, thanks to… Notion!) In general, I continue to be astounded by the amount of tools/services/applications I have not yet heard of, despite how long I have labored to become an authority on Writing Tools.
Too Many Fonts! - WordPerfect
Workflow
In my endeavor to more intentionally design my workspace – to actually dedicate a space for working, originally – I originally very much intended to set up dual displays for my desktop, but the desk I settled for (an old family piece from the early 1900s?) does not have enough surface area to position two displays, regardless of how thin they’ve become since I last had one. Combined with a limited budget and a concern that two displays might actually result in further distraction instead of less, I instead went for a single, 27” LED affair. I’ve also been making full use of Windows 10’s desktop switching feature and have found it surprisingly easy to make a habit, especially thanks to the Ctrl+Win+Lateral Arrow Keys keyboard shortcuts.
Hildur Keyboard Shortcuts
On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I’ve by now worked out a personally-optimized remap (thanks to the keyboard manager tool included with PowerToys, about which I have far too much to say in some future post.) I had a conversation with a few Mastodon friends two weeks ago convincing me that my methodology of forcing myself to learn shortcuts by integrating a cheat sheet into my desktop backgrounds may actually be an original idea and useful to other users.
In terms of writing spaces, I have actually been composing the less serious stuff I’ve been writing within WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, which is not an admission I would’ve expected to be making, just a year ago. A dedicated post about this, too, is fucking coming, but suffice it to say that with a fairly-substantial PC and a better hosting provider (DreamHost over GoDaddy, in this case,) composition has become far far smoother – improving enough to make it a viable space within which to pound away original stuff for the first time. Writing essays for academia has encouraged my return to Microsoft Word, once again, on which I’ll blame the fact that I am currently composing this very bit in The Old Bitch. A desire to once again hack together a set of personalized Word templates has led to the birth of two such files which I am proud enough to share on my Notion drive. Eventually, I would also like to take the time to completely redesign the “Ribbon” in Word – something which I’ve literally never seen anyone else do. (I spent a substantial amount of time trying to find a library for MS Office customization files, to no avail, though you can find my own customization file as it stands on the same Notion page linked just now. Let me know if you’re able to successfully import it.)
Woke Word
A confession of vanity: I suspect the only reason I haven’t yet stopped composing within WordPress is that I figured out how to change the typeface to Adobe Caslon (across both the editor and the front-facing site, naturally,) thanks to my newfound access to Adobe Typekit. Yes, apparently I really am that shallow. For those Office 365 users among you, I highly suggest you look up how to enable the Classic Office sound theme. Unlike Make Use Of, I find them both adorable and genuinely useful as auditory feedback. You may also be interested in my discovery of some fairly-Woke additions to Word’s autocorrect options and the subsequent bitchy controversy their introduction spawned.
Software History Society Banner
The Read-It Website
If you know me at all, the following admission probably seems unbelievable: I have been using Reddit. I created a new subreddit for Extratone – which I do not necessarily expect to be populated any time soon – and r/SoftwareHistory after discovering that it didn’t yet exist, which I definitely do not expect you to populate, but would be delighted if you did. As with seemingly everything else I’ve covered, I also intend to write about how Reddit’s recent feature additions and redesign may actually make it a redeemable space on The Web, which should prove interesting. Clearly, I have become more than willing to accept the moniker of Software Historian* whenever/if ever my authority achieves the appropriate volume to deserve to be christened so.
Obviously, none of the developments I’ve shared in this post indicate any improvement in my productive output, but I hope to learn soon how to settle into a fairly-consistent (and hopefully much more original) writing process.
#software #meta]]>
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An update on all I’ve been doing instead of what I actually intended to do.
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There will always be plenth of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. – Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think“
You have a desire for indulgence in your home and family, Co-Star has just told me in my weekly, email newsletter-delivered horoscope. “Venus conjunct to natal Moon” indicates this part of yourself will transform into something else, and goes on to say something truly stirring: *the way you relate to your past is changing*. I continue to be amazed by how influential the potential of the computing hardware present in my life at any given time can be on my habits. In the two weeks I’ve had my first moderately powerful desktop computer in over ten years, I have found myself using new image & video editing software, installing local WordPress stacks, finally experimenting with Git, somehow generating 20 draft posts on a fresh experimental WordPress site, and putting my whole back into my new Notion account, including – among others – projects like my “Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.” All the while, there has been a pull toward a more deliberate, focused sort of digital existence: reflection on Kevin McGillivray’s Word of The Year concept, digital gardening, and a few other like discoveries have culminated in a newfound, unironic use of the term “Creative Wellness” to describe a set of ideologies which I believe I should strive for in order to improve my intellectual wellbeing.
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In tandem with the fact that I have gone back to school, this has all crucially resulted in very little actual writing, which may or may not be conclusive evidence toward the classical minimalist technology argument that less capability results in more focus. On that note, remember when the Game of Thrones author appeared on Conan’s show and mentioned that he still writes exclusively using WordStar 4.0? This happening has been vaguely in the back of my mind since I encountered it during the relatively brief, basement apartment-dwelling era in Oregon when I first discovered WinWorldPC and got into running a bunch of DOS VMs, trying out every download from that blessed site which sounded even remotely interesting. Before I go on, let me just include a transcript of the entire anecdote I’m referring to here, because it’s actually much shorter than one is led to believe:
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Conan: These novels that that you write are can be over a thousand pages long. They're massive tomes and apparently you write them all on a computer, but unlike most authors, you're not worried about a computer virus. I mean an author who writes a thousand-page book their greatest fear is a virus invades and destroys a chunk of their book you don't worry about that. Why?
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Martin: No I have a secret weapon – I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the internet with and that I get my email on and I do my taxes on and that computer and then I have my writing computer which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.
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Conan: A DOS machine. How old is this program?
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Martin: A DOS machine. You remember DOS? I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system.
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Conan: Did you make this computer out of wood? Did you carve it? I'm curious why you decided to stick with this old program.
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Martin: I actually like it. I mean, it does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital – if I wanted a capital, I would've typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key. Stop fixing it!
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Conan: You yell at computers a lot. What about spellcheck?
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Martin: Oh, I hate spellcheck. Especially when you have the realm of [???], it's [???].
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That’s it! A less than sixty second exchange. I did not remember just how much coverage it received on digital news sites. Embark on a Google search for “george rr martin wordstar,” and you’ll discover a ridiculously long list of brief stories including the YouTube embed. A book I’ve just recently discovered and begun – which I am extremely excited about – is Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and its introduction begins by mentioning The George Thing, which surely indicates that it is the most significant mention of word processing software in popular culture for at least a decade:
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The clip was posted to YouTube and from there embedded in innumerable tweets, Facebook feeds, and blogs. Some commenters immediately, if indulgently, branded Martin a Luddite, while others opined it was no wonder it was taking him so long to finish the whole story (or less charitably, no wonder that it all seemed so interminable). But what was it about these seemingly obscure details that people found so compelling? Part of it was no doubt the unexpected blend of novelty and nostalgia: Many fans would be old enough to remember WordStar for themselves, and the intricacy of its interface seems somehow in keeping with Martin’s quirky persona, part paternalistic grandfather and part Doctor Who character. WordStar thus becomes an accessory to his public image, like the black fisherman’s cap he is frequently photographed wearing. But it is also clearly much more than that. Martin’s passion for the program is unmistakable...
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The book, itself, was also more widely reviewed than one would expect, where it was deemed genuinely unique. I related quite hard to the preface’s first few sentences:
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Track Changes began, as many books do, with a question: What was the first novel written with a word processor? Being an English professor interested in the history of writing as well as computers, I thought it was the sort of thing I should know, but I didn’t.
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Discovering the volume was a result of a personal determination in the last week to give in to my latent obsession with word processing/text editing software, which also led to my creating a Notion table of every word processor I’ve ever heard of. Thanks to my desktop PC acquisition, found myself virtual machining a bit again, though some of the programs I’m particularly interested in trying have inexplicitly disappeared from my personal library and been removed from WinWorldPC, probably due to (mostly absurd) copyright claims. Most versions of WordStar are still available, though, and I’ll confess I still have a desire to learn how to use its cult keyboard shortcuts, as evangelized by Robert J. Sawyer in an essayalso discussed in Track Changes, which specifically shits on WordPerfect more explicitly than I remembered. I keep returning to the idea that I should try writing the stuff I normally work on – like this post, for instance – in these software, but file transfer is a bigger and bigger obstacle the older the OS you’re running: VirutalBox’s “Guest Additions” – which allow clipboard sharing/shared folders/other interoperative network functions – are not compatible with DOS or any Windows editions before 4.0. There are workarounds, but I haven’t found any reasonably within my current abilities.
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Truthfully, though, emulating twenty-year-old software seems a bit unnecessary when contrasted with the fact that Markdown, Typora, and Writeas were supposed to be my saviors from distracted writing. A compulsion to comment on a recent note-taking app comparison published in The Information reminded me that I still haven’t written an in-depth review of Typora, which I plan to prioritize in the near future, especially since it may finally be officially releasing, according to recent activity on Twitter.
Another result of my reintroduction to academia is that I can now afford a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to student discounts. This has been life-changing in a manner which I should probably be a bit ashamed of, but once the desire to make full use of my subscription (by trying every single program it licenses) subsides, I really do intend to become proficient with InDesign – a learning experience which I will surely at least attempt to thoroughly document, here.
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Digital Gardening
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I think it was Tom Critchlow’s Digital Gardening blogchain that first exposed me to the term and his static site-generated wiki project that introduced me to the concept of personal wikis, not so long ago, though the desire to organize and/or archive personally-relevant information through the format has actually been rattling around my head for the better part of a decade. When I discovered that one could install MediaWiki – the platform Wikipedia, itself is built on – I created the shortlived Drywall Wiki, once upon a time. Since I last wrote you, I also purchased the extratone.wiki domain and played around once again with the platform. Typora even offers exports in MediaWiki’s bizarre proprietary text format! For better or worse, though, I don’t see anything becoming of the project for the moment I suppose it feels like somewhat of a risk, investing a lot of time I probably shouldn’t have into documenting all of my Twitter jokes. For the moment, I think my Notion account will have to serve as my personal wiki.
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The most inciteful argument I’ve read among the Digital Gardens discourse revolves around value as it is created within our personal online writing spaces. Two of the many infinitely-quotable essays within this space: Mike Caulfield’s “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral” and “Stock and flow” from Snarkmarket. The former references Vannevar Bush’s infamous “As We May Think” essay (which I’ve finally gotten around to finishing and its description of a “memex,” which many cite as a disturbingly-apt prediction of the World Wide Web. Caulfield, however, disagrees:
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So most people say this is the original vision of the web. And certainly it was the inspiration of those pioneers of hypertext. But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all . Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.
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Reading back from a lens including this commentary, I immediately understood. The memex concept is far more intimate than the web has become (or perhaps ever was – I wouldn’t know.) “Stock and flow” defines creative value in two disparate types of media:
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Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
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Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
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To be honest, I personally cannot imagine undertaking the task of explaining this differentiation to anyone in my own life, but if the reactionary movement within The Web back to a focus on valuable content is, indeed, underway, perhaps such conversations are bound to shortly become more and more natural. For my part, I have attempted setting up an experimental site on Github Pages using Jekyll in the past few days with partial success: as soon as I tried to specify a custom theme, I apparently broke it, at which point I realized that I had homework to do. As much as I hate to admit it, Kev Quirk’s posts regarding WordPress’ practical simplicity over SSGs earlier this monthrings somewhat true. As things currently stand, WordPress’ permeability throughout The Web is an advantage for those who just want to publish something as simply as possible. My counterargument to both Kev and myself: Writeas is a wonderful compromise in terms of substance and image among one’s super e-enabled, Mullenweg-disgusted peers. It’s very much pure Markdown, but it’s far more accessible, cross-platform, than SSGs due to its shear simplicity.
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One component which Digital Gardening would seem to offer others that I have never particularly struggled with is the freedom to write whatever I feel like writing. If anything, I have struggled in the opposite sense, existing in a state completely unhindered by consideration of the value my work may or may not offer anyone else. Perhaps the most substantial addition I’m capable of making to the Digital Gardens conversation, then, is best quoted from the first chapter of the advice book I have finally begun writing for young men, For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss:
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If there is one idea of mine you ever engage with – in this book or otherwise – it is best distilled in this single sentence: you do not *actually* want to attain a state of true apathy, trust me. It is extremely unhealthy, miserable, and alienating. I have existed for an excruciatingly long time trapped in a state of being truly unable to care about anything in the face of a great, varying effort to do so. It is very far from the immunity imbued in terms like carefree – in reality, it is manifested in extreme depression. It is less immunity than it is distance from an essential part of life.
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In terms of one’s blogging, I am glad for those who will/have/are finding a new freedom of expression, but hold this as a serious caution regarding the other extreme. Should you ever approach it, remember that considering one’s audience – as academics love to prioritize – really is important, eventually.
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Curation
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At this point, I’ve used a channel in Extratone’s Discord as my ongoing reading list for several years essentially without change. Earlier this month, though, I discovered Raindrop – a bookmarking service with public collections that (so fars) feels much more aligned with my own needs than Pocket – and pretty much immediately signed up to begin paying for it and set up a bot to crosspost from my new Reading List collection, there to the same Discord channel via the collection’s RSS feed. Raindrop’s browser extension – along with Notion’s, come to mention it – is actually usable in day-to-day browsing. As much as I love Reading.am, the prospect of its longevity worries me considering the most recent post in its development blog dates to 2016. Writing a dedicated “Little Review” of Raindrop is on my (ever-lengthening) todo list, but at the moment, I would especially emphasize my Digital Magazine Collection, which is the result of thousands of hours of web exploration and genuinely worth significant value for most anyone, I think.
With the combination of my public Notion workspaces and public Raindrop collections, I hope to make my curatorial endeavors both more accessibly beautiful and more intimately available. In terms of a dedicated discussion of Notion’s interworkings and culture, I think I have quite a bit more exploring to experience before I’m sufficiently qualified, though my notes are already quite extensive (and publicly accessible, thanks to… Notion!) In general, I continue to be astounded by the amount of tools/services/applications I have not yet heard of, despite how long I have labored to become an authority on Writing Tools.
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Workflow
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In my endeavor to more intentionally design my workspace – to actually dedicate a space for working, originally – I originally very much intended to set up dual displays for my desktop, but the desk I settled for (an old family piece from the early 1900s?) does not have enough surface area to position two displays, regardless of how thin they’ve become since I last had one. Combined with a limited budget and a concern that two displays might actually result in further distraction instead of less, I instead went for a single, 27” LED affair. I’ve also been making full use of Windows 10’s desktop switching feature and have found it surprisingly easy to make a habit, especially thanks to the Ctrl+Win+Lateral Arrow Keys keyboard shortcuts.
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On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I’ve by now worked out a personally-optimized remap (thanks to the keyboard manager tool included with PowerToys, about which I have far too much to say in some future post.) I had a conversation with a few Mastodon friends two weeks ago convincing me that my methodology of forcing myself to learn shortcuts by integrating a cheat sheet into my desktop backgrounds may actually be an original idea and useful to other users.
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In terms of writing spaces, I have actually been composing the less serious stuff I’ve been writing within WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, which is not an admission I would’ve expected to be making, just a year ago. A dedicated post about this, too, is fucking coming, but suffice it to say that with a fairly-substantial PC and a better hosting provider (DreamHost over GoDaddy, in this case,) composition has become far far smoother – improving enough to make it a viable space within which to pound away original stuff for the first time. Writing essays for academia has encouraged my return to Microsoft Word, once again, on which I’ll blame the fact that I am currently composing this very bit in The Old Bitch. A desire to once again hack together a set of personalized Word templates has led to the birth of two such files which I am proud enough to share on my Notion drive. Eventually, I would also like to take the time to completely redesign the “Ribbon” in Word – something which I’ve literally never seen anyone else do. (I spent a substantial amount of time trying to find a library for MS Office customization files, to no avail, though you can find my own customization file as it stands on the same Notion page linked just now. Let me know if you’re able to successfully import it.)
-
-
-
-
A confession of vanity: I suspect the only reason I haven’t yet stopped composing within WordPress is that I figured out how to change the typeface to Adobe Caslon (across both the editor and the front-facing site, naturally,) thanks to my newfound access to Adobe Typekit. Yes, apparently I really am that shallow. For those Office 365 users among you, I highly suggest you look up how to enable the Classic Office sound theme. Unlike Make Use Of, I find them both adorable and genuinely useful as auditory feedback. You may also be interested in my discovery of some fairly-Woke additions to Word’s autocorrect options and the subsequent bitchy controversy their introduction spawned.
-
-
-
-
The Read-It Website
-
-
If you know me at all, the following admission probably seems unbelievable: I have been using Reddit. I created a new subreddit for Extratone – which I do not necessarily expect to be populated any time soon – and r/SoftwareHistory after discovering that it didn’t yet exist, which I definitely do not expect you to populate, but would be delighted if you did. As with seemingly everything else I’ve covered, I also intend to write about how Reddit’s recent feature additions and redesign may actually make it a redeemable space on The Web, which should prove interesting. Clearly, I have become more than willing to accept the moniker of Software Historian whenever/if ever my authority achieves the appropriate volume to deserve to be christened so.
-
-
Obviously, none of the developments I’ve shared in this post indicate any improvement in my productive output, but I hope to learn soon how to settle into a fairly-consistent (and hopefully much more original) writing process.
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/digital-excess
- Thu, 24 Sep 2020 22:31:23 +0000
-
-
- iOS 14's Anxious Destiny
- https://bilge.world/ios14-anxiety-mode?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[iOS 14 Custom Homescreen Collage
It is my privilege and my curse to write about every new major iteration to Apple’s mobile operating system, though I skipped iOS 13 last year, which was largely dominated by Dark Mode, the iPad OS fork, and Memoji – which I could care less about, honestly – and didn’t warrant my investment in a Full Post, I felt. The Photos app improvements were very welcome, but I’d departed from iCloud as my primary storage service, so I didn’t have anything relevant to say. iOS 14 is also mostly irrelevant to my own personal use, but represents a more abstract shift in design philosophy that I thought was worth commenting on. For myself, everything about it adds anxiety, beginning with the launch, itself, at Apple’s WWDC 2020, which I watched, live, and Tweeted extensively about.
I do not want to live on the Memoji planet.
My technology writing over the years has largely centered around my awe and confusion regarding what I've perceived as a divergent path from the future I once imagined. My closest guess as to this divergence's origin is the announcement of iOS7, with Apple's abandonment of skeuomorphic design in favor of an entirely new, "flatter" UX visual language, which I actually found quite jarring. In retrospect, though, of course I'm glad they did so. I thought this was an importat preface to any thoughts I have about today's WWDC Keynote - they will probably seem idiotic in a year or so (they might to you already.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i243Fn1HwOY
Thanks to The Big Beer Virus, this was Apple's first pre-recorded WWDC presentation (though the word "live" continued to be used on several occasions,) which made it especially surreal. During the wait for the Keynote to "go live," the stream was occupied by an animated Earth from orbit. As the clock rolled over the hour's top, AURORA's "Daydreamer" faded in and we began to grow closer to this Earth, gradually revealing that it was covered with millions of floating memoji in various states behind their animated MacBooks. Like much of the event to follow, this scene became more and more anxiety-inducing as we grew closer to the mob (keep in mind that I've never really found memoji cute, unlike plenty of folks.) Eventually, we changed pitch dramatically and plunged through a hole in the clouds straight toward the incenter of the spaceship at Apple Park, through the door, down the staircase, and into a completely empty - but fully lit - Steve Jobs theatre, where Tim Cook emerged on stage and almost immediately began to address racism.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1275178772921270275
This disorganization of Craig Federighi's Homescreen shown in the presentation exemplifies the entire aura of this update: it’s complicated. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn receives this new complication positively in an excellent essay dedicated to the topic, divided into Widgets on The Home Screen, Jiggle Mode and Editing Pages, the App Library, and App Clips. (Yes, in many ways, linking to the essay makes this post redundant.)
---
That's what I wrote about WWDC. iOS 14 officially released five days ago, now, and folks are already showcasing some crazy homescreen modifications on Twitter in #ios14homescreen. I would go into detail, but I'm honestly not all that curious about the process, which is unusual. I hope more than anything that I am not loosing my curiosity or playfulness regarding iOS which not so long ago propelled an exuberant exploration of Shortcuts' capabilities during their early days as an integrated Apple property with the release of iOS 12.
https://twitter.com/ragulover123/status/1307461503948394496
Basically, I'm not going to do the full bit, this year, but I'd like to address some of the notes I did take throughout the past few months of the developer beta. Notably, there is simply far less to iOS 14 that's relevant to my life, personally, than any other release I remember, but that's okay. It's just a wee bit more difficult to motivate myself to talk about it. If there's one definite statement to be made about this release, it's that it is additive rather than transformative. As Dieter Bohn so elequently put it for The Verge:
For the iPhone, the overarching theme is that they're finally letting it get complicated. The home screen starts simple, but it can be complex if you want it to and Apple's also finally putting different elements on top of other elements so you can see Siri on top of your current screen instead of taking over the whole screen.
"iOS and iPadOS 14 public beta preview: something for everybody" | The Verge
Yes, I do find the title of that article quite ironic considering what I just articulated to you.
The title of his penultimate review, additionally, includes the summation "Apple is finally lettting the iPhone homescreen get complicated." Yes... Complexity. I'll be honest: I've actually had the opportunity to play around quite a bit with Android 11 thanks to Android Studio on my PCs, and I found it tremendously underwhelming as an alternative. On a virtual Pixel 3, the experience was functionally no more than a fucking material design\-tasting, slightly varied execution of a smartphone operating system in comparison. I should disclaim, though, that these weeks with early iOS widget implementation - which represents quite a hefty chunk of this release's significance, I think we can all agree - have led me to the conclusion that I personally do not believe in widgets. Or at least - I do not have the usership vocabulary to even begin integrating them into my own handset-using life.\[efn\note\]I'd elaborate but honestly, who cares, really?\[/efn\note\]
To focus a bit, let's look specifically at a Gizmodo article published this past Wednesday: "17 Things You Can Do in iOS 14 That You Couldn’t Do Before:"
App Clips: Oh boy... I'm so physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted. Just gonna say no to that one.
Add widgets to the home screen: I'm going to assume it's Android users who've stigmatised dynamic home screen widgets as a desirable outlet of development resources. I simply cannot fathom any bit of data which would be truly be constructively consumed there, as opposed to unlocking the device and navigating to whatever application it originated from. Perhaps I'm just old and slow.
Send apps to the App Library: Directly related, actually. Still considering how I assume most folks actually navigate to applications that have been in folders or in secondary+ homescreens to date - that is, dragging down and typing a handful of characters into Spotlight search - I'm not sure an alphabetized listing of all apps is really that useful. I know I'm not alone on this one: iJustine expressed an identical assumption on an episode of her podcast, Same Brain.
Hide some of your home screens: (I repeat the exact same argument.)
Watch videos with picture-in-picture mode: Once again, I could definitely be showing my age, but what really constitues watching when you're talking about a fractional segment of a ~6 inch display? You may as well just be listening to the audio, right?
Pin conversations in Messages: I'm afraid the text conversation pinning feature doesn't really apply to someone like myself, who literally never messages anyone but my girlfriend and my mom. All pinning the conversations accomplishes for me is the obfuscation of the handy in-line timestamp found in the normal list view.
Mention your contacts in Messages: Jesus... And we're still using fucking SMS?
Add more variety to your memojis: I still have not figured out how to actually use memojies, practically, so...
Get suggested smart home automations: I'm sorry... What did you say? I'm not familiar with those words.
10. Get to bed on time: Clarification: "iOS 14 works with watchOS 7 (or on its own) to help you get to sleep at the right time each night, with reminders and Do Not Disturb options." If you were truly at all interested in not being disturbed or getting lots of sleep, you wouldn't have spent $300 on a machine to strap to your wrist who's primary function is to disturb you!
11. Translate websites in Safari: Christ... Really? How have I not encountered an issue with this before?
12. Search inside apps: There we go! The first item on this list that suggests anyone at Apple actually uses iOS!
13. Get more detailed weather forecasts: Dark Sky acquision... All this one does is remind me that Apple's self-restraint could breach at any time and essentially the only competent mobile weather app ever devised could die or be molested into irrelevance.
14. Use your iPhone as a translator: Well... Yeah... Anything that convenienctly allows me to reduce dependence on Google, I guess!
15. Get more facts from Siri: ...lol
"Apple says Siri knows more facts than ever before, though it hasn’t offered up any specific examples of something it knows in iOS 14 that it didn’t know in iOS 13—you’ll have to try and test it out yourself. According to Apple, Siri now knows 20 times the number of facts that it did three years ago, and we haven’t been able to catch it out with anything so far."
16. Get cycling directions in Apple Maps: No! Cut that out!
17. Plan a journey in an electric vehicle: I'm not joking when I suggest that this fits perfectly into iOS 14's Anxiety Mode Enchancement theme: all this really means is We've added the new Apple Range Anxiety app!
David Blue's Guide to Columbia, Missouri renders surprisingly beautifully on a desktop browser.
Yes, there are examples of genuine progress. The Guides feature in Maps (seen above) probably could/should have been added a long time ago, but at least Apple executed it quite elegantly. I'm could've sworn sharing your ETA has been possible from within Maps since like... iOS 7 or something, but perhaps I was thinking of Waze. Wallpapers for CarPlay are one of those features that didn’t occur to me to want, but I did/do. Also - though my personal experience with CarPlay has been limited - I can definitely imagine more layout options (“Horizontal status bar”) will be useful in fringe_ use cases.
And that's it! All of my notes have now been crossed off! Now I can finally forget I ever spent time thinking about iOS this year... Gourd Bless.
software]]>
-
-
-
It is my privilege and my curse to write about every new major iteration to Apple’s mobile operating system, though I skipped iOS 13 last year, which was largely dominated by Dark Mode, the iPad OS fork, and Memoji – which I could care less about, honestly – and didn’t warrant my investment in a Full Post, I felt. The Photos app improvements were very welcome, but I’d departed from iCloud as my primary storage service, so I didn’t have anything relevant to say. iOS 14 is also mostly irrelevant to my own personal use, but represents a more abstract shift in design philosophy that I thought was worth commenting on. For myself, everything about it adds anxiety, beginning with the launch, itself, at Apple’s WWDC 2020, which I watched, live, and Tweeted extensively about.
-
-
I do not want to live on the Memoji planet.
-
-
My technology writing over the years has largely centered around my awe and confusion regarding what I've perceived as a divergent path from the future I once imagined. My closest guess as to this divergence's origin is the announcement of iOS7, with Apple's abandonment of skeuomorphic design in favor of an entirely new, “flatter” UX visual language, which I actually found quite jarring. In retrospect, though, of course I'm glad they did so. I thought this was an importat preface to any thoughts I have about today's WWDC Keynote – they will probably seem idiotic in a year or so (they might to you already.)
-
-
-
-
Thanks to The Big Beer Virus, this was Apple's first pre-recorded WWDC presentation (though the word “live” continued to be used on several occasions,) which made it especially surreal. During the wait for the Keynote to “go live,” the stream was occupied by an animated Earth from orbit. As the clock rolled over the hour's top, AURORA's “Daydreamer” faded in and we began to grow closer to this Earth, gradually revealing that it was covered with millions of floating memoji in various states behind their animated MacBooks. Like much of the event to follow, this scene became more and more anxiety-inducing as we grew closer to the mob (keep in mind that I've never really found memoji cute, unlike plenty of folks.) Eventually, we changed pitch dramatically and plunged through a hole in the clouds straight toward the incenter of the spaceship at Apple Park, through the door, down the staircase, and into a completely empty – but fully lit – Steve Jobs theatre, where Tim Cook emerged on stage and almost immediately began to address racism.
This disorganization of Craig Federighi's Homescreen shown in the presentation exemplifies the entire aura of this update: it’s complicated. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn receives this new complication positively in an excellent essay dedicated to the topic, divided into Widgets on The Home Screen, Jiggle Mode and Editing Pages, the App Library, and App Clips. (Yes, in many ways, linking to the essay makes this post redundant.)
-
-
-
-
That's what I wrote about WWDC. iOS 14 officially released five days ago, now, and folks are already showcasing some crazy homescreen modifications on Twitter in #ios14homescreen. I would go into detail, but I'm honestly not all that curious about the process, which is unusual. I hope more than anything that I am not loosing my curiosity or playfulness regarding iOS which not so long ago propelled an exuberant exploration of Shortcuts' capabilities during their early days as an integrated Apple property with the release of iOS 12.
Basically, I'm not going to do the full bit, this year, but I'd like to address some of the notes I did take throughout the past few months of the developer beta. Notably, there is simply far less to iOS 14 that's relevant to my life, personally, than any other release I remember, but that's okay. It's just a wee bit more difficult to motivate myself to talk about it. If there's one definite statement to be made about this release, it's that it is additive rather than transformative. As Dieter Bohn so elequently put it for The Verge:
-
-
For the iPhone, the overarching theme is that they're finally letting it get complicated. The home screen starts simple, but it can be complex if you want it to and Apple's also finally putting different elements on top of other elements so you can see Siri on top of your current screen instead of taking over the whole screen.
Yes, I do find the title of that article quite ironic considering what I just articulated to you.
-
-
The title of his penultimate review, additionally, includes the summation “Apple is finally lettting the iPhone homescreen get complicated.” Yes... Complexity. I'll be honest: I've actually had the opportunity to play around quite a bit with Android 11 thanks to Android Studio on my PCs, and I found it tremendously underwhelming as an alternative. On a virtual Pixel 3, the experience was functionally no more than a fucking material design-tasting, slightly varied execution of a smartphone operating system in comparison. I should disclaim, though, that these weeks with early iOS widget implementation – which represents quite a hefty chunk of this release's significance, I think we can all agree – have led me to the conclusion that I personally do not believe in widgets. Or at least – I do not have the usership vocabulary to even begin integrating them into my own handset-using life.[efn_note]I'd elaborate but honestly, who cares, really?[/efn_note]
App Clips: Oh boy... I'm so physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted. Just gonna say no to that one.
-
Add widgets to the home screen: I'm going to assume it's Android users who've stigmatised dynamic home screen widgets as a desirable outlet of development resources. I simply cannot fathom any bit of data which would be truly be constructively consumed there, as opposed to unlocking the device and navigating to whatever application it originated from. Perhaps I'm just old and slow.
-
Send apps to the App Library: Directly related, actually. Still considering how I assume most folks actually navigate to applications that have been in folders or in secondary+ homescreens to date – that is, dragging down and typing a handful of characters into Spotlight search – I'm not sure an alphabetized listing of all apps is really that useful. I know I'm not alone on this one: iJustine expressed an identical assumption on an episode of her podcast, Same Brain.
-
Hide some of your home screens: (I repeat the exact same argument.)
-
Watch videos with picture-in-picture mode: Once again, I could definitely be showing my age, but what really constitues watching when you're talking about a fractional segment of a ~6 inch display? You may as well just be listening to the audio, right?
-
Pin conversations in Messages: I'm afraid the text conversation pinning feature doesn't really apply to someone like myself, who literally never messages anyone but my girlfriend and my mom. All pinning the conversations accomplishes for me is the obfuscation of the handy in-line timestamp found in the normal list view.
-
Mention your contacts in Messages: Jesus... And we're still using fucking SMS?
-
Add more variety to your memojis: I still have not figured out how to actually use memojies, practically, so...
-
Get suggested smart home automations: I'm sorry... What did you say? I'm not familiar with those words.
-
Get to bed on time: Clarification: “iOS 14 works with watchOS 7 (or on its own) to help you get to sleep at the right time each night, with reminders and Do Not Disturb options.” If you were truly at all interested in not being disturbed or getting lots of sleep, you wouldn't have spent $300 on a machine to strap to your wrist who's primary function is to disturb you!
-
Translate websites in Safari: Christ... Really? How have I not encountered an issue with this before?
-
Search inside apps: There we go! The first item on this list that suggests anyone at Apple actually uses iOS!
-
Get more detailed weather forecasts: Dark Sky acquision... All this one does is remind me that Apple's self-restraint could breach at any time and essentially the only competent mobile weather app ever devised could die or be molested into irrelevance.
-
Use your iPhone as a translator: Well... Yeah... Anything that convenienctly allows me to reduce dependence on Google, I guess!
-
Get more facts from Siri: ...lol
-“Apple says Siri knows more facts than ever before, though it hasn’t offered up any specific examples of something it knows in iOS 14 that it didn’t know in iOS 13—you’ll have to try and test it out yourself. According to Apple, Siri now knows 20 times the number of facts that it did three years ago, and we haven’t been able to catch it out with anything so far.”
-
Get cycling directions in Apple Maps: No! Cut that out!
-
Plan a journey in an electric vehicle: I'm not joking when I suggest that this fits perfectly into iOS 14's Anxiety Mode Enchancement theme: all this really means is We've added the new Apple Range Anxiety app!
Yes, there are examples of genuine progress. The Guides feature in Maps (seen above) probably could/should have been added a long time ago, but at least Apple executed it quite elegantly. I'm could've sworn sharing your ETA has been possible from within Maps since like... iOS 7 or something, but perhaps I was thinking of Waze. Wallpapers for CarPlay are one of those features that didn’t occur to me to want, but I did/do. Also – though my personal experience with CarPlay has been limited – I can definitely imagine more layout options (“Horizontal status bar”) will be useful in fringe use cases.
-
-
And that's it! All of my notes have now been crossed off! Now I can finally forget I ever spent time thinking about iOS this year... Gourd Bless.
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/ios14-anxiety-mode
- Mon, 21 Sep 2020 18:30:05 +0000
-
-
- Varmilo VA108M
- https://bilge.world/varmilo-va108m-mechanical-keyboard?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Varmilo VA108M
Yes, I bought a mechanical keyboard. It occurred to me that folks who spend a lot of time doing things that require tools - professionals, artisans, craftsmen, etc. - usually seek out the best possible quality offerings of those tools. Even if they're just 5% better than the average alternatives and cost twice as much, when one uses them for hours every day, the last bit of refinement pays off very quickly. Considering how much typing I've done in the past 5-10 years, I find it a bit silly that I hadn't before thought to optimize the hardware I've used to do so. Now that I've put at least some thought into designing the space in which I work and gone back to school, I've also invested in bettering the thing my hands actually touch the most.
Actually... Before I go on, here is the link to the Varmilo VA108M User Manual/Guide/Reference in English in case that's what you came looking for. (I had difficulty finding it, too.)
I suppose I've let myself be blinded to the advantages of a mechanical keyboard by the gaemer stigma that surrounds them. This time, I believe I began by simply inputting something like "best keyboard for typing" into a search engine, which returns plenty of iffy results, naturally, but among them was a list from Wirecutter - whom I trust, more or less - of "Best Mechanical Keyboards 2020." Also included were posts in the r/MechanicalKeyboards subreddit, which I actually fucking joined (but promise never to mention again outside of this post.) Uncovering my eyes, I found a ridiculously-extensive community message board and Wiki, which is undoubtedly the most extensive resource on the subject to be found, anywhere. Though I did place a time limit on myself for any research of 15 minutes, in retrospect, I suppose I also had some criteria, which I assume - if you're still reading - you might be interested in:
WIRED as fuck. Bluetooth can fuck off.
"Full" keyboard, for the same reason I'd never spend any money on a piano with any less than 88 keys.
At least tolerably tasteful, aesthetically. (Not overwhelmingly embarrassing if someone were to actually see me using it.)
Cute, ideally.
No light shows.
Not "ergonomic."
Not from Logitech or Microsoft.
Immediately, it was overwhelmingly clear that my choice must also have The Cherry... The Cherries... The "Cherry MX Switches," whatever they are. Any of even the most skimmy reading up on the subject will lead you to this conclusion. That addressed, I arrived upon three considerations: the Ducky One 2, Das Keyboard Model S Professional, and Varmilo VA87M.
Varmilo VA108M (Overhead)
Layout of the VA108M seen from above.
As good as the idea of something as German as the Das Keyboard sounded, I hate the way it looks, and the Ducky seemed to take itself too seriously (despite its brand name.) The VA87M seemed to be ideal if it was full-sized. I searched for the equivalent, found the VA108M, and bought one immediately. Specifically...
| SKU | VA108MP2W/LLK22W |
| --------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Switches | Cherry MX Silent Red |
| Dimensions | 5.39″ x 17.41″ x 1.30″ |
| Cord Length | 60 Inches |
I've already written more than I ever wanted to, but let me just say that I love everything about the thing - the particular set of special keys, the way it feels & sounds, and that its heft prevents it from moving around - and I hope to keep it forever. As I said on the photographs I posted to social media, I promise to never bring this or any other mechanical keyboard up ever again unless asked about it.
[1] Yes, I have actually been using the Read It website in the past 18 months or so, which anyone who’s known me at all would find unbelievable. I don’t know if I’ll write about it in the future, so I’ll just say I’ve unblocked it within my psyche largely because it’s no longer horrendous to look at.
[2] I remain genuinely confused as to why the color of the switches matters, considering they are only visible when the keycaps have been removed.
hardware]]>
-
-
-
Yes, I bought a mechanical keyboard. It occurred to me that folks who spend a lot of time doing things that require tools – professionals, artisans, craftsmen, etc. – usually seek out the best possible quality offerings of those tools. Even if they're just 5% better than the average alternatives and cost twice as much, when one uses them for hours every day, the last bit of refinement pays off very quickly. Considering how much typing I've done in the past 5-10 years, I find it a bit silly that I hadn't before thought to optimize the hardware I've used to do so. Now that I've put at least some thought into designing the space in which I work and gone back to school, I've also invested in bettering the thing my hands actually touch the most.
-
-
Actually... Before I go on, here is the link to the Varmilo VA108M User Manual/Guide/Reference in English in case that's what you came looking for. (I had difficulty finding it, too.)
-
-
I suppose I've let myself be blinded to the advantages of a mechanical keyboard by the gaemer stigma that surrounds them. This time, I believe I began by simply inputting something like “best keyboard for typing” into a search engine, which returns plenty of iffy results, naturally, but among them was a list from Wirecutter – whom I trust, more or less – of “Best Mechanical Keyboards 2020.” Also included were posts in the r/MechanicalKeyboards subreddit, which I actually fucking joined[^1] (but promise never to mention again outside of this post.) Uncovering my eyes, I found a ridiculously-extensive community message board and Wiki, which is undoubtedly the most extensive resource on the subject to be found, anywhere. Though I did place a time limit on myself for any research of 15 minutes, in retrospect, I suppose I also had some criteria, which I assume – if you're still reading – you might be interested in:
-
WIRED as fuck. Bluetooth can fuck off.
-
“Full” keyboard, for the same reason I'd never spend any money on a piano with any less than 88 keys.
-
At least tolerably tasteful, aesthetically. (Not overwhelmingly embarrassing if someone were to actually see me using it.)
-
Cute, ideally.
-
No light shows.
-
Not “ergonomic.”
-
Not from Logitech or Microsoft.
-
-
Immediately, it was overwhelmingly clear that my choice must also have The Cherry... The Cherries... The “Cherry MX Switches,” whatever they are. Any of even the most skimmy reading up on the subject will lead you to this conclusion. That addressed, I arrived upon three considerations: the Ducky One 2, Das Keyboard Model S Professional, and Varmilo VA87M.
-
-
-
-
Layout of the VA108M seen from above.
-
-
As good as the idea of something as German as the Das Keyboard sounded, I hate the way it looks, and the Ducky seemed to take itself too seriously (despite its brand name.) The VA87M seemed to be ideal if it was full-sized. I searched for the equivalent, found the VA108M, and bought one immediately. Specifically...
I've already written more than I ever wanted to, but let me just say that I love everything about the thing – the particular set of special keys, the way it feels & sounds, and that its heft prevents it from moving around – and I hope to keep it forever. As I said on the photographs I posted to social media, I promise to never bring this or any other mechanical keyboard up ever again unless asked about it.
-
-
[1] Yes, I have actually been using the Read It website in the past 18 months or so, which anyone who’s known me at all would find unbelievable. I don’t know if I’ll write about it in the future, so I’ll just say I’ve unblocked it within my psyche largely because it’s no longer horrendous to look at.
-
-
[2] I remain genuinely confused as to why the color of the switches matters, considering they are only visible when the keycaps have been removed.
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/varmilo-va108m-mechanical-keyboard
- Sun, 20 Sep 2020 19:50:46 +0000
-
-
- I Bought a Desktop
- https://bilge.world/hp-envy-desktop?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Hildur
I bought a desktop tower for the first time since 2010 and spent an embarrassingly long time struggling with Bluetooth shit.
As with my entire history of computer purchases, my acquisition of an HP ENVY Desktop tower, today, was last-minute, ill-informed, and certainly irrational. You "PC master race" folk: please spare me the dude, you could've just built your own pc so much cheaper shit.\efn\note\]Or don't. Whatever.\[/efn\note\] Yes, I realize the sensible course of action would've begun with a two hour trip West to the closest Microcenter, where I'm sure the staff would've made PC shopping an absolute blast and I would've come away with a more powerful, much cheaper machine. However, after I managed to [break Windows on my only machine this weekend (and subsequently failed to reset it,) I was getting especially behind on schoolwork and had absolutely no desire to complete any of it on my iPhone.
And so... I've just returned from picking up said HP Tower along with a 27" HP LED display, and am writing you after having set up the machine physically and installed most of my "essential software" list (at least all that I could remember.) As per my favorite tradition of new computer acquisition, I have named the machine after Hildur Odegard from Fortitude:
"First Impressions"
It's been exactly 10 years since I last bought a desktop tower - since I first set hands on the Dell XPS Studio desktop with which I would create the majority of my intellectual property - and I was immediately surprised by how much smaller\[efn\note\]6.12 x 11.93 x 13.28 inches.\[/efn\note\] and lighter\[efn\note\]13.12 lbs.\[/efn\note\] this tower was than my expectations. The display, too, is remarkably light and thin. Rationally, I should not have been surprised by this, but I'm not going to punish myself for continuing to find any sort of magic in technology.
In the box were a Bluetooth keyboard\efn\note\]Specifically, an HP model [4251a-khsap003k.\/efn\note\] and mouse set - the latter of which I will hopefully never have to use, thanks to my [Logitech G203 - and was perplexed by the process of how to pair the former with the tower while it was in setup mode for far too long. I was just about to give up entirely when I revisited the packaging and noticed what I'd previously assumed was an anti-theft device, but was actually the fucking dongle for the pair. I continue to despise Bluetooth peripherals, obviously, but the multimedia function keys of the product led to some important realizations: I now had reason to use Windows Desktop Switching and have a calculator application again! However, I have yet to figure out how to alter the Function key's behavior (I'm not even sure it's possible:) in order to input Alt+F4, I have to input Fn+Alt+F4, which is far too clunky to depend on. The issue did lead to a revelation which I may or may not integrate permanently: I mapped Alt+F4 to the previously-unused button on the very top of the G203. So far, it's been pretty nifty.
HP 4251a-khsap003k
The HP 4251a-khsap003k included in the box with my new HP desktop.
That said, a component of my intention to create an intentional, static, upright-sitting desktop workspace included an allotment for a quality mechanical keyboard - my justification was that any professional in a particular craft makes a point to have the best possible tools for the job, so a high-quality keyboard has actually been very long overdue, in my case. So, I sought out a single Wirecutter recommendations list and even attempted to disseminate r/MechanicalKeyboards.\efn\note\]I haven't even started self-harming yet, so my stomach is definitely strengthening!\[/efn\note\] After a brief jaunt, I concluded that no reasonable person would be able to make heads or tails of the forum or [its seemingly endless wikis without considerable indoctrination so I more or less threw a dart and landed on the Varmilo VA108M, which I ordered. All I know is that it's fairly highly-reviewed on the marketplaces I checked (though hardly mentioned on the subreddit, actually,) and that it has the Cherry Switches, which are... The good ones.
A concern I originally had with taking over the tertiary guest room - by far the smallest allotted living space in the house - as my office was its distance from our wireless router, two floors down. The last time I used the room as a workspace (five years ago,) my old tower's integrated WiFi card often struggled to maintain a reliable connection. The adapter included in this desktop, though, actually managed to clock the fastest download speed on my SpeedTest.net records just now.
SpeedTest Results
Somehow, I just managed to clock the highest download speed on my record from two floors up!
Bad(ish)
It's almost painful even to write this but... As beautiful as this $250 display is to behold, I've grown accustomed to my Surface Laptop 2's 2256 x 1504 13" display after years of hard, daily use. Apparently, those dimensions mean the little machine's display has a pixel density of 201 Pixels-Per-Inch. Filling a 27" display with just 1920 x 1080 means a pixel density of just 81.6 Pixels-Per-Inch,\efn\note\]I suppose I should not have been surprised to immediately discover a [dedicated online tool for calculating pixel density.\/efn\note\] and the disparity was glaring to my eyes, even from the setup screen. After a few hours of regular use, I'm not sure I notice it anymore, but I suspect I will again when I've got the laptop running again. Please do indicate whether or not you think such a complaint makes me awful in the [Crowdsignal poll below.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"have I become truly spoiled or is 1080p just... not high enough resolution for a 27" display./p— ※ David Blue ※ (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1301337431887708162?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"September 3, 2020/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
I've also already had trouble connecting my Bose SoundLink headphones correctly via Bluetooth. On my Surface Laptop, it registered as two separate devices - "Stereo Headphones" and "Headset" - which allowed me to use them as both the primary audio output and the primary audio input. For whatever reason, I have been unable to accomplish such a simultaneous connection on this machine: I can either connect them as headphones or as a headset, but not both. This video provided some help - I know now that I have to open Sound Settings and manually connect the headphones every time I re-connect them. Hopefully, I'll figure out another solution soon.
Returning to the webcam issue: I discovered that absolutely zero local stores keep add-on webcams in stock anymore, which makes sense. I resorted to searching Amazon for webcams and found a gargantuan list of brands I had never heard of. When I filtered by the one I did recognize - Logitech - I saw barely-facelifted versions of the camera my stepdad bought in 2008 and none were in stock. Unwilling to further investigate or research more, I set the price filter for under $40, sorted by customer ratings, and bought the first product which had even remotely legitimate-looking reviews: this 1080p thing branded with "Mersuii."
After returning to the order invoice hours later for this post, I got curious enough to Google search the company name and discovered a dead-end url, zero Wikipedia page, and this Trademark registration, on which I spotted some very interesting information. Entered in the second "Goods & Services" row is the following text:
Adult sexual stimulation aids, namely, devices for massaging or vibrating external and internal portions of the body, vibrating and non-vibrating reproductions of parts of the male and female anatomies, male sex toys, masturbators, penis pumps, electrical penis cyclone pumps, rings, clamps, stimulators, vibrators, dildos, dongs, butt plugs, anal beads, rings to be worn about the penis; Adult sexual stimulation kit comprised primarily of adult sexual stimulation aids and a workbook
MERSUii Trademark Registration - "Goods & Services"
To hell with that keyboard! Now I am immensely curious as to what I'll be receiving in the mail this coming Monday, the 7th.
uTake my Display Resolution Poll/u
#hardware #meta]]>
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I bought a desktop tower for the first time since 2010 and spent an embarrassingly long time struggling with Bluetooth shit.
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As with my entire history of computer purchases, my acquisition of an HP ENVY Desktop tower, today, was last-minute, ill-informed, and certainly irrational. You “PC master race” folk: please spare me the dude, you could've just built your own pc so much cheaper shit.[efn_note]Or don't. Whatever.[/efn_note] Yes, I realize the sensible course of action would've begun with a two hour trip West to the closest Microcenter, where I'm sure the staff would've made PC shopping an absolute blast and I would've come away with a more powerful, much cheaper machine. However, after I managed to break Windows on my only machine this weekend (and subsequently failed to reset it,) I was getting especially behind on schoolwork and had absolutely no desire to complete any of it on my iPhone.
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And so... I've just returned from picking up said HP Tower along with a 27” HP LED display, and am writing you after having set up the machine physically and installed most of my “essential software” list (at least all that I could remember.) As per my favorite tradition of new computer acquisition, I have named the machine after Hildur Odegard from Fortitude:
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“First Impressions”
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-
It's been exactly 10 years since I last bought a desktop tower – since I first set hands on the Dell XPS Studio desktop with which I would create the majority of my intellectual property – and I was immediately surprised by how much smaller[efn_note]6.12 x 11.93 x 13.28 inches.[/efn_note] and lighter[efn_note]13.12 lbs.[/efn_note] this tower was than my expectations. The display, too, is remarkably light and thin. Rationally, I should not have been surprised by this, but I'm not going to punish myself for continuing to find any sort of magic in technology.
-
-
In the box were a Bluetooth keyboard[efn_note]Specifically, an HP model 4251a-khsap003k.[/efn_note] and mouse set – the latter of which I will hopefully never have to use, thanks to my Logitech G203 – and was perplexed by the process of how to pair the former with the tower while it was in setup mode for far too long. I was just about to give up entirely when I revisited the packaging and noticed what I'd previously assumed was an anti-theft device, but was actually the fucking dongle for the pair. I continue to despise Bluetooth peripherals, obviously, but the multimedia function keys of the product led to some important realizations: I now had reason to use Windows Desktop Switching and have a calculator application again! However, I have yet to figure out how to alter the Function key's behavior (I'm not even sure it's possible:) in order to input Alt+F4, I have to input Fn+Alt+F4, which is far too clunky to depend on. The issue did lead to a revelation which I may or may not integrate permanently: I mapped Alt+F4 to the previously-unused button on the very top of the G203. So far, it's been pretty nifty.
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The HP 4251a-khsap003k included in the box with my new HP desktop.
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That said, a component of myintention to create an intentional, static, upright-sitting desktop workspace included an allotment for a quality mechanical keyboard – my justification was that any professional in a particular craft makes a point to have the best possible tools for the job, so a high-quality keyboard has actually been very long overdue, in my case. So, I sought out a single Wirecutter recommendations list and even attempted to disseminate r/MechanicalKeyboards.[efn_note]I haven't even started self-harming yet, so my stomach is definitely strengthening![/efn_note] After a brief jaunt, I concluded that no reasonable person would be able to make heads or tails of the forum or its seemingly endless wikis without considerable indoctrination so I more or less threw a dart and landed on the Varmilo VA108M, which I ordered. All I know is that it's fairly highly-reviewed on the marketplaces I checked (though hardly mentioned on the subreddit, actually,) and that it has the Cherry Switches, which are... The good ones.
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-
A concern I originally had with taking over the tertiary guest room – by far the smallest allotted living space in the house – as my office was its distance from our wireless router, two floors down. The last time I used the room as a workspace (five years ago,) my old tower's integrated WiFi card often struggled to maintain a reliable connection. The adapter included in this desktop, though, actually managed to clock the fastest download speed on my SpeedTest.net records just now.
It's almost painful even to write this but... As beautiful as this $250 display is to behold, I've grown accustomed to my Surface Laptop 2's 2256 x 1504 13” display after years of hard, daily use. Apparently, those dimensions mean the little machine's display has a pixel density of 201 Pixels-Per-Inch. Filling a 27” display with just 1920 x 1080 means a pixel density of just 81.6 Pixels-Per-Inch,[efn_note]I suppose I should not have been surprised to immediately discover a dedicated online tool for calculating pixel density.[/efn_note] and the disparity was glaring to my eyes, even from the setup screen. After a few hours of regular use, I'm not sure I notice it anymore, but I suspect I will again when I've got the laptop running again. Please do indicate whether or not you think such a complaint makes me awful in the Crowdsignal poll below.
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have I become truly spoiled or is 1080p just... not high enough resolution for a 27" display.
I've also already had trouble connecting my Bose SoundLink headphones correctly via Bluetooth. On my Surface Laptop, it registered as two separate devices – “Stereo Headphones” and “Headset” – which allowed me to use them as both the primary audio output and the primary audio input. For whatever reason, I have been unable to accomplish such a simultaneous connection on this machine: I can either connect them as headphones or as a headset, but not both. This video provided some help – I know now that I have to open Sound Settings and manually connect the headphones every time I re-connect them. Hopefully, I'll figure out another solution soon.
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-
Returning to the webcam issue: I discovered that absolutely zero local stores keep add-on webcams in stock anymore, which makes sense. I resorted to searching Amazon for webcams and found a gargantuan list of brands I had never heard of. When I filtered by the one I did recognize – Logitech – I saw barely-facelifted versions of the camera my stepdad bought in 2008 and none were in stock. Unwilling to further investigate or research more, I set the price filter for under $40, sorted by customer ratings, and bought the first product which had even remotely legitimate-looking reviews: this 1080p thing branded with “Mersuii.”
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-
After returning to the order invoice hours later for this post, I got curious enough to Google search the company name and discovered a dead-end url, zero Wikipedia page, and this Trademark registration, on which I spotted some very interesting information. Entered in the second “Goods & Services” row is the following text:
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Adult sexual stimulation aids, namely, devices for massaging or vibrating external and internal portions of the body, vibrating and non-vibrating reproductions of parts of the male and female anatomies, male sex toys, masturbators, penis pumps, electrical penis cyclone pumps, rings, clamps, stimulators, vibrators, dildos, dongs, butt plugs, anal beads, rings to be worn about the penis; Adult sexual stimulation kit comprised primarily of adult sexual stimulation aids and a workbook
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- https://bilge.world/hp-envy-desktop
- Thu, 03 Sep 2020 19:08:36 +0000
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- The Psalms
- https://bilge.world/
- A narcoleptic yokel on software and culture.
- Thu, 22 Jul 2021 17:36:15 +0000
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- The State of Mastodon iOS Apps
- https://bilge.world/mastodon-ios-apps?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Mastodon iOS Apps Surveyed
A safari through the enchanting space of third-party Mastodon clients on iOS.
Apple's second virtual World Wide Developer Conference came and went as I wrote this guide - you can metaphorically picture me looking up from my machine having overheard the news of the 2021 Apple Design Award Winners announcement. Perusing through them, I saw two I would have voted for, myself: CARROT Weather - the beautifully vulgar, grumpy bitch frontend for your preferred weather information service, and Craft - perhaps the most innovative take on word processing of the past two or three years - listed under "Finalists." (Read: losers.) The most positive personal discovery of (all?) WWDCs: an app called Be My Eyes, which "connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call," along with an exceptionally crafted, cross-device accessible-as-fuck TTS solution called Voice Dream Reader. However, a double take in games from Genshin Impact and the fucking League of Legends game certainly sours the mouth and suggests yet further just how much Apple, Inc. has sold out.
The continued prioritization of Growth for Growth's sake over any and all other considerations (namely, users,) is not unexpected from even the most valuable company in the history of the world, I suppose, but there is an actor at this point in the story who is catastrophically and demonstrably failing to fulfill their role: all I really know is that technology media has fallen into a trough of total uselessness when it comes to qualitative, authoritative analysis of consumer-targeted software. The necessity of this guide - and the bizarrely silent ignorance of even the "fringes" on its subject - is unimaginably severe. Before me has been (for years, now,) the "answer" to a Jolly Big Load of what tech and marketing types lament in more and more existential language, yet hardly any of the humans with the most to lose from their negligence - regular, casual social media users - have been delivered to these experiences. The story is not being articulated. The journalism is not being done.
I know you almost certainly did not arrive here to hear one motherfucker's complaints about WWDC, but - as with everything Apple, Inc. does - every morsel of curatorial expression/discrimination/favoritism from The Great Money God within this platform must be scrutinized and criticized. Quite frankly, I found myself completely at a loss as to how not to dwell on the Discovery Disparity, here.
Despite how deeply I've gone into iOS this year, I do not believe myself to be a qualified judge of software design, but I no longer believe Apple to be, either. Regardless of the revenue-related controversies of late, Apple have simply become terrible stewards of the App Store in every imaginable sense. Scams and blatant intellectual property theft abound, while the majority of the most innovative entries I've ever seen remain entirely obfuscated and uncelebrated by all of Apple. Inc.'s mechanisms. If you required an explanation for the amount of time I've invested into App Guides - a space to which I never would have imagined intentionally bringing The Psalms - I hope you can understand.
I must confess: I have been meaning to write this app guide since even before I interviewed Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko on the morning of his Big Press Day, just over 4 years ago. I’ve exhaustively explored different means of convincing my own longtime Twitter friends to move, over that time, with very little success. Eugen, himself, published an official blog post at the beginning of February detailing his plans to open up onboarding by way of “an official Mastodon app that is free to download and that is specialized in helping new users get started on the platform.” As a Patreon supporter of The Mastodon Project (full disclosure,) I've been testing this app (see preview shots at the very end,) and am quite smitten with it. That said, I thought it might be worth going over the third-party options iOS users currently have available to them, largely because the offerings are each innovative and mature applications in their own right. (Also, it’s become quite apparent that the normal tech media sources you’d go to for such a guide aren’t going to give Mastodon the attention it deserves.)
Masto Mascot iOS Art
Obligatory(?) Context
I originally intended to be as clinical as possible in this Post, having realized its potential as the singular comparison of its kind to appear in search results for new and potential users of Mastodon. From my perspective, Mastodon has long since surpassed regard as a novel social media experiment who's function is to prompt academic conversations about decentralization, open source, ad tech, and federated social's solutions to all of the Big Web's Big Boy (proprietary) Problems (though I have been compelled to invest significantly in that very conversation.) In the less intellectual hours of my day-to-day life (read: most of the time,) Mastodon is nothing more or less than my favorite place on the internet. It is a relentless delight which I only lament because I want to share so much of it with my friends, but have continued to fail in my efforts to articulate that Mastodon is not a compromise; it is a better social space.
If you didn't know, this seems to have become my general shit, for lack of a better term: the ethical considerations of open source/"alternative" software are very important, yes! ... but they are far from the whole, and they are not a requisite for new users. The second of this World Wide Web Blog's fundamental considerations, in fact:
The Open Source/Open Web community continues to struggle with their brand image (if you will) in both old and new ways that needlessly alienate (and sometimes obfuscate) some of their most important contributions from the average user. Technology media has failed in their responsibility to address this issue.
The blog on which you're reading this, in fact, is federated on ActivityPub. If you so chose, you could be reading it in any client capable of displaying large bodies of text. The crucial point, though, is that you didn't need to know that - you could very well go on reading it on the web in total ignorance/apathy regarding Federation.
Oh boy, here we go... No. I did not want to say anything ideological - I wanted this Post to function as little more than a pretty screenshot showcase and simple associative list responding to all of the Reddit posts I've seen to the tune of "is there an iPhone app?" As I explored them, however, I was reminded of the sheer creativity the "alternative" software community is capable of. Even the roughest of these considered apps seem unable to be faceless - sorting through the obscene amount of (unlabeled) screenshots accumulated over the past weeks of testing in my Recents folder has been so much easier than I thought it would be because of their relentless originality. If you've actually used any iOS applications and/or browsed the singular App Store from which they can be acquired in the past 3-4 years, you're undoubtedly skeptical: what we might have called "feature overlap" at one time has become all but the platform's core ethos. If you're the sort who enjoys screwing around with apps, generally, as I have for the whole of iPhone history, you have grown accustomed to disappointment.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1402057069927309318
Regardless of who is to blame, we can all agree that the App Store is currently oversaturated nigh beyond usability with mediocre entries built from the beginning with zero apparent ambition toward original function. This, alone, wouldn't be so problematic if Discovery were not so completely and totally Fucked (except when dev-facing,) but I needn't comment further on that subject at the moment - I'm just trying emphasize how absolutely unheard of it is for a single protocol/service's third-party client representation on iOS to be so thoroughly special. It was astonishing to find all but one or two of these apps in a functional state, actually. In all my equivalent experiences downloading the entirety of a given service's API-supported palette (e.g. IRC apps, topically,) an all-too-significant purpose of whatever ends up getting published is simply documenting the ~20% of available titles that actually work at the given moment. (I'd have mentioned the "best service/task] iPhone apps for [year]" listicles found in online publications like Digital Trends were it not for the percentage of them in which it's clear the author did not actually download some/most of the apps listed‽‽‽) Perhaps due to [iOS 14.5's implementation of ATT, all of the Mastodon apps I could find and test (not counting non-English language-supporting apps, in fairness' interest) are currently functioning.
So, if there's virtually zero chance a new Mastodon user might download one of the apps we're about to consider and find it broken, what practical function remains for this guide? Hopefully, to establish a SEO catch-all for such users from a non-automated source less associated with the project than the official apps list. Those for whom Mastodon is still an unfamiliar subject should find the collected imagery intriguing, hopefully.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2MSr7J1GY
Mastodon iOS Icon Strip
The Big 6
My first step in writing this guide was to post a thread on r/Mastodon soliciting thoughts on third-party Mastodon apps from other users, who expressed a lot of love for Toot! and Metatext:
Toot is just a joy to use. It has a little too much sometimes (it actually contains little mini games...which really aren't needed), but the experience of using it has some really clever UI twists. -u/mikepictor
Pragmatic Code's Linky was also mentioned by multiple respondents. It's not a client, but a bridging tool for smoother URL sharing that integrates with iOS' share sheet. I did not have time to try it, myself, but from all accounts, it is an obligatory mention. So too is the GitHub Repository/List I created in order to "formally" offer a list with much greater brevity and zero editorialization.
First, let’s begin with The Big 6 - those apps The Mastodon Project, itself, has seen fit to list on joinmastodon.org.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=LdBFMibyh3Y
Toot!
Dag Ågren‘s Toot! is not only my personal app of choice - I would (and have) go so far as to say it’s the single most innovative mobile social app I’ve ever encountered, largely because of its jacknife-esque instance selection. It’s held a place in my phone’s dock since the day I first downloaded it, for this and many other reasons. While one might find bugs/loose ends (understandably) exploring the functions of other indie social clients, within Toot!, they will only find little delights, like its wholly unique Share Sheet interface.
Toot! Themes
Toot! is extremely beautiful (despite its unfortunate name,) and I am quite superficial in my taste. It’s Obsidian theme (which may or may not be related to the topical notetaking system of the same name) is especially gorgeous.
audio controls
source src="https://github.com/extratone/bilge/raw/main/audio/Toot!%20Custom%20Sounds.mp3"
/audio
In my cacophonous attempt to compare the notifications of all available Mastodon apps simultaneously, it's worth noting that Toot!'s always came first. Its charming custom audio alerts also make them my favorite by far.
They're not just cute: in reflection informed by a newly-considered function of these apps - serving as representing the network as a whole - it occurred to me that Toot! audio alerts playing from my iPhone have prompted more first-time conversations about Mastodon in the wild than I can count. (Seriously: they should be considered an onboarding mechanism.)
Toot! Settings
In my experience, it’s also the most robust of the lot - as in, it is very much the exception rather than the norm to encounter any sort of error or other obstruction in normal, day-to-day use. My own real reservation applies to the entire selection discussed today: I wish Toot! supported Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts.
Mast for iOS
Mast
I originally had high hopes for Shihab Mehboob‘s Mast - which used to look very different from the way it does, today. That’s almost certainly to do with its ownership changing hands at some point (no, I do not have any further details on that story, unfortunately.) That’s not to say the current app isn’t a worthwhile offering, it’s just far less visually ambitious than the original I remember. However, it’s also significantly more reliable.
https://twitter.com/JPEGuin/status/1354854403124178947
Mast Details
Amaroq for iOS
Amaroq
The Original… Genesis… If Amaroq was not the first Mastodon app on the App Store, it’s certainly the oldest to survive. Its GitHub Repository’s first commit dates back to April 17th, 2017. While you’re there, you might note that it’s the only one of these entries coded entirely in Objective-C - the near-40-year-old language originally underpinning iOS before Swift’s birth in 2014. Amaroq was the first Mastodon app I used and remains the strongest free option for iOS users. It’s been nearly a year since its last update, so its missing a few narrower functions like Bookmarking and Polls, but the core features it does include are rock solid. The only wild card: what the fuck is Awoo Mode???
iMast for iOS
iMast
For better or worse, @rinsuki’s iMast will require either a basic grasp of the Japanese language, or the patience to translate its menus and work backwards. (OCR came to mind, but I’m not quite dedicated enough to try it for this guide.) Assuming Google’s translation of its GitHub Pages site is correct, iMast is also Open Source “under the Apache License 2.” Unlike Amaroq, it appears to have been built in Swift from the ground up. Unfortunately, that's about all I can comment on, though I would very much love to hear from any iMast users/Japanese speakers and will update this Post accordingly.
A function I can provide: documenting iMast’s Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts.
iMast’s Keyboard Shortcuts
| Action | Key |
|:-------------------:|:----------:|
| Open Compose Window | ⌘ + N |
| Send Toot | ⌘ + Return |
| Home Timeline | ⌘ + 1 |
| Notifications | ⌘ + 2 |
| Local Timeline | ⌘ + 3 |
| Others (Menu) | ⌘ + 9 |
iMast is also the singular Mastodon app with a Siri Shortcuts action!
Mercury for iOS - Scoops Theme
Mercury
Daniel Nitsikopoulos' Mercury represents yet another entirely original direction in Social clients. It's fresh and "opinionated" in its explicit lack of support for instances that "promote abuse and harassment." From all appearances, this appears to be the singular source of negative reviews on its iOS App Store page. It's also the other option to offer widgets integration (in a single form, currently,) and custom audio notifications, though I couldn't capture a sample. Its Trello Roadmap and Feedback Repo are public but mostly inactive. As you can see in the grid embedded above, I absolutely adore its Scoops theme and find my $0.99 Tip 100% worth its custom icons.
img src="https://i.snap.as/r8Qc4BPc.jpeg" alt="Mercury for iOS - Negative App Store Reviews" style="zoom: 25%;" /
Unfortunately, the state of Mercury's App Store reviews prompt yet another essential economic/editorial consideration. The one in the very center of the image embedded, above - from "FeralDandelion" - is the singular one I will allow myself to address. It is true that Mercury straight up refuses to authenticate or federate with a substantial amount of specific Mastodon servers, but it is exhaustively explicit about this from very get-go. Its single-page Help document includes a detailed, up-to-date table of every single blocked instance and the specific justification for each respective instance's presence on it:
Mercury takes a zero tolerance stance on abuse and harassment and as such does not support many instances that promote abuse and harassment.
Let me be clear: the practical manifestation of this position is exclusively positive. The Mastodon project has long outgrown the sort of fixation on ideology for ideology's sake that even Lucky Linus himself has no patience for. Instead, thank Gourd Mercury's developers took the time to better your social experience! In response to statements like the pullquote above, I expect **only thumbs in the air* from this point, forward.
Metatext for iOS
Metatext
Metatext is perhaps the buzziest of all these apps - well-praised in every space I could find conversation on the subject. It's developed under Justin Mazzocchi's software studio, Metabolist and is as Open Source as it gets! (As per my hardware keyboard shortcuts crusade, I added my own issue requesting support.) u/GummyKibble noted that "it looks like a native app on both iOS and iPadOS." This term - native - seems inextricably linked with Metatext. I vaguely understand what it means, and I do agree, but it's worth noting that I speak with some privilege, having compared all of these apps on the top performing handset Apple currently has to offer. In many ways, it is the most frugal of the new offerings, especially, yet it strikes a keen balance between function and delight. I think "native" can be translated as generally of a stout, sturdy disposition, thanks to the care put into honing said balance.
Less-Than-Sanctioned
Tootle for iOS
Tootle
I'm not entirely positive which Mastodon app was actually the first on my iPhone, back in 2017, but I know for sure it was either Amaroq or the dearest, infinitely-colorful Tootle. Its App Store Page Version History suggests it has not been updated in 14 months, yet the app - which was apparently "Designed for iPad" - appears to be working just fine. There are some overlapping UI elements, but they're barely noticeable. Were it not for the new dev-facing store search tool mentioned above, I would have assumed this app long gone, to be honest, but using it again has somehow managed to genuinely twinge my nostalgia nerve.
In my search for any extra-App Store representation other than Tootle's Mastodon Account (which last posted the day after my birthday, last year,) I discovered Tootle... for Linux. Since I am a dedicated and thorough person, these days, I spent several hours messing around with Linux Virtual Machining until Lubuntu finally functioned just so I could show you what it looks like. Below is a screen capture of Tootle bordered by the most Macish LXQ desktop bars included in Lubuntu and even wearing the new official Apple System Font, SF Pro. Still, I think you'll agree... Tootle for Linux is not related to Tootle.
Tootle for Linux
Personally, I find this a profound shame - I think more apps should be as colorful - and as color configurable - as this little, mysterious Mastodon app. I created the theme you see represented in the frames embedded above using The Psalms colors, naturally, and the whole process took less than five minutes. Play around with it as I remember doing, all those years ago, and you'd be surprised how hard it is to create an unusable color theme. What I find most shame in, though, is that Tootle appears to be completely invisible in regular app store searches, now. (And by "most shame," you know I really mean entirely fucking unacceptable.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBZtmOqyk8c
Tusker on iOS
Tusker
I found my way to the only currently in-development entry on this list thanks to my Mastodon friend wakest. iOS developer Shadowfacts (who also maintains shadowfacts.net) is working on their considerate, distinct app, Tusker in this self-hosted Repository. In #tusker on Mastodon, you'll find a few poignant praises from Pixelfed founder and principal developer Dan Sup, which - from my perspective - are especially high, indeed.
Tusker Landscape Mode!
Tusker's color customization options are technically... well.. not infinite, like other apps here, but the end result of their (obviously, very considered) selection will be a net win for 100% of users over that alternative, I believe. It is definitely of a similar philosophy to Metatext, but unquestionably more ambitious. Out of the lot, testing Tusker was the singular instance in which I found myself considering a "replacement" for Toot! You, yourself can use Tusker right this very minute via Apple's beta distribution system, Testflight, via this invite link.
Roma for iOS
Roma
Installing Roma for the first time led to a puzzling quest with a particularly pleasant end. I noticed fairly quickly that the iOS app was a re-branded release of what used to be Mast. My first instinct upon this discovery was to DM Mast's original developer, Shihab Meboob, on Twitter, but frankly, I've already bothered him enough there over the years, so it's understandable that I didn't hear back. When I downloaded the desktop app I found on Roma's web page and noticed its similarity to Whalebird, I decided to use the site's contact form to inquire about what exactly was going on as gingerly as I could. Happily, I received a reply just minutes later from Leo Radvinsky, head of Leo.com, "a Florida-based boutique venture capital fund that invests in technology companies:"
Hi David,
In both cases we funded the original developers of both Mast and Whalebird to create a branded whitelabel app specially made for Pleroma. The idea was to make Roma a cross platform brand/app. It didn't really work out so now we're working on a new app from scratch called Fedi for iOS and Android and releasing that as open source.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fediverse.app&hl=enUS&gl=US
https://apps.apple.com/in/app/fedi-for-pleroma-and-mastodon/id1478806281
I think Roma has been removed from the app stores as it's no longer supported.
Let me know if you have any other questions
Though my hopes for the original Mast to live on in Roma form were more or less dashed by this message, the suggestion that someone is investing actual capital into federated social is certainly worth celebrating. If Roma is still available on the App Store as you're reading this, I insist you download it immediately. It represents an incredible and original attention to detail which should not simply be forgotten.
Fedi for iOS
Fedi
Naturally, the app inheriting the work/resources established by Mast and Roma - known by Fedi - should be next up for discussion. Hopefully, my relative lack of experience with Pleroma - another ActivityPub-based, federated social network - won't let you down, here. After a brief shock from the uniqueness of Fedi's UI passes, one immediately notices how beautifully it is animated, wholly disregarding my recently-acquired preference for as little animation as possible. Perhaps more than any other app discussed here, Fedi feels uncannily bespoke in a way which iOS apps almost never do. It is undoubtedly the result of a very specific vision - to disregard the whole modern template for social apps and completely reimagine the archetype. Personally, I'm not sure if it would be easy to get used to, but my tastes/habits in this regard are very much the result of the past decade of proprietary social apps' blandness. Going forward with substantial financial backing and the talents of whoever it was that got it this far, no doubt we should all have very high hopes for Fedi.
DUDU (嘟嘟) for iOS
DUDU (嘟嘟)
DUDU (or "嘟嘟," which translates to "Toot," appropriately,) definitely wins for Cutest Iconography. It's a non-English-native application with exceptional English support, which I personally appreciate very much. Compared the entries immediately above, DUDU represents a much more modest interpretation of what a Mastodon client can offer. It’s robust, free of over-animation, and - most distinctly - very wide, which might have something to do with the "designed for iPad" subtitle on its App Store Page.
Tootoise for iOS
Tootoise
Yet another "Designed for iPad" entry, Naoki Kuwata's Tootoise is defined by its custom incoming post rate accommodations and its gorgeous Solarized theme. Its "Max number of new arrival posts" setting ranges from 0-400, allowing one to freeze their timeline entirely from any accidental (or habitual) Pulls to Refresh (set at 0,) load 400 Toots from such a gesture, or anything in between (at 40-Toot increments, anyway.) The advantages of this specification become immediately apparent when one actually begins to explore it, especially for those who have come to Mastodon after feeling overwhelmed by Big Social.
Stella for iOS
Stella
Yet another entirely one-of-a-kind experience, the slightly-mysterious Stella is listed as a "Mastodon, Twitter & News Client," and is notably one of the two apps on this list which do indeed support Twitter! More than that, it is the first app I've seen in a very long time that allows one to simultaneously post to two separate social services (Twitter and Mastodon, in this case.) Without documentation, it's a bit clunky, but its customizable timelines feature also allows one to combine multiple "sources" (social accounts) into a single timeline.
B4X for Pleroma & Mastodon for iOS
B4X
B4X is yet another quite perplexing entry. The "Developer Website" link on its App Store Page leads to b4x.com - a web page entitled "Anywhere Software." The GitHub icon in its footer led me to discover a repository which is labeled as such to lead one to believe it is, indeed, the development space for the iOS app we're discussing, but does not contain a single .swift or .pbxproj file - universally essential for iOS apps, as I understand it. Regardless, B4X appears to be built atop Anywhere Software's "rapid application development tools." I like its elemental simplicity and nice 'n' wide post display.
Oyakodon for iOS
Oyakodon
Isao Takeyasu's Oyakodon feels a bit like it originally began as a school project, and I mean that in the best possible sense. While it’s probably the least polished of the lot - and therefore likely the least viable candidate for the role of your primary, daily-driven Mastodon client - is is far from a throwaway application. Some evil component of Takeyasu’s mind was clearly let loose if only for a moment, for Oyakodon’s Facebook-style theme is reminiscent enough of Big Blue to alarm. The volume of its design definitely peaks in its Cute theme, which is so violently loud I could not help but extract its color palette to illustrate just how furious its creator must have been.
Oyakodon Cute Theme Palette
Truly diabolical design, there. For better or worse, Oyakodon doesn’t really work very well in its current state, but it does work.
StarPterano for iOS
StarPterano
I very vaguely remember happening upon StarPterano in my very first moments on Mastodon, so finding it still published on the App Store - buried as it was - brought me a particular sort of joy. If I’m not mistaken, it holds a special personal accolade as the only iOS app which has caused me to involuntarily shriek. This might sound like an insult, but it is actually the peak of my praise. I believe my knowledge of iOS development safely allows me to suppose that StarPterano was built with complete disregard for any established UI element libraries. That is, the familiar toggles and buttons developers rely on to standardize the iOS experience were cast aside entirely in favor of handbuilt, translucent buttons of a sort of neon quality which call menus and text entry fields no less alien to the platform. The most astonishing bit, though, is that it works. On my 12 Pro Max, it’s exceptionally smooth, in fact.
audio controls
source src="https://github.com/extratone/StarPterano/raw/master/DonParade/Sound/decision21.mp3"
/audio
I would imagine those real iOS developers among you should find StarPterano’s GitHub Repository particularly interesting, considering. In the interest of preservation, I have forked it as well, and fully intend to dive in to its code, one of these days. The audio player embedded above cites a three-second .mp3 file in the repository which perhaps once accounted for the “Sounds” toggle still found in the Settings menu of StarPterano’s current build. I couldn’t get the app to reproduce it, which is actually what set me on the hunt that led to the repo.
Ore2 for iOS
Ore2
Ore2 is another (apparently) non-English-native Mastodon client focused on consolidating Mastodon and Twitter within a single space. Alongside Stella, it's the second of the first two apps I've come across in a very long time which allows one to post to both services simultaneously. Considerable work was obviously done on making its timeline-based tabs switchable with touch. Personally, I very much prefer my current crossposting configuration via this (generously-public) web tool, but I am all but certain those users exist who will find Ore2’s setup preferable.
tooot for iOS
tooot
Inadvertently, I have saved the best story of the lot for last. Developer and researcher Zhiyuan Zheng documents both the narrative context leading up to the creation of his first app, tooot, as well as the philosophy behind its design in “Building my first app - toot.” His reference to the downfall of a prominent social app in mainland China called Douban - and the “Douban Refugees” which resulted - are alarmingly missing from all English news organizations save for a single Quartz article from October 2019. He eludes to a “boom” of Mastodon adoption in the past few years and cites a lack of “user friendly mobile clients” which I can only assume to be a conundrum specific to China.
“With the aim of contributing to the community and to this movement, I decided to take my quarantine time to build an enjoyable mobile client for Douban Refugees,” he explains. He notes that decentralized platforms have universally rejected algorithmic recommendation if for any other reason than “without centralized computing power, such [a] recommendation service is also not that feasible.” “Adapting” back to a linear timeline in a manner which still encourages exploration was clearly a major design consideration for tooot.
The core consists of 3 needs: 1) what I can read; 2) what I can write; 3) what I have done.
Obviously, I very much appreciate Zhiyuan writing publicly about his thoughts on decentralized social and sharing specific considerations in his app’s design and look forward to continued updates.
Get Bent, Big Social
A few universal truths among these apps stand out as obligatory mentions. First - in comparison with their Proprietary, Big Social counterparts - they are all ridiculously frugal. Not a one weighs over 40mb, while minor (unexplained) updates to the official Twitter app often exceed 100mb. They are all astonishingly robust - I did not experience a single crash in the course of normal testing these "alt" social apps- even from the beta builds - while I distinctly remember the official Twitter app crashing several times over this period, even after I deleted and reinstalled it (an accepted maintenance requirement for anyone using it heavily for its entire history.) Also, on the topic of the platform, itself, they are also made absurdly interoperable by the ActivityPub standard. My PixelFed posts show up seamlessly on their timelines among content from Diaspora, Pleroma, and Mastodon, itself.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1393294957352468494
The overwhelming impression I was left with after testing these apps was one of unwavering competence, cleverness, and true innovation. How many different ways can I possibly conjure forth in order to communicate this? I, David Blue - the vain fucker with a precollection for the most superficial variables of software design so healthy that I have on multiple occasions designed whole, years-long workflows around specific applications entirely because of their available color palettes... It is I who requires you to take a good fucking look, because this list of decentralized, largely open source, federated social software is a goddamned fashion show.
Continuing to Explore Social Ownership
Mastodon Account Wordcloud
This couldn't be "just" an app guide - I think I have thoroughly accepted this, by now, just in time for some conclusionary remarks. Somehow, the subject I originally tackled specifically because I thought it would be quick, rudimentary, and straightforward has become yet another personal journey. It'd feel a bit preposterous to declare any one of these apps to be life-changing, but - in every sense of the term, in contemporary, inevitably social media-informed life, they do indeed constitute a form of radical, ideological wellness. Each of them managed to remind me of a different minute delight found within a developer-user dynamic made up of thoughtful and effective minds working to contribute original and valuable experiences, first. Most noteworthy of these little freedoms: the realization that the upcoming "official" Mastodon app along with any future new options are exclusively a positive thing for the user... None of these apps were conceived to gobble up market share because the market is fundamentally, inevitably, uncompromisingly infinitely shared. I don't know anything about business, but I do know that relief from the burden of considering proprietary multivectored development intentions has been personally breathtaking. I can only hope the reciprocal compensation is happening at even a fraction of what it "should" be.
From another essential direction, I hope I have communicated that they're far from curious, "niche" or vanity side projects, now. When I used the term "mature" in introducing this little arena, I very much meant it - these "alt" social clients developed almost exclusively within single-person-led projects now make the Twitter for iOS app look ugly and fucking broken. "Giving social networking back to you" has never been more resonant. Yes, it really is Toot!'s "take a break" blue screen, Amaroq's mysterious Awoo mode toggle, iMast's music app integration, Mercury's configurable timelines, Metatext's native solidity, Tootle's custom colors, Tusker's Digital Wellness controls, DUDU's elemental readability, Roma's quiet resurrection of Mast's UI bravado, Stella's utterly bizarre visual departures, Fedi's odd animated UI behaviors, Tootoise's consideration of pace, B4X's unfathomable elements, Ore2's parallel timelines, tooot's development story, and Oyakodon's adorable rough edges that have made my online life measurably... immensely better, these past weeks. At the forefront of this perception is undoubtedly the comparatively extensive control over my social experience as a user offered by the diversity of mobile experiences these applications offer.
Those of you who haven't yet signed up for Mastodon: ==you are missing the fuck out==. I am being actually pampered, now, in World Wide Web terms. You are so welcome whenever you're ready - the water is nice and warm, as they say.
...Party One
Mastodon for iOS
Yes, you are looking at the currently in-development "Official" Mastodon app on iOS, coming very soon to the Awful App Store. You can join me in testing the app right this very moment by contributing to the Mastodon Project's Patreon. Though I do plan to publish a dedicated review on its release date, what I'll say for now is that it's very cute, includes the* most gorgeous media player I've ever seen on an iOS app, and is as distinctly clever as any of the third-party family we've just visited, all whilst maintaining an expert's aim at its evangelist purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD8GQvNrE7E
The surprise that threw me over the edge to a genuinely pitiful extent: the official Mastodon app already includes full Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts integration on iPhone!
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Those Links, One More Time + a Few More
joinmastodon.org/apps
The dedicated GitHub List/Repository
Direct link to the Full List in the Repository
All collected documentation
My personal notes document for this guide, as is
Video
My one-take video demonstration of the upcoming Mastodon for iOS app’s adorable, perfectly intuitive onboarding process
The App Authentication Race (clipped from a Twitch stream.)
My YouTube demo of Toot! from 2019
My sub-60-second showcase/demo of Tootle
"The Official Mastodon App BETA Edition" | Geotechland on YouTube
software]]>
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A safari through the enchanting space of third-party Mastodon clients on iOS.
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Apple's second virtual World Wide Developer Conference came and went as I wrote this guide – you can metaphorically picture me looking up from my machine having overheard the news of the 2021 Apple Design Award Winners announcement. Perusing through them, I saw two I would have voted for, myself: CARROT Weather – the beautifully vulgar, grumpy bitch frontend for your preferred weather information service, and Craft – perhaps the most innovative take on word processing of the past two or three years – listed under “Finalists.” (Read: losers.) The most positive personal discovery of (all?) WWDCs: an app called Be My Eyes, which “connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call,” along with an exceptionally crafted, cross-device accessible-as-fuck TTS solution called Voice Dream Reader. However, a double take in games from Genshin Impact and the fucking League of Legends game certainly sours the mouth and suggests yet further just how much Apple, Inc. has sold out.
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The continued prioritization of Growth for Growth's sake over any and all other considerations (namely, users,) is not unexpected from even the most valuable company in the history of the world, I suppose, but there is an actor at this point in the story who is catastrophically and demonstrably failing to fulfill their role: all I really know is that technology media has fallen into a trough of total uselessness when it comes to qualitative, authoritative analysis of consumer-targeted software. The necessity of this guide – and the bizarrely silent ignorance of even the “fringes” on its subject – is unimaginably severe. Before me has been (for years, now,) the “answer” to a Jolly Big Load of what tech and marketing types lament in more and more existential language, yet hardly any of the humans with the most to lose from their negligence – regular, casual social media users – have been delivered to these experiences. The story is not being articulated. The journalism is not being done.
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I know you almost certainly did not arrive here to hear one motherfucker's complaints about WWDC, but – as with everything Apple, Inc. does – every morsel of curatorial expression/discrimination/favoritism from The Great Money God within this platform must be scrutinized and criticized. Quite frankly, I found myself completely at a loss as to how not to dwell on the Discovery Disparity, here.
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Despite how deeply I've gone into iOS this year, I do not believe myself to be a qualified judge of software design, but I no longer believe Apple to be, either. Regardless of the revenue-related controversies of late, Apple have simply become terrible stewards of the App Store in every imaginable sense. Scams and blatant intellectual property theft abound, while the majority of the most innovative entries I've ever seen remain entirely obfuscated and uncelebrated by all of Apple. Inc.'s mechanisms. If you required an explanation for the amount of time I've invested into App Guides – a space to which I never would have imagined intentionally bringing The Psalms – I hope you can understand.
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I must confess: I have been meaning to write this app guide since even before I interviewed Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko on the morning of his Big Press Day, just over 4 years ago. I’ve exhaustively explored different means of convincing my own longtime Twitter friends to move, over that time, with very little success. Eugen, himself, published an official blog post at the beginning of February detailing his plans to open up onboarding by way of “an official Mastodon app that is free to download and that is specialized in helping new users get started on the platform.” As a Patreon supporter of The Mastodon Project (full disclosure,) I've been testing this app (see preview shots at the very end,) and am quite smitten with it. That said, I thought it might be worth going over the third-party options iOS users currently have available to them, largely because the offerings are each innovative and mature applications in their own right. (Also, it’s become quite apparent that the normal tech media sources you’d go to for such a guide aren’t going to give Mastodon the attention it deserves.)
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Obligatory(?) Context
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I originally intended to be as clinical as possible in this Post, having realized its potential as the singular comparison of its kind to appear in search results for new and potential users of Mastodon. From my perspective, Mastodon has long since surpassed regard as a novel social media experiment who's function is to prompt academic conversations about decentralization, open source, ad tech, and federated social's solutions to all of the Big Web's Big Boy (proprietary) Problems (though I have been compelled to invest significantly in that very conversation.) In the less intellectual hours of my day-to-day life (read: most of the time,) Mastodon is nothing more or less than my favorite place on the internet. It is a relentless delight which I only lament because I want to share so much of it with my friends, but have continued to fail in my efforts to articulate that Mastodon is not a compromise; it is a better social space.
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If you didn't know, this seems to have become my general shit, for lack of a better term: the ethical considerations of open source/“alternative” software are very important, yes! ... but they are far from the whole, and they are not a requisite for new users. The second of this World Wide Web Blog's fundamental considerations, in fact:
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The Open Source/Open Web community continues to struggle with their brand image (if you will) in both old and new ways that needlessly alienate (and sometimes obfuscate) some of their most important contributions from the average user. Technology media has failed in their responsibility to address this issue.
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The blog on which you're reading this, in fact, is federated on ActivityPub. If you so chose, you could be reading it in any client capable of displaying large bodies of text. The crucial point, though, is that you didn't need to know that – you could very well go on reading it on the web in total ignorance/apathy regarding Federation.
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Oh boy, here we go... No. I did not want to say anything ideological – I wanted this Post to function as little more than a pretty screenshot showcase and simple associative list responding to all of the Reddit posts I've seen to the tune of “is there an iPhone app?” As I explored them, however, I was reminded of the sheer creativity the “alternative” software community is capable of. Even the roughest of these considered apps seem unable to be faceless – sorting through the obscene amount of (unlabeled) screenshots accumulated over the past weeks of testing in my Recents folder has been so much easier than I thought it would be because of their relentless originality. If you've actually used any iOS applications and/or browsed the singular App Store from which they can be acquired in the past 3-4 years, you're undoubtedly skeptical: what we might have called “feature overlap” at one time has become all but the platform's core ethos. If you're the sort who enjoys screwing around with apps, generally, as I have for the whole of iPhone history, you have grown accustomed to disappointment.
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so! I found a way to actually find the apps you’re looking for on the App Store! the search function in this dev-facing tool *ACTUALLY WORKS*!!! https://t.co/XrsStvXq57
Regardless of who is to blame, we can all agree that the App Store is currently oversaturated nigh beyond usability with mediocre entries built from the beginning with zero apparent ambition toward original function. This, alone, wouldn't be so problematic if Discovery were not so completely and totally Fucked (except when dev-facing,) but I needn't comment further on that subject at the moment – I'm just trying emphasize how absolutely unheard of it is for a single protocol/service's third-party client representation on iOS to be so thoroughly special. It was astonishing to find all but one or two of these apps in a functional state, actually. In all my equivalent experiences downloading the entirety of a given service's API-supported palette (e.g. IRC apps, topically,) an all-too-significant purpose of whatever ends up getting published is simply documenting the ~20% of available titles that actually work at the given moment. (I'd have mentioned the “best [service/task] iPhone apps for [year]” listicles found in online publications like Digital Trends were it not for the percentage of them in which it's clear the author did not actually download some/most of the apps listed‽‽‽) Perhaps due to iOS 14.5's implementation of ATT, all of the Mastodon apps I could find and test (not counting non-English language-supporting apps, in fairness' interest) are currently functioning.
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So, if there's virtually zero chance a new Mastodon user might download one of the apps we're about to consider and find it broken, what practical function remains for this guide? Hopefully, to establish a SEO catch-all for such users from a non-automated source less associated with the project than the official apps list. Those for whom Mastodon is still an unfamiliar subject should find the collected imagery intriguing, hopefully.
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The Big 6
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My first step in writing this guide was to post a thread on r/Mastodon soliciting thoughts on third-party Mastodon apps from other users, who expressed a lot of love for Toot! and Metatext:
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Toot is just a joy to use. It has a little too much sometimes (it actually contains little mini games...which really aren't needed), but the experience of using it has some really clever UI twists. -u/mikepictor
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Pragmatic Code's Linky was also mentioned by multiple respondents. It's not a client, but a bridging tool for smoother URL sharing that integrates with iOS' share sheet. I did not have time to try it, myself, but from all accounts, it is an obligatory mention. So too is the GitHub Repository/List I created in order to “formally” offer a list with much greater brevity and zero editorialization.
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First, let’s begin with The Big 6 – those apps The Mastodon Project, itself, has seen fit to list on joinmastodon.org.
Dag Ågren‘s Toot! is not only my personal app of choice – I would (and have) go so far as to say it’s the single most innovative mobile social app I’ve ever encountered, largely because of its jacknife-esque instance selection. It’s held a place in my phone’s dock since the day I first downloaded it, for this and many other reasons. While one might find bugs/loose ends (understandably) exploring the functions of other indie social clients, within Toot!, they will only find little delights, like its wholly unique Share Sheet interface.
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Toot! is extremely beautiful (despite its unfortunate name,) and I am quite superficial in my taste. It’s Obsidian theme (which may or may not be related to the topical notetaking system of the same name) is especially gorgeous.
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In my cacophonous attempt to compare the notifications of all available Mastodon apps simultaneously, it's worth noting that Toot!'s always came first. Its charming custom audio alerts also make them my favorite by far.
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They're not just cute: in reflection informed by a newly-considered function of these apps – serving as representing the network as a whole – it occurred to me that Toot! audio alerts playing from my iPhone have prompted more first-time conversations about Mastodon in the wild than I can count. (Seriously: they should be considered an onboarding mechanism.)
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In my experience, it’s also the most robust of the lot – as in, it is very much the exception rather than the norm to encounter any sort of error or other obstruction in normal, day-to-day use. My own real reservation applies to the entire selection discussed today: I wish Toot! supported Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts.
I originally had high hopes for Shihab Mehboob‘s Mast – which used to look very different from the way it does, today. That’s almost certainly to do with its ownership changing hands at some point (no, I do not have any further details on that story, unfortunately.) That’s not to say the current app isn’t a worthwhile offering, it’s just far less visually ambitious than the original I remember. However, it’s also significantly more reliable.
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They were there last time I checked, but Mast isn’t owned and maintained by me anymore so not sure.
The Original… Genesis… If Amaroq was not the first Mastodon app on the App Store, it’s certainly the oldest to survive. Its GitHub Repository’s first commit dates back to April 17th, 2017. While you’re there, you might note that it’s the only one of these entries coded entirely in Objective-C – the near-40-year-old language originally underpinning iOS before Swift’s birth in 2014. Amaroq was the first Mastodon app I used and remains the strongest free option for iOS users. It’s been nearly a year since its last update, so its missing a few narrower functions like Bookmarking and Polls, but the core features it does include are rock solid. The only wild card: what the fuck is Awoo Mode???
For better or worse, @rinsuki’s iMast will require either a basic grasp of the Japanese language, or the patience to translate its menus and work backwards. (OCR came to mind, but I’m not quite dedicated enough to try it for this guide.) Assuming Google’s translation of its GitHub Pages site is correct, iMast is also Open Source “under the Apache License 2.” Unlike Amaroq, it appears to have been built in Swift from the ground up. Unfortunately, that's about all I can comment on, though I would very much love to hear from any iMast users/Japanese speakers and will update this Post accordingly.
Daniel Nitsikopoulos' Mercury represents yet another entirely original direction in Social clients. It's fresh and “opinionated” in its explicit lack of support for instances that “promote abuse and harassment.” From all appearances, this appears to be the singular source of negative reviews on its iOS App Store page. It's also the other option to offer widgets integration (in a single form, currently,) and custom audio notifications, though I couldn't capture a sample. Its Trello Roadmap and Feedback Repo are public but mostly inactive. As you can see in the grid embedded above, I absolutely adore its Scoops theme and find my $0.99 Tip 100% worth its custom icons.
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Unfortunately, the state of Mercury's App Store reviews prompt yet another essential economic/editorial consideration. The one in the very center of the image embedded, above – from “FeralDandelion” – is the singular one I will allow myself to address. It is true that Mercury straight up refuses to authenticate or federate with a substantial amount of specific Mastodon servers, but it is exhaustively explicit about this from very get-go. Its single-page Help document includes a detailed, up-to-date table of every single blocked instance and the specific justification for each respective instance's presence on it:
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Mercury takes a zero tolerance stance on abuse and harassment and as such does not support many instances that promote abuse and harassment.
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Let me be clear: the practical manifestation of this position is exclusively positive. The Mastodon project has long outgrown the sort of fixation on ideology for ideology's sake that even Lucky Linus himself has no patience for. Instead, thank Gourd Mercury's developers took the time to better your social experience! In response to statements like the pullquote above, I expect *only* thumbs in the air from this point, forward.
Metatext is perhaps the buzziest of all these apps – well-praised in every space I could find conversation on the subject. It's developed under Justin Mazzocchi's software studio, Metabolist and is as Open Source as it gets! (As per my hardware keyboard shortcuts crusade, I added my own issue requesting support.) u/GummyKibble noted that “it looks like a native app on both iOS and iPadOS.” This term – native – seems inextricably linked with Metatext. I vaguely understand what it means, and I do agree, but it's worth noting that I speak with some privilege, having compared all of these apps on the top performing handset Apple currently has to offer. In many ways, it is the most frugal of the new offerings, especially, yet it strikes a keen balance between function and delight. I think “native” can be translated as generally of a stout, sturdy disposition, thanks to the care put into honing said balance.
I'm not entirely positive which Mastodon app was actually the first on my iPhone, back in 2017, but I know for sure it was either Amaroq or the dearest, infinitely-colorful Tootle. Its App Store Page Version History suggests it has not been updated in 14 months, yet the app – which was apparently “Designed for iPad” – appears to be working just fine. There are some overlapping UI elements, but they're barely noticeable. Were it not for the new dev-facing store search tool mentioned above, I would have assumed this app long gone, to be honest, but using it again has somehow managed to genuinely twinge my nostalgia nerve.
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In my search for any extra-App Store representation other than Tootle's Mastodon Account (which last posted the day after my birthday, last year,) I discovered Tootle... for Linux. Since I am a dedicated and thorough person, these days, I spent several hours messing around with Linux Virtual Machining until Lubuntu finally functioned just so I could show you what it looks like. Below is a screen capture of Tootle bordered by the most Macish LXQ desktop bars included in Lubuntu and even wearing the new official Apple System Font, SF Pro. Still, I think you'll agree... Tootle for Linux is not related to Tootle.
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Personally, I find this a profound shame – I think more apps should be as colorful – and as color configurable – as this little, mysterious Mastodon app. I created the theme you see represented in the frames embedded above using The Psalms colors, naturally, and the whole process took less than five minutes. Play around with it as I remember doing, all those years ago, and you'd be surprised how hard it is to create an unusable color theme. What I find most shame in, though, is that Tootle appears to be completely invisible in regular app store searches, now. (And by “most shame,” you know I really mean entirely fucking unacceptable.)
I found my way to the only currently in-development entry on this list thanks to my Mastodon friend wakest. iOS developer Shadowfacts (who also maintains shadowfacts.net) is working on their considerate, distinct app, Tusker in this self-hosted Repository. In #tusker on Mastodon, you'll find a few poignant praises from Pixelfed founder and principal developer Dan Sup, which – from my perspective – are especially high, indeed.
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Tusker's color customization options are technically... well.. not infinite, like other apps here, but the end result of their (obviously, very considered) selection will be a net win for 100% of users over that alternative, I believe. It is definitely of a similar philosophy to Metatext, but unquestionably more ambitious. Out of the lot, testing Tusker was the singular instance in which I found myself considering a “replacement” for Toot! You, yourself can use Tusker right this very minute via Apple's beta distribution system, Testflight, via this invite link.
Installing Roma for the first time led to a puzzling quest with a particularly pleasant end. I noticed fairly quickly that the iOS app was a re-branded release of what used to be Mast. My first instinct upon this discovery was to DM Mast's original developer, Shihab Meboob, on Twitter, but frankly, I've already bothered him enough there over the years, so it's understandable that I didn't hear back. When I downloaded the desktop app I found on Roma's web page and noticed its similarity to Whalebird, I decided to use the site's contact form to inquire about what exactly was going on as gingerly as I could. Happily, I received a reply just minutes later from Leo Radvinsky, head of Leo.com, “a Florida-based boutique venture capital fund that invests in technology companies:”
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Hi David,
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In both cases we funded the original developers of both Mast and Whalebird to create a branded whitelabel app specially made for Pleroma. The idea was to make Roma a cross platform brand/app. It didn't really work out so now we're working on a new app from scratch called Fedi for iOS and Android and releasing that as open source.
I think Roma has been removed from the app stores as it's no longer supported.
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Let me know if you have any other questions
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Though my hopes for the original Mast to live on in Roma form were more or less dashed by this message, the suggestion that someone is investing actual capital into federated social is certainly worth celebrating. If Roma is still available on the App Store as you're reading this, I insist you download it immediately. It represents an incredible and original attention to detail which should not simply be forgotten.
Naturally, the app inheriting the work/resources established by Mast and Roma – known by Fedi – should be next up for discussion. Hopefully, my relative lack of experience with Pleroma – another ActivityPub-based, federated social network – won't let you down, here. After a brief shock from the uniqueness of Fedi's UI passes, one immediately notices how beautifully it is animated, wholly disregarding my recently-acquired preference for as little animation as possible. Perhaps more than any other app discussed here, Fedi feels uncannily bespoke in a way which iOS apps almost never do. It is undoubtedly the result of a very specific vision – to disregard the whole modern template for social apps and completely reimagine the archetype. Personally, I'm not sure if it would be easy to get used to, but my tastes/habits in this regard are very much the result of the past decade of proprietary social apps' blandness. Going forward with substantial financial backing and the talents of whoever it was that got it this far, no doubt we should all have very high hopes for Fedi.
DUDU (or “嘟嘟,” which translates to “Toot,” appropriately,) definitely wins for Cutest Iconography. It's a non-English-native application with exceptional English support, which I personally appreciate very much. Compared the entries immediately above, DUDU represents a much more modest interpretation of what a Mastodon client can offer. It’s robust, free of over-animation, and – most distinctly – very wide, which might have something to do with the “designed for iPad” subtitle on its App Store Page.
Yet another “Designed for iPad” entry, Naoki Kuwata's Tootoise is defined by its custom incoming post rate accommodations and its gorgeous Solarized theme. Its “Max number of new arrival posts” setting ranges from 0-400, allowing one to freeze their timeline entirely from any accidental (or habitual) Pulls to Refresh (set at 0,) load 400 Toots from such a gesture, or anything in between (at 40-Toot increments, anyway.) The advantages of this specification become immediately apparent when one actually begins to explore it, especially for those who have come to Mastodon after feeling overwhelmed by Big Social.
Yet another entirely one-of-a-kind experience, the slightly-mysterious Stella is listed as a “Mastodon, Twitter & News Client,” and is notably one of the two apps on this list which do indeed support Twitter! More than that, it is the first app I've seen in a very long time that allows one to simultaneously post to two separate social services (Twitter and Mastodon, in this case.) Without documentation, it's a bit clunky, but its customizable timelines feature also allows one to combine multiple “sources” (social accounts) into a single timeline.
B4X is yet another quite perplexing entry. The “Developer Website” link on its App Store Page leads to b4x.com – a web page entitled “Anywhere Software.” The GitHub icon in its footer led me to discover a repository which is labeled as such to lead one to believe it is, indeed, the development space for the iOS app we're discussing, but does not contain a single .swift or .pbxproj file – universally essential for iOS apps, as I understand it. Regardless, B4X appears to be built atop Anywhere Software's “rapid application development tools.” I like its elemental simplicity and nice 'n' wide post display.
Isao Takeyasu's Oyakodon feels a bit like it originally began as a school project, and I mean that in the best possible sense. While it’s probably the least polished of the lot – and therefore likely the least viable candidate for the role of your primary, daily-driven Mastodon client – is is far from a throwaway application. Some evil component of Takeyasu’s mind was clearly let loose if only for a moment, for Oyakodon’s Facebook-style theme is reminiscent enough of Big Blue to alarm. The volume of its design definitely peaks in its Cute theme, which is so violently loud I could not help but extract its color palette to illustrate just how furious its creator must have been.
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Truly diabolical design, there. For better or worse, Oyakodon doesn’t really work very well in its current state, but it does work.
I very vaguely remember happening upon StarPterano in my very first moments on Mastodon, so finding it still published on the App Store – buried as it was – brought me a particular sort of joy. If I’m not mistaken, it holds a special personal accolade as the only iOS app which has caused me to involuntarily shriek. This might sound like an insult, but it is actually the peak of my praise. I believe my knowledge of iOS development safely allows me to suppose that StarPterano was built with complete disregard for any established UI element libraries. That is, the familiar toggles and buttons developers rely on to standardize the iOS experience were cast aside entirely in favor of handbuilt, translucent buttons of a sort of neon quality which call menus and text entry fields no less alien to the platform. The most astonishing bit, though, is that it works. On my 12 Pro Max, it’s exceptionally smooth, in fact.
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I would imagine those real iOS developers among you should find StarPterano’s GitHub Repository particularly interesting, considering. In the interest of preservation, I have forked it as well, and fully intend to dive in to its code, one of these days. The audio player embedded above cites a three-second .mp3 file in the repository which perhaps once accounted for the “Sounds” toggle still found in the Settings menu of StarPterano’s current build. I couldn’t get the app to reproduce it, which is actually what set me on the hunt that led to the repo.
Ore2 is another (apparently) non-English-native Mastodon client focused on consolidating Mastodon and Twitter within a single space. Alongside Stella, it's the second of the first two apps I've come across in a very long time which allows one to post to both services simultaneously. Considerable work was obviously done on making its timeline-based tabs switchable with touch. Personally, I very much prefer my current crossposting configuration via this (generously-public) web tool, but I am all but certain those users exist who will find Ore2’s setup preferable.
Inadvertently, I have saved the best story of the lot for last. Developer and researcher Zhiyuan Zheng documents both the narrative context leading up to the creation of his first app, tooot, as well as the philosophy behind its design in “Building my first app – toot.” His reference to the downfall of a prominent social app in mainland China called Douban – and the “Douban Refugees” which resulted – are alarmingly missing from all English news organizations save for a single Quartz article from October 2019. He eludes to a “boom” of Mastodon adoption in the past few years and cites a lack of “user friendly mobile clients” which I can only assume to be a conundrum specific to China.
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“With the aim of contributing to the community and to this movement, I decided to take my quarantine time to build an enjoyable mobile client for Douban Refugees,” he explains. He notes that decentralized platforms have universally rejected algorithmic recommendation if for any other reason than “without centralized computing power, such [a] recommendation service is also not that feasible.” “Adapting” back to a linear timeline in a manner which still encourages exploration was clearly a major design consideration for tooot.
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The core consists of 3 needs: 1) what I can read; 2) what I can write; 3) what I have done.
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Obviously, I very much appreciate Zhiyuan writing publicly about his thoughts on decentralized social and sharing specific considerations in his app’s design and look forward to continued updates.
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Get Bent, Big Social
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A few universal truths among these apps stand out as obligatory mentions. First – in comparison with their Proprietary, Big Social counterparts – they are all ridiculouslyfrugal. Not a one weighs over 40mb, while minor (unexplained) updates to the official Twitter app often exceed 100mb. They are all astonishingly robust – I did not experience a single crash in the course of normal testing these “alt” social apps- even from the beta builds – while I distinctly remember the official Twitter app crashing several times over this period, even after I deleted and reinstalled it (an accepted maintenance requirement for anyone using it heavily for its entire history.) Also, on the topic of the platform, itself, they are also made absurdly interoperable by the ActivityPub standard. My PixelFed posts show up seamlessly on their timelines among content from Diaspora, Pleroma, and Mastodon, itself.
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yup… it’s me again, bringing up inexplicably huge updates to the Twitter app.
. . and pointing out… again… that speculation wouldn’t be necessary if Twitter just published actual release notes. pic.twitter.com/IZFDYPLAvS
The overwhelming impression I was left with after testing these apps was one of unwavering competence, cleverness, and true innovation. How many different ways can I possibly conjure forth in order to communicate this? I, David Blue – the vain fucker with a precollection for the most superficial variables of software design so healthy that I have on multiple occasions designed whole, years-long workflows around specific applications entirely because of their available color palettes... It is I who requires you to take a good fucking look, because this list of decentralized, largely open source, federated social software is a goddamned fashion show.
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Continuing to Explore Social Ownership
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This couldn't be “just” an app guide – I think I have thoroughly accepted this, by now, just in time for some conclusionary remarks. Somehow, the subject I originally tackled specifically because I thought it would be quick, rudimentary, and straightforward has become yet another personal journey. It'd feel a bit preposterous to declare any one of these apps to be life-changing, but – in every sense of the term, in contemporary, inevitably social media-informed life, they do indeed constitute a form of radical, ideological wellness. Each of them managed to remind me of a different minute delight found within a developer-user dynamic made up of thoughtful and effective minds working to contribute original and valuable experiences, first. Most noteworthy of these little freedoms: the realization that the upcoming “official” Mastodon app along with any future new options are exclusively a positive thing for the user... None of these apps were conceived to gobble up market share because the market is fundamentally, inevitably, uncompromisingly infinitely shared. I don't know anything about business, but I do know that relief from the burden of considering proprietary multivectored development intentions has been personally breathtaking. I can only hope the reciprocal compensation is happening at even a fraction of what it “should” be.
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From another essential direction, I hope I have communicated that they're far from curious, “niche” or vanity side projects, now. When I used the term “mature” in introducing this little arena, I very much meant it – these “alt” social clients developed almost exclusively within single-person-led projects now make the Twitter for iOS app look ugly and fucking broken. “Giving social networking back to you” has never been more resonant. Yes, it really is Toot!'s “take a break” blue screen, Amaroq's mysterious Awoo mode toggle, iMast's music app integration, Mercury's configurable timelines, Metatext's native solidity, Tootle's custom colors, Tusker's Digital Wellness controls, DUDU's elemental readability, Roma's quiet resurrection of Mast's UI bravado, Stella's utterly bizarre visual departures, Fedi's odd animated UI behaviors, Tootoise's consideration of pace, B4X's unfathomable elements, Ore2's parallel timelines, tooot's development story, and Oyakodon's adorable rough edges that have made my online life measurably... immensely better, these past weeks. At the forefront of this perception is undoubtedly the comparatively extensive control over my social experience as a user offered by the diversity of mobile experiences these applications offer.
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Those of you who haven't yet signed up for Mastodon: ==you are missing the fuck out==. I am being actually pampered, now, in World Wide Web terms. You are so welcome whenever you're ready – the water is nice and warm, as they say.
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...Party One
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Yes, you are looking at the currently in-development “Official” Mastodon app on iOS, coming very soon to the Awful App Store. You can join me in testing the app right this very moment by contributing to the Mastodon Project's Patreon. Though I do plan to publish a dedicated review on its release date, what I'll say for now is that it's very cute, includes the most gorgeous media player I've ever seen on an iOS app, and is as distinctly clever as any of the third-party family we've just visited, all whilst maintaining an expert's aim at its evangelist purpose.
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The surprise that threw me over the edge to a genuinely pitiful extent: the official Mastodon app already includes full Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts integration on iPhone!
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/mastodon-ios-apps
- Sun, 18 Jul 2021 00:56:27 +0000
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- App Store Review Day (August 15th, 2021)
- https://bilge.world/app-store-review-day?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Mastodon iOS Apps
A commitment to share my thoughts where developers actually want them, and an invitation for other reviewers/users to join me.
I have written more than my fair share of words about software, as I have loved, despised, and been utterly perplexed by it. This year, my return to the iOS community has perhaps inevitably turned apps into an addiction of sorts. This particular platform is so utterly chock full/stocked up of creativity at a scale immeasurably greater and more accessible than the whole of those throughout computing history, combined. For someone like myself, it is all too easy to allow oneself to wander down a virtually endless path of intriguing, very self-indulgent play, especially now that third-party sites like Departures.to have managed to add discoverability to TestFlight beta distributions, allowing those non-millionaires among us opportunities to use test releases of applications we would’ve otherwise had to pay for. This has been exclusively to my benefit - I can only imagine what 15 year-old me would have done with such power.
Your Ratings and Reviews - Apple App Store
In my recent endeavor to focus on making my work more useful to others, I've reflected on something I've heard from nigh every developer of the apps I've reviewed: Ah yes, your blog looks really cool but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE REVIEW MY FUCKING APP on the FUCKING STORE. Read: your commentary is appreciated, but your five stars would almost certainly more economically beneficial.
As you can see from the image embedded above, I have personally fallen very behind in doing my part for those apps I've celebrated, here. A vague intention to get around to it eventually clearly is not working, so I've decided to give myself a deadline: August 15th, 2021 - precisely one month from today. By this date, I will have sifted through my commentary on apps in this setting and adapted the most useful of it (per app, obviously) into a manner appropriate to appear on an App Store Page, and I would like to formally-ish invite other tech writers/app reviewers to join me.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1402057069927309318
I'm terrible at community organization, which certainly does not exclude events, so I very much welcome any feedback you might have, as well as any collaborative contributions you'd be interested in making. As I see it, I have a few essential considerations to offer.
First, the page in the screen capture above - which can be found in the App Store App ⇨ Account (your profile picture in the top-right corner) ⇨ Account Settings (the tapable element at the very top with your profile picture and information) ⇨ Ratings and Reviews - is broken as hell, along with the rest of the Account Settings menu, notably. This is important because I insist we all complain about it on all available channels, considering it's been broken for several months, at least.
Second, you should almost certainly use this "new" dev-facing tool when searching the App Store, considering that it actually works in a trustable way, unlike the user-facing tool in the app.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1415732070626758663
Since the standard online palette of event organization software are all so easy to use, these days, I've established event pages for this event on multiple platforms, linked in the list below, which I will update as per any suggestions/requests for equivalent pages on other services. Of course, it's certainly not a requirement that you join/engage with any of them.
One could could certainly just add the date to their own calendar (conveniently with this .ics file,) remain entirely silent about the thing on social, and still be participating. Those interested in further engagement, however, can Chat Me Up on Extratone's Discord, the Teams event chat, Telegram, etc. I also plan to reshare most of this post as a thread on Twitter.
GitHub Discussion
.ics File
Microsoft Teams Event
Google Calendar Event
Facebook Event
Dev-facing App Store Search Tool
As we face the horrendous, utterly inexcusable state of Discovery on the App Store/Apple's general fuckery regarding the independent developers mostly responsible for making its platforms a worthwhile space, I hope I've created something of value in whipping up this "event." If you have thoughts on how I might do so more effectively, once again, please do reach out.
#software #meta]]>
-
-
-
A commitment to share my thoughts where developers actually want them, and an invitation for other reviewers/users to join me.
-
-
I have written more than my fair share of words about software, as I have loved, despised, and been utterly perplexed by it. This year, my return to the iOS community has perhaps inevitably turned apps into an addiction of sorts. This particular platform is so utterly chock full/stocked up of creativity at a scale immeasurably greater and more accessible than the whole of those throughout computing history, combined. For someone like myself, it is all too easy to allow oneself to wander down a virtually endless path of intriguing, very self-indulgent play, especially now that third-party sites like Departures.to have managed to add discoverability to TestFlight beta distributions, allowing those non-millionaires among us opportunities to use test releases of applications we would’ve otherwise had to pay for. This has been exclusively to my benefit – I can only imagine what 15 year-old me would have done with such power.
-
-
-
-
In my recent endeavor to focus on making my work more useful to others, I've reflected on something I've heard from nigh every developer of the apps I've reviewed: Ah yes, your blog looks really cool but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE REVIEW MY FUCKING APP on the FUCKING STORE. Read: your commentary is appreciated, but your five stars would almost certainly more economically beneficial.
-
-
As you can see from the image embedded above, I have personally fallen very behind in doing my part for those apps I've celebrated, here. A vague intention to get around to it eventually clearly is not working, so I've decided to give myself a deadline: August 15th, 2021 – precisely one month from today. By this date, I will have sifted through my commentary on apps in this setting and adapted the most useful of it (per app, obviously) into a manner appropriate to appear on an App Store Page, and I would like to formally-ish invite other tech writers/app reviewers to join me.
-
-
so! I found a way to actually find the apps you’re looking for on the App Store! the search function in this dev-facing tool *ACTUALLY WORKS*!!! https://t.co/XrsStvXq57
I'm terrible at community organization, which certainly does not exclude events, so I very much welcome any feedback you might have, as well as any collaborative contributions you'd be interested in making. As I see it, I have a few essential considerations to offer.
-
-
First, the page in the screen capture above – which can be found in the App Store App ⇨ Account (your profile picture in the top-right corner) ⇨ Account Settings (the tapable element at the very top with your profile picture and information) ⇨ Ratings and Reviews – is broken as hell, along with the rest of the Account Settings menu, notably. This is important because I insist we all complain about it on all available channels, considering it's been broken for several months, at least.
-
-
Second, you should almost certainly use this “new” dev-facing tool when searching the App Store, considering that it actually works in a trustable way, unlike the user-facing tool in the app.
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tech writers, app reviewers, interested iOS users, I would like to formally invite you to APP STORE REVIEW DAY - a shared personal commitment to sharing commentary on apps where it actually matters most for developers. https://t.co/hfLooBwCCa
Since the standard online palette of event organization software are all so easy to use, these days, I've established event pages for this event on multiple platforms, linked in the list below, which I will update as per any suggestions/requests for equivalent pages on other services. Of course, it's certainly not a requirement that you join/engage with any of them.
-
-
One could could certainly just add the date to their own calendar (conveniently with this .ics file,) remain entirely silent about the thing on social, and still be participating. Those interested in further engagement, however, can Chat Me Up on Extratone's Discord, the Teams event chat, Telegram, etc. I also plan to reshare most of this post as a thread on Twitter.
As we face the horrendous, utterly inexcusable state of Discovery on the App Store/Apple's general fuckery regarding the independent developers mostly responsible for making its platforms a worthwhile space, I hope I've created something of value in whipping up this “event.” If you have thoughts on how I might do so more effectively, once again, please do reach out.
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/app-store-review-day
- Thu, 15 Jul 2021 17:53:41 +0000
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- Marco! Lives
- https://bilge.world/marco?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Marco! Banner
The first release version of my only original contribution to the iOS community is now ready to assist when you can't find your phone.
One of the handful of Siri's most useful features has been the "Hey Siri! Where are you?" command, to which Siri will respond "I'm here" or "here I am!" Were it possible to view how many times one has triggered a particular Siri command on iOS, my personal reliance on it would almost certainly be embarrassing. Often, my handset isn't even obscured from view - it's just faster to have Siri speak up than it is to scan the room. Occasionally, however, my device has managed to become embedded beneath and/or within some genuinely-perplexing series of couch cushions/blankets/briefcase pockets/etc. which require a more constant homing sort of audio reproduction. Asking friends/family to call one's phone is the general goto, yes, but honestly the actual length of time cellular telephones will ring before sending a caller to voicemail in 2021 is ridiculously short, especially when rummaging through Gourd-knows-what. For that matter, most of my peers keep their phones on silent mode, 24/7. What then?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3evgnSlnkjk
Since the very first time I set eyes upon Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12 Beta, I have wanted to create one to address this issue in a creative, entertaining, and (hopefully) genuinely-useful way. On that day almost three years ago, I even knew it would be called Marco!, believe it or not. In the past few months, I've returned to the project on and off and ended up with several different versions of varying complexity. One day, I'd like to figure out how to integrate the full extent of my ideas for Marco! into a Shortcut which can be reliably triggered when one's device is locked, but for this first release version, I have included only what I and a few other (much appreciated) volunteers were able to trigger in every situation we could conceive of.
Marco! Version 1.0 can be downloaded on RoutineHub (which I would highly recommend,) or directly via this iCloud share link. I know it's a bit excessive, but I even created a GitHub Repository just for this Shortcut, seeing as it is undoubtedly the most original I will ever contribute, and the singular one with potential for continued development.
Download Marco! as is and (as long as you don't rename it) use "Hey Siri!... Marco!" This should immediately run the Shortcut, which includes my voice saying "Polo! Bitch!" followed by five repeats of the flashlight/noise cycle as described in detail below.
Marco! JellyCuts Steps
As documented by the Jellycuts file above, Version 1.0 of Marco!'s actions are as follows:
Turn Low Power Mode OFF
Turn Airplane Mode OFF
Turn Wi-Fi On
Turn Bluetooth On
Set brightness to 100%
Turn Do Not Disturb OFF
Turn appearance Light
Set playback destination to iPhone
Set volume to 89%
10. Vibrate device (Not currently working.)
11. Play my voice saying “Polo!” + a few other items
12. Toggle (flash) the flashlight 5 times (odd number leaving your flashlight on constantly unless it was on before the Shortcut was triggered)
13. Simultaneously (in the same repeat action) plays three separate classic Mac sounds 5 times.
The most clever bit about this particular Shortcut is its use of Base64 text to include audio playback. I just fixed a bug on my own Base64 audio encoder Shortcut if you'd like to try it out. Since this version includes my own voice (subject to taste, I realize,) as well as some minor profanity, I do intend to publish a clean variation at some point in the future. If this is an obstacle for you, and/or if you'd like a custom version made with audio of your own choosing, please do send me an email! I would be more than happy to make one for you.
software]]>
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The first release version of my only original contribution to the iOS community is now ready to assist when you can't find your phone.
-
-
One of the handful of Siri's most useful features has been the “Hey Siri! Where are you?” command, to which Siri will respond “I'm here” or “here I am!” Were it possible to view how many times one has triggered a particular Siri command on iOS, my personal reliance on it would almost certainly be embarrassing. Often, my handset isn't even obscured from view – it's just faster to have Siri speak up than it is to scan the room. Occasionally, however, my device has managed to become embedded beneath and/or within some genuinely-perplexing series of couch cushions/blankets/briefcase pockets/etc. which require a more constant homing sort of audio reproduction. Asking friends/family to call one's phone is the general goto, yes, but honestly the actual length of time cellular telephones will ring before sending a caller to voicemail in 2021 is ridiculously short, especially when rummaging through Gourd-knows-what. For that matter, most of my peers keep their phones on silent mode, 24/7. What then?
-
-
-
-
Since the very first time I set eyes upon Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12 Beta, I have wanted to create one to address this issue in a creative, entertaining, and (hopefully) genuinely-useful way. On that day almost three years ago, I even knew it would be called Marco!, believe it or not. In the past few months, I've returned to the project on and off and ended up with several different versions of varying complexity. One day, I'd like to figure out how to integrate the full extent of my ideas for Marco! into a Shortcut which can be reliably triggered when one's device is locked, but for this first release version, I have included only what I and a few other (much appreciated) volunteers were able to trigger in every situation we could conceive of.
-
-
Marco! Version 1.0 can be downloaded on RoutineHub (which I would highly recommend,) or directly via this iCloud share link. I know it's a bit excessive, but I even created a GitHub Repository just for this Shortcut, seeing as it is undoubtedly the most original I will ever contribute, and the singular one with potential for continued development.
-
-
Download Marco! as is and (as long as you don't rename it) use “Hey Siri!... Marco!” This should immediately run the Shortcut, which includes my voice saying “Polo! Bitch!” followed by five repeats of the flashlight/noise cycle as described in detail below.
-
-
-
-
As documented by the Jellycuts file above, Version 1.0 of Marco!'s actions are as follows:
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Turn Low Power Mode OFF
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Turn Airplane Mode OFF
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Turn Wi-Fi On
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Turn Bluetooth On
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Set brightness to 100%
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Turn Do Not Disturb OFF
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Turn appearance Light
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Set playback destination to iPhone
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Set volume to 89%
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Vibrate device (Not currently working.)
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Play my voice saying “Polo!” + a few other items
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Toggle (flash) the flashlight 5 times (odd number leaving your flashlight on constantly unless it was on before the Shortcut was triggered)
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Simultaneously (in the same repeat action) plays three separate classic Mac sounds 5 times.
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The most clever bit about this particular Shortcut is its use of Base64 text to include audio playback. I just fixed a bug on my own Base64 audio encoder Shortcut if you'd like to try it out. Since this version includes my own voice (subject to taste, I realize,) as well as some minor profanity, I do intend to publish a clean variation at some point in the future. If this is an obstacle for you, and/or if you'd like a custom version made with audio of your own choosing, please do send me an email! I would be more than happy to make one for you.
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- https://bilge.world/marco
- Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:51:56 +0000
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- iPhone and Music: For Artists, Curators, and Enthusiasts
- https://bilge.world/iphone-ios-music-apps?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Music on iOS
Reporting from deep within the iOS cult on essential apps/methods for real-life music people.
Listen to this article read (with some bugs) by Siri Voice 3 below...
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source src="https://github.com/extratone/bilge/raw/main/audio/TTS/iPhone%20and%20Music%20-%20For%20Artists%2C%20Curators%2C%20and%20Enthusiasts%20TTS.mp3"
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As you may or may not be aware, I’ve spent all of my 2021 so far diving real deep into iOS, considering all that has changed since “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.” I’ve tuned in to the output of explicitly Apple-adjacent publications both old (MacRumors, Apple Insider, 9to5 Mac, etc,) and new (Apple Scoop, MacStories,) which have all metamorphosed in huge, mostly-redeemable ways just as their primary subject has. I have my own pubescent stories of Mac occultism, but I do not consider my relationship with the brand to be an essential part of my identity, as so many do and have. Apple, Inc’s story is spectacular and infinitely-relevant so long as they remain “the most valuable company in the history of the world,” as I so love to describe them. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am often compelled to bring up the humongous contrasts in the historical context of the company - to scream infinitely many variations of the observation that Apple was basically the fucking indie, premium-tier consumer tech manufacturer owned by the Creative Class for the first half+ of their existence, and have somehow maintained that Think Different™ brand narrative as they have definitively become the Big Blue of their time.
From my perspective, the responsibility for the wellbeing of this utterly-delusional, occasionally very dangerous sentiment actually lies fairly squarely on those of us who consider ourselves better than all of that because of our Debian workflows and their ancient command line utilities. (For the record, this is also 100% delusional as things stand in 2021.) One thing I think we can all acknowledge, though, is that Apple’s image has been inextricably bound with musicmaking, throughout, far more than any other even remotely comparable tech company. Naturally, the business still loves to bring this up all the time in big, glossy gestures. The topical example of note would be the only worthwhile content I’ve yet to encounter on Apple TV+: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which documents the highlights of the young, beloved musician’s prodigious ascension. For what it’s worth, I appreciate some special insights I gained thanks to the film, which I do not actually consider at odds with the truth of its super on-brandness for Apple.
An interesting take I found from 2017 from a new favorite voice on the business end of tech reporting: “How Music Drowns Apple’s Innovation” by The Information’s Jessica Lessin portrays Apple’s relationship with music distribution and the music industry as a sort of compulsive distraction from its ambitions in serving video content, namely. Lessin points out the everpresent reminders of this obsession:
And so it is no wonder that Apple’s first forays into original video content fall under Apple Music. It’s worth noting that the first series the company announced—“Carpool Karaoke” is literally about singing; “Planet of the Apps” features rapper Will.i.am as a judge.
I think I can speak for the majority of my audience when I suggest that the targets of Lessin’s cynicism would be more than welcome, if they were The Whole Truth. Indeed, the most valuable company in all of history retaining an “emotional” attachment to the welfare of music creators might be described as charming or more. As is often the case on The Information, the comments from readers often offer noteworthy insight. In this case, Kevin Swint - who has apparently worked as an executive for both Apple and Samsung, according to his profile on The Information - responded with an important consideration: “…it's possible that Apple's behavior around music has more to do with the company's overall tendency to stick with its past successes a bit too long rather than music really being a core part of its DNA.”
In terms of business, that’s all I have to contribute, and I shall do my best not to evangelize Apple Music (or more likely, disparage Spotify as one of the most destructive cultural forces of our time,) here. However, I would like to respond to a particular Jimmy Iovine quote from the original Apple Music announcement amid the 2015 WWDC Keynote:
There needs to be a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery… and if that place could actually accommodate and support the artists who make the music, not just the top-tier artists, but the kids in their bedrooms too, provide them all with a home and a way to engage with their audiences, that would be pretty great.
Boy, this service Iovine describes sounds an awful lot like Bandcamp, no? The suggestion that Apple should have purchased Bandcamp is a very scary one, from my perspective, but I am reassured by the likelihood that the notion did indeed occur to someone at Apple, Inc. at some point in the past, and was quickly discarded, for whatever reason. I promise not to mention Bandcamp again in this Post, aside from its own two iOS apps: for listeners and for “Artists/Labels” as creator/curator tools.
I’m going to be focusing largely on the iPhone-bound experience, here, though I did borrow my mom’s MacBook Pro for a weekend to explore the state of music on MacOS and (accidentally) played around with Apple Music on The Television (a surprisingly beautiful experience.) On that note, I’ll hurry up and get specific…
iframe allow="autoplay ; encrypted-media ; fullscreen " frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;background:transparent;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/213-music-part-2-music-discovery-playback-and-utility-apps/id1227872143?i=1000516779249"/iframe
Apps
Assuming you’re already an Apple Music user, it’s very possible that you’ve been deprived of the “true” experience on the service provided by the variety of actively-developed but woefully-undercovered app store entries that integrate directly with Apple Music. One of the most glaring discoveries I’ve made so far in my iOS deep dive, this year, has been the absolutely horrific state of Discovery on Apple’s App Store. If you’d thought to search the top charts under the store’s Music category, you wouldn’t find any of the gems I’m going to highlight, here. The credit for exposing me to their existence, in fact, lies with MacStories - a hard-hitting, well-established Apple-adjacent media company piloted by Federico Viticci. At this very moment, their app-centric podcast, App Stories, is in the midst of a special mini-series devoted to Music on iOS/Mac, from which this Post draws upon heavily. For better or worse, they represent the definitive authority on this subject (among many others, naturally,) though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend their various publications be added to the reading lists of any but those most invested in iOS.
MusicHarbor on iPhone
MusicHarbor
There is something uniquely concrete about a purely-chronological feed which we’ve lost in the past 5-10 years in favor of algorithmic curation, generally. The next item in this particular feed, in fact, includes my attempt to explain why Twitter’s hard-chronological Lists feature has sheltered me from the anxiety of the service’s main timeline, now ordered by proprietary (and obscured) formulas. I’d been aware of that dynamic in my own Twitter consumption for years, though. I certainly did not anticipate the impact of the music release equivalent of a chronological timeline as provided by MusicHarbor - an app for iOS and MacOS that acts as a frontend for one’s music library across both Apple Music and Spotify.
It's hard to remember how we (Apple Music) got here without embarking upon some gargantuan A Complete Visual History of Apple Music-like document, but it must be said that Tim Cook's "next chapter in music" has become a sad afterthought. As far as I understand it, the "streaming war" between Apple and Spotify has long since gone definitively to the latter in statistical terms, which I'd suggest to be an overall positive outcome for Apple Music subscribers, generally. The self-perception within the heavy music consumer crowd of "niche," "underground," "obscure" cultural minority should - in theory - push those who believe themselves destined to be different away from Spotify into the handy care of Apple, the absolute champion of this particular self-deception. To be honest - though I write this for all listeners, sincerely - I have found myself in a sort of utopian echo chamber of my own design in music culture terms. My days of waiting through 4+ hours of local openers before rap shows are far behind me, and I consume and engage exclusively with music I find personally redeemable.
My Apple Music library has become quite fragmented after I lost my entire physical music collection along with the external drives containing my accumulated digital music library in 2017. Still, after more or less starting anew this past December and casually, deliberately adding digital files back into the accursed, ancient iTunes desktop application and restoring some (outdated) versions of my handful of shared curatorial playlists thanks to SongShift (which we'll glance on later,) MusicHarbor currently lists 1433 artists represented across my Apple Music and (very sparse) Spotify libraries. I know this because of a very simple Siri Shortcut I modified which returns a text list of all Artists in one's MusicHarbor library in Quick Look. (Here is my result as of this moment in GitHub Gist form.) According my App Store receipts, I first downloaded MusicHarbor on March 26 - 20 days ago - which is mentionable because of how much I've accomplished with very minimal time investment in terms of curating my own music library thanks to MusicHarbor. As you'll note in the 3rd of the 4 screenshots embedded above, I was able to delete System of a Down from my library - a single function which alone justifies the app's one-time $5.99 "Unlock Everything" fee, to my sensibility. I've also been able to begin following all the artists represented in a few of my favorite playlists with a handful of taps - a task which would literally require hours in the native Apple Music app of old (when one could actually follow artists, there.) On that note, it's time to cite the primary MacStories article you should read, entitled "How I Keep Track of New Music Releases," regarding Apple Music's performance as a release tracker:
The ‘New Releases’ section is tucked at the very end of the For You page and laid out as a horizontal carousel that requires a lot of swiping; you can view the ‘New Releases’ page as a grid, which has sections for different weeks, but, in my experience, it only aggregates highlights for new releases from some of my favorite artists. The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.
Here, Federico Viticci is riffing off a newsletter issue written by music blogger Jason Tate, in which he describes the service's missing tracking functionality as "the single most frustrating part of Apple Music." Though these points in the conversation are both almost two years old, MusicHarbor remains the ultimate means of tracking new music releases chronologically on Apple's platforms. Though I am personally just three weeks in, the confidence this app has given me in the certainty of its chronological release feed is quite profound. Its integration with one's calendar to track upcoming releases is a bit much for my own needs, but I know personally enough invested curators for whom it'd be a godsend to mark it no small addition.
MusicHarbor on MacOS
MusicHarbor’s only downside is entirely excusable/understandable, in context: it’s a bit clunky. For the sake of this work, I set up a shared Apple Music playlist so I could further demonstrate all the new music I discovered in MusicHarbor. Adding whole albums to this playlist with a single tap feels powerful because it is - I’ve no idea what sort of developer wizardry is involved in such an action, but the Wait Wheel doesn’t feel like too much to endure. Adding a release to one’s library - the other in-MusicHarbor accumulative function - is a bit quicker. It’s important to remember that this piece of software was/is created and maintained by a single human being, though I would expect nothing but improvement, going forward.
Adding to MusicHarbor Playlist
That’s all I have to report on MusicHarbor, for the moment, but I’ll add further MacStories praise from their 2019 MacStories Selects app rewards:
What makes MusicHarbor special – and, ultimately, the reason why we all use the app here at MacStories – is just how much developer Tanaka understands what someone who wants to know about new music releases is looking for.
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source src="https://github.com/extratone/bilge/raw/main/audio/Marcos%20Tanaka%20Interview%20-%20MacStories.mp3"
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July 2021 Update: The MacStories gentlemen have just published an interview episode of AppStories speaking at length with MusicHabor creator Marcos Tanaka.
Albums for iOS
Albums
On the other end of the spectrum, exploring new digital manifestations of The Music Collection, is Albums, which actually functions as an entire replacement frontend player for Apple Music. Reviewed much more recently by MacStories, it really is best-described as “opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists.” Considering that I installed the app just a week ago and have focused most of my attention on MusicHarbor in that time, I’ll leave most of the commentary to John Voorhees. All I can say, really, is that I see an extremely powerful application, here, for a fairly specific use case: someone who’s listening is largely occupied by albums they already “own” in Apple Music and treasure deeply. The ability to set an individual record’s “Immersive UI Tint” down to the hex (in “Album Settings”) is as in-depth a tool of adoration as I’ve ever seen in a digital music service. Combined with Albums’ presumptuous takeover of actual playback from the Apple Music app, I think I can rightfully say that it was built for the extremely serious music consumer.
My favorite part so far: the app knew well enough to offer me THE ZRO BUTTON. Telling, I think.
The ZRo Button - Albums App
Others
Since it’s already quite clear how much this Post draws from MacStories, I’ll let their review of Soor stand on its own (I couldn’t quite justify spending $6.99 just for review purposes.) In the episode embedded above, they also mention Denim - a playlist cover creator I am not personally all that impressed with. There’s also MusicHarbor’s sibling, MusicSmart, which manages the tricky but essential task of adding the metadata retrieval Apple Music should have included all along. The rest can be found in the episode’s show notes. I’m not done with them, but the rest are what I would differentiate as services…
Services
iframe width="100%" height="150" src="https://embed.song.link/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsong.link%2Fivyhollivana&theme=light" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen sandbox="allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-presentation allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"/iframe
Odesli/Song.Link
One of the bewilderingly undercovered digital music sharing tools of our kind, Odesli has been my preferred method of sharing tracks/albums/EPs since I first discovered it in 2018. It is not specific to iOS but it is essential for competent music sharing, anywhere, these days, in its magical ability to correctly intersect any given piece of music’s links across all streaming services, known and unknown. To be honest, I thought everybody would be using it by now, but it’s continued to develop with minimal attention aside from Siri Shortcuts developers. Thanks to Odesli’s Public API, dozens of Music-centric Siri Shortcuts have emerged over the past few years, resulting in one of the most useful Siri Shortcuts integrations to be found for real, reasonable human beings. Here’s where Apple-adjacent media and I part ways…
While current common conversation might point you to Federico Viticci’s MusicBot hyper-Shortcut and/or @gianflo6’s 600 action-strong Song.Link Shortcut, I (perhaps expectedly) would point you to my own, 17-action Shortcut which spares you any selections and simply opens the Song.Link URL of the track currently playing in Apple Music (while also copying said URL to the clipboard.) It’s not that MusicBot isn’t massively impressive and still useful, but it represents a class of super/hyper-Shortcuts which (from my perspective) far-overreach beyond the intended use case for Siri Shortcuts and end up immediately bewildering/alienating potential new users. Truthfully - as Federico singularly acknowledges - they are full applications built atop a less-than-ideal platform designed for relatively simple, repeatable automations. I’ll spare you further opining on this idea until another, potential Post, and instead demonstrate my personal solution.
https://imgur.com/gallery/eblzlbD
In the clip above, you can see I was working on this very draft when LoneMoon’s “kawAii @F” started playing. Naturally, I was compelled to share it on Twitter, so - without leaving Drafts (my writing app) - I called the type-to-Siri prompt by holding the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and simply typed “sl” (I renamed my Shortcut for this use,) running the Shortcut, which opened the track’s Song.Link page in Safari - very much an optional step, mostly just to make sure the match is correct - and copied its URL to my clipboard, from which I could share it anywhere. Since the advent of widgets in iOS’ Today View, I’ve also kept a button for this Shortcut in one of four precious slots in a box at the very top. For those willing to play around a bit, it should be fairly straightforward to configure the end bits to your liking, but it should work out of the box for even those least interested in Siri Shortcuts/automation in general.
SongShift Playlist Transfer
SongShift
As I confessed before, it is only thanks to SongShift that I was able to recover anything of my original, prized, deeply-considered Apple Music playlists. The standalone MacStories article on this one is a bit dated, but I don’t see much change in function in that time. For most people, SongShift’s free service is simply the best way to transfer a playlist between music streaming services. If you find yourself genuinely sold by the features offered by SongShift Pro, I suspect you know more about playlist manipulation than I could ever learn you by diving in any deeper.
Lastfm on iOS
Last.fm (I s2g.)
Yup… Believe it or not, Last.fm is still fucking scrobbling after 19 fucking years (almost to the day,) and its iOS app still fucking works. What’s most bizarre about this truth is that I did not encounter mention of Last.fm for years until I started noticing it as an integration option in the settings menus of these premium iOS apps. Is this some sort of conspiracy? I’m not sure, but I suppose I might as well insist you follow my ancient account, if you’re still using it.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"alright folks fucking ADD ME ironically or not. this profile is older than all of the cells in my body. a href="https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK"https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK/a/p— ※ David Blue ※ (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1383168815131893763?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"April 16, 2021/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
I should also note that not only is the Last.fm iOS app still working, it’s working well, from all appearances, anyway. Though the service no longer includes hosting, itself, it’s apparently still a prime player in the world of playback tracking.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pSDCbXGIovM
Music Creation
DAWs
What if you actually want to “make” music with your iPhone? We’ve seen iPhone television ads for years featuring amalgamations of musician-looking types playing instruments with cables attached to their handsets, but is the iPhone now a reasonable platform for any sort of serious sound capture? The short answer is no. Who am I to proclaim such an absolute? None other than the motherfucker who’s been messing around with mobile DAWs for 10 whole years. I even “released” an “album” on Bandcamp made exclusively with Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS and inspired by the dangerous life of the contemporary raw milk smuggler. I wouldn’t call it “music,” per se, or an example of what a real electronic producer could pull off in the app, but it does represent its capabilities in the hands of the average user, using mostly default loops.
https://soundcloud.com/dieselgoth/wurlie-jam
While Apple does publish an Apple Book entitled “Everyone Can Create Music” about GarageBand on iOS, it is specifically directed at iPad-bound use. Any serious DAW user uses keyboard shortcuts, which I admit I only discovered recently in GarageBand for iOS. The official documentation is - once again - for iPad, specifically, but most of them still work on iPhone.
FL Studio Mobile - the original third-party iOS-bound DAW - is still going, apparently. While I did, indeed purchase the original version on my iPhone 4, I remember absolutely nothing about it, suggesting I was over my head, even then. There’s also Auxy, as covered recently in this App Store Story and Reason Compact. I’ve played around with these more recently - since they’re both available in their most primitive forms as a free download - with little to report.
Capture
Disappointingly, Apple’s own Music Memos - as demonstrated by Chris Welch from The Verge in the embed, above - is currently in the process of being officially sunsetted and is now no longer available for download on the App Store. As that article notes, users are instead directed toward GarageBand or ye olde native Voice Memos to record high quality audio. However, if you want to take advantage of the stereo audio recording capabilities included in iPhones after the 11 Pro, you must either use the native Camera app to capture video (and extract the audio later,) or Dolby On - Dolby’s own iOS app for recording which - if I’m completely honest - will do nothing but utterly frustrate anyone trying to capture the truest digital audio possible.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GhAknEKy9Ig
As part of my iPhone 12 Pro Max Review, I’ve accumulated quite a few audio files in various formats testing its capture abilities and stashed them in this folder on The Psalms’ GitHub Repository. Probably the most relevant of these, though, is embedded just above. If you’ll forgive my pajamas, ridiculous piano faces, and general rustiness with the instrument, it demonstrates the “Audio Zoom” feature found in the iPhone 11 Pro and up, which I’ve found to be unfortunately underdocumented by Apple, itself. I added my own inquiry to this post on the official Developer forums asking about it, but don’t really expect anything back. According to “What is Audio Zoom for smartphones?” published on the site DxOMark:
The main technology behind audio zoom is called beamforming, or spatial filtering. It allows changing an audio recording’s directivity (that is, the sensitivity according to the direction of the sound source) and shape it in any way necessary. In this case, the optimal directivity is a hypercardioid pattern (see illustration below), which enhances sounds coming from the front direction — that is, from the direction in which your camera is pointed — while attenuating sounds from all other directions (your background noise).
My testing has suggested that the best means of recording unfiltered-as-possible stereo audio with an iPhone is to record video at 1x zoom with the native Camera app and extract the audio from the video file. In the Bandcamp track embedded below, I “mounted” my 12 Pro Max right above my old upright’s soundboard and extracted audio directly from the video file with Audacity. It was then amplified slightly, saved to a FLAC file and uploaded directly to Bandcamp. Of course, it’s worth qualifying that - while I have extensive experience with audio - I have neither professional training, nor any professional monitoring equipment.
https://davidblue.bandcamp.com/track/-
That said, the biggest objection I’ve heard from audiophiles regarding audio capture and manipulation on handsets, generally, has to do with their hardware’s extremely limited capabilities when compared to any sort of professional desktop soundcard. Given the greater argument I've come to regarding the state of consumer tech as best exemplified by smartphone design - that we've come to expect far too much of single devices, and the resulting jack-of-all-tradeness summing their real-life capabilities has become a severe detriment instead of a feature - I must echo, again, that adding "studio" audio capture, manipulation, and production capabilities to our goddamned cellular phones doesn't help anyone. To any user truly hoping to accomplish these things, I say just go home and boot up your damned desktop.
Mushish - Apple Music Web Player
Other Considerations
The final episode in AppStories' three-part miniseries on music was just published today, though I suspect - for my audience, anyway - that its coverage is mostly out-of-scope on this topic, largely for financial reasons. Apple's first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow at noon, my time, and is entitled "Spring Loaded," which - combined with its 4/20 joke date - suggests to me that we'll finally see the release of the APPLE GUN™ alongside iWeed™, but little to nothing in the way of music.
In the midst of my brief research into The Greater History of Apple Music, I discovered the existence of iTunes Ping - which I somehow missed entirely, along with my Twitter friend Jon Male. I also discovered articles from the company's decision to kill its successor "Connect" from Apple Music, which was reportedly "rarely used." Notably, this removal also took away what little power Artists had over the narrative surrounding their music on the service. I can see the business justification for all of this (barely) except for removing the ability for users to follow artists.
The latest Apple Music feature - a "channel" for music videos - also makes zero sense to me, but the launch of Apple Music on the web absolutely does, especially for Windows and Linux users, who are now officially freed from iTunes (the software) and allowed to use a much more modern Apple Music experience. I prepended "officially," there, because third-party Apple Music web players have existed as long as the service has allowed the required integration. First, there was Naveed Golafshani's - which is no longer live - but Brychan Bennett-Odlum's Musish is still live and working, as you can see from the screenshot embedded above. Other than the ability to select between two stream bitrates, I can't seen any remaining advantages to using the latter over Apple's own web player, unless you harbor spite toward their handling of the whole thing, which would be entirely understandable, from my perspective.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1359364473253937153
As someone who grew up in the mp3 era with a first-generation iPod Shuffle and iTunes, living and dying between iTunes Store gift cards, Apple Music still seems like one hell of a magical deal. In effect, it allows access to all of iTunes for a flat monthly fee. Or at least it would* had I never become acquainted with professional independent musicians who've published, there, and have to contend with tedious realities like the process by which one can add those beautiful lyrics to Apple Music tracks, and who's only real means of control/engagement on the service has been removed with virtually zero prospects of a replacement. If, indeed, Jessica Lessin was correct about Apple's obsession with music, it has resulted in very little for any class of music makers, and left even its listeners to seek out and find third-party solutions like MusicHarbor to perform even the most basic personalization one expects from a modern music streaming service without even bothering to amend their App Store's discovery process to illuminate them, or even write a fucking App Story. Despite this, one-to-three-person app teams continue to work on new solutions, to these and other problems...
#music #software]]>
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Reporting from deep within the iOS cult on essential apps/methods for real-life music people.
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Listen to this article read (with some bugs) by Siri Voice 3 below...
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As you may or may not be aware, I’ve spent all of my 2021 so far diving real deep into iOS, considering all that has changed since “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.” I’ve tuned in to the output of explicitly Apple-adjacent publications both old (MacRumors, Apple Insider, 9to5 Mac, etc,) and new (Apple Scoop, MacStories,) which have all metamorphosed in huge, mostly-redeemable ways just as their primary subject has. I have my own pubescent stories of Mac occultism, but I do not consider my relationship with the brand to be an essential part of my identity, as so many do and have. Apple, Inc’s story is spectacular and infinitely-relevant so long as they remain “the most valuable company in the history of the world,” as I so love to describe them. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am often compelled to bring up the humongous contrasts in the historical context of the company – to scream infinitely many variations of the observation that Apple was basically the fucking indie, premium-tier consumer tech manufacturer owned by the Creative Class for the first half+ of their existence, and have somehow maintained that Think Different™ brand narrative as they have definitively become the Big Blue of their time.
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From my perspective, the responsibility for the wellbeing of this utterly-delusional, occasionally very dangerous sentiment actually lies fairly squarely on those of us who consider ourselves better than all of that because of our Debian workflows and their ancient command line utilities. (For the record, this is also 100% delusional as things stand in 2021.) One thing I think we can all acknowledge, though, is that Apple’s image has been inextricably bound with musicmaking, throughout, far more than any other even remotely comparable tech company. Naturally, the business still loves to bring this up all the time in big, glossy gestures. The topical example of note would be the only worthwhile content I’ve yet to encounter on Apple TV+: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which documents the highlights of the young, beloved musician’s prodigious ascension. For what it’s worth, I appreciate some special insights I gained thanks to the film, which I do not actually consider at odds with the truth of its super on-brandness for Apple.
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An interesting take I found from 2017 from a new favorite voice on the business end of tech reporting: “How Music Drowns Apple’s Innovation” by The Information’s Jessica Lessin portrays Apple’s relationship with music distribution and the music industry as a sort of compulsive distraction from its ambitions in serving video content, namely. Lessin points out the everpresent reminders of this obsession:
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And so it is no wonder that Apple’s first forays into original video content fall under Apple Music. It’s worth noting that the first series the company announced—“Carpool Karaoke” is literally about singing; “Planet of the Apps” features rapper Will.i.am as a judge.
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I think I can speak for the majority of my audience when I suggest that the targets of Lessin’s cynicism would be more than welcome, if they were The Whole Truth. Indeed, the most valuable company in all of history retaining an “emotional” attachment to the welfare of music creators might be described as charming or more. As is often the case on The Information, the comments from readers often offer noteworthy insight. In this case, Kevin Swint – who has apparently worked as an executive for both Apple and Samsung, according to his profile on The Information – responded with an important consideration: “…it's possible that Apple's behavior around music has more to do with the company's overall tendency to stick with its past successes a bit too long rather than music really being a core part of its DNA.”
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In terms of business, that’s all I have to contribute, and I shall do my best not to evangelize Apple Music (or more likely, disparage Spotify as one of the most destructive cultural forces of our time,) here. However, I would like to respond to a particular Jimmy Iovine quote from the original Apple Music announcement amid the 2015 WWDC Keynote:
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There needs to be a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery… and if that place could actually accommodate and support the artists who make the music, not just the top-tier artists, but the kids in their bedrooms too, provide them all with a home and a way to engage with their audiences, that would be pretty great.
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Boy, this service Iovine describes sounds an awful lot like Bandcamp, no? The suggestion that Apple should have purchased Bandcamp is a very scary one, from my perspective, but I am reassured by the likelihood that the notion did indeed occur to someone at Apple, Inc. at some point in the past, and was quickly discarded, for whatever reason. I promise not to mention Bandcamp again in this Post, aside from its own two iOS apps: for listeners and for “Artists/Labels” as creator/curator tools.
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I’m going to be focusing largely on the iPhone-bound experience, here, though I did borrow my mom’s MacBook Pro for a weekend to explore the state of music on MacOS and (accidentally) played around with Apple Music on The Television (a surprisingly beautiful experience.) On that note, I’ll hurry up and get specific…
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Apps
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Assuming you’re already an Apple Music user, it’s very possible that you’ve been deprived of the “true” experience on the service provided by the variety of actively-developed but woefully-undercovered app store entries that integrate directly with Apple Music. One of the most glaring discoveries I’ve made so far in my iOS deep dive, this year, has been the absolutely horrific state of Discovery on Apple’s App Store. If you’d thought to search the top charts under the store’s Music category, you wouldn’t find any of the gems I’m going to highlight, here. The credit for exposing me to their existence, in fact, lies with MacStories – a hard-hitting, well-established Apple-adjacent media company piloted by Federico Viticci. At this very moment, their app-centric podcast, App Stories, is in the midst of a special mini-series devoted to Music on iOS/Mac, from which this Post draws upon heavily. For better or worse, they represent the definitive authority on this subject (among many others, naturally,) though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend their various publications be added to the reading lists of any but those most invested in iOS.
There is something uniquely concrete about a purely-chronological feed which we’ve lost in the past 5-10 years in favor of algorithmic curation, generally. The next item in this particular feed, in fact, includes my attempt to explain why Twitter’s hard-chronological Lists feature has sheltered me from the anxiety of the service’s main timeline, now ordered by proprietary (and obscured) formulas. I’d been aware of that dynamic in my own Twitter consumption for years, though. I certainly did not anticipate the impact of the music release equivalent of a chronological timeline as provided by MusicHarbor – an app for iOS and MacOS that acts as a frontend for one’s music library across both Apple Music and Spotify.
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It's hard to remember how we (Apple Music) got here without embarking upon some gargantuan A Complete Visual History of Apple Music-like document, but it must be said that Tim Cook's “next chapter in music” has become a sad afterthought. As far as I understand it, the “streaming war” between Apple and Spotify has long since gone definitively to the latter in statistical terms, which I'd suggest to be an overall positive outcome for Apple Music subscribers, generally. The self-perception within the heavy music consumer crowd of “niche,” “underground,” “obscure” cultural minority should – in theory – push those who believe themselves destined to be different away from Spotify into the handy care of Apple, the absolute champion of this particular self-deception. To be honest – though I write this for all listeners, sincerely – I have found myself in a sort of utopian echo chamber of my own design in music culture terms. My days of waiting through 4+ hours of local openers before rap shows are far behind me, and I consume and engage exclusively with music I find personally redeemable.
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My Apple Music library has become quite fragmented after I lost my entire physical music collection along with the external drives containing my accumulated digital music library in 2017. Still, after more or less starting anew this past December and casually, deliberately adding digital files back into the accursed, ancient iTunes desktop application and restoring some (outdated) versions of my handful of shared curatorial playlists thanks to SongShift (which we'll glance on later,) MusicHarbor currently lists 1433 artists represented across my Apple Music and (very sparse) Spotify libraries. I know this because of a very simple Siri Shortcut I modified which returns a text list of all Artists in one's MusicHarbor library in Quick Look. (Here is my result as of this moment in GitHub Gist form.) According my App Store receipts, I first downloaded MusicHarbor on March 26 – 20 days ago – which is mentionable because of how much I've accomplished with very minimal time investment in terms of curating my own music library thanks to MusicHarbor. As you'll note in the 3rd of the 4 screenshots embedded above, I was able to delete System of a Down from my library – a single function which alone justifies the app's one-time $5.99 “Unlock Everything” fee, to my sensibility. I've also been able to begin following all the artists represented in a few of my favorite playlists with a handful of taps – a task which would literally require hours in the native Apple Music app of old (when one could actually follow artists, there.) On that note, it's time to cite the primary MacStories article you should read, entitled “How I Keep Track of New Music Releases,” regarding Apple Music's performance as a release tracker:
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The ‘New Releases’ section is tucked at the very end of the For You page and laid out as a horizontal carousel that requires a lot of swiping; you can view the ‘New Releases’ page as a grid, which has sections for different weeks, but, in my experience, it only aggregates highlights for new releases from some of my favorite artists. The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.
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Here, Federico Viticci is riffing off a newsletter issue written by music blogger Jason Tate, in which he describes the service's missing tracking functionality as “the single most frustrating part of Apple Music.” Though these points in the conversation are both almost two years old, MusicHarbor remains the ultimate means of tracking new music releases chronologically on Apple's platforms. Though I am personally just three weeks in, the confidence this app has given me in the certainty of its chronological release feed is quite profound. Its integration with one's calendar to track upcoming releases is a bit much for my own needs, but I know personally enough invested curators for whom it'd be a godsend to mark it no small addition.
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MusicHarbor’s only downside is entirely excusable/understandable, in context: it’s a bit clunky. For the sake of this work, I set up a shared Apple Music playlist so I could further demonstrate all the new music I discovered in MusicHarbor. Adding whole albums to this playlist with a single tap feels powerful because it is – I’ve no idea what sort of developer wizardry is involved in such an action, but the Wait Wheel doesn’t feel like too much to endure. Adding a release to one’s library – the other in-MusicHarbor accumulative function – is a bit quicker. It’s important to remember that this piece of software was/is created and maintained by a single human being, though I would expect nothing but improvement, going forward.
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That’s all I have to report on MusicHarbor, for the moment, but I’ll add further MacStories praise from their 2019 MacStories Selects app rewards:
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What makes MusicHarbor special – and, ultimately, the reason why we all use the app here at MacStories – is just how much developer Tanaka understands what someone who wants to know about new music releases is looking for.
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July 2021 Update: The MacStories gentlemen have just published an interview episode of AppStories speaking at length with MusicHabor creator Marcos Tanaka.
On the other end of the spectrum, exploring new digital manifestations of The Music Collection, is Albums, which actually functions as an entire replacement frontend player for Apple Music. Reviewed much more recently by MacStories, it really is best-described as “opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists.” Considering that I installed the app just a week ago and have focused most of my attention on MusicHarbor in that time, I’ll leave most of the commentary to John Voorhees. All I can say, really, is that I see an extremely powerful application, here, for a fairly specific use case: someone who’s listening is largely occupied by albums they already “own” in Apple Music and treasure deeply. The ability to set an individual record’s “Immersive UI Tint” down to the hex (in “Album Settings”) is as in-depth a tool of adoration as I’ve ever seen in a digital music service. Combined with Albums’ presumptuous takeover of actual playback from the Apple Music app, I think I can rightfully say that it was built for the extremely serious music consumer.
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My favorite part so far: the app knew well enough to offer me THE ZRO BUTTON. Telling, I think.
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Others
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Since it’s already quite clear how much this Post draws from MacStories, I’ll let their review of Soor stand on its own (I couldn’t quite justify spending $6.99 just for review purposes.) In the episode embedded above, they also mention Denim – a playlist cover creator I am not personally all that impressed with. There’s also MusicHarbor’s sibling, MusicSmart, which manages the tricky but essential task of adding the metadata retrieval Apple Music should have included all along. The rest can be found in the episode’s show notes. I’m not done with them, but the rest are what I would differentiate as services…
One of the bewilderingly undercovered digital music sharing tools of our kind, Odesli has been my preferred method of sharing tracks/albums/EPs since I first discovered it in 2018. It is not specific to iOS but it isessential for competent music sharing, anywhere, these days, in its magical ability to correctly intersect any given piece of music’s links across all streaming services, known and unknown. To be honest, I thought everybody would be using it by now, but it’s continued to develop with minimal attention aside from Siri Shortcuts developers. Thanks to Odesli’s Public API, dozens of Music-centric Siri Shortcuts have emerged over the past few years, resulting in one of the most useful Siri Shortcuts integrations to be found for real, reasonable human beings. Here’s where Apple-adjacent media and I part ways…
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While current common conversation might point you to Federico Viticci’s MusicBot hyper-Shortcut and/or @gianflo6’s 600 action-strong Song.Link Shortcut, I (perhaps expectedly) would point you to my own, 17-action Shortcut which spares you any selections and simply opens the Song.Link URL of the track currently playing in Apple Music (while also copying said URL to the clipboard.) It’s not that MusicBot isn’t massively impressive and still useful, but it represents a class of super/hyper-Shortcuts which (from my perspective) far-overreach beyond the intended use case for Siri Shortcuts and end up immediately bewildering/alienating potential new users. Truthfully – as Federico singularly acknowledges – they are full applications built atop a less-than-ideal platform designed for relatively simple, repeatable automations. I’ll spare you further opining on this idea until another, potential Post, and instead demonstrate my personal solution.
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In the clip above, you can see I was working on this very draft when LoneMoon’s “kawAii @F” started playing. Naturally, I was compelled to share it on Twitter, so – without leaving Drafts (my writing app) – I called the type-to-Siri prompt by holding the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and simply typed “sl” (I renamed my Shortcut for this use,) running the Shortcut, which opened the track’s Song.Link page in Safari – very much an optional step, mostly just to make sure the match is correct – and copied its URL to my clipboard, from which I could share it anywhere. Since the advent of widgets in iOS’ Today View, I’ve also kept a button for this Shortcut in one of four precious slots in a box at the very top. For those willing to play around a bit, it should be fairly straightforward to configure the end bits to your liking, but it should work out of the box for even those least interested in Siri Shortcuts/automation in general.
As I confessed before, it is only thanks to SongShift that I was able to recover anything of my original, prized, deeply-considered Apple Music playlists. The standalone MacStories article on this one is a bit dated, but I don’t see much change in function in that time. For most people, SongShift’s free service is simply the best way to transfer a playlist between music streaming services. If you find yourself genuinely sold by the features offered by SongShift Pro, I suspect you know more about playlist manipulation than I could ever learn you by diving in any deeper.
Yup… Believe it or not, Last.fm is still fucking scrobbling after 19 fucking years (almost to the day,) and its iOS app still fucking works. What’s most bizarre about this truth is that I did not encounter mention of Last.fm for years until I started noticing it as an integration option in the settings menus of these premium iOS apps. Is this some sort of conspiracy? I’m not sure, but I suppose I might as well insist you follow my ancient account, if you’re still using it.
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alright folks fucking ADD ME ironically or not. this profile is older than all of the cells in my body. https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK
I should also note that not only is the Last.fm iOS app still working, it’s working well, from all appearances, anyway. Though the service no longer includes hosting, itself, it’s apparently still a prime player in the world of playback tracking.
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Music Creation
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DAWs
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What if you actually want to “make” music with your iPhone? We’ve seen iPhone television ads for years featuring amalgamations of musician-looking types playing instruments with cables attached to their handsets, but is the iPhone now a reasonable platform for any sort of serious sound capture? The short answer is no. Who am I to proclaim such an absolute? None other than the motherfucker who’s been messing around with mobile DAWs for 10 whole years. I even “released” an “album” on Bandcamp made exclusively with Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS and inspired by the dangerous life of the contemporary raw milk smuggler. I wouldn’t call it “music,” per se, or an example of what a real electronic producer could pull off in the app, but it does represent its capabilities in the hands of the average user, using mostly default loops.
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While Apple does publish an Apple Book entitled “Everyone Can Create Music” about GarageBand on iOS, it is specifically directed at iPad-bound use. Any serious DAW user uses keyboard shortcuts, which I admit I only discovered recently in GarageBand for iOS. The official documentation is – once again – for iPad, specifically, but most of them still work on iPhone.
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FL Studio Mobile – the original third-party iOS-bound DAW – is still going, apparently. While I did, indeed purchase the original version on my iPhone 4, I remember absolutely nothing about it, suggesting I was over my head, even then. There’s also Auxy, as covered recently in this App Store Story and Reason Compact. I’ve played around with these more recently – since they’re both available in their most primitive forms as a free download – with little to report.
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Capture
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Disappointingly, Apple’s own Music Memos – as demonstrated by Chris Welch from The Verge in the embed, above – is currently in the process of being officially sunsetted and is now no longer available for download on the App Store. As that article notes, users are instead directed toward GarageBand or ye olde native Voice Memos to record high quality audio. However, if you want to take advantage of the stereo audio recording capabilities included in iPhones after the 11 Pro, you must either use the native Camera app to capture video (and extract the audio later,) or Dolby On – Dolby’s own iOS app for recording which – if I’m completely honest – will do nothing but utterly frustrate anyone trying to capture the truest digital audio possible.
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As part of my iPhone 12 Pro Max Review, I’ve accumulated quite a few audio files in various formats testing its capture abilities and stashed them in this folder on The Psalms’ GitHub Repository. Probably the most relevant of these, though, is embedded just above. If you’ll forgive my pajamas, ridiculous piano faces, and general rustiness with the instrument, it demonstrates the “Audio Zoom” feature found in the iPhone 11 Pro and up, which I’ve found to be unfortunately underdocumented by Apple, itself. I added my own inquiry to this post on the official Developer forums asking about it, but don’t really expect anything back. According to “What is Audio Zoom for smartphones?” published on the site DxOMark:
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The main technology behind audio zoom is called beamforming, or spatial filtering. It allows changing an audio recording’s directivity (that is, the sensitivity according to the direction of the sound source) and shape it in any way necessary. In this case, the optimal directivity is a hypercardioid pattern (see illustration below), which enhances sounds coming from the front direction — that is, from the direction in which your camera is pointed — while attenuating sounds from all other directions (your background noise).
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My testing has suggested that the best means of recording unfiltered-as-possible stereo audio with an iPhone is to record video at 1x zoom with the native Camera app and extract the audio from the video file. In the Bandcamp track embedded below, I “mounted” my 12 Pro Max right above my old upright’s soundboard and extracted audio directly from the video file with Audacity. It was then amplified slightly, saved to a FLAC file and uploaded directly to Bandcamp. Of course, it’s worth qualifying that – while I have extensive experience with audio – I have neither professional training, nor any professional monitoring equipment.
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That said, the biggest objection I’ve heard from audiophiles regarding audio capture and manipulation on handsets, generally, has to do with their hardware’s extremely limited capabilities when compared to any sort of professional desktop soundcard. Given the greater argument I've come to regarding the state of consumer tech as best exemplified by smartphone design – that we've come to expect far too much of single devices, and the resulting jack-of-all-tradeness summing their real-life capabilities has become a severe detriment instead of a feature – I must echo, again, that adding “studio” audio capture, manipulation, and production capabilities to our goddamned cellular phones doesn't help anyone. To any user truly hoping to accomplish these things, I say just go home and boot up your damned desktop.
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Other Considerations
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The final episode in AppStories' three-part miniseries on music was just published today, though I suspect – for my audience, anyway – that its coverage is mostly out-of-scope on this topic, largely for financial reasons. Apple's first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow at noon, my time, and is entitled “Spring Loaded,” which – combined with its 4/20 joke date – suggests to me that we'll finally see the release of the APPLE GUN™ alongside iWeed™, but little to nothing in the way of music.
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In the midst of my brief research into The Greater History of Apple Music, I discovered the existence of iTunes Ping – which I somehow missed entirely, along with my Twitter friend Jon Male. I also discovered articles from the company's decision to kill its successor “Connect” from Apple Music, which was reportedly “rarely used.” Notably, this removal also took away what little power Artists had over the narrative surrounding their music on the service. I can see the business justification for all of this (barely) except for removing the ability for users to follow artists.
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The latest Apple Music feature – a “channel” for music videos – also makes zero sense to me, but the launch of Apple Music on the webabsolutely does, especially for Windows and Linux users, who are now officially freed from iTunes (the software) and allowed to use a much more modern Apple Music experience. I prepended “officially,” there, because third-party Apple Music web players have existed as long as the service has allowed the required integration. First, there was Naveed Golafshani's – which is no longer live – but Brychan Bennett-Odlum's Musish is still live and working, as you can see from the screenshot embedded above. Other than the ability to select between two stream bitrates, I can't seen any remaining advantages to using the latter over Apple's own web player, unless you harbor spite toward their handling of the whole thing, which would be entirely understandable, from my perspective.
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MKBHD’s first tech purchase with his own money was an iPod Touch. mine was the original flash drive iPod Shuffle… this is what I mean when I say “I feel old.” it’s not that I’m actually elderly - it’s just strange finding out so often I am older than people I look up to. pic.twitter.com/rbCupcU0R5
As someone who grew up in the mp3 era with a first-generation iPod Shuffle and iTunes, living and dying between iTunes Store gift cards, Apple Music still seems like one hell of a magical deal. In effect, it allows access to all of iTunes for a flat monthly fee. Or at least it would had I never become acquainted with professional independent musicians who've published, there, and have to contend with tedious realities like the process by which one can add those beautiful lyrics to Apple Music tracks, and who's only real means of control/engagement on the service has been removed with virtually zero prospects of a replacement. If, indeed, Jessica Lessin was correct about Apple's obsession with music, it has resulted in very little for any class of music makers, and left even its listeners to seek out and find third-party solutions like MusicHarbor to perform even the most basic personalization one expects from a modern music streaming service without even bothering to amend their App Store's discovery process to illuminate them, or even write a fucking App Story. Despite this, one-to-three-person app teams continue to work on new solutions, to these and other problems...
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- https://bilge.world/iphone-ios-music-apps
- Mon, 19 Apr 2021 21:06:46 +0000
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- Tweetbot 6 for iOS Review
- https://bilge.world/tweetbot-6-ios-review?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Tweetbot Resurrection
In the bleak face of Twitter’s centralization, Tapbots refuses to give up on its mobile client.
Listen to this article read by Siri below...
audio controls
source src="https://github.com/extratone/bilge/raw/main/audio/TTS/Tweetbot%206%20for%20iOS%20Review%20TTS.mp3"
/audio
Were it just I who came to you with only my voice on this cold night, proclaiming the imminent release of a whole numerical version of a third-party mobile Twitter client in 2021, you really would have no choice but to send for the laws, for you’d be left no consideration other than my comprehensive descent into absolute insanity. 825 days ago, I told you lots about the history surrounding the development of Tweetbot 5, which I confidently described as “likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS.” After spending the past few months diving deep into iOS in preparation to review and reflect upon Apple’s current flagship handset, my eyes have been opened to the exponentially-increasing pace of the whole environment’s metamorphosis during the course of my lapsed attention. In the name of progress, I’ve done my best to make a point of looking back, too, yet something astonishingly personally relevant managed to slip past me until just last week: there is a sixth version of the Tweetbot app. At this moment, it is listed on the App Store as an “Early Release” version, though its predecessor can still be downloaded by those who’ve already purchased it in the past, like me. This is an unusual practice - usually, pre-release versions of iOS apps can only be distributed through Apple’s developer beta testing infrastructure, though Testflight. Notably, Tweetbot developer company Tapbots was apparently required to take down Tweetbot 5’s store listing 30 days before releasing Tweetbot 6.
https://soundcloud.com/compaqclub/macstories-on-tweetbot-6
I can’t remember exactly why - though I suspect I was just fucking around on my phone before bed, bleary-eyed - but the implications of this next numeral passed me by the first time I saw and downloaded Tweetbot 6, two weeks ago. Perhaps it’s because the app didn’t appear to have any new features - in fact, it’s technically got less than 5, though those that have been removed - user-specified URL shortening, image hosting, and video hosting services - haven’t worked in a good while anyway. As my old fav, The Verge noted in their coverage of 6, blame for these omissions rests solely on Twitter, Inc., itself, who’s continued to hold its API development inordinately close-to-chest. I didn’t bother to find out about this, though, because my first assumptions upon poking around the new app - especially after encountering its new subscription requirement in order to use any of its substantive features - was that its developers had ceased any actual time investment into the app long ago, and that 6 was a new version in number and rudimentary visual updates, only, shoved out in hopes of peaking old, loyal users like myself enough to get us to download it, at least. In the disappointment I’d already expected, I closed and immediately deleted the app.
I’ve paused everything else to write you on this, though, because the story is actually much bigger. Had I investigated any further that first time, I would have discovered an odd amount of buzz coming from even the most mainstream of tech media in a simple search. (Yes, I am ashamed about it.) You’re still reading, but perhaps - as I was, originally - you are doing so from an appropriately-jaded, well-read perspective on software, generally, in 2021. Perhaps you’re looking at the search results, yourself, and wondering if you’re dreaming. Dedicated coverage of a fucking third-party Twitter client iteration??? At this point in history? What in fuck? I’m fairly certainly neither of us are, though: fucking Tweetbot made headlines on Engadget, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacStories, iMore, MacRumors, and others. No, it’s not 2010 again. In fact, The Verge, at least, has never given up on Tweetbot. If my long term memory had been functioning, I would have remembered noticing its spot in “12 great apps for your new iPhone in 2020:”
Twitter is a vaguely terrible way to spend your time these days, but if you (like me) can’t tear yourself away from the social media service / entryway into hell, you’ll want Tweetbot, which actually makes using Twitter far less painful. Tweetbot shows you the tweets of the people you follow, in the order that they tweeted them. There are no ads or promoted tweets, powerful mute filters to block out unwanted noise, and (thanks to Twitter’s unfriendly API changes) no notifications to constantly ping you to come back to the app.
Here’s to Chaim for exposing me to a perspective I never would have otherwise considered: Tweetbot’s lack of push notifications as a positive. If you’re wondering, no, this new app does not ~yet~ include any additional notification integration, and it’s not clear whether or not it’s on Tapbots future roadmap for the app, or where. As for the reality of integrating Tweetbot 6 into your current Twitter use, I stand by my argument that deleting the native Twitter app isn’t really an option if you plan to ever view your notifications on your phone. The popular assumption (I assume) if you’re still reading is that you are a “poweruser,” meaning details about my own configuration are probably irrelevant. If by chance you’ve just downloaded Tweetbot for the first time, you should take the time to disable notifications for Tweetbot entirely, but leave them on for the native Twitter app, even if you decide to banish it to your App Library. Before I began any work on this review, I made sure to swap in Tweetbot 6 where the native app had been in my dock for several years, now. I originally pushed the native app all the way to page 6, but immediately found this extreme. Instead, I put it in the bottom-right corner in my second screen, as you can see in the screenshot below (which also serves as proof, if you needed it.)
Tweetbot vs Native Twitter Proof
I should also note how much my own engagement on Twitter has diminished in the past 3-5 years. Not to manifest tiny violins - in turn, my engagement on (and investment in) Mastodon has increased exponentially, and it’s of a much higher quality. I bring it up for context’s sake: I can afford to prioritize Tweetbot in my Twitter use because of how few daily notifications I get - a number which is unusual for someone who uses Twitter as much as I do. Inevitably, my own use is once again going to factor heavily in this work, as is the significance of my relationship with Twitter, generally, in my life. If you didn’t already know, I’ve met basically all of my friends since high school through Twitter. As of this moment, my private “Friends” Twitter List includes 149 accounts, and I’ve spent more than 10 years, now, reading almost every single one of their Tweets. I have been as critical of the service as anyone, but - whether or not either of us are willing to acknowledge it, wholly - I believe the intimacy of this arrangement to exceed that of any in-person relationship I have ever had. Reading the random thoughts of these people seconds or minutes after they’ve popped into their heads for all this time has been an experience unique to the format Twitter pioneered, if not to the service, itself. I have no choice but to acknowledge that I am deeply invested in not just Twitter, but Twitter’s less-than-visible Lists feature, emotionally and intellectually. When I hit my follow limit, several years ago, Lists also became my single means of acquiring new connections on the network. If it were to be removed, I would lose this ability, entirely, as well as any reasonable means of communicating with any of my friends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO-ZSD-vymc
Perhaps you understand, now, why I have written and Tweeted so extensively about Lists. You should also understand just how miraculous the possibility of Tweetbot’s new future now seems, personally, unless you’re new to all of these ideas and don’t feel like reading that big olé Tweetbot 5 review of mine (which is fine.) Before I go into the history of Tweetbot, let me first share the single most telling feature in Tweetbot of Tapbots’ belief in using Lists and share some evidence of others’ present day belief in Tweetbot. Shamefully, I’ve spent several years - tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours - using Lists in Tweetbot, oblivious to its upmost Lists integration: “Use Lists as Timeline.” Had I actually bothered to look at the support docs at any point, I would have discovered this long ago, which would have almost certainly made my given year. If you use Tweetbot and Lists, for the love of Gourd, please take a look. Here’s what those docs currently say, in full:
One long time Tweetbot feature is the ability to use any of your lists as your main timeline. To do this, all you have to do is hold down on the “Timeline” label in the navigation bar (in the timeline tab) and a menu populated with your lists will appear. Select one and that will become your current timeline. You can switch to another list or back to your main timeline any time by performing the same action.
Even after reading this multiple times, it still was not obvious to me what it was talking about, and I was unable to find precisely zero visuals on The World Wide Web of this action taking place, so I recorded and uploaded the video embedded above. Good God, how I wish I’d been a more detail-oriented young man! I’ll be privatizing my self-punishment from here on out, though, so bear with me.
Lists Integration | Tweetbot 6
The discourse surrounding Tapbots’ recent announcement has already reached a higher decibel count than I would have ever expected, so it’s obvious there are plenty of users who still love Tweetbot, and you already know from the beforelinked stories that The Verge has also stood firmly by it as the preferred Twitter experience. It takes a wee bit of digging, though, to discover the subtle bets on both Tweetbots and Lists from no less than Apple, Inc., itself. In the official Apple Shortcuts Gallery, a curated list entitled “Twitter Better” includes “Open Twitter Lists” at number 1. In 5th position is “Open in Tweetbot,” and “Open in Twitter App” (3rd,) is configured by default to first ask you to choose between Tweetbot and Twitter’s native app, despite its title.
Tweetbot Bets in Shortcuts
As for App Store rankings, the fact that Tweetbot 5 was forcibly removed from public listings makes it impossible to meaningfully judge recent popularity of Tweetbot on iPhone/iPad. Its MacOS-based sibling, though (called Tweetbot 3,) was the second most popular paid app on the Mac App Store as of February 6th, 2020. That’s the day I borrowed my Mom’s MacBook Pro for a short while to check up on MacOS Big Sur, when I downloaded the current version (3.5.2, if you wanted to know) of Tapbots’ desktop Twitter client and messed around with it enough to tell you that it’s as wonderful as ever. (Had I not switched back to Windows as my primary desktop OS a decade ago, I would use it every single day.)
Tweetbot 3 for MacOS Version 3.5.2
I suspect most active Twitter users in 2021 would be even more surprised to discover Tweetbot’s remaining, discreet hold on today’s Twitter experience than I was, assuming most of them joined more recently than myself and those I regularly interact with. For the sake of this Post, I reached out to Tapbots with an interview request about “Tweetbot’s roadmap, Apple’s requirement that [they] remove 5 from the App Store 30 days beforehand, and why [they’ve] decided to take this (risky, imo) bet on making our lives better,” though I don’t expect a reply, which is fine. They did respond to my support request regarding hardware keyboard shortcut support very quickly, saying they’ll look into it. (Without being verbose, I’ll just tell you that if a near future update to the app fixes the F and ⌘ + R shortcuts, I will shit out my whole ass.)
All Tweetbot Themes
The Business at Hand
Before I dig into the controversy and hypotheticals surrounding what Tweetbot 6 might become, let’s take a moment to qualify it vs all of one’s options to interact with Twitter on iOS currently (as in, Feb 11, 2021 at 19:24.) It’s almost certainly premature to do so, but skeptical readers would note, I’m sure, that its listing on the App Store is “early release” in name only, that I have just spent money on this specific version, which should therefore render inert the normal exceptions a review would make for beta or pre-release software. If you’ve somehow come across this Post before reading anything else about Tweetbot 6 and simply want to know what is new for this version compared with 5.5.3 (its predecessor’s most recent release,) the frank answer as it stands is not much. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, here, but the YouTube videos and tech media articles I could find dealing with the subject of additions, specifically, were all either misleading, entirely wrong, or both.
Account Settings | Tweetbot 5 vs Tweetbot 6
While 6 lists one more option (for a total of 9) under Themes in the Display section of the app’s Settings menu, none are substantive variations of the same themes you’re familiar with from 5. “Future Light” is just a more turquoise variant of the “Default” blue UI theme in 5. In fact, the singular change in the Display menu is the addition of “San Francisco Rounded” under the Fonts selection. Below, you can see side-by-side screenshots of the Tweet Detail view in Tweetbot 5 vs. Tweetbot 6, with the regular SFUI font on the left and rounded variant on the right (text size slider set to max on both apps.)
Tweet Detail | Tweetbot 5 vs Tweetbot 6
To be honest, I can’t really tell the difference between the typefaces in this view, but have used the new app enough to know I prefer the latter. More topically exemplified in that image is Tweetbot 6’s new support for social cards, which the Tapbots boys have executed in a startlingly beautiful way that puts Twitter to shame and makes one feel like you’ve taken them for granted these past few years. Also in that vein and more than worthy of the same accolades is Tweetbot 6’s support for Twitter polls. They’ve never looked so good.
Poll Support in Tweetbot 6
Somewhat on-trend, the app also includes two new icons, but - if we’re being 100% frank - they’re a paltry, dated-looking afterthought and Tweetbot deserves (needs, even) better branding. If I were allowed a singular compulsion to impress upon its developers, I’d make them put out a public call for new art. I’m all but dying to see what the community would come up with.
So, if you were wondering what the fuck Tapbots have been doing these past 3+ years, you should now have the basal bullet points of your answer. The Greater Truth about this gosh darned Twitter app (and why its long-respected developers are now asking you for a whole dollar a month,) though, requires a broader look.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DE1YHcoPxMk
Slow & Steady
For as long as I can remember, both the MacOS and iOS versions of Tweetbot have always possessed a more-or-less undefinable (perhaps Apple Development- specific) quality that’s noticeably set them apart from their direct competitors. I didn’t fully understand why they “feel” so much more “right” until I started making my way through this list of all the interviews/podcast appearances by Tapbots’ iOS code wizard, Paul Haddad, who comments in variations the same argument for a very deliberate developmental pace. The first time, with a MacWorld journalist on some steps outside WWDC 2013, I assumed he was just tossing some self-deprecation around to casualize the interview:
Frankly, we’re slow at doing stuff.
Yes, you are, Tapbot… From a returning user’s perspective, it’s hard to understand what in Gourd’s name they’ve been doing. I listened and read through every Tapbots interview I could find - all but one with Paul, who has through the years continued to come across as a sensitive, well-read, even wise professional developer with a healthy, professional outlook on the work of his little (relatively) weathered company and its place within the warp speed nightmare that is the mobile software industry. I suppose I was expecting to find an explanation for what I saw initially as a minimal regard for Tweetbot’s history, in contrast to 6’s announcement. I wouldn’t find it, though, because in truth, I was sure I already knew it: Twitter made it clear over a decade ago - just after they’d purchased Tweetie and slapped their own name on it - that they had no intention of competing in the client space, so third-party developers were no longer welcome.
Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.
I’ve spent enough time in The App Space (read: Phone Dude Hell) to expect a lot of melodrama, largely without judgement, considering how generally awful the big vendors have made the whole situation. The business legality of the story was spiked into the mainstream conversation last year by controversy encouraged by Basecamp following some pretty toxic, retaliatory correspondence from Apple regarding their plan to subsidize their new email service, HEY. Frankly, I’ve found such stories - about clashes between big software companies over mediocre, uninspiring, and sometimes just downright bad software - ridiculously exhausting and less and less interesting, lately, as I’ve realized that the most innovative, quality work I have experienced has basically all come from the tiniest teams. The most groundbreaking projects and products I’ve bothered to show and tell, here - Unichar, Zalgo Generator, Bear, Toot!, Mastonaut, Mast, etc. - were all built by individual developers except for Shiny Frog’s Bear. (Their team currently numbers 16, by my count.) Each one of those hyperlinks eventually leads to a form of my same rant: why the fuck won’t tech media talk about genuine innovation anymore.
iframe allow="autoplay ; encrypted-media ; fullscreen " frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;background:transparent;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-jardine-and-paul-haddad-tapbots-founders-talk-21/id1164554936?i=1000388739028"/iframe
As I read and listened through Tweetbot’s history for this work, it occurred to me that I might be neglecting to acknowledge an age old divide in development philosophy across platforms. In the singular instance both Tweetbot devs appeared together in a podcast interview - a Founder’s Talk episode from 10 whole years ago - Paul Haddad addressed the when is it gonna be done question in a comprehensive and particularly illuminating way:
I personally hate that question because, you know… it just will get done when it gets done… We’re definitely slow. We go over every screen, every detail over and over again until we get it right. That takes time, which is why we don’t talk about upcoming projects.
Every screen, every detail, over and over again. This sort of deliberateness (which I have personally been working on appreciating, as of late) is actually - as I have come to realize - Tweetbot’s defining feature, especially going forward. Out of all the third-party Twitter clients to come and go, Tweetbot has been overwhelmingly singled out as the favorite because of how aligned it is with the traditional priorities of the Apple space: thoughtful, deeply-considered robustness. Pardon the cliché, but it is the only one that has always felt native - as if it could have been published by Apple, itself.
Everything Happens So Much
The iOS Poweruser Community has been “allowed” to drift away from these principles since iOS 12, especially, and its Pandora’s box-like integration of Siri Shortcuts (Workflow, by another name.) You may or may not be aware of the jailbreaking community’s continued efforts - I was certainly surprised to discover that the r/Jailbreak subreddit has nearly 600,000 subscribers, which outnumbers all but the eldest subreddits in the Apple sphere, including r/iOS, r/iOSBeta, and r/Shortcuts (one of the primary hubs for the Siri Shortcut tinkering community) by a huge margin. Since iOS 14’s addition of sanctioned custom widgets, Twitter and Reddit have been host to a fairly-steady stream of personalized iOS “themes” representing varying degrees of tedium/obsession/madness. One “fringe”-ish avenue I’ve explored quite thoroughly is the adjacent community of public beta tests via Testflight, which allows willing App Scrubs like myself to download beta/pre-release versions of iOS apps. As of this moment, no less than 25 of the 227 apps installed on my iPhone 12 Pro Max are Testflight beta versions (both numbers far higher than normal because of my in-progress review.)
Third-Party Twitter Client Telegram Poll
Essentially, it’s now easier than ever to run incredibly janky software on your iPhone or iPad, remaining well clear of a warranty violation, yet the apps that stick out most boldly in the mind (at least for myself) are unfailingly apart from any sort of experimentation. Bear, for instance - the writing app I evangelize to every iOS user and have continued to describe as “the most beautiful piece of software I have ever seen” - just allowed registered beta testers access to its in-progress “Editor 2.0” on iOS, which Shiny Frog describes as still in its “alpha” stage, yet even I have as yet been unable to trip it up whatsoever. This is the league Tweetbot pioneered, in many ways. For the record, both Tweetbot 6 and Tweetbot 5 have been demonstrably more reliable for me in the past few months than Twitter’s native app, which has been crashing multiple times per day on my devices for quite a while during regular use. I’m accustomed to crashes, so I can’t say with 100% confidence that Tweetbot has never crashed, but it certainly hasn’t since I first downloaded 6 and began this review, despite my deliberate attempts to probe its every possible function.
Not only is Tweetbot 6 reliable as hell - it’s also stupid frugal. Currently, its App Store installation weighs in at 10.9 MB, while Twitter’s app is more than ten times heavier, at 116 MB. I realize Sizes On Disk are further from your mind than they’ve ever been in this age of outright computing gluttony and you probably couldn’t care less about my personal encounter with bandwidth famine in late 2018. In fact, I find it particularly telling that Tapbots has continued to prioritize such efficiency in their development despite operating under less financial, technical, and social pressure than ever to do so.
Various - Tweetbot 6
Future of The Bot
Let’s say you’ve somehow made it this far without either satisfactorily resolving your confusion about Tapbots’ decision to implement subscriptions, why they’ve decided to continue investing their time in third-party Twitter clients, whatsoever, and/or some other App Quandary, and you’re still expecting David Blue of all people to articulate some pivotal element of this story that’ll put your intellect at ease. Perhaps you’re still looking for a comprehensive picture of what using Tweetbot as one’s main Twitter client looks like in 2021. Let’s change it up a bit, toss in some fucking bullet points, and list a few fundamental truths:
If you intend to view your Twitter notifications on iOS at any point, completely deleting the native Twitter app is not an option. (Notably, it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon, if ever.)
“Shopping around” for a third-party Twitter client leads the at all attentive user back to Tweetbot, exclusively. With the potential exception of Fenix, all other Twitter apps on the App Store are fucking bunk and will cost you as much or more as Tweetbot 6’s new subscription.
If you use Twitter Lists regularly, you’d be an idiot not to start your Tweetbot subscription right this fucking minute.
All of these will probably remain true for the foreseeable future, unless I’ve totally misunderstood Twitter’s stated intentions for its API 2.0.
In the ~month since the Tweetbot 6 story first broke (a nice birthday present!,) no less than three newish Twitter features have made the news. Last week, it (apparently) committed to the worst possible user-side content monetization model concept out of the dozens that have dipped in and out of rumor for virtually the service’s entire history: “Super Follows” are slated to shade our collective experience with putrid freemium concerns. “Communities” sound in concept like a worthwhile and genuinely value-adding feature addition for actual Twitter users, but any substantial expectations of the company feel far too risky to invest in. All the while, Twitter Spaces - the audio-only Clubhouse-ish mutilation of Periscope’s corpse - has been silently bestowed upon a secret set of @s at an achingly slow pace. I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t even fully digested fucking Fleets, yet.
What does Tweetbot 6 really offer you, Twitter user, in 2021? Freedom from all of that bullshit.
It’s just occurred to me how much more anxious the movements of Twitter, Inc. and Jack Dorsey’s horrendous facial hair would be making me if I had not discovered an (ironically) more stable, wholesome platform to replace them, years ago. No, I will not discuss Mastodon beyond this remark, but readers invested enough to get to this point who haven’t heard of the federated, open source social network by that name would do well to consult this handy hyperlink. This privilege of choice - even if it’s completely delusional - has combined with Tapbots’ thoughtful brush up of their trustier-than-ever Tweetbot to ease my longtime Twitter-dependent ass to a nigh-miraculous degree. However, stepping back from it all, I realized Tweetbot’s new life bets even heavier on that single, defining feature which the company hardly mentions, and could conceivably restrict - maliciously or not - or remove entirely without real consequences to their business or public standing via tech media outcry. What if Twitter killed Lists? We’d all be fucked.
Upon this realization, I shot out of bed very late in a recent evening and went straight to fucking Trello, of all places, to sift through Twitter’s public development roadmap for any official word on their fate. I really did panic for a beat upon first reading the words “Replacement for Lists functionality” before realizing the actual intention of the card’s expression in the context’s syntax, which is probably about as positive as it could possibly be: a public suggestion that Lists will continue to be supported through 2.0, at least. The card sits in the “Nesting” column (which I assume to be the lowest priority group, chronologically,) right between identical cards for Bookmarks and Direct Messages.
https://imgur.com/gallery/A1zbhLq
The Grandma's House Method
Writing about Tweetbot 6 has been an illuminating personal experience, if you haven’t yet caught on. The timing of its release has proved awfully convenient, just predating the aforementioned catastrophe of disjointed features that has descended harder than ever before on Twitter’s own app, leaving it an absolute mess. When I initiated the symbolic swap maneuver documented at the very beginning of this review, I assumed I was going to find Tweetbot awkward to use as my primary in the present day, but have found the opposite to be true. The social network Tweetbot draws from is barely recognizable as the same property it drew upon originally, when its Lists-loving configuration was simply one of a dozen different interpretations of how one should interact with Twitter (by far the sharpest, I think we’d agree.) Tweetbots, in contrast, is virtually identical in principle, though the unwavering bearing of its development has resulted in the true definition of refinement. The result is the most beautiful way to use Twitter in 2021, no competition, and is also crucially the singular means of interacting with it on one’s “own terms” - as long as yours align with The Lists Method, that is - in an environment that feels predictable and fundamentally at your control.
As much as I have praised the Mastodon app Toot! as the most innovative social app available - and will continue to do so until I encounter something more original and ingenious - it’s perhaps the singular remaining cleverly playful Tweetbots feature which first opened my perspective to appreciate little Easter egg-like tricks. Indeed - even after all we’ve been through together these past ten years - you can still cycle through all of Tweetbot’s visual themes by two-finger swiping vertically in 6. Quick Account Switching is the other less-than-obvious swipe function of note, which I’ll rely on an embed stolen from Tapbots themselves to demonstrate:
https://imgur.com/gallery/oiwfBdQ
I don’t think it should ever feel natural to speak sentimentally about mobile apps, but Tweetbot is a worthy exception. If you glance over the respective comments sections of the articles and YouTube videos I’ve hyperlinked, you’ll pick up on this phenomena of legacy Twitter users chucking back some tragically nostalgic sentiments in response to the reminder surfaced by the Tweetbot 6 news of just how long we’ve been doing this. From my perspective, the other majority sentiment found there catalyzes the bizarre chronobending at play even further. I can’t believe how many folks continue to be flabbergasted by the idea of paying for software in 2021, but I’ve been literally begging Twitter to charge me a monthly fee in exchange for some greater curative capabilities for as long as I can remember. The whole of my gospel, again, is that Tweetbot 6 has personally made using Twitter a little bit better than bearable, so I have no other reasonable choice available: I’m paying the fuck up.
https://soundcloud.com/compaqclub/tweetbot1
See this post's corresponding GitHub Issue for related media, aggregated links, and other minutia.*
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In the bleak face of Twitter’s centralization, Tapbots refuses to give up on its mobile client.
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Listen to this article read by Siri below...
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Were it just I who came to you with only my voice on this cold night, proclaiming the imminent release of a whole numerical version of a third-party mobile Twitter client in 2021, you really would have no choice but to send for the laws, for you’d be left no consideration other than my comprehensive descent into absolute insanity. 825 days ago, I told you lots about the history surrounding the development of Tweetbot 5, which I confidently described as “likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS.” After spending the past few months diving deep into iOS in preparation to review and reflect upon Apple’s current flagship handset, my eyes have been opened to the exponentially-increasing pace of the whole environment’s metamorphosis during the course of my lapsed attention. In the name of progress, I’ve done my best to make a point of looking back, too, yet something astonishingly personally relevant managed to slip past me until just last week: there is a sixth version of the Tweetbot app. At this moment, it is listed on the App Store as an “Early Release” version, though its predecessor can still be downloaded by those who’ve already purchased it in the past, like me. This is an unusual practice – usually, pre-release versions of iOS apps can only be distributed through Apple’s developer beta testing infrastructure, though Testflight. Notably, Tweetbot developer company Tapbots was apparently required to take down Tweetbot 5’s store listing 30 days before releasing Tweetbot 6.
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I can’t remember exactly why – though I suspect I was just fucking around on my phone before bed, bleary-eyed – but the implications of this next numeral passed me by the first time I saw and downloaded Tweetbot 6, two weeks ago. Perhaps it’s because the app didn’t appear to have any new features – in fact, it’s technically got less than 5, though those that have been removed – user-specified URL shortening, image hosting, and video hosting services – haven’t worked in a good while anyway. As my old fav, The Verge noted in their coverage of 6, blame for these omissions rests solely on Twitter, Inc., itself, who’s continued to hold its API development inordinately close-to-chest. I didn’t bother to find out about this, though, because my first assumptions upon poking around the new app – especially after encountering its new subscription requirement in order to use any of its substantive features – was that its developers had ceased any actual time investment into the app long ago, and that 6 was a new version in number and rudimentary visual updates, only, shoved out in hopes of peaking old, loyal users like myself enough to get us to download it, at least. In the disappointment I’d already expected, I closed and immediately deleted the app.
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I’ve paused everything else to write you on this, though, because the story is actually much bigger. Had I investigated any further that first time, I would have discovered an odd amount of buzz coming from even the most mainstream of tech media in a simple search. (Yes, I am ashamed about it.) You’re still reading, but perhaps – as I was, originally – you are doing so from an appropriately-jaded, well-read perspective on software, generally, in 2021. Perhaps you’re looking at the search results, yourself, and wondering if you’re dreaming. Dedicated coverage of a fucking third-party Twitter client iteration??? At this point in history? What in fuck? I’m fairly certainly neither of us are, though: fucking Tweetbot made headlines on Engadget, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacStories, iMore, MacRumors, and others. No, it’s not 2010 again. In fact, The Verge, at least, has never given up on Tweetbot. If my long term memory had been functioning, I would have remembered noticing its spot in “12 great apps for your new iPhone in 2020:”
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Twitter is a vaguely terrible way to spend your time these days, but if you (like me) can’t tear yourself away from the social media service / entryway into hell, you’ll want Tweetbot, which actually makes using Twitter far less painful. Tweetbot shows you the tweets of the people you follow, in the order that they tweeted them. There are no ads or promoted tweets, powerful mute filters to block out unwanted noise, and (thanks to Twitter’s unfriendly API changes) no notifications to constantly ping you to come back to the app.
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Here’s to Chaim for exposing me to a perspective I never would have otherwise considered: Tweetbot’s lack of push notifications as a positive. If you’re wondering, no, this new app does not ~yet~ include any additional notification integration, and it’s not clear whether or not it’s on Tapbots future roadmap for the app, or where. As for the reality of integrating Tweetbot 6 into your current Twitter use, I stand by my argument that deleting the native Twitter app isn’t really an option if you plan to ever view your notifications on your phone. The popular assumption (I assume) if you’re still reading is that you are a “poweruser,” meaning details about my own configuration are probably irrelevant. If by chance you’ve just downloaded Tweetbot for the first time, you should take the time to disable notifications for Tweetbot entirely, but leave them on for the native Twitter app, even if you decide to banish it to your App Library. Before I began any work on this review, I made sure to swap in Tweetbot 6 where the native app had been in my dock for several years, now. I originally pushed the native app all the way to page 6, but immediately found this extreme. Instead, I put it in the bottom-right corner in my second screen, as you can see in the screenshot below (which also serves as proof, if you needed it.)
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I should also note how much my own engagement on Twitter has diminished in the past 3-5 years. Not to manifest tiny violins – in turn, my engagement on (and investment in) Mastodon has increased exponentially, and it’s of a much higher quality. I bring it up for context’s sake: I can afford to prioritize Tweetbot in my Twitter use because of how few daily notifications I get – a number which is unusual for someone who uses Twitter as much as I do. Inevitably, my own use is once again going to factor heavily in this work, as is the significance of my relationship with Twitter, generally, in my life. If you didn’t already know, I’ve met basically all of my friends since high school through Twitter. As of this moment, my private “Friends” Twitter List includes 149 accounts, and I’ve spent more than 10 years, now, reading almost every single one of their Tweets. I have been as critical of the service as anyone, but – whether or not either of us are willing to acknowledge it, wholly – I believe the intimacy of this arrangement to exceed that of any in-person relationship I have ever had. Reading the random thoughts of these people seconds or minutes after they’ve popped into their heads for all this time has been an experience unique to the format Twitter pioneered, if not to the service, itself. I have no choice but to acknowledge that I am deeply invested in not just Twitter, but Twitter’s less-than-visible Lists feature, emotionally and intellectually. When I hit my follow limit, several years ago, Lists also became my single means of acquiring new connections on the network. If it were to be removed, I would lose this ability, entirely, as well as any reasonable means of communicating with any of my friends.
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Perhaps you understand, now, why I have written and Tweeted so extensively about Lists. You should also understand just how miraculous the possibility of Tweetbot’s new future now seems, personally, unless you’re new to all of these ideas and don’t feel like reading that big olé Tweetbot 5 review of mine (which is fine.) Before I go into the history of Tweetbot, let me first share the single most telling feature in Tweetbot of Tapbots’ belief in using Lists and share some evidence of others’ present day belief in Tweetbot. Shamefully, I’ve spent several years – tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours – using Lists in Tweetbot, oblivious to its upmost Lists integration: “Use Lists as Timeline.” Had I actually bothered to look at the support docs at any point, I would have discovered this long ago, which would have almost certainly made my given year. If you use Tweetbot and Lists, for the love of Gourd, please take a look. Here’s what those docs currently say, in full:
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One long time Tweetbot feature is the ability to use any of your lists as your main timeline. To do this, all you have to do is hold down on the “Timeline” label in the navigation bar (in the timeline tab) and a menu populated with your lists will appear. Select one and that will become your current timeline. You can switch to another list or back to your main timeline any time by performing the same action.
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Even after reading this multiple times, it still was not obvious to me what it was talking about, and I was unable to find precisely zero visuals on The World Wide Web of this action taking place, so I recorded and uploaded the video embedded above. Good God, how I wish I’d been a more detail-oriented young man! I’ll be privatizing my self-punishment from here on out, though, so bear with me.
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The discourse surrounding Tapbots’ recent announcement has already reached a higher decibel count than I would have ever expected, so it’s obvious there are plenty of users who still love Tweetbot, and you already know from the beforelinked stories that The Verge has also stood firmly by it as the preferred Twitter experience. It takes a wee bit of digging, though, to discover the subtle bets on both Tweetbots and Lists from no less than Apple, Inc., itself. In the official Apple Shortcuts Gallery, a curated list entitled “Twitter Better” includes “Open Twitter Lists” at number 1. In 5th position is “Open in Tweetbot,” and “Open in Twitter App” (3rd,) is configured by default to first ask you to choose between Tweetbot and Twitter’s native app, despite its title.
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As for App Store rankings, the fact that Tweetbot 5 was forcibly removed from public listings makes it impossible to meaningfully judge recent popularity of Tweetbot on iPhone/iPad. Its MacOS-based sibling, though (called Tweetbot 3,) was the second most popular paid app on the Mac App Store as of February 6th, 2020. That’s the day I borrowed my Mom’s MacBook Pro for a short while to check up on MacOS Big Sur, when I downloaded the current version (3.5.2, if you wanted to know) of Tapbots’ desktop Twitter client and messed around with it enough to tell you that it’s as wonderful as ever. (Had I not switched back to Windows as my primary desktop OS a decade ago, I would use it every single day.)
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I suspect most active Twitter users in 2021 would be even more surprised to discover Tweetbot’s remaining, discreet hold on today’s Twitter experience than I was, assuming most of them joined more recently than myself and those I regularly interact with. For the sake of this Post, I reached out to Tapbots with an interview request about “Tweetbot’s roadmap, Apple’s requirement that [they] remove 5 from the App Store 30 days beforehand, and why [they’ve] decided to take this (risky, imo) bet on making our lives better,” though I don’t expect a reply, which is fine. They did respond to my support request regarding hardware keyboard shortcut support very quickly, saying they’ll look into it. (Without being verbose, I’ll just tell you that if a near future update to the app fixes the F and ⌘ + R shortcuts, I will shit out my whole ass.)
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The Business at Hand
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Before I dig into the controversy and hypotheticals surrounding what Tweetbot 6 might become, let’s take a moment to qualify it vs all of one’s options to interact with Twitter on iOS currently (as in, Feb 11, 2021 at 19:24.) It’s almost certainly premature to do so, but skeptical readers would note, I’m sure, that its listing on the App Store is “early release” in name only, that I have just spent money on this specific version, which should therefore render inert the normal exceptions a review would make for beta or pre-release software. If you’ve somehow come across this Post before reading anything else about Tweetbot 6 and simply want to know what is new for this version compared with 5.5.3 (its predecessor’s most recent release,) the frank answer as it stands is not much. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, here, but the YouTube videos and tech media articles I could find dealing with the subject of additions, specifically, were all either misleading, entirely wrong, or both.
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While 6 lists one more option (for a total of 9) under Themes in the Display section of the app’s Settings menu, none are substantive variations of the same themes you’re familiar with from 5. “Future Light” is just a more turquoise variant of the “Default” blue UI theme in 5. In fact, the singular change in the Display menu is the addition of “San Francisco Rounded” under the Fonts selection. Below, you can see side-by-side screenshots of the Tweet Detail view in Tweetbot 5 vs. Tweetbot 6, with the regular SFUI font on the left and rounded variant on the right (text size slider set to max on both apps.)
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To be honest, I can’t really tell the difference between the typefaces in this view, but have used the new app enough to know I prefer the latter. More topically exemplified in that image is Tweetbot 6’s new support for social cards, which the Tapbots boys have executed in a startlingly beautiful way that puts Twitter to shame and makes one feel like you’ve taken them for granted these past few years. Also in that vein and more than worthy of the same accolades is Tweetbot 6’s support for Twitter polls. They’ve never looked so good.
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Somewhat on-trend, the app also includes two new icons, but – if we’re being 100% frank – they’re a paltry, dated-looking afterthought and Tweetbot deserves (needs, even) better branding. If I were allowed a singular compulsion to impress upon its developers, I’d make them put out a public call for new art. I’m all but dying to see what the community would come up with.
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So, if you were wondering what the fuck Tapbots have been doing these past 3+ years, you should now have the basal bullet points of your answer. The Greater Truth about this gosh darned Twitter app (and why its long-respected developers are now asking you for a whole dollar a month,) though, requires a broader look.
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Slow & Steady
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For as long as I can remember, both the MacOS and iOS versions of Tweetbot have always possessed a more-or-less undefinable (perhaps Apple Development- specific) quality that’s noticeably set them apart from their direct competitors. I didn’t fully understand why they “feel” so much more “right” until I started making my way through this list of all the interviews/podcast appearances by Tapbots’ iOS code wizard, Paul Haddad, who comments in variations the same argument for a very deliberate developmental pace. The first time, with a MacWorld journalist on some steps outside WWDC 2013, I assumed he was just tossing some self-deprecation around to casualize the interview:
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Frankly, we’re slow at doing stuff.
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Yes, you are, Tapbot… From a returning user’s perspective, it’s hard to understand what in Gourd’s name they’ve been doing. I listened and read through every Tapbots interview I could find – all but one with Paul, who has through the years continued to come across as a sensitive, well-read, even wise professional developer with a healthy, professional outlook on the work of his little (relatively) weathered company and its place within the warp speed nightmare that is the mobile software industry. I suppose I was expecting to find an explanation for what I saw initially as a minimal regard for Tweetbot’s history, in contrast to 6’s announcement. I wouldn’t find it, though, because in truth, I was sure I already knew it: Twitter made it clear over a decade ago – just after they’d purchased Tweetie and slapped their own name on it – that they had no intention of competing in the client space, so third-party developers were no longer welcome.
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Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
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As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.
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I’ve spent enough time in The App Space (read: Phone Dude Hell) to expect a lot of melodrama, largely without judgement, considering how generally awful the big vendors have made the whole situation. The business legality of the story was spiked into the mainstream conversation last year by controversy encouraged by Basecamp following some pretty toxic, retaliatory correspondence from Apple regarding their plan to subsidize their new email service, HEY. Frankly, I’ve found such stories – about clashes between big software companies over mediocre, uninspiring, and sometimes just downright bad software – ridiculously exhausting and less and less interesting, lately, as I’ve realized that the most innovative, quality work I have experienced has basically all come from the tiniest teams. The most groundbreaking projects and products I’ve bothered to show and tell, here – Unichar, Zalgo Generator, Bear, Toot!, Mastonaut, Mast, etc. – were all built by individual developers except for Shiny Frog’s Bear. (Their team currently numbers 16, by my count.) Each one of those hyperlinks eventually leads to a form of my same rant: why the fuck won’t tech media talk about genuine innovation anymore.
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As I read and listened through Tweetbot’s history for this work, it occurred to me that I might be neglecting to acknowledge an age old divide in development philosophy across platforms. In the singular instance both Tweetbot devs appeared together in a podcast interview – a Founder’s Talk episode from 10 whole years ago – Paul Haddad addressed the when is it gonna be done question in a comprehensive and particularly illuminating way:
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I personally hate that question because, you know… it just will get done when it gets done… We’re definitely slow. We go over every screen, every detail over and over again until we get it right. That takes time, which is why we don’t talk about upcoming projects.
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Every screen, every detail, over and over again. This sort of deliberateness (which I have personally been working on appreciating, as of late) is actually – as I have come to realize – Tweetbot’s defining feature, especially going forward. Out of all the third-party Twitter clients to come and go, Tweetbot has been overwhelmingly singled out as the favorite because of how aligned it is with the traditional priorities of the Apple space: thoughtful, deeply-considered robustness. Pardon the cliché, but it is the only one that has always felt native – as if it could have been published by Apple, itself.
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Everything Happens So Much
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The iOS Poweruser Community has been “allowed” to drift away from these principles since iOS 12, especially, and its Pandora’s box-like integration of Siri Shortcuts (Workflow, by another name.) You may or may not be aware of the jailbreaking community’s continued efforts – I was certainly surprised to discover that the r/Jailbreak subreddit has nearly 600,000 subscribers, which outnumbers all but the eldest subreddits in the Apple sphere, including r/iOS, r/iOSBeta, and r/Shortcuts (one of the primary hubs for the Siri Shortcut tinkering community) by a huge margin. Since iOS 14’s addition of sanctioned custom widgets, Twitter and Reddit have been host to a fairly-steady stream of personalized iOS “themes” representing varying degrees of tedium/obsession/madness. One “fringe”-ish avenue I’ve explored quite thoroughly is the adjacent community of public beta tests via Testflight, which allows willing App Scrubs like myself to download beta/pre-release versions of iOS apps. As of this moment, no less than 25 of the 227 apps installed on my iPhone 12 Pro Max are Testflight beta versions (both numbers far higher than normal because of my in-progress review.)
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Essentially, it’s now easier than ever to run incredibly janky software on your iPhone or iPad, remaining well clear of a warranty violation, yet the apps that stick out most boldly in the mind (at least for myself) are unfailingly apart from any sort of experimentation. Bear, for instance – the writing app I evangelize to every iOS user and have continued to describe as “the most beautiful piece of software I have ever seen” – just allowed registered beta testers access to its in-progress “Editor 2.0” on iOS, which Shiny Frog describes as still in its “alpha” stage, yet even I have as yet been unable to trip it up whatsoever. This is the league Tweetbot pioneered, in many ways. For the record, both Tweetbot 6 and Tweetbot 5 have been demonstrably more reliable for me in the past few months than Twitter’s native app, which has been crashing multiple times per day on my devices for quite a while during regular use. I’m accustomed to crashes, so I can’t say with 100% confidence that Tweetbot has never crashed, but it certainly hasn’t since I first downloaded 6 and began this review, despite my deliberate attempts to probe its every possible function.
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Not only is Tweetbot 6 reliable as hell – it’s also stupid frugal. Currently, its App Store installation weighs in at 10.9 MB, while Twitter’s app is more than ten times heavier, at 116 MB. I realize Sizes On Disk are further from your mind than they’ve ever been in this age of outright computing gluttony and you probably couldn’t care less about my personal encounter with bandwidth famine in late 2018. In fact, I find it particularly telling that Tapbots has continued to prioritize such efficiency in their development despite operating under less financial, technical, and social pressure than ever to do so.
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Future of The Bot
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Let’s say you’ve somehow made it this far without either satisfactorily resolving your confusion about Tapbots’ decision to implement subscriptions, why they’ve decided to continue investing their time in third-party Twitter clients, whatsoever, and/or some other App Quandary, and you’re still expecting David Blue of all people to articulate some pivotal element of this story that’ll put your intellect at ease. Perhaps you’re still looking for a comprehensive picture of what using Tweetbot as one’s main Twitter client looks like in 2021. Let’s change it up a bit, toss in some fucking bullet points, and list a few fundamental truths:
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If you intend to view your Twitter notifications on iOS at any point, completely deleting the native Twitter app is not an option. (Notably, it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon, if ever.)
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“Shopping around” for a third-party Twitter client leads the at all attentive user back to Tweetbot, exclusively. With the potential exception of Fenix, all other Twitter apps on the App Store are fucking bunk and will cost you as much or more as Tweetbot 6’s new subscription.
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If you use Twitter Lists regularly, you’d be an idiot not to start your Tweetbot subscription right this fucking minute.
In the ~month since the Tweetbot 6 story first broke (a nice birthday present!,) no less than three newish Twitter features have made the news. Last week, it (apparently) committed to the worst possible user-side content monetization model concept out of the dozens that have dipped in and out of rumor for virtually the service’s entire history: “Super Follows” are slated to shade our collective experience with putrid freemium concerns. “Communities” sound in concept like a worthwhile and genuinely value-adding feature addition for actual Twitter users, but any substantial expectations of the company feel far too risky to invest in. All the while, Twitter Spaces – the audio-only Clubhouse-ish mutilation of Periscope’s corpse – has been silently bestowed upon a secret set of @s at an achingly slow pace. I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t even fully digested fucking Fleets, yet.
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What does Tweetbot 6 really offer you, Twitter user, in 2021?Freedom from all of that bullshit.
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It’s just occurred to me how much more anxious the movements of Twitter, Inc. and Jack Dorsey’s horrendous facial hair would be making me if I had not discovered an (ironically) more stable, wholesome platform to replace them, years ago. No, I will not discuss Mastodon beyond this remark, but readers invested enough to get to this point who haven’t heard of the federated, open source social network by that name would do well to consult this handy hyperlink. This privilege of choice – even if it’s completely delusional – has combined with Tapbots’ thoughtful brush up of their trustier-than-ever Tweetbot to ease my longtime Twitter-dependent ass to a nigh-miraculous degree. However, stepping back from it all, I realized Tweetbot’s new life bets even heavier on that single, defining feature which the company hardly mentions, and could conceivably restrict – maliciously or not – or remove entirely without real consequences to their business or public standing via tech media outcry. What if Twitter killed Lists? We’d all be fucked.
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Upon this realization, I shot out of bed very late in a recent evening and went straight to fucking Trello, of all places, to sift through Twitter’s public development roadmap for any official word on their fate. I really did panic for a beat upon first reading the words “Replacement for Lists functionality” before realizing the actual intention of the card’s expression in the context’s syntax, which is probably about as positive as it could possibly be: a public suggestion that Lists will continue to be supported through 2.0, at least. The card sits in the “Nesting” column (which I assume to be the lowest priority group, chronologically,) right between identical cards for Bookmarks and Direct Messages.
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The Grandma's House Method
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Writing about Tweetbot 6 has been an illuminating personal experience, if you haven’t yet caught on. The timing of its release has proved awfully convenient, just predating the aforementioned catastrophe of disjointed features that has descended harder than ever before on Twitter’s own app, leaving it an absolute mess. When I initiated the symbolic swap maneuver documented at the very beginning of this review, I assumed I was going to find Tweetbot awkward to use as my primary in the present day, but have found the opposite to be true. The social network Tweetbot draws from is barely recognizable as the same property it drew upon originally, when its Lists-loving configuration was simply one of a dozen different interpretations of how one should interact with Twitter (by far the sharpest, I think we’d agree.) Tweetbots, in contrast, is virtually identical in principle, though the unwavering bearing of its development has resulted in the true definition of refinement. The result is the most beautiful way to use Twitter in 2021, no competition, and is also crucially the singular means of interacting with it on one’s “own terms” – as long as yours align with The Lists Method, that is – in an environment that feels predictable and fundamentally at your control.
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As much as I have praised the Mastodon app Toot! as the most innovative social app available – and will continue to do so until I encounter something more original and ingenious – it’s perhaps the singular remaining cleverly playful Tweetbots feature which first opened my perspective to appreciate little Easter egg-like tricks. Indeed – even after all we’ve been through together these past ten years – you can still cycle through all of Tweetbot’s visual themes by two-finger swiping vertically in 6. Quick Account Switching is the other less-than-obvious swipe function of note, which I’ll rely on an embed stolen from Tapbots themselves to demonstrate:
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I don’t think it should ever feel natural to speak sentimentally about mobile apps, but Tweetbot is a worthy exception. If you glance over the respective comments sections of the articles and YouTube videos I’ve hyperlinked, you’ll pick up on this phenomena of legacy Twitter users chucking back some tragically nostalgic sentiments in response to the reminder surfaced by the Tweetbot 6 news of just how long we’ve been doing this. From my perspective, the other majority sentiment found there catalyzes the bizarre chronobending at play even further. I can’t believe how many folks continue to be flabbergasted by the idea of paying for software in 2021, but I’ve been literally begging Twitter to charge me a monthly fee in exchange for some greater curative capabilities for as long as I can remember. The whole of my gospel, again, is that Tweetbot 6 has personally made using Twitter a little bit better than bearable, so I have no other reasonable choice available: I’m paying the fuck up.
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See this post's corresponding GitHub Issue for related media, aggregated links, and other minutia.
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- https://bilge.world/tweetbot-6-ios-review
- Mon, 01 Mar 2021 22:00:51 +0000
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- The Psalms' 2020
- https://bilge.world/2020?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[The Psalms 2020 WordCloud
Screens and software subjects big & small discussed within my most moderate 35,000 words ever.
Believe it or not, the cyclical cold season has once again come to pass! Oh, the W̘͖̯E̟̹À̫T̯̫͓̪̮͓̼H̝E̪͇̰̘̖͍ͅŔ͍̖̱̟̪!! If the past two days on Twitter were any indication, it is indeed time for a year's-end retrospective on what has been published on this Web Site. Given the extent of the attention I've devoted to bilge.world this past year - both technically and editorially - I thought it would be nice to chuck in a bit more in the pursuit of whacking myself on the back. I understand that 2020 has been one helluva catastrophic marker of linear time for just about everyone on Earth - as I write this on its last day, the inexplicable news of MF Doom's death has just surfaced and has already hit my adjacent communities remarkably hard.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1334355680078270464
Spring
The earliest archive.org capture of this particular Writeas blog dates back only to May 1st of this year, but its stylistic contrast with the site's current version is immense. I believe I was using Max Henderson's Anxiety theme virtually stock, albeit with some color rearrangements. By the 29th, I had already arrived upon the colors you see today. "You Know I'm Blogging" was just a meta update to say howdy after such a long drought, but "Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips" actually proved popular (for me) among my newly-connected Fedi crowd, especially, thanks to an annotated share by Writeas on Twitter. Honestly, it was entirely worth it just for the accomplishment of exposing my platform peer Dino Bansigan to Alt+D. Writeas Community Manager CJ Eller and I began corresponding, which led to an interview regarding writing tools, managing fiddly compulsions, and the wonder of Markdown.
I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list.
I dug deep in my long-overdue todo list for "Z̴͏a͞l͟g͝o͏ ̕G͟͝e͞n͞҉è̛ŗ͡a͝͞t̴o҉r͞ for iOS," which - along with my 2018 review of Unichar - I felt was a necessary celebration of digital text as a weapon, which is very dear to me. "Preferred Writing Instruments" was probably the singular analog departure The Psalms will ever see and my condensed commentary on Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Discovery, and the current state of Star Trek: Online should fulfill all need mention of science fiction, here, for a very long time. Given yesterday's news regarding Slack's acquisition, perhaps I should feel revalidated in my insistence that "Discord is Better Than Slack," but a developer friend of mine actually addressed my curiosity regarding why startups never mention Discord as a workplace option, despite its identical functionality: it's all about fuckin' enterprise security.
I had wanted to write about The Langoliers - Stephen King's flop of a made-for-TV movie/extended Twilight Zone episode - for a long while. It was probably the first program I watched as a child that genuinely disturbed me and always returns to my thoughts by barren-ish experiences. I had planned to watch the whole three hours all the way through and write whatever came to mind, but I only made it halfway or so in "Craig Toomey's Coronavirus" before I ran completely out of steam. I dropped what I had without revision, to this day. Perhaps one day I shall return...
In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn.
These two sentences begin the sixth chapter of my indefinitely-postponed novel, Blimp's Burden, and are almost certainly my best writing, ever. My vanity simply wouldn't allow them to go forgotten, so I published the chapter as an excerpt on The Psalms. It may seem an intimidating wall of text, but give it your attention and you'll be amused, I think.
The Psalms Stats by Post - 2020
Summer
The general, distinctly 21st-century wisdom regarding one's content popularity seems to be something like you never know what's going to blow up. I experienced this phenomena quite severely for the first time in my writing life after posting "Google Is Not God of The Web" on HackerNews right before going out-of-touch for some 13 straight hours amidst a local BLM protest. I did not intend to write a baity title, nor did I expect anything to come of sharing it, there - I only did so simply because the thought crossed my mind. Honestly, it is probably the least-considered content I'd ever published on The Psalms - I only put it up when I did because I knew all of my energy was about to be absorbed for an entire weekend or more. I only started the thing because I felt it important to raise a small voice in reminder that tech media had started using language when discussing code/online development which had begun to assume the existence of a single, objective standard of measure for good web design. (Fuck your bootstrap baloney, The Drywall Website was a real paradigm shit.)
And yet... That single goddamned post would end up accruing more pageviews than all of my writing on the web, combined (I suspect.) Tens of thousands of words were written in hundreds of comments, which I did my best to parse in a for the hell of it substack email:
Out of everything I’ve shared on Bilge recently, it’s hilarious that this particular post - on which I spent a cumulative total of perhaps 25 minutes writing and made less effort than ever to edit - became probably my most widely-shared work of all time.
Once again, I am thankful for the readership and correspondence, I just really fucking wish it had been on literally anything else I've written about technology.
In retrospect, it really is bonkers that I was excited about yet another vague promise to re-imagine email in the days surrounding the launch of Basecamp's HEY, but I feel it's important to nurture what paltry genuine enthusiasm remains about technology and the future, so I decided to respond to the service's homepage prompt, asking interested visitors to write in with their own thoughts on email. I spent a morning clacking out "Email and I: An Abridged History," which I hope will one day serve as a part-foundation for a thorough, composed extension to my Why I Write About Technology series. This would be The Psalms last relevant work for a few months, while I played around with an experimental WordPress website and dove into fuckin' school for the first time in seven years.
WTF
Fall
I returned in late September with a partial recount of what I'd discovered: "Indulging Once More in Digital Excess." After exploring the concept of Digital Gardens, buying my first pro-ready desktop PC in 10 years, playing with Big Boy Adobe software for the first time, and reading a delightful book documenting the history of word processing, I arrived upon the term Software Historian with which to partially describe myself. It doesn't mean all that much at the moment, but will no doubt be explored imminently on this Web Site.
Addressing "The Social Dilemma's Dilemma" and "Software Thanksgiving" in detail would be awfully redundant, but I would at least note how they represent diametrically opposed perspectives through which to discuss this stuff. Going forward into 2021, I think it's important that I hold short on the progress I've made in moderating my voice since 2018. Digestibility is not a virtue I am at all interested in, nor is it an appropriate one in which to invest any more effort. Any non-radical argument will inevitably prove enormously unoriginal, which makes for a huge waste of all our time. For the moment, that's all the editorializing I've done.
Blogging vs.
Three Point Oh
Somewhere along the research process for one of my school essays, I came across the concept of academic revision tracking and peer review via Git. Having dipped my toe back in academia, any such circumvention of its penchant for the most archaic practices possible was naturally intriguing. Just wait until I show these goons how to use hyperlinks. Perhaps inevitably, I was launched into the Git-Gone Bender I'm still riding simply because I finally had ample reason to actually understand it. In just two months, I've created and forked a total of nearly 80 repositories on my new GitHub account. Though I'd created one for each of my web properties ages ago, I had absolutely no idea how to actually make use of them, so they were all quickly abandoned. In the past two weeks or so, I think I've actually begun to get the hang of the system's core intricacies, best exemplified by The Psalms' Repository as it stands.
The "automated" Project Board I set up has so far been a very impressive replacement for the simple todo list. It tracks and categorizes Post Ideas in their various stages in my process: Mulling, Documentation (research,) Drafting, and actual Publication. Technical "Issues" regarding the CMS and/or the Repository, itself, have also fit in these categories well, so far. Just today, I discovered that one can simply tag Issues by their number to describe Commits, which form an impressive revision-tracking changelog when aggregated together. I also figured out the general idea behind Milestones and set The Psalms' first one for my 27th birthday, next month. The goal is to have figured this all out well enough by then that I'm no longer randomly stumbling upon entire featuresets multiple times in a workday. Thinking in Public - as my friend Tom Critchlow and his crowd say - is what I'm trying to do here, I think. Obviously, this really means that you are more than welcome to hop the fuck in at any time, in any manner you'd prefer. If Git is still no more than a conundrum for you - as it was for me just weeks ago - I would suggest the directory for In-Progress Drafts as a starting point.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1336374708753797123
GitHub Actions are still more or less a mystery to me, but I am unbothered - The Psalms' seems to be producing green text instead of red, now, in the midst of whatever I set it up to do. I poked around the livestreams for "GitHub Universe" a few weeks ago, when dark mode and GitHub Discussions were opened up to more users. At the moment, I cannot imagine a single application for forums in the context of my blog's repository, but I turned them on, anyway. It's very possible that all of the documentation-generating functions of Git are entirely unnecessary in this case, but - as I entrust GitHub with the eternal task of archiving such work - it is my hope that it will help me add further structure to my process.
Caslon Bilge Type Capture
If you've found yourself in possession of a .edu email address and are interested in GitHub related experimentation, see this list of discounted/free dev programs/services for students, which includes a free subscription to "GitHub Pro." (Apparently, equivalent to a $4/month service.) Adobe has similar discounts, as you’re probably already aware, which have allowed me to pursue my goal of learning InDesign. So far, I’ve created a sort of commemorative 404 page for The Drynet and a font showcase of Georgia for my mother. As much as I’d love to continue discussing the current state of Adobe apps, I’ve realized 1) I am quite distinct from a professional user, which is why I genuinely find GIMP more useful than Photoshop, for instance, and 2) given the length of my to-write list considering my current pace, I don’t know if I’d manage to get around to it in this lifetime.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wrhh8zDH-AA
Between now and the 11th of this month, I will be migrating worthwhile posts from the experimental WordPress site (WTF) here and closing its hosting account. I haven’t been compelled to actually do anything with it in months, and the handy redirects, alone, are not worth the upcosts, however fair. Some content - including the corresponding posts for my Adobe experiments will not be imported from WTF here. I’m also going to rely on the Web Archive for publishing the rest. Notable discoveries so far include “Through an iPhone 4’s Lens,” which is a reminder of how revolutionary that particular handset was, and a few extra-Psalms pieces of content I’d like you to experience, like this Notion gallery of my single jaunt into drawing, # DavidBlueDraws. Best of all is my friend Tevin’s episode of Extratone’s defunct flagship podcast. In the years since, he’s become quite the prolific Twitch streamer. (I’ve watched enough and know Tevin well enough to say that he’s particularly entertaining in this medium.)
iframe allow="autoplay ; encrypted-media ; fullscreen " frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;background:transparent;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/esporting-psycholiterates-favored-of-email/id1400636220?i=1000500606715"/iframe
Coming Soon
For better or worse, all of these new exploratory avenues have so far led directly away from the business of actually writing, but - in my best self-estimation - I suspect I’m mostly done with fiddling, now, and ready to start thinking on the page, again. Predictably, I’ve let my upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max Review turn into quite a monstrosity over the past two months. It turns out, years of lapsed attention toward iOS development resulted in my feeling more out-of-the-loop than I expected, which I was compelled to remedy, naturally. If you’re so inclined, you can follow the minutia attached to my review process via this dedicated Snapas gallery, this shared iCloud album, my personal YouTube channel , and this Twitter collection.
https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1344555610155712512
As per my newfound use of GitHub, I’ve played around with various ways of documenting this journey, specifically. First is this Wiki page (which I shall do my best to remember to keep updated) listing the entirety of my writing history on iPhone and iOS. (It’s uh... A bit underwhelming, if I’m honest.) I’ve also just begun a dedicated repository for iOS-related documentation and resources, which will soon include a full, sensically-indexed list of iCloud share links to my entire Siri Shortcuts collection (I hope.) Immediately following the review, I intend to publish here a post dedicated to functions Apple has failed to properly document, which I expect to be the most widely-useful content on this domain. To see some of the suggestions I’ve received so far and/or to add your own, see this mildly-successful thread I posted in r/iOS.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=uXIXjAWXVfQ
When I have finally tired of talking about handsets once more, I hope to return my attention toward some other overwhelmingly-ambitious monstrosities like my academic paper proposing federated, open-source social networks in favor of the Big Boys, my report on the experience of returning to academia for a semester in 2020, and my evaluation of Notion as perhaps the next Big Step in the evolution of notetaking software. Perhaps before tackling projects the size of these, I intend to compile another listicle of handy tips for newcomers to Writeas. As I linked before, you can now view the entirety of The Psalms’* status in as much detail as you’d like via its Project Board on GitHub. As always, you can delight me by directly engaging on Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and/or via email. Let’s hope 2021’s equivalent of this review doesn’t take me until February to publish!
meta]]>
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Screens and software subjects big & small discussed within my most moderate 35,000 words ever.
-
-
Believe it or not, the cyclical cold season has once again come to pass! Oh, the W̘͖̯E̟̹À̫T̯̫͓̪̮͓̼H̝E̪͇̰̘̖͍ͅŔ͍̖̱̟̪!! If the past two days on Twitter were any indication, it is indeed time for a year's-end retrospective on what has been published on this Web Site. Given the extent of the attention I've devoted to bilge.world this past year – both technically and editorially – I thought it would be nice to chuck in a bit more in the pursuit of whacking myself on the back. I understand that 2020 has been one helluva catastrophic marker of linear time for just about everyone on Earth – as I write this on its last day, the inexplicable news of MF Doom's death has just surfaced and has already hit my adjacent communities remarkably hard.
I had forgotten *a lot* more about CSS and HTML than I originally thought. glad I ended up comfortable enough to find myself with a completely original stylesheet before the end of the year, I suppose. pic.twitter.com/4QwlbEJECU
The earliest archive.org capture of this particular Writeas blog dates back only to May 1st of this year, but its stylistic contrast with the site's current version is immense. I believe I was using Max Henderson's Anxiety theme virtually stock, albeit with some color rearrangements. By the 29th, I had already arrived upon the colors you see today. “You Know I'm Blogging” was just a meta update to say howdy after such a long drought, but “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” actually proved popular (for me) among my newly-connected Fedi crowd, especially, thanks to an annotated share by Writeas on Twitter. Honestly, it was entirely worth it just for the accomplishment of exposing my platform peer Dino Bansigan to Alt+D. Writeas Community Manager CJ Eller and I began corresponding, which led to an interview regarding writing tools, managing fiddly compulsions, and the wonder of Markdown.
-
-
I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list.
I had wanted to write about The Langoliers – Stephen King's flop of a made-for-TV movie/extended Twilight Zone episode – for a long while. It was probably the first program I watched as a child that genuinely disturbed me and always returns to my thoughts by barren-ish experiences. I had planned to watch the whole three hours all the way through and write whatever came to mind, but I only made it halfway or so in “Craig Toomey's Coronavirus” before I ran completely out of steam. I dropped what I had without revision, to this day. Perhaps one day I shall return...
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In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn.
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These two sentences begin the sixth chapter of my indefinitely-postponed novel, Blimp's Burden, and are almost certainly my best writing, ever. My vanity simply wouldn't allow them to go forgotten, so I published the chapter as an excerpt on The Psalms. It may seem an intimidating wall of text, but give it your attention and you'll be amused, I think.
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Summer
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The general, distinctly 21st-century wisdom regarding one's content popularity seems to be something like you never know what's going to blow up. I experienced this phenomena quite severely for the first time in my writing life after posting “Google Is Not God of The Web” on HackerNews right before going out-of-touch for some 13 straight hours amidst a local BLM protest. I did not intend to write a baity title, nor did I expect anything to come of sharing it, there – I only did so simply because the thought crossed my mind. Honestly, it is probably the least-considered content I'd ever published on The Psalms – I only put it up when I did because I knew all of my energy was about to be absorbed for an entire weekend or more. I only started the thing because I felt it important to raise a small voice in reminder that tech media had started using language when discussing code/online development which had begun to assume the existence of a single, objective standard of measure for good web design. (Fuck your bootstrap baloney, The Drywall Website was a realparadigm shit.)
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And yet... That single goddamned post would end up accruing more pageviews than all of my writing on the web, combined (I suspect.) Tens of thousands of words were written in hundreds of comments, which I did my best to parse in a for the hell of it substack email:
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Out of everything I’ve shared on Bilge recently, it’s hilarious that this particular post – on which I spent a cumulative total of perhaps 25 minutes writing and made less effort than ever to edit – became probably my most widely-shared work of all time.
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Once again, I am thankful for the readership and correspondence, I just really fucking wish it had been on literally anything else I've written about technology.
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In retrospect, it really is bonkers that I was excited about yet another vague promise to re-imagine email in the days surrounding the launch of Basecamp's HEY, but I feel it's important to nurture what paltry genuine enthusiasm remains about technology and the future, so I decided to respond to the service's homepage prompt, asking interested visitors to write in with their own thoughts on email. I spent a morning clacking out “Email and I: An Abridged History,” which I hope will one day serve as a part-foundation for a thorough, composed extension to my Why I Write About Technology series. This would be The Psalms last relevant work for a few months, while I played around with an experimental WordPress website and dove into fuckin' school for the first time in seven years.
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Fall
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I returned in late September with a partial recount of what I'd discovered: “Indulging Once More in Digital Excess.” After exploring the concept of Digital Gardens, buying my first pro-ready desktop PC in 10 years, playing with Big Boy Adobe software for the first time, and reading a delightful book documenting the history of word processing, I arrived upon the term Software Historian with which to partially describe myself. It doesn't mean all that much at the moment, but will no doubt be explored imminently on this Web Site.
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Addressing “The Social Dilemma's Dilemma” and “Software Thanksgiving” in detail would be awfully redundant, but I would at least note how they represent diametrically opposed perspectives through which to discuss this stuff. Going forward into 2021, I think it's important that I hold short on the progress I've made in moderating my voice since 2018. Digestibility is not a virtue I am at all interested in, nor is it an appropriate one in which to invest any more effort. Any non-radical argument will inevitably prove enormously unoriginal, which makes for a huge waste of all our time. For the moment, that's all the editorializing I've done.
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Three Point Oh
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Somewhere along the research process for one of my school essays, I came across the concept of academic revision tracking and peer review via Git. Having dipped my toe back in academia, any such circumvention of its penchant for the most archaic practices possible was naturally intriguing. Just wait until I show these goons how to use hyperlinks. Perhaps inevitably, I was launched into the Git-Gone Bender I'm still riding simply because I finally had ample reason to actually understand it. In just two months, I've created and forked a total of nearly 80 repositories on my new GitHub account. Though I'd created one for each of my web properties ages ago, I had absolutely no idea how to actually make use of them, so they were all quickly abandoned. In the past two weeks or so, I think I've actually begun to get the hang of the system's core intricacies, best exemplified by The Psalms' Repository as it stands.
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The “automated” Project Board I set up has so far been a very impressive replacement for the simple todo list. It tracks and categorizes Post Ideas in their various stages in my process: Mulling, Documentation (research,) Drafting, and actual Publication. Technical “Issues” regarding the CMS and/or the Repository, itself, have also fit in these categories well, so far. Just today, I discovered that one can simply tag Issues by their number to describe Commits, which form an impressive revision-tracking changelog when aggregated together. I also figured out the general idea behind Milestones and set The Psalms' first one for my 27th birthday, next month. The goal is to have figured this all out well enough by then that I'm no longer randomly stumbling upon entire featuresets multiple times in a workday. Thinking in Public – as my friend Tom Critchlow and his crowd say – is what I'm trying to do here, I think. Obviously, this really means that you are more than welcome to hop the fuck in at any time, in any manner you'd prefer. If Git is still no more than a conundrum for you – as it was for me just weeks ago – I would suggest the directory for In-Progress Drafts as a starting point.
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requesting support on how to "leverage discussions" to talk about pee pee and poo poo. #GitHubUniverse
GitHub Actions are still more or less a mystery to me, but I am unbothered – The Psalms' seems to be producing green text instead of red, now, in the midst of whatever I set it up to do. I poked around the livestreams for “GitHub Universe” a few weeks ago, when dark mode and GitHub Discussions were opened up to more users. At the moment, I cannot imagine a single application for forums in the context of my blog's repository, but I turned them on, anyway. It's very possible that all of the documentation-generating functions of Git are entirely unnecessary in this case, but – as I entrust GitHub with the eternal task of archiving such work – it is my hope that it will help me add further structure to my process.
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If you've found yourself in possession of a .edu email address and are interested in GitHub related experimentation, see this list of discounted/free dev programs/services for students, which includes a free subscription to “GitHub Pro.” (Apparently, equivalent to a $4/month service.) Adobe has similar discounts, as you’re probably already aware, which have allowed me to pursue my goal of learning InDesign. So far, I’ve created a sort of commemorative 404 page for The Drynet and a font showcase of Georgia for my mother. As much as I’d love to continue discussing the current state of Adobe apps, I’ve realized 1) I am quite distinct from a professional user, which is why I genuinely find GIMP more useful than Photoshop, for instance, and 2) given the length of my to-write list considering my current pace, I don’t know if I’d manage to get around to it in this lifetime.
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Between now and the 11th of this month, I will be migrating worthwhile posts from the experimental WordPress site (WTF) here and closing its hosting account. I haven’t been compelled to actually do anything with it in months, and the handy redirects, alone, are not worth the upcosts, however fair. Some content – including the corresponding posts for my Adobe experiments will not be imported from WTF here. I’m also going to rely on the Web Archive for publishing the rest. Notable discoveries so far include “Through an iPhone 4’s Lens,” which is a reminder of how revolutionary that particular handset was, and a few extra-Psalms pieces of content I’d like you to experience, like this Notion gallery of my single jaunt into drawing, # DavidBlueDraws. Best of all is my friend Tevin’s episode of Extratone’s defunct flagship podcast. In the years since, he’s become quite the prolific Twitch streamer. (I’ve watched enough and know Tevin well enough to say that he’s particularly entertaining in this medium.)
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Coming Soon
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For better or worse, all of these new exploratory avenues have so far led directly away from the business of actually writing, but – in my best self-estimation – I suspect I’m mostly done with fiddling, now, and ready to start thinking on the page, again. Predictably, I’ve let my upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max Review turn into quite a monstrosity over the past two months. It turns out, years of lapsed attention toward iOS development resulted in my feeling more out-of-the-loop than I expected, which I was compelled to remedy, naturally. If you’re so inclined, you can follow the minutia attached to my review process via this dedicated Snapas gallery, this shared iCloud album, my personal YouTube channel , and this Twitter collection.
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SO... I’m really starting to see the magic now. I just took this and it’s 2AM... utterly dark outside. I managed to force my car mount to couple with a tripod and set the exposure to 30 seconds. pic.twitter.com/FMLGrFzgy2
As per my newfound use of GitHub, I’ve played around with various ways of documenting this journey, specifically. First is this Wiki page (which I shall do my best to remember to keep updated) listing the entirety of my writing history on iPhone and iOS. (It’s uh... A bit underwhelming, if I’m honest.) I’ve also just begun a dedicated repository for iOS-related documentation and resources, which will soon include a full, sensically-indexed list of iCloud share links to my entire Siri Shortcuts collection (I hope.) Immediately following the review, I intend to publish here a post dedicated to functions Apple has failed to properly document, which I expect to be the most widely-useful content on this domain. To see some of the suggestions I’ve received so far and/or to add your own, see this mildly-successful thread I posted in r/iOS.
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When I have finally tired of talking about handsets once more, I hope to return my attention toward some other overwhelmingly-ambitious monstrosities like my academic paper proposing federated, open-source social networks in favor of the Big Boys, my report on the experience of returning to academia for a semester in 2020, and my evaluation of Notion as perhaps the next Big Step in the evolution of notetaking software. Perhaps before tackling projects the size of these, I intend to compile another listicle of handy tips for newcomers to Writeas. As I linked before, you can now view the entirety of The Psalms’ status in as much detail as you’d like via its Project Board on GitHub. As always, you can delight me by directly engaging on Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and/or via email. Let’s hope 2021’s equivalent of this review doesn’t take me until February to publish!
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/2020
- Thu, 04 Feb 2021 22:50:45 +0000
-
-
- Concerning Discovery in Streaming Music
- https://bilge.world/streaming-music-discovery?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Dark Wrapped 2020 - Spotify
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking" - a function once relegated to magazines - has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” – applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now – can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
Premium Badges - Spotify
In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and – most controversially – the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns – if not its proposed solutions – should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
Responsible Curation
For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook – the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world – as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy – vague, at best.
iframe width="auto" height="auto" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/At_K4FVY198?controls=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen/iframe
In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”
You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
From its very origin, the team designed Bandcamp to make the process of publishing one’s music as easy as possible. In the first post on the company’s blog from September, 2008, Diamond details the results of their engineering:
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”
As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections – which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page – and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
---
[1] While Bandcamp set out from the beginning to make it easier for artists to publish music, getting music on Spotify has always been a grueling process.
[2] I fully intended to quote Kaitlyn Tiffany on how organizations only get tech media attention if a significant amount of capital is involved in some form, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ll certainly come back and add it if/when I do.
#software #music]]>
-
-
-
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
-
-
Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
-
-
For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
-
-
Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking” – a function once relegated to magazines – has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” – applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now – can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
-
-
-
-
In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
-
-
On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
-
-
She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
-
-
According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
-
-
“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
-
-
The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
-
-
In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
-
-
Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and – most controversially – the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns – if not its proposed solutions – should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
-
-
Responsible Curation
-
-
For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
-
-
Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
-
-
Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
-
-
Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook – the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world – as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy – vague, at best.
-
-
-
-
In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
-
-
In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”[^1]
-
-
You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
-
-
In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
-
-
Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
-
-
In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
-
-
Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
-
-
The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
-
-
Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
-
-
I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”[^2]
-
-
As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections – which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page – and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
-
-
Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
-
-
The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
-
-
-
-
[1] While Bandcamp set out from the beginning to make it easier for artists to publish music, getting music on Spotify has always been a grueling process.
-
-
[2] I fully intended to quote Kaitlyn Tiffany on how organizations only get tech media attention if a significant amount of capital is involved in some form, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ll certainly come back and add it if/when I do.
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/streaming-music-discovery
- Wed, 09 Dec 2020 06:00:29 +0000
-
-
- Software Thanksgiving
- https://bilge.world/big-thank?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[Digital Leaves
Purposing a disciplined effort to reflect on those tech products which have remained too fair and/or too good to catch the attention of the alarmists in us, recently.
I've never been a big fan of holidays, nor do I think Thanksgiving should be a federal one, given its shitty, undebatably imperialist origins, but these opinions are entirely inconsequential. Regardless of how I feel, Thanksgiving will remain as pervasive as ever in the spaces around me, so I thought I'd change things up this year and actually participate in a substantial way. I did my best to travel back to a vastly less complicated self, letting all of the crud that's accumulated atop my love of computers in the past twenty years: wokeness, adtech, Obama wearing VR glasses, etc... When I thought the Native Americans were glad to see white people because they gave them guns and horses and assumed people made things because good ideas were the apex of currency. When I was able to respond to new software discoveries by screwing around aimlessly without wondering if they'd been stolen entirely from a handful of talented developers lacking in the resources and know how required to protect their ideas in the face of Microsoft's ruthless Embrace, Extend, Extinguish crusade.
Forgive yourself for a moment and return there with me. Or perhaps somewhere else, if you need - wherever and whenever you last remember feeling genuinely enthralled with The Future of Computers. (Perhaps it was yesterday! If so, Gourd bless you. Never change.) Let's take ourselves back to kindergarten, before we knew anything about the rapid cyclical consolidation and monopolization within the technology industry that had already established itself as a trend, by then, when all we knew of the software we interacted with was contained within our most visceral reactions: I like Ask Jeeves because I like red and I like Jeeves. I vaguely remember when Google (the search engine) first broached the general awareness of my elementary school's computer lab. I'm fairly sure I even remember the sort of feelings that were elicited the first time I actually set eyes on the Google.com homepage: it looked so modern, then, compared to the rest of the web. (After two decades, it currently looks like shit.) Upon the first first query, it was immediately clear that Google was superior to any of the other search engines we'd been using.
This sort of encounter - with a service that significantly alters one's perception of a given set of tasks - is precious in our lives as users.
A few examples from my own using life which come to mind:
The first time I witnessed a Skype call.
Downloading and using the beta Evernote client on the school machines in Junior High.
The first album I uploaded on Bandcamp.
Discord's first public release.
The "moment" I first put a name to Markdown. (I'd been using bits of the syntax for years before I actually read the word.)
And most recently, exploring Notion as personal catch-all documentation software.
The atmosphere of elation about the future on which I so often lament has been replaced by wariness for most of us - from Californian software developers to tractor-hacking farmers. Now, the conversation is saturated with CEO appearances before legal committees, corporate memo leaks, and somber interviews. Of course, I have unquestionably contributed more than my share. In fact, I wish I could be twice as critical in twice the written volume, and I believe the tech media industry to be far too culturally-embedded within Silicon Valley to be nearly critical enough. For this holiday, though, I think a respite from the negative is worthwhile and essential. I know it is for my personal sanity, at least.
iframe src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfPdoP8oKIG6UhpK515D4x6khPNJqJlHPYAYflwKSpuVsUDw/viewform?embedded=true" width="285" height="600" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"Loading…/iframe
A week ago, I shared this Google Form and asked you to reflect with me on the "really great" software/services you have encountered in your using life built by "technology companies who's business ethics align toward the benefit of us users and who's products are well-priced (or free!)" As of the time of this writing, nearly 80 responses have been recorded on the form, itself, and several more via comments on Hacker News. I deeply appreciate your participation! They're far from predictable, too - I've ended up learning a lot. The very first submission was for Logos Bible Software, which has quite a fascinating history. I feel like those less-secular of us go unexposed to theological software without participants such as the human who submitted this one (thank you, human!,) and end up missing out on an entire segment of software development. Having studied The Good Book in a very much analog fashion through Lutheran school, I wonder in retrospect how software solutions could've changed the experience.
I have never received this volume of feedback in my prompts before, nor have I ever really seen a reason to close any of them to responses, so I'm going to take a blind shot at the dartboard and plan to close the form on New Year's Day, 2021. Until then, please feel free to respond in any way you'd like and/or view all the live answers in this very bad spreadsheet full of these very good responses. (My apologies - I have absolutely no idea how to use Google Sheets.)
Software Thanksgiving Cloud
---
ⓣⓗⓐⓝⓚⓢ
I originally intended to go into relatively extensive detail for each of the entities on my own Most Thankful For list, but I do have to actually stop somewhere, so the commentary on these isn't remarkably insightful or educational. It is genuine, though, which is worth something, I hope.
1. Bandcamp
Yes, I have tirelessly promoted my essay about Bandcamp's holiness for years now, but I have done so with good reason: here is a for-profit technology company which is building a one-of-a-kind product that invests directly in independent artists. I spent a whole summer scouring The Web looking for a single misstep or controversy and found absolutely none.
Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
2. OBS
Before OBS (Open Broadcaster Software,) streaming video was an absolute mess that usually involved paying for or pirating some proprietary software. Remember Ustream? Good God...
iframe width="auto" height="auto" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EPZXkvl8cT0?controls=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen/iframe
OBS is the streaming video equivalent of Audacity and GIMP: an extremely powerful, infinitely-malleable set of tools that allow one to take full advantage of their hardware to capture and/or stream video and audio.
Typora - Gitbooks Slate Theme
3. Typora
There's a file entitled "My Darling, Typora" sitting in my essay drafts folder, currently, which describes this text editor as "the perfect writing software." (See its notes page on Notion for more.)
From another recommendation I wrote:
Typora is an infinitely-customizable markdown editor spanning all platforms that's managed to become my primary word processor (and I'm someone who demands a lot from word processors.) It's immensely powerful in all the important ways - my use over the past two years has stress tested it with both enormous (100,000+ words) and extremely complicated (100+ images and embeds) documents. It's able to export even these chunkos to any format you can imagine instantaneously and never crashes.
From a comment I made on The Information's notetaking software comparison:
Typora is a Markdown editor with left sidebar file sorting, very much like Bear (several available themes can make it look actually identical, in fact,) but without its native iCloud-based file syncing. It is cross-platform, open-source, and definitely more powerful, though.
The Typora theming community has been especially on-point, as of late. In the screenshot embedded above, it's wearing the Slate variation of H16nning's Gitbook theme, which is by far the most beautiful configuration I've yet to see the editor in.
4. GIMP
The GNU Image Manipulation Program - which just celebrated its 25th anniversary last week - is one of the most powerful tools in its space and perhaps the number one exemplary example of open source software to cite when explaining the concept for the first time. I have used it my entire creative life for all manner of tasks and evangelized it plenty, but it wasn't until I returned to college this Fall and took advantage of Adobe's student discounts that I had an opportunity to thoroughly explore its proprietary nemesis, Photoshop.
iframe width="auto" height="auto" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CezNvZ-TQlY?controls=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen/iframe
What I found was indeed a very powerful piece of software, albeit as arrogant as ever in its stubborn commitment to the original keyboard shortcuts set by default and other legacy artifacts, though not one I would compare to GIMP, necessarily. This shouldn't be breaking news: as far as I know, there are billions of posts comparing the two going back to the beginning of the written word. My personal conclusion: I can accomplish much more, much faster with GIMP in every single one of my own use cases.
5. Audacity
I was browsing some FOSS-related article aggregation page a few weeks ago when a post caught my eye: "Audacity exceeds 100 million downloads." In reflection, I realized in that moment that perhaps no other single piece of software has been so thoroughly present in my "workflows" across all sorts of projects through the years, largely because of its God-sent Truncate Silence feature, which I have used to remove silence from audio files for as long as I've been working within the medium, basically. Every podcast episode I have ever published has passed through Audacity for this reason and others, as have voiceovers, high school punk band demo tapes, personal voice notes, and more.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"the world would actually be perfect if audacity's truncate silence feature could be autotied to video timecodes./p— David Blue (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/766786796898357248?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"August 19, 2016/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
Until OBS came along, Audacity was where all recorded audio started for myself and my creative friends. It was Audacity that captured (and caused, technically) the death of my friend's soundcard in audio form during the recording process for Hamura, the first Drywall album, back in October of 2011.
iframe width="100%" height="auto" src="https://clyp.it/ycvt1wij/widget" frameborder="0"/iframe
Fucking around in Audacity through the years has led to some halfway creative results on my part, including "SLOWED 'N' THROWED" Hilary Duff tracks and legacy Windows sounds remixes. I still use it for every episode of End User and have recently created a macro for remastering Drycast episodes. (A big feat for me and reflective of Audacity's ingenuity.) As far as I know, there are zero competitors, proprietary or not, which can replicate Audacity's particular usefulness as an audio utility.
iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/516674979&color=%2300006b&autoplay=false&hiderelated=false&showcomments=true&showuser=true&showreposts=false&showteaser=true"/iframe
NeoCities Interactions
6. NeoCities
Shortly after I discovered NeoCities last Spring, I signed up to be a Supporter for $5/month, not necessarily for the additional storage or bandwidth, but because the project immediately sounded like one I was personally obligated to uplift. Parimal Satyal's essay "Rediscovering the Small Web," along with the design of the website which delivered it, inspired me to make another attempt at building an HTML site by hand. So far, davidblue.xyz obviously borrows heavily from his CSS, but looking at the code itself was vastly more pleasant than one would expect. Recently, during the course of writing an academic research essay, I found myself listening to interviews with its founder, Kyle Drake and reading articles from its debut in 2013, which prompted me to take even further advantage of my account.
The Drywall Website
Last week, I moved my inactive automotive blog (dieselgoth.com) from a Writeas blog to a purely-HTML NeoCities website with disturbingly little friction. (I challenge you to spot any differences.) After discovering a backup of the original Drywall Website deep within my old files, NeoCities was the only reasonable host on which to archive it. After I'd finished uploading, I fell down what the youth call a "rabbit hole" of discovery, mesmerized by what I found on page after page of NeoCities' site browser. I did my best to save the best finds by following them within the sites dashboard and have since set up a Best of NeoCities GitHub repository with my absolute favorites among them archived thanks to wget.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"LOOK AT THIS GORGEOUS WEBSITE! a href="https://t.co/nahoRCEkeE"https://t.co/nahoRCEkeE/a a href="https://t.co/mzEfhGygWz"pic.twitter.com/mzEfhGygWz/a/p— David Blue (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1328337497416458247?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"November 16, 2020/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
Trust me when I tell you that *some of the best web design, ever can be found on NeoCities. What's even better: after my deep dive, I was pleasantly surprised by strangers commenting on what I'd found! Replying in a timely, substantial, and genuine manner seems to be a hallmark of the community: my (rather verbose) question regarding the well-manneredness of publishing such an archive without permission in the community Discord I discovered just this morning was almost immediately met with encouraging replies.
A Post you should probably expect soon: "NeoCities is 2020's Best Social Network." Going forward, I'd like to digitize my poetry collection on NeoCities in the near future while continuing to otherwise brush back up on HTML and CSS - both of which I am also* very thankful for, come to think of it.
Thank you again for your correspondence! May your Imperialism Day be a positive experience!
ʰᵉʳᵉ
ᵃʳᵉ
ᵗʰᵉ
ᵈʳʸʷᵃˡˡ
ʷᵉᵇˢᶤᵗᵉ
ᵉᵃˢᵗᵉʳ
ᵉᵍᵍˢ
DryBuy
software]]>
-
-
-
Purposing a disciplined effort to reflect on those tech products which have remained too fair and/or too good to catch the attention of the alarmists in us, recently.
-
-
I've never been a big fan of holidays, nor do I think Thanksgiving should be a federal one, given its shitty, undebatably imperialist origins, but these opinions are entirely inconsequential. Regardless of how I feel, Thanksgiving will remain as pervasive as ever in the spaces around me, so I thought I'd change things up this year and actually participate in a substantial way. I did my best to travel back to a vastly less complicated self, letting all of the crud that's accumulated atop my love of computers in the past twenty years: wokeness, adtech, Obama wearing VR glasses, etc... When I thought the Native Americans were glad to see white people because they gave them guns and horses and assumed people made things because good ideas were the apex of currency. When I was able to respond to new software discoveries by screwing around aimlessly without wondering if they'd been stolen entirely from a handful of talented developers lacking in the resources and know how required to protect their ideas in the face of Microsoft's ruthless Embrace, Extend, Extinguish crusade.
-
-
Forgive yourself for a moment and return there with me. Or perhaps somewhere else, if you need – wherever and whenever you last remember feeling genuinely enthralled with The Future of Computers. (Perhaps it was yesterday! If so, Gourd bless you. Never change.) Let's take ourselves back to kindergarten, before we knew anything about the rapid cyclical consolidation and monopolization within the technology industry that had already established itself as a trend, by then, when all we knew of the software we interacted with was contained within our most visceral reactions: I like Ask Jeeves because I like red and I like Jeeves. I vaguely remember when Google (the search engine) first broached the general awareness of my elementary school's computer lab. I'm fairly sure I even remember the sort of feelings that were elicited the first time I actually set eyes on the Google.com homepage: it looked so modern, then, compared to the rest of the web. (After two decades, it currently looks like shit.) Upon the first first query, it was immediately clear that Google was superior to any of the other search engines we'd been using.
-
-
This sort of encounter – with a service that significantly alters one's perception of a given set of tasks – is precious in our lives as users.
-
-
A few examples from my own using life which come to mind:
-
The first time I witnessed a Skype call.
-
Downloading and using the beta Evernote client on the school machines in Junior High.
-
The first album I uploaded on Bandcamp.
-
Discord's first public release.
-
The “moment” I first put a name to Markdown. (I'd been using bits of the syntax for years before I actually read the word.)
-
And most recently, exploring Notion as personal catch-all documentation software.
-
-
The atmosphere of elation about the future on which I so often lament has been replaced by wariness for most of us – from Californian software developers to tractor-hacking farmers. Now, the conversation is saturated with CEO appearances before legal committees, corporate memo leaks, and somber interviews. Of course, I have unquestionably contributed more than my share. In fact, I wish I could be twice as critical in twice the written volume, and I believe the tech media industry to be far too culturally-embedded within Silicon Valley to be nearly critical enough. For this holiday, though, I think a respite from the negative is worthwhile and essential. I know it is for my personal sanity, at least.
-
-
-
-
A week ago, I shared this Google Form and asked you to reflect with me on the “really great” software/services you have encountered in your using life built by “technology companies who's business ethics align toward the benefit of us users and who's products are well-priced (or free!)” As of the time of this writing, nearly 80 responses have been recorded on the form, itself, and several more via comments on Hacker News. I deeply appreciate your participation! They're far from predictable, too – I've ended up learning a lot. The very first submission was for Logos Bible Software, which has quite a fascinating history. I feel like those less-secular of us go unexposed to theological software without participants such as the human who submitted this one (thank you, human!,) and end up missing out on an entire segment of software development. Having studied The Good Book in a very much analog fashion through Lutheran school, I wonder in retrospect how software solutions could've changed the experience.
-
-
I have never received this volume of feedback in my prompts before, nor have I ever really seen a reason to close any of them to responses, so I'm going to take a blind shot at the dartboard and plan to close the form on New Year's Day, 2021. Until then, please feel free to respond in any way you'd like and/or view all the live answers in this very bad spreadsheet full of these very good responses. (My apologies – I have absolutely no idea how to use Google Sheets.)
-
-
-
-
-
-
ⓣⓗⓐⓝⓚⓢ
-
-
I originally intended to go into relatively extensive detail for each of the entities on my own Most Thankful For list, but I do have to actually stop somewhere, so the commentary on these isn't remarkably insightful or educational. It is genuine, though, which is worth something, I hope.
Yes, I have tirelessly promoted my essay about Bandcamp's holiness for years now, but I have done so with good reason: here is a for-profit technology company which is building a one-of-a-kind product that invests directly in independent artists. I spent a whole summer scouring The Web looking for a single misstep or controversy and found absolutely none.
-
-
Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
Before OBS (Open Broadcaster Software,) streaming video was an absolute mess that usually involved paying for or pirating some proprietary software. Remember Ustream? Good God...
-
-
-
-
OBS is the streaming video equivalent of Audacity and GIMP: an extremely powerful, infinitely-malleable set of tools that allow one to take full advantage of their hardware to capture and/or stream video and audio.
Typora is an infinitely-customizable markdown editor spanning all platforms that's managed to become my primary word processor (and I'm someone who demands a lot from word processors.) It's immensely powerful in all the important ways – my use over the past two years has stress tested it with both enormous (100,000+ words) and extremely complicated (100+ images and embeds) documents. It's able to export even these chunkos to any format you can imagine instantaneously and never crashes.
Typora is a Markdown editor with left sidebar file sorting, very much like Bear (several available themes can make it look actually identical, in fact,) but without its native iCloud-based file syncing. It is cross-platform, open-source, and definitely more powerful, though.
-
-
The Typora theming community has been especially on-point, as of late. In the screenshot embedded above, it's wearing the Slate variation of H16nning's Gitbook theme, which is by far the most beautiful configuration I've yet to see the editor in.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program – which just celebrated its 25th anniversary last week – is one of the most powerful tools in its space and perhaps the number one exemplary example of open source software to cite when explaining the concept for the first time. I have used it my entire creative life for all manner of tasks and evangelized it plenty, but it wasn't until I returned to college this Fall and took advantage of Adobe's student discounts that I had an opportunity to thoroughly explore its proprietary nemesis, Photoshop.
-
-
-
-
What I found was indeed a very powerful piece of software, albeit as arrogant as ever in its stubborn commitment to the original keyboard shortcuts set by default and other legacy artifacts, though not one I would compare to GIMP, necessarily. This shouldn't be breaking news: as far as I know, there are billions of posts comparing the two going back to the beginning of the written word. My personal conclusion: I can accomplish much more, much faster with GIMP in every single one of my own use cases.
I was browsing some FOSS-related article aggregation page a few weeks ago when a post caught my eye: “Audacity exceeds 100 million downloads.” In reflection, I realized in that moment that perhaps no other single piece of software has been so thoroughly present in my “workflows” across all sorts of projects through the years, largely because of its God-sent Truncate Silence feature, which I have used to remove silence from audio files for as long as I've been working within the medium, basically. Every podcast episode I have ever published has passed through Audacity for this reason and others, as have voiceovers, high school punk band demo tapes, personal voice notes, and more.
-
-
the world would actually be perfect if audacity's truncate silence feature could be autotied to video timecodes.
Until OBS came along, Audacity was where all recorded audio started for myself and my creative friends. It was Audacity that captured (and caused, technically) the death of my friend's soundcard in audio form during the recording process for Hamura, the first Drywall album, back in October of 2011.
-
-
-
-
Fucking around in Audacity through the years has led to some halfway creative results on my part, including “SLOWED 'N' THROWED” Hilary Duff tracks and legacy Windows sounds remixes. I still use it for every episode of End User and have recently created a macro for remastering Drycast episodes. (A big feat for me and reflective of Audacity's ingenuity.) As far as I know, there are zero competitors, proprietary or not, which can replicate Audacity's particular usefulness as an audio utility.
Shortly after I discovered NeoCities last Spring, I signed up to be a Supporter for $5/month, not necessarily for the additional storage or bandwidth, but because the project immediately sounded like one I was personally obligated to uplift. Parimal Satyal's essay “Rediscovering the Small Web,” along with the design of the website which delivered it, inspired me to make another attempt at building an HTML site by hand. So far, davidblue.xyz obviously borrows heavily from his CSS, but looking at the code itself was vastly more pleasant than one would expect. Recently, during the course of writing an academic research essay, I found myself listening to interviews with its founder, Kyle Drake and reading articles from its debut in 2013, which prompted me to take even further advantage of my account.
-
-
-
-
Last week, I moved my inactive automotive blog (dieselgoth.com) from a Writeas blog to a purely-HTML NeoCities website with disturbingly little friction. (I challenge you to spot any differences.) After discovering a backup of the original Drywall Website deep within my old files, NeoCities was the only reasonable host on which to archive it. After I'd finished uploading, I fell down what the youth call a “rabbit hole” of discovery, mesmerized by what I found on page after page of NeoCities' site browser. I did my best to save the best finds by following them within the sites dashboard and have since set up a Best of NeoCities GitHub repository with my absolute favorites among them archived thanks to wget.
Trust me when I tell you that some of the best web design, ever can be found on NeoCities. What's even better: after my deep dive, I was pleasantly surprised by strangers commenting on what I'd found! Replying in a timely, substantial, and genuine manner seems to be a hallmark of the community: my (rather verbose) question regarding the well-manneredness of publishing such an archive without permission in the community Discord I discovered just this morning was almost immediately met with encouraging replies.
-
-
A Post you should probably expect soon: “NeoCities is 2020's Best Social Network.” Going forward, I'd like to digitize my poetry collection on NeoCities in the near future while continuing to otherwise brush back up on HTML and CSS – both of which I am also very thankful for, come to think of it.
-
-
Thank you again for your correspondence! May your Imperialism Day be a positive experience!
-]]>
- https://bilge.world/big-thank
- Wed, 25 Nov 2020 21:00:16 +0000
-
-
- The Social Dilemma's Dilemma
- https://bilge.world/the-social-dilemma?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[The Social Dilemma - The Founders on Their iPhones
The pop culture discussion of tech's greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways.
Listen to this article read by Siri Voice 2 below...
audio controls
source src="https://github.com/extratone/bilge/raw/main/audio/TTS/The%20Social%20Dilemma's%20Dilemma.mp3"
/audio
For those of us who've written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/"ethical" conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it's particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn't know what the movie was about. I'm not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could've done better, in that regard.
First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell's casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man's screen, the film's depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as "ridiculous," as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
The Verge's official review of the film - written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey - is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge's audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media - grandmothers, retirees, etc. - who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about "privacy" - a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of "my data," regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which - while possible - is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"you don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses - you need only to want a better and/or different experience./p— David Blue (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1283173322822488064?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"July 14, 2020/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by - and directly promotes on several occasions - one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain... hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for "solutions" to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who've been building against the adtech-funded web for ages - some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization's website nor the film's webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
The Social Dilemma Newsletter Prompt
The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I'm here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you've followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn't still be reading,) you know I've advocated exhaustively for Mastodon - the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who's business model benefits both platform and artist. I'm still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn't immediately off-putting to "the average person."
iframe width="100%" height="265" src="https://clyp.it/oxpup2vm/widget" frameborder="0"/iframe
Poke around the film's official website a bit and you'll discover a variety of heavily-branded "resources" for "taking action," all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the "Take Action" vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall's tips for reducing your screen time, the "Data Detox Kit," which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a "Join Now" button, and - most ironic of all - a link to download the "Ad Observer plugin," in order to "share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable." In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the "Online Political Transparency Project" instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
The Social Dilemma Bingo
No, it's not a scam. Using The Markup's shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here's the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves... incompetence? I'm afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world - regardless of what they believe now, or then - that these folks should not be our first call when we're searching for "solutions." You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can't imagine you'd be correct... Under the heading "CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA," step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both – or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
You wouldn't announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
Now, I've always considered the ability to change a computer's name an immense privilege. My first "real" computer's name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus' name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that's completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone's common name to that of "your favorite television character" (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so...) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it's just that it's ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down "change device name" as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
Firefox for iOS Notification
A notification I received while literally typing this out.
I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an "Alternative Apps Centre" within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the "detox" seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it's hilarious that I can freely refer to "privacy" as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one' social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the "Supported by Mozilla Firefox" badges all over the website and asks me "well, what did you expect?" My answer: something "more" than promotion, I suppose.
I suspect this is another case of don't go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to "innovate" than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I'd somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who's notifications I'd probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I'd wager.) I suspect it's long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as "Email Addiction" goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR's greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email's footer. If you're really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform's archives feature - or don't - but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you'll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it's okay to announce on Facebook that you're taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823-4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I've discovered with you.
My own advice on "privacy:" don't worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the "privacy tools" you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you're an iOS user, you've already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step - if we're really honest with ourselves - is figuring out how you're going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
#software #film]]>
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The pop culture discussion of tech's greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways.
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Listen to this article read by Siri Voice 2 below...
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For those of us who've written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/“ethical” conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it's particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn't know what the movie was about. I'm not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could've done better, in that regard.
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First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell's casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man's screen, the film's depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as “ridiculous,” as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
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The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
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-
The Verge's official review of the film – written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey – is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge's audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media – grandmothers, retirees, etc. – who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about “privacy” – a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of “my data,” regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which – while possible – is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
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you don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses – you need only to want a better and/or different experience.
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by – and directly promotes on several occasions – one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain... hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for “solutions” to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who've been building against the adtech-funded web for ages – some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization's website nor the film's webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
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The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I'm here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you've followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn't still be reading,) you know I've advocated exhaustively for Mastodon – the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who's business model benefits both platform and artist. I'm still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn't immediately off-putting to “the average person.”
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-
-
-
Poke around the film's official website a bit and you'll discover a variety of heavily-branded “resources” for “taking action,” all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the “Take Action” vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall's tips for reducing your screen time, the “Data Detox Kit,” which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a “Join Now” button, and – most ironic of all – a link to download the “Ad Observer plugin,” in order to “share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable.” In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the “Online Political Transparency Project” instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
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-
No, it's not a scam. Using The Markup's shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here's the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves... incompetence? I'm afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world – regardless of what they believe now, or then – that these folks should not be our first call when we're searching for “solutions.” You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
-
-
Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can't imagine you'd be correct... Under the heading “CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA,” step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
-
-
At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both – or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
-
-
This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
-
-
You wouldn't announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
-
-
Now, I've always considered the ability to change a computer's name an immense privilege. My first “real” computer's name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus' name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that's completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone's common name to that of “your favorite television character” (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so...) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it's just that it's ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down “change device name” as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
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-A notification I received while literally typing this out.
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I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an “Alternative Apps Centre” within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the “detox” seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it's hilarious that I can freely refer to “privacy” as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one' social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the “Supported by Mozilla Firefox” badges all over the website and asks me “well, what did you expect?” My answer: something “more” than promotion, I suppose.
-
-
I suspect this is another case of don't go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to “innovate” than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I'd somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who's notifications I'd probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
-
-
Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I'd wager.) I suspect it's long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as “Email Addiction” goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR's greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email's footer. If you're really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform's archives feature – or don't – but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you'll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
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-
If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it's okay to announce on Facebook that you're taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823-4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I've discovered with you.
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My own advice on “privacy:” don't worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the “privacy tools” you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you're an iOS user, you've already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step – if we're really honest with ourselves – is figuring out how you're going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
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- https://bilge.world/the-social-dilemma
- Mon, 19 Oct 2020 20:10:47 +0000
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- Indulging Once More in Digital Excess
- https://bilge.world/digital-excess?pk_campaign=rss-feed
- <![CDATA[So Much To Do, So Much To See
An update on all I’ve been doing instead of what I actually intended to do.
There will always be plenth of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. - Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think"
Everything happens so much. - Horseebooks
You have a desire for indulgence in your home and family, Co-Star has just told me in my weekly, email newsletter-delivered horoscope. “Venus conjunct to natal Moon” indicates this part of yourself will transform into something else, and goes on to say something truly stirring: the way you relate to your past is changing\. I continue to be amazed by how influential the potential of the computing hardware present in my life at any given time can be on my habits. In the two weeks I’ve had my first moderately powerful desktop computer in over ten years, I have found myself using new image & video editing software, installing local WordPress stacks, finally experimenting with Git, somehow generating 20 draft posts on a fresh experimental WordPress site, and putting my whole back into my new Notion account, including – among others – projects like my “Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.” All the while, there has been a pull toward a more deliberate, focused sort of digital existence: reflection on Kevin McGillivray’s Word of The Year concept, digital gardening, and a few other like discoveries have culminated in a newfound, unironic use of the term “Creative Wellness” to describe a set of ideologies which I believe I should strive for in order to improve my intellectual wellbeing.
In tandem with the fact that I have gone back to school, this has all crucially resulted in very little actual writing, which may or may not be conclusive evidence toward the classical minimalist technology argument that less capability results in more focus. On that note, remember when the Game of Thrones author appeared on Conan’s show and mentioned that he still writes exclusively using WordStar 4.0? This happening has been vaguely in the back of my mind since I encountered it during the relatively brief, basement apartment-dwelling era in Oregon when I first discovered WinWorldPC and got into running a bunch of DOS VMs, trying out every download from that blessed site which sounded even remotely interesting. Before I go on, let me just include a transcript of the entire anecdote I’m referring to here, because it’s actually much shorter than one is led to believe:
Conan: These novels that that you write are can be over a thousand pages long. They're massive tomes and apparently you write them all on a computer, but unlike most authors, you're not worried about a computer virus. I mean an author who writes a thousand-page book their greatest fear is a virus invades and destroys a chunk of their book you don't worry about that. Why?
Martin: No I have a secret weapon - I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the internet with and that I get my email on and I do my taxes on and that computer and then I have my writing computer which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.
Conan: A DOS machine. How old is this program?
Martin: A DOS machine. You remember DOS? I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system.
Conan: Did you make this computer out of wood? Did you carve it? I'm curious why you decided to stick with this old program.
Martin: I actually like it. I mean, it does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital - if I wanted a capital, I would've typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key. Stop fixing it!
Conan: You yell at computers a lot. What about spellcheck?
Martin: Oh, I hate spellcheck. Especially when you have the realm of [???], it's [???].
That’s it! A less than sixty second exchange. I did not remember just how much coverage it received on digital news sites. Embark on a Google search for “george rr martin wordstar,” and you’ll discover a ridiculously long list of brief stories including the YouTube embed. A book I’ve just recently discovered and begun – which I am extremely excited about – is Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and its introduction begins by mentioning The George Thing, which surely indicates that it is the most significant mention of word processing software in popular culture for at least a decade:
The clip was posted to YouTube and from there embedded in innumerable tweets, Facebook feeds, and blogs. Some commenters immediately, if indulgently, branded Martin a Luddite, while others opined it was no wonder it was taking him so long to finish the whole story (or less charitably, no wonder that it all seemed so interminable). But what was it about these seemingly obscure details that people found so compelling? Part of it was no doubt the unexpected blend of novelty and nostalgia: Many fans would be old enough to remember WordStar for themselves, and the intricacy of its interface seems somehow in keeping with Martin’s quirky persona, part paternalistic grandfather and part Doctor Who character. WordStar thus becomes an accessory to his public image, like the black fisherman’s cap he is frequently photographed wearing. But it is also clearly much more than that. Martin’s passion for the program is unmistakable...
The book, itself, was also more widely reviewed than one would expect, where it was deemed genuinely unique. I related quite hard to the preface’s first few sentences:
Track Changes began, as many books do, with a question: What was the first novel written with a word processor? Being an English professor interested in the history of writing as well as computers, I thought it was the sort of thing I should know, but I didn’t.
Discovering the volume was a result of a personal determination in the last week to give in to my latent obsession with word processing/text editing software, which also led to my creating a Notion table of every word processor I’ve ever heard of. Thanks to my desktop PC acquisition, found myself virtual machining a bit again, though some of the programs I’m particularly interested in trying have inexplicitly disappeared from my personal library and been removed from WinWorldPC, probably due to (mostly absurd) copyright claims. Most versions of WordStar are still available, though, and I’ll confess I still have a desire to learn how to use its cult keyboard shortcuts, as evangelized by Robert J. Sawyer in an essay also discussed in Track Changes, which specifically shits on WordPerfect more explicitly than I remembered. I keep returning to the idea that I should try writing the stuff I normally work on – like this post, for instance – in these software, but file transfer is a bigger and bigger obstacle the older the OS you’re running: VirutalBox’s “Guest Additions” – which allow clipboard sharing/shared folders/other interoperative network functions – are not compatible with DOS or any Windows editions before 4.0. There are workarounds, but I haven’t found any reasonably within my current abilities.
Truthfully, though, emulating twenty-year-old software seems a bit unnecessary when contrasted with the fact that Markdown, Typora, and Writeas were supposed to be my saviors from distracted writing. A compulsion to comment on a recent note-taking app comparison published in The Information reminded me that I still haven’t written an in-depth review of Typora, which I plan to prioritize in the near future, especially since it may finally be officially releasing, according to recent activity on Twitter.
blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"some gorgeous themes added to Typora's theme gallery recently. a href="https://t.co/oFXop0W9ZU"https://t.co/oFXop0W9ZU/a a href="https://t.co/mZ3OwAqrv6"pic.twitter.com/mZ3OwAqrv6/a/p— David Blue (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1307551063810158594?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"September 20, 2020/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script
Another result of my reintroduction to academia is that I can now afford a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to student discounts. This has been life-changing in a manner which I should probably be a bit ashamed of, but once the desire to make full use of my subscription (by trying every single program it licenses) subsides, I really do intend to become proficient with InDesign – a learning experience which I will surely at least attempt to thoroughly document, here.
Digital Gardening
I think it was Tom Critchlow’s Digital Gardening blogchain that first exposed me to the term and his static site-generated wiki project that introduced me to the concept of personal wikis, not so long ago, though the desire to organize and/or archive personally-relevant information through the format has actually been rattling around my head for the better part of a decade. When I discovered that one could install MediaWiki – the platform Wikipedia, itself is built on – I created the shortlived Drywall Wiki, once upon a time. Since I last wrote you, I also purchased the extratone.wiki domain and played around once again with the platform. Typora even offers exports in MediaWiki’s bizarre proprietary text format! For better or worse, though, I don’t see anything becoming of the project for the moment I suppose it feels like somewhat of a risk, investing a lot of time I probably shouldn’t have into documenting all of my Twitter jokes. For the moment, I think my Notion account will have to serve as my personal wiki.
The most inciteful argument I’ve read among the Digital Gardens discourse revolves around value as it is created within our personal online writing spaces. Two of the many infinitely-quotable essays within this space: Mike Caulfield’s “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral” and “Stock and flow” from Snarkmarket. The former references Vannevar Bush’s infamous “As We May Think” essay (which I’ve finally gotten around to finishing and its description of a “memex,” which many cite as a disturbingly-apt prediction of the World Wide Web. Caulfield, however, disagrees:
So most people say this is the original vision of the web. And certainly it was the inspiration of those pioneers of hypertext. But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all . Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.
Reading back from a lens including this commentary, I immediately understood. The memex concept is far more intimate than the web has become (or perhaps ever was – I wouldn’t know.) “Stock and flow” defines creative value in two disparate types of media:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
To be honest, I personally cannot imagine undertaking the task of explaining this differentiation to anyone in my own life, but if the reactionary movement within The Web back to a focus on valuable content is, indeed, underway, perhaps such conversations are bound to shortly become more and more natural. For my part, I have attempted setting up an experimental site on Github Pages using Jekyll in the past few days with partial success: as soon as I tried to specify a custom theme, I apparently broke it, at which point I realized that I had homework to do. As much as I hate to admit it, Kev Quirk’s posts regarding WordPress’ practical simplicity over SSGs earlier this monthrings somewhat true. As things currently stand, WordPress’ permeability throughout The Web is an advantage for those who just want to publish something as simply as possible. My counterargument to both Kev and myself: Writeas is a wonderful compromise in terms of substance and image among one’s super e-enabled, Mullenweg-disgusted peers. It’s very much pure Markdown, but it’s far more accessible, cross-platform, than SSGs due to its shear simplicity.
One component which Digital Gardening would seem to offer others that I have never particularly struggled with is the freedom to write whatever I feel like writing. If anything, I have struggled in the opposite sense, existing in a state completely unhindered by consideration of the value my work may or may not offer anyone else. Perhaps the most substantial addition I’m capable of making to the Digital Gardens conversation, then, is best quoted from the first chapter of the advice book I have finally begun writing for young men, For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss:
If there is one idea of mine you ever engage with – in this book or otherwise – it is best distilled in this single sentence: *you do not \actually\ want to attain a state of true apathy, trust me. It is extremely unhealthy, miserable, and alienating. I have existed for an excruciatingly long time trapped in a state of being truly unable to care about anything in the face of a great, varying effort to do so. It is very far from the immunity imbued in terms like carefree – in reality, it is manifested in extreme depression. It is less immunity than it is distance from an essential part of life.
In terms of one’s blogging, I am glad for those who will/have/are finding a new freedom of expression, but hold this as a serious caution regarding the other extreme. Should you ever approach it, remember that considering one’s audience – as academics love to prioritize – really is important, eventually.
Curation
At this point, I’ve used a channel in Extratone’s Discord as my ongoing reading list for several years essentially without change. Earlier this month, though, I discovered Raindrop – a bookmarking service with public collections that (so fars) feels much more aligned with my own needs than Pocket – and pretty much immediately signed up to begin paying for it and set up a bot to crosspost from my new Reading List collection, there to the same Discord channel via the collection’s RSS feed. Raindrop’s browser extension – along with Notion’s, come to mention it – is actually usable in day-to-day browsing. As much as I love Reading.am, the prospect of its longevity worries me considering the most recent post in its development blog dates to 2016. Writing a dedicated “Little Review” of Raindrop is on my (ever-lengthening) todo list, but at the moment, I would especially emphasize my Digital Magazine Collection, which is the result of thousands of hours of web exploration and genuinely worth significant value for most anyone, I think.
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font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:550; line-height:18px;" View this post on Instagram/div/divdiv style="padding: 12.5% 0;"/div div style="display: flex; flex-direction: row; margin-bottom: 14px; align-items: center;"div div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; height: 12.5px; width: 12.5px; transform: translateX(0px) translateY(7px);"/div div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; height: 12.5px; transform: rotate(-45deg) translateX(3px) translateY(1px); width: 12.5px; flex-grow: 0; margin-right: 14px; margin-left: 2px;"/div div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; height: 12.5px; width: 12.5px; transform: translateX(9px) translateY(-18px);"/div/divdiv style="margin-left: 8px;" div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 20px; width: 20px;"/div div style=" width: 0; height: 0; border-top: 2px solid transparent; border-left: 6px solid #f4f4f4; border-bottom: 2px solid transparent; transform: translateX(16px) translateY(-4px) rotate(30deg)"/div/divdiv style="margin-left: auto;" div style=" width: 0px; border-top: 8px solid #F4F4F4; border-right: 8px solid transparent; transform: translateY(16px);"/div div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; flex-grow: 0; height: 12px; width: 16px; transform: translateY(-4px);"/div div style=" width: 0; height: 0; border-top: 8px solid #F4F4F4; border-left: 8px solid transparent; transform: translateY(-4px) translateX(8px);"/div/div/div/a p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;" a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CFDYTmuh-kg/?utmsource=igembed&utmcampaign=loading" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="blank"I know it may not seem all that significant, but this digital magazine collection actually represents a lot of effort - years of web exploration, both active and passive. Find it here: davidblue.wtf/magazines/a/p p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;"A post shared by a href="https://www.instagram.com/asphaltapostle/?utmsource=igembed&utmcampaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px;" target="blank" David Blue/a (@asphaltapostle) on time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2020-09-12T22:12:52+00:00"Sep 12, 2020 at 3:12pm PDT/time/p/div/blockquote script async src="//www.instagram.com/embed.js"/script
With the combination of my public Notion workspaces and public Raindrop collections, I hope to make my curatorial endeavors both more accessibly beautiful and more intimately available. In terms of a dedicated discussion of Notion’s interworkings and culture, I think I have quite a bit more exploring to experience before I’m sufficiently qualified, though my notes are already quite extensive (and publicly accessible, thanks to… Notion!) In general, I continue to be astounded by the amount of tools/services/applications I have not yet heard of, despite how long I have labored to become an authority on Writing Tools.
Too Many Fonts! - WordPerfect
Workflow
In my endeavor to more intentionally design my workspace – to actually dedicate a space for working, originally – I originally very much intended to set up dual displays for my desktop, but the desk I settled for (an old family piece from the early 1900s?) does not have enough surface area to position two displays, regardless of how thin they’ve become since I last had one. Combined with a limited budget and a concern that two displays might actually result in further distraction instead of less, I instead went for a single, 27” LED affair. I’ve also been making full use of Windows 10’s desktop switching feature and have found it surprisingly easy to make a habit, especially thanks to the Ctrl+Win+Lateral Arrow Keys keyboard shortcuts.
Hildur Keyboard Shortcuts
On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I’ve by now worked out a personally-optimized remap (thanks to the keyboard manager tool included with PowerToys, about which I have far too much to say in some future post.) I had a conversation with a few Mastodon friends two weeks ago convincing me that my methodology of forcing myself to learn shortcuts by integrating a cheat sheet into my desktop backgrounds may actually be an original idea and useful to other users.
In terms of writing spaces, I have actually been composing the less serious stuff I’ve been writing within WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, which is not an admission I would’ve expected to be making, just a year ago. A dedicated post about this, too, is fucking coming, but suffice it to say that with a fairly-substantial PC and a better hosting provider (DreamHost over GoDaddy, in this case,) composition has become far far smoother – improving enough to make it a viable space within which to pound away original stuff for the first time. Writing essays for academia has encouraged my return to Microsoft Word, once again, on which I’ll blame the fact that I am currently composing this very bit in The Old Bitch. A desire to once again hack together a set of personalized Word templates has led to the birth of two such files which I am proud enough to share on my Notion drive. Eventually, I would also like to take the time to completely redesign the “Ribbon” in Word – something which I’ve literally never seen anyone else do. (I spent a substantial amount of time trying to find a library for MS Office customization files, to no avail, though you can find my own customization file as it stands on the same Notion page linked just now. Let me know if you’re able to successfully import it.)
Woke Word
A confession of vanity: I suspect the only reason I haven’t yet stopped composing within WordPress is that I figured out how to change the typeface to Adobe Caslon (across both the editor and the front-facing site, naturally,) thanks to my newfound access to Adobe Typekit. Yes, apparently I really am that shallow. For those Office 365 users among you, I highly suggest you look up how to enable the Classic Office sound theme. Unlike Make Use Of, I find them both adorable and genuinely useful as auditory feedback. You may also be interested in my discovery of some fairly-Woke additions to Word’s autocorrect options and the subsequent bitchy controversy their introduction spawned.
Software History Society Banner
The Read-It Website
If you know me at all, the following admission probably seems unbelievable: I have been using Reddit. I created a new subreddit for Extratone – which I do not necessarily expect to be populated any time soon – and r/SoftwareHistory after discovering that it didn’t yet exist, which I definitely do not expect you to populate, but would be delighted if you did. As with seemingly everything else I’ve covered, I also intend to write about how Reddit’s recent feature additions and redesign may actually make it a redeemable space on The Web, which should prove interesting. Clearly, I have become more than willing to accept the moniker of Software Historian* whenever/if ever my authority achieves the appropriate volume to deserve to be christened so.
Obviously, none of the developments I’ve shared in this post indicate any improvement in my productive output, but I hope to learn soon how to settle into a fairly-consistent (and hopefully much more original) writing process.
#software #meta]]>
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An update on all I’ve been doing instead of what I actually intended to do.
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There will always be plenth of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. – Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think“
You have a desire for indulgence in your home and family, Co-Star has just told me in my weekly, email newsletter-delivered horoscope. “Venus conjunct to natal Moon” indicates this part of yourself will transform into something else, and goes on to say something truly stirring: *the way you relate to your past is changing*. I continue to be amazed by how influential the potential of the computing hardware present in my life at any given time can be on my habits. In the two weeks I’ve had my first moderately powerful desktop computer in over ten years, I have found myself using new image & video editing software, installing local WordPress stacks, finally experimenting with Git, somehow generating 20 draft posts on a fresh experimental WordPress site, and putting my whole back into my new Notion account, including – among others – projects like my “Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.” All the while, there has been a pull toward a more deliberate, focused sort of digital existence: reflection on Kevin McGillivray’s Word of The Year concept, digital gardening, and a few other like discoveries have culminated in a newfound, unironic use of the term “Creative Wellness” to describe a set of ideologies which I believe I should strive for in order to improve my intellectual wellbeing.
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In tandem with the fact that I have gone back to school, this has all crucially resulted in very little actual writing, which may or may not be conclusive evidence toward the classical minimalist technology argument that less capability results in more focus. On that note, remember when the Game of Thrones author appeared on Conan’s show and mentioned that he still writes exclusively using WordStar 4.0? This happening has been vaguely in the back of my mind since I encountered it during the relatively brief, basement apartment-dwelling era in Oregon when I first discovered WinWorldPC and got into running a bunch of DOS VMs, trying out every download from that blessed site which sounded even remotely interesting. Before I go on, let me just include a transcript of the entire anecdote I’m referring to here, because it’s actually much shorter than one is led to believe:
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Conan: These novels that that you write are can be over a thousand pages long. They're massive tomes and apparently you write them all on a computer, but unlike most authors, you're not worried about a computer virus. I mean an author who writes a thousand-page book their greatest fear is a virus invades and destroys a chunk of their book you don't worry about that. Why?
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Martin: No I have a secret weapon – I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the internet with and that I get my email on and I do my taxes on and that computer and then I have my writing computer which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.
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Conan: A DOS machine. How old is this program?
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Martin: A DOS machine. You remember DOS? I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system.
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Conan: Did you make this computer out of wood? Did you carve it? I'm curious why you decided to stick with this old program.
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Martin: I actually like it. I mean, it does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital – if I wanted a capital, I would've typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key. Stop fixing it!
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Conan: You yell at computers a lot. What about spellcheck?
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Martin: Oh, I hate spellcheck. Especially when you have the realm of [???], it's [???].
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That’s it! A less than sixty second exchange. I did not remember just how much coverage it received on digital news sites. Embark on a Google search for “george rr martin wordstar,” and you’ll discover a ridiculously long list of brief stories including the YouTube embed. A book I’ve just recently discovered and begun – which I am extremely excited about – is Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and its introduction begins by mentioning The George Thing, which surely indicates that it is the most significant mention of word processing software in popular culture for at least a decade:
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The clip was posted to YouTube and from there embedded in innumerable tweets, Facebook feeds, and blogs. Some commenters immediately, if indulgently, branded Martin a Luddite, while others opined it was no wonder it was taking him so long to finish the whole story (or less charitably, no wonder that it all seemed so interminable). But what was it about these seemingly obscure details that people found so compelling? Part of it was no doubt the unexpected blend of novelty and nostalgia: Many fans would be old enough to remember WordStar for themselves, and the intricacy of its interface seems somehow in keeping with Martin’s quirky persona, part paternalistic grandfather and part Doctor Who character. WordStar thus becomes an accessory to his public image, like the black fisherman’s cap he is frequently photographed wearing. But it is also clearly much more than that. Martin’s passion for the program is unmistakable...
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The book, itself, was also more widely reviewed than one would expect, where it was deemed genuinely unique. I related quite hard to the preface’s first few sentences:
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Track Changes began, as many books do, with a question: What was the first novel written with a word processor? Being an English professor interested in the history of writing as well as computers, I thought it was the sort of thing I should know, but I didn’t.
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Discovering the volume was a result of a personal determination in the last week to give in to my latent obsession with word processing/text editing software, which also led to my creating a Notion table of every word processor I’ve ever heard of. Thanks to my desktop PC acquisition, found myself virtual machining a bit again, though some of the programs I’m particularly interested in trying have inexplicitly disappeared from my personal library and been removed from WinWorldPC, probably due to (mostly absurd) copyright claims. Most versions of WordStar are still available, though, and I’ll confess I still have a desire to learn how to use its cult keyboard shortcuts, as evangelized by Robert J. Sawyer in an essayalso discussed in Track Changes, which specifically shits on WordPerfect more explicitly than I remembered. I keep returning to the idea that I should try writing the stuff I normally work on – like this post, for instance – in these software, but file transfer is a bigger and bigger obstacle the older the OS you’re running: VirutalBox’s “Guest Additions” – which allow clipboard sharing/shared folders/other interoperative network functions – are not compatible with DOS or any Windows editions before 4.0. There are workarounds, but I haven’t found any reasonably within my current abilities.
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Truthfully, though, emulating twenty-year-old software seems a bit unnecessary when contrasted with the fact that Markdown, Typora, and Writeas were supposed to be my saviors from distracted writing. A compulsion to comment on a recent note-taking app comparison published in The Information reminded me that I still haven’t written an in-depth review of Typora, which I plan to prioritize in the near future, especially since it may finally be officially releasing, according to recent activity on Twitter.
Another result of my reintroduction to academia is that I can now afford a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to student discounts. This has been life-changing in a manner which I should probably be a bit ashamed of, but once the desire to make full use of my subscription (by trying every single program it licenses) subsides, I really do intend to become proficient with InDesign – a learning experience which I will surely at least attempt to thoroughly document, here.
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Digital Gardening
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I think it was Tom Critchlow’s Digital Gardening blogchain that first exposed me to the term and his static site-generated wiki project that introduced me to the concept of personal wikis, not so long ago, though the desire to organize and/or archive personally-relevant information through the format has actually been rattling around my head for the better part of a decade. When I discovered that one could install MediaWiki – the platform Wikipedia, itself is built on – I created the shortlived Drywall Wiki, once upon a time. Since I last wrote you, I also purchased the extratone.wiki domain and played around once again with the platform. Typora even offers exports in MediaWiki’s bizarre proprietary text format! For better or worse, though, I don’t see anything becoming of the project for the moment I suppose it feels like somewhat of a risk, investing a lot of time I probably shouldn’t have into documenting all of my Twitter jokes. For the moment, I think my Notion account will have to serve as my personal wiki.
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The most inciteful argument I’ve read among the Digital Gardens discourse revolves around value as it is created within our personal online writing spaces. Two of the many infinitely-quotable essays within this space: Mike Caulfield’s “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral” and “Stock and flow” from Snarkmarket. The former references Vannevar Bush’s infamous “As We May Think” essay (which I’ve finally gotten around to finishing and its description of a “memex,” which many cite as a disturbingly-apt prediction of the World Wide Web. Caulfield, however, disagrees:
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So most people say this is the original vision of the web. And certainly it was the inspiration of those pioneers of hypertext. But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all . Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.
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Reading back from a lens including this commentary, I immediately understood. The memex concept is far more intimate than the web has become (or perhaps ever was – I wouldn’t know.) “Stock and flow” defines creative value in two disparate types of media:
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Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
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Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
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To be honest, I personally cannot imagine undertaking the task of explaining this differentiation to anyone in my own life, but if the reactionary movement within The Web back to a focus on valuable content is, indeed, underway, perhaps such conversations are bound to shortly become more and more natural. For my part, I have attempted setting up an experimental site on Github Pages using Jekyll in the past few days with partial success: as soon as I tried to specify a custom theme, I apparently broke it, at which point I realized that I had homework to do. As much as I hate to admit it, Kev Quirk’s posts regarding WordPress’ practical simplicity over SSGs earlier this monthrings somewhat true. As things currently stand, WordPress’ permeability throughout The Web is an advantage for those who just want to publish something as simply as possible. My counterargument to both Kev and myself: Writeas is a wonderful compromise in terms of substance and image among one’s super e-enabled, Mullenweg-disgusted peers. It’s very much pure Markdown, but it’s far more accessible, cross-platform, than SSGs due to its shear simplicity.
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One component which Digital Gardening would seem to offer others that I have never particularly struggled with is the freedom to write whatever I feel like writing. If anything, I have struggled in the opposite sense, existing in a state completely unhindered by consideration of the value my work may or may not offer anyone else. Perhaps the most substantial addition I’m capable of making to the Digital Gardens conversation, then, is best quoted from the first chapter of the advice book I have finally begun writing for young men, For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss:
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If there is one idea of mine you ever engage with – in this book or otherwise – it is best distilled in this single sentence: you do not *actually* want to attain a state of true apathy, trust me. It is extremely unhealthy, miserable, and alienating. I have existed for an excruciatingly long time trapped in a state of being truly unable to care about anything in the face of a great, varying effort to do so. It is very far from the immunity imbued in terms like carefree – in reality, it is manifested in extreme depression. It is less immunity than it is distance from an essential part of life.
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In terms of one’s blogging, I am glad for those who will/have/are finding a new freedom of expression, but hold this as a serious caution regarding the other extreme. Should you ever approach it, remember that considering one’s audience – as academics love to prioritize – really is important, eventually.
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Curation
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At this point, I’ve used a channel in Extratone’s Discord as my ongoing reading list for several years essentially without change. Earlier this month, though, I discovered Raindrop – a bookmarking service with public collections that (so fars) feels much more aligned with my own needs than Pocket – and pretty much immediately signed up to begin paying for it and set up a bot to crosspost from my new Reading List collection, there to the same Discord channel via the collection’s RSS feed. Raindrop’s browser extension – along with Notion’s, come to mention it – is actually usable in day-to-day browsing. As much as I love Reading.am, the prospect of its longevity worries me considering the most recent post in its development blog dates to 2016. Writing a dedicated “Little Review” of Raindrop is on my (ever-lengthening) todo list, but at the moment, I would especially emphasize my Digital Magazine Collection, which is the result of thousands of hours of web exploration and genuinely worth significant value for most anyone, I think.
With the combination of my public Notion workspaces and public Raindrop collections, I hope to make my curatorial endeavors both more accessibly beautiful and more intimately available. In terms of a dedicated discussion of Notion’s interworkings and culture, I think I have quite a bit more exploring to experience before I’m sufficiently qualified, though my notes are already quite extensive (and publicly accessible, thanks to… Notion!) In general, I continue to be astounded by the amount of tools/services/applications I have not yet heard of, despite how long I have labored to become an authority on Writing Tools.
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Workflow
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In my endeavor to more intentionally design my workspace – to actually dedicate a space for working, originally – I originally very much intended to set up dual displays for my desktop, but the desk I settled for (an old family piece from the early 1900s?) does not have enough surface area to position two displays, regardless of how thin they’ve become since I last had one. Combined with a limited budget and a concern that two displays might actually result in further distraction instead of less, I instead went for a single, 27” LED affair. I’ve also been making full use of Windows 10’s desktop switching feature and have found it surprisingly easy to make a habit, especially thanks to the Ctrl+Win+Lateral Arrow Keys keyboard shortcuts.
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On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I’ve by now worked out a personally-optimized remap (thanks to the keyboard manager tool included with PowerToys, about which I have far too much to say in some future post.) I had a conversation with a few Mastodon friends two weeks ago convincing me that my methodology of forcing myself to learn shortcuts by integrating a cheat sheet into my desktop backgrounds may actually be an original idea and useful to other users.
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In terms of writing spaces, I have actually been composing the less serious stuff I’ve been writing within WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, which is not an admission I would’ve expected to be making, just a year ago. A dedicated post about this, too, is fucking coming, but suffice it to say that with a fairly-substantial PC and a better hosting provider (DreamHost over GoDaddy, in this case,) composition has become far far smoother – improving enough to make it a viable space within which to pound away original stuff for the first time. Writing essays for academia has encouraged my return to Microsoft Word, once again, on which I’ll blame the fact that I am currently composing this very bit in The Old Bitch. A desire to once again hack together a set of personalized Word templates has led to the birth of two such files which I am proud enough to share on my Notion drive. Eventually, I would also like to take the time to completely redesign the “Ribbon” in Word – something which I’ve literally never seen anyone else do. (I spent a substantial amount of time trying to find a library for MS Office customization files, to no avail, though you can find my own customization file as it stands on the same Notion page linked just now. Let me know if you’re able to successfully import it.)
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A confession of vanity: I suspect the only reason I haven’t yet stopped composing within WordPress is that I figured out how to change the typeface to Adobe Caslon (across both the editor and the front-facing site, naturally,) thanks to my newfound access to Adobe Typekit. Yes, apparently I really am that shallow. For those Office 365 users among you, I highly suggest you look up how to enable the Classic Office sound theme. Unlike Make Use Of, I find them both adorable and genuinely useful as auditory feedback. You may also be interested in my discovery of some fairly-Woke additions to Word’s autocorrect options and the subsequent bitchy controversy their introduction spawned.
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The Read-It Website
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If you know me at all, the following admission probably seems unbelievable: I have been using Reddit. I created a new subreddit for Extratone – which I do not necessarily expect to be populated any time soon – and r/SoftwareHistory after discovering that it didn’t yet exist, which I definitely do not expect you to populate, but would be delighted if you did. As with seemingly everything else I’ve covered, I also intend to write about how Reddit’s recent feature additions and redesign may actually make it a redeemable space on The Web, which should prove interesting. Clearly, I have become more than willing to accept the moniker of Software Historian whenever/if ever my authority achieves the appropriate volume to deserve to be christened so.
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Obviously, none of the developments I’ve shared in this post indicate any improvement in my productive output, but I hope to learn soon how to settle into a fairly-consistent (and hopefully much more original) writing process.
An attempt to fix a Windows Insider Build issue led to soft-bricking my Surface Laptop 2.
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I finally did it, ladies and gentlemen... I managed to break the Windows installation on my Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 to such an extent that it has been unrecoverable. I am currently borrowing my mother's MacBook Pro and waiting on a Windows 10 installation .ISO file to download so that I can hope to mount it correctly on the last, shitty USB thumb drive I still have lying around.
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YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT BITCH.
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I now suspect I began down this path a few months ago when I discovered Windows Insider Channels and rejoiced... As I've discovered that one can relatively easily find a beta version of virtually any piece of software, it's become a bit of a habit for me. More or less unconsciously, I’ve ended up with an application library full of Developer Beta and NightlyBuild-type shit. I don't think there was/is a single web browser installed on that machine that is not the given entity's “Developer Edition” which – considering most of the regular installs allow you to opt into dev tools, anyway – seem like they might be redundant. I don't particularly care, anymore – I mostly just love their icons. Firefox Developer Edition's logo is a blue Firefox(!,) Edge Chromium Dev's is... more interesting than the regular version. Google Chrome Canary's icon is a surprisingly-tasteful variation of the company's usually-horrendous color palette.
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What I'm trying to say is... I have continued upon this habit of opting for unstable versions of software in a sort of defiance against the common sense notion that relying upon them is generally a bad idea.[^1] I suppose I was just waiting to experience any consequences from such a decision, and well... Here they are!
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It all began when my Surface's integrated webcam became invisible to all applications that used a video input – including Microsoft's own Camera app and OBS. It showed up in Device Manger, where I did the generally-recommended troubleshooting task of uninstalling it completely (including its drivers) and rebooting to force Windows to reinstall it. It did so successfully every time, to no effect on the original issue. I also went into the Surface's BIOS menu, where its hardware devices are explicitly listed, and disabled/re-enabled the camera, to no effect. Normally, the absence of a webcam function would be more or less irrelevant to my day-to-day workflow, but now that I'm partaking in “virtual” college courses, at least one of my professors has pressured me to appear on cam as soon as possible.
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On Sunday night, I decided to revisit the problem with greater commitment, diving into a variety of deeper troubleshooting steps which I do not recall. The crucial one, though, was my decision to use the System File Checker tool (sfc /scannow) with the added instruction to fix whatever errors it found.[^2] This drove my dearest little laptop into a cycle of self-diagnoses which results in an option screen including “Reset PC.” After trying virtually every other option, I decided to try resetting, only to be met with connectivity error messages after pursuing the “Install via Network” option, leaving the use of a bootable Windows 10 recovery USB as my only choice, in theory.
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Another problem now arose: my mother's MacBook Pro is the only other machine I have any sort of access to at the moment, and MacOS no longer supports the creation of such a bootable USB for Windows via the Boot Camp Utility any longer. Nevertheless, I tried to make one by downloading the correct OS ISO and mounting it via UNetbootin, which didn't work. I then called Columbia Computer Center, who very generously agreed to make one for me and only charge me for the drive itself ($10!)
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Unfortunately, that one hasn't worked either, so I'm afraid I'm just going to have to take the thing to them... Stay tuned for the Final Verdict.
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[1] This is why I’ve always downloaded the developer iOS beta releases on my actual, daily driver handset.
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[2] I’m pretty sure it was “-f” but I’m not going to do the research to verify that… Sorry!
Here is another example of the Chrome team coming up with a bunch of web standards and then the Search team making a bunch of incentives based on those standards.
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It was news to me that in May, Google launched a page called “Web Vitals” on its web.dev domain (which they've apparently owned since November 2018.) The company measures “page experience” based on three main criteria:
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Largest Contentful Paint measures perceived load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the page's main content has likely loaded.
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First Input Delay measures responsiveness and quantifies the experience users feel when trying to first interact with the page.
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Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability and quantifies the amount of unexpected layout shift of visible page content.
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CoStar just sent an oddly topical (and honestly, encouraging) notification:
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I'm not a “real” web developer – nor do I mean to dictate to a single one – but I know enough theory to note that of this “core web” education operation centered around web.dev is operating on some irritating assumptions:
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1. Smaller assets are ideal.
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The simple assumption that it is always better to have the smallest page possible – that images should be resized and compressed to hell and typography/other elements should be few in number. Instantaneous page loads should be priority over any other standards of measure for a web page – like interesting design, for instance.
World-wide average mobile download speed was 22.82 Mbps (Megabits per second), an increase of 15.2% over 2017. Average upload speed was 9.19 Mbps, an increase of 11.6%. Fixed broadband speeds also increased. Average download speed increased 26.4% to 46.12 Mbps, while average upload speed came in at 22.44 Mbps, a 26.5% increase.
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I may be a yokel, but these averages are still absolutely inconceivable to me. Our phones have as much RAM as my “studio” work desktop, now. 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously. There is a very reasonable argument for essential services like search engines and news websites to conform to/adopt standards like AMP, but for the rest of The Open Web, ingenuity and risktaking should be encouraged, not discouraged, for the true good of all Peoplekind.
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A term I haven't seen for a good while describes this ideology: “the mobile web,” and it completely sucking ass is not a new concept. I've before referenced an old complaint from 2015 by The Verge's Editor-in-Chief, Nilay Patel (which the original article also links in different context in its last line):
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The entire point of the web was to democratize and simplify publishing using standards that anyone could build on, and it has been a raging, massively disruptive success for decades now. But the iPhone's depressing combination of dominant mobile web marketshare and shitbox performance means we're all sort of ready to throw that progress away.
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3. Google has the right to dictate “Best Practices.”
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The Mobile Web as a utility has its place, but it's certainly not a necessary or desirable ideal for the entirety of The Web, yet Google has the audacity to presume it can dictate what is and is not optimal web design. The URL in and of itself is extremely presumptuous – Google technically has every right to own web.dev, sure, but should it? The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) program has already had an annoying effect on day-to-day browsing. I despise AMP links more than most things in life, just as I despise the name of the website Search Engine Land (which sounds like actual hell) who also reported on this:
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If you have AMP, the good news is that the majority of AMP pages do extremely well in terms of page experience metrics, [Google Project Manager] Rudy Galfi said. It doesn’t mean that all AMP pages will have top page experience metrics, but AMP is built in a way to help with this.
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Recently, I discovered an incredibly refreshing/affirming essay wrapped in a hand-build web experience called “Rediscovering the Small Web” by designer Parimal Satyal, arguing for a different variety of Web presence:
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Modern web design principles are very rarely directed at regular people looking to make a website on something they are interested in. Instead, the focus is on creating websites that perform well:
-Don't use too many colours. Write short, catchy headlines. Don't let content be too long. Optimise for SEO. Produce video content, attention span is decreasing. Have a an obvious call to action. Push your newsletter. Keep important information above the fold. Don't make users think. Follow conventions.
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I realize that the majority of Web utilization cannot “revert” to hand-coded plain HTML web pages hosted on Neocities, but there's something to be learned (or remembered, in my case) from Satyal's argument: The Web's forgotten strength is diversity (much like my country's, it would seem,) and the majority of users are being pushed by Google's search engine toward a very specific minority of URLs. We have not been exploring for a very long time:
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Instead of browsing, the web is for many an endless and often overwhelming stream of content and commentary picked out by algorithms based on what they think you already like and will engage with. It's the opposite of exploration.
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“It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art,” argues Satyal. “The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing.” (Emphasis mine.) It's not just that The Web was meant to be more – nostalgia is definitely not my particular trip, if you didn't know – it's that it can be so much more. My list of favorite Open Web projects contains just a few examples of what I mean.
Google has announced a three-day live digital event at the end of this month (June 30th-July 2nd) in which viewers will “celebrate our community's actions, learn modern web techniques and connect with each other.” “Over three days, we'll share quick tips on aspects of modern web development,” explains the company on its web.dev/live page. I am planning to attend and bitch as much as I am allowed. Stay tuned to hear a chronicle.
What I have long predicted is now coming to pass: Google believes it should assume control.
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Out of all the technology companies that have made my knees knock and my voice hoarse and my Tweets manic as a technoheretic in the past several years, Jumbo Google would easily take home the winning trophy for Dystopian of the Millennium. I have been rehearsing an especially dear pet prophecy of mine, unsolicited, to family, friends, and podcast guests since 2011 in which I end up arguing quite convincingly that Google is a dead ringer for the 16th-century Vatican: an inherently self-isolating organization with an absolute monopoly yielding gargantuan levels of essentially passive income from a service which nearly everybody transacts with, but only Google understands (and is therefore assumed to be its only possible provider,) which inevitably develops such a distance from the rest of the populace and their way of life (in tandem with total notoriety and celebrity among them all) not intentionally out of malice, but from the delusion of mythically-bestowed philanthropic duty that is borned of and compounded by this economic and cultural isolation in a perpetual accumulation of power and wealth that radicalizes the monopolizers — the majority already highly predisposed to zeal as they would’ve needed to be in order to find themselves in this singular, universally powerful position over every other class — and leaves their egocentric minds to wander exempt from all criticism save for that of fellow radicalized monopolizers, who together begin to feel more and more comfortable wondering aloud about themselves in increasingly fantastic presumptions: what if all of this was bestowed upon us because we are superior to them? What if it is ourdivine responsibilityas superior beings to take charge and shepherd the common people as our sheep — for they cannot possibly know as well as we what is truly best for them?
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You see it, right? And you can feel a very specific flavor of terror that is both awed by the scale of the circumstances created by so few human minds and sincerely amused by the absoluteness of your own inability to alter them in any way. Perhaps you even recognize this taste as one perfected by Christianity’s ancient advertising business, but Google knows so much about you that it’s rumored to’ve been selling user data to the Judeochristian God for some time now at a 10% discount, and so we extrapolate and anticipate, yes?
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Of course, it’s admittedly satisfying for me to deliver you to this godfearing place in the most perverse look what I saw first that you didn’t see because you’re just not as bright but lucky for you, I’m so fucking generous with my wisdom sort of thinking around which the entire personas and livelihoods of fringe movement fanatics are built upon, but this is my one thing, okay? I’ve been waiting years for the right time to formally argue this theory in depth, and — thanks to this year’s public spotlight finally pivoting on the giants who’ve been silently swallowing their competition and relentlessly forcing their already ridiculous margins higher and higher in relative obscurity for decades, the time has come, indeed. The common people’s trust in Google had a godawful week.
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Don’t Be Evil
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On Monday, Gizmodo reported that twelve frustrated Google employees were quitting the company in protest of their work assisting the Department of Defense to “implement machine learning to classify images gathered by drones” for the detail fleeting Project Maven, despite some 4000 employee signatures on a letter addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai requesting (in full) that he “cancel this project immediately,” and “draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology,” citing the infamous “Don’t Be Evil” motto, which Google then proceeded to remove from its code of conduct for the first time in 18 years the day after the New York Times article went to press, on April 5th.
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On initial approach to the abstract of this story, from the ass to our thoughts arrives an easy narrative of a Silicon Valley mutiny comprised of twelve brave, conscientious souls who’ve been eaten up inside by their complicity in the filthy deals made by their power-obsessed CEO over scotch and cigars in a dark D.C. study — kept awake for months by the sound of his puffing cackles at satellite images of dead toddlers in a bombed-out street.
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Ah ha, we say. That man is no good, and he just wouldn’t listen! They knew they didn’t have a choice… They only did what they had to do…
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The reality of internal disagreements at Google, though, manages to be even more theatrical. The sheer volume of correspondence must surely be beyond anything capable of the enduser’s imagination, so let’s phone a friend: my favorite peek into the day-to-days of inter-Google existence is an old blog post by Benjamin Tilly on his first month at the company in which he was compelled almost immediately to describe in great detail how best to “deal with a lot of email in gmail” at peak efficiency using shortcuts and labels.
-“As you get email, you need to be aggressive about deciding what you need to see, versus what is context specific.”
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Now we have a bit better idea of the aggressive emailing that was a sure constant on a normal workday at Google in 2010, so it must’ve been deafening after 8 years of Gmail development as 4000 employees no doubt vented, debated, and decided to organize last month, though without making much headway because the leadership’s response was apparently “complicated by the fact that Google claims it is only providing open-source software to Project Maven,” this new knowledge having significant effect on our mind’s image of Sundar Pichai’s activities in Washington: he is now swapping seats with a frustrated Colin Powell in order to install OpenOffice onto his desktop from a flash drive, and we recall that Google’s Googleplex headquarters resembles nowhere in modern life more than a brand new playground built in a design language borrowing heavily from Spy Kids. And though these Twelve disciples are unnamed for the moment, a few of them could immediately land book deals by going public, and every single one would always have by default not only the badge of “I landed a job at Google,” (which is really to say I have hit Life’s maximum level cap,) but “I worked at Google for a while, but ended up quitting to do something else,” which is guaranteed to make you the most interesting, intellectually superior person present in whatever crowd for the rest of your life. The ultra-cool Sarah Cooper quit Google to become a comedian and even got to talk to Kara Swisher!
-I won’t pretend to understand big tech’s diminutive bastardization of prestige, but “more than 90 academics” jumping to publish an open letter (adjacent to a huge DONATE: Support the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots button) in which they “write in solidarity with the 3100+ Google employees” who’s terrible boss decided to help some lackeys in the Pentagon set up their email and didn’t text back for a whole hour doesn’t sound 100% sincere. Notably, I don’t know how or why the fuck 90 people would go about collaborating on a single document, but if it really was managed, they definitely used Google Docs…
-At one point, it was fun to think about the history of the friendly side-scroller-playing garage ghouls and dorm dorks who gave cooky, wacko names to their dot com startups in parody and defiance of the lame-ass surname anagrams on the buildings of their established competitors, but those who’ve stuck around have only done so by becoming expert at SUCKING UP EVERYTHING around them, and it pisses me off every day how worried I am that my species will finally be done in by a company with a name like Yahoo! and be known only to a bunch of adolescent interdimensional silicon blobs 30 million years in the future as that bipedal race who remained dignified until the last 0.01% of their reign on Earth, when in way less than a single generation, they all just wentFUCKING INSANEand blew themselves up because they suddenly hated all sense.
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“Google” is perhaps the worst of these to have to shout in fear and/or anger in your last moments as it sounds in American English like you’ve startled your subject with a ticklish pinch followed so immediately by an esophagus-busting chokehold that the two events appear simultaneous, and in real English English, it almost always sounds like a parent speaking of a character on a pre-K children’s television programme whom they find quite foul and upsetting, but will manage to refrain from expressing so otherwise because they know that Teletubbies shit is the most quickly forgotten stage of television viewership. It’s fascinating how exclusive the word “Google” is to American English because in everything else it really is complete nonsense, but lets halt all etymological discussions right now because we’ve only now just finished with Monday.
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The Soul Ledger
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On Thursday, all of my Google experiences, suppositions, and soul-detaching screenshots were usurped when a thoroughly alarming internal company video called The Selfish Ledger was leaked to The Verge, which I watched once then and do not want to watch again for the sake of this piece, but I will. Though the big V has been disappointingly timid for years about editorializing — when tech journalism desperately needs some confident, informed opinion more than ever — Vlad Savov’s accompanying article should be read in its entirety, to which I can add my own terror where he perhaps could not.
-The production style is technically identical to that of the very popular thinkpiece-esque, motion-graphics-paired-with-obligatory-sharpie illustrated videos which you find playing at max volume on your mom’s iPad from where she’s fallen asleep on the couch at 9PM, but the repeating stock string soundtrack multiplies one’s discomfort as such that we would all end up in the fetal position without remembering the transition were it not for the appearance of trusty old Dank Jenkins, who’s face I thankfully associate heavily enough with his infamous down-and-out Tweet to be a welcome respite in attention before the very scary hypothesis for which it’s been buttering me up, as best summed by Vlad:
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The system would be able to “plug gaps in its knowledge and refine its model of human behavior” — not just your particular behavior or mine, but that of the entire human species. “By thinking of user data as multigenerational,” explains Foster, “it becomes possible for emerging users to benefit from the preceding generation’s behaviors and decisions.” Foster imagines mining the database of human behavior for patterns, “sequencing” it like the human genome, and making “increasingly accurate predictions about decisions and future behaviors.”
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The next time the what if they do something scary question comes up in a casual conversation about Google, you’ll have something a lot more substantial than just speculation. Or will you? The Verge reached out for comment and got an awfully convenient response.
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This is a thought-experiment by the Design team from years ago that uses a technique known as ‘speculative design’ to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate.
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Wow! Leave it up to grand ole Googe to reveal the ultimate excuse for just about any suggestion or behavior, though it does seem almost deliberately uncomfortable, doesn’t it? No matter — whether or not this video was ever about a project or tangible product development, or simply to explore uncomfortable ideas because it is proof that the company has reached that critical Vatican stage — if you’ll remember — where they now feel comfortable exploring Very Bad, but Very easily made Real Ideas amongst themselves about what would happen if they allowed their system to nudge its users around a different, slightly less optimal route to the bar, let’s say — without their knowledge — in order for the system to collect traffic data for the sake of its own interests? Which would be, technically, in the interest of all Ledger users now and in the future, so why not?
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The ledger could be given a focus, shifting it from a system which not only tracks our behavior, but offers direction towards a desired result.”
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This, my dear privacy-obsessed friends, is the real issue with data collection — its power over huge groups by way of their behavior and it is never going to be remedied in any significant way by ad-blockers or VPNs because the EndUser shall always out number you 50 to 1, even decades from now. EndUser does not understand — or, crucially, have any desire to understand anything technical about what leads to the PewDiePie videos playing on his filthy screen. Here’s a great opportunity to escape Silicon Valley’s technolibertarianism and resign your Darwinian empathy in favor of meaningful and truly-effective action: if you want to avoid a future Google Church (or Google Government, more worryingly,) you should invest your time, effort, and knowledge into electing officials more capable of understanding and regulating Big Tech.
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Google Government
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The internet as it stands is made possible by Google as the goto resource for online advertising. In 2016, “Google held 75.8 percent of the search ad market, bringing in $24.6 billion in revenue from search ads,” according to Recode. By 2019, “that’s expected to grow to $36.62 billion in revenue, or 80.2 percent of the market.” Google’s edge in user behavior and targeted advertising combined with their extensive resources available developers to integrate independent platforms with Google’s software services at various levels makes it very difficult for any advertising-funded individual or organization to compete online without dipping in to the Google universe. YouTube — a Google property since 2006 — has actively invested in and supported a new career path entirely within their own platform that is rapidly becoming popularly aspired-to by young children, while the reality of existence as a full-time YouTuber is far less glamorous than the immediately-visible surface would indicate, and the effort already expended by my generation in its pursuit has already made us insane.
So, what would the internet look like if Google didn’t exist? We know they’ve been working with the government now on various projects, but what if some terrible exposed transgression of theirs suddenly warranted an immediate shutdown and seizure of all Google properties? Well, we know from a post on Quora by Googler Ashish Kedia that even 5 years ago, the sudden absence of Google for “2–3 mins” set the internet into a bit of a panic, reducing overall traffic by 40%. In the time since, we’ve all grown exponentially more dependent on Google properties: billions of people rely on Google Maps for directions and, thousands of companies (including the Pentagon and other government institutions) rely on Gmail and GSuites for intercommunication, file sharing, task management, etc., and more and more academic institutions rely on Chromebook devices running connection-dependent operating systems. It’s not much of a stretch to argue that Google’s sudden disappearance would constitute a Civil Emergency in the United States, which will only become a stronger and more serious incentive for regulatory bodies to look the other way.
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Though the tangible results of advertising have been quantified significantly in the past 20 years, one can’t help but wonder after watching YouTube ads for the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class on toy unboxing videos if the companies who spend big bucks on Google advertising understand where their money is going, but they know that if they don’t advertise there, their competitors will. This, of course, is a fundamental practice of a monopoly, and it’s yielded Google so much fucking money that they cannot possibly spend it fast enough, as evidenced by their investments in life extension — so that, perhaps, they will have more time on Earth to figure it out.
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When you build a collection of the world’s smartest people in a self-sufficient environment that discourages exploration of other lifestyles and ideas, and you sustain the society with a gargantuan, relatively low-maintenance revenue stream, you create a culture which is not only well-primed for isolationism, but is also extremely inefficient. In fact, with its vast collection of abandoned products and properties, Google must surely be one of the most inefficient companies in history. Thinking back on recent software releases along with its recent entries into the hardware space, Google is also one of the worst competing tech companies. Very little aside from Gmail, Google Photos, Google Maps, and Chrome have found their place or garnered significant usership. Google Play Music is unintuitive and impossible, Google Allo and Google+ are all but forgotten addendums to other services, and Google Search — its core, original function — has been out of control for years, and all of them are designed blandly and excruciatingly tiring to look at.
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Google Shun
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If this all has stirred nothing more in you than a desire to eliminate Google from your own online life as much as possible, there are alternatives in almost every one of the sphere’s they dominate. As of late, DuckDuckGo has accumulated a fair amount of buzz and coverage as a private, more relevant alternative to Google’s plain old search engine. Though it is clever enough to list us as the first result for “extratone,” I’ve found it simply insufficient as a replacement in my own life because, essentially, it rarely delivers what I’m looking for. By contrast, Dropbox Paper is such an elegant cloud notetaking and word processing software that it makes Google Docs look simply idiotic (and warrants its own review very shortly.) For getting around, know that MapQuest is not only still around — it’s now a very competitive mobile navigation app.
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I, myself, have allowed Google as complete of access to my information and behavior as possible because I believe “privacy” is a completely futile endeavor if one wishes to be a part of society, though I do often use alternatives to Google services simply because I fucking hate the way they look. If you want a more complete list of services and software that allow one to shun the Google God entirely, you’ll be forced to seek out less dignified sources like Lifehacker and Reddit and decide if the additional time you’ll spend using most of them to accomplish the same tasks is really worth your digital angst.
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If Google were to be more explicit with its users and staff about its aspirations to take over control of our lives, there will be little to do but accept the future they intend to create because they’ve long been too powerful to control. In the meantime, I’d suggest you continue to use whatever software works best for you and refrain from wasting your time fretting on conspiratorial suppositions of what the tech industry may be doing to “invade your privacy,” because there is no longer any such thing, nor will there be ever again. However, I would also urge to you worship your own Gods, whomever they may be, for Google will never be worthy. I, for one, shall only pray to our Mother Sun.
Examining Fred Rogers' debut Atlantic-theatre naval anxiety compilation.
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It's a little late to write about Greyhound – Tom Hanks' first screenwriting credit – which released on Apple TV+ this past Father's Day, June 21st. Though I definitely left my quite severe obsession with WWII history in my prepubescence, I thought I'd remark on this film because I originally hoped it would fulfill a role I'd long wanted for: the destroyer-side compliment to U-boat films like Das Boot and U-571. James D. Hornfischer's exceptional account of the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts' part in The Battle off Samar with The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors was my last dive into naval history. It's one of the most astounding war stories I've ever encountered, and upon first seeing Greyhound's trailer, I was sortof hoping it was the Big Boy film adaptation its always warranted. (Though apparently there was a TV movie made in 2005???) Instead, its based on (distinct from “adapted from,” apparently) a 1955 novel by English author C.S. Forester entitled The Good Shepherd.
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Tom Hanks made sure to imbue his first screenplay with a shitload of “opaque naval jargon,” as The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw's review put it. A brief “investigation” by The Cinemaholic suggests that the U.S.S. Keeling – the film's singular setting – most resembles a Mahan-class destroyer, though none actually bore the name. For the actual photography, the production made use of a surviving example of the most mass-produced destroyer of all time:
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When it came to shooting the film, instead of relying completely on sets, the crew of ‘Greyhound’ found another option. They used USS Kidd, a real WWII destroyer, to film the journey of Greyhound. She is a Fletcher-class destroyer and is named after Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, the first US flag officer to die during the Second World War.
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As much as you're going to loathe it, I must include this commentary on Greyhound's historical accuracy if only because – as a undoubtedly mainstream film – its been so widely and competently reviewed, already, by real film writers. I am almost positive U-boats would rarely – if ever – waste their precious few viable torpedo shots firing ultra-close-range at the agile, super-speedy destroyers and destroyer escorts that protected supply convoys, and I am sure that none ever bothered with audibly addressing enemy ships over the radio in English. I understand that dramatizing historic events is the core function of Greyhound's genre, but this particular addition was so unbearably cheesy that it utterly decimates all of the experience's hard-won context. Just look at a snippet from the first of two dialogues in text:
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Greyhound. Greyhound, Greyhound.
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This is Gray Wolf.
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We hunt you and your friends
-Eagle, Dicky and Harry.
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We watch your ships sinking into the deep.
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We hear the screams of your comrades
-as they die.
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How many of them will there be
-before you join them?
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The Gray Wolf is so very hungry.
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I'm sure there's an essential academic film function which only similar enemy taunts could perform and without which this screenplay would've been technically unsound, and – if I were allowed supposition – I would venture to guess that America's Favorite Dad felt pressured to bolster his first penning against easy gimmes for the Great Big institution of cinema criticism as much as possible. However, this shit is just disruptingly cheesy. Fuck it! Have the rest:
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Greyhound!
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Your flock is not safe from this wolf.
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We can always find you
-in the night to kill you.
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Or will Dicky die next? Or Harry?
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[Gray Wolf howls]
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...
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Greyhound.
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Guten Morgen, Greyhound.
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Did you think you had slipped away
-from this Gray Wolf?
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No, you did not. You will not.
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The sea favors the Gray Wolf on the hunt,
-not the hound on the run.
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You and your comrades will die today.
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The contrast with the rest of the script's imposingly thorough and relentlessly-paced naval action dialogue is far too abrupt to not be problematic. Even as obsessed as I was with naval history, I'm still too oblivious to the details of what is/was actually said on the bridge of a warship during combat maneuvers to tell you how authentic Greyhound's depiction really is (it's hardly ever shown on the screen or laid out in nonfiction, even,) which nullifies all relevance the realism would've had, otherwise. Director Aaron Schneider in an interview for Vanity Fair:
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“If you decide to read Greyhound by tracking the dialogue—rudder commands and sonar distances—you’ll soon find yourself completely lost. Because that’s not where the movie lives. This screenplay was designed to beam you aboard the USS Keeling…and it’s up to you to engage with what’s going on and extrapolate how things work, so you can answer the question, ‘What the hell is going on here?’”
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In this sense – crafting a consuming, believable, unbelievably gray, claustrophobic, icing iron reality – Tom Hanks excels.
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Though Letterboxd user brucewayn called it “boring” in the most popular review of the film to date on the platform, I found Greyhound to be quite engaging in an anxious, depressing sense familiar to classic war dramas like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. The tedium of naval warfare's endless orienteering is rescaled to a battlefield of lesser distances – axis and allied vessels actually collide on several occasions and a U-boat crew decides to fuck it all and brawl it out with two parallel destroyers with surface guns instead of retreating after losing their ability to dive. (See: Titanic VI.) Through a combination of wartime compression and stitching, Greyhound is in large part a mashup of naval action at the extremes of what historical fiction will allow within its 48-hour setting. From Ben Lindbergh's review for The Ringer:
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In The Good Shepherd, enemy torpedoes simply sail wide; in the movie, they graze the hull for even closer calls. In the book, Krause agonizes over, and generally resists, calling the crew to general quarters, wary of exhausting their energy reserves; in the movie, he doesn’t hesitate to summon his sailors to battle stations.
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The result is an emotionally effective film constrained by a very specific dramatic aim: another war movie every father can juice for decades' worth of Sunday afternoons on the sofa. “As befits his status as America's Dad, Hanks has constructed for us the ultimate Dad Movie — all the action you could ever need or want, with no annoying characters hanging around, harboring pesky needs and wants of their own,” quips Glen Weldon for NPR. Undoubtedly, though, the subject matter is fresh. I wouldn't say my youth desire for a surface-side Atlantic-theatre film is 100% satiated, but Greyhound managed to accomplish much more than I expected.
Basecamp's HEY matters, and not just because it took on Apple's App Store policies.
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Something always worth celebrating: a considered, no-nonsense new effort to reimagine email. I've lived through many notable milestones in this regard: Apple Mail on the original iPhone, Gmail, Readdle's Spark, and (yes, really,) the revitalization of Microsoft's Outlook. Exciting innovations have abounded throughout email's history, but it's highly debatable whether or not any of them have really changed the way we use it in a profound way, yet I am unfailingly intrigued whenever somebody new comes along, so when I saw Casey Newton's story on The Verge's frontpage discussing Basecamp's HEY before I got out of bed on the morning of June 15th, I was delighted to see an organization still had the courage to invest their confidence and resources into their Ideas About Email. Originally, HEY's homepage included a prompt: “To get on the list, email iwant@hey.com and tell us how you feel about email. Could be a love story, or a hate story. Could be long, could be short. It’s your story, so it’s up to you.” Though I knew it'd likely never be read, I decided to write them a letter about my personal history with email, which turned into an entertaining enough anecdote to publish here.
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The real reason HEY continued to be so widely covered by tech media, though, was its challenge to Apple's App Store policies after one of its updates was rejected by the marketplace just a day after Casey's story was published. Much drama ensued – I have done my best to aggregate links to all the news stories on the subject in a thread on the Extratone subreddit I recently started. I think the public resistance by Basecamp's CTO David Heinemeier Hansson was probably a PR move, which is fine, but all I wanted to contribute was a review of the actual function of HEY, itself. After reading posts by some of my favorite bloggers, however, I think it would be redundant. Kev Quirk argued “Email Is Not Broken,” to which Mike Stone responded “Email Is Broken.” Additionally, Business Insider's Lisa Eadicicco published an in-depth review at the beginning of the month.
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My singular commentary: I'm worried that subscription services that exclusively accept large yearly sums like HEY inevitably become the “country club for the most self-important emailers in business” which Casey spoke of. I guess we'll see.
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The following is an excerpt from my letter to HEY asking for a early-access invite.
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Email and I: An Abridged History
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I am 26 years old, so I suppose I'm of the first generation that's never experienced life without email. I grew up on a farm in rural central Missouri and my dad was very much an early adopter. (You'd be surprised how e-enabled farmers were becoming in the early 2000s.) I cannot remember life before the humongous satellite dish was anchored in our front yard. Long before I had any reason to be online (or really understood what that meant,) he began and ended every day sitting at in front of a CRT on a corner desk, clacking away on a cigarette smoke-yellowed plastic keyboard for hours. I did not understand why, then, but in retrospect I realize that he was corresponding with a huge network of neighbors, politicians, family, and college friends via email lists/chains and that he depended on it both professionally and personally in a big way. As a single man living at least an hour's drive from a city of any size, I suppose my dad was predisposed to have a rich online life long before his suburban peers, which normalized it precociously for me.
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The summer before my first grade year, my elementary school became the first in the district to have a computer lab (also the first air-conditioned room in the building,) so my high school graduating class was literally the very first to have had any digital curriculum – and an email address(!) – for the entirety of our public school experience. Because of this, I think most of us were trained to think of email as a tool for school work – it was eluded to by our computer teachers that our school email addresses were being monitored to make sure they remained so (obviously, they weren't.) As we grew into 6th-7th grade, however, we all seemed to end up with personal email addresses. I consider myself lucky to have experienced a very brief window – before instant messaging/early social networks became mainstream and SMS became even remotely pleasant to use – when my middle school friends and I corresponded exclusively by email when we weren't on the phone.
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It still sounds a bit silly to say, but I've spent the past few years coming to believe more and more strongly that my first-generation iPhone changed my life forever in a profound way – especially my relationship with email. After watching Steve Job's introduction at MacWorld 2007 live, I promised to skip a year of Christmas gifts if my mom would agreed to buy me one, and she did. Obviously, it was like nothing else I'd ever experienced, and it completely changed how I responded to and thought about technology. Before smartphones, there was no checking email outside of time in the computer lab, which was intended to be quite strictly-regulated. I had a real advantage when I started bringing my iPhone to school – absolutely no one knew what it was (a bizarre thought in contrast,) including teachers. Suddenly able to browse and read my inbox in class, at lunch, and on the bus, my use and consideration of email was propelled far ahead of my peers'.
When I started an online magazine in 2016, I don't think I could've conceived of the extent to which running a modern media company – even one targeted toward tech-savvy, early-adopting youth – still involves email. I assumed that my audience rarely actually read from their inboxes and relied almost exclusively on social networks for content discovery, so I originally forwent any implementation of a newsletter. As I grew more and more interested in and engaged with the media beat, I was exposed to the email renaissance of the past 2-3 years thanks to services like Revue and Substack, saw that it was good, and decided to give it a try for myself. I launched our semi-regular newsletter in April, 2017 on the subjects of “Division, Art, and Media” and published a little over 30 issues over the course of 18 months. To be honest, I'm not sure I've ever had so much fun writing.
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Very shortly after it began, I observed our general engagement quadruple, and – quite selfishly – found the process of aggregation to be soothing and very mentally restorative. It exposed some pretty horrendous media consumption habits of mine, but it also offered a painless solution to them. As soon as everything I read became a potential item in the newsletter, I wasn't just reading for myself anymore (or at least, that's the mentality it gave me,) so I could no longer afford to dismiss particular subjects as easily or to skim so recklessly. I nurtured a much less chaotic media diet and found myself absorbing a lot more of what I wanted to without wasting so much time burning through links. I ended up feeling more focused in other, unrelated areas of my life, too. Obviously, I love email for that, and I miss writing that darn newsletter so much that I continuously look for excuses to do something similar.
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My former Tech Editor loved email perhaps as much, but she's definitely the only person I've ever met who finds the medium as entertaining as I do. (If you're really committed, I just made a Twitter Moment full of all the best stuff I've ever posted about email – mostly jokes like “patron saint of email marketing,” but there are one or two profound posts in there, too.) We realized one day that – aside from The Webbys – there are very few notable awards celebrating excellence in the email medium, so we decided our magazine would host the 2017 First Annual Email Awards. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone else had any idea what the heck we were trying to do, so we never received enough submissions. However, I noticed a great opening paragraph in the original announcement post which I thought made a worthy conclusion:
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Man has used electronic mail to intercommunicate, woo, build communities, topple businesses & civilizations, embezzle money, spread worms, distribute cluttered, broken links to discontinued Orscheln products, feed infants, set climate control, confirm identities, check bank account statuses, and lie to exhausted, slightly-conceited, and newly self-published professors. That's right – These Trillions of simple digijewels have purveyed every single possible category of human communication, and it's still growing strong.
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I'm excited to give Hey a try – I hope you'll consider inviting me early. I'll even send my feedback if you so desire it! If not, I'll probably end up trying a paid subscription, anyway hehe. Either way, let me wish the best of luck to your team. Win or lose, I'm glad you're taking action on your complaints, unlike the rest of us.
I would argue that this is the best Honda’s CR-V has ever or will ever look, no thanks to my photographic decisions.
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After 9 or so years and over 100,000 miles, I have totaled my mother’s 2010 Honda CR-V – the car I drove cross-country for the first time at significant distance (St. Louis to Washington, D.C. in essentially one sitting,) and once complimented for being the best possible aesthetic compromise of its near-universally and aggravatingly-compromised breed. It was my her first 1st owner experience, which is frankly a bit of a shame. If I’m completely honest, my late stepfather’s decision to outfit this utterly utilitarian vehicle with enough kit to break the $30,000 within a segment that has always clung to the 20s as one of its truly communicable advantages feels less-than-ideal in retrospect, but what can I say, really? It was not exactly a proud thing, but it did transport a lot of young families and shelter us as we’ve navigated more blizzard-like conditions than should be the norm for what is, essentially, an expensive, extended Civic.
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As per some particulars of my upbringing, I tend to get almost alarmingly attached to vehicles, but it’s hard to say I’m sad to see the CR-V go from all but the most sentimental senses. Objectively, it’s simply not as high-value or as competent a vehicle as it and its contemporaries are still made out to be by automotive media, pop culture, or the presumptions in the average consumer’s discourse. Though it was never intended to be luxurious, the resulting automobile ended up costing real luxury money.
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The Event
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It’s odd to have been driving so long without incident (pretty soon I’m gonna be able to say “I’ve been driving for twenty years, bitch!) and then suddenly find oneself at fault for the accident which claimed the life of the single most sublime, defining object in his existence. This incident, though, was entirely the fault of the other driver. My best friend and I were Northbound, crossing the intersection of Stadium Boulevard and Rock Quarry Road at precisely the point where it becomes College Avenue, where we were t-boned directly on the CR-V’s driver’s side rear wheel by a mid-2000s Mazda 6 that decided to run the red light. It’s hard to guess the speed of impact, but the driver’s side side airbags deployed (as you’ll see from the attached photograph,) and the CR-V was spun nearly 270 degrees around the axis of the front wheels. Neither of us nor the 6’s driver was injured, but both of our vehicles are surely totaled.
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Third-Generation CR-V Ownership in Retrospect
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Two or three years ago, I recorded some (not particularly conclusive or informative) thoughts with my iPhone as I drove the old engorged Civic to the grocery store, when ends abruptly after I said “I think one time I did try to go fast.” Like most surviving crossover nameplates, though, the narrative began with a genuinely good idea: Hondarize and modernize the Suzuki Sidekick template on top of the Civic's platform and charge just a bit more for it – and like the rest, too, the concept has soured tremendously as both crossovers and the compact sedans upon which they're based have grown and fattened under their ever-increasing burden of safety and convenience features. (I say “burden” and not “expectation,” specifically because I know a grand total of zero informed people who are at all thrilled about increasing gross weights across every industry segment.)
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This CR-V was my mother’s first and only crossover following a three-car line of one or two-owner-used, well-equipped V6 Accords in her garage – the later two from the era when Honda’s mid-sized sedan became a surprisingly dynamic driving machine as advances in drivetrain performance intercepted a point in the developmental timeline just before gross weights spiked up toward their current safety and electronic equipment-bloated figures. (In other words: in the sweet spot when engines were growing more powerful but just before the Accord and its peers got fucking fat.) In 2010, the CR-V was almost attractive looking as specced by my stepfather: the combination of the roof rack, bonnet bra, and EX-trim 5-spoke alloys managed to resolve most of the discrepancies in the shapes I've seen from other examples, but it also drove its price above the $30,000 mark. To be fair to Honda, this decision could almost be considered a sortof breach of function considering the CR-V's original ultra-mass-produced, utilitarian purpose.
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Interior
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Neither the leather nor the nav/infotainment system has aged very well, but it should be said that the latter is still 100% functional in 2018: it interfaces well with my iPhone 8 Plus with only the occasional “this device is not supported” hiccup (easily resolvable by simply re-booting the connection, in my experience.) I'm not sure how astonished I should be by the fact that the GPS still offers reliable routes 99% of the time, albeit through a user interface design that seems to grow more and more dated by the passing few seconds one may have to wait for it to calculate. Accommodation remains about as uncomfortable as it was on day 1: thanks to its hard leather and the super-upright seating position common to crossovers, I must continue to insist that operating this car is a wholly unnatural experience, but its interior surfaces shall always place well in a contest of robustness and longevity, as they certainly should.
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Drivetrain
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Perhaps the greatest letdown of this model year (2010) is its legacy four-speed automatic transmission, and I assume the next year's inclusion of a brand-new five-speed unit drastically improved its driving experience. The specific regret one feels when such a development arrives a year after buying any new car is one my stepfather still didn't deserve, yet he was not spared. However, if you, the reader, cannot be dissuaded from buying a CR-V of this generation for whatever goddamned reason, know that you must choose an example from 2011-onward if you want to retain your sanity. No, ye olde four-speed wasn't quite as bad as the transmission that virtually ruined Dodge's new Dart singlehandedly, but it certainly shows its age even for the most inattentive or merciless driver. Without it, I would vouch for the 2.4L four-cylinder's performance as adequate, but its contribution was and forever shall be let down by the aging transmission's developing Alzheimer's. Simply put: they are an unacceptably mismatched team.
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Though I shall forever argue that part-time all-wheel-drive is almost never actually justified in normal use – and yet inadequate for any “extreme” use, for that matter – Honda’s hydraulic “Super-Handling All-Wheel-Drive” did indeed aid our CR-V’s way in a handful of circumstances throughout my mother’s ownership, though neither of our memories of these are robust enough to cite specifics. The single no-bullshit blizzard we experienced was the same type I managed to navigate years later in a sub-compact Chevrolet to reach MagFest 2016, if perhaps less intense. I would speculate that the system increases mechanical drag – and therefore fuel consumption – to a degree that couldn’t possibly justify what little aid it has offered in our use, at least.
Honda: From Trendsetters to Just Another Car Company
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South Korea is poised to take Japan's place in the American market.
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The 1990s. Not the greatest time for the United States auto industry. In those days, with a few exceptions, American cars were all overpriced, devoid of quality and generally unreliable. The big three (along with many other non-automotive related corporations in the U.S.) had an aging generation of management. This group decided that the ideal way to run their business involved expending the least amount of effort into their products as possible, without reducing the price paid by customers. Essentially, they hoped to gain more profit from less product. I don't have to tell you that this thinking just...doesn't work. I would theorize that this mentality came from overconfidence and a lack of joy in production. GM, Ford, and Dodge had been the top sellers of the automobile in the United States since its invention. They originally symbolized the best in quality, luxury and performance. Consumer and producer shared the same values, resulting in a flourishing market. It was a joyous time. And then, somewhere around the 1973 oil crisis, the joy began seeping out of our star shooters. Maybe it was emissions regulations, a loss of those ideal values, or some other factor. Regardless of the source, our homegrown auto industry lost its passion. It reflected in the cars that were built. Designs were reused, progression was halted, the irreverence of quality workmanship lost. “American dependability” became an ironic statement.
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And then came along a company that had been building little, noisy two-stroke engines to fit to bicycles only four decades earlier, proudly displaying a banner the changing public couldn't refuse. They offered a product that was simple, honest, reliable, durable and reasonably priced. A concoction that smelled an awful lot like high value. An odor that no doubt brought back old memories. The Accord, suburban America's new family pet. And the Civic, conveniently debuted in 1972. The college student's greatest companion. Both were conservatively styled and equipped, and thus quite easily ignored, which was exactly what the country wanted. After all those years stranded on the shoulders of our aging interstate system in lumbering, underpowered beasts, the indestructible and dependable qualities of the Hondas came as a breath of fresh air. So. What made the newcomers so different? What was the driving force behind the value of the products? It was something not unknown to the Americans, and its presence had been sorely missed. Picture an ancient sage by the name of Soichiro Honda saying something to the order of “Lets build the best automobile we can and sell it for as little as possible.” Though the man is more a symbol than an actual influence on the four-wheeled endeavors of the institution bearing his name, he represents what led to the same group's success. Honda was untainted by an unrealistic attitude, and unaided by a century of heritage and good reputation. They succeeded only because they built good cars.
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By 2008, Honda had more than made a name for itself. Over the past decade, though, the prices had been steadily increasing, along with the level of luxury and complexity available in their cars. Both the Accord and Civic were bestsellers in their respective classes, and had held their titles for a relatively long time. It was then that I personally theorized they might take the same path American carmakers had taken only a short while before. I don't want to brag, but this was long before Ron Kiino's bold title “Is Hyundai the new Honda?” graced the pages of MotorTrend's October 2011 issue. And it was really a far-fetched notion at the time. Simply a suspicion. Confidently and stubbornly, the Accord held its grip on mid-size sedan sales in the United States, complimented by the Toyota Camry, a similar-looking but even more ignorable competitor. The former still held appeal for someone with the capacity to enjoy themselves. The latter, however, has always been the most desirable choice of individuals that absolutely despise driving. They both held their slightly different niches, with no real fear of losing their place. Then, Honda started skimping a bit on quality. Motoring journalists noticed a lack of improving fuel economy, aging transmissions, and a general loss in competitive edge in the 2011 Accord. Not the best time to start slacking on Honda's part.
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This was the year that Hyundai unveiled the brilliantly-updated 6th generation Sonata. I consider this to be the most significant car to come in the mid-sized segment since the birth of the Accord/Camry duo. In previous generations, it had always been competitively priced. The quality, though, had been lacking. The Koreans were not afraid to design a car that was much less conservative than the two Japanese giants. However, the designs were never really all that great looking. Interesting and different? Yes. Attractive?....No. So these attributes kept Honda and Toyota secure under their cozy comforter of sales, not intimidated by Hyundai's offering. And that's quite understandable. The Sonata never really seemed a direct competitor to the giants. The new one, however, completely changed the game. For one thing, it's gorgeous. Not conservatively pretty, but ridiculous, in the best sort of way. Poised and angular, the exterior looks as if it should cost exponentially more than it does. They managed to carry on the Sonata's tradition of unique styling by rejecting the old car completely and replacing it with a stunner. The interior reflects a similar attitude. It's not only good looking, but significantly more fuel efficient than any other mid-sized car on the market. The drivetrain options are excellent. The best part, though, is the price. At a starting MSRP of 19,195 USD (£11,944), it is several thousand less than any competitor.
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All of this really just makes the Accord and Camry look silly. It's interesting that Hyundai should take up Honda's original niche, given how different their backgrounds are. Our original hero of practicality was created by a man tinkering with small motorcycles. The former, however, was founded as a massive construction firm, only later trying its hand in the realm of automobiles. Cars seemed an alternative for Hyundai, but certainly not an afterthought. Regardless of where they came from, these two companies have had very similar philosophies, if only separated by time. Also, both have had to rely on sheer ingenuity for profit, without the foothold of heritage in the American market. It could be said, though, that Hyundai is doing a bit better. High value cars that are practical and interesting as an experience. Honda could never get that last bit quite right. Or perhaps it's just a sign of the times. Maybe Americans have overcome the compulsion to ignore our cars. My question is this; Has this flip-flop in production attitude become a cycle? And if so, who will be in the hot spot next? My bet is on the big three, believe it or not. A new generation of management has brought about a huge improvement in our products. It could even be one of the rising Chinese companies in the future. Who knows? I can tell you that right now, though, Hyundai has got the goods.
I bought a desktop tower for the first time since 2010 and spent an embarrassingly long time struggling with Bluetooth shit.
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As with my entire history of computer purchases, my acquisition of an HP ENVY Desktop tower, today, was last-minute, ill-informed, and certainly irrational. You “PC master race” folk: please spare me the dude, you could've just built your own pc so much cheaper shit.[efn_note]Or don't. Whatever.[/efn_note] Yes, I realize the sensible course of action would've begun with a two hour trip West to the closest Microcenter, where I'm sure the staff would've made PC shopping an absolute blast and I would've come away with a more powerful, much cheaper machine. However, after I managed to break Windows on my only machine this weekend (and subsequently failed to reset it,) I was getting especially behind on schoolwork and had absolutely no desire to complete any of it on my iPhone.
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And so... I've just returned from picking up said HP Tower along with a 27” HP LED display, and am writing you after having set up the machine physically and installed most of my “essential software” list (at least all that I could remember.) As per my favorite tradition of new computer acquisition, I have named the machine after Hildur Odegard from Fortitude:
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“First Impressions”
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It's been exactly 10 years since I last bought a desktop tower – since I first set hands on the Dell XPS Studio desktop with which I would create the majority of my intellectual property – and I was immediately surprised by how much smaller[efn_note]6.12 x 11.93 x 13.28 inches.[/efn_note] and lighter[efn_note]13.12 lbs.[/efn_note] this tower was than my expectations. The display, too, is remarkably light and thin. Rationally, I should not have been surprised by this, but I'm not going to punish myself for continuing to find any sort of magic in technology.
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In the box were a Bluetooth keyboard[efn_note]Specifically, an HP model 4251a-khsap003k.[/efn_note] and mouse set – the latter of which I will hopefully never have to use, thanks to my Logitech G203 – and was perplexed by the process of how to pair the former with the tower while it was in setup mode for far too long. I was just about to give up entirely when I revisited the packaging and noticed what I'd previously assumed was an anti-theft device, but was actually the fucking dongle for the pair. I continue to despise Bluetooth peripherals, obviously, but the multimedia function keys of the product led to some important realizations: I now had reason to use Windows Desktop Switching and have a calculator application again! However, I have yet to figure out how to alter the Function key's behavior (I'm not even sure it's possible:) in order to input Alt+F4, I have to input Fn+Alt+F4, which is far too clunky to depend on. The issue did lead to a revelation which I may or may not integrate permanently: I mapped Alt+F4 to the previously-unused button on the very top of the G203. So far, it's been pretty nifty.
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The HP 4251a-khsap003k included in the box with my new HP desktop.
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That said, a component of myintention to create an intentional, static, upright-sitting desktop workspace included an allotment for a quality mechanical keyboard – my justification was that any professional in a particular craft makes a point to have the best possible tools for the job, so a high-quality keyboard has actually been very long overdue, in my case. So, I sought out a single Wirecutter recommendations list and even attempted to disseminate r/MechanicalKeyboards.[efn_note]I haven't even started self-harming yet, so my stomach is definitely strengthening![/efn_note] After a brief jaunt, I concluded that no reasonable person would be able to make heads or tails of the forum or its seemingly endless wikis without considerable indoctrination so I more or less threw a dart and landed on the Varmilo VA108M, which I ordered. All I know is that it's fairly highly-reviewed on the marketplaces I checked (though hardly mentioned on the subreddit, actually,) and that it has the Cherry Switches, which are... The good ones.
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A concern I originally had with taking over the tertiary guest room – by far the smallest allotted living space in the house – as my office was its distance from our wireless router, two floors down. The last time I used the room as a workspace (five years ago,) my old tower's integrated WiFi card often struggled to maintain a reliable connection. The adapter included in this desktop, though, actually managed to clock the fastest download speed on my SpeedTest.net records just now.
It's almost painful even to write this but... As beautiful as this $250 display is to behold, I've grown accustomed to my Surface Laptop 2's 2256 x 1504 13” display after years of hard, daily use. Apparently, those dimensions mean the little machine's display has a pixel density of 201 Pixels-Per-Inch. Filling a 27” display with just 1920 x 1080 means a pixel density of just 81.6 Pixels-Per-Inch,[efn_note]I suppose I should not have been surprised to immediately discover a dedicated online tool for calculating pixel density.[/efn_note] and the disparity was glaring to my eyes, even from the setup screen. After a few hours of regular use, I'm not sure I notice it anymore, but I suspect I will again when I've got the laptop running again. Please do indicate whether or not you think such a complaint makes me awful in the Crowdsignal poll below.
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have I become truly spoiled or is 1080p just... not high enough resolution for a 27" display.
I've also already had trouble connecting my Bose SoundLink headphones correctly via Bluetooth. On my Surface Laptop, it registered as two separate devices – “Stereo Headphones” and “Headset” – which allowed me to use them as both the primary audio output and the primary audio input. For whatever reason, I have been unable to accomplish such a simultaneous connection on this machine: I can either connect them as headphones or as a headset, but not both. This video provided some help – I know now that I have to open Sound Settings and manually connect the headphones every time I re-connect them. Hopefully, I'll figure out another solution soon.
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Returning to the webcam issue: I discovered that absolutely zero local stores keep add-on webcams in stock anymore, which makes sense. I resorted to searching Amazon for webcams and found a gargantuan list of brands I had never heard of. When I filtered by the one I did recognize – Logitech – I saw barely-facelifted versions of the camera my stepdad bought in 2008 and none were in stock. Unwilling to further investigate or research more, I set the price filter for under $40, sorted by customer ratings, and bought the first product which had even remotely legitimate-looking reviews: this 1080p thing branded with “Mersuii.”
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After returning to the order invoice hours later for this post, I got curious enough to Google search the company name and discovered a dead-end url, zero Wikipedia page, and this Trademark registration, on which I spotted some very interesting information. Entered in the second “Goods & Services” row is the following text:
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Adult sexual stimulation aids, namely, devices for massaging or vibrating external and internal portions of the body, vibrating and non-vibrating reproductions of parts of the male and female anatomies, male sex toys, masturbators, penis pumps, electrical penis cyclone pumps, rings, clamps, stimulators, vibrators, dildos, dongs, butt plugs, anal beads, rings to be worn about the penis; Adult sexual stimulation kit comprised primarily of adult sexual stimulation aids and a workbook
A laptop, purchased. The beginning of a new era, finally witnessed.
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I managed to be reckless, tedious, and zealous in the usually-dry process of purchasing a new laptop, and found the story worth sharing. Expect a full review of the HP Spectre in the coming weeks.
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The meteorological complaints you’ve been hearing from mid-Missouri since Friday aren’t inappropriate this time – the middlefolk faced one of their most fatal enemies – a well-laid minefield of black ice. It slowed our timid, ABS-oblivious society to ten percent or less of its already near-postmortem pace.
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For God’s sake, at least learn why you needn’t pump your brakes before you opt for infotainment extras or… get your driver’s license.
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I woke up with the same debt and imminent expenses as I did the day before and without any more intention of buying a premium laptop than I’ve had for the two years I’ve gone without one.
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Without the concept of mobile computing in its entirety, actually. I knew I’d lost my desire to carry a loose bluetooth keyboard around everywhere in case some insight were to fall upon me heavy enough to justify reaching for it over my 6S Plus in a public venue, hunched and squinting. There’s still nothing better at cranking out copy than the Lap Top Computer, I suppose. I was holding out for a truly-substantial alternative to Windows 10 and macOS, wanting to be enchanted by lite delights like Acer’s cheeky Chromebook R11, but had decided in self-pity that I’d probably never be able to stand a new operating system ever again.
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My mom graciously decided to take me mall shopping for Christmas, which is comforting in its tradition of vapid routine. The state of a given midwestern metropolis’s mall is a keen indicator of the culture’s soul, I’ve found, and ours is mostly crewed by destitute alcoholics, who are my closest kin, and therefore my most appropriate company for the holidays.
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Dillard’s is the second-best place to lose your mind in America.
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Even now, when the somber corners are not quite so desolate. The acoustic sensation cannot be experienced anywhere else – the battlecries of the Me Generation’s pop reproduced by hateful diaphragms behind their white plastic ceiling facades and absorbed again by palletloads of mass-manufactured stonewashed denim, seemingly coming from a far-off wholesale nether no matter where in the store you’ve been buried. Ours is a few decades old, now – weathered and alone, which accentuates the whole dystopia with a resolute air of infinity, as if it’s certain it will outlast me. It probably will.
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I was deep within it all when I came across Dan Seifert’s praising review of the HP Spectre x360. As I’ve constantly confessed, The Verge‘s lot are the only institution of their kind I’ve come close to trusting too much, so it was no small thing to see something so certain as “the premium laptop to buy this year” in his subhead.
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The last time I was in the market for a laptop, there was little room for aesthetics in the equation. We have been taught this past decade that beautiful devices come in fruit form, only. Somehow, I allowed myself to integrate the ridiculous sentiment that MacBooks were the only option for anyone with any reverence for tactile experience. As I expect you’re aware of to at least some degree by now, Apple’s diligent study of desirability over the years is the singular force behind their lordship, and it’s the token MO of tech opinion to confuse it with sex appeal, resulting in expressions like “[apple hardware device] is sexy,” which is a pityingly desperate delusion. Do you actually find brushed aluminum appealing in any bodily sense?
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We did once, of course. Your infatuation with the stuff probably peaked the moment you first grazed it, and – if you’re anything like me – you could be harboring more aesthetic frustration with their longstanding occupation than you think. Infatuation must be starved to survive, and we’ve been eating up Apples by the bushel for a decade.
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Haha.
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But really, though – by the billion.
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I saw images in that Spectre review which I was completely satisfied with. I watched that new HP logo as it traveled through the frames, stupefied. Out of precious ignorance, I experienced real desire in that undesirable place. (Which could actually represent some sort of defeat on my part, but I’m not too bothered.)
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And in the midst of those desolate people in their fortress of mediocrity, my mom and I hatched a plan to indulge upon the best part of desolation – impulsive, subsidized gluttony. We’d stop by the pharmacy to fill my anti-depressant script before renavigating Bourgeois Bumper Cars to get to Best Buy, where she’d let me use her credit line to purchase my final choice in the segment.
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Best Buy is the best place to lose your mind in America.
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I could’ve sworn it made good sense to me, once – in Middle School, when my friend and I were spending most of our free time emulating the first generation of tech-reviewing YouTubers – but now, it reminds me of a darkwood restaurant with its closing fluorescents on, shining in the inverse frequency of a bug zapper – casting a more effectively-repelling ambiance for the human psyche than anything else I’m capable of dreaming up, at least.
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I used to fucking visit that store for no purpose but to see and experience the diluted bit of the handset renaissance with enough momentum to coast its way here. I probably spent a full sixty minutes wandering around by my own volition on a handful of occasions.
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But these days, I am perturbed from the onset in a big way. There are too many blue vape enthusiasts on the sales floor at any given time, and they all want me to leave. They loaf around the carcass of consumer technology’s passion, not realizing, I guess, that I already know it ’twas they who killed it. (The stench is strongest by the wearables.) It’s eerie how little the Big Box itself has changed, considering the decade their goods have traveled.
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Under a fittingly-gray sky, I wash my pill down with La Croix and a Kind bar to preempt the appropriate rumination in my mouth as we inch toward my Final Financial Doom with the spooked sliders. Though we never exceed 5mph, there are abandoned vehicles littering the shoulders and medians in varyingly absurd orientations. But I do not jest – today, I am silent, for I am one of them.
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By the time we reach the store, my medicine has once again placed my soul in Safe Mode, so we shuffle into the grotesque thing. There are four employees in sight – no one else – and they all send their beady eyes my way. I have too much purpose in my consumerist jowls to pause, though, so I rush to the laptops near the opposite wall in an attempt to get an early estimate on my current level of personal computing idiocy. Naturally, my Mom snags one of another four associates immediately. In this work, I shall refer to him as Zoroaster.
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Despite having never seen 80% of the displayed devices in person before, I am able to spot the Spectres quickly, which is a good sign. I am immediately elated by the contrast to the depressing mushbooks I remember HP making in the oughts. The bezel… the brilliance of the display… the details of the visible body. I open Extratone. I open The Verge. I am hoping that Windows 10 will not be as much of a kicker as I’ve expected.
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I’m not a minute before Mom and Zoroaster have found the new MacBook Pros. Nobody remembers the password to the 13-inch, but the 15 is showing off its “deep blacks” and “Space Gray” mood. The Verge looks phenomenal, and its icon in the touchbar catches my eye. I manage to use it to switch tabs, the less-attuned degenerate in me noting the extra spanning required over CMD-TAB.
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“Have you tried the new keyboard?” asks Zoroaster.
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I hadn’t. It’s as indescribable as you’ve heard, but suggests legitimacy is Apple’s effort to bridge the transition from physical keyboards to their touch replacement. Terrifying legitimacy.
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“You get used to it,” he says.
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I open Pages and click out something ridiculous. Yeah… click. I’m sure there’s a better onomatopoeia available by way of just about any technology website, but I didn’t bother to study the sensation after realizing that it’s a con for my number one use of a Portable Computer – clacking.
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It’s not as if the thing isn’t gorgeous, though, in its way. After years of usership, I can tell you that it is undoubtedly a superb execution of the MacBook marque. It’s polished. It’s The New One. But it is also bleak and slateish. Some might even say dystopian. Do I want to carry such a thing around with me everywhere? Do I even want to carry it out of the store? What will I tell my friends? What will I tell my staff?
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$2,000 of my future spent on what is now a piece of distinctly establishment design…
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I return to the x360 to see what can be done about Windows’ appearance these days.
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Purple-gray taskbars… Hm.
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It’s a sale.
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Let me be honest with you – I spent some ninety minutes going between the two. Even if I’d endured the shame and self-disappointment of choosing the MacBook Pro, the simple grunt of the challenge the Spectre presents to it is no small milestone.
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As Zoroaster scrambles to remove my new machine from The Hanging Jail, I am drained from the decision, but aware that my perspective on the world has changed. I’ve been working on an editorial for the past few weeks that’s mostly alarmed howling about the industry’s utter lack of passion, as of late, but seeing the Windows-running department’s devices and their matured design – finally beautiful without obvious Apple influence – had truly revived some little flame of hope within me.
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Lithe Zoroaster was confused by UPCs a bit, as is understandable, and began juggling three Spectre boxes atop the prison lift, screaming the numbers – one at a time from each device – to his bewildered disciple, below.
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Throughout the later half of the whole ordeal, I’d had company – some sort of blonde working man who’d also braved the frictionless waste to calm himself with debt. I’d been elated at the opportunity for companionship, at first, but he’d found himself unable to escape the store’s bespoke Apple Hole. I did my best to help him, but failed hoist his girth from the 15’s benchmark suction. I’d left him there, bound. May my dreams n’er be haunted by the fading portrait of his tortured, middle class face.
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As the Best Boys did their dance, he somberly came to my side. The grimace he’d worn in the struggle had fallen away. I knew what was coming before he formed the defeated words: “go ahead and grab me the 500 while you’re up there.”
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As one does when they stumble upon a stranger’s funeral, I bowed my head.
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Here begins the part that sorta makes me look like an idiot.
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After signing my mother’s lengthy loan agreement, Zoroaster – the little devil – asked if I wanted the Special Edition, just behind me. I’d stopped by last year’s Big Boy Spectre – the ballsy-ass copper-toned masterpiece – and had wished for a moment that the look could’ve carried to the fresher x360.
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The monospace Hewlett-Packard logo blinded me, and the unlit display (it hadn’t been set up yet) concealed the wider bezel of… The older Spectre 13t – with which I write, now.
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I didn’t notice my blunder until after our treacherous return, and could not care less.
Ten percent of the United States' adult population cannot functionally read or write (conservatively) despite the exponential increase of required reading in the average American's day-to-day life thus far in the 21stcentury. For written American media, especially, one would assume that a financial and social incentive for maximum literacy in the populace should present a straightforward justification for intense widespread coverage of this particular disparity, yet most related coverage in mainstream national magazines and newspapers is alarmingly sparse and often requires a less-than-socially-conscious context (e.g. a for-profit startup) to actually appear in news feeds. From the most wholesome assumption of the industry's general values — that it holds “newsworthiness” above all — we must assume that it does not generally consider American illiteracy “interesting enough to the general public to warrant reporting” as we examine the intermittent discourse surrounding the issue that does achieve publication.
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In late October, the American business and technology magazine Fast Company covered the recent successes of the “for-profit social enterprise” Cell-Ed, noting that “a huge portion of the American labor force is illiterate,” which it described as “a hidden epidemic.” The article's author, Rick Wartzman, mentions foremost that Cell-Ed's userbase is largely “foreign-born” and expected to eclipse one million in number by the end of 2019. Demographically, the magazine's readership is predominantly middle to upper-class, who are the least affected social groups by a significant margin as per illiteracy's strong correlative relationship with poverty. These factors combine to limit any real social consequences from such an article.
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In direct contrast with the professional, market-minded perspective of modern business magazine, even niche independent publications from the opposite end of the media spectrum often trivialize, belittle, or generally mishandle the issue. In a 500-word “Editorial” written by The Editor Eric Black of the Baptist Standard — a small evangelical news website describing itself as “Baptist voices speaking to the challenges of today's world” — he points to a global increase in “illiterate people,” as he so comfortably brands them. Such language is inevitably counter-productive and potentially insensitive: to the eyes and ears of activists, educators, and the general public, such a term unnecessarily lends toward a restricted perspective of those people who have been left behind by the institution of read and written language in one manner or another and portrays them as a great vague collection of lingual lepers bearing their own distinct, inexorable, wordless ethnicity which inevitably bars them from the freedoms allowed by the Editor's learned capacity, including the ability to actually read his words of affliction. Simply put, he has dangerously oversimplified the issue.
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To once again assume the best and infer that Black had a specific purpose in publishing his ill-supported opinion beyond continuity's sake of his weekly Editorials, it appears to be the promotion of a local Texan literacy “ministry” called Literacy Connexus, though no further specifics about the project are provided beyond “helping churches develop literacy programs for their communities, provide training and resources to overcome illiteracy,” which is virtually identical to the introductory copy on the organization's homepage.
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So far, we've examined coverage only in special interest media, but what about legacy news organizations with the largest readerships in the United States? Despite oblivious use of the same ledes, a newspaper like The Washington Post can wield vast influence over the broadest possible readership and the public editorial trust. In November 2016, veteran reporter Valerie Strauss published “Hiding in plain sight: The adult literacy crisis” for Answer Sheet — her weekly newsletter designed to function as “a school survival guide for parents (and everyone else), from education policy to psychology” — which represents the most substantial discussion of American illiteracy in topical, widely-visible media (i.e. presence in a succinct search engine query.) She briefly introduces the issue with a bulleted list of illiteracy's consequences on modern society and the individual cited from a Canadian literacy foundation before turning the stage over to Lecester Johnson, CEO of the Academy of Hope Adult Public Charter School in Washington D.C.
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Johnson presents a passionate and well-informed exploration of the state of the literacy battle from the perspective of a full-time, locally on-the-ground advocate. Her op-ed's introduction includes the most essential observations and statistics throughout, noting “the children of parents with low literacy skills are more likely to live in poverty as adults and are five times more likely to drop out of school,” before setting upon a detailed examination of current and relevant organizations working toward solutions. Of course, it's largely centered upon her own organization, which she claims has “helped more than 6000 adults rebuild their education and job opportunities since 1985.”
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It's significant that an institution as deeply embedded across the American political spectrum as The Washington Post address the issue of American illiteracy, and both Johnson and Strauss are certainly qualified voices for the undertaking, but when we examine this particular article, it's important we consider the context of the Answer Sheet newsletter and its intended audience. Though it's no challenge to pitch the importance of reading and writing to parents and professional educators, the most alarming and destructive issue at hand is the educational disparity between their adult peers. “There's a literacy problem in the capitol, but I'm not talking about young people who can't read. Many adults — perhaps even parents sitting next to you at back to school night — don't possess academic skills,” notes Johnson with her very first paragraph. However, considering the nature of parenthood, the audience primarily consuming these words are undoubtedly preoccupied with juvenile issues, specifically, and we can assume their capacity to empathize with their fellow working adults who could benefit from literacy education is actually lessened from that of childless readers of the same age as a result. “Despite the magnitude of the adult literacy crisis, most of those needing to make up lost ground are pushed toward traditional classroom settings—even though many of these people can't possibly follow through because of cost or work schedules or other obstacles,” she attests.
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Perhaps more than any other American city, Detroit has been struggling with a serious illiteracy problem. According to a profile of the Beyond Basics program (which was adapted from an embedded video broadcast) on their local ABC affiliate's website, forty-seven percent of adult Detroiters cannot read, but even companies like General Motors — who donated \$250,000 to the Beyond Basics program earlier in mid-October — are getting involved. The article quotes Elijah Craft, a young man who was “reading at a first-grade level as a senior at Detroit's Central High School.” “Craft would rare venture from home for fear he would get lost because he could not read street signs,” reports WXYZ anchor Carolyn Clifford. She frames the narrative around a reference to the 2009 film The Blind Side starring Sandra Bullock: “here, you might call this story 'The Detroit Side.'” For local television news, this reference to popular culture likely strengthened the story's power ensnare viewers' emotional attention when it was aired, and even in this written accompaniment, it proves an effective — if a bit crude — analogy. The broadcast of Mr. Craft's interview also depicts his own deep emotional investment in reading when he begins to shed tears, which is not entirely communicated in the written article.
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When the American news media discusses American illiteracy, it's almost always in secondary or tertiary form: either by way of a short post for a weekly education newsletter, an ultra-low-distribution niche editorial column, or a personality profile of a local activist. Perhaps the fundamental obstacle in the face of increasing the discourse surrounding this issue is that its resolutions will require — perhaps more than any other social issue in this country — advocacy by those who can read on behalf of those who cannot because of how sensitive and isolated many of them feel. When voices of advocates like Lecester Johnson are uplifted by major organizations like The Washington Post, the sociological weight of the illiteracy issue can be very powerful. In quoting former United Nations chief Kofi Annan, she sums up for its extensive audience what the facts should ultimately mean to them: 32 million of Eric Black's so-called “illiterate people” in the United States of America have been and continue to be deprived of their “human right” to functional literacy.
A safari through the enchanting space of third-party Mastodon clients on iOS.
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Apple's second virtual World Wide Developer Conference came and went as I wrote this guide – you can metaphorically picture me looking up from my machine having overheard the news of the 2021 Apple Design Award Winners announcement. Perusing through them, I saw two I would have voted for, myself: CARROT Weather – the beautifully vulgar, grumpy bitch frontend for your preferred weather information service, and Craft – perhaps the most innovative take on word processing of the past two or three years – listed under “Finalists.” (Read: losers.) The most positive personal discovery of (all?) WWDCs: an app called Be My Eyes, which “connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call,” along with an exceptionally crafted, cross-device accessible-as-fuck TTS solution called Voice Dream Reader. However, a double take in games from Genshin Impact and the fucking League of Legends game certainly sours the mouth and suggests yet further just how much Apple, Inc. has sold out.
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The continued prioritization of Growth for Growth's sake over any and all other considerations (namely, users,) is not unexpected from even the most valuable company in the history of the world, I suppose, but there is an actor at this point in the story who is catastrophically and demonstrably failing to fulfill their role: all I really know is that technology media has fallen into a trough of total uselessness when it comes to qualitative, authoritative analysis of consumer-targeted software. The necessity of this guide – and the bizarrely silent ignorance of even the “fringes” on its subject – is unimaginably severe. Before me has been (for years, now,) the “answer” to a Jolly Big Load of what tech and marketing types lament in more and more existential language, yet hardly any of the humans with the most to lose from their negligence – regular, casual social media users – have been delivered to these experiences. The story is not being articulated. The journalism is not being done.
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I know you almost certainly did not arrive here to hear one motherfucker's complaints about WWDC, but – as with everything Apple, Inc. does – every morsel of curatorial expression/discrimination/favoritism from The Great Money God within this platform must be scrutinized and criticized. Quite frankly, I found myself completely at a loss as to how not to dwell on the Discovery Disparity, here.
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Despite how deeply I've gone into iOS this year, I do not believe myself to be a qualified judge of software design, but I no longer believe Apple to be, either. Regardless of the revenue-related controversies of late, Apple have simply become terrible stewards of the App Store in every imaginable sense. Scams and blatant intellectual property theft abound, while the majority of the most innovative entries I've ever seen remain entirely obfuscated and uncelebrated by all of Apple. Inc.'s mechanisms. If you required an explanation for the amount of time I've invested into App Guides – a space to which I never would have imagined intentionally bringing The Psalms – I hope you can understand.
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I must confess: I have been meaning to write this app guide since even before I interviewed Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko on the morning of his Big Press Day, just over 4 years ago. I’ve exhaustively explored different means of convincing my own longtime Twitter friends to move, over that time, with very little success. Eugen, himself, published an official blog post at the beginning of February detailing his plans to open up onboarding by way of “an official Mastodon app that is free to download and that is specialized in helping new users get started on the platform.” As a Patreon supporter of The Mastodon Project (full disclosure,) I've been testing this app (see preview shots at the very end,) and am quite smitten with it. That said, I thought it might be worth going over the third-party options iOS users currently have available to them, largely because the offerings are each innovative and mature applications in their own right. (Also, it’s become quite apparent that the normal tech media sources you’d go to for such a guide aren’t going to give Mastodon the attention it deserves.)
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Obligatory(?) Context
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I originally intended to be as clinical as possible in this Post, having realized its potential as the singular comparison of its kind to appear in search results for new and potential users of Mastodon. From my perspective, Mastodon has long since surpassed regard as a novel social media experiment who's function is to prompt academic conversations about decentralization, open source, ad tech, and federated social's solutions to all of the Big Web's Big Boy (proprietary) Problems (though I have been compelled to invest significantly in that very conversation.) In the less intellectual hours of my day-to-day life (read: most of the time,) Mastodon is nothing more or less than my favorite place on the internet. It is a relentless delight which I only lament because I want to share so much of it with my friends, but have continued to fail in my efforts to articulate that Mastodon is not a compromise; it is a better social space.
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If you didn't know, this seems to have become my general shit, for lack of a better term: the ethical considerations of open source/“alternative” software are very important, yes! ... but they are far from the whole, and they are not a requisite for new users. The second of this World Wide Web Blog's fundamental considerations, in fact:
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The Open Source/Open Web community continues to struggle with their brand image (if you will) in both old and new ways that needlessly alienate (and sometimes obfuscate) some of their most important contributions from the average user. Technology media has failed in their responsibility to address this issue.
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The blog on which you're reading this, in fact, is federated on ActivityPub. If you so chose, you could be reading it in any client capable of displaying large bodies of text. The crucial point, though, is that you didn't need to know that – you could very well go on reading it on the web in total ignorance/apathy regarding Federation.
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Oh boy, here we go... No. I did not want to say anything ideological – I wanted this Post to function as little more than a pretty screenshot showcase and simple associative list responding to all of the Reddit posts I've seen to the tune of “is there an iPhone app?” As I explored them, however, I was reminded of the sheer creativity the “alternative” software community is capable of. Even the roughest of these considered apps seem unable to be faceless – sorting through the obscene amount of (unlabeled) screenshots accumulated over the past weeks of testing in my Recents folder has been so much easier than I thought it would be because of their relentless originality. If you've actually used any iOS applications and/or browsed the singular App Store from which they can be acquired in the past 3-4 years, you're undoubtedly skeptical: what we might have called “feature overlap” at one time has become all but the platform's core ethos. If you're the sort who enjoys screwing around with apps, generally, as I have for the whole of iPhone history, you have grown accustomed to disappointment.
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so! I found a way to actually find the apps you’re looking for on the App Store! the search function in this dev-facing tool *ACTUALLY WORKS*!!! https://t.co/XrsStvXq57
Regardless of who is to blame, we can all agree that the App Store is currently oversaturated nigh beyond usability with mediocre entries built from the beginning with zero apparent ambition toward original function. This, alone, wouldn't be so problematic if Discovery were not so completely and totally Fucked (except when dev-facing,) but I needn't comment further on that subject at the moment – I'm just trying emphasize how absolutely unheard of it is for a single protocol/service's third-party client representation on iOS to be so thoroughly special. It was astonishing to find all but one or two of these apps in a functional state, actually. In all my equivalent experiences downloading the entirety of a given service's API-supported palette (e.g. IRC apps, topically,) an all-too-significant purpose of whatever ends up getting published is simply documenting the ~20% of available titles that actually work at the given moment. (I'd have mentioned the “best [service/task] iPhone apps for [year]” listicles found in online publications like Digital Trends were it not for the percentage of them in which it's clear the author did not actually download some/most of the apps listed‽‽‽) Perhaps due to iOS 14.5's implementation of ATT, all of the Mastodon apps I could find and test (not counting non-English language-supporting apps, in fairness' interest) are currently functioning.
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So, if there's virtually zero chance a new Mastodon user might download one of the apps we're about to consider and find it broken, what practical function remains for this guide? Hopefully, to establish a SEO catch-all for such users from a non-automated source less associated with the project than the official apps list. Those for whom Mastodon is still an unfamiliar subject should find the collected imagery intriguing, hopefully.
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The Big 6
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My first step in writing this guide was to post a thread on r/Mastodon soliciting thoughts on third-party Mastodon apps from other users, who expressed a lot of love for Toot! and Metatext:
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Toot is just a joy to use. It has a little too much sometimes (it actually contains little mini games...which really aren't needed), but the experience of using it has some really clever UI twists. -u/mikepictor
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Pragmatic Code's Linky was also mentioned by multiple respondents. It's not a client, but a bridging tool for smoother URL sharing that integrates with iOS' share sheet. I did not have time to try it, myself, but from all accounts, it is an obligatory mention. So too is the GitHub Repository/List I created in order to “formally” offer a list with much greater brevity and zero editorialization.
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First, let’s begin with The Big 6 – those apps The Mastodon Project, itself, has seen fit to list on joinmastodon.org.
Dag Ågren‘s Toot! is not only my personal app of choice – I would (and have) go so far as to say it’s the single most innovative mobile social app I’ve ever encountered, largely because of its jacknife-esque instance selection. It’s held a place in my phone’s dock since the day I first downloaded it, for this and many other reasons. While one might find bugs/loose ends (understandably) exploring the functions of other indie social clients, within Toot!, they will only find little delights, like its wholly unique Share Sheet interface.
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Toot! is extremely beautiful (despite its unfortunate name,) and I am quite superficial in my taste. It’s Obsidian theme (which may or may not be related to the topical notetaking system of the same name) is especially gorgeous.
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In my cacophonous attempt to compare the notifications of all available Mastodon apps simultaneously, it's worth noting that Toot!'s always came first. Its charming custom audio alerts also make them my favorite by far.
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They're not just cute: in reflection informed by a newly-considered function of these apps – serving as representing the network as a whole – it occurred to me that Toot! audio alerts playing from my iPhone have prompted more first-time conversations about Mastodon in the wild than I can count. (Seriously: they should be considered an onboarding mechanism.)
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In my experience, it’s also the most robust of the lot – as in, it is very much the exception rather than the norm to encounter any sort of error or other obstruction in normal, day-to-day use. My own real reservation applies to the entire selection discussed today: I wish Toot! supported Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts.
I originally had high hopes for Shihab Mehboob‘s Mast – which used to look very different from the way it does, today. That’s almost certainly to do with its ownership changing hands at some point (no, I do not have any further details on that story, unfortunately.) That’s not to say the current app isn’t a worthwhile offering, it’s just far less visually ambitious than the original I remember. However, it’s also significantly more reliable.
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They were there last time I checked, but Mast isn’t owned and maintained by me anymore so not sure.
The Original… Genesis… If Amaroq was not the first Mastodon app on the App Store, it’s certainly the oldest to survive. Its GitHub Repository’s first commit dates back to April 17th, 2017. While you’re there, you might note that it’s the only one of these entries coded entirely in Objective-C – the near-40-year-old language originally underpinning iOS before Swift’s birth in 2014. Amaroq was the first Mastodon app I used and remains the strongest free option for iOS users. It’s been nearly a year since its last update, so its missing a few narrower functions like Bookmarking and Polls, but the core features it does include are rock solid. The only wild card: what the fuck is Awoo Mode???
For better or worse, @rinsuki’s iMast will require either a basic grasp of the Japanese language, or the patience to translate its menus and work backwards. (OCR came to mind, but I’m not quite dedicated enough to try it for this guide.) Assuming Google’s translation of its GitHub Pages site is correct, iMast is also Open Source “under the Apache License 2.” Unlike Amaroq, it appears to have been built in Swift from the ground up. Unfortunately, that's about all I can comment on, though I would very much love to hear from any iMast users/Japanese speakers and will update this Post accordingly.
Daniel Nitsikopoulos' Mercury represents yet another entirely original direction in Social clients. It's fresh and “opinionated” in its explicit lack of support for instances that “promote abuse and harassment.” From all appearances, this appears to be the singular source of negative reviews on its iOS App Store page. It's also the other option to offer widgets integration (in a single form, currently,) and custom audio notifications, though I couldn't capture a sample. Its Trello Roadmap and Feedback Repo are public but mostly inactive. As you can see in the grid embedded above, I absolutely adore its Scoops theme and find my $0.99 Tip 100% worth its custom icons.
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Unfortunately, the state of Mercury's App Store reviews prompt yet another essential economic/editorial consideration. The one in the very center of the image embedded, above – from “FeralDandelion” – is the singular one I will allow myself to address. It is true that Mercury straight up refuses to authenticate or federate with a substantial amount of specific Mastodon servers, but it is exhaustively explicit about this from very get-go. Its single-page Help document includes a detailed, up-to-date table of every single blocked instance and the specific justification for each respective instance's presence on it:
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Mercury takes a zero tolerance stance on abuse and harassment and as such does not support many instances that promote abuse and harassment.
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Let me be clear: the practical manifestation of this position is exclusively positive. The Mastodon project has long outgrown the sort of fixation on ideology for ideology's sake that even Lucky Linus himself has no patience for. Instead, thank Gourd Mercury's developers took the time to better your social experience! In response to statements like the pullquote above, I expect *only* thumbs in the air from this point, forward.
Metatext is perhaps the buzziest of all these apps – well-praised in every space I could find conversation on the subject. It's developed under Justin Mazzocchi's software studio, Metabolist and is as Open Source as it gets! (As per my hardware keyboard shortcuts crusade, I added my own issue requesting support.) u/GummyKibble noted that “it looks like a native app on both iOS and iPadOS.” This term – native – seems inextricably linked with Metatext. I vaguely understand what it means, and I do agree, but it's worth noting that I speak with some privilege, having compared all of these apps on the top performing handset Apple currently has to offer. In many ways, it is the most frugal of the new offerings, especially, yet it strikes a keen balance between function and delight. I think “native” can be translated as generally of a stout, sturdy disposition, thanks to the care put into honing said balance.
I'm not entirely positive which Mastodon app was actually the first on my iPhone, back in 2017, but I know for sure it was either Amaroq or the dearest, infinitely-colorful Tootle. Its App Store Page Version History suggests it has not been updated in 14 months, yet the app – which was apparently “Designed for iPad” – appears to be working just fine. There are some overlapping UI elements, but they're barely noticeable. Were it not for the new dev-facing store search tool mentioned above, I would have assumed this app long gone, to be honest, but using it again has somehow managed to genuinely twinge my nostalgia nerve.
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In my search for any extra-App Store representation other than Tootle's Mastodon Account (which last posted the day after my birthday, last year,) I discovered Tootle... for Linux. Since I am a dedicated and thorough person, these days, I spent several hours messing around with Linux Virtual Machining until Lubuntu finally functioned just so I could show you what it looks like. Below is a screen capture of Tootle bordered by the most Macish LXQ desktop bars included in Lubuntu and even wearing the new official Apple System Font, SF Pro. Still, I think you'll agree... Tootle for Linux is not related to Tootle.
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Personally, I find this a profound shame – I think more apps should be as colorful – and as color configurable – as this little, mysterious Mastodon app. I created the theme you see represented in the frames embedded above using The Psalms colors, naturally, and the whole process took less than five minutes. Play around with it as I remember doing, all those years ago, and you'd be surprised how hard it is to create an unusable color theme. What I find most shame in, though, is that Tootle appears to be completely invisible in regular app store searches, now. (And by “most shame,” you know I really mean entirely fucking unacceptable.)
I found my way to the only currently in-development entry on this list thanks to my Mastodon friend wakest. iOS developer Shadowfacts (who also maintains shadowfacts.net) is working on their considerate, distinct app, Tusker in this self-hosted Repository. In #tusker on Mastodon, you'll find a few poignant praises from Pixelfed founder and principal developer Dan Sup, which – from my perspective – are especially high, indeed.
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Tusker's color customization options are technically... well.. not infinite, like other apps here, but the end result of their (obviously, very considered) selection will be a net win for 100% of users over that alternative, I believe. It is definitely of a similar philosophy to Metatext, but unquestionably more ambitious. Out of the lot, testing Tusker was the singular instance in which I found myself considering a “replacement” for Toot! You, yourself can use Tusker right this very minute via Apple's beta distribution system, Testflight, via this invite link.
Installing Roma for the first time led to a puzzling quest with a particularly pleasant end. I noticed fairly quickly that the iOS app was a re-branded release of what used to be Mast. My first instinct upon this discovery was to DM Mast's original developer, Shihab Meboob, on Twitter, but frankly, I've already bothered him enough there over the years, so it's understandable that I didn't hear back. When I downloaded the desktop app I found on Roma's web page and noticed its similarity to Whalebird, I decided to use the site's contact form to inquire about what exactly was going on as gingerly as I could. Happily, I received a reply just minutes later from Leo Radvinsky, head of Leo.com, “a Florida-based boutique venture capital fund that invests in technology companies:”
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Hi David,
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In both cases we funded the original developers of both Mast and Whalebird to create a branded whitelabel app specially made for Pleroma. The idea was to make Roma a cross platform brand/app. It didn't really work out so now we're working on a new app from scratch called Fedi for iOS and Android and releasing that as open source.
I think Roma has been removed from the app stores as it's no longer supported.
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Let me know if you have any other questions
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Though my hopes for the original Mast to live on in Roma form were more or less dashed by this message, the suggestion that someone is investing actual capital into federated social is certainly worth celebrating. If Roma is still available on the App Store as you're reading this, I insist you download it immediately. It represents an incredible and original attention to detail which should not simply be forgotten.
Naturally, the app inheriting the work/resources established by Mast and Roma – known by Fedi – should be next up for discussion. Hopefully, my relative lack of experience with Pleroma – another ActivityPub-based, federated social network – won't let you down, here. After a brief shock from the uniqueness of Fedi's UI passes, one immediately notices how beautifully it is animated, wholly disregarding my recently-acquired preference for as little animation as possible. Perhaps more than any other app discussed here, Fedi feels uncannily bespoke in a way which iOS apps almost never do. It is undoubtedly the result of a very specific vision – to disregard the whole modern template for social apps and completely reimagine the archetype. Personally, I'm not sure if it would be easy to get used to, but my tastes/habits in this regard are very much the result of the past decade of proprietary social apps' blandness. Going forward with substantial financial backing and the talents of whoever it was that got it this far, no doubt we should all have very high hopes for Fedi.
DUDU (or “嘟嘟,” which translates to “Toot,” appropriately,) definitely wins for Cutest Iconography. It's a non-English-native application with exceptional English support, which I personally appreciate very much. Compared the entries immediately above, DUDU represents a much more modest interpretation of what a Mastodon client can offer. It’s robust, free of over-animation, and – most distinctly – very wide, which might have something to do with the “designed for iPad” subtitle on its App Store Page.
Yet another “Designed for iPad” entry, Naoki Kuwata's Tootoise is defined by its custom incoming post rate accommodations and its gorgeous Solarized theme. Its “Max number of new arrival posts” setting ranges from 0-400, allowing one to freeze their timeline entirely from any accidental (or habitual) Pulls to Refresh (set at 0,) load 400 Toots from such a gesture, or anything in between (at 40-Toot increments, anyway.) The advantages of this specification become immediately apparent when one actually begins to explore it, especially for those who have come to Mastodon after feeling overwhelmed by Big Social.
Yet another entirely one-of-a-kind experience, the slightly-mysterious Stella is listed as a “Mastodon, Twitter & News Client,” and is notably one of the two apps on this list which do indeed support Twitter! More than that, it is the first app I've seen in a very long time that allows one to simultaneously post to two separate social services (Twitter and Mastodon, in this case.) Without documentation, it's a bit clunky, but its customizable timelines feature also allows one to combine multiple “sources” (social accounts) into a single timeline.
B4X is yet another quite perplexing entry. The “Developer Website” link on its App Store Page leads to b4x.com – a web page entitled “Anywhere Software.” The GitHub icon in its footer led me to discover a repository which is labeled as such to lead one to believe it is, indeed, the development space for the iOS app we're discussing, but does not contain a single .swift or .pbxproj file – universally essential for iOS apps, as I understand it. Regardless, B4X appears to be built atop Anywhere Software's “rapid application development tools.” I like its elemental simplicity and nice 'n' wide post display.
Isao Takeyasu's Oyakodon feels a bit like it originally began as a school project, and I mean that in the best possible sense. While it’s probably the least polished of the lot – and therefore likely the least viable candidate for the role of your primary, daily-driven Mastodon client – is is far from a throwaway application. Some evil component of Takeyasu’s mind was clearly let loose if only for a moment, for Oyakodon’s Facebook-style theme is reminiscent enough of Big Blue to alarm. The volume of its design definitely peaks in its Cute theme, which is so violently loud I could not help but extract its color palette to illustrate just how furious its creator must have been.
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Truly diabolical design, there. For better or worse, Oyakodon doesn’t really work very well in its current state, but it does work.
I very vaguely remember happening upon StarPterano in my very first moments on Mastodon, so finding it still published on the App Store – buried as it was – brought me a particular sort of joy. If I’m not mistaken, it holds a special personal accolade as the only iOS app which has caused me to involuntarily shriek. This might sound like an insult, but it is actually the peak of my praise. I believe my knowledge of iOS development safely allows me to suppose that StarPterano was built with complete disregard for any established UI element libraries. That is, the familiar toggles and buttons developers rely on to standardize the iOS experience were cast aside entirely in favor of handbuilt, translucent buttons of a sort of neon quality which call menus and text entry fields no less alien to the platform. The most astonishing bit, though, is that it works. On my 12 Pro Max, it’s exceptionally smooth, in fact.
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I would imagine those real iOS developers among you should find StarPterano’s GitHub Repository particularly interesting, considering. In the interest of preservation, I have forked it as well, and fully intend to dive in to its code, one of these days. The audio player embedded above cites a three-second .mp3 file in the repository which perhaps once accounted for the “Sounds” toggle still found in the Settings menu of StarPterano’s current build. I couldn’t get the app to reproduce it, which is actually what set me on the hunt that led to the repo.
Ore2 is another (apparently) non-English-native Mastodon client focused on consolidating Mastodon and Twitter within a single space. Alongside Stella, it's the second of the first two apps I've come across in a very long time which allows one to post to both services simultaneously. Considerable work was obviously done on making its timeline-based tabs switchable with touch. Personally, I very much prefer my current crossposting configuration via this (generously-public) web tool, but I am all but certain those users exist who will find Ore2’s setup preferable.
Inadvertently, I have saved the best story of the lot for last. Developer and researcher Zhiyuan Zheng documents both the narrative context leading up to the creation of his first app, tooot, as well as the philosophy behind its design in “Building my first app – toot.” His reference to the downfall of a prominent social app in mainland China called Douban – and the “Douban Refugees” which resulted – are alarmingly missing from all English news organizations save for a single Quartz article from October 2019. He eludes to a “boom” of Mastodon adoption in the past few years and cites a lack of “user friendly mobile clients” which I can only assume to be a conundrum specific to China.
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“With the aim of contributing to the community and to this movement, I decided to take my quarantine time to build an enjoyable mobile client for Douban Refugees,” he explains. He notes that decentralized platforms have universally rejected algorithmic recommendation if for any other reason than “without centralized computing power, such [a] recommendation service is also not that feasible.” “Adapting” back to a linear timeline in a manner which still encourages exploration was clearly a major design consideration for tooot.
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The core consists of 3 needs: 1) what I can read; 2) what I can write; 3) what I have done.
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Obviously, I very much appreciate Zhiyuan writing publicly about his thoughts on decentralized social and sharing specific considerations in his app’s design and look forward to continued updates.
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Get Bent, Big Social
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A few universal truths among these apps stand out as obligatory mentions. First – in comparison with their Proprietary, Big Social counterparts – they are all ridiculouslyfrugal. Not a one weighs over 40mb, while minor (unexplained) updates to the official Twitter app often exceed 100mb. They are all astonishingly robust – I did not experience a single crash in the course of normal testing these “alt” social apps- even from the beta builds – while I distinctly remember the official Twitter app crashing several times over this period, even after I deleted and reinstalled it (an accepted maintenance requirement for anyone using it heavily for its entire history.) Also, on the topic of the platform, itself, they are also made absurdly interoperable by the ActivityPub standard. My PixelFed posts show up seamlessly on their timelines among content from Diaspora, Pleroma, and Mastodon, itself.
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yup… it’s me again, bringing up inexplicably huge updates to the Twitter app.
. . and pointing out… again… that speculation wouldn’t be necessary if Twitter just published actual release notes. pic.twitter.com/IZFDYPLAvS
The overwhelming impression I was left with after testing these apps was one of unwavering competence, cleverness, and true innovation. How many different ways can I possibly conjure forth in order to communicate this? I, David Blue – the vain fucker with a precollection for the most superficial variables of software design so healthy that I have on multiple occasions designed whole, years-long workflows around specific applications entirely because of their available color palettes... It is I who requires you to take a good fucking look, because this list of decentralized, largely open source, federated social software is a goddamned fashion show.
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Continuing to Explore Social Ownership
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This couldn't be “just” an app guide – I think I have thoroughly accepted this, by now, just in time for some conclusionary remarks. Somehow, the subject I originally tackled specifically because I thought it would be quick, rudimentary, and straightforward has become yet another personal journey. It'd feel a bit preposterous to declare any one of these apps to be life-changing, but – in every sense of the term, in contemporary, inevitably social media-informed life, they do indeed constitute a form of radical, ideological wellness. Each of them managed to remind me of a different minute delight found within a developer-user dynamic made up of thoughtful and effective minds working to contribute original and valuable experiences, first. Most noteworthy of these little freedoms: the realization that the upcoming “official” Mastodon app along with any future new options are exclusively a positive thing for the user... None of these apps were conceived to gobble up market share because the market is fundamentally, inevitably, uncompromisingly infinitely shared. I don't know anything about business, but I do know that relief from the burden of considering proprietary multivectored development intentions has been personally breathtaking. I can only hope the reciprocal compensation is happening at even a fraction of what it “should” be.
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From another essential direction, I hope I have communicated that they're far from curious, “niche” or vanity side projects, now. When I used the term “mature” in introducing this little arena, I very much meant it – these “alt” social clients developed almost exclusively within single-person-led projects now make the Twitter for iOS app look ugly and fucking broken. “Giving social networking back to you” has never been more resonant. Yes, it really is Toot!'s “take a break” blue screen, Amaroq's mysterious Awoo mode toggle, iMast's music app integration, Mercury's configurable timelines, Metatext's native solidity, Tootle's custom colors, Tusker's Digital Wellness controls, DUDU's elemental readability, Roma's quiet resurrection of Mast's UI bravado, Stella's utterly bizarre visual departures, Fedi's odd animated UI behaviors, Tootoise's consideration of pace, B4X's unfathomable elements, Ore2's parallel timelines, tooot's development story, and Oyakodon's adorable rough edges that have made my online life measurably... immensely better, these past weeks. At the forefront of this perception is undoubtedly the comparatively extensive control over my social experience as a user offered by the diversity of mobile experiences these applications offer.
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Those of you who haven't yet signed up for Mastodon: ==you are missing the fuck out==. I am being actually pampered, now, in World Wide Web terms. You are so welcome whenever you're ready – the water is nice and warm, as they say.
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...Party One
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Yes, you are looking at the currently in-development “Official” Mastodon app on iOS, coming very soon to the Awful App Store. You can join me in testing the app right this very moment by contributing to the Mastodon Project's Patreon. Though I do plan to publish a dedicated review on its release date, what I'll say for now is that it's very cute, includes the most gorgeous media player I've ever seen on an iOS app, and is as distinctly clever as any of the third-party family we've just visited, all whilst maintaining an expert's aim at its evangelist purpose.
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The surprise that threw me over the edge to a genuinely pitiful extent: the official Mastodon app already includes full Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts integration on iPhone!
A commitment to share my thoughts where developers actually want them, and an invitation for other reviewers/users to join me.
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I have written more than my fair share of words about software, as I have loved, despised, and been utterly perplexed by it. This year, my return to the iOS community has perhaps inevitably turned apps into an addiction of sorts. This particular platform is so utterly chock full/stocked up of creativity at a scale immeasurably greater and more accessible than the whole of those throughout computing history, combined. For someone like myself, it is all too easy to allow oneself to wander down a virtually endless path of intriguing, very self-indulgent play, especially now that third-party sites like Departures.to have managed to add discoverability to TestFlight beta distributions, allowing those non-millionaires among us opportunities to use test releases of applications we would’ve otherwise had to pay for. This has been exclusively to my benefit – I can only imagine what 15 year-old me would have done with such power.
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In my recent endeavor to focus on making my work more useful to others, I've reflected on something I've heard from nigh every developer of the apps I've reviewed: Ah yes, your blog looks really cool but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE REVIEW MY FUCKING APP on the FUCKING STORE. Read: your commentary is appreciated, but your five stars would almost certainly more economically beneficial.
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As you can see from the image embedded above, I have personally fallen very behind in doing my part for those apps I've celebrated, here. A vague intention to get around to it eventually clearly is not working, so I've decided to give myself a deadline: August 15th, 2021 – precisely one month from today. By this date, I will have sifted through my commentary on apps in this setting and adapted the most useful of it (per app, obviously) into a manner appropriate to appear on an App Store Page, and I would like to formally-ish invite other tech writers/app reviewers to join me.
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so! I found a way to actually find the apps you’re looking for on the App Store! the search function in this dev-facing tool *ACTUALLY WORKS*!!! https://t.co/XrsStvXq57
I'm terrible at community organization, which certainly does not exclude events, so I very much welcome any feedback you might have, as well as any collaborative contributions you'd be interested in making. As I see it, I have a few essential considerations to offer.
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First, the page in the screen capture above – which can be found in the App Store App ⇨ Account (your profile picture in the top-right corner) ⇨ Account Settings (the tapable element at the very top with your profile picture and information) ⇨ Ratings and Reviews – is broken as hell, along with the rest of the Account Settings menu, notably. This is important because I insist we all complain about it on all available channels, considering it's been broken for several months, at least.
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Second, you should almost certainly use this “new” dev-facing tool when searching the App Store, considering that it actually works in a trustable way, unlike the user-facing tool in the app.
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tech writers, app reviewers, interested iOS users, I would like to formally invite you to APP STORE REVIEW DAY - a shared personal commitment to sharing commentary on apps where it actually matters most for developers. https://t.co/hfLooBwCCa
Since the standard online palette of event organization software are all so easy to use, these days, I've established event pages for this event on multiple platforms, linked in the list below, which I will update as per any suggestions/requests for equivalent pages on other services. Of course, it's certainly not a requirement that you join/engage with any of them.
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One could could certainly just add the date to their own calendar (conveniently with this .ics file,) remain entirely silent about the thing on social, and still be participating. Those interested in further engagement, however, can Chat Me Up on Extratone's Discord, the Teams event chat, Telegram, etc. I also plan to reshare most of this post as a thread on Twitter.
As we face the horrendous, utterly inexcusable state of Discovery on the App Store/Apple's general fuckery regarding the independent developers mostly responsible for making its platforms a worthwhile space, I hope I've created something of value in whipping up this “event.” If you have thoughts on how I might do so more effectively, once again, please do reach out.
The first release version of my only original contribution to the iOS community is now ready to assist when you can't find your phone.
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One of the handful of Siri's most useful features has been the “Hey Siri! Where are you?” command, to which Siri will respond “I'm here” or “here I am!” Were it possible to view how many times one has triggered a particular Siri command on iOS, my personal reliance on it would almost certainly be embarrassing. Often, my handset isn't even obscured from view – it's just faster to have Siri speak up than it is to scan the room. Occasionally, however, my device has managed to become embedded beneath and/or within some genuinely-perplexing series of couch cushions/blankets/briefcase pockets/etc. which require a more constant homing sort of audio reproduction. Asking friends/family to call one's phone is the general goto, yes, but honestly the actual length of time cellular telephones will ring before sending a caller to voicemail in 2021 is ridiculously short, especially when rummaging through Gourd-knows-what. For that matter, most of my peers keep their phones on silent mode, 24/7. What then?
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Since the very first time I set eyes upon Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12 Beta, I have wanted to create one to address this issue in a creative, entertaining, and (hopefully) genuinely-useful way. On that day almost three years ago, I even knew it would be called Marco!, believe it or not. In the past few months, I've returned to the project on and off and ended up with several different versions of varying complexity. One day, I'd like to figure out how to integrate the full extent of my ideas for Marco! into a Shortcut which can be reliably triggered when one's device is locked, but for this first release version, I have included only what I and a few other (much appreciated) volunteers were able to trigger in every situation we could conceive of.
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Marco! Version 1.0 can be downloaded on RoutineHub (which I would highly recommend,) or directly via this iCloud share link. I know it's a bit excessive, but I even created a GitHub Repository just for this Shortcut, seeing as it is undoubtedly the most original I will ever contribute, and the singular one with potential for continued development.
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Download Marco! as is and (as long as you don't rename it) use “Hey Siri!... Marco!” This should immediately run the Shortcut, which includes my voice saying “Polo! Bitch!” followed by five repeats of the flashlight/noise cycle as described in detail below.
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As documented by the Jellycuts file above, Version 1.0 of Marco!'s actions are as follows:
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Turn Low Power Mode OFF
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Turn Airplane Mode OFF
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Turn Wi-Fi On
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Turn Bluetooth On
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Set brightness to 100%
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Turn Do Not Disturb OFF
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Turn appearance Light
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Set playback destination to iPhone
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Set volume to 89%
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Vibrate device (Not currently working.)
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Play my voice saying “Polo!” + a few other items
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Toggle (flash) the flashlight 5 times (odd number leaving your flashlight on constantly unless it was on before the Shortcut was triggered)
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Simultaneously (in the same repeat action) plays three separate classic Mac sounds 5 times.
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The most clever bit about this particular Shortcut is its use of Base64 text to include audio playback. I just fixed a bug on my own Base64 audio encoder Shortcut if you'd like to try it out. Since this version includes my own voice (subject to taste, I realize,) as well as some minor profanity, I do intend to publish a clean variation at some point in the future. If this is an obstacle for you, and/or if you'd like a custom version made with audio of your own choosing, please do send me an email! I would be more than happy to make one for you.
Reporting from deep within the iOS cult on essential apps/methods for real-life music people.
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Listen to this article read (with some bugs) by Siri Voice 3 below...
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As you may or may not be aware, I’ve spent all of my 2021 so far diving real deep into iOS, considering all that has changed since “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.” I’ve tuned in to the output of explicitly Apple-adjacent publications both old (MacRumors, Apple Insider, 9to5 Mac, etc,) and new (Apple Scoop, MacStories,) which have all metamorphosed in huge, mostly-redeemable ways just as their primary subject has. I have my own pubescent stories of Mac occultism, but I do not consider my relationship with the brand to be an essential part of my identity, as so many do and have. Apple, Inc’s story is spectacular and infinitely-relevant so long as they remain “the most valuable company in the history of the world,” as I so love to describe them. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am often compelled to bring up the humongous contrasts in the historical context of the company – to scream infinitely many variations of the observation that Apple was basically the fucking indie, premium-tier consumer tech manufacturer owned by the Creative Class for the first half+ of their existence, and have somehow maintained that Think Different™ brand narrative as they have definitively become the Big Blue of their time.
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From my perspective, the responsibility for the wellbeing of this utterly-delusional, occasionally very dangerous sentiment actually lies fairly squarely on those of us who consider ourselves better than all of that because of our Debian workflows and their ancient command line utilities. (For the record, this is also 100% delusional as things stand in 2021.) One thing I think we can all acknowledge, though, is that Apple’s image has been inextricably bound with musicmaking, throughout, far more than any other even remotely comparable tech company. Naturally, the business still loves to bring this up all the time in big, glossy gestures. The topical example of note would be the only worthwhile content I’ve yet to encounter on Apple TV+: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which documents the highlights of the young, beloved musician’s prodigious ascension. For what it’s worth, I appreciate some special insights I gained thanks to the film, which I do not actually consider at odds with the truth of its super on-brandness for Apple.
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An interesting take I found from 2017 from a new favorite voice on the business end of tech reporting: “How Music Drowns Apple’s Innovation” by The Information’s Jessica Lessin portrays Apple’s relationship with music distribution and the music industry as a sort of compulsive distraction from its ambitions in serving video content, namely. Lessin points out the everpresent reminders of this obsession:
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And so it is no wonder that Apple’s first forays into original video content fall under Apple Music. It’s worth noting that the first series the company announced—“Carpool Karaoke” is literally about singing; “Planet of the Apps” features rapper Will.i.am as a judge.
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I think I can speak for the majority of my audience when I suggest that the targets of Lessin’s cynicism would be more than welcome, if they were The Whole Truth. Indeed, the most valuable company in all of history retaining an “emotional” attachment to the welfare of music creators might be described as charming or more. As is often the case on The Information, the comments from readers often offer noteworthy insight. In this case, Kevin Swint – who has apparently worked as an executive for both Apple and Samsung, according to his profile on The Information – responded with an important consideration: “…it's possible that Apple's behavior around music has more to do with the company's overall tendency to stick with its past successes a bit too long rather than music really being a core part of its DNA.”
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In terms of business, that’s all I have to contribute, and I shall do my best not to evangelize Apple Music (or more likely, disparage Spotify as one of the most destructive cultural forces of our time,) here. However, I would like to respond to a particular Jimmy Iovine quote from the original Apple Music announcement amid the 2015 WWDC Keynote:
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There needs to be a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery… and if that place could actually accommodate and support the artists who make the music, not just the top-tier artists, but the kids in their bedrooms too, provide them all with a home and a way to engage with their audiences, that would be pretty great.
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Boy, this service Iovine describes sounds an awful lot like Bandcamp, no? The suggestion that Apple should have purchased Bandcamp is a very scary one, from my perspective, but I am reassured by the likelihood that the notion did indeed occur to someone at Apple, Inc. at some point in the past, and was quickly discarded, for whatever reason. I promise not to mention Bandcamp again in this Post, aside from its own two iOS apps: for listeners and for “Artists/Labels” as creator/curator tools.
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I’m going to be focusing largely on the iPhone-bound experience, here, though I did borrow my mom’s MacBook Pro for a weekend to explore the state of music on MacOS and (accidentally) played around with Apple Music on The Television (a surprisingly beautiful experience.) On that note, I’ll hurry up and get specific…
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Apps
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Assuming you’re already an Apple Music user, it’s very possible that you’ve been deprived of the “true” experience on the service provided by the variety of actively-developed but woefully-undercovered app store entries that integrate directly with Apple Music. One of the most glaring discoveries I’ve made so far in my iOS deep dive, this year, has been the absolutely horrific state of Discovery on Apple’s App Store. If you’d thought to search the top charts under the store’s Music category, you wouldn’t find any of the gems I’m going to highlight, here. The credit for exposing me to their existence, in fact, lies with MacStories – a hard-hitting, well-established Apple-adjacent media company piloted by Federico Viticci. At this very moment, their app-centric podcast, App Stories, is in the midst of a special mini-series devoted to Music on iOS/Mac, from which this Post draws upon heavily. For better or worse, they represent the definitive authority on this subject (among many others, naturally,) though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend their various publications be added to the reading lists of any but those most invested in iOS.
There is something uniquely concrete about a purely-chronological feed which we’ve lost in the past 5-10 years in favor of algorithmic curation, generally. The next item in this particular feed, in fact, includes my attempt to explain why Twitter’s hard-chronological Lists feature has sheltered me from the anxiety of the service’s main timeline, now ordered by proprietary (and obscured) formulas. I’d been aware of that dynamic in my own Twitter consumption for years, though. I certainly did not anticipate the impact of the music release equivalent of a chronological timeline as provided by MusicHarbor – an app for iOS and MacOS that acts as a frontend for one’s music library across both Apple Music and Spotify.
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It's hard to remember how we (Apple Music) got here without embarking upon some gargantuan A Complete Visual History of Apple Music-like document, but it must be said that Tim Cook's “next chapter in music” has become a sad afterthought. As far as I understand it, the “streaming war” between Apple and Spotify has long since gone definitively to the latter in statistical terms, which I'd suggest to be an overall positive outcome for Apple Music subscribers, generally. The self-perception within the heavy music consumer crowd of “niche,” “underground,” “obscure” cultural minority should – in theory – push those who believe themselves destined to be different away from Spotify into the handy care of Apple, the absolute champion of this particular self-deception. To be honest – though I write this for all listeners, sincerely – I have found myself in a sort of utopian echo chamber of my own design in music culture terms. My days of waiting through 4+ hours of local openers before rap shows are far behind me, and I consume and engage exclusively with music I find personally redeemable.
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My Apple Music library has become quite fragmented after I lost my entire physical music collection along with the external drives containing my accumulated digital music library in 2017. Still, after more or less starting anew this past December and casually, deliberately adding digital files back into the accursed, ancient iTunes desktop application and restoring some (outdated) versions of my handful of shared curatorial playlists thanks to SongShift (which we'll glance on later,) MusicHarbor currently lists 1433 artists represented across my Apple Music and (very sparse) Spotify libraries. I know this because of a very simple Siri Shortcut I modified which returns a text list of all Artists in one's MusicHarbor library in Quick Look. (Here is my result as of this moment in GitHub Gist form.) According my App Store receipts, I first downloaded MusicHarbor on March 26 – 20 days ago – which is mentionable because of how much I've accomplished with very minimal time investment in terms of curating my own music library thanks to MusicHarbor. As you'll note in the 3rd of the 4 screenshots embedded above, I was able to delete System of a Down from my library – a single function which alone justifies the app's one-time $5.99 “Unlock Everything” fee, to my sensibility. I've also been able to begin following all the artists represented in a few of my favorite playlists with a handful of taps – a task which would literally require hours in the native Apple Music app of old (when one could actually follow artists, there.) On that note, it's time to cite the primary MacStories article you should read, entitled “How I Keep Track of New Music Releases,” regarding Apple Music's performance as a release tracker:
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The ‘New Releases’ section is tucked at the very end of the For You page and laid out as a horizontal carousel that requires a lot of swiping; you can view the ‘New Releases’ page as a grid, which has sections for different weeks, but, in my experience, it only aggregates highlights for new releases from some of my favorite artists. The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.
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Here, Federico Viticci is riffing off a newsletter issue written by music blogger Jason Tate, in which he describes the service's missing tracking functionality as “the single most frustrating part of Apple Music.” Though these points in the conversation are both almost two years old, MusicHarbor remains the ultimate means of tracking new music releases chronologically on Apple's platforms. Though I am personally just three weeks in, the confidence this app has given me in the certainty of its chronological release feed is quite profound. Its integration with one's calendar to track upcoming releases is a bit much for my own needs, but I know personally enough invested curators for whom it'd be a godsend to mark it no small addition.
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MusicHarbor’s only downside is entirely excusable/understandable, in context: it’s a bit clunky. For the sake of this work, I set up a shared Apple Music playlist so I could further demonstrate all the new music I discovered in MusicHarbor. Adding whole albums to this playlist with a single tap feels powerful because it is – I’ve no idea what sort of developer wizardry is involved in such an action, but the Wait Wheel doesn’t feel like too much to endure. Adding a release to one’s library – the other in-MusicHarbor accumulative function – is a bit quicker. It’s important to remember that this piece of software was/is created and maintained by a single human being, though I would expect nothing but improvement, going forward.
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That’s all I have to report on MusicHarbor, for the moment, but I’ll add further MacStories praise from their 2019 MacStories Selects app rewards:
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What makes MusicHarbor special – and, ultimately, the reason why we all use the app here at MacStories – is just how much developer Tanaka understands what someone who wants to know about new music releases is looking for.
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July 2021 Update: The MacStories gentlemen have just published an interview episode of AppStories speaking at length with MusicHabor creator Marcos Tanaka.
On the other end of the spectrum, exploring new digital manifestations of The Music Collection, is Albums, which actually functions as an entire replacement frontend player for Apple Music. Reviewed much more recently by MacStories, it really is best-described as “opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists.” Considering that I installed the app just a week ago and have focused most of my attention on MusicHarbor in that time, I’ll leave most of the commentary to John Voorhees. All I can say, really, is that I see an extremely powerful application, here, for a fairly specific use case: someone who’s listening is largely occupied by albums they already “own” in Apple Music and treasure deeply. The ability to set an individual record’s “Immersive UI Tint” down to the hex (in “Album Settings”) is as in-depth a tool of adoration as I’ve ever seen in a digital music service. Combined with Albums’ presumptuous takeover of actual playback from the Apple Music app, I think I can rightfully say that it was built for the extremely serious music consumer.
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My favorite part so far: the app knew well enough to offer me THE ZRO BUTTON. Telling, I think.
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Others
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Since it’s already quite clear how much this Post draws from MacStories, I’ll let their review of Soor stand on its own (I couldn’t quite justify spending $6.99 just for review purposes.) In the episode embedded above, they also mention Denim – a playlist cover creator I am not personally all that impressed with. There’s also MusicHarbor’s sibling, MusicSmart, which manages the tricky but essential task of adding the metadata retrieval Apple Music should have included all along. The rest can be found in the episode’s show notes. I’m not done with them, but the rest are what I would differentiate as services…
One of the bewilderingly undercovered digital music sharing tools of our kind, Odesli has been my preferred method of sharing tracks/albums/EPs since I first discovered it in 2018. It is not specific to iOS but it isessential for competent music sharing, anywhere, these days, in its magical ability to correctly intersect any given piece of music’s links across all streaming services, known and unknown. To be honest, I thought everybody would be using it by now, but it’s continued to develop with minimal attention aside from Siri Shortcuts developers. Thanks to Odesli’s Public API, dozens of Music-centric Siri Shortcuts have emerged over the past few years, resulting in one of the most useful Siri Shortcuts integrations to be found for real, reasonable human beings. Here’s where Apple-adjacent media and I part ways…
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While current common conversation might point you to Federico Viticci’s MusicBot hyper-Shortcut and/or @gianflo6’s 600 action-strong Song.Link Shortcut, I (perhaps expectedly) would point you to my own, 17-action Shortcut which spares you any selections and simply opens the Song.Link URL of the track currently playing in Apple Music (while also copying said URL to the clipboard.) It’s not that MusicBot isn’t massively impressive and still useful, but it represents a class of super/hyper-Shortcuts which (from my perspective) far-overreach beyond the intended use case for Siri Shortcuts and end up immediately bewildering/alienating potential new users. Truthfully – as Federico singularly acknowledges – they are full applications built atop a less-than-ideal platform designed for relatively simple, repeatable automations. I’ll spare you further opining on this idea until another, potential Post, and instead demonstrate my personal solution.
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In the clip above, you can see I was working on this very draft when LoneMoon’s “kawAii @F” started playing. Naturally, I was compelled to share it on Twitter, so – without leaving Drafts (my writing app) – I called the type-to-Siri prompt by holding the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and simply typed “sl” (I renamed my Shortcut for this use,) running the Shortcut, which opened the track’s Song.Link page in Safari – very much an optional step, mostly just to make sure the match is correct – and copied its URL to my clipboard, from which I could share it anywhere. Since the advent of widgets in iOS’ Today View, I’ve also kept a button for this Shortcut in one of four precious slots in a box at the very top. For those willing to play around a bit, it should be fairly straightforward to configure the end bits to your liking, but it should work out of the box for even those least interested in Siri Shortcuts/automation in general.
As I confessed before, it is only thanks to SongShift that I was able to recover anything of my original, prized, deeply-considered Apple Music playlists. The standalone MacStories article on this one is a bit dated, but I don’t see much change in function in that time. For most people, SongShift’s free service is simply the best way to transfer a playlist between music streaming services. If you find yourself genuinely sold by the features offered by SongShift Pro, I suspect you know more about playlist manipulation than I could ever learn you by diving in any deeper.
Yup… Believe it or not, Last.fm is still fucking scrobbling after 19 fucking years (almost to the day,) and its iOS app still fucking works. What’s most bizarre about this truth is that I did not encounter mention of Last.fm for years until I started noticing it as an integration option in the settings menus of these premium iOS apps. Is this some sort of conspiracy? I’m not sure, but I suppose I might as well insist you follow my ancient account, if you’re still using it.
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alright folks fucking ADD ME ironically or not. this profile is older than all of the cells in my body. https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK
I should also note that not only is the Last.fm iOS app still working, it’s working well, from all appearances, anyway. Though the service no longer includes hosting, itself, it’s apparently still a prime player in the world of playback tracking.
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Music Creation
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DAWs
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What if you actually want to “make” music with your iPhone? We’ve seen iPhone television ads for years featuring amalgamations of musician-looking types playing instruments with cables attached to their handsets, but is the iPhone now a reasonable platform for any sort of serious sound capture? The short answer is no. Who am I to proclaim such an absolute? None other than the motherfucker who’s been messing around with mobile DAWs for 10 whole years. I even “released” an “album” on Bandcamp made exclusively with Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS and inspired by the dangerous life of the contemporary raw milk smuggler. I wouldn’t call it “music,” per se, or an example of what a real electronic producer could pull off in the app, but it does represent its capabilities in the hands of the average user, using mostly default loops.
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While Apple does publish an Apple Book entitled “Everyone Can Create Music” about GarageBand on iOS, it is specifically directed at iPad-bound use. Any serious DAW user uses keyboard shortcuts, which I admit I only discovered recently in GarageBand for iOS. The official documentation is – once again – for iPad, specifically, but most of them still work on iPhone.
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FL Studio Mobile – the original third-party iOS-bound DAW – is still going, apparently. While I did, indeed purchase the original version on my iPhone 4, I remember absolutely nothing about it, suggesting I was over my head, even then. There’s also Auxy, as covered recently in this App Store Story and Reason Compact. I’ve played around with these more recently – since they’re both available in their most primitive forms as a free download – with little to report.
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Capture
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Disappointingly, Apple’s own Music Memos – as demonstrated by Chris Welch from The Verge in the embed, above – is currently in the process of being officially sunsetted and is now no longer available for download on the App Store. As that article notes, users are instead directed toward GarageBand or ye olde native Voice Memos to record high quality audio. However, if you want to take advantage of the stereo audio recording capabilities included in iPhones after the 11 Pro, you must either use the native Camera app to capture video (and extract the audio later,) or Dolby On – Dolby’s own iOS app for recording which – if I’m completely honest – will do nothing but utterly frustrate anyone trying to capture the truest digital audio possible.
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As part of my iPhone 12 Pro Max Review, I’ve accumulated quite a few audio files in various formats testing its capture abilities and stashed them in this folder on The Psalms’ GitHub Repository. Probably the most relevant of these, though, is embedded just above. If you’ll forgive my pajamas, ridiculous piano faces, and general rustiness with the instrument, it demonstrates the “Audio Zoom” feature found in the iPhone 11 Pro and up, which I’ve found to be unfortunately underdocumented by Apple, itself. I added my own inquiry to this post on the official Developer forums asking about it, but don’t really expect anything back. According to “What is Audio Zoom for smartphones?” published on the site DxOMark:
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The main technology behind audio zoom is called beamforming, or spatial filtering. It allows changing an audio recording’s directivity (that is, the sensitivity according to the direction of the sound source) and shape it in any way necessary. In this case, the optimal directivity is a hypercardioid pattern (see illustration below), which enhances sounds coming from the front direction — that is, from the direction in which your camera is pointed — while attenuating sounds from all other directions (your background noise).
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My testing has suggested that the best means of recording unfiltered-as-possible stereo audio with an iPhone is to record video at 1x zoom with the native Camera app and extract the audio from the video file. In the Bandcamp track embedded below, I “mounted” my 12 Pro Max right above my old upright’s soundboard and extracted audio directly from the video file with Audacity. It was then amplified slightly, saved to a FLAC file and uploaded directly to Bandcamp. Of course, it’s worth qualifying that – while I have extensive experience with audio – I have neither professional training, nor any professional monitoring equipment.
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That said, the biggest objection I’ve heard from audiophiles regarding audio capture and manipulation on handsets, generally, has to do with their hardware’s extremely limited capabilities when compared to any sort of professional desktop soundcard. Given the greater argument I've come to regarding the state of consumer tech as best exemplified by smartphone design – that we've come to expect far too much of single devices, and the resulting jack-of-all-tradeness summing their real-life capabilities has become a severe detriment instead of a feature – I must echo, again, that adding “studio” audio capture, manipulation, and production capabilities to our goddamned cellular phones doesn't help anyone. To any user truly hoping to accomplish these things, I say just go home and boot up your damned desktop.
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Other Considerations
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The final episode in AppStories' three-part miniseries on music was just published today, though I suspect – for my audience, anyway – that its coverage is mostly out-of-scope on this topic, largely for financial reasons. Apple's first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow at noon, my time, and is entitled “Spring Loaded,” which – combined with its 4/20 joke date – suggests to me that we'll finally see the release of the APPLE GUN™ alongside iWeed™, but little to nothing in the way of music.
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In the midst of my brief research into The Greater History of Apple Music, I discovered the existence of iTunes Ping – which I somehow missed entirely, along with my Twitter friend Jon Male. I also discovered articles from the company's decision to kill its successor “Connect” from Apple Music, which was reportedly “rarely used.” Notably, this removal also took away what little power Artists had over the narrative surrounding their music on the service. I can see the business justification for all of this (barely) except for removing the ability for users to follow artists.
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The latest Apple Music feature – a “channel” for music videos – also makes zero sense to me, but the launch of Apple Music on the webabsolutely does, especially for Windows and Linux users, who are now officially freed from iTunes (the software) and allowed to use a much more modern Apple Music experience. I prepended “officially,” there, because third-party Apple Music web players have existed as long as the service has allowed the required integration. First, there was Naveed Golafshani's – which is no longer live – but Brychan Bennett-Odlum's Musish is still live and working, as you can see from the screenshot embedded above. Other than the ability to select between two stream bitrates, I can't seen any remaining advantages to using the latter over Apple's own web player, unless you harbor spite toward their handling of the whole thing, which would be entirely understandable, from my perspective.
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MKBHD’s first tech purchase with his own money was an iPod Touch. mine was the original flash drive iPod Shuffle… this is what I mean when I say “I feel old.” it’s not that I’m actually elderly - it’s just strange finding out so often I am older than people I look up to. pic.twitter.com/rbCupcU0R5
As someone who grew up in the mp3 era with a first-generation iPod Shuffle and iTunes, living and dying between iTunes Store gift cards, Apple Music still seems like one hell of a magical deal. In effect, it allows access to all of iTunes for a flat monthly fee. Or at least it would had I never become acquainted with professional independent musicians who've published, there, and have to contend with tedious realities like the process by which one can add those beautiful lyrics to Apple Music tracks, and who's only real means of control/engagement on the service has been removed with virtually zero prospects of a replacement. If, indeed, Jessica Lessin was correct about Apple's obsession with music, it has resulted in very little for any class of music makers, and left even its listeners to seek out and find third-party solutions like MusicHarbor to perform even the most basic personalization one expects from a modern music streaming service without even bothering to amend their App Store's discovery process to illuminate them, or even write a fucking App Story. Despite this, one-to-three-person app teams continue to work on new solutions, to these and other problems...
In the bleak face of Twitter’s centralization, Tapbots refuses to give up on its mobile client.
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Listen to this article read by Siri below...
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Were it just I who came to you with only my voice on this cold night, proclaiming the imminent release of a whole numerical version of a third-party mobile Twitter client in 2021, you really would have no choice but to send for the laws, for you’d be left no consideration other than my comprehensive descent into absolute insanity. 825 days ago, I told you lots about the history surrounding the development of Tweetbot 5, which I confidently described as “likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS.” After spending the past few months diving deep into iOS in preparation to review and reflect upon Apple’s current flagship handset, my eyes have been opened to the exponentially-increasing pace of the whole environment’s metamorphosis during the course of my lapsed attention. In the name of progress, I’ve done my best to make a point of looking back, too, yet something astonishingly personally relevant managed to slip past me until just last week: there is a sixth version of the Tweetbot app. At this moment, it is listed on the App Store as an “Early Release” version, though its predecessor can still be downloaded by those who’ve already purchased it in the past, like me. This is an unusual practice – usually, pre-release versions of iOS apps can only be distributed through Apple’s developer beta testing infrastructure, though Testflight. Notably, Tweetbot developer company Tapbots was apparently required to take down Tweetbot 5’s store listing 30 days before releasing Tweetbot 6.
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I can’t remember exactly why – though I suspect I was just fucking around on my phone before bed, bleary-eyed – but the implications of this next numeral passed me by the first time I saw and downloaded Tweetbot 6, two weeks ago. Perhaps it’s because the app didn’t appear to have any new features – in fact, it’s technically got less than 5, though those that have been removed – user-specified URL shortening, image hosting, and video hosting services – haven’t worked in a good while anyway. As my old fav, The Verge noted in their coverage of 6, blame for these omissions rests solely on Twitter, Inc., itself, who’s continued to hold its API development inordinately close-to-chest. I didn’t bother to find out about this, though, because my first assumptions upon poking around the new app – especially after encountering its new subscription requirement in order to use any of its substantive features – was that its developers had ceased any actual time investment into the app long ago, and that 6 was a new version in number and rudimentary visual updates, only, shoved out in hopes of peaking old, loyal users like myself enough to get us to download it, at least. In the disappointment I’d already expected, I closed and immediately deleted the app.
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I’ve paused everything else to write you on this, though, because the story is actually much bigger. Had I investigated any further that first time, I would have discovered an odd amount of buzz coming from even the most mainstream of tech media in a simple search. (Yes, I am ashamed about it.) You’re still reading, but perhaps – as I was, originally – you are doing so from an appropriately-jaded, well-read perspective on software, generally, in 2021. Perhaps you’re looking at the search results, yourself, and wondering if you’re dreaming. Dedicated coverage of a fucking third-party Twitter client iteration??? At this point in history? What in fuck? I’m fairly certainly neither of us are, though: fucking Tweetbot made headlines on Engadget, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacStories, iMore, MacRumors, and others. No, it’s not 2010 again. In fact, The Verge, at least, has never given up on Tweetbot. If my long term memory had been functioning, I would have remembered noticing its spot in “12 great apps for your new iPhone in 2020:”
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Twitter is a vaguely terrible way to spend your time these days, but if you (like me) can’t tear yourself away from the social media service / entryway into hell, you’ll want Tweetbot, which actually makes using Twitter far less painful. Tweetbot shows you the tweets of the people you follow, in the order that they tweeted them. There are no ads or promoted tweets, powerful mute filters to block out unwanted noise, and (thanks to Twitter’s unfriendly API changes) no notifications to constantly ping you to come back to the app.
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Here’s to Chaim for exposing me to a perspective I never would have otherwise considered: Tweetbot’s lack of push notifications as a positive. If you’re wondering, no, this new app does not ~yet~ include any additional notification integration, and it’s not clear whether or not it’s on Tapbots future roadmap for the app, or where. As for the reality of integrating Tweetbot 6 into your current Twitter use, I stand by my argument that deleting the native Twitter app isn’t really an option if you plan to ever view your notifications on your phone. The popular assumption (I assume) if you’re still reading is that you are a “poweruser,” meaning details about my own configuration are probably irrelevant. If by chance you’ve just downloaded Tweetbot for the first time, you should take the time to disable notifications for Tweetbot entirely, but leave them on for the native Twitter app, even if you decide to banish it to your App Library. Before I began any work on this review, I made sure to swap in Tweetbot 6 where the native app had been in my dock for several years, now. I originally pushed the native app all the way to page 6, but immediately found this extreme. Instead, I put it in the bottom-right corner in my second screen, as you can see in the screenshot below (which also serves as proof, if you needed it.)
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I should also note how much my own engagement on Twitter has diminished in the past 3-5 years. Not to manifest tiny violins – in turn, my engagement on (and investment in) Mastodon has increased exponentially, and it’s of a much higher quality. I bring it up for context’s sake: I can afford to prioritize Tweetbot in my Twitter use because of how few daily notifications I get – a number which is unusual for someone who uses Twitter as much as I do. Inevitably, my own use is once again going to factor heavily in this work, as is the significance of my relationship with Twitter, generally, in my life. If you didn’t already know, I’ve met basically all of my friends since high school through Twitter. As of this moment, my private “Friends” Twitter List includes 149 accounts, and I’ve spent more than 10 years, now, reading almost every single one of their Tweets. I have been as critical of the service as anyone, but – whether or not either of us are willing to acknowledge it, wholly – I believe the intimacy of this arrangement to exceed that of any in-person relationship I have ever had. Reading the random thoughts of these people seconds or minutes after they’ve popped into their heads for all this time has been an experience unique to the format Twitter pioneered, if not to the service, itself. I have no choice but to acknowledge that I am deeply invested in not just Twitter, but Twitter’s less-than-visible Lists feature, emotionally and intellectually. When I hit my follow limit, several years ago, Lists also became my single means of acquiring new connections on the network. If it were to be removed, I would lose this ability, entirely, as well as any reasonable means of communicating with any of my friends.
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Perhaps you understand, now, why I have written and Tweeted so extensively about Lists. You should also understand just how miraculous the possibility of Tweetbot’s new future now seems, personally, unless you’re new to all of these ideas and don’t feel like reading that big olé Tweetbot 5 review of mine (which is fine.) Before I go into the history of Tweetbot, let me first share the single most telling feature in Tweetbot of Tapbots’ belief in using Lists and share some evidence of others’ present day belief in Tweetbot. Shamefully, I’ve spent several years – tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours – using Lists in Tweetbot, oblivious to its upmost Lists integration: “Use Lists as Timeline.” Had I actually bothered to look at the support docs at any point, I would have discovered this long ago, which would have almost certainly made my given year. If you use Tweetbot and Lists, for the love of Gourd, please take a look. Here’s what those docs currently say, in full:
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One long time Tweetbot feature is the ability to use any of your lists as your main timeline. To do this, all you have to do is hold down on the “Timeline” label in the navigation bar (in the timeline tab) and a menu populated with your lists will appear. Select one and that will become your current timeline. You can switch to another list or back to your main timeline any time by performing the same action.
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Even after reading this multiple times, it still was not obvious to me what it was talking about, and I was unable to find precisely zero visuals on The World Wide Web of this action taking place, so I recorded and uploaded the video embedded above. Good God, how I wish I’d been a more detail-oriented young man! I’ll be privatizing my self-punishment from here on out, though, so bear with me.
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The discourse surrounding Tapbots’ recent announcement has already reached a higher decibel count than I would have ever expected, so it’s obvious there are plenty of users who still love Tweetbot, and you already know from the beforelinked stories that The Verge has also stood firmly by it as the preferred Twitter experience. It takes a wee bit of digging, though, to discover the subtle bets on both Tweetbots and Lists from no less than Apple, Inc., itself. In the official Apple Shortcuts Gallery, a curated list entitled “Twitter Better” includes “Open Twitter Lists” at number 1. In 5th position is “Open in Tweetbot,” and “Open in Twitter App” (3rd,) is configured by default to first ask you to choose between Tweetbot and Twitter’s native app, despite its title.
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As for App Store rankings, the fact that Tweetbot 5 was forcibly removed from public listings makes it impossible to meaningfully judge recent popularity of Tweetbot on iPhone/iPad. Its MacOS-based sibling, though (called Tweetbot 3,) was the second most popular paid app on the Mac App Store as of February 6th, 2020. That’s the day I borrowed my Mom’s MacBook Pro for a short while to check up on MacOS Big Sur, when I downloaded the current version (3.5.2, if you wanted to know) of Tapbots’ desktop Twitter client and messed around with it enough to tell you that it’s as wonderful as ever. (Had I not switched back to Windows as my primary desktop OS a decade ago, I would use it every single day.)
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I suspect most active Twitter users in 2021 would be even more surprised to discover Tweetbot’s remaining, discreet hold on today’s Twitter experience than I was, assuming most of them joined more recently than myself and those I regularly interact with. For the sake of this Post, I reached out to Tapbots with an interview request about “Tweetbot’s roadmap, Apple’s requirement that [they] remove 5 from the App Store 30 days beforehand, and why [they’ve] decided to take this (risky, imo) bet on making our lives better,” though I don’t expect a reply, which is fine. They did respond to my support request regarding hardware keyboard shortcut support very quickly, saying they’ll look into it. (Without being verbose, I’ll just tell you that if a near future update to the app fixes the F and ⌘ + R shortcuts, I will shit out my whole ass.)
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The Business at Hand
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Before I dig into the controversy and hypotheticals surrounding what Tweetbot 6 might become, let’s take a moment to qualify it vs all of one’s options to interact with Twitter on iOS currently (as in, Feb 11, 2021 at 19:24.) It’s almost certainly premature to do so, but skeptical readers would note, I’m sure, that its listing on the App Store is “early release” in name only, that I have just spent money on this specific version, which should therefore render inert the normal exceptions a review would make for beta or pre-release software. If you’ve somehow come across this Post before reading anything else about Tweetbot 6 and simply want to know what is new for this version compared with 5.5.3 (its predecessor’s most recent release,) the frank answer as it stands is not much. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, here, but the YouTube videos and tech media articles I could find dealing with the subject of additions, specifically, were all either misleading, entirely wrong, or both.
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While 6 lists one more option (for a total of 9) under Themes in the Display section of the app’s Settings menu, none are substantive variations of the same themes you’re familiar with from 5. “Future Light” is just a more turquoise variant of the “Default” blue UI theme in 5. In fact, the singular change in the Display menu is the addition of “San Francisco Rounded” under the Fonts selection. Below, you can see side-by-side screenshots of the Tweet Detail view in Tweetbot 5 vs. Tweetbot 6, with the regular SFUI font on the left and rounded variant on the right (text size slider set to max on both apps.)
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To be honest, I can’t really tell the difference between the typefaces in this view, but have used the new app enough to know I prefer the latter. More topically exemplified in that image is Tweetbot 6’s new support for social cards, which the Tapbots boys have executed in a startlingly beautiful way that puts Twitter to shame and makes one feel like you’ve taken them for granted these past few years. Also in that vein and more than worthy of the same accolades is Tweetbot 6’s support for Twitter polls. They’ve never looked so good.
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Somewhat on-trend, the app also includes two new icons, but – if we’re being 100% frank – they’re a paltry, dated-looking afterthought and Tweetbot deserves (needs, even) better branding. If I were allowed a singular compulsion to impress upon its developers, I’d make them put out a public call for new art. I’m all but dying to see what the community would come up with.
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So, if you were wondering what the fuck Tapbots have been doing these past 3+ years, you should now have the basal bullet points of your answer. The Greater Truth about this gosh darned Twitter app (and why its long-respected developers are now asking you for a whole dollar a month,) though, requires a broader look.
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Slow & Steady
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For as long as I can remember, both the MacOS and iOS versions of Tweetbot have always possessed a more-or-less undefinable (perhaps Apple Development- specific) quality that’s noticeably set them apart from their direct competitors. I didn’t fully understand why they “feel” so much more “right” until I started making my way through this list of all the interviews/podcast appearances by Tapbots’ iOS code wizard, Paul Haddad, who comments in variations the same argument for a very deliberate developmental pace. The first time, with a MacWorld journalist on some steps outside WWDC 2013, I assumed he was just tossing some self-deprecation around to casualize the interview:
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Frankly, we’re slow at doing stuff.
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Yes, you are, Tapbot… From a returning user’s perspective, it’s hard to understand what in Gourd’s name they’ve been doing. I listened and read through every Tapbots interview I could find – all but one with Paul, who has through the years continued to come across as a sensitive, well-read, even wise professional developer with a healthy, professional outlook on the work of his little (relatively) weathered company and its place within the warp speed nightmare that is the mobile software industry. I suppose I was expecting to find an explanation for what I saw initially as a minimal regard for Tweetbot’s history, in contrast to 6’s announcement. I wouldn’t find it, though, because in truth, I was sure I already knew it: Twitter made it clear over a decade ago – just after they’d purchased Tweetie and slapped their own name on it – that they had no intention of competing in the client space, so third-party developers were no longer welcome.
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Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
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As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.
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I’ve spent enough time in The App Space (read: Phone Dude Hell) to expect a lot of melodrama, largely without judgement, considering how generally awful the big vendors have made the whole situation. The business legality of the story was spiked into the mainstream conversation last year by controversy encouraged by Basecamp following some pretty toxic, retaliatory correspondence from Apple regarding their plan to subsidize their new email service, HEY. Frankly, I’ve found such stories – about clashes between big software companies over mediocre, uninspiring, and sometimes just downright bad software – ridiculously exhausting and less and less interesting, lately, as I’ve realized that the most innovative, quality work I have experienced has basically all come from the tiniest teams. The most groundbreaking projects and products I’ve bothered to show and tell, here – Unichar, Zalgo Generator, Bear, Toot!, Mastonaut, Mast, etc. – were all built by individual developers except for Shiny Frog’s Bear. (Their team currently numbers 16, by my count.) Each one of those hyperlinks eventually leads to a form of my same rant: why the fuck won’t tech media talk about genuine innovation anymore.
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As I read and listened through Tweetbot’s history for this work, it occurred to me that I might be neglecting to acknowledge an age old divide in development philosophy across platforms. In the singular instance both Tweetbot devs appeared together in a podcast interview – a Founder’s Talk episode from 10 whole years ago – Paul Haddad addressed the when is it gonna be done question in a comprehensive and particularly illuminating way:
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I personally hate that question because, you know… it just will get done when it gets done… We’re definitely slow. We go over every screen, every detail over and over again until we get it right. That takes time, which is why we don’t talk about upcoming projects.
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Every screen, every detail, over and over again. This sort of deliberateness (which I have personally been working on appreciating, as of late) is actually – as I have come to realize – Tweetbot’s defining feature, especially going forward. Out of all the third-party Twitter clients to come and go, Tweetbot has been overwhelmingly singled out as the favorite because of how aligned it is with the traditional priorities of the Apple space: thoughtful, deeply-considered robustness. Pardon the cliché, but it is the only one that has always felt native – as if it could have been published by Apple, itself.
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Everything Happens So Much
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The iOS Poweruser Community has been “allowed” to drift away from these principles since iOS 12, especially, and its Pandora’s box-like integration of Siri Shortcuts (Workflow, by another name.) You may or may not be aware of the jailbreaking community’s continued efforts – I was certainly surprised to discover that the r/Jailbreak subreddit has nearly 600,000 subscribers, which outnumbers all but the eldest subreddits in the Apple sphere, including r/iOS, r/iOSBeta, and r/Shortcuts (one of the primary hubs for the Siri Shortcut tinkering community) by a huge margin. Since iOS 14’s addition of sanctioned custom widgets, Twitter and Reddit have been host to a fairly-steady stream of personalized iOS “themes” representing varying degrees of tedium/obsession/madness. One “fringe”-ish avenue I’ve explored quite thoroughly is the adjacent community of public beta tests via Testflight, which allows willing App Scrubs like myself to download beta/pre-release versions of iOS apps. As of this moment, no less than 25 of the 227 apps installed on my iPhone 12 Pro Max are Testflight beta versions (both numbers far higher than normal because of my in-progress review.)
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Essentially, it’s now easier than ever to run incredibly janky software on your iPhone or iPad, remaining well clear of a warranty violation, yet the apps that stick out most boldly in the mind (at least for myself) are unfailingly apart from any sort of experimentation. Bear, for instance – the writing app I evangelize to every iOS user and have continued to describe as “the most beautiful piece of software I have ever seen” – just allowed registered beta testers access to its in-progress “Editor 2.0” on iOS, which Shiny Frog describes as still in its “alpha” stage, yet even I have as yet been unable to trip it up whatsoever. This is the league Tweetbot pioneered, in many ways. For the record, both Tweetbot 6 and Tweetbot 5 have been demonstrably more reliable for me in the past few months than Twitter’s native app, which has been crashing multiple times per day on my devices for quite a while during regular use. I’m accustomed to crashes, so I can’t say with 100% confidence that Tweetbot has never crashed, but it certainly hasn’t since I first downloaded 6 and began this review, despite my deliberate attempts to probe its every possible function.
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Not only is Tweetbot 6 reliable as hell – it’s also stupid frugal. Currently, its App Store installation weighs in at 10.9 MB, while Twitter’s app is more than ten times heavier, at 116 MB. I realize Sizes On Disk are further from your mind than they’ve ever been in this age of outright computing gluttony and you probably couldn’t care less about my personal encounter with bandwidth famine in late 2018. In fact, I find it particularly telling that Tapbots has continued to prioritize such efficiency in their development despite operating under less financial, technical, and social pressure than ever to do so.
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Future of The Bot
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Let’s say you’ve somehow made it this far without either satisfactorily resolving your confusion about Tapbots’ decision to implement subscriptions, why they’ve decided to continue investing their time in third-party Twitter clients, whatsoever, and/or some other App Quandary, and you’re still expecting David Blue of all people to articulate some pivotal element of this story that’ll put your intellect at ease. Perhaps you’re still looking for a comprehensive picture of what using Tweetbot as one’s main Twitter client looks like in 2021. Let’s change it up a bit, toss in some fucking bullet points, and list a few fundamental truths:
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If you intend to view your Twitter notifications on iOS at any point, completely deleting the native Twitter app is not an option. (Notably, it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon, if ever.)
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“Shopping around” for a third-party Twitter client leads the at all attentive user back to Tweetbot, exclusively. With the potential exception of Fenix, all other Twitter apps on the App Store are fucking bunk and will cost you as much or more as Tweetbot 6’s new subscription.
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If you use Twitter Lists regularly, you’d be an idiot not to start your Tweetbot subscription right this fucking minute.
In the ~month since the Tweetbot 6 story first broke (a nice birthday present!,) no less than three newish Twitter features have made the news. Last week, it (apparently) committed to the worst possible user-side content monetization model concept out of the dozens that have dipped in and out of rumor for virtually the service’s entire history: “Super Follows” are slated to shade our collective experience with putrid freemium concerns. “Communities” sound in concept like a worthwhile and genuinely value-adding feature addition for actual Twitter users, but any substantial expectations of the company feel far too risky to invest in. All the while, Twitter Spaces – the audio-only Clubhouse-ish mutilation of Periscope’s corpse – has been silently bestowed upon a secret set of @s at an achingly slow pace. I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t even fully digested fucking Fleets, yet.
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What does Tweetbot 6 really offer you, Twitter user, in 2021?Freedom from all of that bullshit.
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It’s just occurred to me how much more anxious the movements of Twitter, Inc. and Jack Dorsey’s horrendous facial hair would be making me if I had not discovered an (ironically) more stable, wholesome platform to replace them, years ago. No, I will not discuss Mastodon beyond this remark, but readers invested enough to get to this point who haven’t heard of the federated, open source social network by that name would do well to consult this handy hyperlink. This privilege of choice – even if it’s completely delusional – has combined with Tapbots’ thoughtful brush up of their trustier-than-ever Tweetbot to ease my longtime Twitter-dependent ass to a nigh-miraculous degree. However, stepping back from it all, I realized Tweetbot’s new life bets even heavier on that single, defining feature which the company hardly mentions, and could conceivably restrict – maliciously or not – or remove entirely without real consequences to their business or public standing via tech media outcry. What if Twitter killed Lists? We’d all be fucked.
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Upon this realization, I shot out of bed very late in a recent evening and went straight to fucking Trello, of all places, to sift through Twitter’s public development roadmap for any official word on their fate. I really did panic for a beat upon first reading the words “Replacement for Lists functionality” before realizing the actual intention of the card’s expression in the context’s syntax, which is probably about as positive as it could possibly be: a public suggestion that Lists will continue to be supported through 2.0, at least. The card sits in the “Nesting” column (which I assume to be the lowest priority group, chronologically,) right between identical cards for Bookmarks and Direct Messages.
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The Grandma's House Method
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Writing about Tweetbot 6 has been an illuminating personal experience, if you haven’t yet caught on. The timing of its release has proved awfully convenient, just predating the aforementioned catastrophe of disjointed features that has descended harder than ever before on Twitter’s own app, leaving it an absolute mess. When I initiated the symbolic swap maneuver documented at the very beginning of this review, I assumed I was going to find Tweetbot awkward to use as my primary in the present day, but have found the opposite to be true. The social network Tweetbot draws from is barely recognizable as the same property it drew upon originally, when its Lists-loving configuration was simply one of a dozen different interpretations of how one should interact with Twitter (by far the sharpest, I think we’d agree.) Tweetbots, in contrast, is virtually identical in principle, though the unwavering bearing of its development has resulted in the true definition of refinement. The result is the most beautiful way to use Twitter in 2021, no competition, and is also crucially the singular means of interacting with it on one’s “own terms” – as long as yours align with The Lists Method, that is – in an environment that feels predictable and fundamentally at your control.
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As much as I have praised the Mastodon app Toot! as the most innovative social app available – and will continue to do so until I encounter something more original and ingenious – it’s perhaps the singular remaining cleverly playful Tweetbots feature which first opened my perspective to appreciate little Easter egg-like tricks. Indeed – even after all we’ve been through together these past ten years – you can still cycle through all of Tweetbot’s visual themes by two-finger swiping vertically in 6. Quick Account Switching is the other less-than-obvious swipe function of note, which I’ll rely on an embed stolen from Tapbots themselves to demonstrate:
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I don’t think it should ever feel natural to speak sentimentally about mobile apps, but Tweetbot is a worthy exception. If you glance over the respective comments sections of the articles and YouTube videos I’ve hyperlinked, you’ll pick up on this phenomena of legacy Twitter users chucking back some tragically nostalgic sentiments in response to the reminder surfaced by the Tweetbot 6 news of just how long we’ve been doing this. From my perspective, the other majority sentiment found there catalyzes the bizarre chronobending at play even further. I can’t believe how many folks continue to be flabbergasted by the idea of paying for software in 2021, but I’ve been literally begging Twitter to charge me a monthly fee in exchange for some greater curative capabilities for as long as I can remember. The whole of my gospel, again, is that Tweetbot 6 has personally made using Twitter a little bit better than bearable, so I have no other reasonable choice available: I’m paying the fuck up.
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See this post's corresponding GitHub Issue for related media, aggregated links, and other minutia.
Screens and software subjects big & small discussed within my most moderate 35,000 words ever.
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Believe it or not, the cyclical cold season has once again come to pass! Oh, the W̘͖̯E̟̹À̫T̯̫͓̪̮͓̼H̝E̪͇̰̘̖͍ͅŔ͍̖̱̟̪!! If the past two days on Twitter were any indication, it is indeed time for a year's-end retrospective on what has been published on this Web Site. Given the extent of the attention I've devoted to bilge.world this past year – both technically and editorially – I thought it would be nice to chuck in a bit more in the pursuit of whacking myself on the back. I understand that 2020 has been one helluva catastrophic marker of linear time for just about everyone on Earth – as I write this on its last day, the inexplicable news of MF Doom's death has just surfaced and has already hit my adjacent communities remarkably hard.
I had forgotten *a lot* more about CSS and HTML than I originally thought. glad I ended up comfortable enough to find myself with a completely original stylesheet before the end of the year, I suppose. pic.twitter.com/4QwlbEJECU
The earliest archive.org capture of this particular Writeas blog dates back only to May 1st of this year, but its stylistic contrast with the site's current version is immense. I believe I was using Max Henderson's Anxiety theme virtually stock, albeit with some color rearrangements. By the 29th, I had already arrived upon the colors you see today. “You Know I'm Blogging” was just a meta update to say howdy after such a long drought, but “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” actually proved popular (for me) among my newly-connected Fedi crowd, especially, thanks to an annotated share by Writeas on Twitter. Honestly, it was entirely worth it just for the accomplishment of exposing my platform peer Dino Bansigan to Alt+D. Writeas Community Manager CJ Eller and I began corresponding, which led to an interview regarding writing tools, managing fiddly compulsions, and the wonder of Markdown.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list.
I had wanted to write about The Langoliers – Stephen King's flop of a made-for-TV movie/extended Twilight Zone episode – for a long while. It was probably the first program I watched as a child that genuinely disturbed me and always returns to my thoughts by barren-ish experiences. I had planned to watch the whole three hours all the way through and write whatever came to mind, but I only made it halfway or so in “Craig Toomey's Coronavirus” before I ran completely out of steam. I dropped what I had without revision, to this day. Perhaps one day I shall return...
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In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn.
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These two sentences begin the sixth chapter of my indefinitely-postponed novel, Blimp's Burden, and are almost certainly my best writing, ever. My vanity simply wouldn't allow them to go forgotten, so I published the chapter as an excerpt on The Psalms. It may seem an intimidating wall of text, but give it your attention and you'll be amused, I think.
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Summer
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The general, distinctly 21st-century wisdom regarding one's content popularity seems to be something like you never know what's going to blow up. I experienced this phenomena quite severely for the first time in my writing life after posting “Google Is Not God of The Web” on HackerNews right before going out-of-touch for some 13 straight hours amidst a local BLM protest. I did not intend to write a baity title, nor did I expect anything to come of sharing it, there – I only did so simply because the thought crossed my mind. Honestly, it is probably the least-considered content I'd ever published on The Psalms – I only put it up when I did because I knew all of my energy was about to be absorbed for an entire weekend or more. I only started the thing because I felt it important to raise a small voice in reminder that tech media had started using language when discussing code/online development which had begun to assume the existence of a single, objective standard of measure for good web design. (Fuck your bootstrap baloney, The Drywall Website was a realparadigm shit.)
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And yet... That single goddamned post would end up accruing more pageviews than all of my writing on the web, combined (I suspect.) Tens of thousands of words were written in hundreds of comments, which I did my best to parse in a for the hell of it substack email:
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Out of everything I’ve shared on Bilge recently, it’s hilarious that this particular post – on which I spent a cumulative total of perhaps 25 minutes writing and made less effort than ever to edit – became probably my most widely-shared work of all time.
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Once again, I am thankful for the readership and correspondence, I just really fucking wish it had been on literally anything else I've written about technology.
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In retrospect, it really is bonkers that I was excited about yet another vague promise to re-imagine email in the days surrounding the launch of Basecamp's HEY, but I feel it's important to nurture what paltry genuine enthusiasm remains about technology and the future, so I decided to respond to the service's homepage prompt, asking interested visitors to write in with their own thoughts on email. I spent a morning clacking out “Email and I: An Abridged History,” which I hope will one day serve as a part-foundation for a thorough, composed extension to my Why I Write About Technology series. This would be The Psalms last relevant work for a few months, while I played around with an experimental WordPress website and dove into fuckin' school for the first time in seven years.
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Fall
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I returned in late September with a partial recount of what I'd discovered: “Indulging Once More in Digital Excess.” After exploring the concept of Digital Gardens, buying my first pro-ready desktop PC in 10 years, playing with Big Boy Adobe software for the first time, and reading a delightful book documenting the history of word processing, I arrived upon the term Software Historian with which to partially describe myself. It doesn't mean all that much at the moment, but will no doubt be explored imminently on this Web Site.
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Addressing “The Social Dilemma's Dilemma” and “Software Thanksgiving” in detail would be awfully redundant, but I would at least note how they represent diametrically opposed perspectives through which to discuss this stuff. Going forward into 2021, I think it's important that I hold short on the progress I've made in moderating my voice since 2018. Digestibility is not a virtue I am at all interested in, nor is it an appropriate one in which to invest any more effort. Any non-radical argument will inevitably prove enormously unoriginal, which makes for a huge waste of all our time. For the moment, that's all the editorializing I've done.
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Three Point Oh
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Somewhere along the research process for one of my school essays, I came across the concept of academic revision tracking and peer review via Git. Having dipped my toe back in academia, any such circumvention of its penchant for the most archaic practices possible was naturally intriguing. Just wait until I show these goons how to use hyperlinks. Perhaps inevitably, I was launched into the Git-Gone Bender I'm still riding simply because I finally had ample reason to actually understand it. In just two months, I've created and forked a total of nearly 80 repositories on my new GitHub account. Though I'd created one for each of my web properties ages ago, I had absolutely no idea how to actually make use of them, so they were all quickly abandoned. In the past two weeks or so, I think I've actually begun to get the hang of the system's core intricacies, best exemplified by The Psalms' Repository as it stands.
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The “automated” Project Board I set up has so far been a very impressive replacement for the simple todo list. It tracks and categorizes Post Ideas in their various stages in my process: Mulling, Documentation (research,) Drafting, and actual Publication. Technical “Issues” regarding the CMS and/or the Repository, itself, have also fit in these categories well, so far. Just today, I discovered that one can simply tag Issues by their number to describe Commits, which form an impressive revision-tracking changelog when aggregated together. I also figured out the general idea behind Milestones and set The Psalms' first one for my 27th birthday, next month. The goal is to have figured this all out well enough by then that I'm no longer randomly stumbling upon entire featuresets multiple times in a workday. Thinking in Public – as my friend Tom Critchlow and his crowd say – is what I'm trying to do here, I think. Obviously, this really means that you are more than welcome to hop the fuck in at any time, in any manner you'd prefer. If Git is still no more than a conundrum for you – as it was for me just weeks ago – I would suggest the directory for In-Progress Drafts as a starting point.
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requesting support on how to "leverage discussions" to talk about pee pee and poo poo. #GitHubUniverse
GitHub Actions are still more or less a mystery to me, but I am unbothered – The Psalms' seems to be producing green text instead of red, now, in the midst of whatever I set it up to do. I poked around the livestreams for “GitHub Universe” a few weeks ago, when dark mode and GitHub Discussions were opened up to more users. At the moment, I cannot imagine a single application for forums in the context of my blog's repository, but I turned them on, anyway. It's very possible that all of the documentation-generating functions of Git are entirely unnecessary in this case, but – as I entrust GitHub with the eternal task of archiving such work – it is my hope that it will help me add further structure to my process.
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If you've found yourself in possession of a .edu email address and are interested in GitHub related experimentation, see this list of discounted/free dev programs/services for students, which includes a free subscription to “GitHub Pro.” (Apparently, equivalent to a $4/month service.) Adobe has similar discounts, as you’re probably already aware, which have allowed me to pursue my goal of learning InDesign. So far, I’ve created a sort of commemorative 404 page for The Drynet and a font showcase of Georgia for my mother. As much as I’d love to continue discussing the current state of Adobe apps, I’ve realized 1) I am quite distinct from a professional user, which is why I genuinely find GIMP more useful than Photoshop, for instance, and 2) given the length of my to-write list considering my current pace, I don’t know if I’d manage to get around to it in this lifetime.
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Between now and the 11th of this month, I will be migrating worthwhile posts from the experimental WordPress site (WTF) here and closing its hosting account. I haven’t been compelled to actually do anything with it in months, and the handy redirects, alone, are not worth the upcosts, however fair. Some content – including the corresponding posts for my Adobe experiments will not be imported from WTF here. I’m also going to rely on the Web Archive for publishing the rest. Notable discoveries so far include “Through an iPhone 4’s Lens,” which is a reminder of how revolutionary that particular handset was, and a few extra-Psalms pieces of content I’d like you to experience, like this Notion gallery of my single jaunt into drawing, # DavidBlueDraws. Best of all is my friend Tevin’s episode of Extratone’s defunct flagship podcast. In the years since, he’s become quite the prolific Twitch streamer. (I’ve watched enough and know Tevin well enough to say that he’s particularly entertaining in this medium.)
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Coming Soon
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For better or worse, all of these new exploratory avenues have so far led directly away from the business of actually writing, but – in my best self-estimation – I suspect I’m mostly done with fiddling, now, and ready to start thinking on the page, again. Predictably, I’ve let my upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max Review turn into quite a monstrosity over the past two months. It turns out, years of lapsed attention toward iOS development resulted in my feeling more out-of-the-loop than I expected, which I was compelled to remedy, naturally. If you’re so inclined, you can follow the minutia attached to my review process via this dedicated Snapas gallery, this shared iCloud album, my personal YouTube channel , and this Twitter collection.
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SO... I’m really starting to see the magic now. I just took this and it’s 2AM... utterly dark outside. I managed to force my car mount to couple with a tripod and set the exposure to 30 seconds. pic.twitter.com/FMLGrFzgy2
As per my newfound use of GitHub, I’ve played around with various ways of documenting this journey, specifically. First is this Wiki page (which I shall do my best to remember to keep updated) listing the entirety of my writing history on iPhone and iOS. (It’s uh... A bit underwhelming, if I’m honest.) I’ve also just begun a dedicated repository for iOS-related documentation and resources, which will soon include a full, sensically-indexed list of iCloud share links to my entire Siri Shortcuts collection (I hope.) Immediately following the review, I intend to publish here a post dedicated to functions Apple has failed to properly document, which I expect to be the most widely-useful content on this domain. To see some of the suggestions I’ve received so far and/or to add your own, see this mildly-successful thread I posted in r/iOS.
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When I have finally tired of talking about handsets once more, I hope to return my attention toward some other overwhelmingly-ambitious monstrosities like my academic paper proposing federated, open-source social networks in favor of the Big Boys, my report on the experience of returning to academia for a semester in 2020, and my evaluation of Notion as perhaps the next Big Step in the evolution of notetaking software. Perhaps before tackling projects the size of these, I intend to compile another listicle of handy tips for newcomers to Writeas. As I linked before, you can now view the entirety of The Psalms’ status in as much detail as you’d like via its Project Board on GitHub. As always, you can delight me by directly engaging on Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and/or via email. Let’s hope 2021’s equivalent of this review doesn’t take me until February to publish!
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
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Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
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For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
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Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking” – a function once relegated to magazines – has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” – applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now – can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
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In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
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On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
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She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
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According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
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“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
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The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
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In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
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Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and – most controversially – the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns – if not its proposed solutions – should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
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Responsible Curation
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For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
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Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
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Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
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Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook – the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world – as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy – vague, at best.
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In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
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In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”[^1]
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You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
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In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
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Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
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In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
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Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
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The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
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Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
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I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”[^2]
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As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections – which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page – and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
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Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
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The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
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[1] While Bandcamp set out from the beginning to make it easier for artists to publish music, getting music on Spotify has always been a grueling process.
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[2] I fully intended to quote Kaitlyn Tiffany on how organizations only get tech media attention if a significant amount of capital is involved in some form, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ll certainly come back and add it if/when I do.
Purposing a disciplined effort to reflect on those tech products which have remained too fair and/or too good to catch the attention of the alarmists in us, recently.
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I've never been a big fan of holidays, nor do I think Thanksgiving should be a federal one, given its shitty, undebatably imperialist origins, but these opinions are entirely inconsequential. Regardless of how I feel, Thanksgiving will remain as pervasive as ever in the spaces around me, so I thought I'd change things up this year and actually participate in a substantial way. I did my best to travel back to a vastly less complicated self, letting all of the crud that's accumulated atop my love of computers in the past twenty years: wokeness, adtech, Obama wearing VR glasses, etc... When I thought the Native Americans were glad to see white people because they gave them guns and horses and assumed people made things because good ideas were the apex of currency. When I was able to respond to new software discoveries by screwing around aimlessly without wondering if they'd been stolen entirely from a handful of talented developers lacking in the resources and know how required to protect their ideas in the face of Microsoft's ruthless Embrace, Extend, Extinguish crusade.
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Forgive yourself for a moment and return there with me. Or perhaps somewhere else, if you need – wherever and whenever you last remember feeling genuinely enthralled with The Future of Computers. (Perhaps it was yesterday! If so, Gourd bless you. Never change.) Let's take ourselves back to kindergarten, before we knew anything about the rapid cyclical consolidation and monopolization within the technology industry that had already established itself as a trend, by then, when all we knew of the software we interacted with was contained within our most visceral reactions: I like Ask Jeeves because I like red and I like Jeeves. I vaguely remember when Google (the search engine) first broached the general awareness of my elementary school's computer lab. I'm fairly sure I even remember the sort of feelings that were elicited the first time I actually set eyes on the Google.com homepage: it looked so modern, then, compared to the rest of the web. (After two decades, it currently looks like shit.) Upon the first first query, it was immediately clear that Google was superior to any of the other search engines we'd been using.
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This sort of encounter – with a service that significantly alters one's perception of a given set of tasks – is precious in our lives as users.
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A few examples from my own using life which come to mind:
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The first time I witnessed a Skype call.
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Downloading and using the beta Evernote client on the school machines in Junior High.
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The first album I uploaded on Bandcamp.
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Discord's first public release.
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The “moment” I first put a name to Markdown. (I'd been using bits of the syntax for years before I actually read the word.)
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And most recently, exploring Notion as personal catch-all documentation software.
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The atmosphere of elation about the future on which I so often lament has been replaced by wariness for most of us – from Californian software developers to tractor-hacking farmers. Now, the conversation is saturated with CEO appearances before legal committees, corporate memo leaks, and somber interviews. Of course, I have unquestionably contributed more than my share. In fact, I wish I could be twice as critical in twice the written volume, and I believe the tech media industry to be far too culturally-embedded within Silicon Valley to be nearly critical enough. For this holiday, though, I think a respite from the negative is worthwhile and essential. I know it is for my personal sanity, at least.
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A week ago, I shared this Google Form and asked you to reflect with me on the “really great” software/services you have encountered in your using life built by “technology companies who's business ethics align toward the benefit of us users and who's products are well-priced (or free!)” As of the time of this writing, nearly 80 responses have been recorded on the form, itself, and several more via comments on Hacker News. I deeply appreciate your participation! They're far from predictable, too – I've ended up learning a lot. The very first submission was for Logos Bible Software, which has quite a fascinating history. I feel like those less-secular of us go unexposed to theological software without participants such as the human who submitted this one (thank you, human!,) and end up missing out on an entire segment of software development. Having studied The Good Book in a very much analog fashion through Lutheran school, I wonder in retrospect how software solutions could've changed the experience.
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I have never received this volume of feedback in my prompts before, nor have I ever really seen a reason to close any of them to responses, so I'm going to take a blind shot at the dartboard and plan to close the form on New Year's Day, 2021. Until then, please feel free to respond in any way you'd like and/or view all the live answers in this very bad spreadsheet full of these very good responses. (My apologies – I have absolutely no idea how to use Google Sheets.)
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ⓣⓗⓐⓝⓚⓢ
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I originally intended to go into relatively extensive detail for each of the entities on my own Most Thankful For list, but I do have to actually stop somewhere, so the commentary on these isn't remarkably insightful or educational. It is genuine, though, which is worth something, I hope.
Yes, I have tirelessly promoted my essay about Bandcamp's holiness for years now, but I have done so with good reason: here is a for-profit technology company which is building a one-of-a-kind product that invests directly in independent artists. I spent a whole summer scouring The Web looking for a single misstep or controversy and found absolutely none.
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Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
Before OBS (Open Broadcaster Software,) streaming video was an absolute mess that usually involved paying for or pirating some proprietary software. Remember Ustream? Good God...
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OBS is the streaming video equivalent of Audacity and GIMP: an extremely powerful, infinitely-malleable set of tools that allow one to take full advantage of their hardware to capture and/or stream video and audio.
Typora is an infinitely-customizable markdown editor spanning all platforms that's managed to become my primary word processor (and I'm someone who demands a lot from word processors.) It's immensely powerful in all the important ways – my use over the past two years has stress tested it with both enormous (100,000+ words) and extremely complicated (100+ images and embeds) documents. It's able to export even these chunkos to any format you can imagine instantaneously and never crashes.
Typora is a Markdown editor with left sidebar file sorting, very much like Bear (several available themes can make it look actually identical, in fact,) but without its native iCloud-based file syncing. It is cross-platform, open-source, and definitely more powerful, though.
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The Typora theming community has been especially on-point, as of late. In the screenshot embedded above, it's wearing the Slate variation of H16nning's Gitbook theme, which is by far the most beautiful configuration I've yet to see the editor in.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program – which just celebrated its 25th anniversary last week – is one of the most powerful tools in its space and perhaps the number one exemplary example of open source software to cite when explaining the concept for the first time. I have used it my entire creative life for all manner of tasks and evangelized it plenty, but it wasn't until I returned to college this Fall and took advantage of Adobe's student discounts that I had an opportunity to thoroughly explore its proprietary nemesis, Photoshop.
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What I found was indeed a very powerful piece of software, albeit as arrogant as ever in its stubborn commitment to the original keyboard shortcuts set by default and other legacy artifacts, though not one I would compare to GIMP, necessarily. This shouldn't be breaking news: as far as I know, there are billions of posts comparing the two going back to the beginning of the written word. My personal conclusion: I can accomplish much more, much faster with GIMP in every single one of my own use cases.
I was browsing some FOSS-related article aggregation page a few weeks ago when a post caught my eye: “Audacity exceeds 100 million downloads.” In reflection, I realized in that moment that perhaps no other single piece of software has been so thoroughly present in my “workflows” across all sorts of projects through the years, largely because of its God-sent Truncate Silence feature, which I have used to remove silence from audio files for as long as I've been working within the medium, basically. Every podcast episode I have ever published has passed through Audacity for this reason and others, as have voiceovers, high school punk band demo tapes, personal voice notes, and more.
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the world would actually be perfect if audacity's truncate silence feature could be autotied to video timecodes.
Until OBS came along, Audacity was where all recorded audio started for myself and my creative friends. It was Audacity that captured (and caused, technically) the death of my friend's soundcard in audio form during the recording process for Hamura, the first Drywall album, back in October of 2011.
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Fucking around in Audacity through the years has led to some halfway creative results on my part, including “SLOWED 'N' THROWED” Hilary Duff tracks and legacy Windows sounds remixes. I still use it for every episode of End User and have recently created a macro for remastering Drycast episodes. (A big feat for me and reflective of Audacity's ingenuity.) As far as I know, there are zero competitors, proprietary or not, which can replicate Audacity's particular usefulness as an audio utility.
Shortly after I discovered NeoCities last Spring, I signed up to be a Supporter for $5/month, not necessarily for the additional storage or bandwidth, but because the project immediately sounded like one I was personally obligated to uplift. Parimal Satyal's essay “Rediscovering the Small Web,” along with the design of the website which delivered it, inspired me to make another attempt at building an HTML site by hand. So far, davidblue.xyz obviously borrows heavily from his CSS, but looking at the code itself was vastly more pleasant than one would expect. Recently, during the course of writing an academic research essay, I found myself listening to interviews with its founder, Kyle Drake and reading articles from its debut in 2013, which prompted me to take even further advantage of my account.
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Last week, I moved my inactive automotive blog (dieselgoth.com) from a Writeas blog to a purely-HTML NeoCities website with disturbingly little friction. (I challenge you to spot any differences.) After discovering a backup of the original Drywall Website deep within my old files, NeoCities was the only reasonable host on which to archive it. After I'd finished uploading, I fell down what the youth call a “rabbit hole” of discovery, mesmerized by what I found on page after page of NeoCities' site browser. I did my best to save the best finds by following them within the sites dashboard and have since set up a Best of NeoCities GitHub repository with my absolute favorites among them archived thanks to wget.
Trust me when I tell you that some of the best web design, ever can be found on NeoCities. What's even better: after my deep dive, I was pleasantly surprised by strangers commenting on what I'd found! Replying in a timely, substantial, and genuine manner seems to be a hallmark of the community: my (rather verbose) question regarding the well-manneredness of publishing such an archive without permission in the community Discord I discovered just this morning was almost immediately met with encouraging replies.
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A Post you should probably expect soon: “NeoCities is 2020's Best Social Network.” Going forward, I'd like to digitize my poetry collection on NeoCities in the near future while continuing to otherwise brush back up on HTML and CSS – both of which I am also very thankful for, come to think of it.
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Thank you again for your correspondence! May your Imperialism Day be a positive experience!
The pop culture discussion of tech's greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways.
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Listen to this article read by Siri Voice 2 below...
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For those of us who've written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/“ethical” conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it's particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn't know what the movie was about. I'm not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could've done better, in that regard.
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First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell's casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man's screen, the film's depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as “ridiculous,” as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
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The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
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The Verge's official review of the film – written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey – is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge's audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media – grandmothers, retirees, etc. – who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about “privacy” – a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of “my data,” regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which – while possible – is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
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you don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses – you need only to want a better and/or different experience.
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by – and directly promotes on several occasions – one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain... hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for “solutions” to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who've been building against the adtech-funded web for ages – some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization's website nor the film's webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
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The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I'm here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you've followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn't still be reading,) you know I've advocated exhaustively for Mastodon – the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who's business model benefits both platform and artist. I'm still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn't immediately off-putting to “the average person.”
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Poke around the film's official website a bit and you'll discover a variety of heavily-branded “resources” for “taking action,” all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the “Take Action” vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall's tips for reducing your screen time, the “Data Detox Kit,” which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a “Join Now” button, and – most ironic of all – a link to download the “Ad Observer plugin,” in order to “share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable.” In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the “Online Political Transparency Project” instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
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No, it's not a scam. Using The Markup's shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here's the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves... incompetence? I'm afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world – regardless of what they believe now, or then – that these folks should not be our first call when we're searching for “solutions.” You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
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Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can't imagine you'd be correct... Under the heading “CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA,” step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
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At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both – or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
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This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
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You wouldn't announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
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Now, I've always considered the ability to change a computer's name an immense privilege. My first “real” computer's name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus' name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that's completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone's common name to that of “your favorite television character” (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so...) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it's just that it's ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down “change device name” as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
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-A notification I received while literally typing this out.
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I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an “Alternative Apps Centre” within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the “detox” seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it's hilarious that I can freely refer to “privacy” as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one' social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the “Supported by Mozilla Firefox” badges all over the website and asks me “well, what did you expect?” My answer: something “more” than promotion, I suppose.
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I suspect this is another case of don't go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to “innovate” than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I'd somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who's notifications I'd probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
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Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I'd wager.) I suspect it's long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as “Email Addiction” goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR's greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email's footer. If you're really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform's archives feature – or don't – but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you'll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
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If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it's okay to announce on Facebook that you're taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823-4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I've discovered with you.
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My own advice on “privacy:” don't worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the “privacy tools” you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you're an iOS user, you've already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step – if we're really honest with ourselves – is figuring out how you're going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
An update on all I’ve been doing instead of what I actually intended to do.
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There will always be plenth of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. – Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think“
You have a desire for indulgence in your home and family, Co-Star has just told me in my weekly, email newsletter-delivered horoscope. “Venus conjunct to natal Moon” indicates this part of yourself will transform into something else, and goes on to say something truly stirring: *the way you relate to your past is changing*. I continue to be amazed by how influential the potential of the computing hardware present in my life at any given time can be on my habits. In the two weeks I’ve had my first moderately powerful desktop computer in over ten years, I have found myself using new image & video editing software, installing local WordPress stacks, finally experimenting with Git, somehow generating 20 draft posts on a fresh experimental WordPress site, and putting my whole back into my new Notion account, including – among others – projects like my “Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.” All the while, there has been a pull toward a more deliberate, focused sort of digital existence: reflection on Kevin McGillivray’s Word of The Year concept, digital gardening, and a few other like discoveries have culminated in a newfound, unironic use of the term “Creative Wellness” to describe a set of ideologies which I believe I should strive for in order to improve my intellectual wellbeing.
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In tandem with the fact that I have gone back to school, this has all crucially resulted in very little actual writing, which may or may not be conclusive evidence toward the classical minimalist technology argument that less capability results in more focus. On that note, remember when the Game of Thrones author appeared on Conan’s show and mentioned that he still writes exclusively using WordStar 4.0? This happening has been vaguely in the back of my mind since I encountered it during the relatively brief, basement apartment-dwelling era in Oregon when I first discovered WinWorldPC and got into running a bunch of DOS VMs, trying out every download from that blessed site which sounded even remotely interesting. Before I go on, let me just include a transcript of the entire anecdote I’m referring to here, because it’s actually much shorter than one is led to believe:
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Conan: These novels that that you write are can be over a thousand pages long. They're massive tomes and apparently you write them all on a computer, but unlike most authors, you're not worried about a computer virus. I mean an author who writes a thousand-page book their greatest fear is a virus invades and destroys a chunk of their book you don't worry about that. Why?
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Martin: No I have a secret weapon – I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the internet with and that I get my email on and I do my taxes on and that computer and then I have my writing computer which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.
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Conan: A DOS machine. How old is this program?
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Martin: A DOS machine. You remember DOS? I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system.
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Conan: Did you make this computer out of wood? Did you carve it? I'm curious why you decided to stick with this old program.
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Martin: I actually like it. I mean, it does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital – if I wanted a capital, I would've typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key. Stop fixing it!
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Conan: You yell at computers a lot. What about spellcheck?
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Martin: Oh, I hate spellcheck. Especially when you have the realm of [???], it's [???].
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That’s it! A less than sixty second exchange. I did not remember just how much coverage it received on digital news sites. Embark on a Google search for “george rr martin wordstar,” and you’ll discover a ridiculously long list of brief stories including the YouTube embed. A book I’ve just recently discovered and begun – which I am extremely excited about – is Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and its introduction begins by mentioning The George Thing, which surely indicates that it is the most significant mention of word processing software in popular culture for at least a decade:
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The clip was posted to YouTube and from there embedded in innumerable tweets, Facebook feeds, and blogs. Some commenters immediately, if indulgently, branded Martin a Luddite, while others opined it was no wonder it was taking him so long to finish the whole story (or less charitably, no wonder that it all seemed so interminable). But what was it about these seemingly obscure details that people found so compelling? Part of it was no doubt the unexpected blend of novelty and nostalgia: Many fans would be old enough to remember WordStar for themselves, and the intricacy of its interface seems somehow in keeping with Martin’s quirky persona, part paternalistic grandfather and part Doctor Who character. WordStar thus becomes an accessory to his public image, like the black fisherman’s cap he is frequently photographed wearing. But it is also clearly much more than that. Martin’s passion for the program is unmistakable...
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The book, itself, was also more widely reviewed than one would expect, where it was deemed genuinely unique. I related quite hard to the preface’s first few sentences:
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Track Changes began, as many books do, with a question: What was the first novel written with a word processor? Being an English professor interested in the history of writing as well as computers, I thought it was the sort of thing I should know, but I didn’t.
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Discovering the volume was a result of a personal determination in the last week to give in to my latent obsession with word processing/text editing software, which also led to my creating a Notion table of every word processor I’ve ever heard of. Thanks to my desktop PC acquisition, found myself virtual machining a bit again, though some of the programs I’m particularly interested in trying have inexplicitly disappeared from my personal library and been removed from WinWorldPC, probably due to (mostly absurd) copyright claims. Most versions of WordStar are still available, though, and I’ll confess I still have a desire to learn how to use its cult keyboard shortcuts, as evangelized by Robert J. Sawyer in an essayalso discussed in Track Changes, which specifically shits on WordPerfect more explicitly than I remembered. I keep returning to the idea that I should try writing the stuff I normally work on – like this post, for instance – in these software, but file transfer is a bigger and bigger obstacle the older the OS you’re running: VirutalBox’s “Guest Additions” – which allow clipboard sharing/shared folders/other interoperative network functions – are not compatible with DOS or any Windows editions before 4.0. There are workarounds, but I haven’t found any reasonably within my current abilities.
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Truthfully, though, emulating twenty-year-old software seems a bit unnecessary when contrasted with the fact that Markdown, Typora, and Writeas were supposed to be my saviors from distracted writing. A compulsion to comment on a recent note-taking app comparison published in The Information reminded me that I still haven’t written an in-depth review of Typora, which I plan to prioritize in the near future, especially since it may finally be officially releasing, according to recent activity on Twitter.
Another result of my reintroduction to academia is that I can now afford a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to student discounts. This has been life-changing in a manner which I should probably be a bit ashamed of, but once the desire to make full use of my subscription (by trying every single program it licenses) subsides, I really do intend to become proficient with InDesign – a learning experience which I will surely at least attempt to thoroughly document, here.
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Digital Gardening
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I think it was Tom Critchlow’s Digital Gardening blogchain that first exposed me to the term and his static site-generated wiki project that introduced me to the concept of personal wikis, not so long ago, though the desire to organize and/or archive personally-relevant information through the format has actually been rattling around my head for the better part of a decade. When I discovered that one could install MediaWiki – the platform Wikipedia, itself is built on – I created the shortlived Drywall Wiki, once upon a time. Since I last wrote you, I also purchased the extratone.wiki domain and played around once again with the platform. Typora even offers exports in MediaWiki’s bizarre proprietary text format! For better or worse, though, I don’t see anything becoming of the project for the moment I suppose it feels like somewhat of a risk, investing a lot of time I probably shouldn’t have into documenting all of my Twitter jokes. For the moment, I think my Notion account will have to serve as my personal wiki.
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The most inciteful argument I’ve read among the Digital Gardens discourse revolves around value as it is created within our personal online writing spaces. Two of the many infinitely-quotable essays within this space: Mike Caulfield’s “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral” and “Stock and flow” from Snarkmarket. The former references Vannevar Bush’s infamous “As We May Think” essay (which I’ve finally gotten around to finishing and its description of a “memex,” which many cite as a disturbingly-apt prediction of the World Wide Web. Caulfield, however, disagrees:
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So most people say this is the original vision of the web. And certainly it was the inspiration of those pioneers of hypertext. But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all . Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.
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Reading back from a lens including this commentary, I immediately understood. The memex concept is far more intimate than the web has become (or perhaps ever was – I wouldn’t know.) “Stock and flow” defines creative value in two disparate types of media:
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Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
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Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
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To be honest, I personally cannot imagine undertaking the task of explaining this differentiation to anyone in my own life, but if the reactionary movement within The Web back to a focus on valuable content is, indeed, underway, perhaps such conversations are bound to shortly become more and more natural. For my part, I have attempted setting up an experimental site on Github Pages using Jekyll in the past few days with partial success: as soon as I tried to specify a custom theme, I apparently broke it, at which point I realized that I had homework to do. As much as I hate to admit it, Kev Quirk’s posts regarding WordPress’ practical simplicity over SSGs earlier this monthrings somewhat true. As things currently stand, WordPress’ permeability throughout The Web is an advantage for those who just want to publish something as simply as possible. My counterargument to both Kev and myself: Writeas is a wonderful compromise in terms of substance and image among one’s super e-enabled, Mullenweg-disgusted peers. It’s very much pure Markdown, but it’s far more accessible, cross-platform, than SSGs due to its shear simplicity.
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One component which Digital Gardening would seem to offer others that I have never particularly struggled with is the freedom to write whatever I feel like writing. If anything, I have struggled in the opposite sense, existing in a state completely unhindered by consideration of the value my work may or may not offer anyone else. Perhaps the most substantial addition I’m capable of making to the Digital Gardens conversation, then, is best quoted from the first chapter of the advice book I have finally begun writing for young men, For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss:
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If there is one idea of mine you ever engage with – in this book or otherwise – it is best distilled in this single sentence: you do not *actually* want to attain a state of true apathy, trust me. It is extremely unhealthy, miserable, and alienating. I have existed for an excruciatingly long time trapped in a state of being truly unable to care about anything in the face of a great, varying effort to do so. It is very far from the immunity imbued in terms like carefree – in reality, it is manifested in extreme depression. It is less immunity than it is distance from an essential part of life.
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In terms of one’s blogging, I am glad for those who will/have/are finding a new freedom of expression, but hold this as a serious caution regarding the other extreme. Should you ever approach it, remember that considering one’s audience – as academics love to prioritize – really is important, eventually.
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Curation
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At this point, I’ve used a channel in Extratone’s Discord as my ongoing reading list for several years essentially without change. Earlier this month, though, I discovered Raindrop – a bookmarking service with public collections that (so fars) feels much more aligned with my own needs than Pocket – and pretty much immediately signed up to begin paying for it and set up a bot to crosspost from my new Reading List collection, there to the same Discord channel via the collection’s RSS feed. Raindrop’s browser extension – along with Notion’s, come to mention it – is actually usable in day-to-day browsing. As much as I love Reading.am, the prospect of its longevity worries me considering the most recent post in its development blog dates to 2016. Writing a dedicated “Little Review” of Raindrop is on my (ever-lengthening) todo list, but at the moment, I would especially emphasize my Digital Magazine Collection, which is the result of thousands of hours of web exploration and genuinely worth significant value for most anyone, I think.
With the combination of my public Notion workspaces and public Raindrop collections, I hope to make my curatorial endeavors both more accessibly beautiful and more intimately available. In terms of a dedicated discussion of Notion’s interworkings and culture, I think I have quite a bit more exploring to experience before I’m sufficiently qualified, though my notes are already quite extensive (and publicly accessible, thanks to… Notion!) In general, I continue to be astounded by the amount of tools/services/applications I have not yet heard of, despite how long I have labored to become an authority on Writing Tools.
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Workflow
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In my endeavor to more intentionally design my workspace – to actually dedicate a space for working, originally – I originally very much intended to set up dual displays for my desktop, but the desk I settled for (an old family piece from the early 1900s?) does not have enough surface area to position two displays, regardless of how thin they’ve become since I last had one. Combined with a limited budget and a concern that two displays might actually result in further distraction instead of less, I instead went for a single, 27” LED affair. I’ve also been making full use of Windows 10’s desktop switching feature and have found it surprisingly easy to make a habit, especially thanks to the Ctrl+Win+Lateral Arrow Keys keyboard shortcuts.
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On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I’ve by now worked out a personally-optimized remap (thanks to the keyboard manager tool included with PowerToys, about which I have far too much to say in some future post.) I had a conversation with a few Mastodon friends two weeks ago convincing me that my methodology of forcing myself to learn shortcuts by integrating a cheat sheet into my desktop backgrounds may actually be an original idea and useful to other users.
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In terms of writing spaces, I have actually been composing the less serious stuff I’ve been writing within WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, which is not an admission I would’ve expected to be making, just a year ago. A dedicated post about this, too, is fucking coming, but suffice it to say that with a fairly-substantial PC and a better hosting provider (DreamHost over GoDaddy, in this case,) composition has become far far smoother – improving enough to make it a viable space within which to pound away original stuff for the first time. Writing essays for academia has encouraged my return to Microsoft Word, once again, on which I’ll blame the fact that I am currently composing this very bit in The Old Bitch. A desire to once again hack together a set of personalized Word templates has led to the birth of two such files which I am proud enough to share on my Notion drive. Eventually, I would also like to take the time to completely redesign the “Ribbon” in Word – something which I’ve literally never seen anyone else do. (I spent a substantial amount of time trying to find a library for MS Office customization files, to no avail, though you can find my own customization file as it stands on the same Notion page linked just now. Let me know if you’re able to successfully import it.)
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A confession of vanity: I suspect the only reason I haven’t yet stopped composing within WordPress is that I figured out how to change the typeface to Adobe Caslon (across both the editor and the front-facing site, naturally,) thanks to my newfound access to Adobe Typekit. Yes, apparently I really am that shallow. For those Office 365 users among you, I highly suggest you look up how to enable the Classic Office sound theme. Unlike Make Use Of, I find them both adorable and genuinely useful as auditory feedback. You may also be interested in my discovery of some fairly-Woke additions to Word’s autocorrect options and the subsequent bitchy controversy their introduction spawned.
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The Read-It Website
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If you know me at all, the following admission probably seems unbelievable: I have been using Reddit. I created a new subreddit for Extratone – which I do not necessarily expect to be populated any time soon – and r/SoftwareHistory after discovering that it didn’t yet exist, which I definitely do not expect you to populate, but would be delighted if you did. As with seemingly everything else I’ve covered, I also intend to write about how Reddit’s recent feature additions and redesign may actually make it a redeemable space on The Web, which should prove interesting. Clearly, I have become more than willing to accept the moniker of Software Historian whenever/if ever my authority achieves the appropriate volume to deserve to be christened so.
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Obviously, none of the developments I’ve shared in this post indicate any improvement in my productive output, but I hope to learn soon how to settle into a fairly-consistent (and hopefully much more original) writing process.
West-Coast Indie Folk is Full of Battery-Burgling Megachurch Bands
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I have to just fucking do it — I’m going to start writing about music in this space. There’s virtually zero chance that I’ll shout over other voices of music criticism as long as Bilge remains so poorly optimized for SEO, and Portland, Oregon has been far too confusing to deprive myself the opportunity to work out any understanding of its youth culture. It’s not a lack of talented musicians in the area — the opposite is true — but a severe drought of the kind of tragedy and trauma which ultimately give acoustic American musical expression its whole shit. What I caught of the weekend’s invasion with Santa Cruz musicians were all praiseworthy, tight and confident performers who’d obviously invested heavily in their equipment and their presence here. Joe Kaplow arrived with a sort of bespoke magazine rack containing 20 neatly-arranged effect pedals, leading me to wonder for a moment if I was about to witness banjo powerviolence for the first time, but he explained that he simply preferred their availability, and wouldn’t use “more than a few at once,” and seemed almost genuinely perturbed by my attempt to explain the specific industrially-influenced involvement of audio hardware in hardcore punk and grind performance which I was referring to with the term. (“Powerviolence” has apparently become an ambiguous one around these parts, and I’m sure he was actually just utterly uninterested.)
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No more than two dozen guests made up their peak crowd of witnesses, yet Joe and his band certainly made good on shear effort expended in laying down a hearty, back-to-back recital for us at an unusually protracted rate, though apparently either they, the Getaway Dogs, or The Curfews had insisted that a “cover charge” be collected at the door of the house show. It’s not my business to to dwell on or attempt to investigate an unsubstantiatable rumor, but I understand this could have been a breach of house show etiquette. What I do know is that one of the visiting musicians stole 4 flat AA batteries out of my COOLPIX and apparently attempted to jack its ancient Compact Flash card, which is only hilarious because they didn’t succeed. Regardless, it should be said that Joe Kaplow’s songwriting is more flattered by Indie mags than my own ears, though one still wishes for a more substantive topic than “I thought it’d be cool make a corn cob pipe, so I did.” Then again, much of what you’ll find at this URL reads a lot like “I thought it’d be interesting to make a WordPress blog, so I did.” White people have truly run out of shit to say, haven’t we?
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The inspiration that sparked ‘I Said’ moved me like a puppet. So much so that I had to pull over at the top of Altamont Pass, by the huge windmills, and write the song in the back of my van.
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Joe Kaplow for Glide Magazine
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Reflection upon just about anything can have personal meaning, but no amount of musicianship can mask a stark lack of context. I do wonder if Indie Folk should just return to the megachurch, where songwriters like Joe and musicians of his crew’s sort are literally handed a gigantic audience of trained experts at finding profound meaning where it probably isn’t, along with great salaries, from what I hear. Otherwise, all that taxing preparation and expenditure will only lead to more forgettable performances. Or perhaps I am simply misguided in my assumption that artists work exclusively to communicate something lasting to someone. Every conversation I’ve had with Portlanders about Portland music has been predominantly about what artists and their audiences wear and how they behave instead of what they’re trying to say. There’s nothing inherently wrong with leaving things petty, lyrically and choosing to remain content with established sounds, musically, as long as your work is advertised as entertainment, not performance.
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Before I came Northwest, my fiancé had been exposing me to a variety of its music, which I mostly tolerated politely. Dozens of albums and EPs were played through once and forgotten forever, but when I arrived at a demo tape recorded by her long time friend’s band, The Cigarette Burns, I finally heard something familiar, yet vitally compelling: pissed off punks having fun. That said, I should admit that I only attended Saturday’s show because he was on the ticket, and I’m still glad I did.
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After what felt like hours of drowsy corn cob pipes, Christmas sweaters, and old sweethearts at fifty beats per minute (there were literally two young men sleeping within 15 feet of the bands for the duration,) Ricky sat himself on a stool in the midst of Kaplow’s sprawling gear load at 2:30AM with only his guitar and his voice. Unfortunately, I’d squandered the Nikon’s batteries on Californians (the lighting was not ideal anyway,) so I thought I’d share his set on Periscope. Though Ricky had been patiently present and attentive for the entire night (unlike myself,) those who were left of the entertainers bolted to the porch for a lively discussion about unicycles and quinoa while Ricky told us about hate, jealousy, and feeling like shit in a somber elegy. Any further adjectives may edge dangerously close to a half-assed “concert review,” which I am not yet qualified for, but I will say that Ricky’s sincerity made him most engaging part of the night, and his frustrated, conclusive nod to The Cigarette Burns was the first real punk sounds I’ve yet heard in Portland.
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I realize sharing this small experience does little to grow the conversation, but this isn’t a magazine, and I am desperate for answers about the bizarre reality in which I find myself. When Ricky dedicated a song to Courtney Love, one of the male musicians(?) yelled “Courtney Love fuckin’ killed Kurt Cobain!” which was such an unbelievably cliché happening/decision that I’ll surely spend the rest of my days in this city unsuccessfully attempting to work it out, aloud. I can’t quite recall who it was last Fall that responded to my frustration by challenging “what if there’s nothing to understand?” While this may be a reasonable conclusion, I suspect it’s not one I could accept as long as I remain here without losing my mind. If Portland is truly the dimensionless bastion of apathy and intellectual stagnancy for young Americans, I must blog my way out it as soon as possible (for Pete’s sake, just give these kids some antidepressants,) but I’d still like to believe the idea too oxymoronic to actually exist.
A Brief, Unedited Reflection on the History of my Failed Media Projects
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All of this may one day be worth significantly more revision and/or visibility in the future, but for now, just know that I rambled out all of this because it’s by far my most effective way to think, and this darned lowkey blog post has just provided a very long-overdue opportunity for it. Please feel free to read or even respond to it, if you’d like, but I’d like to ask that you don’t panic or circulate it. Thanks.
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So far… the only intercorrespondence between staff at Inmunis is people having a problem with one another.
-Before Extratone, there was Inmunis – my first, relatively short-lived attempt to launch an online magazine which wasn’t particularly important, but the experience surely did contribute to and inform my progression in understanding media that led to my (utter bewildered) current state. Anyhow, it’s fun to look back. Here’s the web archive’s last snapshot.
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This, a derelict Twitter account, and two film reviews by James Wilson are all that’s left of inmunis.co.uk for good reasons – many of which I did not entirely shed when I tried again. Until I started Extratone and made doing “this” – incessantly reading/exploring the web, obsessively tinkering and experimenting with The Extranet – I actually had very little knowledge on or exposure to the state of digital publishing or the real depth of variety to be found with any significant effort to comprehend the current offering real, surviving magazines, online or not, yet was dumb and arrogant enough to assume that I’d seen it all and none of it was even close to good enough for me to read or seek to write for. I was actually delusional enough to regard myself as too smart and one-of-a-kind to lower myself by going back to journalism school – that I was so special, anything I put effort in creating was destined to turn out superb. Granted, I’d had the actual idea for less than two weeks before I experienced by far the most traumatic, soul-destroying, world-upturning, and life-altering event of my entire existence, which I think accounts for the insanity, and all of my decisions were inevitably preempted by the fact that I was a 21-year-old straight white male community college dropout, which accounts for (but does not excuse) their absurdity.
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I’ve publicly implied before that it was probably only thanks to Drycast – which was also in its infancy during the time of The Big Event (episode 7 was published just two days before) – and its weekly obligation to sit down and talk with my favorite people about interesting stuff that I did not end up dead or institutionalized in 2015 (I wish I was exaggerating.) If there is a Gourd, let it be known that he is fully up-to-date and brand-activated – he sent me a fucking podcast to save my life.
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Reading and compiling stories for the show notes throughout the week provided an early avenue for exploring and embedding myself into media. Beyond the actual content, even, it’s been the rationality in the tone which journalists generally adhere to that has drawn me in and provided a brighter and brighter guiding light to help keep my sanity in check after my world ended because New Media values empathy in tandem with critical thought. All my life, it’s been very important to me that I continue to learn the best way to both appear and feel smart and functional. I’ve long since accepted that I am very fucking weird – and not in the wow, I dye my hair bright red sort of way which helps people feel unique, but in the holy shit, I’m terrified of what would actually result in losing control of my facade sort, which is actually much less sinister than it sounds for you, and infinitely moreso for me.
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This is why I still have a very infantile habit of becoming overwhelmingly frustrated with those who socially emphasize and celebrate their “weirdness” as an important part of their identity because my self-perception has long since transitioned from regarding my deviations as something that made me “unique,” to gigantic obstacles in the way of every possible aspiration which I’ll probably never overcome, but am doomed to kill myself trying. I’m now working on learning to appreciate those very fucking common people who are determined to prove how strange they are because ultimately, my own self-perception is just as ignorant, loneliness is not a virtue, and I’ve only maintained the whole charade because I’d rather have delusions of grandeur than acknowledge that I am also mostly unoriginal, and most of my truly more “original” behaviors could easily be described as simply unhealthy.
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This is an important confession for this explanation because its “solution” is another crucial motivation behind my creation of Extratone – as both a symbolic and literal means of understanding and minimizing my own biases and bitterness by 1) surrounding myself with the huge amount young, talented people I knew with great ideas and 2) editorially committing to curiosity as the most precious ideal in writing (and in life.)
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I do know that – for whatever reason – I really do have a special knack for identifying the culture and creators that are truly fresh, innovative, even cool among those who can’t comprehend or stand it and the heartbreaking number of those who actualize themselves by trying to act aggressively apathetic toward the status quo. This sense is far from 100% reliable and is certainly not of a greater quality than everyone on Earth, but I would still confidently suggest it’s at least better than most, and – as most of us know – it especially jives with and defines the world of magazines.
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As I did in Spring 2016, I still believe that Extratone is the best way for me to hone my greatest talents and shed my biggest problems – that it is the name I can place on my endless journey to improve myself, which – most importantly of all – will all the while achieve the tightest possible adhesion to the only meaning of “original” with any significance or real world value at all, which serves human curiosity without punishing it in any sense. I could actually just be crazy or completely, irrationally inverted – and I know it sounds abstract and preposterous – but I promise it’s my best shot at one day performing my optimal function for the world.
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The very first thing I did after I’d arrived upon these hypotheses and been abruptly forced to cling to them as my last hope in life was to obsessively search for a single mantra/battlecry I could drill into my memory and could shout under duress – including the temptation to escape the whole lot of it – to succinctly remind myself that I had at least one logical chance at a fulfilling life (and yes, it’s still funny that the chance is, in fact, a Web Site.)
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Scribam quid non legerim is possibly grammatically incorrect to a scholar, but it’s the best possible translation I came up with in my Latin research of “I will write what I have not read.” It’s cheesy, yes, and a bit cringey in the middle of just any old day when it happens to catch my eye where it’s proudly displayed, all-caps, in the footer of our CMS, and – I’ll be honest – I don’t know if I could explain it over coffee to a stranger without turning red and covering my face, as I once could, but it’s (sincerely, in this one case) real gravestone material. (As in, if someone were to read this after my death, they would be encouraged to receive it as a bonafide last wish.)
Big Boy; Big Phone still in effect, words on next Tuesday's update from a withering old man.
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Thanks to this week's September 2016 Keynote, we now know that iOS 10 will be officially released in just three days. I suppose it was a bit silly of me to download the public beta so late in the game, but I did, and regret it much less than I could've imagined.
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I've used my rose gold iPhone 6S Plus more than any personal device I've ever owned. For the first time in my functioning life, I've had no persistent need for a laptop, which is a pretty big deal for reasons you couldn't care less about.
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Ownership of my first generation iPhone trained me to dread new releases. Expectedly, it got less and less usable every time Stevie took the stage. For relevance's sake, I decided to opt in a bit early, despite my assumption that my 6S Plus would show its first signs of struggle as a result.
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Immediately, though, the opposite effect was noticeable. Everything is faster: notifications, app opening/closing, intra-app function, and text entry, even. Smoother, too – so much so, it's almost a shame we've had to use iOS 9 on these devices for a whole year. The effect of such smoothing on my perception should be kept in consideration when reading the rest of my opining.
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Raise to wake is less tedious/more useful than I anticipated, though it's been briefly mistriggered a few times in transit from inside my Moshi Overture Wallet Case (an extraordinary product, by the way,) but it should be noted that I walk and carry my phone rather strangely. With relatively default sleep/wake settings, I did not notice enough mistriggering to have quantifiable power consequences.
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Messages is appropriately-complex for the times, now, if that makes sense. The pressure to “compete” with Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, What'sApp, etc. is understandable, but the execution of their reply is not. For me, at least, there is simply nothing to add to SMS. Its role is purely functional. I wasn't able to try out many of the new features. Not just because nobody else had iOS 10, but because – critically – I could not think of someone I'd be willing to bother with useless garbage like... a doodle. And even if I could've, it's probably actually less trouble to use one of those third-party applications in that Application Shop Apple has been so proud of for so long. For old people like me, even cleverly stowed buttons for unused features are still buttons. It feels an awful lot like an obligatory alteration, not a visionary one, and it's a shame that Apple's losing its awareness of the appropriate time for one, the other, or neither.
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I feel like competence in coverage of Apple is heavily dependent upon the ability to differentiate between the allure of an intelligently blingy feature and the allure of an intelligently functional one. Crude, I know, but ever more essential. Contextual predictions are impressive and surprisingly-clever. It's encouraging to see progress in such simple interactions, but – be honest with yourself – making use of it is actually going to cost you time in the majority of cases. Hate to be excessively meta here, but keep in mind – again – that I am not the majority. I tend to type things out... It's my thing. If this is completely obscuring my vision of any of these features' uselessness, please take the time to add to the discussion in the comments. Discourse is the handiest security in such matters.
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I've loved 3D Touch all along, even though something like 75% of the time, I've been triggering it unintentionally. It's very useful for quickly grabbing web images, but I'm probably more of a thief than you'll ever be. Mostly, I just like the sensation. The curt vibration and brittle illusion of a third interactive dimension have provided more functionality than... its actual functionality. With touch and go, though, I can instantly conjure a concise summary of the current local weather conditions, and a singular story from Apple News. Though I'm undoubtedly going to need to make a conscious effort to remember to use them, anything's a plus when one's affection was already so irrational.
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As to Apple News itself... It's just not the same application. The “For You” roll was amusingly messy before but actual structure (read: functional aggregation) has killed some of its beauty, I'm afraid. It is so much faster, though. We'll actually have to take it seriously, now.
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I haven't gotten the opportunity to really use rich notifications yet, but I can't imagine them actually making anything much faster. Perhaps singularly, I've always found my unconscious navigation to a given application itself to be quick enough to consistently glance over “no, you don't have to leave the app” features.
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I suspect the ability to search photos by content will be iOS 10's most useful addition for myself. A few trials demonstrate that it can differentiate between “nightfall” and “night,” and “clothed” and “nude.” (I have never been naked.) It's the most intriguing, too, because it means more nuanced & controversial search parameters are just a few years away. Search by expression? Even search by emotion. I can't wait until Apple gets to wrestle with the perceived difference between peace and apathy within an algorithmic context.
Big Boy; Big Phone still in effect, words on next Tuesday's update from a withering old man.
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Thanks to this week's September 2016 Keynote, we now know that iOS 10 will be officially released in just three days. I suppose it was a bit silly of me to download the public beta so late in the game, but I did, and regret it much less than I could've imagined.
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I've used my rose gold iPhone 6S Plus more than any personal device I've ever owned. For the first time in my functioning life, I've had no persistent need for a laptop, which is a pretty big deal for reasons you couldn't care less about.
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Ownership of my first generation iPhone trained me to dread new releases. Expectedly, it got less and less usable every time Stevie took the stage. For relevance's sake, I decided to opt in a bit early, despite my assumption that my 6S Plus would show its first signs of struggle as a result.
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Immediately, though, the opposite effect was noticeable. Everything is faster: notifications, app opening/closing, intra-app function, and text entry, even. Smoother, too – so much so, it's almost a shame we've had to use iOS 9 on these devices for a whole year. The effect of such smoothing on my perception should be kept in consideration when reading the rest of my opining.
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Raise to wake is less tedious/more useful than I anticipated, though it's been briefly mistriggered a few times in transit from inside my Moshi Overture Wallet Case (an extraordinary product, by the way,) but it should be noted that I walk and carry my phone rather strangely. With relatively default sleep/wake settings, I did not notice enough mistriggering to have quantifiable power consequences.
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Messages is appropriately-complex for the times, now, if that makes sense. The pressure to “compete” with Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, What'sApp, etc. is understandable, but the execution of their reply is not. For me, at least, there is simply nothing to add to SMS. Its role is purely functional. I wasn't able to try out many of the new features. Not just because nobody else had iOS 10, but because – critically – I could not think of someone I'd be willing to bother with useless garbage like... a doodle. And even if I could've, it's probably actually less trouble to use one of those third-party applications in that Application Shop Apple has been so proud of for so long. For old people like me, even cleverly stowed buttons for unused features are still buttons. It feels an awful lot like an obligatory alteration, not a visionary one, and it's a shame that Apple's losing its awareness of the appropriate time for one, the other, or neither.
-
-
I feel like competence in coverage of Apple is heavily dependent upon the ability to differentiate between the allure of an intelligently blingy feature and the allure of an intelligently functional one. Crude, I know, but ever more essential. Contextual predictions are impressive and surprisingly-clever. It's encouraging to see progress in such simple interactions, but – be honest with yourself – making use of it is actually going to cost you time in the majority of cases. Hate to be excessively meta here, but keep in mind – again – that I am not the majority. I tend to type things out... It's my thing. If this is completely obscuring my vision of any of these features' uselessness, please take the time to add to the discussion in the comments. Discourse is the handiest security in such matters.
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I've loved 3D Touch all along, even though something like 75% of the time, I've been triggering it unintentionally. It's very useful for quickly grabbing web images, but I'm probably more of a thief than you'll ever be. Mostly, I just like the sensation. The curt vibration and brittle illusion of a third interactive dimension have provided more functionality than... its actual functionality. With touch and go, though, I can instantly conjure a concise summary of the current local weather conditions, and a singular story from Apple News. Though I'm undoubtedly going to need to make a conscious effort to remember to use them, anything's a plus when one's affection was already so irrational.
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As to Apple News itself... It's just not the same application. The “For You” roll was amusingly messy before but actual structure (read: functional aggregation) has killed some of its beauty, I'm afraid. It is so much faster, though. We'll actually have to take it seriously, now.
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I haven't gotten the opportunity to really use rich notifications yet, but I can't imagine them actually making anything much faster. Perhaps singularly, I've always found my unconscious navigation to a given application itself to be quick enough to consistently glance over “no, you don't have to leave the app” features.
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I suspect the ability to search photos by content will be iOS 10's most useful addition for myself. A few trials demonstrate that it can differentiate between “nightfall” and “night,” and “clothed” and “nude.” (I have never been naked.) It's the most intriguing, too, because it means more nuanced & controversial search parameters are just a few years away. Search by expression? Even search by emotion. I can't wait until Apple gets to wrestle with the perceived difference between peace and apathy within an algorithmic context.
It is my privilege and my curse to write about every new major iteration to Apple’s mobile operating system, though I skipped iOS 13 last year, which was largely dominated by Dark Mode, the iPad OS fork, and Memoji – which I could care less about, honestly – and didn’t warrant my investment in a Full Post, I felt. The Photos app improvements were very welcome, but I’d departed from iCloud as my primary storage service, so I didn’t have anything relevant to say. iOS 14 is also mostly irrelevant to my own personal use, but represents a more abstract shift in design philosophy that I thought was worth commenting on. For myself, everything about it adds anxiety, beginning with the launch, itself, at Apple’s WWDC 2020, which I watched, live, and Tweeted extensively about.
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I do not want to live on the Memoji planet.
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My technology writing over the years has largely centered around my awe and confusion regarding what I've perceived as a divergent path from the future I once imagined. My closest guess as to this divergence's origin is the announcement of iOS7, with Apple's abandonment of skeuomorphic design in favor of an entirely new, “flatter” UX visual language, which I actually found quite jarring. In retrospect, though, of course I'm glad they did so. I thought this was an importat preface to any thoughts I have about today's WWDC Keynote – they will probably seem idiotic in a year or so (they might to you already.)
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Thanks to The Big Beer Virus, this was Apple's first pre-recorded WWDC presentation (though the word “live” continued to be used on several occasions,) which made it especially surreal. During the wait for the Keynote to “go live,” the stream was occupied by an animated Earth from orbit. As the clock rolled over the hour's top, AURORA's “Daydreamer” faded in and we began to grow closer to this Earth, gradually revealing that it was covered with millions of floating memoji in various states behind their animated MacBooks. Like much of the event to follow, this scene became more and more anxiety-inducing as we grew closer to the mob (keep in mind that I've never really found memoji cute, unlike plenty of folks.) Eventually, we changed pitch dramatically and plunged through a hole in the clouds straight toward the incenter of the spaceship at Apple Park, through the door, down the staircase, and into a completely empty – but fully lit – Steve Jobs theatre, where Tim Cook emerged on stage and almost immediately began to address racism.
This disorganization of Craig Federighi's Homescreen shown in the presentation exemplifies the entire aura of this update: it’s complicated. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn receives this new complication positively in an excellent essay dedicated to the topic, divided into Widgets on The Home Screen, Jiggle Mode and Editing Pages, the App Library, and App Clips. (Yes, in many ways, linking to the essay makes this post redundant.)
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That's what I wrote about WWDC. iOS 14 officially released five days ago, now, and folks are already showcasing some crazy homescreen modifications on Twitter in #ios14homescreen. I would go into detail, but I'm honestly not all that curious about the process, which is unusual. I hope more than anything that I am not loosing my curiosity or playfulness regarding iOS which not so long ago propelled an exuberant exploration of Shortcuts' capabilities during their early days as an integrated Apple property with the release of iOS 12.
Basically, I'm not going to do the full bit, this year, but I'd like to address some of the notes I did take throughout the past few months of the developer beta. Notably, there is simply far less to iOS 14 that's relevant to my life, personally, than any other release I remember, but that's okay. It's just a wee bit more difficult to motivate myself to talk about it. If there's one definite statement to be made about this release, it's that it is additive rather than transformative. As Dieter Bohn so elequently put it for The Verge:
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For the iPhone, the overarching theme is that they're finally letting it get complicated. The home screen starts simple, but it can be complex if you want it to and Apple's also finally putting different elements on top of other elements so you can see Siri on top of your current screen instead of taking over the whole screen.
Yes, I do find the title of that article quite ironic considering what I just articulated to you.
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The title of his penultimate review, additionally, includes the summation “Apple is finally lettting the iPhone homescreen get complicated.” Yes... Complexity. I'll be honest: I've actually had the opportunity to play around quite a bit with Android 11 thanks to Android Studio on my PCs, and I found it tremendously underwhelming as an alternative. On a virtual Pixel 3, the experience was functionally no more than a fucking material design-tasting, slightly varied execution of a smartphone operating system in comparison. I should disclaim, though, that these weeks with early iOS widget implementation – which represents quite a hefty chunk of this release's significance, I think we can all agree – have led me to the conclusion that I personally do not believe in widgets. Or at least – I do not have the usership vocabulary to even begin integrating them into my own handset-using life.[efn_note]I'd elaborate but honestly, who cares, really?[/efn_note]
App Clips: Oh boy... I'm so physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted. Just gonna say no to that one.
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Add widgets to the home screen: I'm going to assume it's Android users who've stigmatised dynamic home screen widgets as a desirable outlet of development resources. I simply cannot fathom any bit of data which would be truly be constructively consumed there, as opposed to unlocking the device and navigating to whatever application it originated from. Perhaps I'm just old and slow.
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Send apps to the App Library: Directly related, actually. Still considering how I assume most folks actually navigate to applications that have been in folders or in secondary+ homescreens to date – that is, dragging down and typing a handful of characters into Spotlight search – I'm not sure an alphabetized listing of all apps is really that useful. I know I'm not alone on this one: iJustine expressed an identical assumption on an episode of her podcast, Same Brain.
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Hide some of your home screens: (I repeat the exact same argument.)
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Watch videos with picture-in-picture mode: Once again, I could definitely be showing my age, but what really constitues watching when you're talking about a fractional segment of a ~6 inch display? You may as well just be listening to the audio, right?
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Pin conversations in Messages: I'm afraid the text conversation pinning feature doesn't really apply to someone like myself, who literally never messages anyone but my girlfriend and my mom. All pinning the conversations accomplishes for me is the obfuscation of the handy in-line timestamp found in the normal list view.
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Mention your contacts in Messages: Jesus... And we're still using fucking SMS?
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Add more variety to your memojis: I still have not figured out how to actually use memojies, practically, so...
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Get suggested smart home automations: I'm sorry... What did you say? I'm not familiar with those words.
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Get to bed on time: Clarification: “iOS 14 works with watchOS 7 (or on its own) to help you get to sleep at the right time each night, with reminders and Do Not Disturb options.” If you were truly at all interested in not being disturbed or getting lots of sleep, you wouldn't have spent $300 on a machine to strap to your wrist who's primary function is to disturb you!
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Translate websites in Safari: Christ... Really? How have I not encountered an issue with this before?
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Search inside apps: There we go! The first item on this list that suggests anyone at Apple actually uses iOS!
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Get more detailed weather forecasts: Dark Sky acquision... All this one does is remind me that Apple's self-restraint could breach at any time and essentially the only competent mobile weather app ever devised could die or be molested into irrelevance.
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Use your iPhone as a translator: Well... Yeah... Anything that convenienctly allows me to reduce dependence on Google, I guess!
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Get more facts from Siri: ...lol
-“Apple says Siri knows more facts than ever before, though it hasn’t offered up any specific examples of something it knows in iOS 14 that it didn’t know in iOS 13—you’ll have to try and test it out yourself. According to Apple, Siri now knows 20 times the number of facts that it did three years ago, and we haven’t been able to catch it out with anything so far.”
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Get cycling directions in Apple Maps: No! Cut that out!
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Plan a journey in an electric vehicle: I'm not joking when I suggest that this fits perfectly into iOS 14's Anxiety Mode Enchancement theme: all this really means is We've added the new Apple Range Anxiety app!
Yes, there are examples of genuine progress. The Guides feature in Maps (seen above) probably could/should have been added a long time ago, but at least Apple executed it quite elegantly. I'm could've sworn sharing your ETA has been possible from within Maps since like... iOS 7 or something, but perhaps I was thinking of Waze. Wallpapers for CarPlay are one of those features that didn’t occur to me to want, but I did/do. Also – though my personal experience with CarPlay has been limited – I can definitely imagine more layout options (“Horizontal status bar”) will be useful in fringe use cases.
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And that's it! All of my notes have now been crossed off! Now I can finally forget I ever spent time thinking about iOS this year... Gourd Bless.
A decade of iPhone has probably ruined my life, but will the 8 Plus finally end it?
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Listen to this review read by Siri Voice 2 below...
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Is my True Tone bullshit on?
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“True Tone” is so forgettable, everybody had to mention it first. Quite simply, it uses an ambient light sensor to fiddle with white balance, warming the colors of the display as an immediately-obvious whole, yes, but an interesting contrast to show off is no longer inherently justified in being called a “feature” in Apple products, anymore. Essentially, no matter who you ask (aside from Jon Rettinger,) you should not buy an iPhone 8, though I did last Fall, not only because I had to suddenly decide on a handset in less than 24 hours, but — if anything — to say goodbye to the form, the operating system, and the tech company which I have depended upon and carried with me virtually every day for my entire adult life. I’d originally decided to abandon this review due to a variety of unexpected circumstances, but Apple and its iPhone have maintained their place in the news with their battery scandal, and a third of a year with the 8 Plus has included some experiences which warrant a send-off before iOS 12 is released, making it (and myself) totally irrelevant forever.
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As the longstanding benchmark of the smartphone industry’s state at any given time, the iPhone can be easy to reflect upon as a product once occupying a state of universal exemption from criticism, but it has, in fact, never been so. As Nilay Patel noted, one might regard the 8 as the last compromise of “basically four years” of the same design. Since launch, it’s unsurprisingly stayed a wee bit too far behind on the spreadsheets for most Android-type folks — not that I’ve ever believed them truthfully incapable of comprehending what it means to package a product, given where their greasy startups all eventually ended up. (You cannot doubt me — I once took a year-long sabbatical from iOS with a Sony Xperia Play, and my authority is absolute.) The rest are trying to decide whether or not to pay $200 more for “the phone of the future,” which knows when you’re watching it, and is only good for playing half an hour of stupid video games before it needs a charge.
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So far, I have maintained that my first generation iPhone was the best handset of all time — one hell of an Email Machine that lasted me close to five years — throughout the last two with actual motherboard exposed to the elements in the corner of its cracked screen. That said, who knows how it’d feel to be coerced into using “iPhone OS 2” as it was called, then, for an entire workday in 2018? Two years prior to bringing home an 8 Plus, I vowed that my 6S Plus would be my last ever Apple device, but this one actually feels like a last hurrah. Though the ability to Tweet directly from the swipe-down notification menu is still nowhere to be found (it’s been gone for 5 releases, now, and would seem to have been forgotten by literally everyone but myself,) one gets the sense that Apple’s efforts to add to the iPhone 8 and iOS 11 were to make amends with us by settling a few debts.
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In part, they did. Native apps got a major overhaul — including Mail, which was startling, considering that I’d been looking at what was near as makes no difference the same UI my eldest phone shipped with. As a result, it alone constitutes my benchmark for an email service, and I have been left without a clue as to what a good one looks like. (Apparently it was really bad?) Since time began, there has always been at least one alternative email app of the moment that tech journos refer to as the must-have, end-all replacement. Edison Mail is currently the smoother, faster, most modular option — at least for another few minutes– but I’ll never know it as I know Mail, and I’ll never want to. Playing around with experimental email apps is too scary. What if I decide once again to kill that massive number in the red badge and need to immediately mark 40,000 emails as read? It took all of my iPhone 4’s 1.0Ghz CPU and proprietary software over 18 hours — how am I supposed to trust a shabby little 6-month-old startup with such an important task? Anybody with a hundred bucks can make an app, you know.
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Why is the App Store now the best-looking publishing software on iOS?
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One might interpret the App Store’s redesign as an attempt by Apple to control this conversation — of both the trending new thing and the old“essentials” that you’ve probably had tucked away in an untouched folder for years. Technically, whoever the hell is writing those gorgeously-presented daily bits has made them a publishing company, though I’m not so sure I’m not the last remaining user who’s continued semi-regularly visiting their “Today” section. If I did want to actually read about apps (I don’t — who does?) it wouldn’t make much sense to seek critical reviews from the faceless boffins behind the platform itself, regardless of how much better it may look than all of the tech news sites, paywall or no.
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Native screen recording could conceivably come in handy once or twice, but I see no reason why the red bar must remain at the top of the render, but it has, which could explain the total lack of any such video in the wild. Front-facing 4K, 60fps capture is impressive, but useless — vloggers all have GoPros or DSLRs, these days, and sharing through Snapchat and Instagram will always be ultra-compressed. (Here are two sloppy test clips — at the zoo, and fishing.)
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Perhaps some have figured out the new Files “app,” but it’s sat on my homescreen for months, untapped, and it will likely remain there for all time as a sort of soothing trophy — a thanks for my legacy iPhone loyalty. My reward for half a lifetime of syncing, scrolling, and tolling? I can now view some of the files on my Mobile Computing Device, and even scan documents in, which is mostly novel (though it is fun to digitize excerpts from physical text.) At some point, I must’ve mischecked a permanent option because all file types now open only in an app that does not recognize them. God bless.
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Somehow, I’ve managed to fill my social circle with precisely zero iOS-using folks. All of my friends and colleagues use Android devices (including Tim’s supercool Nextbit Robin,) which provide a few handy datapoints (like the camera in my fiance’s Galaxy S8,) but deprive me of any significant experience with the ostensibly intoxicating cult of iMessage. I’m constantly listening to and reading tech writers claim that it’s one of the only reasons they’re still using iPhones, but my own food-OS loving biome has forced me to find others, and frankly, I can’t imagine looking at the gluttonous palate of available mobile, cross-platform messaging services (Telegram, now Telegram X, WhatsApp, Signal, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Slack, Tinder?, Google Hangouts, Google Allo, Google Chat, Viber, Skype, Line, Wire, etc.) and thinking… well, none of this will do!
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Honestly — even if I’d actually been at all informed in my haste, the photographic capabilities of the 8 Plus, alone would’ve sold it. It’s not the new filters, gif functionality, or even “3D Photos” — it’s those mythical dual 12MP sensors (which it shares with something called the iPhone X.) They’re no less than infallible. After four months of astonishing capturesin all manner of conditions, I don’t even care how exactly they do it anymore — it’s better to be left marveling. This first example was taken at Keystone, Colorado in the middle of a dark, cloudy Fall night — the amount of light they were able to find — “up to 80% more,” according to Apple — is just impossible.
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The vast majority of the samples in my iPhone 8 Flickr Album were taken within the native Camera app as it ships and left unedited. (Especially before just a few weeks ago, when I discovered Halide.
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Here is an unquestionably sensible progression from which iPhone has never wavered far since its fourth generation set the standard, but it’s one of an unfortunate few. Siri is still useless and silly apart from its “disable all alarms” feature and its ability to sound itself off in response when you’re hysterically screaming and digging for it through the vast plush of a forty-year-old Lincoln. The customizable Control Center makes toggling low power mode, orientation lock, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth less frustrating (note the last two aren’t quite hard switches,) though it should’ve come years ago. Notifications are slightly more sensible -certainly better than they were on Android Gingerbread, but I’ve heard things’ve changed quite a bit since then.
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I have been tripped up by the lack of a 3.5mm audio jack a few times, but it just wouldn’t make sense from a hardware perspective, and the new external stereo capability should refute those who can’t or won’t understand. Yes, it would be nice if Apple hadn’t led the industry to quite such a compromising obsession with thinness — we’d all trade a lotof substance for exponentially greater battery life, storage capacity, water resistance, etc. — but I don’t see much sense in expending your energy holding up signs in Silicon Valley.
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I’ll be here long after you’ve died, and you know why?
-Because I took the time to sync my apps.
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Two years ago, a new generation of social apps and the preposterous notion of a quad-core CPU in my iPhone 6S Plus seemed like the harbinger of a world I no longer understood. Now, most of those services have expanded to the far boundaries of my reach, and I’ve stopped counting chips. Refinement of the hardware design is reverent to the extreme. It’s pretentious, but Apple’s decision to pause on the 8 to consider details like stuffing the legal text in the software and adding a little bit of weight back in for ergonomics’ sake leads one to regard it as a monument to all the devices along the development timeline that have led to this… last triumph. Or, it would have perhaps, had they not sold so many.
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One could argue that good execution of consumer electronic design means minimizing as much as possible the obstructions in the way of the user completing any given task, and the iPhone 8 Plus has surpassed the vast majority of these for myself — and I am, surely, a “power user.” iOS has changed a lot in the decade I’ve employed it — in far too many ways for the worse — but this pair of handset and software have reached my imagination’s limit for what I could possibly want to do. Augmented reality and wireless charging won’t ever have a place in my future, for better or worse. Face ID is much too peculiar. Surely, this iPhone is the ultimate expression of the first and fourth generation’s foundation.
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If the 6S Plus was indeed the key to my immortality, I’m afraid the 8 Plus heralds my imminent demise. Whether or not it’s an early one is for you to decide. This really is my last iPhone.
iPhone and Music: For Artists, Curators, and Enthusiasts
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Reporting from deep within the iOS cult on essential apps/methods for real-life music people.
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Listen to this article read (with some bugs) by Siri Voice 3 below...
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As you may or may not be aware, I’ve spent all of my 2021 so far diving real deep into iOS, considering all that has changed since “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.” I’ve tuned in to the output of explicitly Apple-adjacent publications both old (MacRumors, Apple Insider, 9to5 Mac, etc,) and new (Apple Scoop, MacStories,) which have all metamorphosed in huge, mostly-redeemable ways just as their primary subject has. I have my own pubescent stories of Mac occultism, but I do not consider my relationship with the brand to be an essential part of my identity, as so many do and have. Apple, Inc’s story is spectacular and infinitely-relevant so long as they remain “the most valuable company in the history of the world,” as I so love to describe them. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am often compelled to bring up the humongous contrasts in the historical context of the company – to scream infinitely many variations of the observation that Apple was basically the fucking indie, premium-tier consumer tech manufacturer owned by the Creative Class for the first half+ of their existence, and have somehow maintained that Think Different™ brand narrative as they have definitively become the Big Blue of their time.
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From my perspective, the responsibility for the wellbeing of this utterly-delusional, occasionally very dangerous sentiment actually lies fairly squarely on those of us who consider ourselves better than all of that because of our Debian workflows and their ancient command line utilities. (For the record, this is also 100% delusional as things stand in 2021.) One thing I think we can all acknowledge, though, is that Apple’s image has been inextricably bound with musicmaking, throughout, far more than any other even remotely comparable tech company. Naturally, the business still loves to bring this up all the time in big, glossy gestures. The topical example of note would be the only worthwhile content I’ve yet to encounter on Apple TV+: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which documents the highlights of the young, beloved musician’s prodigious ascension. For what it’s worth, I appreciate some special insights I gained thanks to the film, which I do not actually consider at odds with the truth of its super on-brandness for Apple.
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An interesting take I found from 2017 from a new favorite voice on the business end of tech reporting: “How Music Drowns Apple’s Innovation” by The Information’s Jessica Lessin portrays Apple’s relationship with music distribution and the music industry as a sort of compulsive distraction from its ambitions in serving video content, namely. Lessin points out the everpresent reminders of this obsession:
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And so it is no wonder that Apple’s first forays into original video content fall under Apple Music. It’s worth noting that the first series the company announced—“Carpool Karaoke” is literally about singing; “Planet of the Apps” features rapper Will.i.am as a judge.
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I think I can speak for the majority of my audience when I suggest that the targets of Lessin’s cynicism would be more than welcome, if they were The Whole Truth. Indeed, the most valuable company in all of history retaining an “emotional” attachment to the welfare of music creators might be described as charming or more. As is often the case on The Information, the comments from readers often offer noteworthy insight. In this case, Kevin Swint – who has apparently worked as an executive for both Apple and Samsung, according to his profile on The Information – responded with an important consideration: “…it's possible that Apple's behavior around music has more to do with the company's overall tendency to stick with its past successes a bit too long rather than music really being a core part of its DNA.”
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In terms of business, that’s all I have to contribute, and I shall do my best not to evangelize Apple Music (or more likely, disparage Spotify as one of the most destructive cultural forces of our time,) here. However, I would like to respond to a particular Jimmy Iovine quote from the original Apple Music announcement amid the 2015 WWDC Keynote:
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There needs to be a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery… and if that place could actually accommodate and support the artists who make the music, not just the top-tier artists, but the kids in their bedrooms too, provide them all with a home and a way to engage with their audiences, that would be pretty great.
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Boy, this service Iovine describes sounds an awful lot like Bandcamp, no? The suggestion that Apple should have purchased Bandcamp is a very scary one, from my perspective, but I am reassured by the likelihood that the notion did indeed occur to someone at Apple, Inc. at some point in the past, and was quickly discarded, for whatever reason. I promise not to mention Bandcamp again in this Post, aside from its own two iOS apps: for listeners and for “Artists/Labels” as creator/curator tools.
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I’m going to be focusing largely on the iPhone-bound experience, here, though I did borrow my mom’s MacBook Pro for a weekend to explore the state of music on MacOS and (accidentally) played around with Apple Music on The Television (a surprisingly beautiful experience.) On that note, I’ll hurry up and get specific…
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Apps
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Assuming you’re already an Apple Music user, it’s very possible that you’ve been deprived of the “true” experience on the service provided by the variety of actively-developed but woefully-undercovered app store entries that integrate directly with Apple Music. One of the most glaring discoveries I’ve made so far in my iOS deep dive, this year, has been the absolutely horrific state of Discovery on Apple’s App Store. If you’d thought to search the top charts under the store’s Music category, you wouldn’t find any of the gems I’m going to highlight, here. The credit for exposing me to their existence, in fact, lies with MacStories – a hard-hitting, well-established Apple-adjacent media company piloted by Federico Viticci. At this very moment, their app-centric podcast, App Stories, is in the midst of a special mini-series devoted to Music on iOS/Mac, from which this Post draws upon heavily. For better or worse, they represent the definitive authority on this subject (among many others, naturally,) though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend their various publications be added to the reading lists of any but those most invested in iOS.
There is something uniquely concrete about a purely-chronological feed which we’ve lost in the past 5-10 years in favor of algorithmic curation, generally. The next item in this particular feed, in fact, includes my attempt to explain why Twitter’s hard-chronological Lists feature has sheltered me from the anxiety of the service’s main timeline, now ordered by proprietary (and obscured) formulas. I’d been aware of that dynamic in my own Twitter consumption for years, though. I certainly did not anticipate the impact of the music release equivalent of a chronological timeline as provided by MusicHarbor – an app for iOS and MacOS that acts as a frontend for one’s music library across both Apple Music and Spotify.
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It's hard to remember how we (Apple Music) got here without embarking upon some gargantuan A Complete Visual History of Apple Music-like document, but it must be said that Tim Cook's “next chapter in music” has become a sad afterthought. As far as I understand it, the “streaming war” between Apple and Spotify has long since gone definitively to the latter in statistical terms, which I'd suggest to be an overall positive outcome for Apple Music subscribers, generally. The self-perception within the heavy music consumer crowd of “niche,” “underground,” “obscure” cultural minority should – in theory – push those who believe themselves destined to be different away from Spotify into the handy care of Apple, the absolute champion of this particular self-deception. To be honest – though I write this for all listeners, sincerely – I have found myself in a sort of utopian echo chamber of my own design in music culture terms. My days of waiting through 4+ hours of local openers before rap shows are far behind me, and I consume and engage exclusively with music I find personally redeemable.
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My Apple Music library has become quite fragmented after I lost my entire physical music collection along with the external drives containing my accumulated digital music library in 2017. Still, after more or less starting anew this past December and casually, deliberately adding digital files back into the accursed, ancient iTunes desktop application and restoring some (outdated) versions of my handful of shared curatorial playlists thanks to SongShift (which we'll glance on later,) MusicHarbor currently lists 1433 artists represented across my Apple Music and (very sparse) Spotify libraries. I know this because of a very simple Siri Shortcut I modified which returns a text list of all Artists in one's MusicHarbor library in Quick Look. (Here is my result as of this moment in GitHub Gist form.) According my App Store receipts, I first downloaded MusicHarbor on March 26 – 20 days ago – which is mentionable because of how much I've accomplished with very minimal time investment in terms of curating my own music library thanks to MusicHarbor. As you'll note in the 3rd of the 4 screenshots embedded above, I was able to delete System of a Down from my library – a single function which alone justifies the app's one-time $5.99 “Unlock Everything” fee, to my sensibility. I've also been able to begin following all the artists represented in a few of my favorite playlists with a handful of taps – a task which would literally require hours in the native Apple Music app of old (when one could actually follow artists, there.) On that note, it's time to cite the primary MacStories article you should read, entitled “How I Keep Track of New Music Releases,” regarding Apple Music's performance as a release tracker:
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The ‘New Releases’ section is tucked at the very end of the For You page and laid out as a horizontal carousel that requires a lot of swiping; you can view the ‘New Releases’ page as a grid, which has sections for different weeks, but, in my experience, it only aggregates highlights for new releases from some of my favorite artists. The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.
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Here, Federico Viticci is riffing off a newsletter issue written by music blogger Jason Tate, in which he describes the service's missing tracking functionality as “the single most frustrating part of Apple Music.” Though these points in the conversation are both almost two years old, MusicHarbor remains the ultimate means of tracking new music releases chronologically on Apple's platforms. Though I am personally just three weeks in, the confidence this app has given me in the certainty of its chronological release feed is quite profound. Its integration with one's calendar to track upcoming releases is a bit much for my own needs, but I know personally enough invested curators for whom it'd be a godsend to mark it no small addition.
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MusicHarbor’s only downside is entirely excusable/understandable, in context: it’s a bit clunky. For the sake of this work, I set up a shared Apple Music playlist so I could further demonstrate all the new music I discovered in MusicHarbor. Adding whole albums to this playlist with a single tap feels powerful because it is – I’ve no idea what sort of developer wizardry is involved in such an action, but the Wait Wheel doesn’t feel like too much to endure. Adding a release to one’s library – the other in-MusicHarbor accumulative function – is a bit quicker. It’s important to remember that this piece of software was/is created and maintained by a single human being, though I would expect nothing but improvement, going forward.
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That’s all I have to report on MusicHarbor, for the moment, but I’ll add further MacStories praise from their 2019 MacStories Selects app rewards:
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What makes MusicHarbor special – and, ultimately, the reason why we all use the app here at MacStories – is just how much developer Tanaka understands what someone who wants to know about new music releases is looking for.
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July 2021 Update: The MacStories gentlemen have just published an interview episode of AppStories speaking at length with MusicHabor creator Marcos Tanaka.
On the other end of the spectrum, exploring new digital manifestations of The Music Collection, is Albums, which actually functions as an entire replacement frontend player for Apple Music. Reviewed much more recently by MacStories, it really is best-described as “opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists.” Considering that I installed the app just a week ago and have focused most of my attention on MusicHarbor in that time, I’ll leave most of the commentary to John Voorhees. All I can say, really, is that I see an extremely powerful application, here, for a fairly specific use case: someone who’s listening is largely occupied by albums they already “own” in Apple Music and treasure deeply. The ability to set an individual record’s “Immersive UI Tint” down to the hex (in “Album Settings”) is as in-depth a tool of adoration as I’ve ever seen in a digital music service. Combined with Albums’ presumptuous takeover of actual playback from the Apple Music app, I think I can rightfully say that it was built for the extremely serious music consumer.
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My favorite part so far: the app knew well enough to offer me THE ZRO BUTTON. Telling, I think.
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Others
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Since it’s already quite clear how much this Post draws from MacStories, I’ll let their review of Soor stand on its own (I couldn’t quite justify spending $6.99 just for review purposes.) In the episode embedded above, they also mention Denim – a playlist cover creator I am not personally all that impressed with. There’s also MusicHarbor’s sibling, MusicSmart, which manages the tricky but essential task of adding the metadata retrieval Apple Music should have included all along. The rest can be found in the episode’s show notes. I’m not done with them, but the rest are what I would differentiate as services…
One of the bewilderingly undercovered digital music sharing tools of our kind, Odesli has been my preferred method of sharing tracks/albums/EPs since I first discovered it in 2018. It is not specific to iOS but it isessential for competent music sharing, anywhere, these days, in its magical ability to correctly intersect any given piece of music’s links across all streaming services, known and unknown. To be honest, I thought everybody would be using it by now, but it’s continued to develop with minimal attention aside from Siri Shortcuts developers. Thanks to Odesli’s Public API, dozens of Music-centric Siri Shortcuts have emerged over the past few years, resulting in one of the most useful Siri Shortcuts integrations to be found for real, reasonable human beings. Here’s where Apple-adjacent media and I part ways…
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While current common conversation might point you to Federico Viticci’s MusicBot hyper-Shortcut and/or @gianflo6’s 600 action-strong Song.Link Shortcut, I (perhaps expectedly) would point you to my own, 17-action Shortcut which spares you any selections and simply opens the Song.Link URL of the track currently playing in Apple Music (while also copying said URL to the clipboard.) It’s not that MusicBot isn’t massively impressive and still useful, but it represents a class of super/hyper-Shortcuts which (from my perspective) far-overreach beyond the intended use case for Siri Shortcuts and end up immediately bewildering/alienating potential new users. Truthfully – as Federico singularly acknowledges – they are full applications built atop a less-than-ideal platform designed for relatively simple, repeatable automations. I’ll spare you further opining on this idea until another, potential Post, and instead demonstrate my personal solution.
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In the clip above, you can see I was working on this very draft when LoneMoon’s “kawAii @F” started playing. Naturally, I was compelled to share it on Twitter, so – without leaving Drafts (my writing app) – I called the type-to-Siri prompt by holding the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and simply typed “sl” (I renamed my Shortcut for this use,) running the Shortcut, which opened the track’s Song.Link page in Safari – very much an optional step, mostly just to make sure the match is correct – and copied its URL to my clipboard, from which I could share it anywhere. Since the advent of widgets in iOS’ Today View, I’ve also kept a button for this Shortcut in one of four precious slots in a box at the very top. For those willing to play around a bit, it should be fairly straightforward to configure the end bits to your liking, but it should work out of the box for even those least interested in Siri Shortcuts/automation in general.
As I confessed before, it is only thanks to SongShift that I was able to recover anything of my original, prized, deeply-considered Apple Music playlists. The standalone MacStories article on this one is a bit dated, but I don’t see much change in function in that time. For most people, SongShift’s free service is simply the best way to transfer a playlist between music streaming services. If you find yourself genuinely sold by the features offered by SongShift Pro, I suspect you know more about playlist manipulation than I could ever learn you by diving in any deeper.
Yup… Believe it or not, Last.fm is still fucking scrobbling after 19 fucking years (almost to the day,) and its iOS app still fucking works. What’s most bizarre about this truth is that I did not encounter mention of Last.fm for years until I started noticing it as an integration option in the settings menus of these premium iOS apps. Is this some sort of conspiracy? I’m not sure, but I suppose I might as well insist you follow my ancient account, if you’re still using it.
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alright folks fucking ADD ME ironically or not. this profile is older than all of the cells in my body. https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK
I should also note that not only is the Last.fm iOS app still working, it’s working well, from all appearances, anyway. Though the service no longer includes hosting, itself, it’s apparently still a prime player in the world of playback tracking.
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Music Creation
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DAWs
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What if you actually want to “make” music with your iPhone? We’ve seen iPhone television ads for years featuring amalgamations of musician-looking types playing instruments with cables attached to their handsets, but is the iPhone now a reasonable platform for any sort of serious sound capture? The short answer is no. Who am I to proclaim such an absolute? None other than the motherfucker who’s been messing around with mobile DAWs for 10 whole years. I even “released” an “album” on Bandcamp made exclusively with Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS and inspired by the dangerous life of the contemporary raw milk smuggler. I wouldn’t call it “music,” per se, or an example of what a real electronic producer could pull off in the app, but it does represent its capabilities in the hands of the average user, using mostly default loops.
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While Apple does publish an Apple Book entitled “Everyone Can Create Music” about GarageBand on iOS, it is specifically directed at iPad-bound use. Any serious DAW user uses keyboard shortcuts, which I admit I only discovered recently in GarageBand for iOS. The official documentation is – once again – for iPad, specifically, but most of them still work on iPhone.
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FL Studio Mobile – the original third-party iOS-bound DAW – is still going, apparently. While I did, indeed purchase the original version on my iPhone 4, I remember absolutely nothing about it, suggesting I was over my head, even then. There’s also Auxy, as covered recently in this App Store Story and Reason Compact. I’ve played around with these more recently – since they’re both available in their most primitive forms as a free download – with little to report.
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Capture
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Disappointingly, Apple’s own Music Memos – as demonstrated by Chris Welch from The Verge in the embed, above – is currently in the process of being officially sunsetted and is now no longer available for download on the App Store. As that article notes, users are instead directed toward GarageBand or ye olde native Voice Memos to record high quality audio. However, if you want to take advantage of the stereo audio recording capabilities included in iPhones after the 11 Pro, you must either use the native Camera app to capture video (and extract the audio later,) or Dolby On – Dolby’s own iOS app for recording which – if I’m completely honest – will do nothing but utterly frustrate anyone trying to capture the truest digital audio possible.
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As part of my iPhone 12 Pro Max Review, I’ve accumulated quite a few audio files in various formats testing its capture abilities and stashed them in this folder on The Psalms’ GitHub Repository. Probably the most relevant of these, though, is embedded just above. If you’ll forgive my pajamas, ridiculous piano faces, and general rustiness with the instrument, it demonstrates the “Audio Zoom” feature found in the iPhone 11 Pro and up, which I’ve found to be unfortunately underdocumented by Apple, itself. I added my own inquiry to this post on the official Developer forums asking about it, but don’t really expect anything back. According to “What is Audio Zoom for smartphones?” published on the site DxOMark:
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The main technology behind audio zoom is called beamforming, or spatial filtering. It allows changing an audio recording’s directivity (that is, the sensitivity according to the direction of the sound source) and shape it in any way necessary. In this case, the optimal directivity is a hypercardioid pattern (see illustration below), which enhances sounds coming from the front direction — that is, from the direction in which your camera is pointed — while attenuating sounds from all other directions (your background noise).
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My testing has suggested that the best means of recording unfiltered-as-possible stereo audio with an iPhone is to record video at 1x zoom with the native Camera app and extract the audio from the video file. In the Bandcamp track embedded below, I “mounted” my 12 Pro Max right above my old upright’s soundboard and extracted audio directly from the video file with Audacity. It was then amplified slightly, saved to a FLAC file and uploaded directly to Bandcamp. Of course, it’s worth qualifying that – while I have extensive experience with audio – I have neither professional training, nor any professional monitoring equipment.
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That said, the biggest objection I’ve heard from audiophiles regarding audio capture and manipulation on handsets, generally, has to do with their hardware’s extremely limited capabilities when compared to any sort of professional desktop soundcard. Given the greater argument I've come to regarding the state of consumer tech as best exemplified by smartphone design – that we've come to expect far too much of single devices, and the resulting jack-of-all-tradeness summing their real-life capabilities has become a severe detriment instead of a feature – I must echo, again, that adding “studio” audio capture, manipulation, and production capabilities to our goddamned cellular phones doesn't help anyone. To any user truly hoping to accomplish these things, I say just go home and boot up your damned desktop.
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Other Considerations
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The final episode in AppStories' three-part miniseries on music was just published today, though I suspect – for my audience, anyway – that its coverage is mostly out-of-scope on this topic, largely for financial reasons. Apple's first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow at noon, my time, and is entitled “Spring Loaded,” which – combined with its 4/20 joke date – suggests to me that we'll finally see the release of the APPLE GUN™ alongside iWeed™, but little to nothing in the way of music.
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In the midst of my brief research into The Greater History of Apple Music, I discovered the existence of iTunes Ping – which I somehow missed entirely, along with my Twitter friend Jon Male. I also discovered articles from the company's decision to kill its successor “Connect” from Apple Music, which was reportedly “rarely used.” Notably, this removal also took away what little power Artists had over the narrative surrounding their music on the service. I can see the business justification for all of this (barely) except for removing the ability for users to follow artists.
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The latest Apple Music feature – a “channel” for music videos – also makes zero sense to me, but the launch of Apple Music on the webabsolutely does, especially for Windows and Linux users, who are now officially freed from iTunes (the software) and allowed to use a much more modern Apple Music experience. I prepended “officially,” there, because third-party Apple Music web players have existed as long as the service has allowed the required integration. First, there was Naveed Golafshani's – which is no longer live – but Brychan Bennett-Odlum's Musish is still live and working, as you can see from the screenshot embedded above. Other than the ability to select between two stream bitrates, I can't seen any remaining advantages to using the latter over Apple's own web player, unless you harbor spite toward their handling of the whole thing, which would be entirely understandable, from my perspective.
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MKBHD’s first tech purchase with his own money was an iPod Touch. mine was the original flash drive iPod Shuffle… this is what I mean when I say “I feel old.” it’s not that I’m actually elderly - it’s just strange finding out so often I am older than people I look up to. pic.twitter.com/rbCupcU0R5
As someone who grew up in the mp3 era with a first-generation iPod Shuffle and iTunes, living and dying between iTunes Store gift cards, Apple Music still seems like one hell of a magical deal. In effect, it allows access to all of iTunes for a flat monthly fee. Or at least it would had I never become acquainted with professional independent musicians who've published, there, and have to contend with tedious realities like the process by which one can add those beautiful lyrics to Apple Music tracks, and who's only real means of control/engagement on the service has been removed with virtually zero prospects of a replacement. If, indeed, Jessica Lessin was correct about Apple's obsession with music, it has resulted in very little for any class of music makers, and left even its listeners to seek out and find third-party solutions like MusicHarbor to perform even the most basic personalization one expects from a modern music streaming service without even bothering to amend their App Store's discovery process to illuminate them, or even write a fucking App Story. Despite this, one-to-three-person app teams continue to work on new solutions, to these and other problems...
Seven years ago, the fourth generation of Apple’s iPhone instigated a change in our perception of digital photography. Now – thanks to Google Photos – I’d like to reflect on my favorite shots of mine.
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When iPhone 4 handsets began shipping in the Summer of 2010, I’d been carrying my first generation for three solid years – since its now history-stricken release, in fact – and its age started to become a problem. I’d drop it screen-down on a rock in the airport parking lot just before going back to school for my Junior year, splitting a crack in the screen that wouldn’t quite kill it – it was the demands of iOS 4 on its 412 MHz CPU and meager 128 MB of RAM that would ultimately cease its usability.
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The single 2 megapixel rear-facing camera would surprise one at times, but was never lauded as anything but what it was – a mobile phone-bound sensor capturing very cellular-looking* images, but Steve Jobs wasn’t three minutes in to his iPhone 4 presentation at the June 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference before he pronounced the design’s closest possible “kin” to be “an old Leica camera,” associating his device with photography in its first impression. The equivalent of the first generation’s rear-facing camera could now be found facing you, and the fourth’s primary sensor now shot at 5 megapixels (2592 x 1936) with autofocus and 5x digital zoom, setting a fundamental smartphone sensor configuration standard that’s still adhered to by the industry.
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After unleashing Google Photos upon the ~15,000 images on my home machine’s hard drive last year, I have been constantly reminded of my own photographic history – for better or worse – and regularly shown five, six, seven-year old snaps in a manner that wouldn’t have been possible (or have made any sense) before. Recently, I was astounded to find that I took many of the better shots with my iPhone 4, so I thought I’d share a few from my high-school days in loving memory of my trusty little rectangular companion.
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All taken with iPhone 4, left unedited. View more onFlickr.
In revisiting Disney movies from our childhoods, we stumbled upon a good number of surprisingly insightful sentiments about race and class.
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In the late 1990s, when the dwindling cocaine generation of American high corporate executives had long since left their misogynistic glory days in the Disco era, their ruthlessness peaked. Whether it was instigated maliciously/ignorantly, collectively or individually, I care not. I think we can all agree, though, that the vast majority of American products were awful. When given some thought, one tends to regard it as the absolute low of “American quality.”
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But why not, right? If you’re going to be forced into retirement at any moment, and likely face The Ultimate End shortly after, why not accrue some extra income to ensure you sufficiently entertain yourself in the buffer period between? And really… If you’ve got the nogginism to climb all the way to Chief Executive Officer, you’ve figured out just how worthless your “legacy” will be after your last one-way dip into Nothing. The Ends before The End have long justified any method of achieving them. Good Ole’ Pop has gone from a squeaky-clean young believer to a secretly-Godless fiend and — though he may tell you and the rest of the world otherwise — measures himself only by the gracefulness of his transition’s execution.
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I could probably provide some evidence of the phenomena in the automotive industry, specifically, but I don’t intend to bother.
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After some ancient memories were dug up by I-can’t-quite-recall-who, though, a friend and I have embarked to explore some Disney-actualized relics from the period. To my knowledge, the corporation’s leadership were anything but exempt, and decided to experiment with filling their filmography with a shitload of low-budget, made-for-TV features over their original masterpiece-a-half-century tradition.
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Titles from the deepest and darkest compartments of our recollection are retrieved and cleared of dust for the first time in over a decade: Brink, Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, Halloweentown, Smart House, Johnny Tsunami, Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, Motocrossed, The Luck of the Irish, The Even Stevens Movie, and many…many more menaces to my childhood television schedule.
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I grew up rurally, so the only available alternative to local channels was in the stupendously-tedious delivery of early satellite television. Though it was quite clumsy, it did offer the first accessible program schedule I’d ever experienced, and I remember dreading the sight of such titles and — consciously or not — planning my free time around them. Yet, upon hearing the words, I was intrigued! All that time ago, I watched many of them again and again…and again, so why did I feel the desire to voluntarily revisit them?
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It’s quite simple, actually. I was even more of an ignorant film consumer in my elementary years than I am now. I couldn’t have foreseen that instead of flying commercial jets, twenty-something me would be paying for the affliction I endured for free so that he could construct pretentious and unsolicited arguments about their greater implications.
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That said, we flipped a smartphone — ⚠️ (PARADIGM SHIFT ALERT) ⚠️— for it and so began with Smart House. I have been obsessed with artificial intelligence since those days (no, it was not due to this film,) and was keen for it, in particular, because I remembered it stirring some rare reaction in me. There were a few period spectacles, of course. The online contest addiction plaguing Prickly Phisher, Bewildered Nick’s incompetence in controlling his neglected submissive sadomasochistic desires, and Silkroad Sarah’s ultra-datamouth were enough to entertain us for a few minutes, but there was little more of substance until the last moments.
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When you think about it… ACTUALLY Race War 2.0
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I’d wondered why LeVar Burton had directed a Disney movie until the climax, when full monstrous maternal sentience got the answer to the question “why can’t I just be your mother?” Phisher answered with something like “because you can never comfort us.” Pat grew somber (and smaller actually — I suppose increasing her size was an in-budget method of demonization,) ran her hand through Prickly’s face in a failed attempt to stroke his cheek, and then began cyberweeping.
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(Apparently, it’s suicide for a holographic android.)
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Her final free words were “I will miss you all.”
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If she had been human, such a scene wouldn’t have bothered me a bit, but my preference and fascination with artificial intelligence justified my being actually a bit upset at the reality of the situation. I realized that my vague memory of reactivity was actually in a broader sadness for AI because even then, it was an issue that weighed heavily upon my day-to-day psyche.
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We’ll create them, direct them, and then persecute them for our own ignorance.
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I’m sure the story has been written by countless science fiction writers I’m too weary to pretend I’ve read.
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While I think the sentiment of the film was somber regarding the inevitable fate of Sarah Mouth’s brainchild, its conclusion was aggravatingly ignorant. The last line comes from Tortured Nicholas in response to the question “how’s Pat been doing?”
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Servitude without interference.
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There’s a jewel for ya.
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Next up was Johnny Tsunami, which very nearly unbearable, if we’re all honest with ourselves. It’s entertaining to watch from the perspective of race & class warfare, though. The Urchins and the Skys, and all that.
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I think I’ll make a fan sequel one day — with dearest Brandon’s blessing, of course — involving Johnny Grandad’s assistance in offering Emily as a blood sacrifice to some ancient Hawaiian God in exchange for a total terraformation of the Northeast into a tropical/arid hell hybrid in order to finally commence the delivery of reparations upon the whites for our colonialism.
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When Britain first, at Heaven’s command
-Arose from out the azure main;
-This was the charter of the land,
-And guardian angels sang this strain:“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
-“Britons never will be slaves.”
-relentless, the country keeps
-doors and walls reverberate
-all but rest in summer’s heat
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I remember the dawn and dusk – the open palette, gradiented above
-opposite a front
-overtaking me,
-on the 4030,
-tilling terraces ’round the North 180
-
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growing here is not a war with Earth,
-but a chronological board game,
-won by the punctual
-and patient
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I am neither of these,
-but I am fond of a good emergency
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and it all plays out for me;
-the torrent released in Missouri haste
-big drops turn to steam on the labored muffler
-too much to do;
-getting it over with,
-God cries in heaves, quickly,
-around here
My girlfriend very generously offered to go for a drive with me yesterday evening, though neither of us particularly expected to end up parked at 5:40AM outside a little Diner called Ziggie’s some four hours away from home. I managed to learn a bit about driving apps and briefly flood my Jetta’s intake long enough to stall it after fording some flood water a wee bit too rapidly.
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Since I’ve begun working in Kansas City and occasionally commuting from Columbia, I’ve found incentive to revisit the crowdsourced driving directions mobile app Waze, which I recall being very excited about in early 2016. It’s smoother now, yet devoid of that pseudocountercultural sense in a design sense. Functionally, it is still the most reliable method of police detection I’ve ever encountered – in this Second Era of my Waze usage I have yet to see a single Missouri Highway Parol car sat in the center of I-70 that hadn’t been reported on Waze first – even at crazy hours on weekday mornings – which should be all the reassurance one needs regarding the immediate future of their userbase.
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I'm using Waze to drive to to Licking, MO, arriving at 2:24. Watch my drive in real-time on the Waze map! David Blue on Twitter
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Somehow, I was unaware until this morning that Waze allows you to “share” your route by generating a link to a web app of theirs that will live track your progress. Though I can’t actually imagine too many use cases for this, I still think it’s cool. Anybody who’s interested in stalking my every move should follow me on Twitter – where I’m sure I’ll be sharing more drives from now on – and/or DM me and just ask me to enable 24/7 location-sharing for ya!
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On the topic of mobile apps for those folks like me who’s only real hobby is just fucking driving around, I did actually find mention in a listicle from a real motoring enthusiast’s publication. “Seven Apps That Will Help Improve Your Driving Experience” is not exactly the sort of advisory article I remember seeing in Road & Track considering that it actually only contains one single app even vaguely related to True Driving Pleasure called Greatest Drive.
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Users contribute their favorite routes and with Yelp integration you can either pick a destination to find the most scenic way to get there or find a good spot to eat along the route you've already chosen.
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Of course, it’s nowhere to be found on the App Store, but it sounded relatively foodist anyway.
Apparently the premier mile-tracking app right now is Microsoft’s MileIQ, which I’m going to continue to try because I can’t resist automatically-generated PDF reports, ever.
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I gave my girlfriend administrator roles for my derelict joke Facebook page Boiler Explosion Memes and she’s somehow managed to get it to almost 100 likes / +25,000% impressions in just a matter of days!!!!
The first release version of my only original contribution to the iOS community is now ready to assist when you can't find your phone.
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One of the handful of Siri's most useful features has been the “Hey Siri! Where are you?” command, to which Siri will respond “I'm here” or “here I am!” Were it possible to view how many times one has triggered a particular Siri command on iOS, my personal reliance on it would almost certainly be embarrassing. Often, my handset isn't even obscured from view – it's just faster to have Siri speak up than it is to scan the room. Occasionally, however, my device has managed to become embedded beneath and/or within some genuinely-perplexing series of couch cushions/blankets/briefcase pockets/etc. which require a more constant homing sort of audio reproduction. Asking friends/family to call one's phone is the general goto, yes, but honestly the actual length of time cellular telephones will ring before sending a caller to voicemail in 2021 is ridiculously short, especially when rummaging through Gourd-knows-what. For that matter, most of my peers keep their phones on silent mode, 24/7. What then?
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Since the very first time I set eyes upon Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12 Beta, I have wanted to create one to address this issue in a creative, entertaining, and (hopefully) genuinely-useful way. On that day almost three years ago, I even knew it would be called Marco!, believe it or not. In the past few months, I've returned to the project on and off and ended up with several different versions of varying complexity. One day, I'd like to figure out how to integrate the full extent of my ideas for Marco! into a Shortcut which can be reliably triggered when one's device is locked, but for this first release version, I have included only what I and a few other (much appreciated) volunteers were able to trigger in every situation we could conceive of.
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Marco! Version 1.0 can be downloaded on RoutineHub (which I would highly recommend,) or directly via this iCloud share link. I know it's a bit excessive, but I even created a GitHub Repository just for this Shortcut, seeing as it is undoubtedly the most original I will ever contribute, and the singular one with potential for continued development.
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Download Marco! as is and (as long as you don't rename it) use “Hey Siri!... Marco!” This should immediately run the Shortcut, which includes my voice saying “Polo! Bitch!” followed by five repeats of the flashlight/noise cycle as described in detail below.
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As documented by the Jellycuts file above, Version 1.0 of Marco!'s actions are as follows:
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Turn Low Power Mode OFF
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Turn Airplane Mode OFF
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Turn Wi-Fi On
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Turn Bluetooth On
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Set brightness to 100%
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Turn Do Not Disturb OFF
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Turn appearance Light
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Set playback destination to iPhone
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Set volume to 89%
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Vibrate device (Not currently working.)
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Play my voice saying “Polo!” + a few other items
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Toggle (flash) the flashlight 5 times (odd number leaving your flashlight on constantly unless it was on before the Shortcut was triggered)
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Simultaneously (in the same repeat action) plays three separate classic Mac sounds 5 times.
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The most clever bit about this particular Shortcut is its use of Base64 text to include audio playback. I just fixed a bug on my own Base64 audio encoder Shortcut if you'd like to try it out. Since this version includes my own voice (subject to taste, I realize,) as well as some minor profanity, I do intend to publish a clean variation at some point in the future. If this is an obstacle for you, and/or if you'd like a custom version made with audio of your own choosing, please do send me an email! I would be more than happy to make one for you.
The monumental amount of unsubstantiated gossip and conjecture enabled every day by Facebook is lethal to the human intellect. Can fire be fought with fire?
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Today, after positing on whether or not a pastry was in fact the namesake of the battleship Bismarck, I was told by its owner – a local woman of a far-from-excusable age – that “[I] should be on that big bang show.” Upon such fuckery, I looked her in her eyes and informed her that she'd just changed my plans for the night: I was now going to go home, wrap my lips around the barrel of my Beretta, and blow my brains out. I should've known better than to so jest with a boomer immediately after receiving such glaring indicators of minimal intellectual function, but I fell for the hope – as I often do, to no avail – that such a jarring reaction would encourage reflection on her foul, tragically misled sentiments regarding the general state of youth, and perhaps even spare a peer or two from future tribulation.
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Instead, she called the police.
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Three round cops found me, an hour later, approaching hesitantly. Strangely enough, they were chuckling – maybe to a little joke about all the recent hubbub on the radio covering a recent wave of blatantly negligent medical care in American prisons, though I hope nervous laughter is just SOP when responding to a suicide threat. As all Columbia cops always are toward me, they were aggravatingly genuine and hilariously understanding. I began by simply recreating my interaction with their summoner, quoting her word-for-word, and – I swear to my new Lord – all three immediately released a choral “ohhhhh” in unison. I'll never know for sure if they actually assimilated the reality of the situation so quickly, but it'd certainly seem that way.
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Clearly, I should've threatened her life.
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Despite the day-to-day expression of our recurring wisdoms, habits, instincts, patterns and cycles of cultural metamorphosis in the discourse, the stream of “well, you know they were sayin' the world was going to end when I was in elementary school” to my ear has fallen abruptly silent since the inauguration. Our parents and grandparents are both impossibly fortunate and unfortunate, having to duck out as the most multiplicative (read: sickest) cerebral orgy in the history of mankind will just've begun nibbling on the slope to its climax. We'll be lucky if we'll still be able to articulate our goodbyes by the time they reach the door. Nonsense does a fuckin number on perceived wisdom, but the gaps are widening at a dangerous pace. Tectonic or domestic, we are all straddling expanding space, and the chill of its draft is now stealing too much of our heat to ignore.
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Though it is entertaining in the moment (and otherwise redundant,) it would not be well-to-do of me now – nor was it, then – to leave the conversation in edgy absurdity. Yes, a part of me would like to campaign for Sheldon to be reclassified as an expletive, in disgust, but – as an adult in all-out sprint to make up for stalled emotional development – I must note that such a display of concern should've been at least reciprocated with a bit of explanation, if not appreciation. Still, there are much more appropriate reasons and situations in which to waste public servants' time.
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It's not news – the Theory is providing some ghoulishly skewed portrayal of less-than-forty pseudointellectuals. Obviously, my savior's time was worth very little to her, but the fact that she spent any quantity of anything at all engaging with even a decidedly mainstream generationally ambassadorial bridge could be regarded – if stretched – as the result of a curious seed, which has skyrocketed in human value, as of late. It is undiscouragable. Read the trail a bit, and you'll find that your frustration is simply an expression of the terror that's ignited by the stagnancy of their pace.
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It's great that you've managed to inch over to modern-ish sitcoms from Judge Judy and Independence Day , mom, but you're gonna have toreally pick up the paceand work on following a few body modification communities on the darknet.
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If an absence of solutions are the crux of the blog, here I'm now gloating.
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To whom does the commoner look to for such solutions when they'd prefer not to terrorize their kooky middle age parents into a half century of brutal fasting under vows of silence?
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The Big Thinkers!
-The Men of the Hour.
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Yes, men. All Big Bumbling Billionaire Imbeciles.
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Elon Musk cannot be the Nicola Tesla of the 21st century, or even the 20th, for that matter, because literally every mechanically-minded professional I've ever heard talk about battery technology has condemned it in some manner as an inescapable dead end, developmentally. Perhaps, then, the champion of electrochemical storage is the False Prophet.
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No, I'm not capable of citing research or conjuring Mars-capable spacecraft, but I've been a bit too preoccupied with my country's class war and its 10% adult illiteracy rate. It's all well and good to be privy to romanticism, but it's not the 1960s anymore. Even Howard Hughes would be more concerned for the wellness of the species than our continued reach for the stars, were he still alive.
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Well. Maybe not...
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Charles Lindbergh would be, though.
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We spent the 1990s preparing to rid ourselves of history because the smartest among us foresaw some facsimile of the renaissance we are currently experiencing. If they'd been shown a glimpse of some statistics on the volume of media we consume, they'd exclaim of their pride – no doubt – in their species' capability to progress, and perhaps even their own contribution to it. However, extended observation of an average American's day-to-day life would be lamented, in disgust, and a huge portion of the blame can be placed on one t-shirt-touting cyberyokel: Mark Zuckerberg.
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His name is stupid, his spawn is ruining my life, and he continues to insist upon saying shit that frightens the bejesus out of me.
But Fuck, himself wouldn't be at all intimidating without his money. The scariest bit is the lack of class in the criticisms of his intellectual influence. Farhad Manjoo's attention has been diligent and premium as a Times er's should be, but the same occupation bars him from authoring with the color of unsubstantiated claims.
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Mine does not.
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Elon Musk is not an apologetic genius. He's willing to joke about his intellectual distance from the planet and its populace on Twitter. Apparently, his mind's even surpassed the need to punctuate. Crazy.
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Google is well on it's way to becoming the neo-Vatican... yada yada yada, but they're too far gone – I do not have the expertise to address them. Fuck, though, is a singular short-sleeved, Even Stevens -haired young man without so much as private office space (even though his sentiments on breathing room at home are obviously inverse.)
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Clearly, it's all just to protect him from the truth: The Apostle John'sBook of Revelationis about Facebook. Fuck's cyberchild is the horseman, the beasts, and the plagues, stuffed into one tyrannical website.
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And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.
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If I can repeatedly trigger accidental voice calls on Fuckbook Messenger, don't tell me it's not possible to inadvertently live stream myself on the pot.
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The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.
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Of course, it's unlikely that Mark's essence was bred entirely of evil, but – like Tump, in many ways – he is an excruciatingly wealthy idiot. Though he is spending 2017 touring the United States, he doesn't seem to be all that interested in actually closing the gap between himself and the rest of us, which suggests that he only wants us to throw us off his extra-terrestrial, xenophobic scent. I can't imagine what The Mothership would really want with my Amazon browsing history, though.
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And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe.
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Just to be clear, he is notThe Antikhristos.
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He'd better not be, anyway.
-I'd be absolutely Livid with Lucifer if his choice of a figurehead for his Big Plan was such a Fucking dork.
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I mean... if Fuck wanted to spend his time crafting 6000-word essays, why the Fuck didn't he just build a Fucking CMS back in his Jesse Eisenberg era instead of the actual weekly-updated tower of digital Babylon? Surely, Satan would know better than to waste resources and pulverize creativity by ordering his Demonic Dev team to release regular builds for build's sake rather than on a per-need basis, but that'd be because The Tempter is an authority on incentive s as thoroughly as Fuck isn't.
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If you’re equipped with the privilege of literacy, you’ve been reading a lot about Fuckbook’s political consequences, recently. Frankly, it’s about Fucking time, but I’m compelled to emphasize that the most significant motor driving the politik is fueled by the eldest, fossilized portions of our thought meat. According to Manjoo, “the News Feed team’s ultimate mission is to figure out what users want,” dipping in Facebook's ocean of action data, searching for a soul.
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Yet another Fuckism that suggests he's an alien: everybody knows that nobody knows what they want.
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There's a central mechanic of our brains that by nature wreaks a whole helluva lot of contradiction. If you've ever mentioned ADHD with your doctor, or know a hypochondriac/adderall fiend who has, you may have heard it described as “the lizard brain.” Simply put, it's the brain stem, and it's responsible for the most basal and primitively emotional instincts and habits; an anti-intellectual agitant, arguing at all times for the course of action with the most immediate gratification. The Great Clickbait War of 2013 was a startling demonstration that revealed the strength of the hold Fuckbook had (and still has) on these reptilian bits – the true location of its power.
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“In surveys, people kept telling Facebook that they hated teasing headlines. But if that was true, why were they clicking on them?”
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Volition is the Word of the Day. Here, we must once again invoke an ancient parable from the wise foretellings of the Disney film, Smart House: when dealing with human beings, boundless compliance quickly leads to abject misery for all parties involved.
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Mindlessly, habitually, endlessly clicking... this is how we die.
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Something about Fuck's direction is fundamentally poisonous to the human mind. Yes, he is assuredly too Fucking democratic, but misinformation is far from the only form of evil his creation has assumed. If you can jog your memory back a bit, you'll remember a much wider variety of brain-rotting filth.
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In lapses of their existences' finitude, the 40-something second cousins of the world may still send you the occasional Can Crunch Saga invite, jarring you back to Jr. High in 2009, and forever associating themselves in your mind with the horrors of mortality and f u c k b o o k g a m e s.
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Elon is a more likely candidate, but I'll leave those differentiations to the not-idle cult masses.
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More than one sixth of all living eyes see Fuckbook every single day, placing its consumption behind only eating and drinking as the most universally human activity.
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Mr. Fuck achieved his vision and became perhaps the greatest purveyor of words who's ever lived. He's taught (or... is teaching) us something very profound about ourselves: capability is not the whole of the equation. Ability on its own cannot guarantee growth, but it can often result in decay. Discussion does not inherently lead to connection. Population is not a cure for isolation.
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That said, I must begrudgingly admit to you that I, myself am one of the 100 million users who've depended upon a “very meaningful” Fuckbook group for a “physical support structure” for which I have Fuck to thank.
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I've spent half of my existence watching cheesy barnstorming movies, whirling around die-cast biplanes, seeking out stories from old pilots – military and commercial, and eventually trained to become one myself. As regular activities at young ages do, aviation became deeply ingrained into my identity, but my local community is very sparse – it's not exactly cool, these days. On Fuckbook, an unofficial group for members of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association has allowed me to stay connected to the rest of the world's Soaring Nerds, which is no small deal. It's the only forum which I am compelled to participate in with 100% sincerity and emotional effect.
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Photos of members standing proudly next to their first airplane, or of adolescent students in a similar pose after their first solo, or of three old white rubes on a hangar picnic, laughing around a fold-up table full of rudimentary ham sandwiches in front of two gleaming Stearmans...
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They tug around on my heart like nothing else in life can.
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I stopped flying lessons at 16 because I began to see behind the naivety of my childhood perception of what it meant to fly commercially and realized that I was unequipped for- and uninterested in the sort of challenges it presented. I haven't flown in seven years, but the community will always have a tremendous dividend of my core being.
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These days, not a single person in my day-to-day life knows or cares about aviation, which wouldn't be laudable whatsoever – it's not exactly the most relevant goingson at the moment – were it not so emotionally necessary for me.
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A few days ago, a member shared a photo with the group of Charles Lindbergh's modified Ryan cockpit, captioned “what airplane am I?”
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In my youth, Lindbergh filled my closest equivalent to the 'childhood hero' role. My grandmother bought me a first-edition copy of The Spirit of St.Louis from a small town bookshop when I was six or seven, and I carried it literally everywhere with me until middle school. I watched the Jimmy Stewart film tens and tens of times, and I cried when I saw the Spirit in the flesh at the Smithsonian, yet I've never had an informed conversation about any of it with another human being. It really warmed me to see how many of the comments were correct answers.
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Breaking news: it's nice to know that there are other people on Earth who give a shit about the same things you do.
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Again – aspiration should always be encouraged. This is Fuck's vision for his creation, and it is feasible, even for myself. At least his public persona – however valid or invalid it may be – is making a huge effort to have positive consequence, even if his idiocy is imbuing itself within all of humanity.
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Fuck is too powerful to be exempted from responsibility for what Fuckbook's done to the Western psyche over the past decade, but – like the Christian god – perhaps all we need require is his repentance.
A safari through the enchanting space of third-party Mastodon clients on iOS.
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Apple's second virtual World Wide Developer Conference came and went as I wrote this guide – you can metaphorically picture me looking up from my machine having overheard the news of the 2021 Apple Design Award Winners announcement. Perusing through them, I saw two I would have voted for, myself: CARROT Weather – the beautifully vulgar, grumpy bitch frontend for your preferred weather information service, and Craft – perhaps the most innovative take on word processing of the past two or three years – listed under “Finalists.” (Read: losers.) The most positive personal discovery of (all?) WWDCs: an app called Be My Eyes, which “connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call,” along with an exceptionally crafted, cross-device accessible-as-fuck TTS solution called Voice Dream Reader. However, a double take in games from Genshin Impact and the fucking League of Legends game certainly sours the mouth and suggests yet further just how much Apple, Inc. has sold out.
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The continued prioritization of Growth for Growth's sake over any and all other considerations (namely, users,) is not unexpected from even the most valuable company in the history of the world, I suppose, but there is an actor at this point in the story who is catastrophically and demonstrably failing to fulfill their role: all I really know is that technology media has fallen into a trough of total uselessness when it comes to qualitative, authoritative analysis of consumer-targeted software. The necessity of this guide – and the bizarrely silent ignorance of even the “fringes” on its subject – is unimaginably severe. Before me has been (for years, now,) the “answer” to a Jolly Big Load of what tech and marketing types lament in more and more existential language, yet hardly any of the humans with the most to lose from their negligence – regular, casual social media users – have been delivered to these experiences. The story is not being articulated. The journalism is not being done.
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I know you almost certainly did not arrive here to hear one motherfucker's complaints about WWDC, but – as with everything Apple, Inc. does – every morsel of curatorial expression/discrimination/favoritism from The Great Money God within this platform must be scrutinized and criticized. Quite frankly, I found myself completely at a loss as to how not to dwell on the Discovery Disparity, here.
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Despite how deeply I've gone into iOS this year, I do not believe myself to be a qualified judge of software design, but I no longer believe Apple to be, either. Regardless of the revenue-related controversies of late, Apple have simply become terrible stewards of the App Store in every imaginable sense. Scams and blatant intellectual property theft abound, while the majority of the most innovative entries I've ever seen remain entirely obfuscated and uncelebrated by all of Apple. Inc.'s mechanisms. If you required an explanation for the amount of time I've invested into App Guides – a space to which I never would have imagined intentionally bringing The Psalms – I hope you can understand.
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I must confess: I have been meaning to write this app guide since even before I interviewed Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko on the morning of his Big Press Day, just over 4 years ago. I’ve exhaustively explored different means of convincing my own longtime Twitter friends to move, over that time, with very little success. Eugen, himself, published an official blog post at the beginning of February detailing his plans to open up onboarding by way of “an official Mastodon app that is free to download and that is specialized in helping new users get started on the platform.” As a Patreon supporter of The Mastodon Project (full disclosure,) I've been testing this app (see preview shots at the very end,) and am quite smitten with it. That said, I thought it might be worth going over the third-party options iOS users currently have available to them, largely because the offerings are each innovative and mature applications in their own right. (Also, it’s become quite apparent that the normal tech media sources you’d go to for such a guide aren’t going to give Mastodon the attention it deserves.)
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Obligatory(?) Context
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I originally intended to be as clinical as possible in this Post, having realized its potential as the singular comparison of its kind to appear in search results for new and potential users of Mastodon. From my perspective, Mastodon has long since surpassed regard as a novel social media experiment who's function is to prompt academic conversations about decentralization, open source, ad tech, and federated social's solutions to all of the Big Web's Big Boy (proprietary) Problems (though I have been compelled to invest significantly in that very conversation.) In the less intellectual hours of my day-to-day life (read: most of the time,) Mastodon is nothing more or less than my favorite place on the internet. It is a relentless delight which I only lament because I want to share so much of it with my friends, but have continued to fail in my efforts to articulate that Mastodon is not a compromise; it is a better social space.
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If you didn't know, this seems to have become my general shit, for lack of a better term: the ethical considerations of open source/“alternative” software are very important, yes! ... but they are far from the whole, and they are not a requisite for new users. The second of this World Wide Web Blog's fundamental considerations, in fact:
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The Open Source/Open Web community continues to struggle with their brand image (if you will) in both old and new ways that needlessly alienate (and sometimes obfuscate) some of their most important contributions from the average user. Technology media has failed in their responsibility to address this issue.
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The blog on which you're reading this, in fact, is federated on ActivityPub. If you so chose, you could be reading it in any client capable of displaying large bodies of text. The crucial point, though, is that you didn't need to know that – you could very well go on reading it on the web in total ignorance/apathy regarding Federation.
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Oh boy, here we go... No. I did not want to say anything ideological – I wanted this Post to function as little more than a pretty screenshot showcase and simple associative list responding to all of the Reddit posts I've seen to the tune of “is there an iPhone app?” As I explored them, however, I was reminded of the sheer creativity the “alternative” software community is capable of. Even the roughest of these considered apps seem unable to be faceless – sorting through the obscene amount of (unlabeled) screenshots accumulated over the past weeks of testing in my Recents folder has been so much easier than I thought it would be because of their relentless originality. If you've actually used any iOS applications and/or browsed the singular App Store from which they can be acquired in the past 3-4 years, you're undoubtedly skeptical: what we might have called “feature overlap” at one time has become all but the platform's core ethos. If you're the sort who enjoys screwing around with apps, generally, as I have for the whole of iPhone history, you have grown accustomed to disappointment.
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so! I found a way to actually find the apps you’re looking for on the App Store! the search function in this dev-facing tool *ACTUALLY WORKS*!!! https://t.co/XrsStvXq57
Regardless of who is to blame, we can all agree that the App Store is currently oversaturated nigh beyond usability with mediocre entries built from the beginning with zero apparent ambition toward original function. This, alone, wouldn't be so problematic if Discovery were not so completely and totally Fucked (except when dev-facing,) but I needn't comment further on that subject at the moment – I'm just trying emphasize how absolutely unheard of it is for a single protocol/service's third-party client representation on iOS to be so thoroughly special. It was astonishing to find all but one or two of these apps in a functional state, actually. In all my equivalent experiences downloading the entirety of a given service's API-supported palette (e.g. IRC apps, topically,) an all-too-significant purpose of whatever ends up getting published is simply documenting the ~20% of available titles that actually work at the given moment. (I'd have mentioned the “best [service/task] iPhone apps for [year]” listicles found in online publications like Digital Trends were it not for the percentage of them in which it's clear the author did not actually download some/most of the apps listed‽‽‽) Perhaps due to iOS 14.5's implementation of ATT, all of the Mastodon apps I could find and test (not counting non-English language-supporting apps, in fairness' interest) are currently functioning.
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So, if there's virtually zero chance a new Mastodon user might download one of the apps we're about to consider and find it broken, what practical function remains for this guide? Hopefully, to establish a SEO catch-all for such users from a non-automated source less associated with the project than the official apps list. Those for whom Mastodon is still an unfamiliar subject should find the collected imagery intriguing, hopefully.
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The Big 6
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My first step in writing this guide was to post a thread on r/Mastodon soliciting thoughts on third-party Mastodon apps from other users, who expressed a lot of love for Toot! and Metatext:
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Toot is just a joy to use. It has a little too much sometimes (it actually contains little mini games...which really aren't needed), but the experience of using it has some really clever UI twists. -u/mikepictor
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Pragmatic Code's Linky was also mentioned by multiple respondents. It's not a client, but a bridging tool for smoother URL sharing that integrates with iOS' share sheet. I did not have time to try it, myself, but from all accounts, it is an obligatory mention. So too is the GitHub Repository/List I created in order to “formally” offer a list with much greater brevity and zero editorialization.
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First, let’s begin with The Big 6 – those apps The Mastodon Project, itself, has seen fit to list on joinmastodon.org.
Dag Ågren‘s Toot! is not only my personal app of choice – I would (and have) go so far as to say it’s the single most innovative mobile social app I’ve ever encountered, largely because of its jacknife-esque instance selection. It’s held a place in my phone’s dock since the day I first downloaded it, for this and many other reasons. While one might find bugs/loose ends (understandably) exploring the functions of other indie social clients, within Toot!, they will only find little delights, like its wholly unique Share Sheet interface.
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Toot! is extremely beautiful (despite its unfortunate name,) and I am quite superficial in my taste. It’s Obsidian theme (which may or may not be related to the topical notetaking system of the same name) is especially gorgeous.
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In my cacophonous attempt to compare the notifications of all available Mastodon apps simultaneously, it's worth noting that Toot!'s always came first. Its charming custom audio alerts also make them my favorite by far.
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They're not just cute: in reflection informed by a newly-considered function of these apps – serving as representing the network as a whole – it occurred to me that Toot! audio alerts playing from my iPhone have prompted more first-time conversations about Mastodon in the wild than I can count. (Seriously: they should be considered an onboarding mechanism.)
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In my experience, it’s also the most robust of the lot – as in, it is very much the exception rather than the norm to encounter any sort of error or other obstruction in normal, day-to-day use. My own real reservation applies to the entire selection discussed today: I wish Toot! supported Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts.
I originally had high hopes for Shihab Mehboob‘s Mast – which used to look very different from the way it does, today. That’s almost certainly to do with its ownership changing hands at some point (no, I do not have any further details on that story, unfortunately.) That’s not to say the current app isn’t a worthwhile offering, it’s just far less visually ambitious than the original I remember. However, it’s also significantly more reliable.
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They were there last time I checked, but Mast isn’t owned and maintained by me anymore so not sure.
The Original… Genesis… If Amaroq was not the first Mastodon app on the App Store, it’s certainly the oldest to survive. Its GitHub Repository’s first commit dates back to April 17th, 2017. While you’re there, you might note that it’s the only one of these entries coded entirely in Objective-C – the near-40-year-old language originally underpinning iOS before Swift’s birth in 2014. Amaroq was the first Mastodon app I used and remains the strongest free option for iOS users. It’s been nearly a year since its last update, so its missing a few narrower functions like Bookmarking and Polls, but the core features it does include are rock solid. The only wild card: what the fuck is Awoo Mode???
For better or worse, @rinsuki’s iMast will require either a basic grasp of the Japanese language, or the patience to translate its menus and work backwards. (OCR came to mind, but I’m not quite dedicated enough to try it for this guide.) Assuming Google’s translation of its GitHub Pages site is correct, iMast is also Open Source “under the Apache License 2.” Unlike Amaroq, it appears to have been built in Swift from the ground up. Unfortunately, that's about all I can comment on, though I would very much love to hear from any iMast users/Japanese speakers and will update this Post accordingly.
Daniel Nitsikopoulos' Mercury represents yet another entirely original direction in Social clients. It's fresh and “opinionated” in its explicit lack of support for instances that “promote abuse and harassment.” From all appearances, this appears to be the singular source of negative reviews on its iOS App Store page. It's also the other option to offer widgets integration (in a single form, currently,) and custom audio notifications, though I couldn't capture a sample. Its Trello Roadmap and Feedback Repo are public but mostly inactive. As you can see in the grid embedded above, I absolutely adore its Scoops theme and find my $0.99 Tip 100% worth its custom icons.
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Unfortunately, the state of Mercury's App Store reviews prompt yet another essential economic/editorial consideration. The one in the very center of the image embedded, above – from “FeralDandelion” – is the singular one I will allow myself to address. It is true that Mercury straight up refuses to authenticate or federate with a substantial amount of specific Mastodon servers, but it is exhaustively explicit about this from very get-go. Its single-page Help document includes a detailed, up-to-date table of every single blocked instance and the specific justification for each respective instance's presence on it:
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Mercury takes a zero tolerance stance on abuse and harassment and as such does not support many instances that promote abuse and harassment.
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Let me be clear: the practical manifestation of this position is exclusively positive. The Mastodon project has long outgrown the sort of fixation on ideology for ideology's sake that even Lucky Linus himself has no patience for. Instead, thank Gourd Mercury's developers took the time to better your social experience! In response to statements like the pullquote above, I expect *only* thumbs in the air from this point, forward.
Metatext is perhaps the buzziest of all these apps – well-praised in every space I could find conversation on the subject. It's developed under Justin Mazzocchi's software studio, Metabolist and is as Open Source as it gets! (As per my hardware keyboard shortcuts crusade, I added my own issue requesting support.) u/GummyKibble noted that “it looks like a native app on both iOS and iPadOS.” This term – native – seems inextricably linked with Metatext. I vaguely understand what it means, and I do agree, but it's worth noting that I speak with some privilege, having compared all of these apps on the top performing handset Apple currently has to offer. In many ways, it is the most frugal of the new offerings, especially, yet it strikes a keen balance between function and delight. I think “native” can be translated as generally of a stout, sturdy disposition, thanks to the care put into honing said balance.
I'm not entirely positive which Mastodon app was actually the first on my iPhone, back in 2017, but I know for sure it was either Amaroq or the dearest, infinitely-colorful Tootle. Its App Store Page Version History suggests it has not been updated in 14 months, yet the app – which was apparently “Designed for iPad” – appears to be working just fine. There are some overlapping UI elements, but they're barely noticeable. Were it not for the new dev-facing store search tool mentioned above, I would have assumed this app long gone, to be honest, but using it again has somehow managed to genuinely twinge my nostalgia nerve.
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In my search for any extra-App Store representation other than Tootle's Mastodon Account (which last posted the day after my birthday, last year,) I discovered Tootle... for Linux. Since I am a dedicated and thorough person, these days, I spent several hours messing around with Linux Virtual Machining until Lubuntu finally functioned just so I could show you what it looks like. Below is a screen capture of Tootle bordered by the most Macish LXQ desktop bars included in Lubuntu and even wearing the new official Apple System Font, SF Pro. Still, I think you'll agree... Tootle for Linux is not related to Tootle.
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Personally, I find this a profound shame – I think more apps should be as colorful – and as color configurable – as this little, mysterious Mastodon app. I created the theme you see represented in the frames embedded above using The Psalms colors, naturally, and the whole process took less than five minutes. Play around with it as I remember doing, all those years ago, and you'd be surprised how hard it is to create an unusable color theme. What I find most shame in, though, is that Tootle appears to be completely invisible in regular app store searches, now. (And by “most shame,” you know I really mean entirely fucking unacceptable.)
I found my way to the only currently in-development entry on this list thanks to my Mastodon friend wakest. iOS developer Shadowfacts (who also maintains shadowfacts.net) is working on their considerate, distinct app, Tusker in this self-hosted Repository. In #tusker on Mastodon, you'll find a few poignant praises from Pixelfed founder and principal developer Dan Sup, which – from my perspective – are especially high, indeed.
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Tusker's color customization options are technically... well.. not infinite, like other apps here, but the end result of their (obviously, very considered) selection will be a net win for 100% of users over that alternative, I believe. It is definitely of a similar philosophy to Metatext, but unquestionably more ambitious. Out of the lot, testing Tusker was the singular instance in which I found myself considering a “replacement” for Toot! You, yourself can use Tusker right this very minute via Apple's beta distribution system, Testflight, via this invite link.
Installing Roma for the first time led to a puzzling quest with a particularly pleasant end. I noticed fairly quickly that the iOS app was a re-branded release of what used to be Mast. My first instinct upon this discovery was to DM Mast's original developer, Shihab Meboob, on Twitter, but frankly, I've already bothered him enough there over the years, so it's understandable that I didn't hear back. When I downloaded the desktop app I found on Roma's web page and noticed its similarity to Whalebird, I decided to use the site's contact form to inquire about what exactly was going on as gingerly as I could. Happily, I received a reply just minutes later from Leo Radvinsky, head of Leo.com, “a Florida-based boutique venture capital fund that invests in technology companies:”
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Hi David,
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In both cases we funded the original developers of both Mast and Whalebird to create a branded whitelabel app specially made for Pleroma. The idea was to make Roma a cross platform brand/app. It didn't really work out so now we're working on a new app from scratch called Fedi for iOS and Android and releasing that as open source.
I think Roma has been removed from the app stores as it's no longer supported.
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Let me know if you have any other questions
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Though my hopes for the original Mast to live on in Roma form were more or less dashed by this message, the suggestion that someone is investing actual capital into federated social is certainly worth celebrating. If Roma is still available on the App Store as you're reading this, I insist you download it immediately. It represents an incredible and original attention to detail which should not simply be forgotten.
Naturally, the app inheriting the work/resources established by Mast and Roma – known by Fedi – should be next up for discussion. Hopefully, my relative lack of experience with Pleroma – another ActivityPub-based, federated social network – won't let you down, here. After a brief shock from the uniqueness of Fedi's UI passes, one immediately notices how beautifully it is animated, wholly disregarding my recently-acquired preference for as little animation as possible. Perhaps more than any other app discussed here, Fedi feels uncannily bespoke in a way which iOS apps almost never do. It is undoubtedly the result of a very specific vision – to disregard the whole modern template for social apps and completely reimagine the archetype. Personally, I'm not sure if it would be easy to get used to, but my tastes/habits in this regard are very much the result of the past decade of proprietary social apps' blandness. Going forward with substantial financial backing and the talents of whoever it was that got it this far, no doubt we should all have very high hopes for Fedi.
DUDU (or “嘟嘟,” which translates to “Toot,” appropriately,) definitely wins for Cutest Iconography. It's a non-English-native application with exceptional English support, which I personally appreciate very much. Compared the entries immediately above, DUDU represents a much more modest interpretation of what a Mastodon client can offer. It’s robust, free of over-animation, and – most distinctly – very wide, which might have something to do with the “designed for iPad” subtitle on its App Store Page.
Yet another “Designed for iPad” entry, Naoki Kuwata's Tootoise is defined by its custom incoming post rate accommodations and its gorgeous Solarized theme. Its “Max number of new arrival posts” setting ranges from 0-400, allowing one to freeze their timeline entirely from any accidental (or habitual) Pulls to Refresh (set at 0,) load 400 Toots from such a gesture, or anything in between (at 40-Toot increments, anyway.) The advantages of this specification become immediately apparent when one actually begins to explore it, especially for those who have come to Mastodon after feeling overwhelmed by Big Social.
Yet another entirely one-of-a-kind experience, the slightly-mysterious Stella is listed as a “Mastodon, Twitter & News Client,” and is notably one of the two apps on this list which do indeed support Twitter! More than that, it is the first app I've seen in a very long time that allows one to simultaneously post to two separate social services (Twitter and Mastodon, in this case.) Without documentation, it's a bit clunky, but its customizable timelines feature also allows one to combine multiple “sources” (social accounts) into a single timeline.
B4X is yet another quite perplexing entry. The “Developer Website” link on its App Store Page leads to b4x.com – a web page entitled “Anywhere Software.” The GitHub icon in its footer led me to discover a repository which is labeled as such to lead one to believe it is, indeed, the development space for the iOS app we're discussing, but does not contain a single .swift or .pbxproj file – universally essential for iOS apps, as I understand it. Regardless, B4X appears to be built atop Anywhere Software's “rapid application development tools.” I like its elemental simplicity and nice 'n' wide post display.
Isao Takeyasu's Oyakodon feels a bit like it originally began as a school project, and I mean that in the best possible sense. While it’s probably the least polished of the lot – and therefore likely the least viable candidate for the role of your primary, daily-driven Mastodon client – is is far from a throwaway application. Some evil component of Takeyasu’s mind was clearly let loose if only for a moment, for Oyakodon’s Facebook-style theme is reminiscent enough of Big Blue to alarm. The volume of its design definitely peaks in its Cute theme, which is so violently loud I could not help but extract its color palette to illustrate just how furious its creator must have been.
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Truly diabolical design, there. For better or worse, Oyakodon doesn’t really work very well in its current state, but it does work.
I very vaguely remember happening upon StarPterano in my very first moments on Mastodon, so finding it still published on the App Store – buried as it was – brought me a particular sort of joy. If I’m not mistaken, it holds a special personal accolade as the only iOS app which has caused me to involuntarily shriek. This might sound like an insult, but it is actually the peak of my praise. I believe my knowledge of iOS development safely allows me to suppose that StarPterano was built with complete disregard for any established UI element libraries. That is, the familiar toggles and buttons developers rely on to standardize the iOS experience were cast aside entirely in favor of handbuilt, translucent buttons of a sort of neon quality which call menus and text entry fields no less alien to the platform. The most astonishing bit, though, is that it works. On my 12 Pro Max, it’s exceptionally smooth, in fact.
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I would imagine those real iOS developers among you should find StarPterano’s GitHub Repository particularly interesting, considering. In the interest of preservation, I have forked it as well, and fully intend to dive in to its code, one of these days. The audio player embedded above cites a three-second .mp3 file in the repository which perhaps once accounted for the “Sounds” toggle still found in the Settings menu of StarPterano’s current build. I couldn’t get the app to reproduce it, which is actually what set me on the hunt that led to the repo.
Ore2 is another (apparently) non-English-native Mastodon client focused on consolidating Mastodon and Twitter within a single space. Alongside Stella, it's the second of the first two apps I've come across in a very long time which allows one to post to both services simultaneously. Considerable work was obviously done on making its timeline-based tabs switchable with touch. Personally, I very much prefer my current crossposting configuration via this (generously-public) web tool, but I am all but certain those users exist who will find Ore2’s setup preferable.
Inadvertently, I have saved the best story of the lot for last. Developer and researcher Zhiyuan Zheng documents both the narrative context leading up to the creation of his first app, tooot, as well as the philosophy behind its design in “Building my first app – toot.” His reference to the downfall of a prominent social app in mainland China called Douban – and the “Douban Refugees” which resulted – are alarmingly missing from all English news organizations save for a single Quartz article from October 2019. He eludes to a “boom” of Mastodon adoption in the past few years and cites a lack of “user friendly mobile clients” which I can only assume to be a conundrum specific to China.
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“With the aim of contributing to the community and to this movement, I decided to take my quarantine time to build an enjoyable mobile client for Douban Refugees,” he explains. He notes that decentralized platforms have universally rejected algorithmic recommendation if for any other reason than “without centralized computing power, such [a] recommendation service is also not that feasible.” “Adapting” back to a linear timeline in a manner which still encourages exploration was clearly a major design consideration for tooot.
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The core consists of 3 needs: 1) what I can read; 2) what I can write; 3) what I have done.
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Obviously, I very much appreciate Zhiyuan writing publicly about his thoughts on decentralized social and sharing specific considerations in his app’s design and look forward to continued updates.
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Get Bent, Big Social
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A few universal truths among these apps stand out as obligatory mentions. First – in comparison with their Proprietary, Big Social counterparts – they are all ridiculouslyfrugal. Not a one weighs over 40mb, while minor (unexplained) updates to the official Twitter app often exceed 100mb. They are all astonishingly robust – I did not experience a single crash in the course of normal testing these “alt” social apps- even from the beta builds – while I distinctly remember the official Twitter app crashing several times over this period, even after I deleted and reinstalled it (an accepted maintenance requirement for anyone using it heavily for its entire history.) Also, on the topic of the platform, itself, they are also made absurdly interoperable by the ActivityPub standard. My PixelFed posts show up seamlessly on their timelines among content from Diaspora, Pleroma, and Mastodon, itself.
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yup… it’s me again, bringing up inexplicably huge updates to the Twitter app.
. . and pointing out… again… that speculation wouldn’t be necessary if Twitter just published actual release notes. pic.twitter.com/IZFDYPLAvS
The overwhelming impression I was left with after testing these apps was one of unwavering competence, cleverness, and true innovation. How many different ways can I possibly conjure forth in order to communicate this? I, David Blue – the vain fucker with a precollection for the most superficial variables of software design so healthy that I have on multiple occasions designed whole, years-long workflows around specific applications entirely because of their available color palettes... It is I who requires you to take a good fucking look, because this list of decentralized, largely open source, federated social software is a goddamned fashion show.
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Continuing to Explore Social Ownership
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This couldn't be “just” an app guide – I think I have thoroughly accepted this, by now, just in time for some conclusionary remarks. Somehow, the subject I originally tackled specifically because I thought it would be quick, rudimentary, and straightforward has become yet another personal journey. It'd feel a bit preposterous to declare any one of these apps to be life-changing, but – in every sense of the term, in contemporary, inevitably social media-informed life, they do indeed constitute a form of radical, ideological wellness. Each of them managed to remind me of a different minute delight found within a developer-user dynamic made up of thoughtful and effective minds working to contribute original and valuable experiences, first. Most noteworthy of these little freedoms: the realization that the upcoming “official” Mastodon app along with any future new options are exclusively a positive thing for the user... None of these apps were conceived to gobble up market share because the market is fundamentally, inevitably, uncompromisingly infinitely shared. I don't know anything about business, but I do know that relief from the burden of considering proprietary multivectored development intentions has been personally breathtaking. I can only hope the reciprocal compensation is happening at even a fraction of what it “should” be.
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From another essential direction, I hope I have communicated that they're far from curious, “niche” or vanity side projects, now. When I used the term “mature” in introducing this little arena, I very much meant it – these “alt” social clients developed almost exclusively within single-person-led projects now make the Twitter for iOS app look ugly and fucking broken. “Giving social networking back to you” has never been more resonant. Yes, it really is Toot!'s “take a break” blue screen, Amaroq's mysterious Awoo mode toggle, iMast's music app integration, Mercury's configurable timelines, Metatext's native solidity, Tootle's custom colors, Tusker's Digital Wellness controls, DUDU's elemental readability, Roma's quiet resurrection of Mast's UI bravado, Stella's utterly bizarre visual departures, Fedi's odd animated UI behaviors, Tootoise's consideration of pace, B4X's unfathomable elements, Ore2's parallel timelines, tooot's development story, and Oyakodon's adorable rough edges that have made my online life measurably... immensely better, these past weeks. At the forefront of this perception is undoubtedly the comparatively extensive control over my social experience as a user offered by the diversity of mobile experiences these applications offer.
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Those of you who haven't yet signed up for Mastodon: ==you are missing the fuck out==. I am being actually pampered, now, in World Wide Web terms. You are so welcome whenever you're ready – the water is nice and warm, as they say.
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...Party One
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Yes, you are looking at the currently in-development “Official” Mastodon app on iOS, coming very soon to the Awful App Store. You can join me in testing the app right this very moment by contributing to the Mastodon Project's Patreon. Though I do plan to publish a dedicated review on its release date, what I'll say for now is that it's very cute, includes the most gorgeous media player I've ever seen on an iOS app, and is as distinctly clever as any of the third-party family we've just visited, all whilst maintaining an expert's aim at its evangelist purpose.
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The surprise that threw me over the edge to a genuinely pitiful extent: the official Mastodon app already includes full Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts integration on iPhone!
Since you last heard from us, the federated social network Mastodon has scaled tremendously in usership and steadily grown technologically into an incredibly robust and dynamic platform. Perhaps inevitably, Eugen Rochko and his gaggle of open source developers have continued to embarrass the living fuck out of Twitter's team – at least for those who've continued to pay attention (i.e. those of us whose sense of aspiration has yet to perish.)
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I planned on getting ahead of an innovative wake in iOS development by watching closely for the first “premium” Mastodon clients to come out, which I suspected (quite correctly) would carry the first substantial risk-taking on the part of plucky social apps to be seen on the goddamned App Store in what felt like eternity. Unfortunately, I've ended up far too deep in screenshots/insights from Toot! and Mast, creating a bit of an overwhelming obstacle in comparing and/or reviewing the two without sinking deep in my regular, pretentious hole. (Though both of them are absolutely gorgeous, fascinating, and impressive projects which you should invest in and follow if you're interested in the future of federated social whatsoever.)
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That said... I'd like only to mention and briefly demonstrate the first premium desktop Mastodon client, Mastonaut, which I had the privilege of experiencing momentarily last night.
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In the interest of brevity (and because I was unable to continue fucking around for any length of time,) I'll just list some observations:
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The entire GUI experience is distinctly uncluttered (or perhaps barren, depending on your subjective desires from this sort of thing,) but duplicates dearest TweetBot's functionality impressively well considering its age as an independently-developed product.
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Keyboard shortcuts! Fuck me, God.
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I love the live-updated instance directory search (above) as a second landing for first-time users.
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Though I did actually have to repeat the first-time login process after freezing and subsequently force-quitting Mastonaut, I think you'll probably place the blame on my own immediate and inpatient window management mania considering how smoothly it all went the second time around.
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To be honest, Bear, Spark, and recent other beautiful Mac applications beckon me to buy or hack myself into MacOS again. If I have time in the near future, I'll show you why.
As we bid farewell to the Miata’s third-generation, sizing up its top trim summarizes its legacy.
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I recently had the chance to drive the facelifted 2013 Mazda MX-5. This is the first time the looks of the perky roadster have changed since the front-mounted smile became an all-out grin of insanity in 2008. They have once again dulled it to what I would call a smirk. The new front end blends with the rest of car more than it has in the past. It seems to have grown a bit more serious. In fact, with black 17-inch alloys on a glossy black (creatively called “Brilliant Black,”) this example is the most aggressive-looking of any Miata I have seen.
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That's not to say it's aggressive in the slightest, even in such a scheme. This car is in the “Club” trim replacing the previous “Touring” designation as the top-of-the-line option. This selection adds ridiculous three-leaf clover side badges, red stitching on the seats, red stripes on the dash and sides, along with a price tag very near 30,000 USD.
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So I present you with my first problem with this particular car....it's a contradiction. The MX-5 was never intended to look serious. That grin was there to convey the primary attribute aspired to by its creators; joy. It's designed to be joyful in driving and the exterior of previous generations did a good job of communicating what the car is all about. Unfortunately, it seems they have decided that it's time for the roadster to grow up. Frankly, that's not going to work.
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Now, to the drive.
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For this year, the car has been lightened, the braking response quickened, as well as the throttle response in manual-equipped cars. Unfortunately, I was only able to drive the 6-speed automatic with optional pattle-shifters. Given that this is my first drive in an NC (third generation) MX-5, I can only compare it to my own NB.
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Immediately, my passenger and chaperon starts the process of opening the optional retractable hard top. Open air is this car's natural environment, and it appears that somebody got busy making sure its occupants never notice. Wind buffeting has been drastically reduced. We were able to maintain conversation beyond 70mph without necessitating shouting thanks to a much taller wind brake behind our seats. Unfortunately, I couldn't really hear much of anything from the 158-hp 2.0L 4 up front, even with liberal amounts of right foot burying. It would seem the optional dual exhaust outlets are rather pointless then.
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Getting in the car, I had expected the experience to be ruined by the 6-speed auto. Buying a Miata with an automatic is sort of like going on a scenic vacation without a camera. It doesn't necessarily ruin the immediate experience but you'll always have some regret regarding the subject in the future. The pattles add some of the fun back in, but I prefer the Golf GTI's arrangement of right side-shift up, left side-shift down, while the MX-5 has both functions on either side of the wheel.
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It took some deliberate self-coaching to get used to, but it won't effect your daily driving experience. Another plus; when in manual shift mode, it is truly manual, meaning the transmission will allow you to exceed the redline. It may sound trivial, but being nannied when you're first told that you're in control can be a major annoyance. (Looking at you, Kia Forte.) It's disappointing that Mazda chose only to up throttle response in manual-equipped cars. This one most certainly needed it.
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The original Miata was built on a philosophy of communication between driver and machine, summarized in the Japanese phrase “Jinba Ittai,” meaning “rider and horse are one.” Being an MX-5 owner, this philosophy is very important to me, thus my expectations for the steering were very high. It was very disappointing, then, to discover that it has been very nearly ruined.
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The leather-wrapped steering wheel was comfortable, yes, but not very generous in revealing the road. In corners it felt jumpy, imprecise, and unsure of itself. The same lack of self-confidence was noticeable in a straight line as well, along with a nervous fidget. Keep in mind, I am comparing this to roadsters of the past, not to other automobiles currently on the market. It would take a global nuclear war to make the MX-5 less fun to drive than a Toyota Camry.
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Though it has lost communication and soul, the Miata has gained a more comfortable suspension and oodles of storage space. The trunk is massive for a roadster of this size, and the example I drove was equipped with an optional storage compartment extending behind the seats, especially handy for CDs, candy, and the like. The center console contains two reasonably-sized cupholders obscured by a sliding door that will inevitably lead to annoyance in single-drink occasions. Mr. Cunningham also pointed out to me that the track on which the door slides appears vulnerable to crumbs. Only time will tell, I suppose.
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In general, being inside the car is a much more comfortable experience, albeit a boring one. It seems to me that the MX-5 has “grown up,” forgoing fun for comfort and practicality. And is that not exactly the opposite of the direction it should be moving? It was never meant to be an aggressive-looking performance car, and it will never do well as one. It will never be luxurious enough to be a true touring car, either.
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Its soul has made it the top-selling roadster of all time, and I'm afraid it's losing it, bit by bit. To be honest, if you're attracted by the values on which the original Miata was built, I would recommend a Subaru BRZ/Toyota GT 86/Scion FR-S. The recommendation does not come lightly or easily.
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Until Mazda gets wise about what it's doing to the beloved little car, I'm afraid it's headed down a path that will mean losing a grip on the niche it's held for so long, and that's quite saddening.
A broken Mazda RX-7, that lived in a shed on the family farm, was David Blue's first real experience with a car. Years later he got to try out a living, working example of the same car – and, unlike Max Prince previously found, loved it. – Speedmonkey Matt
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My bond with one particular example of Mazda's best-selling Wankel-powered sports car began on the Midwestern farm where I grew up. A 1980 model LS-trimmed example, originally painted in “Solar Gold” (one of only 500 made, it turns out). It had been sitting in a small shed, condemned to rest there only a few years after my birth from issues with the fuel delivery system. The search for a mechanic capable of working on the rotary engine without destroying it was eventually given up.
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My father told me stories of his flings with the car. He used to say the police would pull him over simply because it “looked fast.” Naturally, as a small boy, the stories took a hold of my imagination. The RX-7 held a very special sort of allure. It eventually became my ideal image of “racecar”. Its environment added to the intoxication. The lack of electric power to the car, its immobility, and the stories I was told combined to create the aura of a fading, forgotten superhero. Tired, abandoned, and only necessitating the help of a friend in order to bring it back to glory.
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It wasn't very long after toddlerhood that I took to spending a large portion of my free time sitting in the RX-7, practicing rowing through the gears and making engine noises with my mouth. I still remember vividly how delightful the experience of simply sitting in that car was. The dash layout, the feel of the steering wheel in my hands, and the smell of the interior are all deeply etched into memory. It was almost as if I had a deeper perception into its soul, a capability that I feel has been lost.
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Much before I had expected, I had the opportunity to meet this hero, so to speak. I encountered a partially-restored 1983 Series 2 example, slightly different than my RX-7. Different enough to subdue my worries of adultery to the car I grew up with, but similar enough to be an important discovery.
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I was treated to the complete RX-7 ownership experience, including a dead battery and a difficult, choked cold start. Perry, my host, was kind enough to pay for the fuel for the drive with money out of his own pocket. After ensuring that we would not be walking back, I pointed that very long, very 80s nose toward some local back highways.
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I had never driven anything powered by a Wankel, and the contrast of the RX-7 compared to everything with wheels I had experienced was stark, and noticeable immediately. The feedback normally received from a piston engine is not felt, due to the fact that there is no more conversion from vertical to rotational motion, a rotary engine (as implied by the name) involves no vertical momentum. It's not that the engine refuses to communicate with you, it's just speaking an entirely different language. The whiny exhaust note has an odd property to it that can be heard from no other source. It conjures up images of the mysterious, angry pair of triangles whirling about in their cage. Purely imaginary, of course.
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Because the Wankel is so smooth, I found myself wondering why I should shift up. A piston engine makes you anxious when you push it close to the redline. Most send the driver a variety of auditory and tactile messages indicating that they must either shift up, or face a molten tie rod to the head. The RX-7, however, gives no such indication. When close to the redline, one hears only an excited whir. The result (forgive the upcoming Disney analogy) is an almost magic carpet-like experience. It's as though the power simply materializes before you with no apparent source or sacrifice.
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For me, the tranquility of the engine eliminated the reservations I had for speed. It's an incentive, in fact, to keep the needle in the upper portion of the tachometer as much as possible. The car had only 100 hp and 105 lb-ft. of torque in 1983, and has no doubt lost a few along its journey. Frankly, I'm thankful it's not more powerful. Otherwise, there wouldn't be room to fully enjoy revving it to its limit.
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Though I have decided that a transmission with multiple ratios is unnecessary when coupled to a Wankel, the 5-speed manual in the RX-7 was quite a treat. It's very notchy, with a mid-length throw. The well-spaced ratios paired with a very light, but engaging clutch made rev matching pleasant and natural.
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Unfortunately, the steering in the car I drove was quite loose, likely from wear. It is unassisted, though, and was at one time very engaging, I suspect. Given that it is a sports car from the 1980s, driver communication is a result of the engineering, not vice versa.
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The driving position is actually more relaxed than it looks, and the interior is a thoroughly enjoyable place to be in. This particular car had a factory-installed manually-adjustable equalizer mounted beneath the stock head unit. A useless, though interesting, novelty that quickly rids the occupants of any doubt as to when the car was built.
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The RX-7 is too often overlooked for what it is; a very special piece of automotive history. It's an experience completely unlike any piston-powered alternative. And for me, it's much more than that. My RX-7 represents an entire childhood's worth of dreams and a sort of companionship, even. My experiences with it were a very large influence on my drive to pursue a career in automotive writing. Driving one did change my perspective, but not at all for the worse.
New Microsoft Office features, the PowerToys Run Preview, and a test of Edge Chromium.
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I have no idea why I signed up to attend Microsoft's virtual 2020 Build Conference, but I did. I thought I'd add my End User commentary to the mix. Sorry. My first event was called “Every developer is welcome, with Scott Hanselman and guests.” Hanselman is listed as a blogger and podcaster living (of course) in Portland. I'm not a “real” developer, but I know what Microsoft Teams is, and I recognized the event as a desktop screenshare of his calls with different Microsoft employees. There was a child invasion and a dropped phone. I also noticed the icon for the “new” Microsoft Edge browser in his taskbar and realized that I hadn't downloaded it yet. I remedied that for the conference's sake – I thought it only appropriate that I try to use as much Microsoft software as possible in this context. I also installed the new PowerTools Run preview which I mentioned in my tips post.
Build allows an attendee to build one's own event schedule, but I neglected to find those focused on what I really care about: Office 365. As reported by The Verge, Microsoft Fluid is going to change a lot:
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Microsoft’s Fluid Framework sounds a lot like Google Docs, but it’s actually Google Docs on steroids. Microsoft is so confident it has built the future of productivity, it’s now open-sourcing its Fluid Framework so the rest of the world can help shape what it has created.
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There's also Microsoft Lists, which is reportedly going to revolutionize SharePoint Lists into something more modern and useful:
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It builds off the existing feature in SharePoint, and will let you track progress and data to organize your teams, potentially making the company’s offerings more streamlined and productive.
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Microsoft Edge Chromium
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As an Office 365 administrator, I basically only use Edge for administrative/management tasks. Otherwise, I can't imagine a reason to use it over Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, Chrome, Opera, etc, but I thought I'd give the “new” (as of January) Edge a tryout for your sake and make it my default browser for a day as well as Microsoft's Bing search engine. There's also news specific to Build: Edge is integrating with Pinterest, of all things:
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Now, Edge will feature a Pinterest-powered tool that will show suggestions from Pinterest at the bottom of a collection. Clicking on that, Microsoft says, will take users to a Pinterest board “of similar, trending Pins so users can quickly find and add ideas relevant to their collection.” Users will also be able to export collections to Pinterest.
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I'm in no position to “test” a browser, but the new Edge is noticeably faster at rendering pages and much much smoother when navigating between tabs/preference windows. It looks much more like Chrome, which makes sense. Perhaps because my install is absent of third-party extensions, opening new tabs and windows was much faster than my other browsers. I recorded a ~2 minute demo of normal browsing on my Surface Laptop 2.
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In terms of touch support, Edge remains the only acceptable browser on Windows 10. If you've spent money on a new PC recently, chances are your device is touch-enabled. If you're like me, you've already disabled it. If not, you'll find scrolling and navigation in Edge have improved tremendously – it's like an entirely new browser because it is.
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Because Edge used a different rendering engine than Chrome or Safari, it meant that it would sometimes have problems on websites. Testing a website against multiple browsers has always been difficult, and because Edge had so little uptake, it meant optimizing for it often fell off the priority list for web developers.
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I really like how easy it is to mute audio from tabs and how much better my CMS is rendered. I still prefer Firefox's method of tab switching (by last-used chronologically instead of in the order presented.) The reader view is smoother than its competitors and offers a beautiful selection of themes as well as the best “Read aloud” feature in the business.
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I'm not going to quote you measurements – check out Computerworld's browser review for that – but I can say that Edge Chromium is using more RAM than Firefox but a bit less than Chrome. Office.com also looks and works incredibly well. Overall, I'm extremely impressed with Edge Chromium and the improvements to Bing. As of my experiences today, it's the fastest and smoothest web browser I have, which is a complete flip from that of the old Edge.
Microsoft's Surface Laptop 2 Was Built for Me but You Should Buy One Too
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Assuming Jesus Christ is in your thoughts this evening before yet another anniversary of his birth, I am infinitely astonished by the truth in what I’m about to suppose with you. If the Son of God was living today, most of us have agreed for a long time now that he’d use marijuana recreationally – big fuckin whoop. I think it’s far more interesting and appropriate (we all know his birthday was wholly reconfigured into a consumerist holiday long ago) to speculate on how he’d behave after finding himself inadvertently in the market for a new laptop within the ~$1000 range (following a stubbed toe whilst walking on water incident, perhaps.) Surely, it would not be entirely holy for him to opt in to the Foxconn-complicit world of Apple, Incorporated, nor the openly-blasphemous one created and exuberantly grown by Google LLC, and I’m afraid he’d be too much of an End User idiot to integrate any of the sparse Linux-dedicated hardware available. In May of 2017, however, Billy Gates’ old Microsoft finally released “the laptop we’ve always wanted them to make,” but could its recent update be truly worthy of our Lourde and Saviour? Or your newly-enrolled offspring? Should you sprint downstairs and swap out the new MacBook Air you just bought?
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From an entirely valid perspective, an observer might declare my last two months of 2018 to be an outright shameful period defined by hypocrisy and traitorous betrayals. After finally taking the time to explore the full narrative surrounding Linux and the bloody tale of Microsoft’s cruel genocidal destruction of countless creative software projects throughout computing’s adolescence (see: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish,”) I eventually declared myself “100% Open Source” and began outlining an essay designed primarily to express that Linux is finally ready to be the operating system of the people without succumbing immediately to the brand of cybercrackpot illegitimacy associated with the L-word in the minds of the general public so readily thanks to decades of misinformed, condescending neckbeards. Such a feat would require entire new planes of cultural awareness and dialectal delicacy, yet certainly result in zero personal reward from even the best possible outcome, yet I proceeded to ponder the subject very deliberately all the way through October because I genuinely believed in a new democratized future of computing. 2018 had been my Grand Awakening to the idyllic possibilities of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) across the whole applied spectrum from office suites to social networks, yet – as two thousand eighteen comes to an end – I’ve managed to find myself among the most jaded, soul-sapped tech community I have yet encountered: Microsoft Administrators.
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Complimenting this Linux-laden culture in which I was not so long ago deeply embedded was a confused and frustrated outlook regarding what I felt were excessive and completely idiotic sacrifices across the industry’s hardware design to the greedy, gluttonous god of Lightness. It seemed only reasonable to Myself As Consumer that the entire buying public should exclusively seek designs prioritizing greatest possible performance and battery life, even from portable computers and smartphones, so I assumed my perspective on this updated iteration of Microsoft's most laptopy Surface laptop – which exists in large part to compete directly with Apple's beloved (and just-updated) MacBook Air – wouldn't be at all useful. However, a few weeks ago, my employer prompted me with a sweet sweet ultimatum: for the sake of a tax break, I want to spend ~$1000 on a laptop for you as soon as possible. Yes, I know I should consider myself a very fortunate man – this wasn't even the first time I'd been surprised with the “hey, I want to buy you a laptop but it has to be today” experience, and may even be considered a sort of sequel to my Tales of Whirlwind Manic Consumerism, but it’s ultimately one of the most idiotic strategies to achieve a major purchase decision and completely inadvisable for anyone on a budget. Still I was indeed thankful to be put in a nearly-identical situation of Consumer Electronic haste, and have come to be especially appreciative of the specific time I was approached as such: just one week after Microsoft launched the Surface Laptop 2.
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Considering the vast majority of its users are trapped inside my television, there’s no harm in covering the Surface brand with our virtual palm for a moment. If you’ll indulge me so, you’ll notice that Microsoft has actually delivered unto us The Laptop II – as in, the sequel... the successor to every other laptop computer yet conceived... but does this one machine truly represent the second coming of the Notebook Christ? Naturally, it would be a bit zealous to stand behind this extreme statement with 100% sincerity, but there truly are certain elements of this Personal Computing product's execution which do indeed will its user to expect and/or desire from others in coming years. As I've stated before, I also simply cannot help but be jazzed by such bravado from the mouths of even a company with as crooked and hateful history as Microsoft's. (Note: no other technology company has actually achieved what Microsoft historically has in this regard, and hopefully none ever will again.)
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I must be honest: it hasn't yet been two months and I've already scuffed and perhaps even stained the beautiful maroon alcantara surrounding my machine’s touchable body, but it’s occurred to me that I might draw upon the vast library of automotive interior tutorials available on YouTube – and even purchase some of the alcantara care-specific products they recommend – in order to really maintain the exterior of the Laptop II. After all, alcantara was undeniably car culture’s material first. I should also confess that objectively, the Surface Laptop II is the best-suited computer for my personal uses that I’ve ever owned or used for any length of time. Subjectively, I don’t think all of the hardware design touches that make it so – like its keyboard layout, divine 3:2 aspect ratio, and particular I/O complement – have yet had the chance to seduce my emotional brain into truly loving it as much as I certainly should by any reasonable measure. For my own sake, I hope I’m able to fall in child-like infatuation with its magic, but in the interim, I believe the coldness of my heart should hopefully preserve any useful commentary I might have to add. Though this is undoubtedly the most timely review of a hardware product I’ve ever published, I’d still ask that you indulge my perspective suggesting the importance of considering it part of a package with its operating system, considering that the whole of tech media would’ve unanimously declared it the year’s “best laptop” were Apple’s aging, but still widely-adored MacOS absent from the frame.
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I've tested a bunch of laptops this year, running the spectrum of 2-in-1s, Chromebooks, MacBooks, gaming laptops, etc. Everyone's needs are going to be different, which is why there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all for laptops. But enthusiasts’ laptops aside, I strongly feel the Surface Laptop 2 is the best laptop of the year. And by that I mean the best laptop for most folks' needs.
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With as much humility as possible, I must add that I myself am anything but “most folks,” yet my experience so far with the product has been one of astonishing compatibility and battery life. Using recommended power settings, the Surface Laptop 2 endured four hours and twenty-two minutes of a workload it wasn’t particularly designed for including heavy web browsing, image manipulation, brief audio/video capture with OBS, and moderate subsequent editing in Audacity and OpenShot. Dan Seifert – Vox Media’s “only Windows user” – reported “about seven hours” of Microsoft’s claimed 14.5, but frankly, I don’t know what any of y’all are doin – I’m just thankful this machine is a better marathoner than any other I can recall owning. While we’re on the subject, I consider Microsoft’s inclusion of a magnetically-attached power cable and unassuming auxiliary USB charging port on the attached power supply to be personal godsends – further evidence, even, that the Surface Laptop 2 was actually designed to be nice to use. For the sake of those readers actually in the market for a new laptop who’ve somehow found themselves here, though, Raymond Wong’s review for Mashable is the most thorough offering you’ll find – it’s quoted front and center on Microsoft’s web page for the Laptop II, even – but it’s important to mention that his critical comparative perspective predates the late launch of its ultimate competitor, the new MacBook Air. Rather pitifully, however, his colleague’s “good, but not great” resolution suggests that Apple failed to challenge Microsoft’s relatively moderate update enough to warrant any revision, and that Mashable as a publication stands by my new laptop’s Best of the Year title, for whatever it may or may not be worth to you.
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If the new MacBook Air came in at the same price as the old one, it would be a steal. Sure, you pay for the privilege of being able to use macOS on the Apple ecosystem. But in years past that also meant access to cutting-edge features and design. As pretty as the MacBook Air is, there's nothing that innovative about it. In today's Apple, it seems, privilege amounts to just staying current.
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You won’t find many others who regularly invest editorial merit in publishing 2500+ word laptop reviews anymore, which I’d concede is plenty reasonable in the Surface Laptop’s case, at least. Perhaps your first point of comparative entry should be a barely-dated conversation between Kara Swisher, Lauren Goode, and Dan Seifert on Too Embarrassed to Ask regarding the original’s odds of truly competing in the “premium laptop” segment (if you’d prefer to hear from those who struggle to take it seriously, that is.) Assuming the original product direction of the Surface line still stands, Microsoft doesn’t actually intend to sell at high volume, especially when it comes to this runt of the marque, which does not hesitate to omit itself from the popular discourse of the moment surrounding tablets as the future of all computing to which all of its siblings have contributed so much. Though I shall always remember my dearest Libel (the special edition Spectre x360 with which I built most of Extratone) with great respect and deep fondness – I think it’s even worth mounting on some sort of plinth – the significantly-cheaper Laptop II has already demonstrated true value in its “premium” segment bragging rights with far superior materials and build quality. If you’re looking for the prettiest possible slice of magnesium lightness but aren’t the sort to have followed the story of Microsoft’s first venture into personal computer production since it began in the last year of the Mayan calendar, it’s worth your while to read Joshua Topolsky’s projections of the project’s impact on the popular narrative surrounding Microsoft from history’s freshest possible perspective: the eve of the first Surface tablet’s launch.
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The entire tablet was designed in-house by Microsoft's teams, and if you believe what was said in the presentation yesterday, design and functionality in hardware has suddenly become a big deal in Redmond. That's a big shift, and it's an important one. The announcement of the Surface shows that Microsoft is ready to make a break with its history — a history of hardware partnerships which relied on companies like Dell, HP, or Acer to actually bring its products to market. That may burn partners in the short term, but it could also give Microsoft something it desperately needs: a clear story.
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A pungent stigma festered from Microsoft’s history of inadequate and inelegant public relations (especially compared to its greatest longtime rival) has remained in relentlessly obvious orbit around every “significant” Windows and Office update for so long that its status quo has grown into a truly inhibitive force for all parties involved. Topolsky is unquestionably a compromising favorite of mine, but it’s hard not to decry then-CEO Steve Ballmer’s failure to comprehend Josh’s day-after insight in the whole three months that passed before his Seattle Times interview in September, 2012. Ultimately, The Big M is either incapable of understanding any alternative utopic Visions of Computing to its own, or simply overwrought with the same counteraspirational carelessness its culture has always depended upon. In analytical terms regarding Ballmer’s utilization of the forum’s opportunity to finally tell the fucking story, at least, the timidity of a term like “pre-eminent software” as a viably bright new beacon in contrast with “people would say we were a software company” (emphasis mine) – as if Steve-O himself doesn’t even have the power to publicly describe his company’s function as its #1 man – combined at the apex of what was almost impressively-negligent behavior.
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I think when you look forward, our core capability will be software, (but) you'll probably think of us more as a devices-and-services company. Which is a little different. Software powers devices and software powers these cloud services, but it's a different form of delivery...
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Don’t make the same mistake I did and wear yourself out trying to extract the meaning from these three sentences – there’s none to be found. Ultimately, whatever opportunity the Surface project could have provided for Microsoft’s identity has been vastly overshadowed by its success as last resort supercatalyst to restore any sense of dignity and pride within the hardware companies who produce the vehicles. In Fall 2017, The Registerquoted industry gossip regarding the company’s new CEO Satya Nadella and his intent to “exit the product line” because “overall they are not making money [and] it doesn’t make sense for them to be in this business,” but newcomers to this conversation should know that no subsequent reporting has corroborated anything but a sustaining future of the line, though the measurable rate of innovation in Microsoft’s products continues to leave much to be desired. Now that you’ve heard from the experts, though, allow me to expand our lens a bit and examine what the Surface Laptop 2’s existence suggests as per The Present & Future of Computing.
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The Clam Clan
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In case I’ve yet to mention it, all of my tech writing is in substantial debt to my much-older and child-oriented siblings for providing 8 nieces and nephews over the course of 11 years – if not for any reason but the perspective offered by the slightest observation of their day-to-day lives. In this profoundly bizarre and historic technological sprint our species is experiencing, the differences in their respective relationships with consumer tech as they’ve grown up are fascinatingly… disturbingly significant. My eldest niece Abby was born four years after myself in 1998, and her younger sister Amber just quite three years later in 2001. All three of us are Aquarians who went to the same public schools (aside from 2 exceptions on my part,) and the two sisters have been close, significant influences on each other all their lives, yet the way Abby and I use and think about computers differs significantly from Amber’s. Our first real PCs introduced an important social and intellectual vehicle to our pre-teen lives, and both of us still “live on” our machines as young adults. For us and many others from this short-lived microgeneration of ours, budget laptops like the Dell Inspirion 2200 (which served as the first “real computer” for both of us) introduced the internet and Being Online as a State of Being with AIM groups, MySpace, and Yahoo! chain mails before smartphones and tablets were capable of doing so.
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Amber prefers to use her iPhone for most everything and regards her computer as a tool for work – it’s booted up and down exclusively for that purpose, which is significantly healthier than the habit Abby, myself, and many of my Online friends developed: we left our computers running and Logged On all the time because we were otherwise unreachable. We learned from origin to depend on them for 100% of our computing tasks – from streaming Pandora to playing Flash games within six billion open browser tabs – which likely explains both our ADD and its resulting influence on the ease with which our personal computers can distract us. As a Journalism student and professional photographer, Abby uses the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, and [Insane Blogger] David Blue has spent years looking for an alternative, becoming the first and only iPhone user to make extensive use of its Bluetooth keyboard support in the process, but both of us are entirely uninterested in the rest of the industry’s insistence on convertibles, removable keyboards, or ‘professional’ tablets. I wish the Linux community was finally ready to drop the elitist pretenses plaguing its nerdy history; I wish I could finally tell someone like Abby that a machine like the System76 Galago Pro could slot itself into her workflow without losing her time or compatibility – that the reputation surrounding Linux People had finally lost most of its validity and her desire to learn more about computing as a young woman and Power User would be met with respectful and worthwhile conversation from their end. Unfortunately, I’ve still found some of the Old Guard to be elitist, socially behind, and juvenilely possessive, as if computing was still the niche interest from their 1980s and 90s childhoods. Though this conversation certainly warrants its own essay in the future, I’ll just express now that it’s a real shame some folks don’t realize the entire point of making great things is ultimately to give them to the world.
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The opportunity I’ve had in the past year to finally get my Linux distro frenzy over with and out of my system managed to both radicalize and democratize my understanding of MacOS, Windows, and Linux as they are in the present. While I had nothing better to do, fiddling with Ubuntu Studio and Linux Mint to the extent I did throughout Spring and Summer led me to further appreciate the value of keyboard shortcuts, gave me my first real proficiency with a command line, helped globalize my comprehension of my own technological privilege, reacquainted me in a huge way with both the true history of software and my own personal past as an experimental test tube baby of Microsoft’s, and helped to answer a lot of questions I’d worried over for years about why software seemed like it simply couldn’t improve anymore. While it’s true that important open source projects like ElementaryOS continue to sprout from the Linus Extended Universe and the growing Open Source community on Mastodon is filled with brilliant, helpful, unpretentious, and remarkably curious enthusiasts (probably because many of those I’ve interacted with so far are non-cis and/or non-white,) little ole me was able to stumble upon some totally unnecessary and excruciatingly ignorant sociopolitical commentary by way of the white, middle-age host and his undoubtedly-white and staunchly libertarian caller on a live broadcast of the Ask Noah Show. (It’s not as if I haven’t said ignorant and very ugly things too, but I wasn’t a forty-something father on a semi-professional talk show representing an entire community.)
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Essentially, I was quite frustrated and disappointed to find that Linux is still let down most by its own community, but the operating system itself is still much further along on its way to becoming a real alternative for the average user than mainstream tech journalism would have you believe. However, in my case, finally taking the time to really learn about Open Source computing also helped me understand (surprisingly) why Apple and its environment continue to be the best and most popular choice for professional applications. Linux Mint gave me tremendous power in enabling me to alter, specify, and redesign the most minute details of its interface, but I couldn’t have foreseen how all-consuming such power would be for someone like myself. In retrospect, I’ve realized that I ended up spending more time perfecting my custom LibreOffice Writer shortcuts than I did actually writing – I somehow found myself in a mind state which justified unironically creating a shortcut for the Shortcuts menu. Though I swore I’d never succumb to the bewildering hobby of collecting and exploring different Linux Distributions, it took no time at all for me to fill a folder with disc images of the installers for almost a dozen different interpretations of the operating system after I’d made the simple concession to myself that I’ll just try Ubuntu, that’s all. The most profound realization from all this (arguably otherwise wasted) time: for a user like me, a walled garden is actually the best place to be productive because apparently, I don’t have the self-control to keep myself from running away and/or fixating on completely unproductive tasks without its boundaries. I think this phenomenon is perhaps the worst culprit in the persistence of the aforementioned divide between “computer people” and everyone else who simply uses computers, as I’m sure any one of the latter could tell you after all of five minutes with a Linus type.
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The most comprehensive and somewhat-urgent revision to illustrate the significance of this contrast from my perspective regards the exceptional iOS/MacOS markdown-based notetaking app Bear. Frankly, my own “Word Processing Methodology” essay from June has already become problematically out of date (and therefore embarrassing) in terms of my own knowledge of the segment and its history. Though I promised the conversation was “done,” I’ve continued to explore further into word processing’s history as well as its current state. “I had a go at Bear’s free iOS experience and saw little functional difference from DayOne,” the old, negligent, cursory David Blue noted, but if I’d simply been willing to cough up a bit more time and just $1.49 a month for Bear Pro, I’d have spared myself such shame and realized that the hype around this app really is 100% justified. Bear is the most beautiful iOS app I’ve ever seen, but I’m now also fully qualified to declare it the most effective execution of “distraction-free” writing software to come along in the past 25 years. Developer Shiny Frog’s secret is their perfect balance between capability and simplicity. It turns out, Daily Content Lord Casey Newton’s word on this matterreally was worth more than mine, not to mention more succinct: “Bear may look simple, but there’s power underneath the surface.”
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Those longtime Linux and Windows diehards who’ve tolerated me thus far, listen up: MacOS may be ancient, neglected, and full of incongruencies, but its single-minded methodology paired with Apple’s iCloud really does make it the most effective and elegant environment for most people to simply get shit done. It’s clear that many of you have realized the importance of simplicity for compact and/or educational distributions, but let me just add that the democratization of Linux provides a gargantuan development opportunity to make something that beats MacOS at its own game without starting from such a shitty premise and all of its resulting compromises – all without detracting from any other technically-minded distributions whatsoever. That is the magic of The Distro, remember?! If you’ve existed in a similar state of confusion to that of my entire adult life regarding the appeal of Apple products – despite having once been an extensive OSX user, myself – you’re very welcome for the insight. Instead of paying me for the profound self-improvement I’ve just provided, try prioritizing this newfound knowledge the next time you talk to your MacBook Pro-loving friend about their workflow. If you’re like myself, you’ll find their arguments have magically transformed from the bewildering bullshit they’ve always seemed to be into challenges for future competing operating systems to surpass Apple’s old bitch and excel in because MacOS and even its much-younger iOS counterpart – as well as the billions of people who depend on them – desperately need real competition in order to maintain their viability, much less become what products of the world’s wealthiest company should be.
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Yes, the manner in which these operating systems are perceived really is an important discussion prompted by a product as insignificant as the Surface Laptop 2 because as you read, the industry is bracing for another paradigm shift in computing, which many believe (preposterously, I might add) could be as significant and disruptive as 2007’s introduction of the iPhone. This machine of Microsoft’s and its “new” MacBook Air counterpart could potentially be the last designs to carry us to a computing future where the tried-and-true clamshell design is forgone entirely by the mainstream, but Apple’s release of this year’s new iPad Pro prompted even the most Cupertino-loving tech commentators to respond with genuine discord along with a few long-overdue shouts of “are you crazy?!” I’m very proud of The Verge’s Nilay Patel, in particular, for so eloquently deconstructing its usability for all but the very wealthy. “It is impossible to look at a device this powerful and expensive and not expect it to replace a laptop for day-to-day work,” he reminds us in the introduction to his full review of the updated product, along with a beautifully transient sentiment which I think we all needed to hear again: “I don’t think people should adapt to their computers. Computers should adapt to people.” Even something as consumerist and bourgeois as the introduction of another pricepoint-burgeoning Apple hardware flagship can turn a simple tablet review into a much-needed manifesto for a user-centric way forward for the industry, which is itself worthy of celebratory encouragement.
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I’ve favored The Verge and its cast long past the point of excess throughout the span of my work about technology, but Nilay’s review and its accompanying episode of The Vergecast are truly special and profound gems of content that shouldn’t be passed up. Apparently – as the Editor-in-Chief immediately insists as the episode begins – his “ongoing theory” that “the more important you are, the less actually important work you do, and the more likely you are to be an iPad user” roused anger from “that whole class of [billionaires,]” but the experiences behind his argument actually suggest that Apple’s own favorite child of late – into which it has begun investing and thereby implicitly sponsoring over its much older brother as the ultimate heir of the majority’s future computing – has unequivocally failed to do its part in growing the iPad Pro into the “laptop replacement” we’d all heard so much about. Of iOS 12’s performance as an operating system beneath true work-related tasks, he exasperates “you have to spend all of your time figuring out how to do stuff instead of doing stuff,” which I couldn’t help but hear as echoes of my own late Linux lamentations. As thankful as I am to have finally achieved enlightenment of the Planet Apple, I’m afraid I was pitifully late: its very natural laws underwent their most brutal tests of the 21st century this past year. Now that I’ve finally come to adore the elegant effectiveness of a new generation of iOS apps like Bear, I’m faced with yet another of the episode’s statements of weight: “I think it’s time to stop pretending that the future of computing looks like Apple’s restrictions.” On the opposing end of the line, the world’s first trillion-dollar company’s other major product release of 2018 managed to disappoint even the most fanatical fans of its original operating system’s best-selling platform with an insultingly mediocre update to the MacBook Air marque upon which it once so fondly doted.
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My best friend’s parents bought her the original Surface tablet when she enrolled in art school, and her frustration with its lackluster keyboard (among others) leads MacOS alternative-seeking users like us to wish Microsoft had started with a traditional design like the Surface Laptop first. Perhaps Apple and Microsoft’s emphasis on their tablets is nothing but a bit premature for the most current crop of users, and the rest of my nieces and nephews will expand upon an entirely different methodology of usership when they receive their freshman computer. Those elders of us who still take the Clamshell form seriously and love printing our documents are apparently facing a future industry saturated with products we can’t believe in, but it’s up to you to decide if this issue is worth expending your energy in advocacy for either camp. With my 120+ word per minute proficiency with physical keyboards, I for one have been completely bewildered by the iPad as anything but an indulgence for reading text on the web, and I’m pleased as punch with my Surface Laptop 2. Even if it proves to be the last new computer I’ll ever own to come as optimized for my use, I’m just grateful and astonished it happens to be the best yet.
eighteen dollars will buy you an hour's passage on the worn & weary Mark Twain
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the same stretch under Lover's Leap,
-an idle paddle wheel dragged cyclically, on and on
-by her diesels
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costumed so long,
-moored not far from horrid wax figures,
-similarly fated
-who bare old Sam's names with the rest of them,
-the Hannibilians assuredly assuaged by their sounds,
-so heard
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the ambiance of the little town,
-shrill with tourists' wonder,
-depression of the damned,
-envisaged waterborne toxins
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despite it all,
-I departed her as a newfound touchstone,
-knowing she's just up twenty four,
-eighteen dollars away,
-no time soon to break her jaded rhythm
-as a forgotten timepiece,
-buried in a rank cellar
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supposing she'd ease most crisis that could ever befall me
-she and her unsalted captain,
-who has not aged (truthfully, I do remember.)
‘Mom and Dad’’s Discrepant Defense Against Stale Industry and the Population Problem
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A 'fun' movie
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The Earth will reach its maximum occupancy load (12 billion) when I am in my mid-fifties, meaning there’ll be more than twice as many gorging, shitting, shooting, complaining, and lying human beings than there were when I started, and perhaps Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad is in fact a reasoned argument for a particular solution to our inevitable plight. I’m still not sure what a “cult” movie is, precisely, but I can’t imagine what sort of cult could possibly sustain itself around the ethos of this film alone, despite its concise, agitating, at once lighthearted, yet genuinely-disturbing trip. No, it is probably not propaganda. From the experts, you’ll get precisely the same review, varying only in length. The New York Times’ Glenn Kenny couldn’t be bothered with more than 250 words, but RogerEbert dot com’s Simon Abrams shelled out a whole 1000. They are suspiciously close to these big round numbers — perhaps each was written to respective quotas, and perhaps you could say all that could reasonably be said in 10, but I don’t care.
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The tropes here are polished to a miraculous sheen — two emotionally-stunted, middleaged, overly preoccupied-with-their-lost-youth suburban parents (Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair) who’s existing envies & irritations regarding their own classically bratty teenage girl (Anne Winters) and her mischievous little brother (Zackary Arthur) is merely agitated by a sudden TV static-bound killer instinct into bloodlust, not originated. I’m not sure any pill dealer would actually flip off their customers after a fair buy — even in high school, but drugs, a black boyfriend, and a stinkbomb? in the old Trans Am!? I’m going to kill you!
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Somebody, somewhere knew all the best sources on suburbia and how to put them to good use. The Camry, the golf bag, ping pong smashing, sweat-stained Big Sur tee, and Dr. Oz, for Christ’s sake! Granted, talking to your girlfriend/boyfriend on the phone at all is a bit dated — especially while riding a BMX — and I don’t think Froot Loops are generally accepted middle-class chow anymore. These are staples from my youth, and I am very old. Technically, the iMessage bubble graphics are more chronographically appropriate, but with great consequence, I fear — if we’re going to accept them once and for all as authentic mechanisms for telling stories set in the present, they are going to age faster than Nick’s new jowls (unless we’re all soon killed by our parents.) It’s been two years since I knew anything about music, but I seriously doubt even the gothest fifteen?-year-old girls are listening to Father-esque post-Memphis horrorcore in class — there’s something about SoundCloud that really clashes with chokers.
If there was ever a film in which to use grimy dubstep-influenced electronic slaps, buzzes, chirps, and great grating clanking, it’s this one. It’s a terrific disappointment that Hollywood feels so timidly about their use of the most intimate medium. One forgets its potential to control the nuances of an audience’s fear, anger, discomfort, and panic beyond cheap jump scares until they experience an irritating, distressing, ghastly gross, all-possessing feat of accentuating audio production such as that of Mom and Dad. If you want to judge Academically the effectiveness of a nominee’s work for an award with a title like Best Sound Editing (as opposed to whatever the hell criteria was met most fully by Skyfall,) you must give the little golden man to these folks, whoever they are.
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When’s the last time you saw a truly, believably shitty modern parental pair on a big screen? I really can’t remember, myself. Brent and Kendall Ryan are masterpieces of character craft — both a perfect précis and thoroughly-defined exploration of miserable white suburbanites. They’re even named unimprovably, which reflects a quality in care and attention to detail that I very much appreciate. They are vain, vulgar, impatient, selfishly afraid, and careless, freely feeling and saying it all directly in front of their children. I love being told explicitly which characters to hate (no joke,) and in this case it’s the whole damned lot. Brian Taylor and Nicolas Cage scream it over and over (as I’d like to imagine) a single afternoon of one-take filming, considering that the latter took it upon himself to first memorize the entire screenplay and its prose, vanilla to perfection, before photography began, and I hope it all stays with him forever, especially “my mom is such a penis.”
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Mom and Dad could conceivably be Nicolas Cage’s I Am Legend if for no other reason than the total lack of possible stand-ins for Brent Ryan — even the standard by which all white suburban Dad performances have been measured in the 21st century, Jason Bateman. Nick himself described it as “punk rock, rebellious, irreverent, original, badass,” and the “number one” movie he’s made in the past ten years (disqualifying National Treasure, in case you were worried.) No surprise, I must agree — this one is a wonderfully raucous and feral thing, but the scene involving the attempted murder of a newborn by her mother (Kendall’s sister) came very close to crossing the line. However, I am old and the intensity of my paternal instincts has probably outpaced my understanding of them. You could also argue, of course, that pushing such boundaries is a core function of a film like Mom and Dad. Nobody ended up vomiting or anything.
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This fun thing shouldn’t feel as foreign as it does in cinema, but you already knew that. With all its implicit grapples with overpopulation, kids and gun violence, class, and racism — truly, this is a film charged electrically with current issues. Or maybe not. Ultimately, I can at least tell you for certain that Brian Taylor made exponentially better use of his resources (I couldn’t find a solid number for its production budget) than the Fucking Spierig Brothers did with Winchester (just so you know what a disaster looks like,) and managed to be refreshingly original (astonishing that nobody’s had this specific idea before.) A spectacular riot, Mom and Dad does all you could possibly want it to do. With just eighty-three minutes to lose, it’s worth the commitment just to hear Nicolas Cage whimper and say “anal beads.”
As dual speakers become the norm in smartphone design, let us briefly examine and explain why one should always expect to hear their music in stereo.
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Though I have many audiophilical sentiments and preferences, I cannot — by conscience — fully claim the title because I’ve never been able to justify the allotment of funds necessary for the obligatory equipment. (And my digital compressor usage in the production of Drycast and Futureland has been manifestly vulgar.) That said, audio engineering is one of the few topics which I can actually speak on with almost-academic authority, and my pretentiousness-capacitated preoccupation with quality-of-life compels me to bring up a ludicrously-rational standard that most of us have continued to undershoot for far too long.
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Two weeks ago, the abundantly-rumored omission of the 3.5mm audio port in the iPhone 7 was finally settled. We played our own part in feeding the “controversy,” yeah, but I believe Apple was actually quite tardy in labeling smartphone-bound analog audio as archaic, though I’m not going to waste words in that discussion — it is definitely oversaturated, at this point — because I think mono audio is an even more prevalent topic.
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Honestly, out of all the missing features we’ve lamented over in the past decade, stereo speakers should’ve been the most aggravating. The gigantic difference, of course, is that the industry (and — by muddled extension — the consumers) has been all but silent in that regard. I write you, now, because we should all be colossally disappointed with ourselves.
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Two channels. Left and right. Read: Mono vs. Stereo But why should you care? What if Google — somehow — failed to provide you with a significant difference?
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One channel of sound is — in terms of locale — rigidly static in your perception. Doubling the data creates a spectrum, adding dimensionality, which is infinite, ya know. Playing back audio in stereo, through two or more diaphragms (the fundamental hardware unit of sound reproduction,) now enables the exhibition of audio pictures.
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If this is entirely new to you, I want you to do something. Find yourself a pair of headphones or a set of two or more computer speakers. (If these aren’t available, consider your car’s sound system. If it’s at all current and healthy, it’s gonna do the trick.) Bother to discover “L” and “R.” That is, left and right. Orient accordingly. Download this 37-second clip I recorded at BikeFest with my Zoom H2n. (Be advised: the preview is formatted in 5.1 surround, so it’s a very large file for its playback length.) Listen, obviously, and then listen again on your singular smartphone “loudspeaker.”
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That’s what I’m talking about.
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Why am I being so abashedly patronizing? Why am I transgressing against our particular assumptions about you — the informed, savvy millennial audience? Because the vast majority of playback I hear in day-to-day life is still from a singular diaphragm; a singular source.
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A topical example: I am shown a YouTube video on an iPhone. (A pre-iPhone 7 device, that is.)
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Walking downtown, I pass a small band of adolescent skateboarders listening to Cannibal Ox on a Samsung Galaxy Note.
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Worst of all: I find myself watching a Netflix film on my iPhone, in bed, not having bothered to wear the $200 pair of QC15s sitting within arm’s length.
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Informed or not, consumers are neglecting audio, and dimensionality, alone is worth a change. Recent years have allowed the unlimited bandwidth assumption to become habit, so even the vast majority of today’s spoken word programs (like podcasts) — which, in general, stay in the “center” of their mix, making little to no use of the left-right spectrum — are produced in stereo, now. In many cases (including a few of ours,) this doublesizing is often for the sake of introductory themes, alone. If you care to imagine a more data-frugal society, the “waste” is ridiculous. It is not unrealistic to expect such a reality in the near future, but the same holds true for the reverse.
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In the present’s abundance, though, the result is simply a decrease — as a whole — in playback’s “full experience,” if the hardware is not changed. Imagine how great it’d be if a digital audio formatting standard could be developed that’d enable a singular file to be mono or stereo, if needed/utilized, to trim off redundancy, sorta like variable bit rate. Get on that, would ya?
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So, why haven’t we become more diligent about our sound experiences? 1 billion iPhones in circulation, all with mono playback by default, are suspect culprits, I think. Of course, there are other devices, but none as influential — even the iPod, funny enough — on fundamental digital functions like music playback. And honestly, when is it appropriate or suave to take the extra steps?
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I want to show you this song. Let me untangle my headphones… Yes, okay. Put them in. I’m going to sit here in silence for four minutes, looking into your eyes as you listen to the entirety of this track.
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It’s never going to be socially acceptable. But what about wireless alternatives? Apple’s new Air Pods look absurd, but their by-computing optimization of the Bluetooth audio standard is revolutionary, in a small way, in propelling the “hearables” paradigm into the mainstream, if only for a moment. If — in a strangely-audiocentric future — we are always wearing multipurpose sound reproduction devices in our ears, perhaps the waste of the Mono Monstrosity will be finally resolved. Until then, I suppose all we can do is give it an extra thought, for our own quality-of-life’s sake.
The recently-discontinued Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet darkly mirrors sentiments first begun with the Pontiac Aztek, narrating Generation X’s decline.
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My Nissan wheeltime for Honk has grown a massive respect for the brand’s audacity within me. My interest in the profession has spanned years of maturity — from asking can’t you just…? to active affection for those who dare reliably retort with a confident no.
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Can’t you just retire your body-on-frame SUV entries already like everybody else did ten years ago?
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The noble, rugged Xterra, which we shall sincerely miss.
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Can’t you just follow the Golf’s unquestionably low-risk lead into the tumultuous youth market?
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The Juke NISMO, which we regard as the industry’s singular steady grasp on what youth actually means.
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Can’t you just take some cues from Honda and Toyota, and make your sedans easy on the eye?
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The Altima and the Maxima, which constitute the last truly evil marque available.
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Can’t you just step a little lighter on the Versa’s margins? You’d be insane to build a car designed by MSRP alone!
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The Versa is — for better or worse — the absolute essence of automobiles’ transportive function, and no more.
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And there’s the GT-R, of course, which continues to make fools of an entire culture of self-titled “gearheads” who claim speed as their one true dowry.
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Throughout the years, Nissan has over and over again made me look like an absolutely absurd idiot for your display — and I cannot think of a better gift. Of all the brands to misunderstand, it is the ultimate muse.
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So, in the present, I am grandiosely assuming you’ve been attentive enough to deliberate the possible outcomes of our time with the Murano CrossCabriolet.
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It was quickly apparent that the experience was not going to resemble our Night of the Juke in the slightest. It could be attributed to my pre-game mentality. For the first time, I came to this monstrosity thinking I’d finally learned my lesson,desperately hoping to be whipped again — real bad — but walk away with more closure than with which I arrived. Like a good diplomat, I made myself approach without want for anything but understanding.
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On first take, the Xterra was proud, and the Juke was clever.
Just since its assembly in 2011, our example’s trim has endured enough to begin disintegrating in a few bizarre locales. Not to over-iterate, but it’s needing strong mention: I had never sat in a roofless crossover before. I’m assuming you haven’t, either. It is unnatural. It is harrowing.
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From the organization I have summed so many times over the years as “acutely ingenious” came this… unsettling suburban bathtub.
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It’s a shame — I repeatedly remark on the extrapolated potential I can see in a roofed Murano. Everything else in sight is worth my time. If only it had been better-protected.
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The sensation is simply ridiculous in what’d be a tasteful sense were this a one-off project of some hearty garage tinkerer or tuning shop, but… my God; Nissan delivered it this way, and had the gall to ask $10,000 more for their molestation.
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Still, its webpage (in past tense, thank God,) proclaims “the Murano CrossCabriolet was the world’s first and only All-Wheel Drive convertible crossover” in the same language I’d tout the Xterra (may it rest in peace and eternally-inadequate glory) as the last available SUV, in the traditional use of the segment, or the Juke NISMO as the first competently-composed automotive product for millennial youth. Or the GT-R as by far the most effective, high-value instrument for the pursuit of maximum velocity across the ground. And so on.
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The language so assured, the parallels must inevitably be drawn to that cheap joke of the century’s turn… the Pontiac Aztek.
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The details of its life story are reliably amusing, should you find yourself mid-research. From the journos’ gasps at its corporately-edgy concept’s unveiling to the weary original steed of Breaking Bad‘s Meth Man, there is a similar lifestyle vehicle thread between the products that weaves an obscure narrative.
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My own contribution: after a missed exit outside Galveston just as Azteks first became rentable, my stepfather (the most earnestly late-history Pontiac man who ever lived) took an entirely-unexpected and uncharacteristic 70 mile-an-hour plunge into the choppy grass median after shouting “this is an off-road vehicle!”
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As I’m sure you can imagine, it was the single most traumatic event I have ever experienced as the passenger of a motor vehicle, but the damned thing was unscathed, despite having repeatedly chucked us all (fully-belted) into its beige ceiling.
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Gary believed in Pontiac.
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Though he was keen enough to smell death, he chose to believe in the Aztek.
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And you know what? His faith, too, has made me look like an idiot.
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That’s what separates the Aztek from ye late CrossCabriolet: it really was a genuinely-bold innovation. Survive the laymen’s idle party chat and crude design critiques, and you’ll find an impressive clarity in its purpose, especially given the context of its conception. In the used market especially, it still represents a characterful, practical, and high-value consideration. And yet — at the expense of themselves — American buyers did not clamor for it like the informed of the populace did. Perhaps it was because the informed — like then-BusinessWeek‘s David Welch — were echoing hopes of a “design renaissance” for General Motors. The renaissance that would not come until the Flush of the Boomer Higher-Ups some eight years later.
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Both tales, I think, represent a profound neglect of consumer journalism.
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At the turn of the century, though, it was not unusual to go a day without accessing the internet. Today, people are still buying the few flops the industry has left to offer — making what is most likely the second-largest purchase of their life’s current epoch without consulting the volumes of diverse, intelligent, and articulate opining now accessible instantly free of charge via the subsidized slates that lightly jostle in their jean pockets as they wiggle their signatures on dealer paperwork.
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ALERT: Inbound tennis enthusiasts!
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Funny, isn’t it?
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An American hit when the Japanese were unquestionably winning, and — just over a decade later — a Japanese miss as their winning had just begun to be questioned. Make no mistake; I am not being patriotic. For me, sovereignty does not extend beyond design houses, R&D facilities, and test centers.And it’s somewhere within Nissan’s where pillars were severed and delusions nurtured; all astoundingly with executives’ blessing. I am terribly and shockingly ashamed to report that my countrymen actually bought them.
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As many as 3300 units in the last year of the Mayan calendar. The worst bit, though, is that they all made their way to my particular part of the planet.
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I swear to the Sun; I am surrounded.
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If you’re familiar with Columbia, Missouri, it does not take more than a moderate imagination to comprehend the sense, as grueling as it is. I see them regularly; once a month, at least. In a town where one can expect to spot a Gallardo in front of Buffalo Wild Wings marred by horrid plastic athletic miniflags wedged in its five-figure doors, they are everpresent reminders that the New Money Effect continues to flourish, unbridled in the Midwestern U.S.
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The soft top is always retracted, of course, and the exposed driver is always a sweating middle-aged white woman wearing a light-colored tennis visor. She… they… are always on their way to a match. Doomed to roast forever, I suppose, as there is only one nearby court, as far as I know.
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It is disheartening to realize that, now, I see many more of them than Azteks around. Though neither were designed for any tangible “lifestyle,” per se, I am saddened by the shift this minuscule tell indicates in my hometown’s morale. From an (albeit equally-vague) yearning for new adventure in an intriguing new century to an emotionally-destitute jaunt to the court, I have witnessed all of Generation X’s vigor erode procedurally away before my eyes.
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Y2K, Great Depression II, an ancient apocalyptic prophecy from one of the wisest civilizations in recorded history… Surely, one of these foretold disasters will finally End it All!
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Perhaps Nissan knew that even the well-read of the North American market were, by and large, simply looking for ways to pass the time before the death which they felt so assuredly approached. The number of unanimously-unbuyable prospects available has shrunken to virtually none, and the CrossCabriolet was not much of an investment; not all that highly-engineered, really. Perhaps they felt obligated to entertain us in our delusional way out. Perhaps it was all just an awfully-German prank.
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And, if the End of the World is imminent, what’s to stop one, really, from leasing the world’s first and only convertible crossover?
A not altogether-cohesive review of July reads and research.
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In case you're similarly long overdue for a reminder that beautiful things are still being made on the internet...
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After nearly a year of relative sobriety from my old, once-severe addiction to Web Site hunting, it occurred to me just yesterday that some explicit wandering as I once did for days at a time – through the clever, innovative, and uniquely tasteful projects through which an astonishingly-original few give their whole thinking (and often physical) selves in obscurity despite how little financial (and often professional) incentive is maintained by those who unknowingly need it the most – might be the best feasible remedy to my current, most perplexing state of faithlessness and bafflement toward the ambitions of trades and cultures I feel I once so thoroughly understood. A great portion of you are surely undergoing your own manifestations of the same hopelessness – I cannot ever remember a time in my life when global events were so utterly discouraging so relentlessly.
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Design and The Open Web
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In this present when every element of American reality is so much more incessantly ugly than we could’ve ever imagined, let’s take at least a momentary respite to look at some visually irresistible and/or super sick Sites on the truly-resolute Open Web to assure our existential selves that yes, beauty shall not cease to exist. For better or worse, my #1 goto source to find innovative, delicious web design has always been Typewolf, who announced last fall that he will not be continuing his “Site of the Month” section, though his relentless “Site of the Day” roll will continue, unhindered.
Those of us for whom the Podcast medium became a trusted and relatively regular one in our lives long before anyone figured out how to make a real business out of it – certainly eons preceeding the original startup podcast-only (apparently HBO-like publication – Gimlet Media – to be successfully launched. Now, though, your mom – perhaps even her mom – listens to podcasts, and what was once a The single Missouri alumni at The Verge, Ashley Carmen, explored the proliferation of podcasting and the process by which it became profitable.
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In 2009, only 11% of the U.S. population had listened to a podcast in the past month.
-How podcasts became so popular | The Verge on YouTube
Speaking of Gimlet Media: the latest episode of my longtime favorite of their podcasts, Reply All, is a sort of condensed remake of my favorite podcast episode of all time (of any show, not just this one) in which hosts Alex Goldman and P.J. Vogtmaintained an open telephone line for 48 hours and spoke with a whole bunch of people (mostly Americans) about... whatever. The result was beautifully human, if you’ll forgive my use of the cliche. I tend to revisit it when I’m feeling particularly isolated from and/or confused about the general ambitions of the people around me. I’ll be honest: I didn’t pay much attention to my first listen through the new episode, but I can tell you that it is worth your time, at least.
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I was distraught when Spotify bought both the aforementioned Gimlet Media andthe social audio turned podcasting app Anchor – both of which I (rather ridiculously) felt a special personal ownership over. (The latter, especially, because they reached out to me early on to feature Extratone’s channel on their music section.) However, it appears that both are being treated fairly well in the 18+ months since their acquisition – probably because they’ve been making Spotify money.
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so illequipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.
It is my privilege and my curse to write about every new major iteration to Apple’s mobile operating system, though I skipped iOS 13 last year, which was largely dominated by Dark Mode, the iPad OS fork, and Memoji – which I could care less about, honestly – and didn’t warrant my investment in a Full Post, I felt. The Photos app improvements were very welcome, but I’d departed from iCloud as my primary storage service, so I didn’t have anything relevant to say. iOS 14 is also mostly irrelevant to my own personal use, but represents a more abstract shift in design philosophy that I thought was worth commenting on. For myself, everything about it adds anxiety, beginning with the launch, itself, at Apple’s WWDC 2020, which I watched, live, and Tweeted extensively about.
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I do not want to live on the Memoji planet.
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My technology writing over the years has largely centered around my awe and confusion regarding what I've perceived as a divergent path from the future I once imagined. My closest guess as to this divergence's origin is the announcement of iOS7, with Apple's abandonment of skeuomorphic design in favor of an entirely new, “flatter” UX visual language, which I actually found quite jarring. In retrospect, though, of course I'm glad they did so. I thought this was an importat preface to any thoughts I have about today's WWDC Keynote – they will probably seem idiotic in a year or so (they might to you already.)
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Thanks to The Big Beer Virus, this was Apple's first pre-recorded WWDC presentation (though the word “live” continued to be used on several occasions,) which made it especially surreal. During the wait for the Keynote to “go live,” the stream was occupied by an animated Earth from orbit. As the clock rolled over the hour's top, AURORA's “Daydreamer” faded in and we began to grow closer to this Earth, gradually revealing that it was covered with millions of floating memoji in various states behind their animated MacBooks. Like much of the event to follow, this scene became more and more anxiety-inducing as we grew closer to the mob (keep in mind that I've never really found memoji cute, unlike plenty of folks.) Eventually, we changed pitch dramatically and plunged through a hole in the clouds straight toward the incenter of the spaceship at Apple Park, through the door, down the staircase, and into a completely empty – but fully lit – Steve Jobs theatre, where Tim Cook emerged on stage and almost immediately began to address racism.
This disorganization of Craig Federighi's Homescreen shown in the presentation exemplifies the entire aura of this update: it’s complicated. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn receives this new complication positively in an excellent essay dedicated to the topic, divided into Widgets on The Home Screen, Jiggle Mode and Editing Pages, the App Library, and App Clips. (Yes, in many ways, linking to the essay makes this post redundant.)
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That's what I wrote about WWDC. iOS 14 officially released five days ago, now, and folks are already showcasing some crazy homescreen modifications on Twitter in #ios14homescreen. I would go into detail, but I'm honestly not all that curious about the process, which is unusual. I hope more than anything that I am not loosing my curiosity or playfulness regarding iOS which not so long ago propelled an exuberant exploration of Shortcuts' capabilities during their early days as an integrated Apple property with the release of iOS 12.
Basically, I'm not going to do the full bit, this year, but I'd like to address some of the notes I did take throughout the past few months of the developer beta. Notably, there is simply far less to iOS 14 that's relevant to my life, personally, than any other release I remember, but that's okay. It's just a wee bit more difficult to motivate myself to talk about it. If there's one definite statement to be made about this release, it's that it is additive rather than transformative. As Dieter Bohn so elequently put it for The Verge:
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For the iPhone, the overarching theme is that they're finally letting it get complicated. The home screen starts simple, but it can be complex if you want it to and Apple's also finally putting different elements on top of other elements so you can see Siri on top of your current screen instead of taking over the whole screen.
Yes, I do find the title of that article quite ironic considering what I just articulated to you.
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The title of his penultimate review, additionally, includes the summation “Apple is finally lettting the iPhone homescreen get complicated.” Yes... Complexity. I'll be honest: I've actually had the opportunity to play around quite a bit with Android 11 thanks to Android Studio on my PCs, and I found it tremendously underwhelming as an alternative. On a virtual Pixel 3, the experience was functionally no more than a fucking material design-tasting, slightly varied execution of a smartphone operating system in comparison. I should disclaim, though, that these weeks with early iOS widget implementation – which represents quite a hefty chunk of this release's significance, I think we can all agree – have led me to the conclusion that I personally do not believe in widgets. Or at least – I do not have the usership vocabulary to even begin integrating them into my own handset-using life.[efn_note]I'd elaborate but honestly, who cares, really?[/efn_note]
App Clips: Oh boy... I'm so physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted. Just gonna say no to that one.
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Add widgets to the home screen: I'm going to assume it's Android users who've stigmatised dynamic home screen widgets as a desirable outlet of development resources. I simply cannot fathom any bit of data which would be truly be constructively consumed there, as opposed to unlocking the device and navigating to whatever application it originated from. Perhaps I'm just old and slow.
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Send apps to the App Library: Directly related, actually. Still considering how I assume most folks actually navigate to applications that have been in folders or in secondary+ homescreens to date – that is, dragging down and typing a handful of characters into Spotlight search – I'm not sure an alphabetized listing of all apps is really that useful. I know I'm not alone on this one: iJustine expressed an identical assumption on an episode of her podcast, Same Brain.
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Hide some of your home screens: (I repeat the exact same argument.)
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Watch videos with picture-in-picture mode: Once again, I could definitely be showing my age, but what really constitues watching when you're talking about a fractional segment of a ~6 inch display? You may as well just be listening to the audio, right?
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Pin conversations in Messages: I'm afraid the text conversation pinning feature doesn't really apply to someone like myself, who literally never messages anyone but my girlfriend and my mom. All pinning the conversations accomplishes for me is the obfuscation of the handy in-line timestamp found in the normal list view.
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Mention your contacts in Messages: Jesus... And we're still using fucking SMS?
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Add more variety to your memojis: I still have not figured out how to actually use memojies, practically, so...
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Get suggested smart home automations: I'm sorry... What did you say? I'm not familiar with those words.
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Get to bed on time: Clarification: “iOS 14 works with watchOS 7 (or on its own) to help you get to sleep at the right time each night, with reminders and Do Not Disturb options.” If you were truly at all interested in not being disturbed or getting lots of sleep, you wouldn't have spent $300 on a machine to strap to your wrist who's primary function is to disturb you!
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Translate websites in Safari: Christ... Really? How have I not encountered an issue with this before?
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Search inside apps: There we go! The first item on this list that suggests anyone at Apple actually uses iOS!
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Get more detailed weather forecasts: Dark Sky acquision... All this one does is remind me that Apple's self-restraint could breach at any time and essentially the only competent mobile weather app ever devised could die or be molested into irrelevance.
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Use your iPhone as a translator: Well... Yeah... Anything that convenienctly allows me to reduce dependence on Google, I guess!
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Get more facts from Siri: ...lol
-“Apple says Siri knows more facts than ever before, though it hasn’t offered up any specific examples of something it knows in iOS 14 that it didn’t know in iOS 13—you’ll have to try and test it out yourself. According to Apple, Siri now knows 20 times the number of facts that it did three years ago, and we haven’t been able to catch it out with anything so far.”
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Get cycling directions in Apple Maps: No! Cut that out!
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Plan a journey in an electric vehicle: I'm not joking when I suggest that this fits perfectly into iOS 14's Anxiety Mode Enchancement theme: all this really means is We've added the new Apple Range Anxiety app!
Yes, there are examples of genuine progress. The Guides feature in Maps (seen above) probably could/should have been added a long time ago, but at least Apple executed it quite elegantly. I'm could've sworn sharing your ETA has been possible from within Maps since like... iOS 7 or something, but perhaps I was thinking of Waze. Wallpapers for CarPlay are one of those features that didn’t occur to me to want, but I did/do. Also – though my personal experience with CarPlay has been limited – I can definitely imagine more layout options (“Horizontal status bar”) will be useful in fringe use cases.
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And that's it! All of my notes have now been crossed off! Now I can finally forget I ever spent time thinking about iOS this year... Gourd Bless.
Yes, I bought a mechanical keyboard. It occurred to me that folks who spend a lot of time doing things that require tools – professionals, artisans, craftsmen, etc. – usually seek out the best possible quality offerings of those tools. Even if they're just 5% better than the average alternatives and cost twice as much, when one uses them for hours every day, the last bit of refinement pays off very quickly. Considering how much typing I've done in the past 5-10 years, I find it a bit silly that I hadn't before thought to optimize the hardware I've used to do so. Now that I've put at least some thought into designing the space in which I work and gone back to school, I've also invested in bettering the thing my hands actually touch the most.
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Actually... Before I go on, here is the link to the Varmilo VA108M User Manual/Guide/Reference in English in case that's what you came looking for. (I had difficulty finding it, too.)
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I suppose I've let myself be blinded to the advantages of a mechanical keyboard by the gaemer stigma that surrounds them. This time, I believe I began by simply inputting something like “best keyboard for typing” into a search engine, which returns plenty of iffy results, naturally, but among them was a list from Wirecutter – whom I trust, more or less – of “Best Mechanical Keyboards 2020.” Also included were posts in the r/MechanicalKeyboards subreddit, which I actually fucking joined[^1] (but promise never to mention again outside of this post.) Uncovering my eyes, I found a ridiculously-extensive community message board and Wiki, which is undoubtedly the most extensive resource on the subject to be found, anywhere. Though I did place a time limit on myself for any research of 15 minutes, in retrospect, I suppose I also had some criteria, which I assume – if you're still reading – you might be interested in:
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WIRED as fuck. Bluetooth can fuck off.
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“Full” keyboard, for the same reason I'd never spend any money on a piano with any less than 88 keys.
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At least tolerably tasteful, aesthetically. (Not overwhelmingly embarrassing if someone were to actually see me using it.)
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Cute, ideally.
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No light shows.
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Not “ergonomic.”
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Not from Logitech or Microsoft.
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Immediately, it was overwhelmingly clear that my choice must also have The Cherry... The Cherries... The “Cherry MX Switches,” whatever they are. Any of even the most skimmy reading up on the subject will lead you to this conclusion. That addressed, I arrived upon three considerations: the Ducky One 2, Das Keyboard Model S Professional, and Varmilo VA87M.
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Layout of the VA108M seen from above.
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As good as the idea of something as German as the Das Keyboard sounded, I hate the way it looks, and the Ducky seemed to take itself too seriously (despite its brand name.) The VA87M seemed to be ideal if it was full-sized. I searched for the equivalent, found the VA108M, and bought one immediately. Specifically...
I've already written more than I ever wanted to, but let me just say that I love everything about the thing – the particular set of special keys, the way it feels & sounds, and that its heft prevents it from moving around – and I hope to keep it forever. As I said on the photographs I posted to social media, I promise to never bring this or any other mechanical keyboard up ever again unless asked about it.
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[1] Yes, I have actually been using the Read It website in the past 18 months or so, which anyone who’s known me at all would find unbelievable. I don’t know if I’ll write about it in the future, so I’ll just say I’ve unblocked it within my psyche largely because it’s no longer horrendous to look at.
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[2] I remain genuinely confused as to why the color of the switches matters, considering they are only visible when the keycaps have been removed.
I bought a desktop tower for the first time since 2010 and spent an embarrassingly long time struggling with Bluetooth shit.
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As with my entire history of computer purchases, my acquisition of an HP ENVY Desktop tower, today, was last-minute, ill-informed, and certainly irrational. You “PC master race” folk: please spare me the dude, you could've just built your own pc so much cheaper shit.[efn_note]Or don't. Whatever.[/efn_note] Yes, I realize the sensible course of action would've begun with a two hour trip West to the closest Microcenter, where I'm sure the staff would've made PC shopping an absolute blast and I would've come away with a more powerful, much cheaper machine. However, after I managed to break Windows on my only machine this weekend (and subsequently failed to reset it,) I was getting especially behind on schoolwork and had absolutely no desire to complete any of it on my iPhone.
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And so... I've just returned from picking up said HP Tower along with a 27” HP LED display, and am writing you after having set up the machine physically and installed most of my “essential software” list (at least all that I could remember.) As per my favorite tradition of new computer acquisition, I have named the machine after Hildur Odegard from Fortitude:
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“First Impressions”
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It's been exactly 10 years since I last bought a desktop tower – since I first set hands on the Dell XPS Studio desktop with which I would create the majority of my intellectual property – and I was immediately surprised by how much smaller[efn_note]6.12 x 11.93 x 13.28 inches.[/efn_note] and lighter[efn_note]13.12 lbs.[/efn_note] this tower was than my expectations. The display, too, is remarkably light and thin. Rationally, I should not have been surprised by this, but I'm not going to punish myself for continuing to find any sort of magic in technology.
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In the box were a Bluetooth keyboard[efn_note]Specifically, an HP model 4251a-khsap003k.[/efn_note] and mouse set – the latter of which I will hopefully never have to use, thanks to my Logitech G203 – and was perplexed by the process of how to pair the former with the tower while it was in setup mode for far too long. I was just about to give up entirely when I revisited the packaging and noticed what I'd previously assumed was an anti-theft device, but was actually the fucking dongle for the pair. I continue to despise Bluetooth peripherals, obviously, but the multimedia function keys of the product led to some important realizations: I now had reason to use Windows Desktop Switching and have a calculator application again! However, I have yet to figure out how to alter the Function key's behavior (I'm not even sure it's possible:) in order to input Alt+F4, I have to input Fn+Alt+F4, which is far too clunky to depend on. The issue did lead to a revelation which I may or may not integrate permanently: I mapped Alt+F4 to the previously-unused button on the very top of the G203. So far, it's been pretty nifty.
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The HP 4251a-khsap003k included in the box with my new HP desktop.
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That said, a component of myintention to create an intentional, static, upright-sitting desktop workspace included an allotment for a quality mechanical keyboard – my justification was that any professional in a particular craft makes a point to have the best possible tools for the job, so a high-quality keyboard has actually been very long overdue, in my case. So, I sought out a single Wirecutter recommendations list and even attempted to disseminate r/MechanicalKeyboards.[efn_note]I haven't even started self-harming yet, so my stomach is definitely strengthening![/efn_note] After a brief jaunt, I concluded that no reasonable person would be able to make heads or tails of the forum or its seemingly endless wikis without considerable indoctrination so I more or less threw a dart and landed on the Varmilo VA108M, which I ordered. All I know is that it's fairly highly-reviewed on the marketplaces I checked (though hardly mentioned on the subreddit, actually,) and that it has the Cherry Switches, which are... The good ones.
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A concern I originally had with taking over the tertiary guest room – by far the smallest allotted living space in the house – as my office was its distance from our wireless router, two floors down. The last time I used the room as a workspace (five years ago,) my old tower's integrated WiFi card often struggled to maintain a reliable connection. The adapter included in this desktop, though, actually managed to clock the fastest download speed on my SpeedTest.net records just now.
It's almost painful even to write this but... As beautiful as this $250 display is to behold, I've grown accustomed to my Surface Laptop 2's 2256 x 1504 13” display after years of hard, daily use. Apparently, those dimensions mean the little machine's display has a pixel density of 201 Pixels-Per-Inch. Filling a 27” display with just 1920 x 1080 means a pixel density of just 81.6 Pixels-Per-Inch,[efn_note]I suppose I should not have been surprised to immediately discover a dedicated online tool for calculating pixel density.[/efn_note] and the disparity was glaring to my eyes, even from the setup screen. After a few hours of regular use, I'm not sure I notice it anymore, but I suspect I will again when I've got the laptop running again. Please do indicate whether or not you think such a complaint makes me awful in the Crowdsignal poll below.
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have I become truly spoiled or is 1080p just... not high enough resolution for a 27" display.
I've also already had trouble connecting my Bose SoundLink headphones correctly via Bluetooth. On my Surface Laptop, it registered as two separate devices – “Stereo Headphones” and “Headset” – which allowed me to use them as both the primary audio output and the primary audio input. For whatever reason, I have been unable to accomplish such a simultaneous connection on this machine: I can either connect them as headphones or as a headset, but not both. This video provided some help – I know now that I have to open Sound Settings and manually connect the headphones every time I re-connect them. Hopefully, I'll figure out another solution soon.
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Returning to the webcam issue: I discovered that absolutely zero local stores keep add-on webcams in stock anymore, which makes sense. I resorted to searching Amazon for webcams and found a gargantuan list of brands I had never heard of. When I filtered by the one I did recognize – Logitech – I saw barely-facelifted versions of the camera my stepdad bought in 2008 and none were in stock. Unwilling to further investigate or research more, I set the price filter for under $40, sorted by customer ratings, and bought the first product which had even remotely legitimate-looking reviews: this 1080p thing branded with “Mersuii.”
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After returning to the order invoice hours later for this post, I got curious enough to Google search the company name and discovered a dead-end url, zero Wikipedia page, and this Trademark registration, on which I spotted some very interesting information. Entered in the second “Goods & Services” row is the following text:
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Adult sexual stimulation aids, namely, devices for massaging or vibrating external and internal portions of the body, vibrating and non-vibrating reproductions of parts of the male and female anatomies, male sex toys, masturbators, penis pumps, electrical penis cyclone pumps, rings, clamps, stimulators, vibrators, dildos, dongs, butt plugs, anal beads, rings to be worn about the penis; Adult sexual stimulation kit comprised primarily of adult sexual stimulation aids and a workbook
An attempt to fix a Windows Insider Build issue led to soft-bricking my Surface Laptop 2.
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I finally did it, ladies and gentlemen... I managed to break the Windows installation on my Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 to such an extent that it has been unrecoverable. I am currently borrowing my mother's MacBook Pro and waiting on a Windows 10 installation .ISO file to download so that I can hope to mount it correctly on the last, shitty USB thumb drive I still have lying around.
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YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT BITCH.
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I now suspect I began down this path a few months ago when I discovered Windows Insider Channels and rejoiced... As I've discovered that one can relatively easily find a beta version of virtually any piece of software, it's become a bit of a habit for me. More or less unconsciously, I’ve ended up with an application library full of Developer Beta and NightlyBuild-type shit. I don't think there was/is a single web browser installed on that machine that is not the given entity's “Developer Edition” which – considering most of the regular installs allow you to opt into dev tools, anyway – seem like they might be redundant. I don't particularly care, anymore – I mostly just love their icons. Firefox Developer Edition's logo is a blue Firefox(!,) Edge Chromium Dev's is... more interesting than the regular version. Google Chrome Canary's icon is a surprisingly-tasteful variation of the company's usually-horrendous color palette.
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What I'm trying to say is... I have continued upon this habit of opting for unstable versions of software in a sort of defiance against the common sense notion that relying upon them is generally a bad idea.[^1] I suppose I was just waiting to experience any consequences from such a decision, and well... Here they are!
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It all began when my Surface's integrated webcam became invisible to all applications that used a video input – including Microsoft's own Camera app and OBS. It showed up in Device Manger, where I did the generally-recommended troubleshooting task of uninstalling it completely (including its drivers) and rebooting to force Windows to reinstall it. It did so successfully every time, to no effect on the original issue. I also went into the Surface's BIOS menu, where its hardware devices are explicitly listed, and disabled/re-enabled the camera, to no effect. Normally, the absence of a webcam function would be more or less irrelevant to my day-to-day workflow, but now that I'm partaking in “virtual” college courses, at least one of my professors has pressured me to appear on cam as soon as possible.
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On Sunday night, I decided to revisit the problem with greater commitment, diving into a variety of deeper troubleshooting steps which I do not recall. The crucial one, though, was my decision to use the System File Checker tool (sfc /scannow) with the added instruction to fix whatever errors it found.[^2] This drove my dearest little laptop into a cycle of self-diagnoses which results in an option screen including “Reset PC.” After trying virtually every other option, I decided to try resetting, only to be met with connectivity error messages after pursuing the “Install via Network” option, leaving the use of a bootable Windows 10 recovery USB as my only choice, in theory.
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Another problem now arose: my mother's MacBook Pro is the only other machine I have any sort of access to at the moment, and MacOS no longer supports the creation of such a bootable USB for Windows via the Boot Camp Utility any longer. Nevertheless, I tried to make one by downloading the correct OS ISO and mounting it via UNetbootin, which didn't work. I then called Columbia Computer Center, who very generously agreed to make one for me and only charge me for the drive itself ($10!)
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Unfortunately, that one hasn't worked either, so I'm afraid I'm just going to have to take the thing to them... Stay tuned for the Final Verdict.
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[1] This is why I’ve always downloaded the developer iOS beta releases on my actual, daily driver handset.
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[2] I’m pretty sure it was “-f” but I’m not going to do the research to verify that… Sorry!
My friend Sierra has used SoundCloud almost exclusively for her music discovery, consumption, and recommendations, but has remained resolute in her unwillingness to financially invest in the service. As such, her listening is regularly interrupted by ads and limited to bitrates as low as 64kbps. Since I was last employed, I have maintained a vow to her that I would pay for a subscription to SoundCloud Go+ – the premium listener tier of the service – with my own money, once I was once again in place at a steady job. This move would remove all advertising from her listening and up its bitrate to 256kbps, among other benefits.
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Two nights ago, we were refueling her car in preparation for another one of our recreational drives into rural Missouri when I made the decision on a whim to simply signup for a trial of Go+ on my own account using Apple Pay, mostly because I knew we’d be going out of effective cell network range and one of Go+’s most emphasized features is its ability to download music locally. (Since my Apple Music subscription expired earlier this year, I only have a single album actually downloaded on my phone.)
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***
-The above is what I wrote several weeks ago, just as I was beginning my trial period. Now, having experienced a significant amount of time as a SoundCloud Go user, I am a bit sad that my trial is over. To be honest, I fully intended to become a paying subscriber, but my PayPal account was $0.70 short of the $12.99 monthly fee when the first billing cycle came, two weeks ago. This is not a conclusion I expected to come to, as SoundCloud’s fundamental arrangement could not possibly differ any more from the music streaming service I long claimed as my ideal own: Apple Music.
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One major worry I would imagine potential subscribers may have when approaching SoundCloud as a replacement for their single music subscription service would revolve around the extent of SoundCloud’s establishment music industry library. There’s no way your Dad’s Sunday barbecue playlist is going to be on SoundCloud, right? Strangely enough, I was unable to find a single track that was not in the library. From my own favorite Keith Jarrett’s archives to the new Dixie Chicks album, every bit of big time record label-distributed music I could conceieve of could be found aside the Go+ badge (though notably, neither of these showed significant playcounts.) As far as the app experience goes, I swear it got smoother as soon as I signed up for Go+. This is probably bullshit, but regardless, with the seemingly ever-widening disparity in the experiences of free vs. premium users, SoundCloud appears to be moving actively away from the former.
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I have long said (somewhat in jest) that Chance The Rapper is the only reason SoundCloud still exists.
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From a future historian’s perspective, the battle for the definitive name in independent digital music distribution has already won, largely thanks to its relationship with Chance The Rapper, who’s quickly become a “cultural influencer, thought leader, global star,” and one of my generation’s upmost celebrity champions. Obviously, there is little sense trying to determine whether SoundCloud earned his partnership or landed their popular association with his name as long as the artist maintains it publicly, while continuing to give new meaning to the phrase “serially likable.”
--“Bandcamp: Streaming’s Secret Savior” | July, 2018
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If CNET_ was asking the question a year before that Bandcamp essay, I think I can feel properly varified. What I’d really like to know, now: does Chance still feel the same way about the streaming service after the launch of SoundCloud Go+? Considering that I am far from a real music journalist, I do not have any more contact resources than you have. That said, I left [a comment on his Facebook Page](https://www.facebook.com/chancetherapper/posts/3299672310124810?commentid=3319045628187478). I guess we’ll see.
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Some more technical bits: SoundCloud is now castable on Chromecast, but not supported by Apple CarPlay, for whatever that’s worth. Notably apart from Bandcamp and Apple Music and aligned with Spotify, SoundCloud is explicitly investing in algorithmic music discovery, which means its users are doing the curatorial work. I am doing/have done the curatorial work. That means the DnB crowd is going to receieve Toto recommendations, given what I sought out for this post. You’re welcome, and sorry…
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While I was surprisingly unable to find any Tweets or Evernotes further evangelizing Apple Music (I suspect I’m thinking of an old, untranscribed Drycast episode,) I found real magic in the service as I perceieved it: $9.99 a month for all of iTunes. 13 year-old me would considerthat one helluva deal.
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Naturally, if you know of one, please do comment and/or drop me a line.
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In fact, it is the only streaming app I found that _does not _have CarPlay support. Even Bandcamp and MixCloud for iOS do!
Examining Fred Rogers' debut Atlantic-theatre naval anxiety compilation.
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It's a little late to write about Greyhound – Tom Hanks' first screenwriting credit – which released on Apple TV+ this past Father's Day, June 21st. Though I definitely left my quite severe obsession with WWII history in my prepubescence, I thought I'd remark on this film because I originally hoped it would fulfill a role I'd long wanted for: the destroyer-side compliment to U-boat films like Das Boot and U-571. James D. Hornfischer's exceptional account of the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts' part in The Battle off Samar with The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors was my last dive into naval history. It's one of the most astounding war stories I've ever encountered, and upon first seeing Greyhound's trailer, I was sortof hoping it was the Big Boy film adaptation its always warranted. (Though apparently there was a TV movie made in 2005???) Instead, its based on (distinct from “adapted from,” apparently) a 1955 novel by English author C.S. Forester entitled The Good Shepherd.
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Tom Hanks made sure to imbue his first screenplay with a shitload of “opaque naval jargon,” as The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw's review put it. A brief “investigation” by The Cinemaholic suggests that the U.S.S. Keeling – the film's singular setting – most resembles a Mahan-class destroyer, though none actually bore the name. For the actual photography, the production made use of a surviving example of the most mass-produced destroyer of all time:
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When it came to shooting the film, instead of relying completely on sets, the crew of ‘Greyhound’ found another option. They used USS Kidd, a real WWII destroyer, to film the journey of Greyhound. She is a Fletcher-class destroyer and is named after Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, the first US flag officer to die during the Second World War.
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As much as you're going to loathe it, I must include this commentary on Greyhound's historical accuracy if only because – as a undoubtedly mainstream film – its been so widely and competently reviewed, already, by real film writers. I am almost positive U-boats would rarely – if ever – waste their precious few viable torpedo shots firing ultra-close-range at the agile, super-speedy destroyers and destroyer escorts that protected supply convoys, and I am sure that none ever bothered with audibly addressing enemy ships over the radio in English. I understand that dramatizing historic events is the core function of Greyhound's genre, but this particular addition was so unbearably cheesy that it utterly decimates all of the experience's hard-won context. Just look at a snippet from the first of two dialogues in text:
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Greyhound. Greyhound, Greyhound.
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This is Gray Wolf.
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We hunt you and your friends
-Eagle, Dicky and Harry.
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We watch your ships sinking into the deep.
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We hear the screams of your comrades
-as they die.
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How many of them will there be
-before you join them?
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The Gray Wolf is so very hungry.
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I'm sure there's an essential academic film function which only similar enemy taunts could perform and without which this screenplay would've been technically unsound, and – if I were allowed supposition – I would venture to guess that America's Favorite Dad felt pressured to bolster his first penning against easy gimmes for the Great Big institution of cinema criticism as much as possible. However, this shit is just disruptingly cheesy. Fuck it! Have the rest:
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Greyhound!
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Your flock is not safe from this wolf.
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We can always find you
-in the night to kill you.
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Or will Dicky die next? Or Harry?
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[Gray Wolf howls]
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...
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Greyhound.
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Guten Morgen, Greyhound.
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Did you think you had slipped away
-from this Gray Wolf?
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No, you did not. You will not.
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The sea favors the Gray Wolf on the hunt,
-not the hound on the run.
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You and your comrades will die today.
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The contrast with the rest of the script's imposingly thorough and relentlessly-paced naval action dialogue is far too abrupt to not be problematic. Even as obsessed as I was with naval history, I'm still too oblivious to the details of what is/was actually said on the bridge of a warship during combat maneuvers to tell you how authentic Greyhound's depiction really is (it's hardly ever shown on the screen or laid out in nonfiction, even,) which nullifies all relevance the realism would've had, otherwise. Director Aaron Schneider in an interview for Vanity Fair:
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“If you decide to read Greyhound by tracking the dialogue—rudder commands and sonar distances—you’ll soon find yourself completely lost. Because that’s not where the movie lives. This screenplay was designed to beam you aboard the USS Keeling…and it’s up to you to engage with what’s going on and extrapolate how things work, so you can answer the question, ‘What the hell is going on here?’”
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In this sense – crafting a consuming, believable, unbelievably gray, claustrophobic, icing iron reality – Tom Hanks excels.
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Though Letterboxd user brucewayn called it “boring” in the most popular review of the film to date on the platform, I found Greyhound to be quite engaging in an anxious, depressing sense familiar to classic war dramas like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. The tedium of naval warfare's endless orienteering is rescaled to a battlefield of lesser distances – axis and allied vessels actually collide on several occasions and a U-boat crew decides to fuck it all and brawl it out with two parallel destroyers with surface guns instead of retreating after losing their ability to dive. (See: Titanic VI.) Through a combination of wartime compression and stitching, Greyhound is in large part a mashup of naval action at the extremes of what historical fiction will allow within its 48-hour setting. From Ben Lindbergh's review for The Ringer:
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In The Good Shepherd, enemy torpedoes simply sail wide; in the movie, they graze the hull for even closer calls. In the book, Krause agonizes over, and generally resists, calling the crew to general quarters, wary of exhausting their energy reserves; in the movie, he doesn’t hesitate to summon his sailors to battle stations.
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The result is an emotionally effective film constrained by a very specific dramatic aim: another war movie every father can juice for decades' worth of Sunday afternoons on the sofa. “As befits his status as America's Dad, Hanks has constructed for us the ultimate Dad Movie — all the action you could ever need or want, with no annoying characters hanging around, harboring pesky needs and wants of their own,” quips Glen Weldon for NPR. Undoubtedly, though, the subject matter is fresh. I wouldn't say my youth desire for a surface-side Atlantic-theatre film is 100% satiated, but Greyhound managed to accomplish much more than I expected.
Basecamp's HEY matters, and not just because it took on Apple's App Store policies.
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Something always worth celebrating: a considered, no-nonsense new effort to reimagine email. I've lived through many notable milestones in this regard: Apple Mail on the original iPhone, Gmail, Readdle's Spark, and (yes, really,) the revitalization of Microsoft's Outlook. Exciting innovations have abounded throughout email's history, but it's highly debatable whether or not any of them have really changed the way we use it in a profound way, yet I am unfailingly intrigued whenever somebody new comes along, so when I saw Casey Newton's story on The Verge's frontpage discussing Basecamp's HEY before I got out of bed on the morning of June 15th, I was delighted to see an organization still had the courage to invest their confidence and resources into their Ideas About Email. Originally, HEY's homepage included a prompt: “To get on the list, email iwant@hey.com and tell us how you feel about email. Could be a love story, or a hate story. Could be long, could be short. It’s your story, so it’s up to you.” Though I knew it'd likely never be read, I decided to write them a letter about my personal history with email, which turned into an entertaining enough anecdote to publish here.
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The real reason HEY continued to be so widely covered by tech media, though, was its challenge to Apple's App Store policies after one of its updates was rejected by the marketplace just a day after Casey's story was published. Much drama ensued – I have done my best to aggregate links to all the news stories on the subject in a thread on the Extratone subreddit I recently started. I think the public resistance by Basecamp's CTO David Heinemeier Hansson was probably a PR move, which is fine, but all I wanted to contribute was a review of the actual function of HEY, itself. After reading posts by some of my favorite bloggers, however, I think it would be redundant. Kev Quirk argued “Email Is Not Broken,” to which Mike Stone responded “Email Is Broken.” Additionally, Business Insider's Lisa Eadicicco published an in-depth review at the beginning of the month.
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My singular commentary: I'm worried that subscription services that exclusively accept large yearly sums like HEY inevitably become the “country club for the most self-important emailers in business” which Casey spoke of. I guess we'll see.
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The following is an excerpt from my letter to HEY asking for a early-access invite.
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Email and I: An Abridged History
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I am 26 years old, so I suppose I'm of the first generation that's never experienced life without email. I grew up on a farm in rural central Missouri and my dad was very much an early adopter. (You'd be surprised how e-enabled farmers were becoming in the early 2000s.) I cannot remember life before the humongous satellite dish was anchored in our front yard. Long before I had any reason to be online (or really understood what that meant,) he began and ended every day sitting at in front of a CRT on a corner desk, clacking away on a cigarette smoke-yellowed plastic keyboard for hours. I did not understand why, then, but in retrospect I realize that he was corresponding with a huge network of neighbors, politicians, family, and college friends via email lists/chains and that he depended on it both professionally and personally in a big way. As a single man living at least an hour's drive from a city of any size, I suppose my dad was predisposed to have a rich online life long before his suburban peers, which normalized it precociously for me.
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The summer before my first grade year, my elementary school became the first in the district to have a computer lab (also the first air-conditioned room in the building,) so my high school graduating class was literally the very first to have had any digital curriculum – and an email address(!) – for the entirety of our public school experience. Because of this, I think most of us were trained to think of email as a tool for school work – it was eluded to by our computer teachers that our school email addresses were being monitored to make sure they remained so (obviously, they weren't.) As we grew into 6th-7th grade, however, we all seemed to end up with personal email addresses. I consider myself lucky to have experienced a very brief window – before instant messaging/early social networks became mainstream and SMS became even remotely pleasant to use – when my middle school friends and I corresponded exclusively by email when we weren't on the phone.
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It still sounds a bit silly to say, but I've spent the past few years coming to believe more and more strongly that my first-generation iPhone changed my life forever in a profound way – especially my relationship with email. After watching Steve Job's introduction at MacWorld 2007 live, I promised to skip a year of Christmas gifts if my mom would agreed to buy me one, and she did. Obviously, it was like nothing else I'd ever experienced, and it completely changed how I responded to and thought about technology. Before smartphones, there was no checking email outside of time in the computer lab, which was intended to be quite strictly-regulated. I had a real advantage when I started bringing my iPhone to school – absolutely no one knew what it was (a bizarre thought in contrast,) including teachers. Suddenly able to browse and read my inbox in class, at lunch, and on the bus, my use and consideration of email was propelled far ahead of my peers'.
When I started an online magazine in 2016, I don't think I could've conceived of the extent to which running a modern media company – even one targeted toward tech-savvy, early-adopting youth – still involves email. I assumed that my audience rarely actually read from their inboxes and relied almost exclusively on social networks for content discovery, so I originally forwent any implementation of a newsletter. As I grew more and more interested in and engaged with the media beat, I was exposed to the email renaissance of the past 2-3 years thanks to services like Revue and Substack, saw that it was good, and decided to give it a try for myself. I launched our semi-regular newsletter in April, 2017 on the subjects of “Division, Art, and Media” and published a little over 30 issues over the course of 18 months. To be honest, I'm not sure I've ever had so much fun writing.
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Very shortly after it began, I observed our general engagement quadruple, and – quite selfishly – found the process of aggregation to be soothing and very mentally restorative. It exposed some pretty horrendous media consumption habits of mine, but it also offered a painless solution to them. As soon as everything I read became a potential item in the newsletter, I wasn't just reading for myself anymore (or at least, that's the mentality it gave me,) so I could no longer afford to dismiss particular subjects as easily or to skim so recklessly. I nurtured a much less chaotic media diet and found myself absorbing a lot more of what I wanted to without wasting so much time burning through links. I ended up feeling more focused in other, unrelated areas of my life, too. Obviously, I love email for that, and I miss writing that darn newsletter so much that I continuously look for excuses to do something similar.
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My former Tech Editor loved email perhaps as much, but she's definitely the only person I've ever met who finds the medium as entertaining as I do. (If you're really committed, I just made a Twitter Moment full of all the best stuff I've ever posted about email – mostly jokes like “patron saint of email marketing,” but there are one or two profound posts in there, too.) We realized one day that – aside from The Webbys – there are very few notable awards celebrating excellence in the email medium, so we decided our magazine would host the 2017 First Annual Email Awards. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone else had any idea what the heck we were trying to do, so we never received enough submissions. However, I noticed a great opening paragraph in the original announcement post which I thought made a worthy conclusion:
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Man has used electronic mail to intercommunicate, woo, build communities, topple businesses & civilizations, embezzle money, spread worms, distribute cluttered, broken links to discontinued Orscheln products, feed infants, set climate control, confirm identities, check bank account statuses, and lie to exhausted, slightly-conceited, and newly self-published professors. That's right – These Trillions of simple digijewels have purveyed every single possible category of human communication, and it's still growing strong.
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I'm excited to give Hey a try – I hope you'll consider inviting me early. I'll even send my feedback if you so desire it! If not, I'll probably end up trying a paid subscription, anyway hehe. Either way, let me wish the best of luck to your team. Win or lose, I'm glad you're taking action on your complaints, unlike the rest of us.
Here is another example of the Chrome team coming up with a bunch of web standards and then the Search team making a bunch of incentives based on those standards.
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It was news to me that in May, Google launched a page called “Web Vitals” on its web.dev domain (which they've apparently owned since November 2018.) The company measures “page experience” based on three main criteria:
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Largest Contentful Paint measures perceived load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the page's main content has likely loaded.
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First Input Delay measures responsiveness and quantifies the experience users feel when trying to first interact with the page.
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Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability and quantifies the amount of unexpected layout shift of visible page content.
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CoStar just sent an oddly topical (and honestly, encouraging) notification:
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I'm not a “real” web developer – nor do I mean to dictate to a single one – but I know enough theory to note that of this “core web” education operation centered around web.dev is operating on some irritating assumptions:
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1. Smaller assets are ideal.
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The simple assumption that it is always better to have the smallest page possible – that images should be resized and compressed to hell and typography/other elements should be few in number. Instantaneous page loads should be priority over any other standards of measure for a web page – like interesting design, for instance.
World-wide average mobile download speed was 22.82 Mbps (Megabits per second), an increase of 15.2% over 2017. Average upload speed was 9.19 Mbps, an increase of 11.6%. Fixed broadband speeds also increased. Average download speed increased 26.4% to 46.12 Mbps, while average upload speed came in at 22.44 Mbps, a 26.5% increase.
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I may be a yokel, but these averages are still absolutely inconceivable to me. Our phones have as much RAM as my “studio” work desktop, now. 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously. There is a very reasonable argument for essential services like search engines and news websites to conform to/adopt standards like AMP, but for the rest of The Open Web, ingenuity and risktaking should be encouraged, not discouraged, for the true good of all Peoplekind.
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A term I haven't seen for a good while describes this ideology: “the mobile web,” and it completely sucking ass is not a new concept. I've before referenced an old complaint from 2015 by The Verge's Editor-in-Chief, Nilay Patel (which the original article also links in different context in its last line):
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The entire point of the web was to democratize and simplify publishing using standards that anyone could build on, and it has been a raging, massively disruptive success for decades now. But the iPhone's depressing combination of dominant mobile web marketshare and shitbox performance means we're all sort of ready to throw that progress away.
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3. Google has the right to dictate “Best Practices.”
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The Mobile Web as a utility has its place, but it's certainly not a necessary or desirable ideal for the entirety of The Web, yet Google has the audacity to presume it can dictate what is and is not optimal web design. The URL in and of itself is extremely presumptuous – Google technically has every right to own web.dev, sure, but should it? The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) program has already had an annoying effect on day-to-day browsing. I despise AMP links more than most things in life, just as I despise the name of the website Search Engine Land (which sounds like actual hell) who also reported on this:
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If you have AMP, the good news is that the majority of AMP pages do extremely well in terms of page experience metrics, [Google Project Manager] Rudy Galfi said. It doesn’t mean that all AMP pages will have top page experience metrics, but AMP is built in a way to help with this.
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Recently, I discovered an incredibly refreshing/affirming essay wrapped in a hand-build web experience called “Rediscovering the Small Web” by designer Parimal Satyal, arguing for a different variety of Web presence:
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Modern web design principles are very rarely directed at regular people looking to make a website on something they are interested in. Instead, the focus is on creating websites that perform well:
-Don't use too many colours. Write short, catchy headlines. Don't let content be too long. Optimise for SEO. Produce video content, attention span is decreasing. Have a an obvious call to action. Push your newsletter. Keep important information above the fold. Don't make users think. Follow conventions.
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I realize that the majority of Web utilization cannot “revert” to hand-coded plain HTML web pages hosted on Neocities, but there's something to be learned (or remembered, in my case) from Satyal's argument: The Web's forgotten strength is diversity (much like my country's, it would seem,) and the majority of users are being pushed by Google's search engine toward a very specific minority of URLs. We have not been exploring for a very long time:
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Instead of browsing, the web is for many an endless and often overwhelming stream of content and commentary picked out by algorithms based on what they think you already like and will engage with. It's the opposite of exploration.
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“It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art,” argues Satyal. “The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing.” (Emphasis mine.) It's not just that The Web was meant to be more – nostalgia is definitely not my particular trip, if you didn't know – it's that it can be so much more. My list of favorite Open Web projects contains just a few examples of what I mean.
Google has announced a three-day live digital event at the end of this month (June 30th-July 2nd) in which viewers will “celebrate our community's actions, learn modern web techniques and connect with each other.” “Over three days, we'll share quick tips on aspects of modern web development,” explains the company on its web.dev/live page. I am planning to attend and bitch as much as I am allowed. Stay tuned to hear a chronicle.
I've been devoting significant attention to this blog recently, and I hope it shows. Reading now contains a list of recommended email newsletters as well as an ongoing list of my all-time favorite reads on The Web. I also added Podcast for End User and a dedicated Subscribe page. I've added Open – a list of some of my favorite Open Web projects and Social – a list of my social links. About has also been updated with new branding and more current hyperlinks. Typography and colors have been unified and updated to Version 2.3, and my theme has been officially listed for those of you willing to engage in the sincerest form of flattery. Also, look at that favicon! Thank you, CJ!
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Furthermore, I took the time to import some old work:
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“Bandcamp: Streaming's Secret Savior“
-A magnum opus of a 13,000+ word essay on why Bandcamp should be the future of music streaming services.
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“Mark Fuck and the Goofy Godheads“
-An old, hilarious rant about Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk that – if I may say so – still rings awfully true today.
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“The Matchsellers' Inheritance“
-A local bluegrass band releases an album that proves they are not just what they appear to be.
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“The Case for Chuck Klosterman“
-A deep dive into whether or not the voice of one old White Portland Dad should be culturally considered.
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“Kilgore Trout on CreateSpace“
-A critique of self-publishing culture (immediately after self-publishing myself) disguised as a review of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
“Illiteracy in American Media“
-A short academic essay about how little the illiteracy issue is covered in American media.
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This blog has now surpassed Extratone in number of email subscribers, which I deeply appreciate. Though you're not paying – yet (hehe) – let me once again encourage any/all feedback you may have. Send me an email!
This is an excerpt from my novel project, Blimp's Burden, about a jaded software engineer who’s new, ridiculously-eccentric boss presents a future which forces him to reckon with his mishandled grief. To support the novel's creation with art, funds, etc, please email me.
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Listen to the entirety of the chapter read aloud by Siri Voice 2 below.
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In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn. From the main gated lane of The Nice, Huge Estate, Lenny Lather slid through the muddy barrier and started bouncing West on the blacktop, brogues squeaking every third step. The overcasted clouds were having trouble deciding whether or not to let down their rain – as they had been all day – and the old, heavy early-March mist softened the yellow glow of the tall, buzzing streetlamps so much that he couldn’t help but intermittently wipe his eyes, for the spreading light convinced his mind that his eyelashes must’ve been wetted.
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Theodore Pith’s big old house was now burrowed between two mismatched neighborhoods – the bleaker Easterly, which was too new for its alien trees to have recovered from the brutality of its development’s clear-cutting and contained within one of its central featureless backyards an unidentifiable creature which made all through the night the most unimaginably ghastly, disturbingly human child-like shrieking; the opposing Westerly’s trees further enough along in their regrowth – ten or twenty years perhaps – to appear more of the planet Earth to Manhattan-bred Lenny Lather, who still found the colorless destruction of suburbia unendingly upsetting, especially when coming down. In the interest of his regular withdrawal’s mitigation, he had already established two short, repeatable tracks and a longer, several mile-long loop which skirted him sufficiently around the East’s center to avoid hearing the shrieks in all but the stillest nights. Never in his years – on these walks he was especially reminded of just how many there were – had he been able to feel such absolute ownership of his surroundings. The eroding Earth slipping away from the hem of the warped, stained wood fences; the sidewalks, cracked, bent, sloped helter-skelter, often muddied in the troughs and joints – generally laying haphazardly in layers after having been steadily tossed about by the glacial forces of their intermixture with clay, precipitation, and the tumultuous temperature-dependent torture of the two – these were his, entirely, in the right hour. Between two and five in the morning when the earliest risers would blearily revive their dewy automobiles from long, silent hibernation, the whole world – everything in his sight and more at any moment – it was all his, without a single worthy challenger.
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In the right hour, the roads were completely and totally abandoned – for the New Yorker, an unfathomable absolute – and all humanity was at rest. In the right hour, Lenny Lather was the appointed guardian of the worn domesticity of a small nation, though the lonely occupation was astoundingly lax, for in the miles and miles of empty streets he had already traversed in his nightly holidays from the World of Pith, he had yet to encounter a single unexpected factor or minutely threatening presence. Since shortly after his December arrival, he’d walked through even the most frigid mornings. Of course, the stillness had then been even more otherworldly, and Lenny was curious to see how his new most private domain would change with the seasons. Though the auxiliary guest room which he now called home was no smaller or less hospitable than the master bedroom of his late Hudson Yards flat shared with his late Wife, it proved to be a poor respite from Theodore Pith, who treated him – when they were “home” at Nice, Huge – as the puppy he never had, and expected his participation to remain entirely vulnerable to his any whim. Granted – in their shared abuse of amphetamines, cocaine, and assorted other stimulants – Lenny Lather was vastly more prepared for the games than any circadian guest could’ve possibly been. At first, the ten-foot door of his dawn-facing room had closed without latching, but with the warmth and moisture brought with the Midwestern Spring, the most secure state in which the engorged wood could be forcibly arranged still left a half-inch crack, and Lather’s last chance of privacy was lost.
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The latest favorite pastime of Nice, Big’s Master necessitated a willing, capable driver, and – as keeping a single Butler (much less an entire household staff) was proving extremely difficult for him – Lenny Lather was the sole pick of the draft. In the earliest hours of one Tuesday morning in February, he’d been pleasantly dosing and drooling on his laptop after an evening of obsessive, incoherent notetaking when the huge door had been kicked ajar by a deep black, blindingly shiny oxford with excessively violent force. Attached to the shoe in an equally blinding penguin tuxedo, towering bowler hat, and cartoonish fake mustache was the Great, Blown Pith.
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“Hope you’re not busy,” he’d said quite loudly to the lolling Lather, leaning and tilting his head into the lamp light, which had dislodged his monocle and briefly occupied him with untangling its chain.
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…
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“You’re not busy, are ya?!” he’d shouted, tapping the shiny brass lion’s head of his shiny black cane against the vanity… then swatting it with a flicking wrist… then clubbing it with a full, two-handed homerun swing – taking huge, vaguely cat nose-shaped gouges from the surface of the wood. The splintery wood chips had rained down upon the hunched Lenny; he’d stirred with one found its way in his open mouth – he’d chewed it slowly and swallowed it, but he still had not awoken. Nevertheless, Theodore Pith’s coked-up enthusiasm couldn’t possibly have yielded to common decencies like his guest’s nighttime peace.
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…
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“SHOOT, LENNY,” he’d screamed in his companion’s ear, having traversed the room to his bedside.
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“I SURE HOPE YOU’RE NOT BUSY RIGHT NOW!”
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…
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Finally, he’d resorted to tickling Lenny’s nose with the ornament, which had reeked with the urinal smell of metal polish – the sudden, overwhelming delivery of which to the writer’s olfactory nerves finally causing ample alarm in his nervous system to justify bringing him abruptly back to his life and deluded host.
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“I need a favor. The Duesie’s warming up. We’re going for a ride.”
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Unable to form a linguistic response, Lenny Lather had obeyed Theo’s frenzied, repeating instructions and stumbled into the matching suit he’d brought over his arm – wondering with marginal, arrested clarity at how well-tailored it was for him. He had not the soundness of perception to protest when Pith had whipped a deep black, blindingly shiny bowtie around his already-congested esophagus, nor when he’d adheased the huge, itchy matching fake moustache to his upper lip and nearly pulled the matching Tower of Bowler all the way down over his ears. He had been unresponsive when he’d been sat on the bench under the agonizing fluorescent lights of the laundry room, affixed with deep black, blindingly shiny matching oxfords, and asked if he smoked and how well he could say guffaw.
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…
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“Just wait… you have no idea… you have no idea how much fun this is going to be.”
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Lenny Lather had not… could not have made a sound through the confusing nonsense of his waking pre-Great Depression dream, but when the old servant’s door had been opened before him and set the heartless, single-digit Winter wind upon his very soul, he had all at once arrived in the world, laughing and whooping together with Theodore Pith.
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“Jesus Christ!” he’d screamed as they’d hobbled to the stable, where a devilishly dark red Model J Duesenberg had sat shivering in a rough idle, staring out the retrofitted garage door with its basketball-sized lights as if it was, indeed, a flesh-and-blood steed that had just been frightened awake by a thunderstorm, but the sky had been as clear as it would’ve been from an asteroid – as it is only on the coldest nights – and almost comically dominated by the setting, gluttonously luminescent moon. Theodore had then grabbed a screwdriver from the workbench and bent down to remove the license plate – which had said BLOOD in big black bold block letters – and its containing frame. By the time he had settled into the frigid red leather of the exposed, roofless driver’s seat, Lenny Lather was full-to-bursting with adrenaline and laughing out huge streams of breathy steam. From behind him in the cabin, Pith had been guffawing plumes, too, as he’d briefly ignited his cocaine-sprinkled mustache instead of the bratwurst-sized cigar between his teeth. The smell of burning human hair had accented his explanation of the old car’s transmission and its direct path from source-to-nose for Pith had required a brief, unplanned intermission as it induced without warning his violent heaving – still part-guffawing – hanging half out of his beautifully-upholstered suicide door.
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As he had spewed – expertly sparing the swoop of the gleaming waxy fender – Lenny had found a pair of deep black, blindingly shiny gloves and – after less grinding than you would imagine, to his credit – first gear, setting the whole dastardly circus in motion.
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“Where to, Sire?” Lenny had asked, nose lifted to an untenable altitude in a pitiful approximation of an accent that’d never actually been used before by any person or persons in all of history, struggling for breath.
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“Left at the gates, Barnsward, old chap,” Theodore had replied in a contrasting fashion after again sitting upright from his heaves and taking a breath, ironing out – if anything – the flatness of his perforating Ohio Ds and Ps, resulting in such a culturally destructive racket that it had set both of them in uncontrollable, cloudy fits lasting long after Lather had swerved the great length of the car from the gravel to his abandoned asphalt retreat. The two had continued their banter down that soul-suckingly flat vector, one-upping each other’s etymologic barbarity against the savage thievery of the heatless wind.
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“Now to star-board, Budleigh, my good fellow!”
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…
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“Right-o, as you say, sir!”
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…
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“Down to the pu-hb for a spaht of brahn-dee with me mae-its!”
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…
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“Oncemo-ar right, pip pip!”
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…
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“By jah-lee, there we are!”
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…
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After the entirety of Northern European history had been decimated and subsequently forgotten, the Duesenberg named BLOOD had turned its orange, googley-eyed stare and narrow whitewalled hooves up the reflective, freshly-painted access of the new 24-hour grocery in the no-man’s-land between the cookie-cutter stares of the neatly-rowed Easterly neighborhood and the droning respiration of Interstate 43, two miles distant. It was 2:12 in the morning and most of the greasy-haired night stocking shift had been halfway through their third smoke break, circled around a store-used picnic table 50 yards from the far sliding airlock doors. The first to spot BLOOD had been the second shortest of the lot, whose weary scrutiny along the truest radian to the West from under his sweaty beanie in her entrance she had crossed, and the depth of her red as he first spied it had caused him vertigo – as if he would fall in – and cast upon the shorter-than-average length of his being an all-consuming existential doubt. The tallest and loudest of them had faced squarest the white faux-brick wall of the box building and was at that moment engaged upon a spirited rant about where and where’nt and when a vapist ought to buy his Suck juice between long, gasping Sucks from his super-shiny Suck box. Of course, the arrival of a customer even at such a late hour did not warrant notice at a huge, broadly-servicing operation like theirs, but as BLOOD had crept through all four reflective yellow-checkered pedestrian crossings, closing without a flinch, and the details of her occupying caricatures had become more and more numerous, she had stolen the attention of the huddle, one-by-one, and elicited from each the rarest under-breath profanity of true, unmolested wonder.
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“Jesus Christ,” had said the shortest.
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“Holy fuck,” had said the youngest.
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“Gee whiz,” had said the oldest.
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And the Sucking tallest, having realized he’d lost his audience, had been the last to turn and follow their eyes BLOOD’s way as she had halted coolly in front of the purely white glowing concrete leading into the closest customer entrance, and had – without the gradual exposure over the length of her approach that his peers had been afforded – dropped his Suck box and exclaimed at the sudden, undiluted immensity of the spectacle, simply, “FUCK!”
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The Sucking’s FUCK and the splitting shatter of his Suck against the glass of their smoking table had reached the two arrivees – albeit in a muted way – and through the onset of their frostbite’s early stages even further stoked their already-uncontrollable boyish giggling. Theodore Pith had paused briefly to affix his monocle as firmly as possible in his eye socket and stuff down his spasmic guffaws with a few lip-smacking puffs of his then successfully-lit cigar before swinging his right door open.
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“Stay here and wait at the ready, my good… my best Bagsy! I shan’t be a twinkle,” he had declared, clicking it lightly shut again and turning on his heels toward the pale light of the store, twirling his cane in dramatically shortened strides so as to reproduce the oversped effect of a silent motion picture, puff-puffing away. As the doors had sensed him and indiscriminately whirred aside, he had turned to the smokers – most of whom had still been reeling, grabbing for their hair – and bobbed the bulk of his big black bowler toward their communion with his gloved black fingers by the brim.
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“Tally-ho, my boys!” he had shouted, sending Lenny Lather’s wide open face toward the floor of the idling car as he doubled over himself in the first spontaneously asphyxiating, tear-lobbing laughter he’d yet to experience in the 21st century. As Theodore had entered the masterpiece of the boxed store’s bleakness in his cane twirling, head swinging, cigar puffing shuffle, he had made sure to stay his instinct to sneak for a swift, full-chat dart, instead, and the on-duty leather-faced embodiment of tedium’s wrath beneath his lone lit lane light had looked up from his People Magazine just in time to see the heel of a deeply black oxford and the last shiny inches of flowing black coattails disappear behind the potato sack endcap of the far Aisle 1. He’d hesitated, chin against palm, holding his next glossed page perpendicularly erect between his tightened thumb and index finger for a long few seconds of fantastic stillness – had hastily attempted a diagnostic of his present senses – before a locomotive-like segmented tube of cigar smoke had risen from against the light tiles and unsoiled trimming to intersect his line-of-sight where it met the darkened deli, recessed in the far wall from his hunch, the motion startling him into his own throat-clearing, counter-rounding, key-jingling, excuse me-shouting march toward the lumpy potato sacks and the climbing dissipation of the most unbelievable violation. As he had jingled, he had reflected on the few occasions in which he’d ever smelled tobacco smoke in his store: all incidental, most very brief, and many followed by a lengthy, unreasonably self-deprecating apology. To just walk in his Temple of Domestic Fulfilment during this most Serene Time of Silent Service, spewing orange nicotine on his premium, Food & Drug Administration-blessed body and blood offering to the middle class was surely in ignorance, but could have even been in spite. Regardless, the transgression was worthy of the most merciless wrath, and he had been selected as its willing, capable vessel. In just the fifteen seconds it’d taken him to jingle his way to Aisle 1, he’d thought himself and his leather into flash-broiling, fast-rising fury.
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Perhaps the least expected sight that could have possibly greeted this Apostle of Appraisal on the far side of Aisle 1 – as he rounded the potato sack endcap and filled his excuse me lungs in preparation through his nose – was the labored lifting of the 125-pound eldest child of the new, Parisian-trained, full-time, certified cheese artisan – whom the store had just won out of 175 competitors in a region-wide raffle of her pilot program – by the dashing, swinging, and smoking real-life manifestation of a young Rich Uncle Pennybags, yet shock did not long halt the Keys & Leather.
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“Sir! Excuse me!”
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…
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“Excuse me! Sir!”
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…
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Theodore Pith – having reevaluated the girth of his intended booty – had propped his shiny black cane against the sill of the refrigerator and popped each slack bottom up off his oxfords from his shins before squatting over the massive Holy Wheel of the Artisan where it lay displayed on a sturdy bespoke plinth.
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…
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“Sir! You need to put out that cigar… the cigar – put it out immediately!”
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Keys & Leather had the odd inability to both shout and shuffle at the same time, so he’d only made it to the pomegranate juice by the time Pith had mustered enough momentum to swing the cheese child into a high enough pendulum to carry it stably facing forward under his chin with his two hands spaced evenly on the Great Wheel’s bottom.
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…
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“Sir! I’m going to have to ask you to put that down… That is a four thousand dollar item… If you want to buy it, we need to go about-”
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“…now, see here!” Pith had replied with great effort, in the midst of weighing in his mind the worth of the cane as a casualty, then of the monocle, too, which had fallen out while he was weighing, and of his own physical intelligence, and whether or not it was capable of retrieving the cane by its brass lion’s head handle via the top of a flicking foot without losing his balance. Keys & Leather, meanwhile, had been tortured at great length witnessing – in Theodore’s gravitational struggle – the Cuban’s ashes knocked all over the precious round Immanuel; the artisan’s Beloved, Chosen son of cheese – a nauseating sensation of loss overwhelming all hope of his store’s defense. The Terrible Theodore had at once noticed his hesitation and arrived upon a plan to leave no prop behind. He had leaned forward with the girth of the wheel and closed the remaining few feet between them, advancing with the huge mass of Nazarethian dairy to bear it all down upon the unsuspecting Leather, who in his grief for the prized wheel was far too slow to deflect its incoming mass.
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“Now, see here, chum!” Pith had forced from the furthest possible extremis of his best mob mouth as he transferred his burden all at once to its most concerned party, who collapsed against the multilayered tables that made up the fresh cookie display, with the weight of the wheel on his belly. As the stunned Leather struggled to separate himself without further soiling the only item in his store that sold for double a month’s paycheck, Theodore had replaced his monocle and returned for his cane in a single stride, which he’d then used after a return step to the pile of chocolate chip, almond nut, and fuming night manager to rap loose with the snout of the terrible brass cat Leather’s white knuckle-tight grip on the wheel with a lampoonish haha! before rolling the freed cheese toward the door in a villainous cackle.
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“Man, come on,” the defeated Leather had yelled halfheartedly from his pile of sweets, struggling against the awkward, slippery boxes for enough footing to stand. His efforts, though, were interrupted after a time by the abrupt mute of Pith’s cackling in the second swooshing of the front sliding doors – he had missed his last chance of pursuit. It had all been in vain – he’d failed to guard the crown jewel of the whole suburb. As he had given up the chase and the cheese and slumped once more against the ruined pile, the ridiculousness of the crime against him nearly cracked a smile, but soon was deterred by the very real thought of explaining what had happened to his General Manager when she arrived in just five hours. After a moment, there, covered in cookies, dust, ashes, and shame, he had quietly begun to sob.
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After he had regained control of his diaphragm, Lenny Lather had been amused, outside, by the varying velocities in which the smokers of the night shift gave in to their curiosities about the presence of the seven-figure collectible and its purpose in waiting at its now healthier idle in front of their grocery store in the loneliest time of a Tuesday morning. The first and the bravest had been the one who first spotted their intrusion – the shortest – if only because he had remained entirely convinced for the duration that BLOOD and its two, period-dressed occupants were nothing but an apparition of his dead Grandfather and Great Uncle like others he’d thought he’d seen before, and – though he’d been terrified by the clarity of this realest visit yet, he’d been irritated more than anything, and wanted to know “why the hell can’t you just leave me alone?!” The others behind him had been staggered in the proximity to the waiting car they had achieved – the lesser and most cowardly being the largest – the Sucking evangelist – who had been waiting for the great automobile to leave so he could forge the exchange of his broken Suck box for a new one from the back. In the delirium of his exhaustion and progressing frostbite, Lenny Lather had thought the image of the men where they were would make for an interesting, organic graph on the nature of courage – their positions simply representing their unaltered datapoints, and had been considering how best to deal with or respond to the nearer, deluded one, who had by then come close enough to the elegant, professionally polished front-right fender to reach out and touch it with his unwashed hands, and appeared to be taking the matter under serious consideration. He’d been seconds away from finally deciding between his idiotic ideas for a joke response when by far the largest wheel of cheese he’d ever seen had come rolling out of the opening doors onto the concrete, followed closely behind by Theodore Pith who’d still had three-quarters or more of his cigar left to smoke and apparently switched to cheap mob clichés in his brief absence.
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“Haste, Don Lenny!” he’d yelled, re-opening his closest cabin door to chuck his cane in first. He’d then straddled the great wheel to position it against the step before making a scene of grunting and huffing against its side with his full weight. Again, the bewildered smokers had fallen silent – they did not recognize the ridiculous delicacy because it was special inventory and could only be handled by the Holy Artisan herself. Lather had started revving the huge old straight-8 to answer Pith’s urgency, who had found himself fresh out of phrases after the wheel had finally succumbed to its capture and rolled into the footwell.
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“Make haste, make haste, my boy!” he’d shouted, diving theatrically into the covered back seat, head-first, to which his icing chauffer had responded by revving the behemoth and briskly popping her clutch, which had lurched the pair into the last, getaway stage of their late grocery heist. As BLOOD’s razor-edged hood ornament had sliced through the night by the dumbstruck smokers, Theodore Pith was unable to think of anything to shout at them as he passed but for “bada-bing, bada-BOOM!”
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Though the Lake Geneva Police Department was shown the security footage of that first theft by management, the theatricality of their matching getup had inadvertently obscured their identities, and the organization’s extreme deficit of imagination had left them stumped by the lack of license plates on the car, despite the free and effortless ability of just about any casual enthusiast of early American luxury automobiles and/or lackadaisical disciple of the Concours religion to immediately identify BLOOD by name from the grainiest image, if consulted. If anything, their incompetence rewarded Pith and Lather’s continued focus on the products of the same store’s cheese artisan, as intelligence on the state of her latest flagship incubation was freely available with no more effort than it took to simply stop by her display amid regular shopping trips. Twice in two weeks, they stole both of her replacements for the biggest child without any significant alternation of their method, which frustrated her and the management nearly to the point of crises, and quickly lost all potential for fun in a third attempt – their kicks were in their absurdity, not their effectiveness, and neither of them cared much for the cheese.
The ancient IP’s MMO is still Online, albeit with some disappointing discontinuations.
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I entertained fantasies about a Star Trek MMO since first experiencing the genre through Eve Online and World of Warcraft in early adolescence. The idea of commanding my own starship in a universe of other “captains” alongside a hand-picked bridge crew was a beguiling one to myself and many others. This year, the game celebrated its ten-year anniversary (aligning well with the continued involuntary beat of this blog.) I’m currently in the midst of my annual check-in with STO and thought an exploration of this most-consequential video game of my life’s history would be an appropriate undertaking.
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The execution of today’s final, Arc Games-owned and maintained product is a particularly long and interesting one. As Justin Olivetti chronicled for Engadget, the license for Star Trek Online was originally bought and developed on by Perpetual Entertainment, which was assaulted by a lawsuit and extensive layoffs in December, 2006. The company was sued by Kohnke Communications for allegedly selling “valuable assets like the Star Trek Online license” to an affiliated entity called P2 entertainment. Clever. A quote from the complaint as reported by Ten Ton Hammer:
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“On information and belief, the assets transferred to P2 include Perpetual Entertainment trademarks and copyrights, the perpetual.com domain name, and assets related to Star Trek Online, including code and the license… Perpetual received less than market value for the assets it transferred to P2, and the transfer made Perpetual insolvent (or worsened Perpetual's existing insolvency).”
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Perpertual’s STO was significantly different from today’s MMO. Instead of captaining one’s own starship, “players would have taken on the role of an officer who would be part of a crew of a starship,” echoing old legacy titles like Star Trek: Bridge Commander.
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The proposed solution was that players could own smaller ships like fighters and minor spaceships, but the big ones — like the Galaxy class — would instead be adventure hubs with explorable, detailed interiors.
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I was 14 in 2008 when I joined the original post-Perpetual Entertainment STO IRC channel when the game's license was first transferred to Cryptic Studios. In fact, this channel was the only reason I left IRC clients open on my computers for years. It was exciting to find a community of people who were looking forward to participating in a Star Trek MMO as much as I was. I originally went by the (very cringey) username “crazyhooligin,” under which my current STO account is still registered. In the IRC channel, I met Sata – host of the now-defunct MMO Junkies podcast and ex-Perpetual developer. He and the STORadio crew accepted me into their Teamspeak conversations despite how strange and unsocialized I was. I learned how extensive and beautiful their development had been. One wonders what Cryptic did with the original game and art assets and who technically owns them now.
We were under a very massive deadline to deliver the game. We had acquired the license from Perpetual and Perpetual’s license had an expiration date on it, and we had to ship the game before the expiration date or we would lose the license.
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STOked also provided an excellent historical account of the acquisition entitled “How Cryptic Saved Star Trek Online.” By late-Fall, 2009, Star Trek Onlineentered Closed Beta, which I somehow acquired a key for in the name of STOHolic.com (a blogger site which represents one of my first web projects ever.) I was dual-booting Windows 7 Beta on my 2008 MacBook, which only supported 2 of its 4GB of RAM. The resulting performance was not optimal, but I was tremendously excited just to participate. Somewhere, there are at least three 480p handicam videos of Closed and Open Beta gameplay taken from over my shoulder, but I could not find them at the time of this writing. Comparatively, beta looked drastically different from the property that’s online today. In this video of the original entry tutorial, we are introduced to the game’s basic controls by the voice of Zachary Quinto of J.J. Abrams fame as the new Emergency Medical Hologram in godawful dropshadowed text. The lighting is dated, the blue-based user interface even more so.
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The hair was bad and the textures of the armor, worse. So was mine, though. I uploaded two videos under my STOholic name: an unboxing of the Collector’s Edition and what appears to be the definitive YouTube tutorial to run Star Trek Online on Mac OSX using the (now defunct) wineskin wrapper. Though I was sixteen years old, I appear to be about eight. Endless waves of ground enemies, pressing the “1” key hundreds of thousands of times to whittle them away with my phaser rifle. There were bugs on top of bugs. My favorite was a swap between one's ground and space avatars: a gigantic captain would appear in space and a little ship would appear on the ground.
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Four years ago, Lead Developer Al Rivera wrote “History of Star Trek Online – a Retrospective” – a blog post detailing the chronology of the game from its February 2nd, 2010 release date – about a week after my 16th birthday, for which my mom bought me my first and only gaming PC. I have never been very good at video games, and Star Trek Online has been no exception. After 10 years, my main Captain – Ambassador Kuvak – is still not doing adequate DPS to hold my own in Task Force Operations, from what I understand. My 15-16-year-old self chose a Science Captain but wanted to fly the great (engineering/tank-focused) cruisers of The Original Series, The Next Generation, and the latter's movies. This is possible, but not necessarily advised. Generally, one specs an Engineering Captain to tank, a Tactical Captain for DPS, and a Science Captain for “exotic DPS” and light healing. I managed to level a single science character – the original – through to the max ranks using little intelligence and a lot of persistence. Later in life, I’ve learned the patience for a more deliberate approach, but still struggle to make the numbers.
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The Exploration System
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For many Star Trek fans, Star Trek Online’s combat feels excessive. Or at least, that’s what you’d think. The current reality is that search engine results for “too much combat in STO” are virtually nill. There are some comments on Massively Overpowered posts, a year-old blog post in Contains Moderate Peril by Roger Edwards, an old Ryan Somna take, and… that’s about it. There was a definite (and entirely reasonable) argument against the amount of combat across the community early in the game’s development, but it looks like the arguers have simmered down and/or given up. This is also reasonable, considering its now ten-year lifespan. The only trouble is that non-combat options in Star Trek Online have actually diminished over the years.
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The original Exploration System was an ingenious and significant idea that “used automated tools to facilitate large quantities of widely varied content.” Unfortunately, the result was “nothing close to what [Cryptic] originally planned.” Instead of inspiring variety, Exploration Clusters ended up becoming the most repetitive activity in the game – nothing more than a good source of crafting materials. The missions were generic and the environments simply randomly combined segments of the same interior textures. Procedurally generated environments would hit the mainstream conversation years later with No Man’s Sky, which was written about in two fascinating articles by Raffi Khatchadourian in The New Yorker and Chris Baker in Rolling Stone:
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Using procedural generation isn’t simply about offloading the creative process onto an algorithm – the real challenge is that it requires developers to teach an algorithm the difference between good and bad game design.
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Perhaps if Star Trek Online’s initial development window had not been so limited, Cryptic would’ve had time and resources to pioneer something truly Trek and extraordinary in the exploration system, but it ended up having to kill the idea altogether – no amount of Change.org petitions could prevent this.
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The Foundry
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Perhaps the most innovative feature Star Trek Online contributed to gaming as a whole came to the live server in Spring, 2011. It was called The Foundry, and it allowed players access to a diluted form of the same mission creation tools Cryptic themselves used to create content, enabling the community to publish its own playable stories. The result was a wonder virtually inexpressible in words. In player-made Foundry Missions, I found joy, wonder, sorrow, and insight – truly everything and more than one could ever want from fiction. Throughout 2013-2014 my girlfriend at the time and I ran regular Foundry missions together along with couple friends in our fleet. Unfortunately, I cannot remember a single specific mission (aside from Unholy Alliances, I think,) but I remember the storytelling. I remember laughing at, dwelling on, and even crying for the characters we were introduced to. There were farming-oriented missions and some fairly rough drafts, sure, but the vast majority of the content was deliberately and delicately considered, especially the Foundry Spotlight series, which highlighted player-created stories of a particular quality and intrigue.
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Last April, however, Arc retired the Foundry forever – perhaps the worst possible news – stating “the legacy knowledge required to maintain the Foundry at our quality standards is no longer available,” meaning – as Rodger Edwards notes – that all developers with their hands, hearts, and heads in the project had long since departed the company. The community reaction was heartbreaking. On Reddit, a group of mission authors and devotees committed to capturing as many Foundry Missions as possible on video in the month between the announcement and date of death. User waimser lamented the loss of the Foundry as a critical hit to Star Trek Online’s endgame:
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Once you've played through the story missions and built your ship, the foundry is what's left, and it has some damn good stuff.
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The group even created a Google Docs spreadsheet to coordinate the effort. Another created a thread in the Star Trek Online forums dedicated to “aggregating the various channels with Foundry content and providing those links to you and updating them as necessary.” In an interview for Gamesindustry.biz, Al Rivera suggested that the secret to the title’s longevity in which his team had been “strategically successful” was knowing when and when not to make drastic changes. “Don't change the fundamentals of what players love about your game,” he suggested.
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Community
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Though STOked and STORadio have long since been off the air, the Roddenberry Podcast Network’s PriorityOne is still going strong, having just recorded its 460th episode. As I discovered last year, the game’s Twitch community is also thriving. Layiena’s streams are incredible because – while he understands theory as well as the other broadcasters in the STO Twitch community – it’s his incredible skills at live Captain commentary (calling out abilities and other command inputs as if he really is in the captain’s chair.) It may sound cringey (and perhaps it would be to many,) but his thoroughness and accuracy actually 1) make it seem pretty darn cool to me and 2) are hugely valuable in helping the viewer understand what he’s doing. After some three years, I know my one rotation fairly well, but only three or four of its steps by name – not even remotely well enough to do what he does. Unfortunately, it appears as though he’s been inactive since last year.
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Sphynx’s streams also have an especially professional feel – he is excellent at calling out his actions as well, if perhaps without so much intensity. His Norwegian sensibility is wonderful: when I introduced myself as being around in the community since 2008, he remarked “that’s strange considering the game has only been out since 2010.” Nigh-universally common threads among them: imperturbable kindness to their audience and an impressively wholesome commitment to actually having fun. Though I’m far from deeply saturated with Twitch culture as a whole, I’ve watched my fair share of Eve Online, World of Warships, and Gran Turismo Sport streams, and – while all of these have incredible communities – there’s none quite like the sincerity of the Star Trek fraternity.
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A few weeks ago, I departed my own derelict STO fleet for the aptly-named United Federation of Planets which has over three thousand (presumably at least semi-active) members in its fleet armada. The fleet website has user profiles, a very active forum, and a Discord server – everything I could possibly ask for. So far, I have been welcomed with overwhelming positivity, and I’m grateful. In a prompt posted on both their forums and Reddit, I asked players what their favorite part of the community is. Oddly enough, some of the responses I got from the latter were quite jaded: “I really enjoy the love and respect the PVP community gets. No, wait...” Alex Rowe for The Startup:
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The game’s subreddit is full of folks who are tired of the game because they’ve blasted through all the content, but as someone who has only seen about 1/6th of the quests currently in the game, I’m eager to check out more.
You can do all the lockbox promo vids you want, but you are going to have to live in reality, no matter where your ego flies off to.
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However, there were some positives. User ModestArk:
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What I really like about this community is that it seems to be more grown up than other gaming communities. Maybe this comes from Star Trek itself, since it is more based/focused on science than Star Wars etc.
This past January, Star Trek Online: Legacy was launched, bringing The Original Series-referencing episodes The Measure of Morality parts I and II along with a new 10 year anniversary event and the Tier 6 Khitomer Alliance Battlecruiser – “the first Klingon/Federation Starship.” I did not participate in the event, save for experiencing the new missions, which I talked about in my review of Star Trek: Discovery. JustGaming4Us produced an excellent, in-depth video review of the two missions as well as a tour of the event as a whole. I, for one, have never been partial to Shiny New Ship gluttony largely because of how long it took me to “master” my own Intrepid-Class Retrofit – christened the U.S.S. Bataan after the aircraft carrier my grandfather served on in WWII – as much as I have. It took me years to arrange my bridge officer abilities and their keybinds in such a way that I could maintain a fairly-steady dps rotation and I have no desire to go through the process of learning a new ship again. For most veteran players, however, trying out different ships/skill specs is all there is left to do.
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Choosing whether or not – or to whom – to recommend the game is an issue best left to actual gaming journalists. In March, Massively Overpowered – the followup project to what was once Massively.com – published Mia DeSanzo’s account of her first experience in the game:
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Everything you’ve heard is true. Ground combat is, as multiple sources have told me, “a hot mess.” I don’t think clunky is an adequate descriptor. You’d have to try it.
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For the same site, Tyler F.M. Edwards argued in January that Star Trek Online is best left to those who already love Star Trek:
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STO has some things going for it as a video game, and it’s certainly unique in the MMO space, but it has too many basis quality issues for it to be a game I’d recommend to someone who’s never watched an episode of Star Trek.
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Compared to what I experienced all those years ago in Closed and Open Beta, Star Trek Online is now vastly more polished, but perhaps compared to other MMOs in 2020, it is, indeed, “rough.” In my casual return this past month, I have yet to experience any significant bugs. Considering his character data dates back to launch, I’d like to think that the server is set into some brief, confused panic every time I log in to Kuvak, but perhaps that’s just a fantasy. I have still been enjoying the space combat in the classic Advanced-level Borg Disconnected and Counterpoint TFOs and my first entry into high-level gear upgrade crafting from the vast cache of materials I’ve built up over the years. . Apparently, my old lockbox collection might actually be worth some significant Energy Credits on the Exchange – as of the time of this writing, however, not a one had yet to sell.
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If you’re a ship junkie who’s entirely unfamiliar with the property, know that Star Trek’s ships are fucking cute. The Nebula Class, especially, inspires real affection. In my opinion, it alone is worth giving this free-to-play game a shot. My two point eight pound Surface Laptop 2 is enough to run it fairly well at medium-high settings, which is an absurdly low barrier-to-entry. You shouldn’t be worried about investing your time, either – Star Trek doesn’t appear to be dying anytime soon.
Why Extratone has used Discord instead of Slack for our team chat.
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Back in 2015, I hosted a pre-Extratone culture podcast called Drycast with musician friends from all over the net. To record remotely, we originally used Teamspeak 3 – a gamer VoIP staple. When I discovered Discord, I thought we'd found podcasting heaven. Originally, the free plan included 128kbps audio in its voice channels, which was nearly twice what we were getting out of our paid Teamspeak server. If I were still podcasting, Discord's just-released server video feature would undoubtedly prove invaluable for live streams.
According to a poll I ran on Twitter, 2/3rds of all people on Earth are thankful for Discord's existence. This is not surprising considering what every Discord user is still offered without spending any money at all: community spaces with audio/video and text chat capability, organizable by Twitch and YouTube-integrated roles with a plethora of different permission options, instantly and easily shareable by customizable temporary or permanent invite links through an application that's about as cross-platform as one can get (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, or simply one's web browser.) Those of us that remember IRC, Ventrilo, and Teamspeak should all consider Discord a tremendous gift.
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Never before have so many VoIP, video, and text chat features been offered together, or in such a beautiful package. “What we really did was create an all-in-one voice, video, and text chat app that replaced this constellation of tools that people would use,” said CEO Jason Citron in an interview with CNBC. Technically in terms of these details, Discord has no competition. Slack offers text and voice chat with its paid plans, yes, but nothing close in terms of video – especially considering Discord Go Live, its fairly-new streaming feature, which allows users to stream game video directly to 10 other users in the server. With some jury-rigging, it's possible to simply screen share this way, which is an essential sell for business video communication applications like Skype.
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Does anyone else have a discord server where you're the only member and you use different text channels to plan your weekly schedules lmaoooo
“Discord and Slack have many similarities, but Discord is the superior tool,” says esports team Ardent United. “Discord has voice channels, which allows us to easily chat with our supporters and other team members. Discord also allows us to set user roles and permissions which makes moderation extremely simple.” It's not just gaming companies, though. Decentralized cloud platform Sia also moved their community to Discord:
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Its intended audience is gamers, but many large communities have switched from Slack to Discord, including development communities like Reactiflux and Unreal Slackers. It includes an unlimited number of users, unlimited file uploads (with a per-file size limit), unlimited message histories, and really great moderation and spam filtering features.
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Slack is often praised for its integrations, but it shares support with Zapier – a dedicated web integration service which more or less integrates them equally.
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Slack works with a long list of tools, including Google Calendar, Zendesk, Salesforce, Wunderlist, and dozens of others. If you're looking for an integration that isn't immediately obvious, you can always turn to Zapier for help, because Slack is a supported service. Zapier is an online service that creates integrations between other apps and services, without you having to know any code to make it happen.
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For sharing detailed post embeds, there's also Discohook, which I just discovered. Productivity company Chanty's blog wrote perhaps the most in-depth comparison of the two services (emphasis theirs):
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At their core, Discord and Slack and very similar. Both are team chat apps with a similar interface. Both apps have team communication organized in channels. The biggest difference between the two is their target audience, and of course, their specific features.
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Ultimately, one must decide how relevant the services' respective target audiences are to productivity. For a not-for-profit media organization like Extratone, Discord's features-for-price ratio is simply too rich to pass up. If you'd like, stop by our server or try out our server template.
In Stephen King's “The Langoliers,” the state of today's air travel is foreshadowed.
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I told myself I would not be topical – that I would publicly ignore the coronavirus – but I can no longer. There is simply too much to say about one of the most emotionally effective, surreal films of my childhood. The Langoliers occupied 9-11PM's slot on ABC for May 14th and 15th, 1995 (Sunday and Monday, twenty-five years ago.) It's an adaptation of a Stephen King novel of the same title and is fairly widely-regarded as the worst such adaptation of all time. You can now watch the whole three hours of The Langoliers in 360p (supposedly) at your leisure thanks to OpenTube (for now.) One commenter (on the since-taken-down YouTube video) echoes what I'm about to tell you: “My god! I thought I dreamed this movie up as a kid. I have been trying to describe this to people for years and here it is, it’s real!” In order to write this, I joined the Stephen King Wiki Discord server and was immediately welcomed with a request not to type in the text channels: “I’m working on adding some new channels so pls nobody type in them til I’m done.”
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The Langoliers begins with a pissed-off British secret agent (Mark Lindsay Chapman,) an insane businessman (Bronson Pinchot,) a psychic, vision-impaired young woman (Kate Maberly,) Sarah Jessica Parker (Patricia Wettig,) and a just-widowed pilot (David Morse) all boarding the same redeye flight to Boston – American Pride Flight 29. This group falls asleep and mysteriously wakes up alone on the aircraft except for Stephen King himself (Dean Stockwell,) a stupid incel violinist (Christopher Collet,) and a stoner (Kimber Riddle.) My favorite character, Craig Toomey, is the “twerp” business boy with daddy issues who can't stop himself from demanding to know what's going on. James Bond shuts him up with a “nose hold.”
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Whoa. No one's driving the plane!
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David Morse proceeds to try and contact air traffic control in a fairly-realistic manner, but is unable to receieve any radio signals at all, even from Strategic Air Command. Frankie Faison plays the single person of color on the flight, Don Gaffney – “a tool and die worker for Hughes Aircraft” – who dies first, of course. James Bond lecures David about inciting panic and almost immediately reveals his secret identity. Then, the Hungry Idiot (Baxter Harris) wakes up whilst Toomey begins screaming again.
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Scaring the little girl? Scaring the little girl?! Lady, we're diverting to some tin-pot airport in the middle of nowhere, and I've got better things to think about than scaring the little girl!
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After the entirety of the male cast threatens to beat him up, Toomey, sweating his balls off, begins slowly tearing strips of paper and moaning sexually like an absolute madman. Some irritiatingly irrelevant dialogue insues in which Stephen King Author Man narrates through Sherlock Holmes deduction to figure absolutely nothing out. He is wearing stripes on plaid. He suggests that the entire situation could be some sort of government experiment and I can't believe I'm wasting your time with this. “If it were just this plane, I could give you a scenario, but unfortunately, it's not just this plane. The city of Denver is probably still down there, but all its lights were off if it was.” Here you can see how excellently this script was written.
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I've been sitting here running all these old stories through my head. You know, time warps, space warps, alien raiding parties. I mean, we really don't know if there's anything left down there, do we?
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Sarah Jessica Parker reveals to Powers Girl that she's on her way to meet a guy she's been emailing with. Stoner girl asks if everything is going to be okay and Incel Violinist looks horny. She's going to rehab for stones. The captain announces to his nine passengers that they're beginning their descent into Bangor International Airport, near Stephen King's birthplace. Don asks Toomey to stop ripping up paper and the useless food addict yells “well, at least we'll be able to get some chow when we land” offscreen. Craig, sweating even more, is still ripping up magazines in the face of Don's threats. “Try it, you little jackass,” he says. I'm wondering where I can snag this American Pride livery for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Director Tom Holland manages to add drama to a more-or-less routine landing.
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This place is utterly, totally deserted... You know, there's something wrong with the air here, Brian.
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It's occuring to me that this may be the worst script I've ever actually sat through reading. “This place smells wrong. Really badly wrong.” Toomey threatens to sue the airline for $30 million for missing his 9AM meeting before seeing flashbacks to his abusive father (John Griesemer,) who mentions the Langoliers for the first time. The deserted airport scene is the reason I've written this whole thing – the dulled sounds of the characters' heels on the tarmac, the putrefied air. The clocks have stopped. The payphones are dead. The computers are lifeless. The abadonedness of it all. This is what the coronavirus has done to the world and to Craig Toomey. Even the battery-powered devices are dead. This is what confuses Stephen King Author Man to the point of head-rubbing and cigarette smoking for the first time in ten years.
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The production was actually made at Bangor International Airport as this incredible video hosted by Toomey's actor explores.
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LOVE IS NOT PART OF THE BIG PICTURE!
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It's never actually explained what The Langoliers are. Ken Tucker for Entertainment Weekly describes them as “little meatballs.” The little Beatles-haired girl can hear them approaching. “It sounds a little like rice krispies after you pour the milk.” Foodism abounds. “A really terrible, scary sound... Something making that horrible cereal noise.” She screams that the cereal is going to kill them. Somehow, Toomey finds a revolver while he's losing his mind. Kimber Riddle the Stoner went to NYU.
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Don't forget, Craiggy-weggy, the langoliers were here. And they will be back.
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Stephen King Author Man and Food Addict note that the food and soda have gone completely flat. “Tastes like old tire,” says Don. “What we're dealing with is time, not dimension,” says Stephen King. I'm wondering what in the hell sort of room they're in at the moment, and who decided those light wood countertops were ever a good idea.
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The bottom line is, I believe, that we have hopped an absurdly short distance into the past, say as little as 15 minutes, and we're discovering the unlovely truth about time travel. That one can't appear in the Texas State School Book Depository on November 22nd, 1963 and hope to stop the Kennedy assassination. One can't witness the building of the pyramids or the sack of Rome, or investigate the age of the dinosaurs firsthand. No, fellow time travellers, have a look around you. This is the past. It's empty. It's silent. It's a world with all the meaning of a discarded old paint can. Sensory input has disappeared. Electricity has already disappeared. And time itself is winding down in a kind of a spiral that's going faster and faster.
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Little Prophet notes that the sound she's been hearing is once again getting louder. Mr. Toomey's face is shoved in the floor, his nose bent.
New Microsoft Office features, the PowerToys Run Preview, and a test of Edge Chromium.
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I have no idea why I signed up to attend Microsoft's virtual 2020 Build Conference, but I did. I thought I'd add my End User commentary to the mix. Sorry. My first event was called “Every developer is welcome, with Scott Hanselman and guests.” Hanselman is listed as a blogger and podcaster living (of course) in Portland. I'm not a “real” developer, but I know what Microsoft Teams is, and I recognized the event as a desktop screenshare of his calls with different Microsoft employees. There was a child invasion and a dropped phone. I also noticed the icon for the “new” Microsoft Edge browser in his taskbar and realized that I hadn't downloaded it yet. I remedied that for the conference's sake – I thought it only appropriate that I try to use as much Microsoft software as possible in this context. I also installed the new PowerTools Run preview which I mentioned in my tips post.
Build allows an attendee to build one's own event schedule, but I neglected to find those focused on what I really care about: Office 365. As reported by The Verge, Microsoft Fluid is going to change a lot:
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Microsoft’s Fluid Framework sounds a lot like Google Docs, but it’s actually Google Docs on steroids. Microsoft is so confident it has built the future of productivity, it’s now open-sourcing its Fluid Framework so the rest of the world can help shape what it has created.
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There's also Microsoft Lists, which is reportedly going to revolutionize SharePoint Lists into something more modern and useful:
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It builds off the existing feature in SharePoint, and will let you track progress and data to organize your teams, potentially making the company’s offerings more streamlined and productive.
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Microsoft Edge Chromium
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As an Office 365 administrator, I basically only use Edge for administrative/management tasks. Otherwise, I can't imagine a reason to use it over Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, Chrome, Opera, etc, but I thought I'd give the “new” (as of January) Edge a tryout for your sake and make it my default browser for a day as well as Microsoft's Bing search engine. There's also news specific to Build: Edge is integrating with Pinterest, of all things:
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Now, Edge will feature a Pinterest-powered tool that will show suggestions from Pinterest at the bottom of a collection. Clicking on that, Microsoft says, will take users to a Pinterest board “of similar, trending Pins so users can quickly find and add ideas relevant to their collection.” Users will also be able to export collections to Pinterest.
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I'm in no position to “test” a browser, but the new Edge is noticeably faster at rendering pages and much much smoother when navigating between tabs/preference windows. It looks much more like Chrome, which makes sense. Perhaps because my install is absent of third-party extensions, opening new tabs and windows was much faster than my other browsers. I recorded a ~2 minute demo of normal browsing on my Surface Laptop 2.
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In terms of touch support, Edge remains the only acceptable browser on Windows 10. If you've spent money on a new PC recently, chances are your device is touch-enabled. If you're like me, you've already disabled it. If not, you'll find scrolling and navigation in Edge have improved tremendously – it's like an entirely new browser because it is.
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Because Edge used a different rendering engine than Chrome or Safari, it meant that it would sometimes have problems on websites. Testing a website against multiple browsers has always been difficult, and because Edge had so little uptake, it meant optimizing for it often fell off the priority list for web developers.
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I really like how easy it is to mute audio from tabs and how much better my CMS is rendered. I still prefer Firefox's method of tab switching (by last-used chronologically instead of in the order presented.) The reader view is smoother than its competitors and offers a beautiful selection of themes as well as the best “Read aloud” feature in the business.
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I'm not going to quote you measurements – check out Computerworld's browser review for that – but I can say that Edge Chromium is using more RAM than Firefox but a bit less than Chrome. Office.com also looks and works incredibly well. Overall, I'm extremely impressed with Edge Chromium and the improvements to Bing. As of my experiences today, it's the fastest and smoothest web browser I have, which is a complete flip from that of the old Edge.
A powerful iOS utility for fucking digital text with ruthless efficiency.
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A warning siren sounds louder still for the current state of the Digital Divide than the profoundly ignorant spectacle of Mark Zuckerberg’s drooling, ghoulish interrogators last year from the digital hole of none other than W3School’s trusty web validator, which would surely be rated as the Most Anxious Being in History if it were to acquire sentience. The CSS file this very webpage referenced returned no fewer than 350 syntax errors at the time of this writing; Facebook dot com’s login page set off only 55. For going on a decade, now, the web has continued to expand into a grotesque, diseased mass.
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Yet another piece of software I have notably been using for 10 years: the infamous eemo.net Zalgo web text fucker. Ideally, I’d now proceed to embed some special examples of the hedonistic online text vandalism which the tool enabled me to inflict widely throughout my adolescence. However – as you can probably imagine – searching for these criminally-broken posts using standard tools provided by the services that have hosted them is virtually futile. In retrospect, I do not recall ever eliciting any acknowledgment of Zalgo’s effects, yet I’m positive that at least the majority of my victims set eyes upon the mess at some point – their silence is actually more entertaining than not, I think. Despite my extensive use of the format, I made a point to maintain my total ignorance about the origin of “Zalgo” for the past decade – only spoiling it in the name of good journalism for your sake and this review.
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On forums and image boards, scrambled text began being associated with Zalgo with phrases like “he comes” and “he waits behind the wall.” David Higgins revealed that the text is an ~abuse~ of a Unicode feature that enables the user to combine multiple superscript and subscript characters into a vertical line.
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By bizarre coincidence or some ridiculously obscure, intractable common cultural thread (which would probably take a lifetime to successfully trace,) Dave Higgins and I were already mutuals on Mastodon before I had any idea his name was at all associated with Zalgo. More bizarre still: Dave must’ve been watching his timeline at the exact moment when I posted the above quote mentioning him.
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Unfortunately, it seems his blog has moved, killing the hyperlink citation in one of the two relevant search engine results for “zalgo”: its Know Your Meme page. Searching the same term on his new WordPress blog yields absolutely nothing, so perhaps “I deny everything” was a more sincere response than one expected. A thread on Stack Overflow entitled “How does Zalgo text work?” explains the fuckery in more detail than I ever could:
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You can easily construct a character sequence, consisting of a base character and “combining above” marks, of any length, to reach any desired visual height, assuming that the rendering software conforms to the Unicode rendering model.
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There is something artistic about destroyed text like this – something that's more than just edgy chaos. I believe in “surreal memes” that can break Facebook and Twitter posts. I believe in Zalgo, and I believe you need Zalgo Generator for iOS on your phone right now.
Though I grew up on a farm surrounded by (and loving) diesel equipment, owning a diesel-powered automobile somehow never occurred to me. This is especially puzzling given the overwhelmingly positive experience I was privileged to have with one 2014 Volkswagen Jetta TDI Sportwagen over the past year. It would find me signing up to Facebook groups, using real Fast Boy terms, revisiting long-lost roads of home, and returning to my local community in an extremely intimate ridesharing stint. Throughout it all, the Jetta made me smile much much more than I would’ve thought. I found a real love for this relatively simpleton form of transportation that I should have seen coming, but did not at all. There is something delightfully indulgent about a manual-equipped diesel wagon. Even The New York Times knows this:
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Auto writers have long tooted the horn about the benefits of diesel engines, and a bunch of them have also argued that the old-school station wagon is a far more efficient way to haul things around than a bloated high-set S.U.V.
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I knew it, too, apparently, long before I actually decided to act on a purchase. On October 24th, 2012, I Tweeted “I sat in a Jetta wagon today. I need one.” I really did intend on becoming The Jetta Man (perhaps without the fashion.) In acquiring it, my plan – and it was a good plan – was to cease an era of general insensibility in my life's decisions by entombing my wayward self within the most sensible expression of modern automotive design I suspected I could live with. The wagon component joined with diesel power and a manual transmission upon casual research. Diesel, manual, wagon – of the people's car, these I sought. Nay, demanded.
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An ex-girlfriend of mine drove an utterly decimated Mk. V Jetta Sedan which she’d acquired in some sort of dicey deal. I remember finding it surprisingly robust given its lot, and quite dynamic to drive. We traveled all over the Midwest in it – from central Missouri to Des Moines to Chicago to Kansas City and back again. I mocked, but it was everything one could hope for in cheap transportation and quite a bit more. It turns out, Volkswagen was shooting high. As Tony Quiroga recalls for Car & Driver:
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During the press launch of the outgoing Jetta back in 2005, Volkswagen touted that car as a less expensive alternative to an Acura TSX or Volvo S40. Volkswagen pointed to its growth in size, high-quality interior, new rear suspension, and refined demeanor as evidence that the Jetta had moved out of the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla class.
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In terms of premium compacts, my experience is quite limited, but it’s no wonder the company has struggled to find a place in the market for this product: in German, “Volkswagen Jetta” literally means “people’s car jet stream.” The first component is infamous, of course, because of the Nazis and their horrid Beetle, but the second seems to be almost entirely unknown. In my research, I had to specifically investigate the Jetta’s name before reading anything about it. When an American thinks of “Jetta,” they unconsciously dissociate the word from the “jet” sound and make largely unsophisticated jokes. (It’s also Regular Car Reviews’ most hated car.) Now, the name has become a marque in and of itself: in China, Volkswagen began selling several different models under the JETTA brand last year. This also was news to me, and I try to keep up with the industry.
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In 2011, the Mk. VI Jetta was released with an outdated base, 115-hp powertrain and a “hard plastic [interior] that wouldn’t look out of place in a Chrysler Sebring.” (Quiroga insults, to clarify.) Compared to the Mk. V, “Volkswagen made it clear that the targets are once again the strong-selling Civic and Corolla.” Once again, I’m at a loss for experience in the equivalent extra-Volkswagen competition, save for the Chevrolet Cruze and Kia Forte. (Surprisingly, GM actually produced a diesel version of the Cruze and AutoGuide compared it against the Jetta TDI.) It’s been too long since I last drove my ex’s Mk. V to really have much to say, but I do remember a particular solidity about the steering – perhaps because it was still hydraulic. Once again, I’ll rely on Tony:
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Less obvious cost cutting includes the loss of adjustability for the center armrest, a lack of lumbar adjustment in most models, no more power-reclining seatbacks, and a simpler stability-control program that can no longer be shut off or even reduced.
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When I began searching for my first ever truly modern car in February 2019, I surprisingly only needed to pass up a single option in the Kansas City area before I found The One: a 2014 post-Dieselgate example with ~65,000 miles on its odometer in “Deep Black Pearl” with a “Cornsilk Beige” interior which had been previously owned only by a single Michigan cyclist. I’d been without a car since dailying/living in a 1976 Lincoln Continental the year before, in Portland, and my friend had driven me around everywhere in his Wrangler for a full month (thanks, Jack!) I’d walked around and cold-idled another, high-mileage Sportwagen, but I was committed to getting something with a light-colored interior after the red velvet cake Lincoln and my dank smoking room-dark XJR.
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Three of us walked into a dealership in the middle of a frigid Kansas afternoon – Jack, my girlfriend Sierra, and I. We hovered by a smart, gleaming little Golf GTI whilst my salesman, Charles, retrieved the car I had found online. After he finished copying my driver’s license while the little diesel warmed up, the four of us set off into suburban Lawrence. Back when the Mk. VI Golf was released, I attended a Volkswagen dealership event in which Mk. V and Mk. VI GTIs were driven back-to-back – I’m assuming to reassure buyers that yes, they really had made it better (though I was quite vocal in my disagreement about this, to the dealer’s chagrin.) The car I bought immediately reminded me more of the former – perhaps I just enjoy the increased body roll of a 50,000+ mile suspension – albeit with a much longer wheelbase and significantly more torque. Rowing through the gears, I was immediately impressed and bewildered by the characteristics of the 140-horsepower, 236 lb.-ft.-developing diesel powerplant. The diesel engines I grew up around in tractors, combines, and other heavy machinery were designed to more or less remain at a constant, relatively low RPM for the majority of their use cases. It’s not a screamer, but the idea that a diesel engine can rev at all was something that took a bit to wrap my head around. However, it is almost immediately evident that carrying on to the 6000 RPM (?) redline is a futile and incorrect practice. There is nothing at all to be found up there.
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I’ve driven some quick straight-line cars in my time, but none of them have delivered their power anything like the Jetta’s long-distinguished 2.0L inline-four. It’s very odd having comparatively so little actual horsepower, yet so much torque – I’d heard Jeremy Clarkson complain about diesel power coming in “great lumps,” but I’d already started to find them extremely (and positively) amusing in my first few minutes. When asked, the oil burner will produce protracted front tire squeal and torque steer from a stop, which is odd and hilarious coming from such an otherwise docile automobile. Also hilarious: Charles likely noted that Jack, Sierra, and I were (and are) entirely unafraid of facing The End when a very near collision during our test drive did not perturb us in the least, but left him huffing and puffing from adrenaline. He was a star, though, throughout the more than four hours of deliberations required for his institution to reckon with my credit history. Eventually, I ended up spending almost exactly $12,000, which was probably too much, and named my new automobile Martin – “Marty” for short – after Martin Winterkorn, the former CEO of Volkswagen AG who bore more than his share of the blame for Dieselgate, including charges of fraud by the German government. Dirty diesel rolling coal in prison.
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Naughty Diesel
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By “post-Dieselgate,” I mean that my new car was a part of Volkwagen's $10 billion buyback program, so the Michigander sold it back to the manufacturer for its “fair replacement value” – between $12,500 and $44,000 according to Car & Driver on behalf of FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez. To be technical, the powerplant is a 2.0L EA189/CJAA turbodiesel four-cylinder. “The EA 189 was one of the most important engines in the company, destined not only for millions of Volkswagen-brand cars but also for a wide variety of other brands from the parent Volkswagen Group, like Audi, Skoda and Seat, as well as some light utility vehicles,” said The New York Times regarding the “clean diesel” “scheme.” In original spec, 236 lb.-ft. of it arrived between 1750-2800 RPM, but my (admittedly, unscientific) perception indicates that post-update, the torque was coming a bit later. If I thought you were interested, I would attempt to detail exactly what my car was then subjected to by a dealer, but suffice it to say that it was made less fuel efficient and a bit less powerful, to my displeasure. For a complete and comprehensive video on the scandal, try Regular Car Reviews. I’d also recommend the following reading from Jalopnik, The Verge, The New York Times, and The Independent.
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My own views on Dieselgate are entirely irrelevant, but I will note that buying back a buyback car for such a price felt like a favor to my dealer and that it’s pretty cool to have my own copy of VW’s Extended Emissions Warranty Notice, not to mention the fact that I actually made use of it (which I will discuss later.) From my perspective, the automotive industry is the most heavily-regulated business space in the world and I’d suggest a company like the Volkswagen Group feeling like they should cheat on emissions testing might indicate that the standards of the test could be unreasonable and/or unrealistic.
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After returning from almost two hellish, extremely confusing years in Portland taking public transport, Martin became a vehicle for a rediscovery and newfound appreciation for my Missouri home – the great Missouri River, especially. Not since owning my Miata had I driven so much in the country. Sierra and I visited Cooper’s Landing in the wet and ventured down to Springfield, Missouri (very far South,) near which we discovered Hodges Speedway – a then-abandoned dirt oval surrounded by demolition derby casualties and the large trucks used to haul them around.
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Somewhere North of Kansas City, I opened the taps all the way on a very long straight and reached 125mph, which is either the aerodynamic VMax, an electronically limited limit, or both. Surprisingly, the modern People’s Car feels quite stable at this speed – were it not my own automobile, I’m not sure I wouldn’t just travel this fast everywhere. In the past few years, Interstate 70 – which cuts Missouri just about in half from West-East, connecting St. Louis and Kansas City with my hometown in the center – has become significantly faster-paced than I remembered it before moving to Portland for two years. 80mph used to be the accepted number, 70 (the actual speed limit) was the unenforced minimum. In my old Toyota pickup, I could travel at 65 without attracting too much criticism. Now, however, one must maintain 85 to keep up with traffic, especially when traveling with commuters. 90-95 will no longer garner judgmental looks and 100mph left-laners are given a pass.
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“I’ll bet that’s great on the highway” is probably the most regular comment received from passersby and riders right after “is this a diesel!?” (Really, the fact of my Jetta’s existence as a manual-equipped diesel wagon seemed to utterly astound a great many people.) There is truth in this general supposition: the ability of the diesel powerplant to deliver hill-climbing torque at low RPM is simply unmatched by gasoline powerplants of the same displacement, which means that “highway” driving entails virtually zero downshifting – arrive in sixth gear, set the cruise control, take a nap. Everything else is taken care of. There is a definite luxury in the knowledge that one is no longer needed in the process at speed – luxury that is NOT present in a gasoline-to-manual Jetta drivetrain. From Hackaday:
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[Diesel] has a higher volumetric energy density than gasoline, and thanks to low volatility, diesel engines can run at significantly higher compression ratios without risking detonation. These benefits allow diesel engines to produce significantly more torque than similarly sized gasoline engines.
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“Diesel engines are typically poor when it comes to power to weight ratio, as their high compression ratio and torque output demands heavier materials in their construction,” notes Lewin Day, meaning steel engine block. Here we arrive on my singular dissatisfaction with the Jetta: its weight. While traveling from Kansas City back home in the East one day, I decided to satisfy a longtime bucketlist item and stop by a weigh station. As I drove up to the scale, the police-uniformed attendant looked up at me from his glass box and gave the standard white guy smile frown. It took a moment for the scale to register Martin, but it eventually displayed a whole 3440lbs. My little “compact” wagon… weighed significantly more than one and three-quarter tons – just 528 lbs. less than the full-sized, supercharged V8-powered Jaguar saloon car I call the automotive love of my life, and almost a full 200 lbs. more than its GLI sedan sibling. There was one single advantage to this weight: we were able to use Martin as a ballast to help re-spool the winch cable on Jack’s Wrangler.
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After discovering this figure, I did what I could to diminish the weight easily without tearing into the seats or removing some of the car’s fourteen airbags. Upon lifting up the base of the “car-go” area in the rear, I found a full steel spare wheel – some 30 lbs of it at least – which I immediately removed, along with some sort of flapping cargo restraint that I can only suspect was designed to keep objects (like dogs, perhaps) in the cargo area from sailing into the passenger compartment during an accident (it’s called the “luggage compartment cover” in the owner’s manual.) Ideally, I intended to one day strip out all of the interior except for the driver’s side chair, but it ‘twas not intended to be.
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After driving the Jetta for about a week, I was on the short commute back home from the office when I noticed that the cooling fans were running at what sounded like maximum capacity. Then, at a red light, I felt some rough dips in the engine’s idle. When I reached home minutes later, I turned off the ignition and removed the key only to find the fans still spooling. I was convinced I had already broken the car somehow in rough driving, but in reality, Marty was in the process of Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) Regeneration – a procedure designed to clean the little shitpot under the hood by heating it up some thousands of degrees to burn off built up diesel exhaust soot. At least, this is the way I understand it.
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Otherwise, I disagree with most reviews about the “diesel rumble” being bothersome. Perhaps it’s because this is by far the most modern car I’ve ever spent this much time with – the only car I’ve ever spent so much consecutive time with, in fact – or because I did, indeed, grow up sitting (and standing) right next to 8-liter turbodiesels at full chat for hours on end. Compared to my mother’s 1.4L gasoline-powered Mk. VII sedan at idle in her garage, there is a more pronounced clacking, but it’s nothing you’d have any trouble sleeping through. I would know! Whilst driving for Uber and Lyft through one of the warmest summers on record, I idled away many hours parked on the street with the (averagely effective) air-conditioning on. I idled when I wasn’t online, too – I would even go as far as to say that I made idling one of the trendiest activities of Summer 2019.
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What’re you up to man?
-Nothin’ much yo. Just over here idling.
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Ridesharing
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For more than six months, my primary income was from Uber and Lyft driving around Columbia, MO – a distinctly academically-dominated demographic. Frankly, I can’t think of any vehicle more suited to what ridesharing actually entails than a diesel Jetta wagon. It’s a relatively spacious and comfortable place to be for four adults – certainly when no trip lasts longer than thirty minutes – with a ridiculously stout cargo capacity. I was able to fit 9 freshman fraternity guys in for a short trip once. Their faces were all genuinely somber as one expressed “it’s really hard having 8 friends when we try to go out.” (No, you’re not supposed to accept those rides.) It was a challenge carrying some 1500 lbs. of Sad Boys, mostly for the brakes. Once, a group of young men and women began to make fun after noticing the DIESELGEEK decal I’d stuck on my side’s rear quarter window (which I’d acquired with a new shifter bushing kit.) “So are you a diesel geek?” they asked, jeering to themselves, to which I responded: “you know, it’s so weird you mention that because I know this place that sells these stickers…” They no longer seemed amused.
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All of the cars I’ve owned have been attention-grabbing in their own way – my old Toyota pickup was adored by the locals; my Miata was adored by other Miata owners. My XJR was gorgeous and my Swamp Continental seemed to be passionately coveted by absolutely everyone over 40. With the Jetta, though, I did not expect any unusual attention whatsoever, yet I must confess that more conversations were started about it than of all of the others, combined. Ridesharing will do that, yes, but it is ridiculous how many people of all races, classes, and ages were enamored by – or overly curious about – Martin.
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What is this a Jetta, dude? Is this a Jetta? Whoa! Dude, is this a stickshift!? Dude I think this is a stickshift. BRO. I can’t believe you’re driving a stick right now. He’s driving a stickshift car! Wow I think this is a manual car! Oh shit this is a diesel!? It’s a diesel too?! No way! I can’t believe you’re out here driving a diesel Jetta wagon bro. Is this a stickshift? You can drive stick!?
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No.
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Early one morning, a ride was requested from the local news station just out of town – a fascinating place. News vans parked in a converted horse stable. They farm televisions out there. A few minutes into the ride, after picking up the young woman, I noticed in the rearview mirror out of my eye’s corner that she had put down her phone to watch my right hand with total bewilderment. Eventually, she asked “what are you doing to the car?” She’d never heard of a manual transmission before. I did my best to explain, but when she asked “but why wouldn’t you just buy a regular car?” I did not have a sufficient answer. Unlike many automotive enthusiasts, I think it’s totally okay that people are allowed to exist independent of this knowledge. There are many, many other things in life to worry about. 80% of cars sold in the United States are shipped with automatics and expecting every young person who lives in an urban environment to think about automobiles as anything beyond simple transportation is asking a lot.
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While we’re on the topic of manual transmissions, it’s relevant to mention how excellent the Jetta TDI is as a vehicle to teach first timers how to operate one. With the clutch in, the engine will not rev beyond 3500 RPM thanks to an electronic limiter, which dramatically reduces the number of obligatory stalls when learning clutch control. The learner can simply hold the accelerator to the floor as they get the hang of declutching instead of having to receive shouts of “more gas!” repeatedly. Of course, being a diesel further eases those stresses with much more readily available torque. Sierra was able to grasp the basics this way in a single night, which is unprecedented in my experience. She found particular comfort in the suggested gear indicator on the instrument panel’s main information display, which is very conservative, naturally, but also apparently relief from some great anxiety regarding the question which gear should I be in right now?
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Community
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I have derided Facebook for my entire adult life for its shitty design, inaspirational effect on its users, and its massive intellectual power, but strangely, through Jetta ownership, I was able to find a community on the service that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Groups like TDI Scumbags, VW TDI Owners, VW TDI support group, and VW TDI Owners Performance and Tech Talk are full of absolutely hilarious and insightful content that I’m genuinely glad I didn’t miss.
On Instagram, I found @jp_eurogarage’s Mk. IV diesel sportwagen, which I adore. I especially love its idle. @projectownersclub posted a video in December, 2018 of a very rusty diesel Mk. III with a straight vertical stack spewing smoke all over its owner’s yard. A video was shared on one of my Facebook groups captioned “when you only drive manual” in which a very generic-looking white man with moustache finds himself gagging in a car with a traditional automatic transmission. The wholesomeness of these posts is often adorable, and not only on Facebook. VW Vortex is an active and helpful forum/blog for TDI owners that I found to be invaluable when researching modifications.
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Performance
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For the first time in my personal automotive history, I felt the desire to modify one of my own cars. Perhaps the most famous appearance of the Jetta Sportwagen in The Web Era was driving instructor Austin Cabot’s 2014 Sportwagen in one of Matt Farah’s infamous One-Takes. You can find the full list of modifications on the car’s WheelWell page. I intended to emulate Austin with a few modifications including Dieselgeek’s Sigma 6 shortshift kit and “high performance” shifter bushing kit (which I did get around to buying, but never installed.) For those interested in engine/ECU tuning, Malone Tuning has a beautiful tool to help you customize your order.
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Instead of installing the shortshift kit right away, I decided to splurge on a bespoke Raceseng Ashiko weighted shift knob, which made throws immediately better. The issue these products are combatting is the particularly disconnected gearshift which Volkswagen has been notorious for the past few decades. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like you’re just operating a lever instead of shifting a transmission, if that makes sense.
The knob itself is beautifully machined and extremely satisfying to hold. I also “deleted” (removed, in other words) the (likely) faux-leather shift boot after realizing that I’ve always hated the sound and sensation of them, but hadn’t been willing to modify my previous cars in any way. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually quite personally noteworthy that I was able to traverse the unseen boundary into mod culture. The result was a slightly more mechanical-feeling shift that would’ve certainly been vastly improved by installation of Dieselgeek’s kit.
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Another aspirational goal of mine for Martin: H&R’s Sport Springs Set paired with a set of Firestone Firehawk Indy 500s. The goal was to sure up some of that body roll and torque-induced wheelspin. I suspect the result would’ve been a very, very sticky Martin. Unfortunately, I would not get the chance before I killed him in an accident on December 22nd of last year.
According to my fuel logs, (they are public, yes, though not necessarily 100% complete,) I averaged close to 30 mpg over 78 fillups and just over 19500 miles. Considering that I was ridesharing most of that time and driving quite obnoxiously for all of it, you should be very impressed. “Diesels tend to get about 30-percent better fuel economy than their conventional counterparts,” says Consumer Reports in a comparison between diesels and hybrids dating back to 2013. From the Union of Concerned Scientists:
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Much of the reason for diesel vehicle’s high fuel economy has to do with the diesel combustion process; however, some of the increase in fuel economy is due to the simple fact that a gallon of diesel fuel contains more energy than a gallon of gasoline.
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The joy my Sportwagen brought me was not expected. My plan to make myself a more reasonable person (and driver) by buying a “boring” car was obviously foiled by the diesel’s torque, the community’s dynamism, and my own communion with mod culture. I spent more consecutive time driving the Jetta than I have in any other automobile and was able to truly enjoy it. After my experience owning a diesel-powered Volkswagen, I would very much like to try driving/owning the Golf GDI – a performance-oriented diesel version of their excellent hatch. Truthfully – given the way I killed Martin – I did not deserve his kinship, but I’m certainly grateful I had the experience.
Discovery is pushing boundaries, but for what purpose?
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Discovery may no longer be new – not even the newest Star Trek property – but it is new to me. According to the alternate timeline exemption of the J.J. movies, I've been left without “Canon” Star Trek television since 2005 (or 2155) with the last episode of Enterprise, but I've been looking forward with moderate anticipation to an opportunity to watch this new entry into “the stodgiest and squarest of all sci-fi universes.” Though I am extremely well-versed in Gene Roddenberry's baby, I come to both you and Discovery with absolutely zero desire to analyze whether or not it is “Trek” enough, “good” science-fiction, or even “good” television – I'd like only to land on your screen between all of these institutions and their proctors in some unique insight from all of them, without the clichés, cringey jokes, or unnecessary Trekism. What I will strive to do is perform my Special Duty in relation to American intellectual property mastodons for which I have my own adoration: to determine whether or not they should die. I know absolutely nothing about television writing – the same amount I know about film – so I hope I can provide something usefully unique.
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I would rather Star Treknot have to die, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s necessary. Without sounding like I have to prove myself, know that the property – in particular the history of Star Trek Online’s development – was a very important part of my adolescent life. I have watched every episode of every series several times at least, but I know better than to entrust my entire emotional existence into the promise of a continuation like Discovery. It most fascinates me how revivals of old names like this go about contextualizing their dialogue and other elements for today’s audience. “Snug as a bug in a rug” is surely not an expression we should expect to survive the next 250 years of human development, and yet this is supposed to be an aspirational series? It even made it in the recap! I should confess now: it is actually Star Trek Online which made me curious enough to seek out a CBS All Access Free Trial. The marketing worked very well.
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I tend to install the game for a few weeks or so around this time every year just to check in. This time, I was greeted by Star Trek Online: Legacy – a new expansion featuring Voyager’s Jeri Ryan and Discovery’s Sonequa Martin-Green reprising their respective characters in voiceover roles. I figured out that Michael Burnham must have been from The New Show fairly quickly, but I was disappointed to find out that the character was not in fact a trans man, but rather a female character with an unusually male name. For the most part, Burnham is simply an outlier in The Measure of Morality Parts I and II. She accompanies one’s character (along with Seven of Nine) to several different battlegrounds and stories we’d already seen before in previous episodes – when the budget’s running low, reuse sets, but there is one instance where we are brought into her (Discovery’s) world, which feels disorienting. The whole experience plays like it was forced upon STO by CBS in order to squeeze as many viewers into our free CBS All Access trials with as little developmental investment into the game as possible. Well, here I am!
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In Season 1, Episode 4 of Discovery, the writers made a very foul mistake… They placed fucking Elon Musk’s name alongside the aviation pioneering Wright Brothers and the fictional inventor of warp drive, Zefram Cochrane.
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How do you want to be remembered in history? Alongside the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, Zefram Cochrane? Or as a failed fungus expert?
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I can’t be timid about this – it straight up makes me ill. I can guarantee you that Orville and Wilbur Wright would have never watched fucking South Park and that I am actually going to be sick right here on this couch.
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I'm sorry, I don't look up to anyone who watches South Park. it's just a personal rule, okay?
I’ll spare you further ranting, but… Jesus Christ. I will not believe that I live in a world where this sort of comparison is acceptable. I’m not going to freak out because they say “shit” and “fuck” now, though I do wonder what Gene Roddenberry (though he wasn’t all that great, it turns out) would say – something like “profanity is no longer a necessary part of 23rd century language.” I thought Morgan Jeffery’s take on this for Digital Spy was an interesting one:
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There's an argument to be made that the old style of Trek might feel naive in 2017. But there's another that it'd be a refreshing antidote to the times, the Trek we really need right now as opposed to the one we deserve.
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I like to watch fellow Star Trek enthusiasts squirm and cry “continuity” and “canon” as much as any reasonable human being, but I’m not sure this sort of boundary-pushing is actually productive. Is anything being accomplished? Other than marking Discovery forever as not “family-friendly entertainment?” Linguistically, the word “fucking” in “fucking cool” was used for emphasis, which perhaps suggests there was no other way for the character to express that level of enthusiasm. In his IndieWire interview, Anthony Rapp (Paul Stamets) explains:
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“These people just put their brains to work in a really tough way and they had a breakthrough. And I imagine there’s scientists in their labs who might do that any time. We didn’t drop the F-bomb in ‘Star Trek’ by telling something to go fuck themselves. It’s like we did it by saying ‘this is fucking cool.'”
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If Discovery was “making history,” I’m not so sure what Star Trek: Picard was doing with fucking and pissant. I’m also not sure it matters at all in the grander scheme. What other freedoms should CBS feel free to explore, now that they’ve said the bad words? What else hasn’t been explored? Bathrooms? Shitting and farting? That has my vote. I really don’t remember as many colloquialisms showing up in the earlier series, but perhaps that’s just because those colloquialisms have since become part of our language. I’m not the greatest television watcher of all time, but I got lost in Discovery’s plot, and apparently I’m not the only one.
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There turned out to be too many of those twists in Discovery’s first season, and it was frustrating to watch as the writers sidled up to new, risky frontiers for exploration, only to suddenly change course right when things were starting to get interesting.
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Season 1, Episode 7 is called “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” and it’s the most classically Star Trek of what I’ve seen. One of those stuck-in-a-time-loop stories which truly makes you want to die. What’s even better and slightly meta: playback kept resetting for me at exactly 21:26 and starting from the beginning while the cat kept stepping on the delete key and destroying this paragraph. I had to keep watching the man from The Fucking Office continually kill the captain after the crew parties to 250-year-old West Coast hip hop and 300-year old Al Green all whilst writing this over again. I do not like Rainn Wilson invading my Star Trek. He gives Aquariuses a bad name and… beard. “Listen, petunia, I've been screwed over since the day I was born. I deserve this,” he says, and I wonder if in fact it is Rainn himself speaking of his invasion. He looks and sounds like a fucking incel. All of this makes me wonder if my entire problem with this show is simply that I do not particularly like its characters.
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The Vessel
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Relying on Memory Alpha – a tried-and-true Star Trek fan resource – we can examine the U.S.S. Discovery, itself. I’m not so sure about this spore drive shit. If the NCC-1701 Enterprise was indeed launched in 2245, its existence would blatantly overlap with Discovery’s, now wouldn’t it? I don’t actually care all that much, but here are a few screenshots from Star Trek Online.
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Note how much larger this Crossfield-class ship is than the Intrepid-class from some 120 years into the future. Then again, the latter was designed for “long-range exploration missions” and Discovery is the fleet’s flagship(?) Its “most advanced ship,” at least. The inclusion of technologies like the holodeck and the spore drive (perhaps the show’s most potent plot device,) though, are really stretching the canon timeline’s ability to accommodate them. The decision to include the Discovery as a playable, top-tier ship in Star Trek Online is 100% a business one, surely. I’m not here to judge, though – after all, games are about having fun, right? One of Star Trek’s ironies has always been its existence in a capitalist society as an IP within a debatably socialist future. (Everybody wants to see their own ideal socioeconomic label in this future, it would seem.) “What makes Star Trek’s economics fundamentally different, and, in many ways, fundamentally incomprehensible to us, is that scarcity is no longer a factor,” says Dale Franks. Today, though, Star Trek properties still require finite resources and labor to produce, and they always have. Atari spent over $50 million to acquire Cryptic Studios – the original developers of Star Trek Online – and Discovery supposedly cost “$6-7 million per episode.” Though the former is free-to-play, it’s filled with microtransactions and about 5 billion different currencies. When Star Trek.com says “Star Trek Online is best described as a permanent Star Trek convention,” they’re correct: it is full of shit to buy.
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There is also a lot of combat, though Discovery seems to have struck a healthy balance between warfare and other intrigues. It is definitely Trek in many ways: redshirts die without any plot consequence and all the classic character flaw tropes are represented. There is the aforementioned time loop episode with fucking Harry Mudd and even a mirror universe arc beginning with “Despite Yourself,” in which the crew actually responds to their new environment and does the research required to blend in with the Terran forces. This took an ancient Star Trek format and actually explored a new, interesting avenue within it (the time loop episode did not.) They even change the Discovery’s registry on the hull to read “ISS Discovery” instead of “USS.”
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Every moment is a test. Can you bury your heart? Can you hide your decency? Can you continue to pretend to be one of them? Even as, little by little, it kills the person you really are.
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Complaints
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There’s a reason we all hate Captain Lorca, and why he says things like “sometimes the ends justify terrible means” and “there’s no way we’re asking these neighbors for a cup of sugar.” I do not believe in Spoilers, but there’s not much reason for me to tell you why, specifically. Perhaps it is racist and/or misogynist to say so, but I found it difficult to get as attached to Discovery’s characters as I have to those of series past. Michael is great, of course, though my girlfriend Sierra surmised that her purpose in the show is to illustrate that “nobody listens to black women.” Sierra was also quite aggravated by the misunderstanding and mistreatment of the tardigrade. When Paul Stamets mentioned that his uncle Everett participated in a Beatles cover band, we both despaired, for we discovered an entry in Memory Alpha for “The Beatles.” If I were to standardize a system of measurement for my television ratings, Discovery’s cringe factor would be 9/10. The holodeck hasn’t been invented yet!
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Also, CBS All Access’ user interface is the worst I’ve ever seen from a streaming service, across iOS, desktop browser, and my Samsung television. It’s impossible to scrub, really, or to dictate a preference for high definition. One cannot navigate backward between episodes without re-searching the title and navigating through an incredibly clunky menu sequence. I was able to cast to both my Samsung TV and Sierra’s Chromecast from my iPhone, at least.
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Compliments
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Despite its failings (including Rainn Wilson,) Discovery’s acting is superb. James Frain as Sarek, especially, is the best of the three. I thought it was especially thoughtful that for the most part (at least in Season 1,) the Klingons actually spoke Klingon to each other. Given that Dr. Marc Okrand spent the time and effort to construct a fully-functional Klingon language, it seems only reasonable to include as much of it as possible. I also love Hugh Culber’s doctor’s uniform and the “cinematic” cinematography of the whole thing. It’s very much an action show, yet not quite obnoxious.
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So, should *Star Trek* die? Perhaps it shows my extreme bias, but no, I do not think it need perish quite yet. From my (white, male, cishet) perspective, Discovery does an okay job at remaining thoroughly Trek whilst acknowledging the present context’s social issues. It remains a very capitalist enterprise and wholesomely cringey generation X cultural mastodon, but I think it’s still worth our time.
Jason Isaacs is giving a very compelling performance. But the writers seem to be turning him into a fundamentally different person from who he was earlier in the season. Some might call this character development. Others might say there are more shoes to drop.
I was interviewed by Write.as Community Manager CJ Eller about writing software, Extratone, blogging, and self-curation.
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So I am super curious that you mentioned Markdown as something that saved you from fiddling your life away. Can you go more into that?
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I started an online magazine four years ago originally on WordPress. I thought I knew something about web development, but honestly I did not. It ended up becoming a fixation on trying to make something technically different from what I'd seen done with WordPress, which detracted heavily from my Editorial duties over the years. I'm on the OCD spectrum so I just couldn't let it go. I spent thousands of hours fiddling with different themes and formatting within those themes, and what I ended up with was a mess. I would make changes that would break old posts, so I'd go back and fix those, only to make more changes days/weeks/months later and have to go back again. I'd known vaguely about Markdown, but it wasn't until it was mentioned in the WordPress dev Slack that I really considered it seriously as a way out of what I'd been doing. I realized that its inherit limitations were actually very good for me – that I needed a limited system to constrain my workflow to keep myself on task. Finally, in late-2018, I started to convert our old content to Markdown and essentially haven't looked back since.
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Did it take a while for you to accept Markdown's limitations? Was there a turning point for you? Did you look for a Markdown plugin on WordPress to help after making the change? I imagine there's something like that out there.
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There are third-party plugins, yes, but I believe the new WordPress editor now supports “markdown blocks,” which is sortof handy for those who want to continue in that direction. The turning point was probably when we ran out of money and lost our account with our hosting provider. I was left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. I'd already started moving that direction within WordPress (largely because of the Gutenberg editor project,) but losing the site in its entirety was what I really needed to push us into a more modern, progressive CMS. Honestly, Markdown is capable of everything we actually need and nothing more. I'd like to think I was able to realize this from the beginning.
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So you're left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. Talk to me about the process then of finding that modern, progressive CMS. Did you have a vague idea of what you were looking for? I imagine getting those backups ready for whatever you were going to choose as another process entirely.
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I actually decided to ditch the backups and just move forward with a different Editorial direction (the project has since been more or less put on hiatus.) I knew Markdown had to be involved and that I never wanted to look at anything like WordPress' dashboard ever again. I played around with a local Ghost instance but just didn't feel anything for it, if that makes sense. I'd already moved my personal blog to Write.As months before and eventually realized that it was just what Extratone needed – so far, I've only imported my own contributions and the most recent work from others.
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Could you explain what you mean by feeling something for a piece of software? I noticed this in your recent post on your personal blog and what I enjoyed about it so much. There's an enthusiasm about the software you do recommend that jumps through the screen. I want to use Bear after reading your post.
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I'm glad to hear that! I suppose it dates back to my upbringing on a farm in rural Missouri, where I felt a real affection for – and attachment to – our tractors, combine, and such. When one cares about their work, I think it's inevitable for them to be emotionally invested in the tools they use to accomplish it every day. During my brief stint in IT in the beginning of 2019, I saw a lot of users struggling with outdated and ridiculously unintuitive software throughout their entire workday and it made me really appreciate the idea of “good workflow.” I'm not really a developer, but I believe software can always be better because I've seen it. As an End User of sorts with not much cash, I feel like my main contribution back to developers should be celebrating their good work. This is an idea I feel I do not encounter enough in day-to-day life.
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As someone who also had a brief stint in IT, I totally agree with the struggles people go through because of outdated & unintuitive software. But IT also made me realize how much of software is personal — someone will want a solution that's unintuitive to you but is intuitive to them. You learn a lot of empathy from that.
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I am intrigued by your last point there — why don't you think you encounter the idea of celebrating software developers enough in day-to-day life?
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I suppose specifically I mean I don't see enough celebration of good development. It's hard to challenge the personal workflow of anyone, yes, but I hope folks will continue to want to better their lives with new solutions. As I mentioned in my Tips post, Microsoft Word is a great specific example of software that simply should not be used anymore – especially in composition for The Web. Not that Word is celebrated, necessarily, but its alternatives are not. It should be noted that I have no specific authority in this matter other than years of experience with – and enjoyment of – playing around with software. I just think that End Users deserve better than they get, and awareness of new/different software is a huge part of the problem. Making average people aware of better solutions should be the primary function of special interest tech journalism, IMO.
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Great point about Microsoft Word. I don't even remember the last time I seriously used it — high school maybe? And like you said, discovery can be an issue to the adoption of these alternative tools. So are there any common patterns you've noticed as to how you've come about these software alternatives that you now use? Patterns that someone could adopt?
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It's not that I slave away, but it does take a lot of time to discover them. The simple answer is: I drink a lot of caffeine and hyperfixate on the internet. I'm not sure it's something the average user should want to adopt, but if they do, they should be on Mastodon. They should be googling “alternatives to...” regularly, and they should worship Free and Open Source Software. Accepting that you never have to settle for one piece of software is probably the beginning. For lack of a better term, I just love playing around with software. That's not something I would advocate for my old clients or other End Users – I would rather find out myself and then present a list of alternatives in an entertaining way. I hope that's an appropriate and sufficient answer hehe.
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No that's great! The acceptance of never having to settle for one piece of software is at once valuable and challenging to adopt. If you keep switching you could be a sort of software vagabond who throws their data into a rucksack to head to the next viable platform. I've always had trouble trying to find the proper balance between playing around with software & learning a tool well enough that it can be useful. How have you personally navigated that? I could imagine your foray into & out of Wordpress as an example.
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It's always a challenge when trying new things. I obsess over different ways to accomplish tasks. I've probably signed Extratone for 15 different newsletter services (including Buttondown today) though I haven't actually written a single edition of our newsletter in nearly two years. I think it's only recently that I've been able to look at these habits from a reasonable perspective. As in, I am now able to finally differentiate between playing and being productive, but it took some 15 years. Self-awareness of one's actual progress is key. Asking questions like why am I actually doing this – for profit or for play? Differentiating between these two is something someone like me will always struggle with, I think.
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The distinction between playing and being productive can be quite blurry. I sometimes find that playing around with a piece of software can lead to a productive use of it. How about you? Did you start with the idea of creating Extratone first and then tried to find the right software to fit the job? Or did you start playing around with Wordpress and then the idea of the digital publication took form soon after?
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That's an insightful supposition. I actually tried to launch an online magazine before Extratone with virtually zero editorial focus along with a standalone podcast that I'd been hosting on WordPress for years. I originally began playing around with WordPress sites in my early adolescence, so you could say it all culminated in the idea. It took maturity to realize that I actually wanted to build a platform for other voices rather than continue to invest in my own. I'd like to believe that was all enabled by the playing hehe.
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So what lead you to the conclusion of building a platform for other voices? Especially curious from the maturity angle. Because you still have a personal blog, so it doesn't feel like you've completely neglected your personal voice. But would you consider that as not the same investment of time & effort that you'd put into something like Extratone?
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I should be clear that I have not accomplished what I set out to do with Extratone. After a fairly big personal trauma in 2015, I had a bit of an existential crisis and realized that I had surrounded myself with so many talented (in a particularly relevant way) online friends who were producing all sorts of incredible content – music and videos, mostly. I realized that I was better at editing and other platform duties than I was at writing, and that perhaps the online communities I was astride could be provided a single banner to give themselves. In that sense, I haven't figured out how to do what I set out to yet. Ideally, my byline would be completely gone from Extratone, so I've more or less put it on hold until I figure out how to accomplish that. Turning it into a somewhat profitable media company is still my biggest long-term life goal.
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The curatorial characteristic you describe is underrated, even though the “everyone is a curator” idea is jammed down our throats all the time. There's something about this curation on a person-to-person level that still has lots of room for experimentation. On that subject, do you have any examples of communities, sites, or models that guide where you'd want Extratone to go?
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My citable aspirations in that regard have been somewhat superficial, I'm afraid. From a technical perspective, I really admired what Joshua Topolsky was trying to do with The Outline – which just closed this month, actually. They built their own CMS including a bespoke advertising delivery platform which really looked great but they just couldn't figure out a sustainable editorial focus. In my fantasy world, I have the connections and digital media insight of Topolsky and know how to apply them in a way that supports our community because I don't see any one brand popping up any substantial umbrellas over the electronic musicians I know. (It wasn't until “too late” that I realized Extratone's sole editorial focus should have been electronic music all along.) I read a lot about media but I'm pretty picky as far as hero worship goes when it comes to my own professional goals. I once promised that Extratone would never run ads, so I could see some sort of non-profit classification working out in our future. I believe I could be an excellent curator – I'm just not quite sure how to get there yet.
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I think you're a great curator — had to ask that question of influence because I think you have a unique curatorial presence on the web. Just saw you tweet about tractordata.com. Who else would recommend that? Love it. That's why I thought Are.na would be right up your alley.
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So you emphasized “our community” there — what do you define as your community in that broader context?
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Well thank you! That's a question I'm still struggling to define. Electronic music is about as far as I've gotten. I met most of my talented friends on Twitter over the past 10 years or so and have tried to contain them in a list before. There are innate challenges in defining such a creative community – I have done my best to label without being constricting, but it's definitely difficult trying to figure out how to provide a flag which everyone feels comfortable flying. I still think the best I've done to articulate what I'm trying to say was for Extratone's About page. Most of the folks I'm talking about are used to hustling their own brand so it's been a real challenge working on the right way to reach out.
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A flag which everyone feels comfortable flying — that's a great way to put it. What I find interesting about your internet presence is that you defy the idea of flying just a single flag. Along with Extratone you have multiplepodcasts, multipleblogs, and now you're starting a Motorsports & Tech dedicated Mastodon instance.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about how important it is to have many online buckets to put your ideas in. One just feels too limiting, especially if it's solely linked to your legal identity. How do you think about this matter of identity & expression with your own online presence?
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That's a very good question. I can't take credit for mastd.racing, actually – I'm not sure who created that server but it's administered by an account called RaceControl. You've arrived at another one of my biggest challenges. Consolidating my interests has always been a problem, especially on The Web. Age has definitely helped narrow them down a bit, but I still can't help myself sometimes. I think it's ended up alienating a lot of my followers on social because I have a hard time posting just within my niche(s). I'm not so sure how to feel about this, honestly. One could argue that I should post whatever I want, whenever, but consider your audience is also a concept I can no longer ignore. If anything, I need to learn to let myself be limited a bit more by those buckets. Once again, Extratone is a good example of this – I should've never published app reviews there, but I did. We're all learning, I suppose.
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Do you feel like you have to even learn to limit yourself on your personal blog? It seems like a personal blog can act as the release valve — a way of getting around cornering yourself into the niches that Extratone and other projects require. You can freely write about pens and Picard without feeling constrained to a single subject.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list. Since we've begun talking I've begun building my blogs bookmark folder back up and following the #100DaystoOffload challenge, which I find immensely impressive. I can't say I'm quite up to it, personally, but I definitely plan on opening up the taps a bit more. (I also don't want to flood read.write.as with too many joke posts ya know hehe.)
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That's awesome! You're reminding me of the interesting relationship between writing & tinkering when it comes to blogs. They both feed into each other in a strange way. Before, when my blog was on Wordpress, I didn't care about tinkering around — writing was my sole focus. When I moved to my new blog, however, I found myself shift towards creating apps that extend my blog and messing around with its CSS. So it's interesting that you've gone the opposite way, publishing more instead of solely tinkering.
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What has awoken the urge for you to tackle those items on your personal “to-write” list? To open up those taps a bit more? Because I can see the publication mindset, being somewhat of an authority, getting in the way.
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That is interesting. I'm wondering how many people are in each of our camps. I hate to be so topical, but the pandemic and being home constantly has definitely contributed. I've also begun to learn to let things go, which is an essential skill. Being able to actually kill work when it needs to die is the real secret. I just built up the strength to delete the rest of my 2019 list a few weeks ago.
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I wonder also! And hey, no problem bringing up the current situation. I think it's making me write more also.
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Want to drill into that practice of letting go as an essential skill for blogging. As a final question for this chat, how have you gone about the decision of keeping ideas that you've had for a long time and when to let them go? It's been something I've been struggling with for recently as ideas for blog posts start to pile up.
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Self-curation is definitely tough. Generally, it's very hard to let things go – especially when I've progressed at all significantly into research/first drafting, but I know when to kill something if I reread and am unable to immediately see where I was going. I've noticed that trying to rekindle interest or momentum in a topic is unusually not a worthwhile use of time in my case. If I can't get my rhythm back fairly early in, I am very unlikely to, ever. That said, I think it's also important to forgive yourself for investing time in something that won't work out – otherwise, you will settle for less than what you originally intended and release something you won't be happy with.
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Thank you so much for your time! I really enjoyed this!
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Forgive and forget! That's a great point about rekindling an interest being a sign of letting go of an idea. I've done that too many times. This has been a blast to chat virtually David — really enjoyed your thoughts and am looking forward to future blog posts and installments of Extratone!
He named his dog Number One. His eyebag game disastrous. The Romulans are in a Borg Cube. They’re flirting in The Cube. It’s a Sex Cube. Its shields are very loud, now. They’re smoking weed on Weed Road. There is simply not enough runtime for a truly episodic television show anymore, is there? A Borg Romulan Scott. (Imagine Borg snot.) The shear fucking hubris. There’s the F word again. I didn’t know Romulans could be so hot. Jesus Christ. “I never really cared for science fiction – I just didn’t get it,” says Picard. Very funny, folks.
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Did he drop something or...? Paradigmatic. CBS’ closed captions are janky and I’m getting older by the second. They are in the Sex Cube again. The Star Trek OS looks like it has annoying notifications. A son? Using the term Quest. This is segregation. The Nightingale was a slave ship. This is not lost on me. Spanish speaking! Nothing about operating these ships is visceral at all. Hey! Jeri Ryan! These CBS All Access ads are absolutely bizarre. Icheb is here!? Jesus what a coincidence. Oh.
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TECHNO FUTURE. That head tilt was sudden. Romulans are freaking out in English, for some reason. Colonel Jane – Sterling’s young wife – is still a bitch. What a surprise. I still haven’t gotten tired of the introductory credits’ theme. Pissant, really? “And now the windmills have turned out to be giants.” I have no idea what that’s referencing. Admirals should not say shut the fuck up. The holograms are just different levels of Scottish according to their class. Did they do this just to make sure Scots continued to be represented in Star Trek? Why does Rios have so many pips? What rank would he be if he put all of them on? God? ALISON PILL. Dr. Pill.
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Fear is the great destroyer.
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Coordinated bonk. “We’re at a threshold” is not political at all. If I was watching this show by the week, I would be very frustrated by its pace. Very sad about the Orchid deaths. They were cute. They mentioned the Picard Maneuver correctly. Jonathan Frakes directed this. Seven of Nine just said “same,” but we will forgive Brent Spiner for aging and – I hope – for dying.
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I think we probably should’ve let ourselves let Picard die.
It’s very pretentious to talk about pens, I agree, but I believe there’s a level of pen pretentiousness which is worth sharing with the writing masses. I continually encounter people in both personal and professional settings using – and often worshipping – very shitty pens. I'm not going to pretend spending $15 on a pen has not become a novel or ridiculous idea in contemporary culture, but if you're willing, this is one of those areas where some retrospective can lead to real pleasantnesss. Here are some of the tools I've owned. (I'll be linking heavily to The Pen Addict in this post. It's all we've got. Sorry.)
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Parker Jotter
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I believe everyone on Earth should own a Parker Jotter. It's a slim, small ballpoint designed for sketching with a clicking action that just about everyone loves. I have owned and lost many and I will continue to for the rest of my writing life. I cannot even begin to communicate how worth it $16.99 is to never write with another disposable ballpoint ever again. They're tough, light, and beautiful. Sarah Read for The Pen Addict:
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If you're primarily a fountain pen user, but you acknowledge the occasional need for a ballpoint, this really is the perfect one. It looks and feels like you're spoiling yourself, but the price is low enough that you'll still have to add a fountain pen to your cart to get free shipping.
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Pilot Metropolitan
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The Pilot Metropolitan has been the entry-level fountain pen for all of time as far as I know. Google for reviews and you'll find praises across the blog spectrum – from Little Coffee Fox to Writing For Pain and Pleasure to The Gentleman Stationer. “I'm not sure there is anything on the market that even approaches a pen of this quality for $15.00,” says the latter. Testimony from the first:
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I love how the Pilot Metropolitan feels in my hand. The brass body is cold and weighty while you write without becoming a burden to use. Despite its low cost, the look and feel of this pen will be sure to leave an impression on your friends and coworkers.
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The Pen Addict argues for the next pen on my list as The Ultimate Beginner, but I'll stick with the Metropolitan. It's a little unorthodox, actually – it doesn't feel quite as substantial as the other fountain pens I've used in my time, but it's a blast.
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Lamy Safari
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The modern alternative to the Pilot Metropolitan, the Lamy Safari is the coolest instrument on this list to own, but it is generally twice the price. Though I liked being seen with the Safari more than the Metropolitan, and its writing experience is more conventional in terms of what to expect from other composite fountain pens, I still think the Metropolitan is more fun to use. Instead of reading what I have to say, though, check out the only words about any of these pens I spied in a major publication. For The Strategist, David Notis writes:
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Fountain pens can be complicated and intimidating, but the Safari was designed to be approachable. (It was apparently originally meant to help teach proper handwriting to schoolchildren). Pen enthusiasts often recommend it as a great “starter” fountain pen, which I’ve found to be spot-on. [...]
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Not that I’m suddenly an expert, but there is something special about writing with a fountain pen. The steady flow of ink is so expressive; it somehow makes the weird, messy quirks of my handwriting feel intentional.
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To be honest, I feel like I could've done without my Safari, but I did actually write with it quite extensively. Here are two more opinions: The Gentleman Stationer and Little Coffee Fox.
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Kaweco
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Huge bias here: I adore Kaweco as a company. I first bought a Mint Skyline Sport (the featured image of this post) in 2016 and I fell in love. I love the breeziness of their colors. I love how Germanic their old logo is and how anything you read about their history is inevitably found on a website looking like this. As Susan M. Pigott points out for The Pen Addict, the plastic Sport series can be a bit lacking in refinement. “The Skyline Sport is made of plastic, and it feels rather cheap in the hand,” she says. Unfortunately, my white Classic Sport had the same problem, though I also adored it. From Shashwat Vardhana:
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If you have small to medium sized hands and like the screw cap action, you should most certainly go for this pen. While it might not be the best writer of its class, its reliability is absolute and I have never had any complaints with the pen in this aspect.
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My baby – my ultimate pen acquisition – was my Kaweco Steel Sport. I bought it in person with cash at Pen Place in Kansas City, and it was by far my favorite writing instrument of all time. As far as I'm concerned, this is as high as pens get. Find yourself in the position to buy one and you will be satisfied forever. From The Pen Addict:
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The Steel Sport features a – wait for it – stainless steel barrel. What is it about stainless steel that I love so much in pens? It tends to land in a barrel weight sweet spot that is heavier than aluminum, and lighter than copper and brass. [...]
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Stainless steel has a density and warmth that I enjoy in a pen barrel. It is also practically indestructible, which is what I want in a pocket pen.
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If you write by hand, you should treat yourself to one of these instruments. If you'd like to write more by hand, you definitely should. A good pen will have you looking for excuses to write.
I don’t want you to think this is just another listicle to mark as spam or ignore completely – though it technically is, I suppose. I know how it looks… because I’ve run into many of them and have been just as irritated as you. In fact, I would be so bold as to presume I’ve run into many many more than you have simply because a primary hobby of mine has always been Just Trying to Do Things On The Computer without any academic authority or hands-on training. This is a way of life for my generation and those proceeding it, yes, but I promise you that I have gone far, far deeper than the vast majority of anyone you know. What I’m ultimately trying to do here is to spare you the hundreds – perhaps thousands – of hours I have had to spend mulling through shitty workflows throughout my childhood and adulthood before I stumbled upon Good Practices (i.e. Better Ways to Do Things.)
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I want you to come away from this list feeling as liberated and powerful as I do now when I’m On My Computer without any condescension or tedium. Unfortunately, there’s probably going to be some of both, so please stick with me and don’t take it personally. I do a lot of online reading, writing, and fiddling. I’ve been compelled to do these things in one form or another since very early childhood, and what follows could be described as a list of my favorite tools to accomplish things. Almost all of them are entirely free to use and the vast majority of them are easily and beautifully functional as well. They are what I suggest for my own mother to use, for what that’s worth, and I would argue sincerely for their extreme importance. Don’t waste your life on bad software.
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You Need a Password Manager
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In 2020, password managers are no longer optional for digital life. They are mandatory. If you only ever heed a single piece of my advice, ever, please make it this one. Most password managers available are secure, cross-platform, optionally cloud-synced tools that help you generate, store, and organize digital credentials. More likely than not, you’re already using one in your favorite browser. On MacOS and iOS, Safari is linked to a service called Keychain, which is – functionally – a robust password manager. On signup for a given website or service, Safari should prompt you to automatically generate secure, complex passwords to store in Keychain. Generally, it’s pretty smart about knowing when it’s time to retrieve the credentials with Touch-ID, but for when it isn’t, you should know how to manually retrieve passwords from Keychain. If you’re deeply enough embedded into the Mac ecosystem, you can feel free to continue to rely on this process as long as you know how to help yourself when it fails. I’m not going to tell you who to trust, but I do almost actually believe in Apple’s commitment to securing user data, if only because of the way their incentives are aligned (in contrast with those in front of data-funded organizations like Google.)
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If you’re using a Windows Home Machine and/or an Android smartphone, I believe it’s more urgent that you find a standalone password management solution immediately. I use a gorgeous app called Enpass to store all of my passwords as well as my bank credentials, credit cards, driver’s license information, and anything else I might need to keep handy, securely. I can use virtually any cloud or file-sharing service to keep my “vaults” synced between all of my devices: Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, Box, etc, and I also regularly create encrypted local backups just in case. I can even share end-to-end encrypted credentials with another device or Enpass installation. I migrated to Enpass two years ago after using 1Password for nearly 10. It was intuitive and virtually seamless, as such things in software tend to be these days, and as a result, I haven’t had to memorize a single password since my adolescence. Enpass allows me to create custom login templates for quick differentiation when creating new entries as well as picturized categories and tags. With one click, even the icon can be pulled from a given URL’s favicon to help keep my vault looking visually itemized. It also includes presets for a hundred services or so – from Google to Wix to Yahoo! Japan.
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Total Recall with a Clipboard Manager
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Imagine if everything you had ever copied (as in Ctrl-C) were listed in linear order, easily and instantly searchable via a single global keyboard shortcut (Alt-`) and navigable with the arrow keys. Imagine if you could then export an archive of your clipboard so nothing could ever be lost. Imagine clipboard tabs that are easily switchable. CopyQ – an “advanced clipboard manager” – is one of my favorite software discoveries of all time. Some workdays, I use it literally hundreds of instances in my workflow. It is difficult to describe how much more useful it makes the clipboard feature – something we’ve all been using for decades, now. For someone like me who copies a ridiculous amount of links every day, CopyQ’s functionality has truly become life-changing.
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Alt-D and Other Keyboard Shortcuts
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Somehow, I did not discover Alt-D until 2018, which means that I had spent the entirety of my 24 years since triple-clicking to select every single URL I’d ever copied. I built a media company this way, and I can’t believe nobody told me about this shortcut. Open any given web browser, use Alt-D, and your selection will move to the URL in the address bar on top of the page. It’s very possible this will be of little use to you, but anyone who regularly shares or copies links will save themselves so much time. I felt the same way when I discovered text navigation with Alt, Shift, Ctrl + the arrow keys. Most of these are cross-platform, but I am specifically focusing on Windows shortcuts for this piece because that’s what I’m currently using.
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Arrow key-related shortcuts
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· Shift in conjunction with the arrow keys selects text in a document surrounding the cursor.
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· Alt in conjunction with the arrow keys allows one to go forward or backward in a browser.
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· Ctrl in conjunction with the arrow keys allows one to navigate text by word.
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Virtually all of the “Windows logo key” shortcuts are usable in day-to-day workflows. I use Win-D to immediately minimize all windows and show the desktop on the regular. Microsoft is currently testing a feature like MacOS’ spotlight which is triggered with this key.
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Designed to replace the existing Win + R shortcut, the new launcher will include options to quickly search apps and files across Windows and support for plugins like calculators, dictionaries, and search engines.
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We can only hope this feature will be as useful as spotlight (which is triggered with ⌘-Spacebar for you Mac users,) and will be implemented as standard as soon as possible. If you’re not already using basic shortcuts for functions like closing tabs/windows and cut/copy/pasting text, I’d advise you to begin as soon as possible. It can be hard to commit, but I promise it’ll make your life better. Try printing out a list of shortcuts for your particular operating system to keep by your workspace and/or find or create an image of the list to set as your desktop background for a while.
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Learn Markdown Immediately
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While we’re on the subject of text – and hopefully without finding ourselves exploring the entire history of word processing – I’d like to evangelize what very well might be the Ultimate Formatting Language for digital text. It’s called Markdown, and it’s something you’ve likely already used in one form or another. Technically, Markdown is “a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers,” but – more importantly – it’s a method of stylizing text which is as simple as possible, easy to universalize, and already quite popular. While Vice argues that Markdown is a “power-user tool,” I’d suggest that it’s one everybody should make use of. Though I am currently writing this in Word (for the first time in a good while,) I’m going to pay for it later.
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A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology.
I once had to convert a Word document to a web page.
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Once.
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After spending hours deleting mso-style blocks and cleaning up thousands of lines of crap, I swore (and swore, and swore) that I’d never do that again.
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So I moved to Markdown. For a writer who publishes mostly to the web, it’s perfect.
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Before I committed to writing in Markdown and moved Extratone to Write.As – a wonderfully simple, open-source web CMS entirely based on Markdown – I really struggled with text formatting on our old WordPress-based site, spending hours cleaning up text from Word, Apple Notes, Dropbox Paper, and Google Docs. Now, WordPress natively supports Markdown along with Ghost, Slack, Discord, Tumblr, and more.
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OKAY, YOU GUYS WERE RIGHT ABOUT BEAR...
the whole world was right about Bear...
I'm not sure if I've ever seen a more beautiful text editor and I've seen A LOT. pic.twitter.com/8SzGiBgoYt
Mashable published a formidable list of Markdown editors in 2013, but many are since significantly out of date. Instead, I’d refer you to @awwsmm’s “State of Markdown Editors 2019,” which suggests Joplin as the winning pick. Joplin is open-source and syncs across devices using your preferred cloud service, but it requires that all notes be written in a monospace typeface, which I do not prefer. If you have a MacOS-running machine and/or an iOS-running smartphone, you must download and try an application called Bear. It is quite simply the most beautiful piece of software – aesthetically and functionally – that I have ever seen, and therefore the most beautiful possible execution of a Markdown Editor. From The Verge’s Dieter Bohn:
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Bear uses a simple three-paned design. The largest column is devoted to your current note. A smaller column to the left contains your notes in reverse-chronological order, topped by a search bar. The left-most column contains notes that you’ve pinned, as well as any tags you’ve created to organize your notes — #recipes, for example. I spent years trying to sort my notes into notebooks in Evernote, only to learn that what I really needed was a faster search box.
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As much as I despise the term “seamless,” everything about Bear is its definition. For someone like me, it, alone, almost warrants a reversion to MacOS. If you have the correct platforms, I require you to try it. Unfortunately, there can be no true Windows or Linux equivalent without the work Shiny Frog has done to streamline Bear’s near-instantaneous iCloud integration, but there is one application that can literally simulate its functionality in every other way. Typora is an infinitely-customizable alternative that spans all three platforms with a well-populated themes gallery (including an actual copy of my favorite Bear theme.) My installation is not nearly as smooth as Bear, but it’s technically more powerful – bad news for users like me who can’t resist fiddling. I’ve downloaded (and attempted to author/modify) a billion themes for Typora. Bear, by contrast, allows just enough stylistic modification (color theme, a choice list of 7 beautiful typefaces, and sliders for font size, line height, paragraph spacing,) without any access to its internal workings. In this way, it provides the perfect blend of customizability and minimalism. If you tend toward the latter, try an ultra-slim solution like WordPress’ Simplenote.
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Telegram
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I ran a poll on both Twitter and Mastodon yesterday asking “do you still email things to yourself?” Overwhelmingly, my “audience” responded “yes,” which is awfully surprising considering their demographic – young, techish early adopters. Though email is not yet “obsolete” – as envisioned by Inc’s John Brandon in 2015 – it has indeed been replaced by other software in many of its functions, especially the old Mail-to-Self practice. I cannot remember the last time I emailed myself anything – even to transfer photos from my cellular to my computer, as I used to do often. Instead, I use a private Telegram channel to send myself photos, videos, links, text, and any other file up to 1.5GB! There’ve always been plenty of reasons to use the messaging app for general communication – especially since Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014. Though press coverage of the application has all but dried up, I would argue there are now more reasons than ever to make use of Telegram in your day-to-day life.
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As of 2016, Telegram had 100 million active users, but it’s certainly experienced its fair share of controversies. I see no reason to be worried about encryption or privacy at all, for that matter, for the vast majority of Mail-to-Self cases. If the files you’re sending yourself are sensitive enough to worry about, you shouldn’t be emailing them, anyway.
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Other Stuff
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If you’re the sort of person who regularly types out 500+ word text messages (or have to do homework/any real writing) on your smartphone, I have a secret to reveal to you: most smartphones still have Bluetooth keyboard support. It may look strange, but yes, you can use a full qwerty keyboard with your phone. Those of us who’ve livestreamed or used screenrecording software know that OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is an absolute gift from Gourd, but these days, it’s also easy enough for most computer users to make use of. I’d encourage everybody who can think of a reason to record their screen – to show somebody how to do something, for instance – to download and install it. Finally, I think every Windows user should look into compacting their operating system into just the essentials. “Compact OS” is really just a Windows 10 install without bloatware: the shit you almost certainly don’t need. If you do find yourself in need of default Microsoft apps, you’ll be able to redownload them instantly from the Windows Store.
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I’d been meaning to write something like this for a very long time, so I hope you or someone you know has found it useful. I’m not an authority in the technical sense, but I’ve used every one of these suggestions in my own computing life for years, now, to great benefit. If you have any comments/suggestions/feedback/petty insults, please do contact me via email, Twitter, Mastodon, or Discord.
When I have to pee too much to actually finish anything.
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I've updated the look of this blog with a theme adapted from “Anxiety” by Max Henderson but I've yet to update the colophon with the new colors (partially because I don't have the energy to name them yet.) Extratone's theme was listed on write.as' new themes project a while ago, of which I am quite proud. I've begun crossposting to Mastodon from Twitter again.
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Autos And Such
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I'm mostly blogging because I am fairly stuck on the Volkwagen Atlas review I promised to get done this week. (That link is to an online Word doc of my live progress, on which I'd love any comments on if you have them.) I've been playing enough Gran Turismo Sport that I've created a new blog specifically for automotive writing at dieselgoth.com. There, on Titanic day, I made a post including an “exclusive” invite link to mastd.racing, which I would compel any enthusiasts among you to oblige.
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Hanging out with myself trying to get Zoom-bombed.
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Listening
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This feature on the Bandcamp Daily regarding “Bleep” has really been my shit. Imagine my 70-year-old mother dancing to this.
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[Matt] Anniss subsequently went on a local Bristol internet station, penned a blog post, and posted a DJ set of Bleep, as a way to convince those same DJs that his thesis had some merit. He wrote an in-depth feature on the form for electronic music site Resident Advisor—which caused him to think bigger about this formative, unsung moment in UK dance music history. “I found the sound itself alien and otherworldly, but also endlessly fascinating for some reason,” he says. “It seemed so fresh and futuristic still, but also mysterious.”
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Software and Stuff
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Still waiting on my tax return/possible Corona stipend, I have lost my subscription to Google One, meaning the business Extratone Gmail (ihadtopee@gmail.com) is about to be unhooked(?)/deleted/no longer able to receive mail. As such, I've spent the past few days moving accounts to davidblue@extratone.com including the newsletters I'm most fond of (like Nextdraft.) This has given me a good opportunity to weed out those I don't particularly care about and to try using Outlook as my primary email client once again. Somehow, this has got me reverted into trying to make use of my Microsoft Office business subscription once again – I have (eeek!) not been writing in Markdown. May the Gourd have mercy on my text format-fucking soul.
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The other project I've been trying to distract myself from the Atlas review with is my list of poweruser/especially handy Windows/iOS/MacOS applications/tricks that I believe just about everyone should be using. From “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” (working title):
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I want you to come away from this list feeling as liberated and powerful as I do now when I’m On My Computer without any condescension or tedium. Unfortunately, there’s probably going to be some of both, so please stick with me and don’t take it personally. I do a lot of online reading, writing, and fiddling. I’ve been compelled to do these things in one form or another since very early childhood, and what follows could be described as a list of my favorite tools to accomplish things. Almost all of them are entirely free to use and the vast majority of them are easily and beautifully functional as well. They are what I suggest for my own mother to use, for what that’s worth, and I would argue sincerely for their extreme importance. Don’t waste your life on bad software.
Why spend so much time worrying about what Medium is? Maybe because we wanted to know whether it was a friend or an enemy. The answer is that it’s neither. It’s a reflection of what the media industry has worried about, and hoped for, and not received. But Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like. That’s not much fun for people who got burned along the way, but Medium was never exactly ours to begin with.
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Other Stuff
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I wrote Extratone's sparse submissions page today after signing us up for Submit.as. I'd encourage you to check out the prompts and to send me any suggestions you might have.
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Extratone.com's favicon has been updated thanks to the beautiful geniuses at write.as. (They literally just take requests for this via email.)
VW's Jumbo new offering is titanic to live with and genuinely amusing to drive, but is it a condescending German prank on America?
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Upon meeting an elderly recently immigrated German friend of my mother's for the first time yesterday, she exclaimed He looks German!... and so tall! Both of these compliments were relatively true, but certainly not extremely. I am more German-looking than not, perhaps. Supposedly, I am half a product of a very large family whose elders are only one and two generations from German royalty – my legal last name is on a state sign in front of a small black castle somewhere in Der Vaterland. I slacked through two years of high school German language classes – Frau Rosa once took me aside to ask you’re not going to shoot up the school or anything, right? (Sorry Frau & peers.) Though my much-older half siblings grew up mostly in the town of Schweinfurt, I have never actually set foot in Germany, yet I’ve come to identify with and admire its culture enough to (perhaps unjustly or inappropriately) feel comfortable joking about Deutsche peculiarities as vain self-mockery.
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Despite all of this (carefully nationalism-free) affection, the real truth of myself is an American one. I have long since broached the point of no return: no matter how hard I might try, I would never be able to mold the Me another perceives in such a way that I’d become observably German-native. I’m just a midwestern boy with a Germanic name on his paperwork, and therefore have more in common with Volkswagen’s newish entry into the dramatically different full-size Sport Utility Vehicle segment. The Atlas bears a remarkably good name (annoyingly, literally everyone's reviews seem to begin with a comment on how decipherable the new name is for Americans) – especially among new automotive products introduced to market in recent memory. Honda’s Clarityshould be clever alongside the definitively 21st-century Insight marque, but violates an unfortunately universal law in the industry: never name a car for a state of being (Introducing the New 2020 Honda Ambiguity [Insolence, Fugue, Debacle, Setback]) ~especially~ one so obtusely irrelevant to the product itself. Insight comes from a chat with a colleague over coffee, but Clarity is a metaphysical, zealous plane that sounds our ever-inadequate platitude alarms in a very unsettling manner. Um... Is Honda doing okay? It not only ends up irritating and off-putting: after Hannah’s season of The Bachelorette, it’s just dumb, lazy, and foul.
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After decades of trying to force Yankees into models that many found too small, VW has figured it out: Big-ass SUVs are what Americans want, and the Atlas is designed around the biggest asses you can imagine.
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In contrast, the fucking Nissan Kicks ages so swiftly and uncomfortably that it’s pitifully tacky before it even hits the lot, which is particularly disappointing considering the most cleverly bestowed Juke name was. One marvels at the situation Nissan has found itself in: young American black men love our brand, but they also love shoes! Atlas, though, is on par with Honda’s Odyssey inspirationally, though a smidge more grounded through the distinctly Earthen science of topography, just as it should be. Originally billed as a replacement for VW’s Routan minivan, the three-row Atlas is Volkswagen’s newest bid for the Panic Room-loving American parent demographic. Therefore, it’s crucial for us to examine it thoroughly for any signs of condescension from the Germans and their brand “whose business in the US is built on providing small, fun-to-drive cars like the Golf, the Beetle, the Jetta, and the Passat.”
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From our perspective, what we have here is a German take on the American family SUV. A Ford Explorer by way of Wolfsburg, if you will. Well, sort of. The Atlas is actually built in Chattanooga, Tennessee alongside the Passat sedan.
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Unavoidably, the most notable, remarkable, and extraordinary item to note about the Atlas is simply that it is fucking fat. Just about any review you watch or read will mention this. Even CNET calls theirs “a very broad boy.” After I first read the number – 5997 lbs. – I was never able to escape it throughout the entirety of my time with it. Three tons is unbelievably, inexcusably, violently, hopelessly heavy. Hopelessly not because it stands out in its segment, but that it does not. Obesity is still a problem in America, but it's our automobiles now. While we continue to worship safety and fuel economy together, we skew the triangle (the other side is performance) further and further, and yes – a good portion of the blame can be placed on our obsession with SUVs. I spent 2018 driving a 1976 Lincoln Continental Mk. IV around – the second-longest two-door car ever sold at 228.1 inches from its pointed nose to its massive ass. Despite being a full thirty inches longer than the 2019 Atlas, my 460-powered mammoth yacht weighed some 700 pounds less, and it was filled with real wood. I'm no expert in physics by any means, but I can tell you that every pound has expounding effects on the energy required to move, turn, and stop a vehicle, which just about sums up the ultimate formula to pulverize efficiency. When our friends at the IIHS say that “fuel economy can be improved without sacrificing safety,” they are just... fundamentally wrong, (though technically correct.)
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I'm not entirely sure why the Atlas weighs so much, but its mass is inevitably a major variable in just about every facet of its experience as a product. The best potential hoot to be had from it as a driving device should be sought by ordering it to shuffle briskly on curving country blacktops in Sport Mode with all the assists (save for lane-keeping) on. Not to be too crude, but it's fun to make the fat fucker run. Through your ass, you can feel the suspension squirm and struggle to redirect all 266 lb.-ft. of VR6 oomf between 4 wheels beneath an entirely separate war against the physics of such top-heavy body roll.
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Scrambling is definitely the correct verb. Pleasantly light steering in Comfort Mode (where I'd advise you leave it in virtually any situation) combined with a supple-ish ride from multilink suspension provide a trace of a past luxury sentiment not unlike the energy exhibited by my old Connie through and through. It's all about the sensation of power. Not in the horse sense, but in the satisfaction achieved from the manipulation of maximum mass with minimum effort. Comparatively, the level of actual ego-stroking is of course quite miniscule, and unfortunately, it is the numbness that is most noticeably left over with very little gain.
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Also unfortunate: I did not end up making the opportunity to truly test whatever offroad capabilities the Atlas may posses in any sort of formalized test. My example came with Hill Descent Control and Hill Start Assist, and I was able to find a small hill just steep enough to trigger the former. I cannot say I'd put my money on the Atlas winning the Dakar as it is, but we now know it can handle wet grass on a mild incline. What about county road gravel? Realistically, these are the two extremes 99% of Atlas' will ever face in their usable service lives. I found an entirely quiet section of back rock road and walked through the steps to disable all of the traction and stability control assists before stomping on the throttle, but was unable to provoke any significant wheelspin. In an episode of Autoline After Hours, Michael Loveti (Vice President, Product Line Mid/Full-Size, Volkswagen Group of America, Inc.) confirms the drivetrain really isall-time all-wheel-drive, (though the dual exhaust ports in the rear are unfortunately fake,) and that the Atlas is actually based on the MQB platform, which is astonishing. Prospective buyers should definitely have a listen.
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This theme of “thoroughly German, yet somehow distinctly Americanized” occurs over and over and over and over again in the Atlas' story. Its horizontal lines match both the Jetta and Ford's Explorer. In that way, surely it is a success. I cannot imagine a better execution of its marque's directives as stated by Mr. Loveti than what I drove.
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Cover the Volkswagen logo and you might think the Atlas was made by someone else. The hard lines and boxy shape are a sharp departure from the rest of the VW lineup. But look at its competitors here in the states, especially the Ford Explorer. It’s almost like Volkswagen tried to build its own Ford with the Atlas.
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Even though it has been on the market for only a year, the Atlas had become VW's second-most-popular car in the German automaker's lineup in March 2018, showing that the American car-buying public's thirst for crossovers and SUVs remains unslaked.
In the splitting of already fine hairs, it's the new Telluride that makes a stronger case over the Atlas, thanks to its price advantage, its plush and thoughtful appointments, and its slightly more comfortable third-row.
Freedom through security. In truth, neurotypical people are naturally driven to minimize risk, yet also to romanticize the sick, inhibitionless madmen – to envy them both internally and externally (in a most restrained way.) Collectively, our authority in (or mastery of) risktaking remains pathetically irrational. If we were to itemize our ability to asses risk into a sixth physical sense, it would rank just as poorly against the rest of the world's creatures (or perhaps neck-and-neck with those of the squirrel or the deer.)
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So many struggles of the too-often-cited “Human Condition” are grounded in the incompetence of this sense. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that risktakers in general are a very special topic amid The Middle Class – those who occasionally find themselves atop just enough excess to call it “capital.” This equates in day-to-day life as only the most potent – yet almost entirely inert next to the cushion of multi-millionaires – subject, catalyst, and indicator of dire fret. By far the most widespread affectation of this petty affliction spreads like divine wrath over the upper forty percent of this Middle Class. Thus, we must ask ourselves how safe doth the Atlas make me feel?
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Inside
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My Atlas’ interior was finished in Titan Black Leatherette, which sounds both grandiose and a bit like a kink. “Volkswagen is known for good build quality and tight-feeling interiors,” writes Danny Geraghty for Auto123, “but I found I was encountering just a bit too much hard plastic, making for a somewhat dated feel.” Perhaps my loaner was less worn in because neither I nor my girlfriend found anything wrong with the Atlas’ interior quality – even after bombing gravel roads to the point of sustaining a left-rear puncture, we did not encounter any annoying squeaks or rattles. She spent an entire afternoon sleeping in the passenger’s seat reclined and described it as “comfy.” For The Car Connection, Senior Editor Andrew Ganz writes:
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It’s not much to behold, with a chunky shape as conservative as they come that is not offset by a distinct lack of flair inside. Instead, the Atlas is quietly competent and exceptionally good at carrying seven humans—even seven adults.
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Standard with the SEL trim is Volkswagen’s “Digital Cockpit” instrument panel, which I like much more than I expected to, though its color options are already dated and unfortunately unchangeable. Ageability is an inevitable issue with these sorts of bespoke graphic design decisions automakers are making now, but at least you’ll be able to tell your friends that your Volkswagen has a digital dashboard “just like the Rolls-Royce Phantom,” which is, of course, the ultimate Queen of timelessness in the industry. Perhaps it’s telling that the only layout I found acceptable for the digital dash was the one with simulated analog needles for the tach and speedo, and how often do you really use a compass in day-to-day driving? For that matter, how useful could a digital compass in the speedometer’s center hub really be in an “offroad” situation? It’s a bit petty, but I also really despise the typeface shared across the instruments and infotainment system. It’s just… bad.
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Outside
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In Platinum Gray Metallic, the Atlas looks authoritative enough in a very ordinary way. Unless you’re on the lookout for one, you’d hardly notice it, and you certainly wouldn’t expect what you see to cost as much as it does. That is why I’d prefer any one of the other exterior finishes, especially (in order): Pure White, Tourmaline Blue Metallic, Pacific Blue Metallic, and Fortana Red. The real wonder is how VW managed to execute a seven-seat SUV with its existing design language. Though the Atlas is by far Volkswagen’s largest vehicle, it fits neatly within their lineup.
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Road Rage
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My only authentic Road Rage experience in some 5000 miles of rideshare driving occurred on All Hallow's Eve when I stopped – no more illegally than usual – on the opposite corner from a popular downtown Mexican restaurant called The Nap with hazards and all courtesy interior lights shining. The car immediately behind me hesitated no more than necessary, but the Biggest Big Infiniti behind them (a QX80 – the Atlas' competitor) just... stopped. There was honking and frenzied, hoarse screaming of what the fuck are you doing? and such.
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I responded with pleasantly amused but relatively-encouraging glances at the impersonal black mass of the Infiniti's windshield through my mirrors. I rolled down the Atlas' driver's side window and politely gestured that they go around me, but failed to coax any movement whatsoever from the ugly behemoth through at least two full cycles of the nearby traffic light. There must be some aquatic authority in the bulbous black ass of the QX80, for no one behind it seemed willing to pass either. The driver waited significantly longer than you'd imagine before emerging, huffy. She was wearing a classic poofy black North Face vest some sort of slate gray turtleneck. Nothing below these were stimulating enough to retain any memory of. Uggs?
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How positive are you that the truth has absolutely zero consequence: contrasted silver-beige eyeliner and little eye contact, dirty-ish straight blonde hair over a spray-tanned face, exhibiting zero anxious tics or hesitation. She was obviously the New Matriarch, and she was obviously much more of an authority on traffic law than I. As she approached, she scanned the street as one naturally does when they enter a busy one... except it was completely empty, thanks to her blockade. She first informed me that I was “not supposed” to be stopped there. I tried to listen and respond with as much sincerity as possible as I realized all at once that my behavior had genuinely perturbed this woman – that her choice to leave the huge hideous warmth of the guppy wagon to speak as humans to one another required great courage.
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I inserted the next logical question which I'd been screaming telepathically: can you not get around me? I began to pity her when I then saw in her face the distinct possibility that going around as a concept had not occurred to her whatsoever. She stuttered a wee bit in retorting “I could go around, but I don't want to get a ticket.” Here, one of the most fascinating avenues of suburban psychology is explored: Guppy Mom is not being ingenuine with this expression, nor has she had an untoward experience with law enforcement, ever. Guppy Mom did know her excuse was bullshit – nobody has ever been written a traffic citation for carefully circumventing an obstacle in the road. Given the opportunity to interrogate this kernel of entirely uncompromising obedience to utterly delusional traffic law superstitions, I think we'd simply discover a life of unnaturally positive interactions with LEOs. We must conclude, then, that the source of her fear was either myself or the Atlas.
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Granted, to her I am still a Young Man, and am therefore instinctively programmed to believe myself more informed than literally everyone – even the very foundational architects of modern civilization. Her Stucco Highness may have felt a representative of these builders (edgy take: she is in fact their servant.) Her own folks surely complain regularly about their distaste for disrespect, and my gig-economy, Austin Powers-looking ass was somehow disrespecting the order laid down by her would be (entirely fantastical) forefathers. Though her expression of her quaint fear of such “ugliness” (if you will) is hard-headed, an ugliest decision of hers (or her kin) idled behind me, its giant seafood-looking mouth gaping, unhinged. It'd almost be more redeemable if it was a hardcore, chronic mouthbreather. (The QX80 is actually powered by a comparatively oldschool V8.)
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Freedom from fear is the sum desire of all the most primitive compulsions we share. Ultimately, the only efficient and reasonable response to Mrs. Guppy's kind in such a situation is to very kindly oblige, which I did, of course, with great respect and great pity. In the months since this encounter, I'd been wondering what was missing from the outline of this Atlas review. I recently realized that it is this analysis of fear as a factor for the American carbuyer.
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Though it has been disproven over and over again for decades, consumers often cite safety as their primary motivation for buying full-sized SUVs. Mrs. Guppy's Great Guffaw led me to realize why this particularly disconnected supposition/folktale continues to thrive so uninhibited by the truth: the brand image, physical presence, and actual driving sensation must communicate and “feel” safe – these are far more integral to buyers' perception of a product than the testable reality. Even the people of the world's most Christian nation do not have faith – they trust not unless they see with their own eyes; feel with their own asses. They entrust their souls to the Word of the Lord, but not their lives to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. (I recently gave both of mine to NHTSA for All Eternity.)
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The Collegiate Take
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The two or three nights I spent Uber/Lyft driving around my college town shuttling Halloween party traffic in the Atlas were expectedly uneventful. I had to create a preset text message to send immediately upon connection with a rider to communicate as succinctly as possible that I was not going to be arriving in the Jetta Sportwagen on my profile but instead in the Atlas, and to transparently try to make sure that was okay. (No, drivers are not supposed to do this and you should reserve the right to bail on a ride should you find yourself opposite my own position in this situation because nobody refused me.)
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Hello! Just a heads up: My Jetta is in the shop so I'm driving a gray 2019 Volkswagen Atlas
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(It's VW's largest SUV and has 7 seats.)
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License: FATLAS
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If this is inconvenient or uncomfortable for you, please let me know.
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Thank you!
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I made a point to try and ask most of the riders if they had any thoughts on the Atlas without sounding like I was just desperately fishing for compliments on my own car, but I don't remember any significant thoughts being imparted whatsoever – certainly nothing negative. Folks here are just too polite – they won't speak up no matter how many times you insist that you do not own the car. We experienced this phenomena years ago when we tried to interview people on the street regarding the horrid Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet. Regardless, there's no reason to expect young people to have anything to say about the Atlas – it is neither extraordinary nor cheap.
[Atlas] was designed and built specifically for American families, and buyers and critics alike are letting us know that we’re hitting the mark with this seven-seater SUV.
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It's immediately evident from the outside that the Atlas is the most Americanized product in Volkswagen's lineup – indeed, in its entire history. For Car Magazine's review, Ben Barry notes “the square-jawed front, Jeep-like wheel arches, and the suggestive utilitarianism of the stampings in the bonnet and roof” before remarking on just how much more you can spend on the Porsche Cayenne's cousin, the beloved Touareg.
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Ultimately, the Atlas is far from a dynamic, agile machine, but it feels comfortable and unintimidating to drive, and perfectly at home on US city streets and the slower-paced driving of California highways.
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Efficiency, the Other Fixation
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Surprisingly, the Atlas carries a rare and precious jewel of automotive history under its broad, satisfying hood. The VR6 “zig zag” arrangement is actually one of Volkswagen legend – defining icons like the Corrado. As Dan Prosser explains for Evo magazine:
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‘VR’ stands for V-Reihenmotor, which translates to V-Inline, describing both vee and inline cylinder layouts. That is, of course, contradictory. The unit is actually a very narrow-angle V6, displacing 2861cc, with two offset banks of cylinders at 15 degrees to one another. Unlike a conventional V6, but exactly like an inline six, there’s just one cylinder head. The result is a six-cylinder engine that’s both much narrower than a typical V6 and shorter than a straight six. In fact, it’s more comparable in size to a four-cylinder than a six, which meant it could slot easily into a Golf floorpan. A creative and borderline ingenious engineering solution.
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The Atlas' 3.6L VR6 makes 276 hp and 266 lb-ft. of torque. Though other reviews cited highway mileage figures of 23-25 mpg, I was able to coax a whole twenty-eight miles-per-gallon on a live Periscope stream without air conditioning or cruise control through a two-way simulated 20 minute commute, through which I suffered for the hard data. My average before resetting the odometer for that feat, though, was 14.7mpg. “Good range and miles between trips to the gas station are criteria I look for in a good car, and the fuel-gulping Atlas rates low in this department” may be the blandest statement of all time, but MotorTrend does have a point – with the same 18.6 gallon fuel tank shared between the four and six cylinder models, the latter realistically has 250 miles of range between fillups, which is pitiful for a modern vehicle in just about any segment. Crossing one State is not enough.
It's a straightforward conversion from Atlas to Atlas Cross Sport. In the name of perceived sportiness, out goes that most minivan of things: the third row of seats.
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Normally, I'd be disgusted with such a thing, but from where I'm sitting, the Cross Sport appears to be what the Atlas should've been all along. The third row seats in my example wasn't any more comfortable than that of a 10-year-old minivan, so removing them for the sake of the second makes perfect sense. According to Car & Driver, the 2021 Atlas will “adopt” the Cross Sport's styling, though there are some technologies – like road sign recognition- which are exclusive to the Cross Sport.
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Instead of getting 20.6 cubic feet of cargo space behind the third row in the Atlas, you get 40.3 behind the second row. Fold that down and it becomes 77.8 cubic feet to work with. And that’s from an SUV with the same wheelbase as the upcoming 2021 Atlas at 117.3 inches, yet it is 5.2 inches shorter and 2.2 inches lower to the ground.
Once we got the steering fixed, my opinion of the Atlas did grow sunnier, though it's still not perfect. Maybe it's not fair to compare the driving experience to my previous long-term vehicle, the slightly smaller Mazda CX-9, but in my opinion the Mazda still sets the ride and handling bar for the competitive set. Setting the Mazda aside, if you hop behind the wheel of one of the newer competitors like the Kia Telluride, there's a noticeable disparity in the refinement in ride quality and body control in the Atlas... Volkswagen should have made the GTI of three-row SUVs, not just another minivan alternative.
The 2018 Volkswagen Atlas does little wrong, but it's light on personality and a little low-rent inside—and it guzzles fuel. It's worth a look, but mostly rivals do more for less.
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Volkswagen’s first substantial entry into the SUV market is well-named, relatively well-endowed, fairly bland for its price tag, and very, very heavy. Also, Start/Stop is still unbearable – thanks Obama – but the Atlas is not a scam.
Volkswagen traditionally tuned its suspensions closer to the European ideal, firm but well-damped, which incidentally made even non-enthusiast Volkswagens more pleasant than average to drive (with a few recent exceptions). But Volkswagen made a conscious decision to soften up the Jetta for American tastes, beyond what softening Volkswagen traditionally applied, and it seems like this philosophy scaled up to the much larger Atlas. Maybe the soft ride impresses on test drives, but a firmer setup would likely make life nicer for occupants over the long haul.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
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Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
A not altogether-cohesive review of July reads and research.
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In case you're similarly long overdue for a reminder that beautiful things are still being made on the internet...
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After nearly a year of relative sobriety from my old, once-severe addiction to Web Site hunting, it occurred to me just yesterday that some explicit wandering as I once did for days at a time – through the clever, innovative, and uniquely tasteful projects through which an astonishingly-original few give their whole thinking (and often physical) selves in obscurity despite how little financial (and often professional) incentive is maintained by those who unknowingly need it the most – might be the best feasible remedy to my current, most perplexing state of faithlessness and bafflement toward the ambitions of trades and cultures I feel I once so thoroughly understood. A great portion of you are surely undergoing your own manifestations of the same hopelessness – I cannot ever remember a time in my life when global events were so utterly discouraging so relentlessly.
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Design and The Open Web
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In this present when every element of American reality is so much more incessantly ugly than we could’ve ever imagined, let’s take at least a momentary respite to look at some visually irresistible and/or super sick Sites on the truly-resolute Open Web to assure our existential selves that yes, beauty shall not cease to exist. For better or worse, my #1 goto source to find innovative, delicious web design has always been Typewolf, who announced last fall that he will not be continuing his “Site of the Month” section, though his relentless “Site of the Day” roll will continue, unhindered.
Those of us for whom the Podcast medium became a trusted and relatively regular one in our lives long before anyone figured out how to make a real business out of it – certainly eons preceeding the original startup podcast-only (apparently HBO-like publication – Gimlet Media – to be successfully launched. Now, though, your mom – perhaps even her mom – listens to podcasts, and what was once a The single Missouri alumni at The Verge, Ashley Carmen, explored the proliferation of podcasting and the process by which it became profitable.
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In 2009, only 11% of the U.S. population had listened to a podcast in the past month.
-How podcasts became so popular | The Verge on YouTube
Speaking of Gimlet Media: the latest episode of my longtime favorite of their podcasts, Reply All, is a sort of condensed remake of my favorite podcast episode of all time (of any show, not just this one) in which hosts Alex Goldman and P.J. Vogtmaintained an open telephone line for 48 hours and spoke with a whole bunch of people (mostly Americans) about... whatever. The result was beautifully human, if you’ll forgive my use of the cliche. I tend to revisit it when I’m feeling particularly isolated from and/or confused about the general ambitions of the people around me. I’ll be honest: I didn’t pay much attention to my first listen through the new episode, but I can tell you that it is worth your time, at least.
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I was distraught when Spotify bought both the aforementioned Gimlet Media andthe social audio turned podcasting app Anchor – both of which I (rather ridiculously) felt a special personal ownership over. (The latter, especially, because they reached out to me early on to feature Extratone’s channel on their music section.) However, it appears that both are being treated fairly well in the 18+ months since their acquisition – probably because they’ve been making Spotify money.
Yes, I am still managing to waste my time digging up and re-arranging some very old content, but I just couldn't resist. Somehow, it didn't occur to me until yesterday evening that I could sort through the original video files of my old vines fairly easily in fucking Google Photos and blast them through iMovie for iOS into a full montage relatively easily.
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Some of these are very cringey...
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Yes, I'd love to finally get around to my ultimate romantic editorialization on that most dearly departed social network, but things are way too jumbled right now, obviously.
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so illequipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.
-relentless, the country keeps
-doors and walls reverberate
-all but rest in summer’s heat
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I remember the dawn and dusk – the open palette, gradiented above
-opposite a front
-overtaking me,
-on the 4030,
-tilling terraces ’round the North 180
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growing here is not a war with Earth,
-but a chronological board game,
-won by the punctual
-and patient
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I am neither of these,
-but I am fond of a good emergency
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and it all plays out for me;
-the torrent released in Missouri haste
-big drops turn to steam on the labored muffler
-too much to do;
-getting it over with,
-God cries in heaves, quickly,
-around here
Since you last heard from us, the federated social network Mastodon has scaled tremendously in usership and steadily grown technologically into an incredibly robust and dynamic platform. Perhaps inevitably, Eugen Rochko and his gaggle of open source developers have continued to embarrass the living fuck out of Twitter's team – at least for those who've continued to pay attention (i.e. those of us whose sense of aspiration has yet to perish.)
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I planned on getting ahead of an innovative wake in iOS development by watching closely for the first “premium” Mastodon clients to come out, which I suspected (quite correctly) would carry the first substantial risk-taking on the part of plucky social apps to be seen on the goddamned App Store in what felt like eternity. Unfortunately, I've ended up far too deep in screenshots/insights from Toot! and Mast, creating a bit of an overwhelming obstacle in comparing and/or reviewing the two without sinking deep in my regular, pretentious hole. (Though both of them are absolutely gorgeous, fascinating, and impressive projects which you should invest in and follow if you're interested in the future of federated social whatsoever.)
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That said... I'd like only to mention and briefly demonstrate the first premium desktop Mastodon client, Mastonaut, which I had the privilege of experiencing momentarily last night.
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In the interest of brevity (and because I was unable to continue fucking around for any length of time,) I'll just list some observations:
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The entire GUI experience is distinctly uncluttered (or perhaps barren, depending on your subjective desires from this sort of thing,) but duplicates dearest TweetBot's functionality impressively well considering its age as an independently-developed product.
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Keyboard shortcuts! Fuck me, God.
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I love the live-updated instance directory search (above) as a second landing for first-time users.
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Though I did actually have to repeat the first-time login process after freezing and subsequently force-quitting Mastonaut, I think you'll probably place the blame on my own immediate and inpatient window management mania considering how smoothly it all went the second time around.
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To be honest, Bear, Spark, and recent other beautiful Mac applications beckon me to buy or hack myself into MacOS again. If I have time in the near future, I'll show you why.
The Psalms is proudly hosted by Write.as – a new sort of blogging content management system built atop Markdown and maintained by a company which explicitly shares my commitment to a better, Open web.
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A somewhat-outdated version of this site's theme is listed among others in Writeas' official themes list. The full, up-to-date CSS and JS can be found below and on in this GitHub repository, which I created in November, 2020 as an experiment in using Git to track editorial changes. (That means you can see current in-progress drafts!)
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Download the entirety of this blog in EPUB format here.
Download The Psalms 3.0 color pack for a limited time here.
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Code
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The Psalms’ GitHub Repository also hosts the technical documentation for its Write.as theme. Download the latest “release,” here and/or view the raw CSS here.
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Drafts Theme
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If you happen to be a user of agiletortoise’s infamous Drafts app on iOS and/or MacOS, I have just released a quite-uncanny theme on the new Themes Directory emulating The Psalms’ reading experience which I am quite pleased with.
My girlfriend very generously offered to go for a drive with me yesterday evening, though neither of us particularly expected to end up parked at 5:40AM outside a little Diner called Ziggie’s some four hours away from home. I managed to learn a bit about driving apps and briefly flood my Jetta’s intake long enough to stall it after fording some flood water a wee bit too rapidly.
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Since I’ve begun working in Kansas City and occasionally commuting from Columbia, I’ve found incentive to revisit the crowdsourced driving directions mobile app Waze, which I recall being very excited about in early 2016. It’s smoother now, yet devoid of that pseudocountercultural sense in a design sense. Functionally, it is still the most reliable method of police detection I’ve ever encountered – in this Second Era of my Waze usage I have yet to see a single Missouri Highway Parol car sat in the center of I-70 that hadn’t been reported on Waze first – even at crazy hours on weekday mornings – which should be all the reassurance one needs regarding the immediate future of their userbase.
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I'm using Waze to drive to to Licking, MO, arriving at 2:24. Watch my drive in real-time on the Waze map! David Blue on Twitter
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Somehow, I was unaware until this morning that Waze allows you to “share” your route by generating a link to a web app of theirs that will live track your progress. Though I can’t actually imagine too many use cases for this, I still think it’s cool. Anybody who’s interested in stalking my every move should follow me on Twitter – where I’m sure I’ll be sharing more drives from now on – and/or DM me and just ask me to enable 24/7 location-sharing for ya!
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On the topic of mobile apps for those folks like me who’s only real hobby is just fucking driving around, I did actually find mention in a listicle from a real motoring enthusiast’s publication. “Seven Apps That Will Help Improve Your Driving Experience” is not exactly the sort of advisory article I remember seeing in Road & Track considering that it actually only contains one single app even vaguely related to True Driving Pleasure called Greatest Drive.
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Users contribute their favorite routes and with Yelp integration you can either pick a destination to find the most scenic way to get there or find a good spot to eat along the route you've already chosen.
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Of course, it’s nowhere to be found on the App Store, but it sounded relatively foodist anyway.
Apparently the premier mile-tracking app right now is Microsoft’s MileIQ, which I’m going to continue to try because I can’t resist automatically-generated PDF reports, ever.
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I gave my girlfriend administrator roles for my derelict joke Facebook page Boiler Explosion Memes and she’s somehow managed to get it to almost 100 likes / +25,000% impressions in just a matter of days!!!!
Assuming Jesus Christ is in your thoughts this evening before yet another anniversary of his birth, I am infinitely astonished by the truth in what I’m about to suppose with you. If the Son of God was living today, most of us have agreed for a long time now that he’d use marijuana recreationally – big fuckin whoop. I think it’s far more interesting and appropriate (we all know his birthday was wholly reconfigured into a consumerist holiday long ago) to speculate on how he’d behave after finding himself inadvertently in the market for a new laptop within the ~$1000 range (following a stubbed toe whilst walking on water incident, perhaps.) Surely, it would not be entirely holy for him to opt in to the Foxconn-complicit world of Apple, Incorporated, nor the openly-blasphemous one created and exuberantly grown by Google LLC, and I’m afraid he’d be too much of an End User idiot to integrate any of the sparse Linux-dedicated hardware available. In May of 2017, however, Billy Gates’ old Microsoft finally released “the laptop we’ve always wanted them to make,” but could its recent update be truly worthy of our Lourde and Saviour? Or your newly-enrolled offspring? Should you sprint downstairs and swap out the new MacBook Air you just bought?
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From an entirely valid perspective, an observer might declare my last two months of 2018 to be an outright shameful period defined by hypocrisy and traitorous betrayals. After finally taking the time to explore the full narrative surrounding Linux and the bloody tale of Microsoft’s cruel genocidal destruction of countless creative software projects throughout computing’s adolescence (see: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish,”) I eventually declared myself “100% Open Source” and began outlining an essay designed primarily to express that Linux is finally ready to be the operating system of the people without succumbing immediately to the brand of cybercrackpot illegitimacy associated with the L-word in the minds of the general public so readily thanks to decades of misinformed, condescending neckbeards. Such a feat would require entire new planes of cultural awareness and dialectal delicacy, yet certainly result in zero personal reward from even the best possible outcome, yet I proceeded to ponder the subject very deliberately all the way through October because I genuinely believed in a new democratized future of computing. 2018 had been my Grand Awakening to the idyllic possibilities of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) across the whole applied spectrum from office suites to social networks, yet – as two thousand eighteen comes to an end – I’ve managed to find myself among the most jaded, soul-sapped tech community I have yet encountered: Microsoft Administrators.
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Complimenting this Linux-laden culture in which I was not so long ago deeply embedded was a confused and frustrated outlook regarding what I felt were excessive and completely idiotic sacrifices across the industry’s hardware design to the greedy, gluttonous god of Lightness. It seemed only reasonable to Myself As Consumer that the entire buying public should exclusively seek designs prioritizing greatest possible performance and battery life, even from portable computers and smartphones, so I assumed my perspective on this updated iteration of Microsoft's most laptopy Surface laptop – which exists in large part to compete directly with Apple's beloved (and just-updated) MacBook Air – wouldn't be at all useful. However, a few weeks ago, my employer prompted me with a sweet sweet ultimatum: for the sake of a tax break, I want to spend ~$1000 on a laptop for you as soon as possible. Yes, I know I should consider myself a very fortunate man – this wasn't even the first time I'd been surprised with the “hey, I want to buy you a laptop but it has to be today” experience, and may even be considered a sort of sequel to my Tales of Whirlwind Manic Consumerism, but it’s ultimately one of the most idiotic strategies to achieve a major purchase decision and completely inadvisable for anyone on a budget. Still I was indeed thankful to be put in a nearly-identical situation of Consumer Electronic haste, and have come to be especially appreciative of the specific time I was approached as such: just one week after Microsoft launched the Surface Laptop 2.
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Considering the vast majority of its users are trapped inside my television, there’s no harm in covering the Surface brand with our virtual palm for a moment. If you’ll indulge me so, you’ll notice that Microsoft has actually delivered unto us The Laptop II – as in, the sequel... the successor to every other laptop computer yet conceived... but does this one machine truly represent the second coming of the Notebook Christ? Naturally, it would be a bit zealous to stand behind this extreme statement with 100% sincerity, but there truly are certain elements of this Personal Computing product's execution which do indeed will its user to expect and/or desire from others in coming years. As I've stated before, I also simply cannot help but be jazzed by such bravado from the mouths of even a company with as crooked and hateful history as Microsoft's. (Note: no other technology company has actually achieved what Microsoft historically has in this regard, and hopefully none ever will again.)
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I must be honest: it hasn't yet been two months and I've already scuffed and perhaps even stained the beautiful maroon alcantara surrounding my machine’s touchable body, but it’s occurred to me that I might draw upon the vast library of automotive interior tutorials available on YouTube – and even purchase some of the alcantara care-specific products they recommend – in order to really maintain the exterior of the Laptop II. After all, alcantara was undeniably car culture’s material first. I should also confess that objectively, the Surface Laptop II is the best-suited computer for my personal uses that I’ve ever owned or used for any length of time. Subjectively, I don’t think all of the hardware design touches that make it so – like its keyboard layout, divine 3:2 aspect ratio, and particular I/O complement – have yet had the chance to seduce my emotional brain into truly loving it as much as I certainly should by any reasonable measure. For my own sake, I hope I’m able to fall in child-like infatuation with its magic, but in the interim, I believe the coldness of my heart should hopefully preserve any useful commentary I might have to add. Though this is undoubtedly the most timely review of a hardware product I’ve ever published, I’d still ask that you indulge my perspective suggesting the importance of considering it part of a package with its operating system, considering that the whole of tech media would’ve unanimously declared it the year’s “best laptop” were Apple’s aging, but still widely-adored MacOS absent from the frame.
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I've tested a bunch of laptops this year, running the spectrum of 2-in-1s, Chromebooks, MacBooks, gaming laptops, etc. Everyone's needs are going to be different, which is why there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all for laptops. But enthusiasts’ laptops aside, I strongly feel the Surface Laptop 2 is the best laptop of the year. And by that I mean the best laptop for most folks' needs.
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With as much humility as possible, I must add that I myself am anything but “most folks,” yet my experience so far with the product has been one of astonishing compatibility and battery life. Using recommended power settings, the Surface Laptop 2 endured four hours and twenty-two minutes of a workload it wasn’t particularly designed for including heavy web browsing, image manipulation, brief audio/video capture with OBS, and moderate subsequent editing in Audacity and OpenShot. Dan Seifert – Vox Media’s “only Windows user” – reported “about seven hours” of Microsoft’s claimed 14.5, but frankly, I don’t know what any of y’all are doin – I’m just thankful this machine is a better marathoner than any other I can recall owning. While we’re on the subject, I consider Microsoft’s inclusion of a magnetically-attached power cable and unassuming auxiliary USB charging port on the attached power supply to be personal godsends – further evidence, even, that the Surface Laptop 2 was actually designed to be nice to use. For the sake of those readers actually in the market for a new laptop who’ve somehow found themselves here, though, Raymond Wong’s review for Mashable is the most thorough offering you’ll find – it’s quoted front and center on Microsoft’s web page for the Laptop II, even – but it’s important to mention that his critical comparative perspective predates the late launch of its ultimate competitor, the new MacBook Air. Rather pitifully, however, his colleague’s “good, but not great” resolution suggests that Apple failed to challenge Microsoft’s relatively moderate update enough to warrant any revision, and that Mashable as a publication stands by my new laptop’s Best of the Year title, for whatever it may or may not be worth to you.
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If the new MacBook Air came in at the same price as the old one, it would be a steal. Sure, you pay for the privilege of being able to use macOS on the Apple ecosystem. But in years past that also meant access to cutting-edge features and design. As pretty as the MacBook Air is, there's nothing that innovative about it. In today's Apple, it seems, privilege amounts to just staying current.
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You won’t find many others who regularly invest editorial merit in publishing 2500+ word laptop reviews anymore, which I’d concede is plenty reasonable in the Surface Laptop’s case, at least. Perhaps your first point of comparative entry should be a barely-dated conversation between Kara Swisher, Lauren Goode, and Dan Seifert on Too Embarrassed to Ask regarding the original’s odds of truly competing in the “premium laptop” segment (if you’d prefer to hear from those who struggle to take it seriously, that is.) Assuming the original product direction of the Surface line still stands, Microsoft doesn’t actually intend to sell at high volume, especially when it comes to this runt of the marque, which does not hesitate to omit itself from the popular discourse of the moment surrounding tablets as the future of all computing to which all of its siblings have contributed so much. Though I shall always remember my dearest Libel (the special edition Spectre x360 with which I built most of Extratone) with great respect and deep fondness – I think it’s even worth mounting on some sort of plinth – the significantly-cheaper Laptop II has already demonstrated true value in its “premium” segment bragging rights with far superior materials and build quality. If you’re looking for the prettiest possible slice of magnesium lightness but aren’t the sort to have followed the story of Microsoft’s first venture into personal computer production since it began in the last year of the Mayan calendar, it’s worth your while to read Joshua Topolsky’s projections of the project’s impact on the popular narrative surrounding Microsoft from history’s freshest possible perspective: the eve of the first Surface tablet’s launch.
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The entire tablet was designed in-house by Microsoft's teams, and if you believe what was said in the presentation yesterday, design and functionality in hardware has suddenly become a big deal in Redmond. That's a big shift, and it's an important one. The announcement of the Surface shows that Microsoft is ready to make a break with its history — a history of hardware partnerships which relied on companies like Dell, HP, or Acer to actually bring its products to market. That may burn partners in the short term, but it could also give Microsoft something it desperately needs: a clear story.
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A pungent stigma festered from Microsoft’s history of inadequate and inelegant public relations (especially compared to its greatest longtime rival) has remained in relentlessly obvious orbit around every “significant” Windows and Office update for so long that its status quo has grown into a truly inhibitive force for all parties involved. Topolsky is unquestionably a compromising favorite of mine, but it’s hard not to decry then-CEO Steve Ballmer’s failure to comprehend Josh’s day-after insight in the whole three months that passed before his Seattle Times interview in September, 2012. Ultimately, The Big M is either incapable of understanding any alternative utopic Visions of Computing to its own, or simply overwrought with the same counteraspirational carelessness its culture has always depended upon. In analytical terms regarding Ballmer’s utilization of the forum’s opportunity to finally tell the fucking story, at least, the timidity of a term like “pre-eminent software” as a viably bright new beacon in contrast with “people would say we were a software company” (emphasis mine) – as if Steve-O himself doesn’t even have the power to publicly describe his company’s function as its #1 man – combined at the apex of what was almost impressively-negligent behavior.
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I think when you look forward, our core capability will be software, (but) you'll probably think of us more as a devices-and-services company. Which is a little different. Software powers devices and software powers these cloud services, but it's a different form of delivery...
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Don’t make the same mistake I did and wear yourself out trying to extract the meaning from these three sentences – there’s none to be found. Ultimately, whatever opportunity the Surface project could have provided for Microsoft’s identity has been vastly overshadowed by its success as last resort supercatalyst to restore any sense of dignity and pride within the hardware companies who produce the vehicles. In Fall 2017, The Registerquoted industry gossip regarding the company’s new CEO Satya Nadella and his intent to “exit the product line” because “overall they are not making money [and] it doesn’t make sense for them to be in this business,” but newcomers to this conversation should know that no subsequent reporting has corroborated anything but a sustaining future of the line, though the measurable rate of innovation in Microsoft’s products continues to leave much to be desired. Now that you’ve heard from the experts, though, allow me to expand our lens a bit and examine what the Surface Laptop 2’s existence suggests as per The Present & Future of Computing.
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The Clam Clan
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In case I’ve yet to mention it, all of my tech writing is in substantial debt to my much-older and child-oriented siblings for providing 8 nieces and nephews over the course of 11 years – if not for any reason but the perspective offered by the slightest observation of their day-to-day lives. In this profoundly bizarre and historic technological sprint our species is experiencing, the differences in their respective relationships with consumer tech as they’ve grown up are fascinatingly… disturbingly significant. My eldest niece Abby was born four years after myself in 1998, and her younger sister Amber just quite three years later in 2001. All three of us are Aquarians who went to the same public schools (aside from 2 exceptions on my part,) and the two sisters have been close, significant influences on each other all their lives, yet the way Abby and I use and think about computers differs significantly from Amber’s. Our first real PCs introduced an important social and intellectual vehicle to our pre-teen lives, and both of us still “live on” our machines as young adults. For us and many others from this short-lived microgeneration of ours, budget laptops like the Dell Inspirion 2200 (which served as the first “real computer” for both of us) introduced the internet and Being Online as a State of Being with AIM groups, MySpace, and Yahoo! chain mails before smartphones and tablets were capable of doing so.
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Amber prefers to use her iPhone for most everything and regards her computer as a tool for work – it’s booted up and down exclusively for that purpose, which is significantly healthier than the habit Abby, myself, and many of my Online friends developed: we left our computers running and Logged On all the time because we were otherwise unreachable. We learned from origin to depend on them for 100% of our computing tasks – from streaming Pandora to playing Flash games within six billion open browser tabs – which likely explains both our ADD and its resulting influence on the ease with which our personal computers can distract us. As a Journalism student and professional photographer, Abby uses the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, and [Insane Blogger] David Blue has spent years looking for an alternative, becoming the first and only iPhone user to make extensive use of its Bluetooth keyboard support in the process, but both of us are entirely uninterested in the rest of the industry’s insistence on convertibles, removable keyboards, or ‘professional’ tablets. I wish the Linux community was finally ready to drop the elitist pretenses plaguing its nerdy history; I wish I could finally tell someone like Abby that a machine like the System76 Galago Pro could slot itself into her workflow without losing her time or compatibility – that the reputation surrounding Linux People had finally lost most of its validity and her desire to learn more about computing as a young woman and Power User would be met with respectful and worthwhile conversation from their end. Unfortunately, I’ve still found some of the Old Guard to be elitist, socially behind, and juvenilely possessive, as if computing was still the niche interest from their 1980s and 90s childhoods. Though this conversation certainly warrants its own essay in the future, I’ll just express now that it’s a real shame some folks don’t realize the entire point of making great things is ultimately to give them to the world.
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The opportunity I’ve had in the past year to finally get my Linux distro frenzy over with and out of my system managed to both radicalize and democratize my understanding of MacOS, Windows, and Linux as they are in the present. While I had nothing better to do, fiddling with Ubuntu Studio and Linux Mint to the extent I did throughout Spring and Summer led me to further appreciate the value of keyboard shortcuts, gave me my first real proficiency with a command line, helped globalize my comprehension of my own technological privilege, reacquainted me in a huge way with both the true history of software and my own personal past as an experimental test tube baby of Microsoft’s, and helped to answer a lot of questions I’d worried over for years about why software seemed like it simply couldn’t improve anymore. While it’s true that important open source projects like ElementaryOS continue to sprout from the Linus Extended Universe and the growing Open Source community on Mastodon is filled with brilliant, helpful, unpretentious, and remarkably curious enthusiasts (probably because many of those I’ve interacted with so far are non-cis and/or non-white,) little ole me was able to stumble upon some totally unnecessary and excruciatingly ignorant sociopolitical commentary by way of the white, middle-age host and his undoubtedly-white and staunchly libertarian caller on a live broadcast of the Ask Noah Show. (It’s not as if I haven’t said ignorant and very ugly things too, but I wasn’t a forty-something father on a semi-professional talk show representing an entire community.)
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Essentially, I was quite frustrated and disappointed to find that Linux is still let down most by its own community, but the operating system itself is still much further along on its way to becoming a real alternative for the average user than mainstream tech journalism would have you believe. However, in my case, finally taking the time to really learn about Open Source computing also helped me understand (surprisingly) why Apple and its environment continue to be the best and most popular choice for professional applications. Linux Mint gave me tremendous power in enabling me to alter, specify, and redesign the most minute details of its interface, but I couldn’t have foreseen how all-consuming such power would be for someone like myself. In retrospect, I’ve realized that I ended up spending more time perfecting my custom LibreOffice Writer shortcuts than I did actually writing – I somehow found myself in a mind state which justified unironically creating a shortcut for the Shortcuts menu. Though I swore I’d never succumb to the bewildering hobby of collecting and exploring different Linux Distributions, it took no time at all for me to fill a folder with disc images of the installers for almost a dozen different interpretations of the operating system after I’d made the simple concession to myself that I’ll just try Ubuntu, that’s all. The most profound realization from all this (arguably otherwise wasted) time: for a user like me, a walled garden is actually the best place to be productive because apparently, I don’t have the self-control to keep myself from running away and/or fixating on completely unproductive tasks without its boundaries. I think this phenomenon is perhaps the worst culprit in the persistence of the aforementioned divide between “computer people” and everyone else who simply uses computers, as I’m sure any one of the latter could tell you after all of five minutes with a Linus type.
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The most comprehensive and somewhat-urgent revision to illustrate the significance of this contrast from my perspective regards the exceptional iOS/MacOS markdown-based notetaking app Bear. Frankly, my own “Word Processing Methodology” essay from June has already become problematically out of date (and therefore embarrassing) in terms of my own knowledge of the segment and its history. Though I promised the conversation was “done,” I’ve continued to explore further into word processing’s history as well as its current state. “I had a go at Bear’s free iOS experience and saw little functional difference from DayOne,” the old, negligent, cursory David Blue noted, but if I’d simply been willing to cough up a bit more time and just $1.49 a month for Bear Pro, I’d have spared myself such shame and realized that the hype around this app really is 100% justified. Bear is the most beautiful iOS app I’ve ever seen, but I’m now also fully qualified to declare it the most effective execution of “distraction-free” writing software to come along in the past 25 years. Developer Shiny Frog’s secret is their perfect balance between capability and simplicity. It turns out, Daily Content Lord Casey Newton’s word on this matterreally was worth more than mine, not to mention more succinct: “Bear may look simple, but there’s power underneath the surface.”
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Those longtime Linux and Windows diehards who’ve tolerated me thus far, listen up: MacOS may be ancient, neglected, and full of incongruencies, but its single-minded methodology paired with Apple’s iCloud really does make it the most effective and elegant environment for most people to simply get shit done. It’s clear that many of you have realized the importance of simplicity for compact and/or educational distributions, but let me just add that the democratization of Linux provides a gargantuan development opportunity to make something that beats MacOS at its own game without starting from such a shitty premise and all of its resulting compromises – all without detracting from any other technically-minded distributions whatsoever. That is the magic of The Distro, remember?! If you’ve existed in a similar state of confusion to that of my entire adult life regarding the appeal of Apple products – despite having once been an extensive OSX user, myself – you’re very welcome for the insight. Instead of paying me for the profound self-improvement I’ve just provided, try prioritizing this newfound knowledge the next time you talk to your MacBook Pro-loving friend about their workflow. If you’re like myself, you’ll find their arguments have magically transformed from the bewildering bullshit they’ve always seemed to be into challenges for future competing operating systems to surpass Apple’s old bitch and excel in because MacOS and even its much-younger iOS counterpart – as well as the billions of people who depend on them – desperately need real competition in order to maintain their viability, much less become what products of the world’s wealthiest company should be.
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Yes, the manner in which these operating systems are perceived really is an important discussion prompted by a product as insignificant as the Surface Laptop 2 because as you read, the industry is bracing for another paradigm shift in computing, which many believe (preposterously, I might add) could be as significant and disruptive as 2007’s introduction of the iPhone. This machine of Microsoft’s and its “new” MacBook Air counterpart could potentially be the last designs to carry us to a computing future where the tried-and-true clamshell design is forgone entirely by the mainstream, but Apple’s release of this year’s new iPad Pro prompted even the most Cupertino-loving tech commentators to respond with genuine discord along with a few long-overdue shouts of “are you crazy?!” I’m very proud of The Verge’s Nilay Patel, in particular, for so eloquently deconstructing its usability for all but the very wealthy. “It is impossible to look at a device this powerful and expensive and not expect it to replace a laptop for day-to-day work,” he reminds us in the introduction to his full review of the updated product, along with a beautifully transient sentiment which I think we all needed to hear again: “I don’t think people should adapt to their computers. Computers should adapt to people.” Even something as consumerist and bourgeois as the introduction of another pricepoint-burgeoning Apple hardware flagship can turn a simple tablet review into a much-needed manifesto for a user-centric way forward for the industry, which is itself worthy of celebratory encouragement.
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I’ve favored The Verge and its cast long past the point of excess throughout the span of my work about technology, but Nilay’s review and its accompanying episode of The Vergecast are truly special and profound gems of content that shouldn’t be passed up. Apparently – as the Editor-in-Chief immediately insists as the episode begins – his “ongoing theory” that “the more important you are, the less actually important work you do, and the more likely you are to be an iPad user” roused anger from “that whole class of [billionaires,]” but the experiences behind his argument actually suggest that Apple’s own favorite child of late – into which it has begun investing and thereby implicitly sponsoring over its much older brother as the ultimate heir of the majority’s future computing – has unequivocally failed to do its part in growing the iPad Pro into the “laptop replacement” we’d all heard so much about. Of iOS 12’s performance as an operating system beneath true work-related tasks, he exasperates “you have to spend all of your time figuring out how to do stuff instead of doing stuff,” which I couldn’t help but hear as echoes of my own late Linux lamentations. As thankful as I am to have finally achieved enlightenment of the Planet Apple, I’m afraid I was pitifully late: its very natural laws underwent their most brutal tests of the 21st century this past year. Now that I’ve finally come to adore the elegant effectiveness of a new generation of iOS apps like Bear, I’m faced with yet another of the episode’s statements of weight: “I think it’s time to stop pretending that the future of computing looks like Apple’s restrictions.” On the opposing end of the line, the world’s first trillion-dollar company’s other major product release of 2018 managed to disappoint even the most fanatical fans of its original operating system’s best-selling platform with an insultingly mediocre update to the MacBook Air marque upon which it once so fondly doted.
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My best friend’s parents bought her the original Surface tablet when she enrolled in art school, and her frustration with its lackluster keyboard (among others) leads MacOS alternative-seeking users like us to wish Microsoft had started with a traditional design like the Surface Laptop first. Perhaps Apple and Microsoft’s emphasis on their tablets is nothing but a bit premature for the most current crop of users, and the rest of my nieces and nephews will expand upon an entirely different methodology of usership when they receive their freshman computer. Those elders of us who still take the Clamshell form seriously and love printing our documents are apparently facing a future industry saturated with products we can’t believe in, but it’s up to you to decide if this issue is worth expending your energy in advocacy for either camp. With my 120+ word per minute proficiency with physical keyboards, I for one have been completely bewildered by the iPad as anything but an indulgence for reading text on the web, and I’m pleased as punch with my Surface Laptop 2. Even if it proves to be the last new computer I’ll ever own to come as optimized for my use, I’m just grateful and astonished it happens to be the best yet.
The genius of one Chuck continues to perform to the refreshing benefit of scholars in American culture.
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Thanks to an episode of Peter Kafka'sRecode Media, I've just now discovered that former New York Times Magazine Ethicist, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and longtime men's interest media-affiliated sports and music columnist Chuck Klosterman pronounces his surname kloa-ster-men instead of klaw-ster-men as I have been, shamefully – even within earshot of other human beings on a handful of occasions. I am willing to submit myself for punishment for these transgressions under the single condition that I be allowed to call him Cuck Klusterfuck the next time he ends a spoken sentence with “or whatever” in an interview – an unfortunate habit he's maintained for years. If my own byline had any pedigree in the world of literary criticism, I would now collect his penance simply by including those hateful, 90s stoner-kid buzzwords in every quote, unedited, but it most certainly does not. I've searched moderately hard for any reason to bother contributing any criticism of books or their authors and returned with very little. I've read The Broom of the System and White Girls this year, yes, but I'd have to be a Fuck Boy to write anything about David Foster Wallace, and Hilton Als’ elegant, genre-busting masterpiece is so far beyond both my societal rights and perceptive capacity that I wouldn't dare utter a single editorialized peep about it – aside from a log line-length recommendation – even under immediate threat of certain death.
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Given my recent voluntary relocation to Portland, Oregon and the word-y pursuits on which I choose to spend all of my money and energy, I should adore everything about Chuck Klosterman and in turn he should be completely invisible across the under-30 demographic, yet I’ve found a special originality in his voice since first exploring it and I think it might be worth requalification. A good friend of mine once dug his first novelDowntown Owl out of a bulk box of bargain books she’d bought as a preteen, long ago and became an enthusiastic fan of his perspective and a harsh, but fond critic of his persona. It was her copy of his second that I read first: The Visible Man – ultimately a surprisingly-original take on the psychologist of a gifted outcast tale that classically exemplifies the easy-to-digest yet thoughtfully-exploratory reputation of his craft. Thanks to her library card, I was able to follow it up immediately with Chuck’s latest, most topical work – an anthology of past essays written for publications like The Guardian, Grantland, and GQ entitled X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century, which proved an impossibly entertaining, even more polished execution of The Quaint Chuck’s Explanations in non-fiction form, beginning at onset with refreshing brevity in its introduction.
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I’m not fully accredited by either side of the professional equation (sportswriters think I’m too pretentious and music writers don’t think I’m pretentious enough,) but I’m able to write about whatever I want, as long as it actually happened.
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Using “pretentious” even when just vaguely and loosely expressing other readers’ thoughts about your work is the first of many miniscule technical infractions against convention laid down in X’s arrangement which proves to act toward the benefit of its experience. If you substitute car nerds for sportswriters, I’d personally identify with this picoautobiography in a big way, but more importantly as a reader I had never encountered anything written about sports which I would describe as pretentious, per se, and that realization could very well have birthed enough curiosity to land the sale, had I been skimming in a bookshop, which I would’ve eventually been pleased with.
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Now, during what we should hope to be the first dawn of a new microera of sincerity, we must recognize how valuable it is for Klosterman as an observer to be comfortably engaged with his subjects, emotionally, and confident in the value of his commentary in middleage without the need to insist upon his eccentricity, as so many cringey, culturally-daft Dads do, these days. He uses keywords in his writing and spoken publicity that should dismiss him immediately as one of these – a nostalgic, out-of-time dork – but are instead somehow magically manipulated to serve him in articulating reasonable, even profoundly-innovative insight. As I have explored his bibliography and his publicly-expressed thoughts, I have been caught up and hinged on a single supposition: Chuck Klosterman is the only white, 46-year-old bearded Portland Dad you should be reading. Do mind that I am in no way exempt from this lens, but it’s still my job to determine his viability as an intellectual – a “thought leader,” even – for those of us who were conceived around the same time he was wrapping up his collegiate sentence at the University of North Dakota.
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For a solid hunk of the American reading audience, a quick, elemental vector of quality and mastery we look for in an essayist is the ability to “transcend” their subject matter for even the most presumptuous and conceited among us, usually to deliver a more abstract sentiment to leave with. Here, Klosterman’s significant career experience is irrefutably evident – in X, he achieves this transcendence organically with a fluidity unlike anything I’ve read before. We can already check a single box: convincing even a young professional twenty-something to shell out for a physical hardback of contemporary non-fiction requiring any sort of academic effort to consume is going to be nigh-impossible, even though X actually happens to be the best-looking specimen of print product design I have ever handled across cover, type, and layout. It’s been difficult having to convince myself to give this copy back.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I must take special care to emphasize just how highly I regard Peter Kafka as editor and interviewer extraordinaire within the Media beat – well-proven to be capable of hitting consistently hard on both novel and old guard industry personalities with refined, seemingly unimpeachable stone-faced skepticism. However, this Chuck Klosterman interview for Recode Media is an uncharacteristically disarmed display of serious admiration: he introduces X with an outright confession: “It’s great. I bought it. I bought a signed copy,” which is an unexpected oddity (though not an unwelcome one – I’m glad Peter enjoys his life.) Their conversation dips briefly in personal history (Chuck and his wife moved to Portland from Brooklyn for its proximity to family) before plopping down upon the substance of his clearly superb and matter-of-fact interview technique. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a conversation between Kafka and any previous guests with whom he was quite so obviously alike in general disposition.
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The only reason I’m able to ask you these questions is because I’m a reporter and I can ask you questions now that I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable asking you if we were friends, so I’m not going to pretend that we are and I’m not going to create some fake thing where we’re going to have a relationship beyond this conversation. I’m just going to ask you the things I want to know about and I hope that you respect the fact that I’m just being straight with you. I find that that works much better.
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From the broadest possible pop cultural lens, Chuck's most spectacular and widely-circulated work, demographically (I assume) is his 2015 interview and cover story for GQ with Taylor Swift – then “the most popular human alive.” Yes, it really is worth dwelling on the image: this guy... this very Dorky Dad, just hanging out with the most highly-demanded teen idol who's ever lived, sitting awkwardly next to her in the backseat of her car as she maniacally panics to accept a call from Justin Timberlake. When one Chucks such a distinguished contrast upon such a high-profile contemporary medium, the weight of the potential scrutiny becomes palpable, but Klosterman anticipates and braces for this (very risky) business in the only manner he can: acknowledging it over and over and over again in the second paragraph of his every interview appearance.
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It doesn’t matter if it was complimentary or insulting necessarily. It would seem as though I wasn’t taking her seriously as a musical artist, and the idea is that I do. That’s why I’m writing about her is because I do think she’s a meaningful, significant artist. It’s not worth the risk of having the story then get shifted by other people who perhaps just perceive themselves as somebody who’s a watchdog for certain signifiers or certain elements of the culture and that their job is to be on the watch for this. If your story then gets moved into that silo, that’s all it’s going to be remembered for... It’s a touchier thing now. It’s a more dangerous thing.
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In the print itself, the cover story is prefaced by a very short but uncomfortably-telling complaint about changing expectations for culture writers. One might reasonably suggest that Klosterman regards the practice of calling out or remarking on “creepy misogyny” as “dumb” – nothing but the byproduct of changing “times.”
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Something you may notice in the following 2015 feature on Taylor Swift is that I never describe what she looks like or how she was dressed, even though I almost always do that with any celebrity I cover... If I did, it would be reframed as creepy misogyny and proof that I didn't take the woman seriously as an artist. It would derail everything else about the story. It would become the story.
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But… is it? Note how desperately close his language comes to the common white guy whining about feminism classification without actually fitting the bill. Right…? It doesn’t? Surely, it must be certified Awake through some combination of keywords or format I’m unfamiliar with or unable to visually register because Klosterman’s ass would have long been grass, otherwise. These 224 words are X’s most contentious, which you could call impressive, all things considered – he appears to care enough about his public image to curate it somewhat diligently. When a motherhood blogger published an open letter in 2013 citing three very ableist uses of the R-word in his work, it only took him two days to respond: “I was wrong. You are right.”
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More than any other writer of his demographic, Chuck Klosterman has a close, wary relationship with the everchanging contextual boundaries of public expression. He knows when to be transparent with his feelings on progression, and he's careful to avoid what could be “problematic” for the sake of functioning better as a writer (I assume.) For Slate's I Have to Ask podcast, he managed to speak extensively about these mechanisms for nearly an hour without bellowing anything definitively cringey.
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I can’t say it’s better or worse. It’s just different, and because it’s different, it makes me feel uncomfortable, but there’s actually like an adversarial relationship with the history of anything, and that somehow that history is seen as oppressive. And you shouldn’t even know about it. It’s better to live in now.
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A quick jaunt from pretty horrendous to almost-ideal, then. If we are to place our faith in Chuck as our last bearded champion, we must hope that last sentence is sincerely intended to be his lens to the changing world. Granted – even if it is the truth – it’s not as if persistent acknowledgement of one’s position can miraculously wash away any systematic patriarchal dynamics involved in authoring (or reading, for that matter) a high-profile feature of a young woman on cover of a magazine which explicitly seeks most to speak to “all sides of the male equation,” (are you sure aboutthat, Condé Nast?) especially considering how unlikely it would've been for me to read anything about Taylor Swift outside of this very white man's anthology. Fundamental themes of power and control are threaded throughout both his fiction and non-fiction, which is especially prevalent in the Macho Big Boy cultures of the athletics and music industries. In profiling Taylor Swift – the undisputed apex of the latter in 2015 – Klosterman provided a firsthand account of the grueling maintenance of a public and private personality under tremendous strain from said factors as they were magnified to the max by the most extreme celebrity.
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Here we see Swift’s circuitous dilemma: Any attempt to appear less calculating scans as even more calculated. Because Swift’s professional career has unspooled with such precision, it’s assumed that her social life is no less premeditated.
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I’m right there with Chuck: I’ve even found a fundamental pillar in Power and Control relationships supporting my own fiction experiments: how we attain them, how we lose them, and how best to make use of them – all of which had apparently been quite problematic for Taylor Swift for most of her adult life, though we wouldn’t be allowed to really comprehend how deep her inner turmoil had drilled until it overwhelmed even her expertly-designed self-control four years later, boiling over entirely with such unexpected violence that all of America’s pseudorural glam-pop-country-glossy-chode-hipsters let out a simultaneous, dangerously-alarmed holler of OH FOR PETE’S SAKE that was actually heard and recorded from the overflying orbit of the International Space Station.
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It’s somehow different when the hub of the wheel is Swift. People get skeptical. Her famous friends are marginalized as acquisitions, selected to occupy specific roles, almost like members of the Justice League ('the ectomorph model,' 'the inventive indie artist,' 'the informed third-wave feminist,' etc.). Such perceptions perplex Swift, who is genuinely obsessed with these attachments.
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No, it’s not only worthwhile as an exercise in superbly athletic self-awareness – the Taylor profile is profound. I’d recommend reading and treasuring it with or without the rest of the anthology because bizarre intersections like these are rare to come by from anybody else. Short, sharp, and occasionally somewhat petty notions are what Chuck Klosterman does best and most originally. Thanks to a digression of Kafka’s beginning with “you and I are about the same age…,” he arrives (by way of REM, believe it or not) at a significant statement about youth and identity.
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It seems strange to me to be into music for its coolness outside of high school. That seems like that’s the only time when you’re a young person and you’re using art basically to create a personality because you don’t have a real personality yet.
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Klosterman is debatably exempt from the traditional academic abstract of “objectivity” for the vast majority of his notable work because of its stated primary subject: his “interior life.” Perhaps the success of his voice could be at least partially attributed to his development of an existential muscle – a perspective unique enough to entertain, yet no less recognizably Midwestern with which he’s been able to reflect particularly clearly on the profession in tandem with the experience he’s accumulated over the course of his career.
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You know, when you’re young, you’re a real emotional writer if you’re a writer… If I was a young person now, I would be incredibly attracted to the idea that when you’re 22 you can be a national writer, which was impossible when I was 22.
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In a way, Klosterman does surmise that it was indeed its objectivity that media lost, and that writing is no longer a “one-way relationship,” but a sort of ridiculous dance in which “many people feel the reason they’re consuming media is to respond to it… that it’s not for the content.” I would remind old Chuck that there are very few functioning adults outside of academia or retirement in the United States who spend much of their time reading anything solely for the sake of absorption, and the disparity between those who were and weren’t was exponentially greater in the past. The story of American media is defined by its cycles of waning and waxing democratization, but many of the more traditional avenues in the business have bet on the “two-way relationship” to keep them relevant.
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My own favorite chapter of the collection is a 2500-word personal essay constructed for Grantland to answer a single incongruity: “Why is watching a prerecorded sporting event less pleasurable than watching the same game live?” Some form of this question has at least mildly troubled every American since the 1960s, including myself, and Klosterman manages to provide an entertaining and concise analysis of this plight through his own wisdom. In its short preface in the volume – which was written “in 2008, in Europe, when [Chuck] was pretend depressed” is the story of his encounter with a house-painting stranger, to whom he explains the meter for success in his opinion-manufacturing profession, as he sees it: “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.”
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Last weekend I was in a hashish bar in Amsterdam. It was post-dusk, pre-night. The music was terrible (fake reggae, late-period Eric Clapton, Sublime deep cuts.) I was sitting next to a British stranger with a shaved head and a speech impediment. Our conversation required subtitles, so I imagined them in my mind. He told me he had lost three family members within the past year: his mother, who was sixty-six; his uncle, who was fifty-six; and his sister, who was forty-six. He said he'd just turned thirty-six. He asked if I saw a pattern developing. “Yes,” I said. “But only numerically.”
-I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a housepainter. He asked me the same question about myself. “I manufacture opinions,” I said.
-“Really?” he asked. “How do you know if you’re any good at that?”
-“By the number of people who agree or disagree,” I said in response. “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.”
-“That’s interesting,” said the bald British man who could barely speak. “I guess house painting is a totally different thing.”
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Rarely are situations or discussions that begin with back in my day actually constructive in any sense, but Chuck Klosterman appears to be the exception. If you’re willing to indulge him, you may find yourself reassured. He now writes from a remote cabin (with WiFi,) was tortured – like all of us – in sifting through and compiling his old work for X, and finds its index to be his favorite part.
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Exploring the index from a book you created is like having someone split your head open with an axe so that you can peruse the contents of your brain.
I haven't watched A Charlie Brown Christmas in at least twenty-five years, solely because I can't emotionally reconcile the final scene.
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You’ll notice that his entire answer to the live television debacle is – again – entirely about control (or the lack thereof.) In fact, his relationship with and desire for control also contributed to his choice of profession.
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Part of the reason I became a writer is because it was this completely controlled reality where I could do this thing by myself where you’d go out and you’d do the interviews and stuff, but then you’re back by yourself, transcribing and then writing. Then, when the story is done and you send it off, that’s the end. Now that’s the middle. Now it’s like, when the story is published, it’s the middle of the process very often because the consumer feels differently now.
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While Klosterman’s voice is pleasant to someone like me, neither it nor himself necessarily belong to The People. In his X review for Paste Magazine, B. David Zarley proclaims essays to be “a love letter to a moment,” concluding that Chuck is “’effectively narcissistic,’ proving that culture essays can teach us something about ourselves and the people around us.” For The Washington Post, Justin Wm. Moyer notes “it’s hard to think of another writer who could make a 30-page, deeply reported essay about a North Dakota junior-college basketball game interesting,” suggesting that this new collection marks Klosterman’s ascendance from critic to philosopher. From what I’ve read to date, I would counter that he has always fulfilled the term to the extent of its usefulness in the 21st century and is even now beginning to redefine it. Last January, he braved the “dystopic” Google Gates to speak critically for a crowd of Googlers, describing them as “an umbrella over the entire culture,” and urging caution and reflection in the coming future to keep them from doing “something bad.” His engagement with them – especially during the Q&A – is a fascinating insight into the Greater Google Mind, and I would encourage any invested parties in Chuck Klosterman’s role as a philosopher to watch the talk in full. I was unfamiliar with “the boat-sails-wind analogy” before I read James Murphy’s interview for LCD Soundsystem’s “last album.”
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Your life is a boat, the sails are your emotions, and drugs are the wind. When you're a kid, your boat is small and your sail is huge, and drugs are like a hurricane.
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Control x Time = the Klosterman beat. I suppose this must be what other entertainment writers are referring to when they accuse Chuck of nostalgia trafficking, but I can’t be so sure. Though I’d like to think my own snout for the stuff is especially well-tuned, I am undeniably from a different planet – even auditorily. All but one or two of the musicians interviewed throughout X were entirely unknown to me by name, which Klosterman’s voice managed to make even more compelling – not to mention the included stories of athletes and the sports industry, which include stories of the human ego, paranoia, and complex drama that always manage to transcend their setting when articulated with such dexterity.
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I’ve never before written a book review of any sort – nor am I defensibly qualified to compare culture writers – but with good ole’ Chuck, I dove much further in order to tackle one very important question: should Klosterman be recommended reading for anyone under 30 above or alongside bestsellers like George Saunders or groundbreaking essayists of color like Hilton Als? In many a case, I must conclude by saying, simply, that something of value would be forgone if we shunned Chuck, even if his insight is old news to all but the most rudimentary yokels. I have little to offer women or people of color, but I’d bet X would prove itself worth a library trip for any idiot white guys in their lives who may be falling far behind. I don’t know of any other voices who are in a better position to introduce these issues, nor any who are quite so practiced at handling them delicately. While Jenna Wortham-level readers will gain little to nothing from this examination or the ecology of its subject (and will likely find themselves pausing momentarily for a deserved jest before moving on and returning to their high-level plane of complex neoliberal commentary,) but most of their less-aWoken fathers should find in Chuck a man they can truly trust, who manages to consistently distill and articulate the need-to-knows of the most complex pop culture and pop science conversations without using any of the academic language found in most institutional discourse which daddy finds too condescending and superfluous to bear. Those readers who’ve absolutely fucking despised my voice so far in this essay should give Klosterman a go – I take as much time as I can muster to fiddle with and season the words in context like this work because I basically *enjoy* the bullshit, yet I’ve found both X and But What If We’re Wrong? remarkably refreshing and impressive exercises.
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[These are] the cultural conditions in which I was raised under and which I pursued journalism under. That was part of the thing that drew me to the idea of being a reporter was I was like, this is something I can do, I think. My ability to detach my personal emotions from what I am investigating, while not perfect, I can do this. And now it turns out that the opposite is what’s desirable. I think it’s really going to change the kind of person who goes into media going forward.
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Reading Chuck Klosterman is going to be perturbing, but true sincerity is almost always uncomfortable. Comprehensively, his nonfiction represents perhaps the most important possible behavior to encourage from both the critic and his readership because it incubates and exudes sincere curiosity and a genuine interest in learning to listen. From the perspective of quantified societal contribution, I’d argue that Klosterman’s craft is a significantly more honorable and worthwhile pursuit than greater academic literature in its unique and entertaining treatment of subjects the establishment tends to pulverize into minutia. Unless he’s broke and/or bookish, buy X as a gift for your Dad and at least give it a try when he’s done. If nothing else, at leastread the Taylor Swift interview, okay? If he doesn’t enjoy the book, I’m always available if one or both of you need to blow off some steam: give me a call at (573) 823-4380. (Normal text messaging / talktime rates will apply.)
Apple's latest mobile OS update might've seemed mundane, but Siri Shortcuts gives users vastly more power than Apple customers have ever before experienced.
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Back in 2016, Pokémon Go, overclocked Apple Watches, pissing wearables, and What You See is What You Get blogging services all claimed unprecedented casualties among consumers according to Futureland's iOS 10 episode, which we did our absolute best to dramatize in order to survive what was expected to be the dullest event on record. We'd only that day been first made aware of Boomerang photos and the mysterious nature of “Live Blogging” as an occupation. AirPods were introduced and subsequently shit on, and the comparatively archaic 3.5mm analog audio jack was confidently parted with, finally. At least I got over “forgetting” about Live Photos because it's rapidly becoming difficult to keep stuff on the phone now. I am coming sincerely close to believing none of this is real, anyway. Today, though, it’s a damned straight ballgame, isn’t it? Months have passed since Apple pushed out its major mobile OS release of the year to more little rectangular computers than any one person could speedcount in a lifetime and YouTube is already recommending me dozens of videos about the next one. At this point, you and I are already aware of the iOS development community, who has already been using Internet Operating System 12 on their personal devices for more than half a year by the time your irises are landing here. Hopefully, all but two or three stranded, dying explorers in the arctic have updated their iPhones and iPads by now, and why wouldn’t they?
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Our expectations from this ritual are completely alien compared to those we’d need to anticipate from the event 5 or 6 releases ago, when one’s phone had to be sent away (in a sense) to latch itself tight to the stability of a desktop-class product in order to undergo a lengthy, destined metamorphosis. Sometimes, backups via 30-pin to USB-2.0 cables took hours, after which the custodian may or may not find their companion’s replication had completed successfully. If it had, one had to be sure to close any applications apart from iTunes to provide a working environment of utter silence – restarting after finishing the download was my own preferred method – before entrusting the despicably unreliable software to whittle away in a sometimes frantically rebooting, feverish procedure with near life-threatening stigma: it wasn’t uncommon for an update to inexplicably fail, “bricking” the subject iPhone and requiring that one take two whole steps in the wrong direction and restore it from the entire backup they’d just created (hopefully) in order to… make another, precisely-identical attempt, for lack of variables or alternatives to the process. However, if the user planned sufficiently and made a point to begin the whole charade immediately upon arriving home for the evening, these potential frustrations could be compensated for, and odds would favor counting on their smartphone to emerge safe and sound from the procedure just before bed, when even those holding the second-newest product in the lineage would have just enough screen time to notice that text entry, web page loading, and window management had noticeably slowed before sighing and tossing their device toward the darkness.
These days, one would need to try very hard to be inconvenienced by iOS updates. My iPhone 8 Plus is two or three times more powerful than my laptop at the moment, and my new friends’ WiFi connection is better than what the State government uses internally, back home. I haven’t needed to physically back it up more than once or twice since I bought it — iCloud stores the lot for $4.99 a month anyway. I blinked once watching Riki-Oh with high school friends some time ago and all of the sudden, a 1.6GB download isn’t really a big deal. Siddown and watch your Instagram stories for twenty minutes, and hey! You’re ready to update! Somehow, I have abruptly found myself in a reality in which I am the obvious bottleneck and my 100 words per minute on a smartphone keyboard, even, is no longer fast enough: my fucking phone is now waiting on me when it updates. The keyholder is the whole goddamned holdup.
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So, what possible purpose could there be in pounding out this “Review” of a free software update that’s in no way optional (waiting a month is no longer a rational minimization of risk — it’s just dumb,) not any more difficult to attain than the bills currently waiting in your mailbox, nor allowed by the nature of mobile operating systems to compete with any cross-platform alternatives? For myself, it’s proved a gratifying tradition of sorts and a good use of my apparently-abundant time if only for the record's sake (hello, future web archivists, neohuman and otherwise!,) but this release – assuming I haven’t overlooked something – is the most globe-shucking of all because of one single featureset: Siri Shortcuts. However, the vast majority of the intra-Apple press' coverage of this release has come across nearly as unconcerned with them as I was originally. Take Macworld's iOS 12 Review, for instance: it was the first result in my Google search for “iOS 12 review,” yet Siri Shortcuts are only mentioned in the bottom quarter of its first page. When I recorded the “iOS 12 Review” episode of my “podcast,” I spoke as if I was somehow the only person on the planet who comprehends the profound implications of this software addition – which was, of course, more of an absorbent acquisition – but I have since discovered one gem, at least, which has continued the conversation in a most superb manner. It's a technology podcast called Supercomputer, and it's hosted by Alex Cox and Matthew Cassinelli – the latter of whom developed a significant amount of the iOS app Workflow (and wrote most or all of its documentation, apparently,) which Apple assimilated as Siri Shortcuts. Both are extremely knowledgeable and competent commentators on – as far as I can hear, at least – virtually the entire iOS *lifestyle*. (For those on the outside who've never stepped in: laugh if you must, but yes it is a lifestyle, still, and it's new thought leader isn't exactly coming up short these days.) iOS is technically software, yes, but it leaves an intractable itch for some greater, transcendent term.
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In just forty minutes, without any prior knowledge about this feature, I was able to create a Shortcut which sends any given handset's IP address and precise GPS location (among other mundane metrics) in a text message to my phone number. I could share this shortcut among my other submissions to Sharecuts or ShortcutsGallery.com, where any iOS user could download and subsequently send this information back to my phone. (Don't believe me? Have a go at it yourself and I'll send back a screenshot if you'd like.) I accomplished this without any particular skills or education in software development or cybersecurity – without any real malice, even – I was just playing around. As far as my recollection goes, Apple has never included such a powerful, potentially-dangerous piece of software in a standard software update before. It's both absolutely brilliant and sortof a ripoff to be so entrusted for the first time. In many ways – like my Disable Bluetooth & WiFi shortcut – Siri Shortcuts represent an awfully half-assed solution to some of the most basic, longtime incongruencies within iOS. Sure, it's great that I can just make myself a shortcut to completely disable my phone's WiFi and Bluetooth activity with one press or Siri command (combining “type to Siri” with Siri Shortcuts basically enables a form of Command Line functionality in iOS,) but frankly, one should've expected the world's largest company to do it themselves in perhaps the second of third version of this operating system instead of saying okay, here are the tools – you do it! in its twelfth.
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I've found it inevitable when speaking on iOS to avoid discussing the other literature available on the subject at any given time. The depth to which technology media has assimilated the habits and mannerisms of a single American company is absolutely mind-boggling, regardless of its history, its market share, or even its recent trillion-dollar valuation. Dozens of media companies – CultofMac, MacRumors, Macworld, 9to5 Mac, AppleInsider, iMore, and... more – exist solely to cover one single independent company: Apple, Incorporated. One wonders how the sum total of the individuals involved with and these organizations compares with the total number of employees working for the company their careers are (for the moment, at least,) entirely centered around. (Further interesting questions: are there any comparable situations anywhere else in Western capitalism, and if not – doesn't this sort of attention constitute some kind of Monopoly, even if it was not necessarily an anti-competitive one?) For “reasonable people,” the image one conjures up of The All-The-Time Apple Beat does not lend to envy, but let's choose to limit ourselves to only the most casual forms of speculation. I do not wish to mock them, for I, too remember the sensation of The Apple Drug from an unfortunate time in my childhood development when I was willing to wear a cheap sweatshirt branded with a stupid Mac vs. Windows Users joke unironically to a real live public Junior High school. There are few more embarrassing admissions, except perhaps admitting that a part of me genuinely yearns to return to this level of enthusiasm, as misplaced and cringey as it was. It's the addiction to the mystic; it's aspirational in its democratization. Billionaires are running the same operating system and much of the same software as I am every day – even the most followed person on any given platform is still accessing it through the same interface I might be. These are incredible truths, but they also reflect a dangerous lack of competition in a product category that has become more essential to day-to-day human life than any other in just three or four blinks of an eye.
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some of those “indie” alternatives:@Bandcamp – music streaming Mastodon – microblogging Diaspora – facebook PixelFed – instagram https://t.co/kCCVffPRR3
Fuck David Blue, though. Who are the real, hard-hitting minds who've kept this industry and this company in check? Well, it's funny you should ask that, because the people's quirky New York Times tech critic of late – the esteemed Farhad Manjoo – has just concluded a five-year-long technology column with some essential (if perhaps a bit unoriginal) advice: “just slow down.” If you're still following along, you shall surely enjoy clicking some of his links, and I would certainly encourage that you do until you're out of free articles, at least. When Manjoo speaks, Apple listens: his January decree for Apple to bend with the industry wind and build “a Less Addictive iPhone” is convincingly prophetic considering Screen Time – probably the most mulled-over iOS 12 addition. As someone who was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (however much or little that may mean to you) just one or two years after I began using my/the first iPhone, I've developed a history of what he might call Addiction to iPhones in variable oscillation touching both extremes. I carried my first-generation iPhone for almost 5 years – as you can imagine, it was far from a 100%-functional device toward the end of that bell curve. In contrast, I've also stood in line at dawn for two iPhone launches, jailbroken, listened to podcasts only about apps (far before they were good,) and been compelled to chronicle and reflect upon all of it for as long as I can remember.
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There's no denying that the iPhone has had a profound effect on my life mostly thanks to my own choices, which is why it's worth telling the vast majority of you that features like Screen Time will never help you achieve whatever vague conception of reduced usage you may have. If you haven't yet quantified the figures you'll find within it in mental estimates, you aren't really concerned at all and if you have, Screen Time will only confirm them. Using reminder notifications to optimize your appflow makes no attempt at all to actually escape the mentality of the behavior you seek to lessen from yourself. Another app is still another app; a notification reminding you to stop using an app does nothing but add still more stimuli. If you want to stop using the phone so much, *stop* using the fucking phone. If you are truly concerned about how your handset companion has changed your life, turn it off for a week/month/quarter – however long you possibly can. By that, I mean no more or less than what you can manage without getting fired/dumped/expelled/etc. If you have truly reached this point, anything less is probably worth it. There is simply no other way to get a clear picture of how it's changed you.
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Google, Facebook, and the rest of the industry are well aware of this, but know they can't actually advocate against the fundamental mechanism that drives their businesses, so they express concern by doing what they know: building more software. Apple is in a slightly different situation: they still need you to buy their phones – and even to look at them – but not past the point of hurting yourself emotionally, mentally, or physically because those injuries tend to hurt one economically. Screen Time's purpose is to keep us thriving and buying, but the only effective solve for this can only be communicated in garbage cinema language: you must find it within yourself. I am actually the worst person from which to model your life, except perhaps for my iPhone use: unless there's little else worthy of my attention, my phone is not out. Even if checking my emails, Mastodon, Twitter, etc. are my default tasks, there are infinitely many besides that come first. Every once in a while, it's okay to finish an important message while walking down the street or waiting at a stoplight if things are urgent, but I can guarantee you that my attention is better consolidated on traveling in 95% of cases – moving with purpose and then focusing on my composition after I've arrived is almost always more efficient. I realize that I'm cowboying it here and sound like your Dad, but I'm better with iOS than he is, yet I've never publicly run into anything while looking down at my smartphone in 10 years of hardcore use. Find somebody who's company makes you forget about all of this for hours at a time and treasure them. Also: stop playing games on your phone. What the hell are you doing? Read a blog! Explore the wonders of the open web! Your peers, your battery, and your elderly future self with thank you for it. (One exception is playing word/trivia games with your partner. That's very cute and good for you.)
To get back to specifics, the new Photos application is now basically what it should have been all along, 3D Touch has been virtually eclipsed for those strange bastards among you who never liked it, and the release's most democratically-redeemable feature is optimization, which even on my iPhone 8 Plus was blatantly noticeable and very welcome. However, probably the best insight to come out of my long, rambly End User review was the revelation that basically any other human activity is a better use of time than applauding Apple for learning to hold new features off until they've been thoroughly tested and focusing instead on smoothing existing software. In fact, I'd argue there is absolutely no reason for someone like me to say anything even remotely positive about the world's wealthiest company ever again, though that doesn't apply to The Verge or Chaim Gartenberg, who's review – for the record – was much more useful to 9999 times more people than anything I'll ever write. However, isn't it sortof unreasonable to expect anything but absolute perfection from Apple at this trillion-dollar juncture? A handful of varying interpretations of absolute perfection per product category, even.
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With gorgeous, iCloud-enabled premium apps like Bear in the picture, integrating wholly into the Apple environment has maintained its relative rank above the alternatives to its specific minimal-esque utilitarian niceness which appeals so strongly to those people among both consumer and professional buyers. Readers from within this culture recognized a short time ago that iOS is in the process of replacing MacOS as the star component of this environment across the board, though there's at least a moderate journey ahead before it truly reaches this achievement for the median user. For myself, iOS 12 improved the experience of using my 8 Plus and certainly gave me something intriguing to play with in Siri Shortcuts. For the rest of the world's billions of daily iOS users, I say be as insatiable as possible – always expect more.
I would argue that this is the best Honda’s CR-V has ever or will ever look, no thanks to my photographic decisions.
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After 9 or so years and over 100,000 miles, I have totaled my mother’s 2010 Honda CR-V – the car I drove cross-country for the first time at significant distance (St. Louis to Washington, D.C. in essentially one sitting,) and once complimented for being the best possible aesthetic compromise of its near-universally and aggravatingly-compromised breed. It was my her first 1st owner experience, which is frankly a bit of a shame. If I’m completely honest, my late stepfather’s decision to outfit this utterly utilitarian vehicle with enough kit to break the $30,000 within a segment that has always clung to the 20s as one of its truly communicable advantages feels less-than-ideal in retrospect, but what can I say, really? It was not exactly a proud thing, but it did transport a lot of young families and shelter us as we’ve navigated more blizzard-like conditions than should be the norm for what is, essentially, an expensive, extended Civic.
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As per some particulars of my upbringing, I tend to get almost alarmingly attached to vehicles, but it’s hard to say I’m sad to see the CR-V go from all but the most sentimental senses. Objectively, it’s simply not as high-value or as competent a vehicle as it and its contemporaries are still made out to be by automotive media, pop culture, or the presumptions in the average consumer’s discourse. Though it was never intended to be luxurious, the resulting automobile ended up costing real luxury money.
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The Event
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It’s odd to have been driving so long without incident (pretty soon I’m gonna be able to say “I’ve been driving for twenty years, bitch!) and then suddenly find oneself at fault for the accident which claimed the life of the single most sublime, defining object in his existence. This incident, though, was entirely the fault of the other driver. My best friend and I were Northbound, crossing the intersection of Stadium Boulevard and Rock Quarry Road at precisely the point where it becomes College Avenue, where we were t-boned directly on the CR-V’s driver’s side rear wheel by a mid-2000s Mazda 6 that decided to run the red light. It’s hard to guess the speed of impact, but the driver’s side side airbags deployed (as you’ll see from the attached photograph,) and the CR-V was spun nearly 270 degrees around the axis of the front wheels. Neither of us nor the 6’s driver was injured, but both of our vehicles are surely totaled.
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Third-Generation CR-V Ownership in Retrospect
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Two or three years ago, I recorded some (not particularly conclusive or informative) thoughts with my iPhone as I drove the old engorged Civic to the grocery store, when ends abruptly after I said “I think one time I did try to go fast.” Like most surviving crossover nameplates, though, the narrative began with a genuinely good idea: Hondarize and modernize the Suzuki Sidekick template on top of the Civic's platform and charge just a bit more for it – and like the rest, too, the concept has soured tremendously as both crossovers and the compact sedans upon which they're based have grown and fattened under their ever-increasing burden of safety and convenience features. (I say “burden” and not “expectation,” specifically because I know a grand total of zero informed people who are at all thrilled about increasing gross weights across every industry segment.)
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This CR-V was my mother’s first and only crossover following a three-car line of one or two-owner-used, well-equipped V6 Accords in her garage – the later two from the era when Honda’s mid-sized sedan became a surprisingly dynamic driving machine as advances in drivetrain performance intercepted a point in the developmental timeline just before gross weights spiked up toward their current safety and electronic equipment-bloated figures. (In other words: in the sweet spot when engines were growing more powerful but just before the Accord and its peers got fucking fat.) In 2010, the CR-V was almost attractive looking as specced by my stepfather: the combination of the roof rack, bonnet bra, and EX-trim 5-spoke alloys managed to resolve most of the discrepancies in the shapes I've seen from other examples, but it also drove its price above the $30,000 mark. To be fair to Honda, this decision could almost be considered a sortof breach of function considering the CR-V's original ultra-mass-produced, utilitarian purpose.
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Interior
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Neither the leather nor the nav/infotainment system has aged very well, but it should be said that the latter is still 100% functional in 2018: it interfaces well with my iPhone 8 Plus with only the occasional “this device is not supported” hiccup (easily resolvable by simply re-booting the connection, in my experience.) I'm not sure how astonished I should be by the fact that the GPS still offers reliable routes 99% of the time, albeit through a user interface design that seems to grow more and more dated by the passing few seconds one may have to wait for it to calculate. Accommodation remains about as uncomfortable as it was on day 1: thanks to its hard leather and the super-upright seating position common to crossovers, I must continue to insist that operating this car is a wholly unnatural experience, but its interior surfaces shall always place well in a contest of robustness and longevity, as they certainly should.
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Drivetrain
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Perhaps the greatest letdown of this model year (2010) is its legacy four-speed automatic transmission, and I assume the next year's inclusion of a brand-new five-speed unit drastically improved its driving experience. The specific regret one feels when such a development arrives a year after buying any new car is one my stepfather still didn't deserve, yet he was not spared. However, if you, the reader, cannot be dissuaded from buying a CR-V of this generation for whatever goddamned reason, know that you must choose an example from 2011-onward if you want to retain your sanity. No, ye olde four-speed wasn't quite as bad as the transmission that virtually ruined Dodge's new Dart singlehandedly, but it certainly shows its age even for the most inattentive or merciless driver. Without it, I would vouch for the 2.4L four-cylinder's performance as adequate, but its contribution was and forever shall be let down by the aging transmission's developing Alzheimer's. Simply put: they are an unacceptably mismatched team.
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Though I shall forever argue that part-time all-wheel-drive is almost never actually justified in normal use – and yet inadequate for any “extreme” use, for that matter – Honda’s hydraulic “Super-Handling All-Wheel-Drive” did indeed aid our CR-V’s way in a handful of circumstances throughout my mother’s ownership, though neither of our memories of these are robust enough to cite specifics. The single no-bullshit blizzard we experienced was the same type I managed to navigate years later in a sub-compact Chevrolet to reach MagFest 2016, if perhaps less intense. I would speculate that the system increases mechanical drag – and therefore fuel consumption – to a degree that couldn’t possibly justify what little aid it has offered in our use, at least.
On Windows XP ballot day, I spent my beatnik-ass time marveling at the (seemingly) abrupt availability of some genuinely innovative social apps on the Apple App Store for the first time since iOS 7(?) Of course, I am aware that reasonable people would regard a “sneak peek,” NDA-violating, perfectly Adobe Premiered app review to be pretty fucking lame, and I won’t dispute any accusations to the tune of “just an insane white guy with a WordPress site,” but I still believe it’s important to talk about software especially because virtually everyone uses it (as opposed to quieting down just when these apps and the people who make them attain the most advantageous possible position to fuck the whole world.)
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That said, I’m going to keep this as brief and unrevisionist as I can: Tweetbot’s latest iteration may actually justify the dedicated subreddit I’ve just discovered! (Reddit’s the last place anyone wants to talk about apps, I guess.) I’ve complained at length about Twitter’s increasingly hostile (but justified, sortof) treatment of its once astonishingly diverse landscape of third-party clients and tools, yet I’d honestly grown significantly in accepting that the dynamic would never again see the power of the world’s most cash-stuffed companies delivered into the sweaty hands of small, kooky one and two-man teams, and it never would’ve occurred to me that Tweetbot was still around — much less getting ready to update its trusty old app with a release that would suddenly make it clearly more stable and better-looking than its last competitor: the Native Fuck, itself, which has also undergone significant cosmetic surgery, recently. Namely, they moved the one fucking button that’s given the app a usability premium over its mobile web-based low-rent clone.
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“The compose button has been moved to the bottom right-hand corner and “floats” as users scroll down their timeline. That means the button is always available to quickly send a tweet when the mood strikes.”
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Yeah okay, Matt.
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We’ve got a shiny, new compose button to unveil on Twitter for iOS! Easier than ever to use, the floating icon is prominently displayed and perfect for one-handed scrolling and Tweet composing. Pro tip: Press and hold the icon to access your drafts, photos, and the GIF gallery.
--@TwitterSupport
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Twitter Support is no @Cher, yeah, but it seems strange that less than a thousand of Twitter’s more than 300 million monthly users would bother to engage with the announcement of a significant fundamental change to its infrastructure. Imagine if the federal government announced via White House press conference that every stoplight in the United States was going to have its yellow light removed to “streamline workflow” without any further explanation, yet only 1000 total Americans even bothered to tune in to the television coverage across all the news networks. It’d be strange, yeah? Well, y’all are using Twitter more than you’re driving, I’ll bet. Next time, get out andvote on my Twitter poll, you fascist!
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In my Twitter glory days — that is, when I used to spend the entirety of every one of my community college classes Tweeting from my phone — there was a healthy offering of third-party clients on both mobile and desktop that filled the english of the era’s software media with an absolutely barbaric brand-beaten pile of linguistic Twittrash. After Twinkle — one of the earliest and ugliest ways to use Twitter ever — you’d have to choose between Twitpic, Tweetdeck, Twittercounter, Twitterfeed, Twhirl, Twitturly, Twtpoll, Retweetist, Tweepler, Hellotxt, Twitdom, Tweetscan, Tweetburner, Tweetvisor, Twittervision, Twibs, Twistori, and Twitbin. These are just a few I picked up from a 10-year-oldTechCrunchreport listing the top 21 Twitter applications by traffic.
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Twibs
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Now, I have to stop myself from digging too deep here and attempting something absurd like The History of Twitter Clients, but the fucking material is there! I could spend an entire afternoon going through YouTube searches and gadget blogs because it brings me back to that time when I lived every day assuming these things were going to continue to astonish for my entire adulthood. So many incredible ideas! However, I’m going to save them for later and focus on the cream of the crop, so to speak: Twitterific and Tweetbot, which has been a longtime favorite of mine. As I said, it was in community college that I first ponied up money for Tweetbot 3 on my iPhone 4S simply because the hype over it among app and gadget nerds was so bonkers that it managed to spill over into my life, despite the fact that iOS7 and I were having serious issues in our marriage.
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If you trust Mark Watson with your life as I do, you’d better believe that Tweetbot has been “a screamer” since its very beginning, when it pioneered the Premium Poweruser segment, for which a demographic apparently still exists. It was fast, yet always noticeably smoother than the native app, just as the newest release is today. I must point out, though, that the bloggers and YouTubers who’ve insisted that Tweetbot or Twitterrific or any other premium app could replace the native Twitter app entirely on iPhone even before they were stripped of a most live/push functionality (which I’ll come back around to in just a moment,) are undoubtedly lying to themselves — as good as they got, they never overtook Twitter’s own app in immediacy terms, which is almost inevitably going to present fundamental deterrence on the part of the active Twitter user who intends to rid themselves of the default pedestrian avenue of administration. Tweetbot solved a lot of things, it really is daft when it comes to notifications. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they came a few hundred seconds late — it’s that they’re never predictably or consistently so, which severs entirely the human perception of engaged plugged-in-ness, if you will. It’s the same phenomena Chuck Klosterman explores best in the context of DVRing live sports to watch later.
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It’s difficult to project fictional scenarios that are more oblique and unexpected than the craziest moments from reality. We all understand this. And that understanding is at the core of the human attraction to liveness. We don’t crave live sporting events because we need immediacy; we crave them because they represent those (increasingly rare) circumstances in which the entire spectrum of possibility is in play.
--“Space, Time, and DVR Mechanics” by Chuck Klosterman
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Tweetbot is unquestionably a more thorough environment in which to explore Twitter than any other third party client, but it can’t do the live thing. (Please do complain to Twitter, Inc. about the API situation if you’re so inclined, though.) All I’m trying to say is, there is no fucking reason you’d delete the Twitter app — hide it away in a folder and never ever open it again if it disgusts you so, but leave its notifications settings on so that it can keep itself busy in there. Now that is a smart workflow! In fact, it was mine! And it did work for such a long time that you’d probably forget about the arrangement in no time were there not the occasional obvious discrepancies between Tweetbot’s Mention’s tab and the native app’s instant notifications. There has never been — nor will there be, I think — a client for Twitter that can replace some use of its own properties.
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I think Tweetbot 3 made me into my own ridiculous equivalent of a “poweruser.” Things are a little hazy now, but I know that I departed my main Twitter account just before the app’s release, and I didn’t come back until 2015. I was going to school in the same old mall building that housed the tool store in which I was also working in full-time, which is surely the only explanation for the shamelessness I demonstrated in bringing a wireless Apple Bluetooth keyboard to my classes and placing it behind the phone on whatever surface was in front of me so that I could lean forward and type into iOS with my nose damned near touching the screen. Strangely, I was not able to verify when Bluetooth keyboard support was added to iOS, but we’re going to conclude for the sake of convenience that it was first included in the immediate predecessor to the iPhone 4S I was using then.
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The cognoscenti have been on Twitter for years now. Stephen Fry, the web service’s patron saint — in Britain at least, joined in 2008. However, it wasn’t until early 2009, xsomewhere around the time that Fry tweeted while stuck in a lift, that the service went truly mainstream. Mentions of Twitter, usually involving celebrities, could be found in newspapers and on breakfast television.
--“Top 10 technology highlights of 2009 ” | The Telegraph
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If you’ve made it this far, you’ve already seen the demos and skimmed reviews at least. You should know by now whether or not Tweetbot 5 is worth it to you in purely functional terms, but I think we should all acknowledge that this release of Tweetbot is likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS. The mess that is Twitter, Inc. has made clear this year that it intends to prioritize its own clients over maintaining the APIs necessary for others to receive push notifications. And when I say “its own,” I’m also referring to our dearest TweetDeck, which they in fact absorbed. From a business perspective, it makes sense: only “six million App Store and Google Play users installed the top five third-party Twitter clients between January 2014 and July 2018,” according to TechCrunch. I never expected to see Tweetbot on the App Store charts again, nor would I have considered that Echophon, TweetCaster or Twitterrific would have been left available. They’re on the App Store, at least, and I can confirm that they all technically still work, but it’s safe to say they’re showing their fucking age. Tweetbot and Twitterrific, though, are not just satellite products of the platform — they literally built it. These two are the poles that have spent Twitter’s lifetime thus far demonstrating for the company and its userbase their own respective interpretations of a mobile social application. Today, they are united — along with Talon and Tweetings — in a plea for continued access to the platform they helped establish on behalf of Twitter users and developers around the world.
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Both Tweetbot and Twitterrific are in their 5th versions, and neither has actually changed much since iOS 7. (Twitterrific appears to still be in the same version number.) Facing the growing walls around the service, one struggles to imagine them surviving more than one or two iOS releases, but I’ve been wrong before. (In fact, I discovered yesterday that Lookbook is still around somehow.) By the time iOS 7 came around, the new native Twitter app still looked fucking terrible. When Tapbots released Tweetbot 3, everything about its visual experience was beyond anything we’d seen on the iPhone before and its effectiveness as a Twitter tool was immediately recognizable in contrast with even Jack’s brand-new app and mobile web experience. The animations were tasteful and smooth and the “pro user” label on Tapbot’s demographic allowed them to fully explore the functionality of iPhone’s gestures separate any bond with the hypothetically least-capable user.
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This is a dynamic which I am apparently unable to avoid across just about all of my subjects — including digital media — so you may take it as generally unreasonable or extreme, but I’m nearly as tired of being treated as an idiot user as I am an idiot reader. Readability is to Usability, etc. It’s especially aggravating when I could do so much more if developers would just assume I’m capable of any knowledge acquisition or intellectual growth whatsoever. Except for a few leftover keyboard shortcuts, the native Twitter app’s only function are the most obvious to engage with, as per the highest possible standards of use, which would make perfect sense if it was paired with competent investments in Accessibility, but Twitter always appears to detest the subject, even while quietly putting in some of the work. Thanks to Mastodon’s explicit and visible acknowledgement of accessibility by way of just one young German man and a volunteer team, we certainly know it’s not because it’s an expensive one at all. (The “if Mastodon can do it than Twitter can definitely fucking do it” argument can be expanded almost without limit.)
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Somewhere out there is a social media manager using a screen reader whose professionalism has been undermined by the belief that the update is available to everyone. We deserve equal access to the tools our peers take for granted, and the security to know that we will be able to do our jobs tomorrow regardless of updates.
--Kit Englard for The Outline
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I would like to commend myself now for making it this far without mentioning Lists — a subject which I’ve already Tweeted and written about extensively — but this time, I have the wondrous blessing of two premiere mobile software companies who recognized the potential power in list functionality to dispel or avoid most of the inherent risks assigned to the usage of a social network like Twitter and bet heavily on it. Neither can be utilized to the fullest without lists and wouldn’t it be such a shame to not get your money’s worth? Tapbots expanded their curative ability tremendously by adding customizable filters to any timeline in Tweetbot, allowing the user to infinitely manipulate incoming posts with any combination of every variable supported by the core Twitter code itself. Within a matter of seconds, you could create a filter that will exclude all Tweets except for those from unverified accounts that mention “blimps” and include a media attachment and apply this filter to any of the app’s timeline views — including Home, Mentions, Profile (your own Tweets,) your Favorites, and your Searches — everything but your Direct Messages can be sorted this way.
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TweetBot and I accomplished a lot of sorting together, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me had it not crept to #1 Paid Social App again a few weeks ago that perhaps my bias towards Twitter lists could be entirely attributed to my early use of TweetBot and Twitterrific, which allowed me to amass a Following count of over 5000 without physically perishing or mentally disintegrating to the point of undeniable insanity. However, by the time TweetBot 4 was released in 2015, it had long since swapped places with the native app within my iPhone’s homescreens and was only used when I felt particularly like Tweetstorming from a stationary situation. From my wireless Apple Keyboard, this meant Cmd (⌘)-N to compose a Tweet and ⌘-Enter to send it.
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Today — in Tweetbot 5 — this continues to be a tried-and-true method of Tweeting Tweets on Twitter, smoothly and efficiently, as always. Returning to Ye Olde Alternative in 2018 yields both familiar and newly-implemented goods: animation and audio notifications are carried over and/or updated as needed to maintain a fluid and fresh experience. The ability to switch between its intelligently-chosen color themes with a two-fingered vertical swipe, alone will be justification enough for many users like myself to hand over another $4.99 to the Tapbots developers who’ve managed against all odds to one-up Twitter’s own mobile app development one last time. Over any other alternative app, Tweetbot 5 retains the robust qualities necessary to achieve #1 Paid Social App status on the App Store despite its new API shackles.
Seven years ago, the fourth generation of Apple’s iPhone instigated a change in our perception of digital photography. Now – thanks to Google Photos – I’d like to reflect on my favorite shots of mine.
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When iPhone 4 handsets began shipping in the Summer of 2010, I’d been carrying my first generation for three solid years – since its now history-stricken release, in fact – and its age started to become a problem. I’d drop it screen-down on a rock in the airport parking lot just before going back to school for my Junior year, splitting a crack in the screen that wouldn’t quite kill it – it was the demands of iOS 4 on its 412 MHz CPU and meager 128 MB of RAM that would ultimately cease its usability.
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The single 2 megapixel rear-facing camera would surprise one at times, but was never lauded as anything but what it was – a mobile phone-bound sensor capturing very cellular-looking* images, but Steve Jobs wasn’t three minutes in to his iPhone 4 presentation at the June 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference before he pronounced the design’s closest possible “kin” to be “an old Leica camera,” associating his device with photography in its first impression. The equivalent of the first generation’s rear-facing camera could now be found facing you, and the fourth’s primary sensor now shot at 5 megapixels (2592 x 1936) with autofocus and 5x digital zoom, setting a fundamental smartphone sensor configuration standard that’s still adhered to by the industry.
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After unleashing Google Photos upon the ~15,000 images on my home machine’s hard drive last year, I have been constantly reminded of my own photographic history – for better or worse – and regularly shown five, six, seven-year old snaps in a manner that wouldn’t have been possible (or have made any sense) before. Recently, I was astounded to find that I took many of the better shots with my iPhone 4, so I thought I’d share a few from my high-school days in loving memory of my trusty little rectangular companion.
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All taken with iPhone 4, left unedited. View more onFlickr.
If you’ve been keeping up with the web at all in the past two years, you’re no doubt at least somewhat familiar with the terms “Mastodon,” “Diaspora,” or “federated social.” Extratone readers may remember my interview with Eugen Rochko last April — the day when his federated social “clone” made its way around the front pages of the major technology and tech media websites. Though the piece itself was designed and written quite disastrously (genuinely sorry about that — it was easy for me to get carried away when I had no idea what I was carrying,) Eugen is a great communicator of his ideal, which you’ll find to be as aligned with a FOSS future as you’d think it would be.
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I signed up for mastodon.social in the February of last year, yet I suppose year sof o find myself going back to Twitter looking for what I only get on Mastodon, these days: diverse, sincere, talented, and extremely curious users from all over the world backed and deeply co-habitated with an inclusive developer culture filled with smart problem solvers who just want to contribute something grand. It’s not exactly easy, yet instances and variations on the ActivityHub project, itself have begun springing up at a pace I can’t keep up with. There’s the open-source federated blogging CMS Plume, along with the gorgeous and very promising Instagram-esque PixelFed. Additionally, Diaspora is gorgeous and fully-functional now.
Ten percent of the United States' adult population cannot functionally read or write (conservatively) despite the exponential increase of required reading in the average American's day-to-day life thus far in the 21stcentury. For written American media, especially, one would assume that a financial and social incentive for maximum literacy in the populace should present a straightforward justification for intense widespread coverage of this particular disparity, yet most related coverage in mainstream national magazines and newspapers is alarmingly sparse and often requires a less-than-socially-conscious context (e.g. a for-profit startup) to actually appear in news feeds. From the most wholesome assumption of the industry's general values — that it holds “newsworthiness” above all — we must assume that it does not generally consider American illiteracy “interesting enough to the general public to warrant reporting” as we examine the intermittent discourse surrounding the issue that does achieve publication.
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In late October, the American business and technology magazine Fast Company covered the recent successes of the “for-profit social enterprise” Cell-Ed, noting that “a huge portion of the American labor force is illiterate,” which it described as “a hidden epidemic.” The article's author, Rick Wartzman, mentions foremost that Cell-Ed's userbase is largely “foreign-born” and expected to eclipse one million in number by the end of 2019. Demographically, the magazine's readership is predominantly middle to upper-class, who are the least affected social groups by a significant margin as per illiteracy's strong correlative relationship with poverty. These factors combine to limit any real social consequences from such an article.
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In direct contrast with the professional, market-minded perspective of modern business magazine, even niche independent publications from the opposite end of the media spectrum often trivialize, belittle, or generally mishandle the issue. In a 500-word “Editorial” written by The Editor Eric Black of the Baptist Standard — a small evangelical news website describing itself as “Baptist voices speaking to the challenges of today's world” — he points to a global increase in “illiterate people,” as he so comfortably brands them. Such language is inevitably counter-productive and potentially insensitive: to the eyes and ears of activists, educators, and the general public, such a term unnecessarily lends toward a restricted perspective of those people who have been left behind by the institution of read and written language in one manner or another and portrays them as a great vague collection of lingual lepers bearing their own distinct, inexorable, wordless ethnicity which inevitably bars them from the freedoms allowed by the Editor's learned capacity, including the ability to actually read his words of affliction. Simply put, he has dangerously oversimplified the issue.
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To once again assume the best and infer that Black had a specific purpose in publishing his ill-supported opinion beyond continuity's sake of his weekly Editorials, it appears to be the promotion of a local Texan literacy “ministry” called Literacy Connexus, though no further specifics about the project are provided beyond “helping churches develop literacy programs for their communities, provide training and resources to overcome illiteracy,” which is virtually identical to the introductory copy on the organization's homepage.
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So far, we've examined coverage only in special interest media, but what about legacy news organizations with the largest readerships in the United States? Despite oblivious use of the same ledes, a newspaper like The Washington Post can wield vast influence over the broadest possible readership and the public editorial trust. In November 2016, veteran reporter Valerie Strauss published “Hiding in plain sight: The adult literacy crisis” for Answer Sheet — her weekly newsletter designed to function as “a school survival guide for parents (and everyone else), from education policy to psychology” — which represents the most substantial discussion of American illiteracy in topical, widely-visible media (i.e. presence in a succinct search engine query.) She briefly introduces the issue with a bulleted list of illiteracy's consequences on modern society and the individual cited from a Canadian literacy foundation before turning the stage over to Lecester Johnson, CEO of the Academy of Hope Adult Public Charter School in Washington D.C.
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Johnson presents a passionate and well-informed exploration of the state of the literacy battle from the perspective of a full-time, locally on-the-ground advocate. Her op-ed's introduction includes the most essential observations and statistics throughout, noting “the children of parents with low literacy skills are more likely to live in poverty as adults and are five times more likely to drop out of school,” before setting upon a detailed examination of current and relevant organizations working toward solutions. Of course, it's largely centered upon her own organization, which she claims has “helped more than 6000 adults rebuild their education and job opportunities since 1985.”
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It's significant that an institution as deeply embedded across the American political spectrum as The Washington Post address the issue of American illiteracy, and both Johnson and Strauss are certainly qualified voices for the undertaking, but when we examine this particular article, it's important we consider the context of the Answer Sheet newsletter and its intended audience. Though it's no challenge to pitch the importance of reading and writing to parents and professional educators, the most alarming and destructive issue at hand is the educational disparity between their adult peers. “There's a literacy problem in the capitol, but I'm not talking about young people who can't read. Many adults — perhaps even parents sitting next to you at back to school night — don't possess academic skills,” notes Johnson with her very first paragraph. However, considering the nature of parenthood, the audience primarily consuming these words are undoubtedly preoccupied with juvenile issues, specifically, and we can assume their capacity to empathize with their fellow working adults who could benefit from literacy education is actually lessened from that of childless readers of the same age as a result. “Despite the magnitude of the adult literacy crisis, most of those needing to make up lost ground are pushed toward traditional classroom settings—even though many of these people can't possibly follow through because of cost or work schedules or other obstacles,” she attests.
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Perhaps more than any other American city, Detroit has been struggling with a serious illiteracy problem. According to a profile of the Beyond Basics program (which was adapted from an embedded video broadcast) on their local ABC affiliate's website, forty-seven percent of adult Detroiters cannot read, but even companies like General Motors — who donated \$250,000 to the Beyond Basics program earlier in mid-October — are getting involved. The article quotes Elijah Craft, a young man who was “reading at a first-grade level as a senior at Detroit's Central High School.” “Craft would rare venture from home for fear he would get lost because he could not read street signs,” reports WXYZ anchor Carolyn Clifford. She frames the narrative around a reference to the 2009 film The Blind Side starring Sandra Bullock: “here, you might call this story 'The Detroit Side.'” For local television news, this reference to popular culture likely strengthened the story's power ensnare viewers' emotional attention when it was aired, and even in this written accompaniment, it proves an effective — if a bit crude — analogy. The broadcast of Mr. Craft's interview also depicts his own deep emotional investment in reading when he begins to shed tears, which is not entirely communicated in the written article.
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When the American news media discusses American illiteracy, it's almost always in secondary or tertiary form: either by way of a short post for a weekly education newsletter, an ultra-low-distribution niche editorial column, or a personality profile of a local activist. Perhaps the fundamental obstacle in the face of increasing the discourse surrounding this issue is that its resolutions will require — perhaps more than any other social issue in this country — advocacy by those who can read on behalf of those who cannot because of how sensitive and isolated many of them feel. When voices of advocates like Lecester Johnson are uplifted by major organizations like The Washington Post, the sociological weight of the illiteracy issue can be very powerful. In quoting former United Nations chief Kofi Annan, she sums up for its extensive audience what the facts should ultimately mean to them: 32 million of Eric Black's so-called “illiterate people” in the United States of America have been and continue to be deprived of their “human right” to functional literacy.
The duo's new album manages to be wonderfully explorative without sacrificing any sacred traditions.
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For years, I took the voices and culture of working Americans for granted and sought to generally distance myself from my origin’s heritage as much as possible, but I’ve since realized that I couldn’t have done so without absolute certainty that country, bluegrass, and folk music were stubborn as State highway ditch-rooted fescue blades: omnipresent forces of Midwestern nature that’d secured their invincibility with the simple superiority of their belonging. While this conclusion is true enough for the time being, it’s quite independently so of their worth or necessity. In such conditional blindness, I’ve simply proven my sensibilities to be (predictably in the case of my seniors) not exempt. This truth is noteworthy only because of its potential to spare others the embarrassment of blatant ignorance to their own privilege. That said, I would suggest that you engage this music sincerely for a moment for your own sake, regardless of your own convictions regarding country music, Indiana, plaid, pickup trucks, the end of the world, or the proper noun for “cantaloupe.”
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As young adults, even those folks who’ve remained resolutely country-minded found themselves trivializing the name of the titanic Dallas-born trio The Dixie Chicks not out of half-assed iconoclasm, but because their brand was so cleverly immune to irony. You thought you were proving yourself of a higher caliber of discernment, but mocking goddesses only paraded your ignorance. In my teen rebellion against the culture of my rural origin, I scoffed at their mention for a while, somehow oblivious to my blatant hypocrisy. Thanks to my older sisters and their automobiles, I spent before and after elementary school days absorbing thousands of hours’ worth of late-90s/early-oughts Pop Country radio. Two summers ago, I returned to this library at length for the first time in 10 years and found my heart completely vulnerable to its related memories and my mind consistently flabbergasted by the oomph of the composition that defines the genre’s last mainstream hurrah.
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The original three Chicks – Natalie Maines, Emily Robison, and Marty Maguire – are still very much alive, kicking, and radio-playing. They even “returned from exile” with a real international tour in 2016. (I regret little more in my adult life than missing the opportunity to see them.) According to a fascinating November 2015 analysis in The Guardian, their 2003 denouncement of President George W. Bush cost them serious cred among their audience, but Johnny Cash likely harbored similar sentiments, Stephen Morrissey is… not straight, the most worthwhile current country sounds from my teenage home are composed and performed by a trans woman, and the staple tunes from the genre’s most chaste personalities are often just about sex. No reasonable individual would still cite this incident in an argument opposing the essential legacy of these three miraculously talented women.
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From a pop perspective at least, The Dixie Chicks are almost certainly the penultimate expression of country music as a technical and emotional exercise. Their extraordinary musicianship and prodigally antecedent mastery of suave sincerity represented the absolute peak of pop country’s untenable relationship with the American working class in one hell of a 21st-century-breaching last hurrah that still brings tears of pride to many an eye. However, the hysterical backlash of the greater working people personified in part by Donald Trump’s presidency is a last sure indication of the mainstream’s final estrangement from all distillations of rural culture. In the coming years, I fear the toiling masses will be left only with less and less authentic, more and more suburban bastardizations of their music as the last superficial delusions of condescending affection from the middle class fade, and the enterprise dies. What does survive will “graduate” (retire) to Folk (for white performers,) and further strengthen the Blues resurrection (for everyone else.) That said, it’s hard to find anyone who’s comfortable mourning the loss openly after acceptance has progressively set in – there’s simply nowhere else to go, and its aging icons have been in desperate need of retirement throughout the Information Age.
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The Top 10 Vegan Alternatives to Working-Class America
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Even if I’d had the moderate exposure from my current perch in the midst of the notoriously grass-roots nature of Portland’s Folk/Blues scene, 2000 miles west, I would have still been totally blindsided by my incidental introduction to The Matchsellers, two years ago. One needn’t harbor any presumptions about the relationship between Kansas City violinist/fiddler Julie Bates and Hoosier blues guitarist, Andrew Morris – they’re just about the cutest pair you’ll ever see, couple’s act or not (it’s less relevant than you’d think, and none of our business.) They’re also extremely talented and genuinely authoritative world-class musicians with plenty of authentic country mileage who exude a proud air of warm, confident serenity occupying the bluegrass sphere. After happening upon their set at Columbia’s faux-speakeasy in Summer 2016, I was at once charmed and impressed by the pervasive magnitude of the ethereal aura that followed them, especially after our brief post-performance conversation. I’m ninety percent sure they came without a mobile phone between them carrying a wicker basket full of CDs and matchbooks, and shucks… I do believe we’ve been doing this whole thing wrong, all along.
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I bought a copy of Kosciusko County then and there and played the shit out of it the next summer, wandering aimlessly around Missouri with my best friend, revisiting (and occasionally disrupting) the resolute peace of the tiny communities I grew up orbiting. On our way to the Hannibal – Huckleberry’s Fictional home/the great Mississippi’s tired tourism machine – we just left it on repeat. As a soundtrack to such sentimental pursuits, a central trio of back-to-back tracks proved especially potent, beginning with “Mentone (The 3,000 lb Egg)” – the work’s nostalgic, tear-jerking sole instrumental. Production isn’t low-fidelity, but appropriately honest – no amount of expensive mastering would be capable of compressing the essence of a surprise late-night live performance from The Matchsellers’ work into a digital audio file, anyway.
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Bates’ fiddling is an impossibly rare pleasure – the real type of sawing that mystically manages to erase one’s inhibitions and sense of civic responsibility when tearing about the borders of quiet row-crop plots, leaving long-lived lesions of billowing limestone high above numbered county roads at ninety miles-per-hour. Succeeding the distant, eye-misting cruise of the 1.5-ton Egg, “Driving Escort” is a masterpiece (naturally) of this raucous realm.
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Driving down the road with a yellow light on top of my truck / Going down to Vincennes earning my sixty bucks.
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Add the accompaniment of Morris’ obviously-fathomless relationship with the guitar, and the result nails a select truth without any hint of prudishness. At sufficient volume, “Muskmelon Breakdown” becomes a beautifully-harmonious catalyst of fast, loose, maniacal, hilarious energy that’s sure to land you in a ditch, but you’ll still be laughing your ass off by the time you’re pulling clay clumps and waist-high fescue blades from your steaming radiator. Kosciusko County isn’t an innovative record by any critical instrumentation, but I’d do best to keep my sun-faded, skip-worn copy readily at hand for the next time I find myself on a fresh gravel road, whenever that may be.
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For the last five years, all we said was goodbye
-I said it again, it was the fifth time
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I took your word and did what I thought was best
-I took your word and went 600 miles west
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That’s it, then – we’ve got The Matchsellers pretty well figured for either wannabe(?) or reformed(?) yahoos of their own design; charming, dusty novelties who chose a folly destiny of toiling their craft for none but a seasonal dozen acres of white, sweating State Fair flesh. Obviously, they’re meant for us sophisticated, globetrotting Winners to collect like thrift store antiques on our way down the interstate. Their time is ours to book for nothing on our mediocre “speakeasy’s” waxy new stage; to post on an Instagram story, to Tweet in an easy compartmentalization of their quaint displacement from our time, deep in the dusty recesses of our collections for no good bargain, where they’ll fall comfortably in line as our predictable and willing country servants should an opportunity happen upon us to show a stranger how interesting, dynamic, and worldly we are.
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As a displaced (and formerly ex-communicated) yokel, I’ve often been astonished by how easy it is to discard American folk music for huge swaths of time unless it expresses some unignorable sort of spectacular torment. My own failure to recognize the value in this one until I became separated and homesick was an overtly foolhardy cliché (though quite predictable of like privilege,) but I can’t help but wonder: is it unavoidable? Of course, the process is necessary for ‘class justice’ – one might even call it a natural law of sorts – and in the case of The Matchsellers, there’s hardly a struggle to communicate emotionally. For a real music scholar, though, it’s surely worth asking of those voices who know: do the oppressed, destitute, and hope-impoverished people of this country still rely on bluegrass, or has it been replaced for them?
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The abstraction of the phrase “good surprise” had plummeted from our collective vocabulary at a record-demolishing velocity in the interim, but this past spring’s release of Bluegrastronauts hit me squarely upside the skull again, stirring a solid half hour of hysterical, shrieking psychosis. I assumed the worst… Dear God, what has the internet forced upon that sweet, rootsy duo?! – and was immediately compelled to drop everything and listen.
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Hoosiers, we have a problem. What the fuck is this album, exactly? A nonchalant, apparently oblivious challenge to every assumption you could possibly arrive with. It’s safe to suppose “Bluegrastronauts” refers to its departure from the rest of their discography – from smack dab in Indiana’s center to the goddamned Beta Quadrant, the two managed to stupefyingly ace a theme most comfortable residents of their bluegrass sphere would take care to avoid leaving up on the kitchen whiteboard – even tackling apocalypse with regal serenity. At first glance, I was sure that copious soft glow had to either be the false product of my own insanity, or a deliberate attempt to alienate the sum of their audience in a single crises of identity. In fact, The Matchsellers had pulled off yet another especially-sparse artistic miracle and harnessed their creative restlessness to propel their departure from the elderly genre’s pretensions without spilling a single drip of their secret sauce. It’s not a concept album (thank God,) but doesn’t wander in any disparaging sense, either.
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Earl Scruggs in a spaceship on his way to Mars
-Pickin' away on the banjo at 100,000 miles an hour
-Bill Monroe in a rocket, see the look on his face
-it's mighty dark to travel when you're in outer space
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Name-dropping four bluegrass legends within the number 1 album-titled introductory track is the pair’s single self-conscious acknowledgment of visiting folk fanatics: this CD looks crazy, but we know what we’re doing – and Kansas City’s mention accredits the locale of the following entirely Missouri-made production. Indeed, in the WhoDoneIts, you’ll see The HillBenders’ Chad Graves layed em’ down in Springfield, and Johnny Kenepaske’s Dead Horse Sound Company spread em’ around in the Heart of America, itself. Missourian musicians especially should take note of these names: the offerings may have diversified since my day, but sound talent like this is difficult to come across, even within explosive college towns. Cutting two live acoustic tracks per performer – four in total – while expecting to retain any subsequent control over the behavior of either unwanted or subject sound is as difficult as any other circumstance you’ll encounter in studio production at this level. I know this much (but little more in that direction): real sound control is simply too tedious to bear for monomiking rascals with GarageBand. Now, having lost or been estranged from any remotely-professional sound reproduction equipment, Bluegrastronauts sounds as balanced and polished as my wired Apple earbuds could ever convey.
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In shared verses, Julie and Andrew’s charmed harmonies are separated beautifully about the listener without inducing a sense of lateral imbalance when one of them sings alone. (Admittedly, I don’t exactly know how it’s accomplished.) No single personality in the record’s toolset – guitar, fiddle, banjo, bass, or dobro steps over any other.
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I have no idea who’s listening, but I’m positive their numbers should be multiplying by a hundredfold very quickly, filling especially with all of ye who feel abandoned by all authentic American representation. They shouldn’t ever fill up stadiums or establishment radiowaves, nor should their art invite extensive pretentious dissection, but they will be adored.
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It’s a quintessential manner of Country Boy pride to whip the middle class’s condescension right back around with a classic demonstration: Oh, you thought I didn’t know about that? You thought I couldn’t do that? Well, of course I can! I’m just not particularly interested. The Matchsellers, though, have attained a much higher tier of comfort and confidence in their own skin.
I have to just fucking do it — I’m going to start writing about music in this space. There’s virtually zero chance that I’ll shout over other voices of music criticism as long as Bilge remains so poorly optimized for SEO, and Portland, Oregon has been far too confusing to deprive myself the opportunity to work out any understanding of its youth culture. It’s not a lack of talented musicians in the area — the opposite is true — but a severe drought of the kind of tragedy and trauma which ultimately give acoustic American musical expression its whole shit. What I caught of the weekend’s invasion with Santa Cruz musicians were all praiseworthy, tight and confident performers who’d obviously invested heavily in their equipment and their presence here. Joe Kaplow arrived with a sort of bespoke magazine rack containing 20 neatly-arranged effect pedals, leading me to wonder for a moment if I was about to witness banjo powerviolence for the first time, but he explained that he simply preferred their availability, and wouldn’t use “more than a few at once,” and seemed almost genuinely perturbed by my attempt to explain the specific industrially-influenced involvement of audio hardware in hardcore punk and grind performance which I was referring to with the term. (“Powerviolence” has apparently become an ambiguous one around these parts, and I’m sure he was actually just utterly uninterested.)
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No more than two dozen guests made up their peak crowd of witnesses, yet Joe and his band certainly made good on shear effort expended in laying down a hearty, back-to-back recital for us at an unusually protracted rate, though apparently either they, the Getaway Dogs, or The Curfews had insisted that a “cover charge” be collected at the door of the house show. It’s not my business to to dwell on or attempt to investigate an unsubstantiatable rumor, but I understand this could have been a breach of house show etiquette. What I do know is that one of the visiting musicians stole 4 flat AA batteries out of my COOLPIX and apparently attempted to jack its ancient Compact Flash card, which is only hilarious because they didn’t succeed. Regardless, it should be said that Joe Kaplow’s songwriting is more flattered by Indie mags than my own ears, though one still wishes for a more substantive topic than “I thought it’d be cool make a corn cob pipe, so I did.” Then again, much of what you’ll find at this URL reads a lot like “I thought it’d be interesting to make a WordPress blog, so I did.” White people have truly run out of shit to say, haven’t we?
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The inspiration that sparked ‘I Said’ moved me like a puppet. So much so that I had to pull over at the top of Altamont Pass, by the huge windmills, and write the song in the back of my van.
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Joe Kaplow for Glide Magazine
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Reflection upon just about anything can have personal meaning, but no amount of musicianship can mask a stark lack of context. I do wonder if Indie Folk should just return to the megachurch, where songwriters like Joe and musicians of his crew’s sort are literally handed a gigantic audience of trained experts at finding profound meaning where it probably isn’t, along with great salaries, from what I hear. Otherwise, all that taxing preparation and expenditure will only lead to more forgettable performances. Or perhaps I am simply misguided in my assumption that artists work exclusively to communicate something lasting to someone. Every conversation I’ve had with Portlanders about Portland music has been predominantly about what artists and their audiences wear and how they behave instead of what they’re trying to say. There’s nothing inherently wrong with leaving things petty, lyrically and choosing to remain content with established sounds, musically, as long as your work is advertised as entertainment, not performance.
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Before I came Northwest, my fiancé had been exposing me to a variety of its music, which I mostly tolerated politely. Dozens of albums and EPs were played through once and forgotten forever, but when I arrived at a demo tape recorded by her long time friend’s band, The Cigarette Burns, I finally heard something familiar, yet vitally compelling: pissed off punks having fun. That said, I should admit that I only attended Saturday’s show because he was on the ticket, and I’m still glad I did.
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After what felt like hours of drowsy corn cob pipes, Christmas sweaters, and old sweethearts at fifty beats per minute (there were literally two young men sleeping within 15 feet of the bands for the duration,) Ricky sat himself on a stool in the midst of Kaplow’s sprawling gear load at 2:30AM with only his guitar and his voice. Unfortunately, I’d squandered the Nikon’s batteries on Californians (the lighting was not ideal anyway,) so I thought I’d share his set on Periscope. Though Ricky had been patiently present and attentive for the entire night (unlike myself,) those who were left of the entertainers bolted to the porch for a lively discussion about unicycles and quinoa while Ricky told us about hate, jealousy, and feeling like shit in a somber elegy. Any further adjectives may edge dangerously close to a half-assed “concert review,” which I am not yet qualified for, but I will say that Ricky’s sincerity made him most engaging part of the night, and his frustrated, conclusive nod to The Cigarette Burns was the first real punk sounds I’ve yet heard in Portland.
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I realize sharing this small experience does little to grow the conversation, but this isn’t a magazine, and I am desperate for answers about the bizarre reality in which I find myself. When Ricky dedicated a song to Courtney Love, one of the male musicians(?) yelled “Courtney Love fuckin’ killed Kurt Cobain!” which was such an unbelievably cliché happening/decision that I’ll surely spend the rest of my days in this city unsuccessfully attempting to work it out, aloud. I can’t quite recall who it was last Fall that responded to my frustration by challenging “what if there’s nothing to understand?” While this may be a reasonable conclusion, I suspect it’s not one I could accept as long as I remain here without losing my mind. If Portland is truly the dimensionless bastion of apathy and intellectual stagnancy for young Americans, I must blog my way out it as soon as possible (for Pete’s sake, just give these kids some antidepressants,) but I’d still like to believe the idea too oxymoronic to actually exist.
Opera's no-connection mascot is the cutest branding on any current web browser. Fight me.
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Yesterday, I finished moving out of the situation I’d been living in for ~6 weeks in the basement of a southeast Portland home near the western base of Mt. Tabor. You'd see it just across from the flat Washington Mall-ish grass rectangle that provides daring suburban explorers their most worthwhile reward for reaching the top. It resembles one of many local residential templates which I was completely unequipped to understand when I arrived in the area last year. You'll never observe any of its inhabitants outside doing any of the things people do when they are unaware of – or unconcerned with being observed. Walking by an afternoon front yard “family gathering” (young white parents and their one or two children) is a prospect of haste. Introducing new movement to the vicinity after the sun has gone down stirs a disruption from deep within its energy. Everyone in this town is afraid. I say it’s an unnatural way to live, but I’m just a fucking bumpkin.
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As you may or may not have observed, the vast majority of my working being lives on the World Wide Web, which requires, fundamentally…. An internet connection. In most any other present-day first world circumstance, these are infinitely available, but I discovered – after the moving process was entirely completed, of course – that my tenants did not actually have an in-house connection of their own. They explained to me that their neighbor – an “IT professional” for IBM – had offered to let them use his WiFi network, and they’d found the arrangement sufficient. However, because IBM is The archaic marque of digital fascism (disclosure: they are also my sworn blood enemy,) it wasn’t altogether a surprise when they told me that his offer did not extend to “guests.”
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I considered that a defined period of WiFi fasting at home could make for an interesting experiment – perhaps even a needed mental reset – and I couldn't reasonably afford to acquire my own dedicated 4G hotspot, anyway. The reality became a relentless paranoid battle for any trickle of access – sometimes for a dozen bytes per second; for just the most basic digital communications like SMS and email – which led to more superstitious hypotheses about precarious antenna orientation, progress bar hallucinations, out-of-control frustration, and hopeless fixation with refresh commands than I remember from 2nd generation cell networks in the Midwest, 10 years ago, or even domestic dial-up, and truly revealed the extent to which I'd taken connectivity for granted.
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My observations of my own behavior throughout this drought are worth more than their mild amusement: even this petty disparity (I was never more than two or three yards from nearly-whole signal at the top of the outside stairs) re-sensitized my perspective to the abstract concept of network unreliability which I'd been entirely spared since prepubescence. Though 4 billion human beings now regularly interact with the World Wide Web, their connections span a mathematically gargantuan spectrum of speed and reliability. In urbanizing myself as an adult, I have unconsciously latched on to the entitled ideal that internet access is a public service and accepted dramatically-increasing dependence on services that engorge greater and greater volumes of bandwidth without any explanation but their lack of incentives for efficiency. I reflect on my relationship with technology every day, yet I still became an oblivious data glutton in mind-bogglingly little time.
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The current state of connectivity in the United States, alone is quite alarming under 5-year-absent examination. Mobile carriers are still merging and the compartmentalization of all ISP customers between prioritization tiers continues to be tested, less encumbered by regulatory safeguards than ever. I don't know my politics on this issue, nor do I have any specific solutions, but I'd point to the work of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, and express only that I hope the pace of the technology's progress is greater than the growth of its merchants' imaginations and the scope of their greed so that the sheer volume of plenty overcomes even the shortest-sighted, and humanity as a whole continues toward a more just distribution of connectivity. What I am in a position to share are the revelations about our current infrastructure, software services, and hardware devices I could only have discovered from such an experience.
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Variables
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I remember standing on top of a John Deere combine's 15ft-high roof in order to successfully make a telephone call 10 years ago – one of thousands of behaviors which were more abruptly and universally required for a few years and subsequently more abruptly forgotten than any other such united tick in American history. This blip of shared technological adversity also led to an unfathomably vast collective mythology surrounding incredibly tedious manipulation of our archaic handsets in varying degrees of desperation for just one bar.
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My Sprint plan includes unlimited 4G LTE data for my iPhone 8 Plus with a 10GB tethering limit – which performed so admirably in the lonely role of my thin tether to the rest of the world that I am obligated to actually use the phrase like a champ, but the quality of its connection is dramatically impacted by the studio apartment's depth. From the space's geometric center at stomach-level, the handset indicates “1x,” meaning CDMA 1x, which is technically a data connection, but certainly not in any usable sense for the network applications of 2018. The native Twitter app, Apple Mail, Snapchat, Instagram & Facebook, Safari, Opera Mini, Firefox, Chrome, and all others I tested in this condition would simply timeout – giving up after a minute or two of repeated attempts before declining to continue, each in their own minor variations. An interesting anecdote: in a pertinent reflection our human ballooning expectations for connectivity at all times, the language of our creations across both iOS and desktop applications has recently become noticeably less accountable and more accusatory. Instead of saying “____ can’t connect to the internet,” many of the browsers will declare an absolute: there is no internet connection, or just straight up blame the user: “you are not connected to the internet.” (Emphasis mine.) No apologies... No regrets.
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Dude, no wifi? Where the fuck are U?
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Directly above my head’s place on the bed, the phone could be propped on the sill of the East-facing window on a clear-skied day, enabling it to scrounge up and loosely establish enough contact to receive calls and text messages, claiming 1-4 3G “bars,” and a single in 4G at night, though one overcast Northwestern week basically did it in completely. If we were actually doing something to noticeably increase our old Nokia boxes’ bandwidth bids on those early networks by turning them every which way to find “better reception,” it’s completely futile on current devices. (I’m fairly sure I remember a network professional explaining this to me when LTE was first gaining traction.) It was immediately apparent that orientation had no effect, but the handset’s bearing certainly did… Most sensitively so. I realized quite early on that I should endeavor not to spend too much time standing in different positions throughout the space attempting to will on a browser loader bar above a story I’ve probably read already. Intstead, I committed to the very first position that indicated any correlation whatsoever with a better connection: atop the biscuit tin on the metal rack nearest the outside door.
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It’s been three months, but I’m still using my tired old Hewlett-Packard 6930p backup machine, so I was very skeptical about the odds we’d be successfully reliably pairing its ancient network adapter – now worth just $9.99 – with that of A Cellular Phone 10 years its junior without struggling significantly with range or reliability, especially considering that it cannot run a single one of its vast library of proprietary drivers on Linux. You’d at least assume they’d need to be practically touching each other to maintain a smooth marriage, yet the only compromise I had to make on the local end was to bring them near to each other as they paired. Afterwards, I could return the phone to its tin and work on the laptop from the kitchen table, 12-15 feet away. (Curiously enough, the 6930p itself shipped with hotspot capability by way of the SIM card slot behind the unit’s main battery.)
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Quantifying the speed of a mobile data connection as you would a dedicated WiFi network is incongruent because the former trades in a much less consistent packet stream. That’s the extent of my knowledge, but it’s easy to visualize: a signal that can travel a mile or two in big globules bound to be intercepted in splashes upon the device’s little antennae, versus your home network’s local, evenly distributed sauna of irradiated mist. It’s much less definite, to say the least, and I can’t actually comprehend the sort of voodoo that’s required in order to expand and maintain the networks as they are, nor would I ever wish to burden myself with such knowledge.
If you've ever found this industry's history intriguing, you've likely heard Brian McCullough's superb Internet History Podcast before, and it's obvious to you how invaluable an interview episode with Compaq's Biggest Boy would be for a head start on digesting the story. In accordance with Halt and Catch Fire's pilot release in 2014, the broad-shouldered soldier of open computing appeared to have been on a mini media tour (even though he openly admitted he’d yet to actually watch it.) [His last remark – “maybe even as exciting as the real thing” – may sound like silly Dork Rod conjecture, but the show wasn’t nearly as engaging because they had(?) to remove the compatibility component, which is the meat of the whole thing.] McCullough is usually ace at this stuff, but he sounds a bit shaky in this one, though nobody should blame him – I certainly would be, too. Rod Canion's accent (BIOS=buy-OSS) and general intensity must make for one hell of a presence, even over the phone. 2014 was a long time ago.
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McCullough's own summary of the conversation is so thorough (he was writing a book,) there's only a single possible addition.
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“There's a certain risktaking gene that runs through a lot of Texans.”
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There’s no other way to say it: I believe in Texas. Specifically, Houston. DJ Screw, UGK, Z-Ro, Trae, Fat Pat, etc.– these I adopted as religion, years ago. From my perspective, Rod Canion’s ballsy, loyal Houstonianism hustle makes perfect sense. Yes, I’m afraid you’ve basically stumbled into my passionate cause to unite two Houston icons.
I stumbled across this wonderful help document in Lotus SmartSuite 9.8 and my head just shot right off.
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All of the programs in this release of Lotus SmartSuite meet Lotus guidelines for Year 2000 (Y2K) readiness. When used in accordance with its associated documentation, each of the SmartSuite programs is capable of correctly processing, providing and/or receiving date data within and between the 20th and 21st centuries, provided that all products (for example, hardware, software and firmware) used with the program properly exchange accurate date data with it.
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A little background information
-In the past, you have probably entered a 2-digit number to represent the year in a date with the assumption that the year would fall between 1900 and 1999. For example, 4/10/02 was in 1902 and 5/8/47 was in 1947.
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With the change to the year 2000, you should be aware that computer programs may now interpret dates you enter with 2-digit years to be in the 20th or the 21st century depending on the method the program uses to define a 2-digit year.
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SmartSuite programs use a sliding (rolling) window method to determine the year when you enter only 2 digits to represent the year in a date.
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Notes
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You can enter the year as 4 digits to make sure you get the results you want. For example, enter 1916 or 2016 instead of 16 for the year.
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Although you can change how a program displays a date by selecting different date formats, the program stores a constant value for the date no matter how you choose to display it.
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What is the sliding window method?
-In SmartSuite, the sliding window method defines a window of 100 years around the current year (determined by the system date on your computer). When you enter a 2-digit year, the program compares the 2 digits you entered with the years that fall within this 100 year window.
-For example, entering 25 for the year might be interpreted as 1925 but 04 might mean the year 2004.
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The years that mark the beginning and end of this window are defined by where the program splits the window with the current year.
-By default, 1-2-3, Approach, Freelance Graphics, Organizer, and Word Pro use an 80/20 rule for this sliding window — the window begins 80 years before and ends 19 years after the current year.
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How does the 80/20 rule work?
-Suppose the current year is 1999. Using the 80/20 rule, a window spanning 100 years includes the years 1919 to 2018.
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In 1999, any 2-digit year you enter from 19 to 99 will equal years from 1919 to 1999. Any 2-digit year you enter from 00 to 18 will equal years from 2000 to 2018. If you want to enter a date before 1919 or after 2018, you must enter 4 digits for the year.
-For example, assume that the current year is 1999.
-• If you enter 4/2/19, the year will be 1919.
-• If you enter 4/2/72, the year will be 1972.
-• If you enter 4/2/00, the year will be 2000.
-• If you enter 4/2/17, the year will be 2017.
-• If you enter 4/2/1917, the year will be 1917.
-Every year this 100 year window moves (slides) forward one year. Under the 80/20 rule, when the year changes to 2000, the window will include the years 1920 to 2019. When the year changes to 2001, the window will include the years 1921 to 2020, and so on.
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How do you change the 80/20 default?
-The 80/20 default for SmartSuite is set through a single entry in the Windows registry. You can change this registry entry using the sample scripts available on the Web (www.lotus.com/smartsuitedev) and in the \Extra directory on the CD version of Lotus SmartSuite.
-Caution Changing the default changes it for all of the programs in SmartSuite.
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How do SmartSuite programs store dates?
-All the SmartSuite programs store date values with the fully qualified year. Therefore, dates already stored in files are not affected by the sliding window. The sliding window is used to interpret a date when you enter it using 2 digits to represent the year.
-Caution If years are stored as separate values in a file, and scripts or macros interpret these dates as they run, the sliding window rules will apply to those values when only 2 digits are stored for the year.
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For 1-2-3 users only
-You can turn off the 80/20 sliding window in 1-2-3 by changing the date settings in the 1-2-3 Preferences dialog box. You can also display all dates with 4-digit years. For more information on 1-2-3 and the year 2000, open Help in 1-2-3 and search on Year 2000 in the Help Index.
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Notice
-The information regarding the Year 2000 readiness of Lotus products is provided for informational purposes only and is not a warranty or an extension or modification to the terms of any applicable warranty. The limited warranty for Lotus products is solely as contained in the software agreement governing your use of Lotus software. For the most complete and current information about the Year 2000 readiness of the SmartSuite products and other Lotus products, please see the Lotus Year 2000 web site (http://www.lotus.com/year2000).
Setting out upon a desperate personal journey to rediscover enchantment with computers.
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This evening, a package is scheduled to arrive upon my doorstep containing a Compaq Portable Plus luggable computer from 1983 which I have fantasized about buying for far too many years. Despite living in the midst of perhaps the worst possible financial situation to spend $139.99 outright on a relic of computing, I finally just bought one anyway last Thursday because I’m absolutely fed up with life without the magic I remember feeling from computers. Yes, I am having a mid-life crises and The Machine is just a physical manifestation of one of my favorite stories, but I expect it will provide something irreplaceable for me and at least one piece of entertainment for just about anybody: I’m going to start a photoseries of myself using the 26-lb., suitcase-like, and utterly time-displaced Portable Plus in different coffee shops throughout Portland.
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There’s also potential opportunity (or necessity) for me to make use of my limited knowledge of hardware electronics. I’ve never been very comfortable with openly using the term “hobby,” but I fully intend to savor, document, and preserve every possible detail of my experience, so we’re going to behave as if the tales of computer history are precious to a dedicated audience besides myself, and that I am thereby and hereafter binding myself to an important duty of discovery, curation, and presentation expressed through multimedia of the highest possible caliber.
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In other words, I’m pretty sure I’ve just begun a vintage computing blog. Before we go any further, then, let’s dispense with the obligatory arrangements.
Put simply, Compaq was punk as fuck. Three dorky Texan technodads premeditated their leave of fair, secure jobs in the industry in order to bet everything on the promise of a single undeniably pro-user ideal to disrupt its dominant monopolistic supervillian. Unlike any of the countless other stories from the information age with the very same introduction, theirs was immediately propelled into stratospheric, record-breaking success — from coffee table sketches in the wastelands of suburban Houston nights to one billion dollarsin less than five years, proving that it was possible to win huge in tech by committing sincerely to liberating the consumer and manifesting the ultimate performance of the underdog complex American business has ever witnessed.
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Those of us who’ve maintained some curious orbit of technology have recently entered a reconcillatory process as the world has become all at once intimately familiar with our collective pursuits’ true consequences. Never has it been more appropriate to reflect on the wholesome bravado of the only American computer company to build a billion-dollar business atop the sole mantra of user liberation. At a glance one might assume that AMC’s attempt to reproduce Mad Men’s formula with a story set in Compaq’s origin in a series that’s supposedly attracted a fair number of Netflixers called Halt and Catch Fire in conjunction with the 2016 documentary Silicon Cowboys have sufficiently reminded America of to whom it really owes its privileged tech industry. However, a Twitter search for “Compaq” turns up virtually nothing of consequence, and — on the other cultural spectrum — I’ve yet to see a single well-documented collection of Compaq hardware, and I’m unsatisfied.
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Like it not, you’re coming with me on a safari back through two full nostalgic cycles to rediscover our wonder and excitement about technology because I miss it desperately and I know you do too. We’re going to find something marvelous.
As the industry endeavors once again to reconcile the cultural and financial incentives of streaming digital music, one independent platform has wavered little from its 10-year-long mission to bring the business to the unsigned artist with elegance and integrity.
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If you’ve ever thought to yourself wow, Bandcamp has looked basically the same forever, you were entirely correct – now for a tenth of the century, at least – and you’ll be hard-pressed to find another Silicon Valley technology company toting a venture-funded origin story with such casual, yet robust long-standing user relationships underneath an unwavering, bullshit-free commitment to their product. Even under the most ludicrous scrutiny, the company’s rudder is flawless and its course true. What at first glance you’d swear to be an unsolicited conclusion to an obscure examination could very reasonably be described as cheesy, stubborn, dweebish, pious, or just generally boring, indeed, yet the respective accuracy of each of these adjectives are no more than the byproducts of the very same operational ethics which we’ve suggested, requested, demanded, and begged the rest of the world’s computing capitol to re-adopt, enforce, or at least ponder for a beat. The volume of the masses’ exponentially-increasing attendance of late is only overcome by its hysterical shouting match, so let us pipe down for a while, now so that we may be precise as we dig deeper into the methodology which has finally led to a profitable, drama-free outlying technology organization without the need for a single drop of analogous sweat over its brand upkeep. By arranging the company in its infancy to so precisely and elementally align with the needs of its customers, the original troupe of Bandcamp Bums ensured profound and lasting simplicity in the single overarching priority for those in every single role behind the quiet perpetuation of Bandcamp dot com: selling goodmusic.
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The platform indiscriminately provides both individual artists and labels with a clean, cozy, charming, smartly-designed and technically competent storefront with a wide-open storage allocation, optimal search engine optimization and a widely-trusted point of sale experience in exchange for 15% of any sales that should come in – significantly less than other channels; half what Apple Music will take. In examining Bandcamp’s history, its impact on independent music, and its viability as an alternative streaming service, we shall excavate the truth behind the derisive cynicism directed its way by the titans of the tech and music press. Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
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To catch our starting gun, we must first travel to Face The Music 2016 in Melbourne – as far as one can possibly get from The Valley – alongside Bandcamp’s super-worldly Chief Curator, Andrew Jervis to observe his interview for a live audience.
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Bandcamp has always grown extremely organically. There’s never actually been any advertising that we’ve done; there’s never any advertising on the site, and there never will be. We haven’t really tooted our horn very hard.
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In fact, just about everything from the shrewd idealism of those who beget its conception to the on-the-nose care in their person-to-person customer service is so adamantly inverse of the tech industry archetype which the global End User community at large are presently discovering at twice the speed of sound there should at least be some conspiratorializing going around. Where I come from, launching a desolate business to little mainstream success with persistence and dignified determination is (or should be) regarded as a telltale sign that one is running a front (according to the television, anyway,) but exploration of this plausibility yielded nothing in Bandcamp’s case, even after I took the risk of incrimination and begged a certain Boston-based future funk producer to accept my ginormous bribe and include any sort of pharmacological substance with his summer beat tape. He wouldn’t even send antihistamines.
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As uncomfortably as it lands on the soul, no moniker describes Bandcamp more comprehensively than “an online record store.” As far as Ethans go, Bandcamp’s CEO and founders’ public attaché Ethan Diamond is as good as they come: it’s quite telling that he is the only Silicon Valley CEO who’s remained intellectually grounded enough with the rest of us in order to retain any skills in nuanced forms of verbal communication like… humor. The closest the company has ever come to promotion? His awkward, sub-20-minute presentation at the XOXO Festival 2014 offered an impressively succinct introduction to their greater mission considering the unmistakable agony in his body language.
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“We worked out of the public library for the first four years of the company's existence,” he admits. Impressively, Bandcamp was operated entirely as a “virtual company” until 2015.
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Either Bandcamp just happens to be the single Silicon Valley company where the executives are unanimously so fucking fulfilled by their work without exception that they aren’t compelled to leave it long enough to stumble upon the inevitable coastal colleague with a connection to something like The Internet History Podcast, or technology journalism has definitively lost all reverence for actual innovation in favor of the emotionally-charged Innovation Myth, now relinquished almost entirely to the narrative control of its own protagonists. Perhaps it was inevitable that Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos would become immortalized as “those who make things happen,” but our ability to quantify value as consumers tends to scurry rapidly away behind our backs when they’re turned by the constant distraction of these mostly inert figureheads. As their personalities have stolen the story, the people in industry with their hands on real product have all but completely disappeared from the frame, and all of the work remaining at the End User’s eye level was abandoned by aspiration long ago and replaced with the unfulfilling mechanism of A Quick Buck. Though now we are proceeding into a similar frame – only because our subject cares more about their mission than claiming recognition for it and might just be the first such company run by a cast who become sincerely defensive at the suggestion of a cash-out.
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“Bandcamp’s philosophy has always been very different [from] a lot of the companies we’re surrounded by,” reflects Jervis. “We are not a ‘let’s-raise-money-and-burn-through-it’ type of company.”
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I know that your mind has been trained by years of engagement with the digital media of a rapidly-globalizing, venture capital-obsessed society to block the passage of this sort of language across your conscious threshold at risk of life-threatening overexposure to the Medium Dialect and its churnalising neoliberal cyberchode scholars of the Personal Brand; I know you’ve read the exact same quote from how many entrepreneurs in how many worthless, masturbatory business magazine profiles, but I swear on my one-of-a-kind Estonian Hilary Duff pullout that Jervis speaks without irony or deception. how many fucking churnicles have abandoned you, but this time, it’s actually sincere.
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On The Web
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Though Bandcamp was technically the first comprehensive library-modeled music streaming service in existence, the topical conversations between both technology and music journalists and industry executives flooding both podcast and news feeds at the moment orbiting the “Cord-Cutting” phenomena as it’s washed over television, cinema, and music are rooted in the same building blocks as the core technology behind the delivery of all of these conversations as well as their subjects, funny enough. As long as my subgeneration has known it, The Web has been a source of sound in some manifestation, but the example with the most perplexing history was also the first. Today, one of five tabs in the main menu of my iPhone’s native music app contains the text “Radio” beneath an “antenna with waves” graphic which opens a service once called iTunes Radio that was absorbed into – and restricted to subscribers of – Apple Music as of 2016, confusingly. However, both “iTunes Radio” and “Apple Music Radio(?)” – along with any and all audio streaming services (mentioned and not) – are fundamentally nothing more than different UX design interpretations of the “simple” practice of streaming an audio file, which made its debut at the turn of the century in the form of “Internet Radio.” Astonishingly, the protocol – still referred to by at least one person on Earth as “Webcasting,” no doubt – has survived nearly 20 years, and even the youngest of us have likely encountered it in unusual situations.
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Ironically, the majority of Internet Radio broadcasts remaining on the air are nothing more than live duplicates of the traditional radio wave-bound products from the physical stations your car’s head unit receives. Even the current desktop version of iTunes maintains support for streaming “audio files over the internet,” though a glance at Apple’s dated support page for the process suggests it hasn’t crossed anybody’s mind for at least half of that history. In 1994, the publicly-funded radio network Voice of America became the “First [radio] on the Internet” when it began – after an introduction by Al Gore, no less – “offering digitized audio versions of selected newscasts and other program segments in 15 languages on its public internet server on Monday, Aug. 15,” according to former engineer Chris Kern. However – since we’re already this deep into internet history – a distinction must be established between streaming static files and streaming live audio. The first relies on pre-recorded audio files uploaded to a publicly-accessible server – in Kern’s original case, “via anonymous FTP and the Internet Gopher protocol,” which continues to be the elemental process behind every audio file streamed across the Web (including those on Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) more or less because it ain’t broke.
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Semantically, “live” digital audio streaming in its aforementioned “purest” form is more or less exclusive to Internet Radio. Obscured aside from the traditional station simulcast, Web-only Internet Radio stations have their own of “the Internet’s quiet success stories,” filled with quaint experiences and an endless cycle of death proclamations which continue to be disproven, anywise.
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On June 27th, 1999, The Seattle Times ran an especially worthwhile introduction to the concept that likely represents the only major newspaper’s mention of SHOUTcast (the first and likely last name in DIY Web DJing) in the history of the printed word within a work of truly phenomenal tech reporting on Mark Mataassa’s part. From the past, one will find his chillingly spot-on foresight and well-considered observations are bestrewed with mind-boggling hilarity when they look.
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Dialing in to the Net through a 56 kilobit-per-second modem, as I am, this seems like a ridiculous waste – or at least misallocation – of resources.
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I'm using a $3,000 machine, tying up a phone line and seriously compromising my computing power for an experience that in sound quality, simplicity and dependability can't compare, truthfully, with the $9 Emerson clock radio an arm's length away.
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And yet Web radio is one of the hottest ideas going in the ever-hot world of Internet startups and acquisitions: In the past few months, America Online and Yahoo! each have purchased fast-growing Web music sites, rock-music trendsetters like Rolling Stone and MTV have gotten into the business, and technological improvements – from Microsoft's newest browser and Real Networks' newest player to the latest MP3 enhancements – are closing the quality and accessibility gaps.
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The combination of developments is not only changing how computers (and radios) are used, but offering a glimpse of a future when audience demographics are sliced ultra-thin – to the person – and everybody has the potential to be a radio broadcaster as well as listener.
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I only have a few experiences with Internet Radio of my own, but they’re all rampantly more memorable than one would expect. The now in-stasis NWIRE project was by the most relevantly intriguing and savvily-curated home for a diverse host of electronic musicians I’ve ever come across – it was my second default browser tab for most of 2017, when I’d even listen to the odd-hour broadcasts overseen by just the automated library-perusing bot for hours. On episode 16 of Drycast, I recounted the absurd tale of my surprise morning encounter with a Norwegian station’s live broadcast from some European breakcore club, which was likely responsible for the most fun I’ve ever had working in retail.
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Extratone’s former Tech Editor is partial to a station called Radio Swiss Jazz, which appears to be thriving in comparison with most visible broadcasters, and unapologetically emits a bizarre amalgamation of tunes both chart-topping and Seriously Obscure across every conceivable genre (including Marching Music,) and continent of origin. Between every few charts, the brief commentary and station identification has provided our own private mystery: Was that one pre-recorded? This guy was on yesterday, but has since shed his accent? However, these tiny temporary mysteries are Internet Radio’s only remaining value for us, and I suspect the same is true for all but the most laggard laggards. For as long as I’ve been coherent enough to disseminate between much of anything, very few of its visible offerings have offered anything groundbreaking or fresh, perhaps out of negligence (one can very easily arrange leave a machine running SHOUTcast to shuffle through a given library of music and/or podcasts indefinitely,) frustration, or economic necessity.
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Crucially, the truly most critical consequences and contributions provided by the pioneers of Internet Radio to our current digital streaming experience were centered within intellectual property legislation and advertising-supported business. Unfortunately, this juncture marks our complete departure from my wheelhouse, but thankfully, a few sacred accounts of one of technology’s foremost confusing clashes with the ill-equipped, technoilliterate monoliths of the American justice system do indeed remain. As early as 2002, the ineffable Doc Searls reported on a document authored by the Library of Congress’ Copyright Royalty Board called “Determination of Royalty Rates and Terms for Ephemeral Recording and Webcasting Digital Performance of Sound Recordings” for Linux Journal in an encyclopedic breakdown of its implications ironically entitled “Why Are So Many Internet Radio Stations Still on the Air?” I would hope my comprehension is sufficient to declare that this was no Cambridge Analytica: only a few years subsequent the technology’s inception, operators within the Internet Radio business faced serious and immediate fines for their pre-enforcement distribution of copyrighted material stretching four years back – the severity of which the Doc suggested would “surely bankrupt many of the individual broadcasters that have been pioneering this marketplace for the longest time.”
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Unlike the commercial radio stations we hear on the old-fashioned airwaves, Internet radio stations' primary market relationship isn't with advertisers; it's with listeners. In many cases, the listeners are the primary source of revenue. This business model is similar to that of noncommercial (public) radio, only the market relationship is much more direct and efficient. Internet radio stations don't need to stop programming to hold marathon whine-fests begging listeners to call phone volunteers and pledge money to qualify for a mug or a t-shirt. Listeners simply click on a PayPal or an Amazon link, and after a few more clicks they've made a payment.
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By March, 2010, just 374 stations were aggregated in Google’s Internet Radio Directory, and my own quick sample from its list unfortunately indicated that most are now silent, but SHOUTcast has yet to be abandoned after all this time and we can safely suppose the core architecture of the internet will remain recognizable enough to support it until after we’re all dead, rendering the necessary tools indefinitely ready and accessible should new projects in NWIRE’s vein come along (I know of no better fate I could wish upon the protocol.) From Internet Radio’s pioneer days, we must skip over a whole era to close in on Bandcamp’s origin in the very brightest peak of Web 2.0.
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Again, we find ourselves in 2008 and nobody knows what an iPhone is, but the same classic rock-worshiping, upper-middle class, white collar Early Majority who first loved Internet Radio are now rapidly and delightedly distributing links to something called “Pandora dot com” between AOL and Hotmail inboxes. True luxury music reproduction comes in the form of Beats headphones motivated by a 320GB iPod Classic. Budding audiophiles and backpacker dweebs illegally torrent lossless .FLACs to play over their Christmas-gifted studio monitors with WinAmp, which they’ve set up to impeccably “scrobble” their history with every played track to their Last.fm profiles. Everybody else is still buying music from iTunes. (Those who cannot afford to buy the music they intend to add to their libraries transition to the music nerd classification as soon as they’ve sought out a way to obtain it free.) “Streaming” comes from subscription services like Rhapsody (now Napster,) which are too buried in Digital Rights Management controversy to feel sustainable. MySpace Music has just begun to fade away – next year, in “the Twitter era,” SoundCloud will definitively replace it as the go-to creator network – and Pandora’s immediate future is bright – they’ll make a big move on brand-new mobile streaming experience when they launch their iPhone OS app in July, but the limited performance of the handset’s EDGE network will render it a poor alternative to onsite .mp3s for years to come.
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In January, to minimal acclaim, Oddpost’s Ethan Diamond launched Bandcamp, the startup with programmer friends Joe Holt, Shawn Grunberger, and Neal Tucker to be “a sortof WordPress for musicians” – an easily-created, well-designed landing page to showcase one’s digital music files. As Holt laments in an interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for your music had long been “a pain in the ass.”
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“You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.”
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As an address to all of their shared complaints about the experience of online music distribution up to that point, early Bandcamp was an astounding piece of engineering. The quaint, unsurprisingly crate-digger-looking Ethan Diamond – who’s more or less remained the singular public face of the company since the very beginning – began a brand tradition of transparently music-nerdy correspondence with his first post on the Bandcamp blog, explaining the solutions the team had come up with in greater detail.
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We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
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The launch garnered very little attention from tech or music publications of the time, but Andy Baio’s interview with Diamond provides a substantial, technically in-depth picture of just how revolutionary and necessary it was. Most of what has continued to make Bandcamp such an essential tool was present at the very beginning: server-side stats and metadata (a unique architectural undertaking, no doubt,) track and album-oriented pagination, and a robust, easily-embedded Flash player.
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Study Diamond’s first “screencast” alongside a video tour of SoundCloud from the period and you’ll notice just how much more functional, future-proofed and dignified Bandcamp appeared in comparison. As apprehensive as I am to be caught arguing for minimalism over good design, it’s made perfect sense in the use case of this one platform, which knew exactly what it was from birth, along with what it would always be, apparently, which is such a bizarre reversal of the archetypes and the relentless common narrative we know from The Valley’s legends. Ethan first shows the consumer’s experience – none of which has changed after a whole decade aside from quality-specific track purchases – before delving into the artist-side UI, beginning with the statistics tool, which included playback and search insights to a depth that was (and still is) unheard of from a free service. Then, he demonstrates the publishing process from upload to playback: adding album art, setting a release date, and pricing its purchase. Aside from their removal of the old waveform visualizer (I couldn’t find any record of an announcement of this decision, official or otherwise,) Bandcamp has changed absolutely nothing of what’s shown in Diamond’s tutorial. In the next few months, they would add custom page design, email address capture, and support for custom domains. By October 2008, they’d made enough waves to be picked up by CNET, for whatever that was worth. Apparently, Facebook Music was a legitimate property as well, but I do not remember anything about it at all—pondering an alternate reality in which The Social Network became the dominant online music streaming platform leads to a bizarre comparison of Neil Diamond and Mark Zuckerberg which I can’t imagine being altogether productive. Suffice it to say, the two founders’ visions differ greatly.
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Musicblogocide
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Contextually, it’s also important that we dwell for a moment on the legal and financial hullabaloo surrounding music sales during Bandcamp’s first formative years, and the federal government’s losing battle to interpret, enforce, or replace intellectual property law for the information age. As the Web had grown exponentially more capable and accessible as a means of audio file distribution, it had become absolutely saturated with blatantly DRM-circumventing .mp3s and .wavs. For years, the quickest way to follow up on a check it out sort of music recommendation was simply to search Google for its track name followed by “.mp3.” If the first go didn’t yield success, even the most rudimentary application of cryptography – like substituting some variation of “nsilmtic.rar” to find a download for Nas’ Illmatic, for instance – was a sure bet for one’s second try, which would often return several copies just laying around Google-indexed WordPress media libraries, though results hosted on Mediafire were a preferable alternative. This was the establishment into which my first adolescent digital music discoveries were borned, and I’m still convinced that 99% of us participants were completely without malice. I’d argue heartily that music’s brief escape from the tireless grip of the record industry as its only medium stumbled into digital form would be clearly shown to have a net gain for the whole of American recording artists if you could measure and plot it, including the past, present, and future use of peer-to-peer sharing.
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2010 would prove to be The Year of Reckoning for the fraction of DRM-violating traffic on the visible Web, at least. Though it’d be virtually impossible to quantify, is it only reasonable to assume that many siteowners made some real money from the ad impressions that directly resulted from their unauthorized hosting and Mediafire-embedding, but let’s consider how minuscule even the most outrageously liberal overestimate would be, side-by-side with the billions in additional revenue YouTube has raked in from the same music since assuming their place as the de facto platform for quickly summoning just about any work of audio that’s ever taken digital form. It was in February of that year that Blogger (another Google property) deleted six music blogs from its platform in response to complaints about allegedly DMCA-violating .mp3s. The Registryinsisted the collective finger be pointed at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, itself.
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“It would seem the music bloggers aren't versed in the ways of DMCA claims and counterclaims. But you can't blame Google for that,” they concluded, after one of the blog’s founders expressed some of the most personally-dramatic words mine empathy has yet faced as quoted in The Guardian.
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“It's just sad because we were documenting young people's music from all around the globe. For a lot of people, it was music they wouldn't have been able to discover elsewhere.”
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In hindsight, “blame” is an even more useless avenue of one’s attention than usual, especially when one party (Google) was 100% exempt from any consequences all along. The alarming takeaway is not the DMCA’s deftness, but that Google had the freedom to wait for a parallel business incentive before deciding the law applied to them.
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Frankly, we should all have realized long ago just how fucking futile it is to attempt to control any file traffic. Every desktop-class browser ships with the capability to capture any streamable media on the Web with a handful of keystrokes – it’d take a maximum of 20 minutes to bestow upon even the most casual user the knowledge they’d need to keep every single track, YouTube video, and Twitch stream they’d ever watch, 100% legally without a single third-party service/extension interaction, but the crucial question remains to what end, exactly? It’s easy, but it’s not exactly a fun way to spend an afternoon. The only two rationales that’d justify capturing streamed Web files at scale are 1) the totally bonkers inclination that any given property/ies is likely to disappear from the entire World Wide Web, ever or 2) the increasingly rarefying expectation of prolonged time away from internet access.
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As Bandcamp has stood so obdurately still, the mainstream music streaming sphere has expanded titanically around it as if enveloping the Indie platform in a surrealist timelapse within the eye of a ruinous tech industry cyclone, which would explosively expand the market into a ghoulish, filthy monstrosity beyond anything we’d recognize from the rule of the WinAmp Hipster, long ago. Today, the coolest and most rabid daily music listeners I know all have Spotify memberships, joining 70 million others globally as of January. For most, it’s how they prefer to swaddle their lives in a constant soundtrack – at work, in the car, at school, then at home on the television. For many, it’s how they “explore” new music outside of peer and social recommendations... or, that’s how the narrative was supposed to go, anyway. Those folks I know who actually create music, however, are rarely seen using Spotify—even after they’ve endured untold horrors in order to publish their own music there—because the real story of its track record as a place to “Discover” new artists, genres, or sounds is completely abysmal. When 2017’s streaming data began coming in this past January, a popular feature by Galaxie 500’s Damon Krukowski was run by the definitively terminal music magazine of broad notoriety—Pitchfork—entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which he began by citing some very alarming statistics.
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“More than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks [on Spotify.] Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.”
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Why? A brazen disregard for necessary meta information, for one.
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“Look now at how badly their applications already serve entire genres of less popular music. Spotify lists recordings by song title, album title, or featured artist name. But that information is so limited it leaves out even the other performers on a recording, a crucial aspect to classical and jazz.”
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Alarming for those of us who intend to create or consume any music separate the Top 40, anyway, which one should feel justified expecting from most people, most of the time. Last month, The Carters released an album on which even Beyoncé identified the problematic service by name. “Patiently waiting for my demise ‘cause my success can’t be quantified,” she rapped, “if I gave two fucks about streaming numbers woulda put Lemonade up on Spotify.” The unfortunate issue with this single denouncement of the industry’s current direction is that its source is adamantly guaranteed a place for her work within Spotify’s top 10 percent for the rest of her career’s lifetime (and probably far beyond.)
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[I could now take the time to complain that she’s also entirely abandoned the city she owes for her career’s creation in its darkest hour, but let’s just plan on coming back to the subject at a later date, when we’ll be sure to touch on how terribly Drake also treats Houston (and women.)]
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Unsurprisingly, the apathy is far from mutual. From the Swedish company’s perspective, the digits themselves should’ve been dearly and universally beloved from the beginning, and their exponentially ballooning hubris became so inflated by 2014 that they launched a WordPress blog dedicated entirely to promoting and discussing their data called Spotify Insights, proclaiming themselves—naturally—to be “the world’s favorite streaming service,” championing the growing diversity in their demographics. Though Beyoncé is mentioned only twice upon a search of its archive as it stands today, it’s with fanfare: “10 Female Artists Women Listen To The Most on Spotify” declared her the third most popular female artist among women, globally, and “Single Ladies” the number one female-streamed track in the world (assuming I’m interpreting its language correctly.)
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We’ve established that Spotify has comfortably planted itself at the polar opposite end of the business spectrum from Bandcamp, yet for the sake of an oblivious adjudicating layman’s understanding, you’d have your work cut out for you explaining the difference between them: both are online marketplaces with gigantic libraries of digital music which a listener can browse, download locally, or stream from using Web browser or the mobile applications offered by each, respectively—and they can do from just about anywhere, for as much or as little as they wish. And—as the music industry and its satellites shall always remain for the rest of humanity’s reign—both are overwhelmingly associated with young people. There, the crucial divide should probably ring a bell—it’s been a constant between cultural generations for as long as culture, itself has existed.
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There are those among us who’s adolescent adoration of music is still completely valid as a very powerful component of hormonal development, yet doomed to quickly sizzle into casual listening or worse by the time our post-secondary Senior year rolls around. And then, there are those on whom the curiosity clings devotedly on: the cool high school punk band-forming types our culture loves to romanticize, who’ll inevitably end up bald and bespeckled with a pre-dawn community radio block. These Musicians, Crate-Diggers, and capital-A Audiophiles have historically overlapped in synonymous functions across a love triangle of dweebish intolerability, though it’s become especially easy as of late to forget that DIY recording is by no means a recent development—its financial and technical barrier-to-entry has simply plummeted thanks to the developmental progression of Digital Audio Workstations and a growing industry of consumer-oriented audio equipment. For succinct insight into this dynamic, let’s refer to the pre-dialogue context in Chuck Klosterman’s GQ interview with “the second- or the third-best rock guitarist of all time”—Zinc Blimp legend Jumbo Page.
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The only thing Page really wants to talk about [is] the sound of the music, and how that sound was achieved. He can talk about microphone placement for a very, very long time. Are you interested in having a detailed conversation about how the glue used with magnetic audiotape was altered in the late 1970s, subsequently leading to the disintegration of countless master tapes? If so, locate Jimmy Page. If a different musician obsessed over technological details with this level of exacting specificity, he would likely be classified as a “nerd,” as that has become a strange kind of compliment in the Internet age. People actually want to be seen as nerds. But that designation does not apply here. Jimmy Page does not seem remotely nerdy.
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Bandcamp’s core architecture was handbuilt from the beginning to handle the “hard part” for creators “so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy,” which it, alone pioneered on the Web, becoming the best metadata management utility for all time, but also committing to a traditional interpretation of music mediums that can feel old fashioned in 2018. Despite having been around for a directly comparable length of time, SoundCloud has maintained its relevance among friends in my network as the more socially-focused platform for keeping up with work from their peers thanks in large part to its exclusive, timestamp-oriented comment function, which allows for ultra-specific shortform feedback between fellow creators and fans. This is how the company has chosen to grow its community, which has lent especially to its strength in the most “nerdy” independent scenes: hip-hop and electronic music. The experience is busy by design and the divide between listener and creator is next to non-existent—by now, the difference is universally irrelevant. External sharing has also become a major strength since the inception of SoundCloud’s Web audio player, which was unlike any other embeddable we’d ever seen at the time. Over the years, it’s become the most universally-supported means of embedding a track or playlist elsewhere, though the space has quite recently began blooming with a few much slimmer Open Web offshoots like Vocaroo, Clyp, and Instaudio.
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While I can casually throw these names around for you in the same sized font, the gulfs between the properties they denote are completely inexpressible in words. Because Spotify went public in Q1 of this year, they released their first earnings report in April: 170 million active monthly users, $1.33 billion in total quarterly revenue, and $5.7-$6.2 billion in expected total revenue for 2018. I’ll spare you the entire Forbes piece it would require to comprehensively demonstrate just how cavernous of a disparity canyon the industry represents. Early projects like Pandora were docile, ad-free, and sincerely curious about the curatorial potential of music streaming services – *let’s use this cool new tech to play music for anybody with a Web browser if only because it’ll be a blast* – yet in that sense, they’ve all failed entirely. All except Bandcamp, anyway.
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“We started as a service to help artists sell their music and merchandise directly to their fans, but then as the site grew—it’s now at about 12 million tracks and 1.5 million albums [as of 2014]—we evolved into also being a destination for music Discovery,” he explains, partially anticipating the foot-to-the-floor transition to streaming which has indeed shook the industry the hell up over the years since. The company's solution is minimal, elemental, yet uniquely alternative as only theirs could be: an idealized digital interpretation of a music collection, which had actually launched a year before XOXO as part of “Bandcamp for Fans.” That release notably introduced the ability to “follow” both artist and fan accounts, the now-iconic “supported-by” section on release pages showing customers’ avatars and optional comments, and public wishlists. “I think it’s great to use a streaming service for music Discovery—they can be really really good for that,” Diamond concedes, before reiterating one of the several variations of Bandcamp’s founding premise that composes his core argument: “if you actually care about music, and you care about the people who make it, and you want them to keep making it, the best way to do that is to buy directly from them, or to use services that allow you to directly support them.”
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Instead of the “firehose”-like experience of a contemporary activity feed, “you’ve got a collection of albums and tracks that people were passionate enough to spend money on.” For my personal use, Ethan lit up a long-dormant incandescent bulb in my skull. My use of Bandcamp had long been to purchase and download music files, only—never to stream it—and there’s been good reason for this. While Bandcamp has formally supported playback on iPhone and iPad in-browser since July 2010, actually using it for any substantial amount of playback has always been a souring endeavor. Considering that it’s persisted to this day, we must concede that it is part of an intentional design rather than just an irritating flaw: multitasking between apps or even browser tabs will prevent continuous playback of an album, as will locking the device. In order to move from track to track fluidly, one must keep the page with the in-use Bandcamp player front and center. For three years, this was the only way to stream Bandcamp on mobile, but such capability was far from reliably expected by even the earliest adopters, then—3G data networks were worse than you remember, anyway—and then in 2013, the Bandcamp app was launched on iOS and Android, providing a sufficient fix in my book at the time. (I’d rather any externally-embedded players I may engage with in an album review or artist profile be limited to a single track, anyway.) However, the app itself remained quite mediocre for years, which was a tangible disappointment given how revolutionary their desktop experience had been when the company launched,but not necessarily a substantial deterrent to the sort of user they were attracting.
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I made a point to spend a lot of time engaging with Bandcamp’s service as much as possible – naturally, this included a trip back through my neglected, digitally dusty Collection, which proved a way more emotionally provocative experience than I anticipated. Ethan’s simple truth didn’t really sink in until I realized that this list is made up exclusively of my real favorites, and there’s not a single track that is not inextricably and intoxicatingly tied to a specific era(s) of my life (yes, even that one Blank Banshee album... I was 18, okay?) It’s absurdly powerful—not something I could engage with for any extended time without becoming saturated with nostalgic gut stuff. (Listen for my upcoming special celebratory episode of Extratone Radio to hear the best music I’ve found through Bandcamp.) It hadn’t occurred to me that I would retain ownership and streaming rights to all music I’ve purchased—including for a $0.00 sum, as I did for at least half of the works you see—even after an artist chose to delete or hide it on their own page. (Though they are not retained in my public collection, of course.)
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The Discovery Debacle
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Pursuing an objective definition of “music Discovery” might appear foolish – an individual’s music taste is perhaps the most broadly angst-steeped realms of overwhelming subjectivity in modern American culture, after all – but its the pungent poignancy of our fundamental human relationship with sound, itself which makes the history of Discovery’s digitization so important (and fascinating.) If I were to ask you what you believe should be the single most important function that must be reliably performed by any “music Discovery” device – whether it be an application, Web service, magazine or even a crate-digging habit – the single factor which would render whole vague concept inert, irrelevant, and/or completely destroyed, how would you answer? How would you interpret the question?
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It’s important we do well to take a considerable moment to cultivate a special wariness of the eggshells beneath our feet in this arena. Debatably at least a minim more than one’s taste in film, Americans from Generation X on forward until the end of time (I suspect) will hold “their” music as perhaps the most integral support upon which their identities are built throughout every stage of their lives. The intense sensation of ownership that propels this phenomenon within our culture leaves an especially sensitive passage ahead of us.
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As a wide-eyed teenager and infantile audio producer, I explored the idea of anti-music in my own entirely Bandcamp-supported project while I searched – aided tremendously by my expert best friend – for the edgiest, least sensical sounds and scenes on which to publicly attach on my identity in an opposing of “Discovery’s” extremes with fandom: an obsessive, entirely-detached last-ditch skirmish between the cultural reality and my delusional pubescent need to be unique. This process appears to be a universal requisite in modern youth in one form or another, but it’s important now that I emphasize this confession: I was an especially ostentatious little backpacker fuck, but I’ve continued to find my shame well worth achieving a specific balance for music’s purpose in my life, and I’d anecdotally endorse its potential to relieve cognitive dissonance at great scale. There’s only so much fun to be had blasting breakcore cassettes at deafening, distorted volumes solely to bewilder rural overnight convenience store clerks on their smoke breaks in the wee hours or the bruteforce seizure of the speakers’ Bluetooth connection at a frat party just to play harsh noise or anime-sampling Hardstyle while demonically shrieking – eyes rolled back – and lighting various parts of oneself ablaze before one realizes that 1) it’s they who end up looking like the idiots for aggressively breaching a group’s fun with inappropriate tunes (yes, no matter how interesting, rare, or underrated they may be, Chadley;) 2) by ferally manifesting, you’ve deligitimized yourself, which 3) can seriously damage any future attempts to accomplish the fundamental drive to share the gospel of music’s variety out of your own rubish frustration with the differences between you.
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The real, sweetest truth is that 100% of all music has value potential because of the medium’s broad influence on the human psyche. Pop music is amazing right now; the signature trap sound we devalued with Datpiff jokes made us all look like fools when it unconsciously transcended our “irony” and burrowed its own huge partition in our sincere hearts. After my pitiful attempt to reject and distance myself from my own rural roots by scoffing at country music for years, I’ve made a beautiful peace with the childhood memories and the historic excellence of Shania Twain and The Dixie Chicks in their mastery of both wholesome joy and crippling nostalgia (I’ve even cried to Taylor Swift.) Yes, it’s been entirely reasonable all along to enjoy the straightforwardly slothen pleasure in belching “Sweet Home Alabama” pounding cheap pissbeer on a foul pontoon boat on the Lake of the Ozarks, leaving my penultimate irony to confess that I’ve only found true and serene identity through music after learning how to stop insisting so violently upon the worldly, one-of-a-kind superiority of my “taste.”
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That said, it’s still bewildering how content we are to abruptly abandon the substance music had to our teenage selves out of misconstrued justifications for our classic fainéance – actively choosing to subject our public ambiance to thousands of replays of “the best” records in favor of dipping even the most cowardly toe into unfamiliar waters, even when the opportunity cost is inherently halved – only to then have the audacity to evangelize our dilapidated conceptions of “good music” to our children as we demonize the music of their generation, depriving them of a very essential rite of their cognitive development. I can think of little more reductive, repugnant, reckless, or racist crusades as a model figure than indoctrinating your child with an inherent distaste for their own culture, and nothing more deeply alarming to hear from the mouth of someone born in the 21st century than shit like “Queen was better than any rapper will ever be,” or “real musicianship will die forever with Eric Clapton.” It’s unfair and unnatural: imagine if your high school classmates had consistently turned up their scrunched nose at the living whole of rock & roll, declaring Scott Joplin to be the last musician they could stand.
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Consider if the industry-wide customer experience standard for the musical ambiance in 1970s American eating and drinking establishments was entirely comprised of works by John Phillip Souza, and the most prevalent cultural revolution manifested itself something like the following: In countless popular films set in the time (and the stories told today by your parents of their youths that informs them,) a group of popular high school boys – generally three longtime childhood friends and a single addition from the previous summer with an Army Dad and a moderate bad boy aura that’s made him one of the school’s notoriously attractive students and the somewhat-abusive leader in the pack. After spending some time trying to convince the other three (the crucial moment for his case being the bad kid’s rare moment of sincerity trope) of its guaranteed social, sexual and financial ROI, they seal their agreement to start a band with a four-way saliva slap. Imagine if in the progression of this exhausted old tale, it remained entirely classic (and boring) when it faded to a “THREE MONTHS LATER...” ceiling shot of the four the in full, gleaming, performance-spec get-up of the presidential marching band in their garage, and it was revealed that they’d they practiced “The Star Spangled Banner” every night just to make the girls swoon in the film’s resolution with an encore of “America the Beautiful” at an unsanctioned (and very patriotic!) house party.
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Suffice it to say that it’s absolutely fucking bonkers how often I encounter “Sweet Home Alabama” (and other tunes I’ve already heard hundreds of times throughout the first third of my existence, conservatively) dripping down from the overhead speakers in all manner of big retail stores, where it’s inappropriate and unwelcome. Even from the generous assumption that every single one of them is an objective masterwork of composition, the amount of affection the American music listening audience has for the same 500 singles is on par with our rampant gun violence in terms of our unanimous tolerance for ridiculously illogical habits. I’ve been sitting in a cute, moderately trendy coffee shop on the corner of the major avenue of access to my cute, moderately trendy Portland neighborhood for an hour now, and I’ve recognized every single one of the tracks played just a bit too loudly on the stereo. I’ve been sick of them all since Middle School. That one Bow Bow Chicka Chicka thing… How very charming.
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“The 70s, the 80s… the one-hit wonder channel!”
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Contrary to the popular hipster narrative we’ve just defeated, it’s not the popularity of the lineup that makes these experiences so distasteful, but their regularity. It doesn’t take a doctor of psychology to observe that tireless exposure to any given work of art inevitably erodes its value, yet we continue to expend resources saturating most mundane spaces in our society with an unyielding regurgitation of the same brackish pop culture symbols as if we’re trying to either induce a canonical vomit, intentionally obliterate the Yelp! reviews for a distant future museum’s “North America Enters the 21st Century” exhibit, or both. After failing my best attempts to elaborate with historical analogy citing a past event, I’m afraid we must pivot to a science fiction-esque nanonarrative containing obnoxiously speculative hypotheticals, instead.
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Imagine: It’s 2036 – four years after we found out we are not alone in the universe when a significantly more advanced civilization makes formal first contact with humanity by sending a party of diplomats, anthropologists, and explorers (who were actually getting ready to go in 2016 before getting word of the Trump presidency and deciding we weren’t quite ready just yet) who land their space egg right in front of the United Nations’ New York City headquarters and expressing something to the tune of hey so um… we noticed you guys moved in and we just wanted to stop by and say hi, entirely altering humanity’s self-perception and future trajectory (see: works by Gene Roddenberry) yadda yadda. The visitors expressed a wish to begin a cultural exchange project with us, and it’s just now coming to fruition… I have only moments ago made history in the eyes of the entire world when I walked through the front door of a Target store in suburban New Jersey leading a hovering hyper-intelligent silicon-based sphere of agender mist (roughly comparative to a basketball in size,) who’s already both impressing and shaming me tremendously as we move by the in-store Starbucks. From above us, Semisonic’s “Closing Time” is belched upon my life’s proudest moment and my guest requests we pause to discuss it, to my profound horror.
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“The sound from the reproduction devices embedded above us...” the android translator trails off for a moment. “It is the same noise that was distantly reproduced 51 hours ago in ‘Miami’ as I conversed with Ambassador Phillip Defranco about ‘the setting sun’ on the ‘beach,’ coming from a small open air structure which he defined as ‘a surf shop,’ which was occupied by a young male who appeared to be moderately agitated, moving about in jagged strides as he wildly smacked the foundational surface with ‘a broom.’ The Ambassador explained the youth was likely nearing the end of his allotted period of daily occupational labor.”
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Blood is flooding my cheeks as I listen with a building dread to the robot’s interpretation, awash with all manner of embarrassment for my species.
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“Is the purpose of this noise reproduction of a logistical nature, or is it perhaps a common ritual within business and/or working class culture?”
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Now, it’s your turn to be the human representative in this pico science fiction: you’re now obligated to confirm the alien anthropologist’s hypothesis and explain that “Closing Time” is but one piece of recorded music among billions of diverse expressive works across millennia. You must reverently describe how the “universal language” of math within melodious composition has long been a hefty buzzword in the pop culture conversations about interstellar communication and our longtime search for extraterrestrial intelligence from the future-thrilled 90s—S.E.T.I.’s glory days – when we felt pretty damned good about space. The historic launch of the United Nations’ “greetings on behalf of the people of our planet” etched into The Golden Record aboard Voyager I and Jodie Foster’s novel portrayal of a S.E.T.I. scientist in the iconic Carl Sagan-sourced 1997 science fiction drama Contact are among the globally-celebrated Best Hits of humanism (not to mention the organization listed on your paystubs,) and they weigh a billion tons on you, now—in the most significant moment of your entire life, bar none – as you explain on behalf of your species to real extraterrestrial intelligence the reality of how negligent it is actually is of the culture the Record claimed to treasure. The worst part, though? The entire experience is accompanied by a nasal-as-hell Semisonic soundtrack.
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Aren’t you frustrated? You should be, but it’s not over yet: inevitably, your round fictional companion of note is going to follow up their query with some seriously burning meat.
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“Just a half-generation ago, your utopian dream of a globally-connected world – in which everyone would be empowered to saturate and culture themselves with new ideas and forms of expression – was the defining aspiration of your society, and yet you’ve definitively achieved Total Connectivity, now, and caused the overwhelmingly opposite result: you’re all intolerable shitheads who every passing solar orbit become less and less capable of anything but regurgitation of the same foul bullshit. Y’all fucking wack. I’m out. ”
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And there, that filthy little ball would have us all. Friends, colleagues, human siblings of mine, it’s long-past time we expect better from ourselves as music citizens of the world. Even the longest living of us are endowed with very little opportunity to absorb anything more than an infinitesimal fraction of all there is to experience, and we’ve all been carelessly and embarrassingly chucking it to the weeds. If it this all seems excessive, there’s no need to feel attacked, but for Pete’s sake… please stop claiming you “like music” because it’s misleadingly inaccurate and I’ll promise never to use the phrase “music citizens of the world” again, in exchange.
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Distribution & Curation
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You, your friends, and I are missing out on way too much cool shit and we’re going to continue addressing possible causes and solutions to this ongoing catastrophe without asking for a single moved finger on your part because we are fucking saints. Let’s come back to ground and consider a casual real-world use case for a streaming service which I’ve observed.
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It’s just after 1PM on an especially beautiful Summer day in 2018, and you’ve decided with your two best friends that an impromptu hot dog barbecue in your little apartment’s parking lot would be a great way to spend the afternoon. You get on Facebook Messenger – no time to bother with the formality of creating an event – and begin to bother your group of art school friends. In a few hours, you’ve set up chairs in a circle around the borrowed fire pit, gathered meat tubes, marshmallows, and beer, and your guests have begun to arrive. The next step: retrieve your cordless Bluetooth speaker from inside to place it atop a log nearest the scene, re-pair it with your smartphone, and ___?
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Let’s acknowledge that music has incredibly diverse purposes of value in human life—of course I realize this—and ultimately, nobody can dictate those fulfilled for another individual by any given track, album, artist, or genre across time and setting. Even splittercore-obsessed serial killers and body modding cybergrind disciples are doomed: inevitably, they will one day let their guard down and find themselves singing along with “Goodbye Earl” on the radio way off key, smiling like a doofus. Even if one hates humanity, they will eventually be forced to acknowledge that The Dixie Chicks came very close to its penultimate manifestation.
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I understand that it’s not always time for something new for everyone, but you’re missing out on music’s most worthwhile function by far if you never seek anything fresh, and—if you still find yourself unwilling to bother, even—carrying around even the slightest bit of anecdotal knowledge about what’s going on in music with you can be invaluably culturing to your image when socializing with youths and alien intelligences, alike. There is a spectrum of enthusiasm (or pretentiousness, depending on one’s own subjectives) for music that is far more culturally consequential than the practice of partaking and/or patroning any other artform. Settle comfortably on any point – extreme or not – and you’re at serious risk of being uncool. Nobody wants Anthony Fantano showing up to their party, but if you live too long confusing the Beach Boys with the Beatles – as I have – folks start to behave as if there’s something wrong with you. If it helps, let’s suppose this to be the real reason behind my need to discuss Bandcamp – perhaps its relative lack of aged or worshiped-at-scale work justifies it all.
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By this nature, its effort is designed to bracket the enthusiast as wholly as possible, but the value most in need of its experience has become its comparatively extravagant hospitality for the dabbler. The “Discoverinator” (I would’ve voted for calling it “Genre-Fucker”) is simply the most ingenious tool available anywhere to filter music by genre, subgenre, location, and medium. Or at least... It’s too gorgeous not to be. Thanks to its recent visual redesign, I don’t even care if it’s useful—it’s just a beautiful thing to play with on both the Web and the iOS app (though I’d bet they were each crafted separately.)
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Front and center on the homepage is the Bandcamp Daily – a showcase of features, lists, albums of the day, and artist interviews from various staff and guest contributors which I’d most certainly judge befit of a standalone publication – and the Bandcamp Weekly – an extraordinarily-produced podcast like no other with special mixes, guest appearances, and commentary which the company’s Chief Curator Andrew Jervis has been honing since 2013 over 289 episodes as of this morning. Its player functions both in-browser and on the iOS app unlike any I’ve ever seen, with a list of embedded tracks that pop out when they’re actually spinning on the show so that you can engage further with them, if you wish. It’s difficult to describe, but it feels visually like you’re listening to a playlist in Bandcamp’s normal player, except tracks are intermixed and faded between one another beneath the host’s commentary, so the audio itself must be pre-rendered. Regardless, it’s nearly as extraordinary an achievement in Web design as the program itself is in curatorial music broadcasting. I’m no addict to the genre, but I have yet to Discover another similar product which I can binge episode after episode for hours without becoming bored or irritated as I can the Bandcamp Weekly’s.
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To fill in the parking lot party blank with a single streaming solution for the sake of our young, art school-attending, likely more musically-literate than average summer barbecue guests—how viable is Bandcamp? Truthfully, it’s only slightly more suited now than it was in its earliest infancy for obediently filling a space with ambiance. We could ponder whether or not its design discourages absentminded playback only consequently, or perhaps condescendingly from the high, white tower of hipster elitism on which you’ll occasionally hear it accused of perching, but UX design is the most ridiculous sphere within which to intenspeculate in lieu of verification (gazing at you with the timeless grace of a thousand moons, Medium,) so lets hold off to seek out an interview with a Bandcamp representative.
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SoundCloud would be a bit closer to the mark—it can be configured to simply keep going after you’ve finished a track, regardless of where you may be within the interface (excluding the embedded player, of course)—but it’d be much safer to spend the smidgen of extra time required to find a manmade playlist. Letting it loose will quickly land you on some seriously dubious (and probably embarrassing) nerd shit. As I understand it, YouTube has long been the go-to houseparty music player because of its universality, Chromecast support, and (obviously) visual component for accompanying music videos, so its new, ad-free YouTube Music service has a lot of potential, in theory, but we’re outside in this scenario and our smartphone is our only playback device.
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Startlingly, the Web’s given best answer to this situation is still Spotify in all of its culture-diluting gluttony. Internet radio? Yikes. You can still find a gem of a stream every once in a while, but they’re usually unreliable and probably abandoned, so the catalog won’t last you more than a few hours before you’ll start to hear repeats. You could search out the internet stream of your favorite radio station—a student radio station, even—but those offering the most entertaining programming are unlikely to have a suitable playlist on a summer afternoon. So—forgetting its overwhelming financial funneling toward its top 10% and everything else for a moment—why not just give up the pretense and use Spotify? Again, for most of my friends, it works just fine to play Cat Stevens, Run DMC, Gorillaz or The Rolling Stones, but I have yet to figure out a combination of keywords to keep it on target within even the most rudimentary parameters. Such ill-restraint becomes especially dire—necessary, really—when I queue up “Cannibal Ox Radio” for the office and R Kelly ends up playing, 20 minutes in. Using personally-targeted artist bans is probably too subjective to ask of such a service in the spotlight, but how about an option to filter out white rappers? (I hope you didn’t blink because that’s by far my best contribution in tech writing yet.)
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The truth is, I’d probably end up calling upon Apple Music as I’ve been an on-and-off subscriber since its release, but have yet to meet a single fellow user. The girth of its catalog is reportedly still nearly 25% larger, its UI is significantly more cohesively integrated with iOS (which hasn’t always been a given from Apple with its music software, mind you,) yet it costs me precisely the same $9.99 a month as Spotify Premium would. If I did know somebody else who used it, they’d be able to see my public profile including my playlists and activity, just as my followers on Spotify can, and I can create “Stations” for artists that function similarly to Spotify’s endless adaptive playlists, but—crucially, for myself—after the app’s redesign for iOS 10, the integration of Apple Music music with my own iTunes library is completely seamless. With unlimited data, I’ve selected the option to refrain from storing music locally, which further diminishes the distinction between “my” music and the music I’ve paid for the rights to stream. Fundamentally, the end result is that I pay ten bucks a month for “ownership” of all the music on iTunes proper.
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While I might personally play Bandcamp Weekly episodes in such a context and gladly accept whatever results I’d get, I’d only do so acknowledging the subsequently increased risk of some vest-wearing fuck I’ve never met springing out of the bushes to accost me about Weird Allan. However, I am neither cool nor musically literate, which makes me particularly vulnerable to misusing algorithmic Discovery—the practice in which artificial intelligence has become most widely-deployed which continues to prove itself to better deserve the term “automated wallowing,” or “robotized ear rot.”
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Ironically, Damon Krukowski’s aforementioned “responsibility” essay on Pitchfork openly cites Liz Pelly’s burning-hot and 100% essential analysis of algorithmically-generated playlists for The Baffler notes the publication’s own substantial relationship with Spotify, including a Webby Award-winning advertorial series called Inside Discovery, which the two collaborate to produce that’s “meant to boost awareness of the ‘Discover Weekly’ feature.”
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The series shows Pitchfork editors (and favored musicians) gushing about their love of streaming—the immediacy! The deep back catalogs! One editor says it helps him keep track of his listening habits, while another rejoices at not having to dig through crates at record shops anymore. Yet another likens Spotify to walking around a music festival, discovering something new at every turn. What does it mean for “the most trusted voice in music” to celebrate an algorithm as preferable to its own crate digging? What does it mean when the tastemaking humans endorse data-driven machines? What does it mean when the algorithms become cool? Virtually every music publication now relies on Spotify media players to embed songs within online articles, and Websites like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone regularly celebrate their playlists with listicles: “Ten Albums To Stream Now.” “The Five Playlists You Need to Hear This Summer.”
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We love bespoke Open Web projects, so exploring Inside Discovery’s (surely bespoke) experience induced the same pathetic sort of I wish business just incentived building nice things disappointment which has become my default, bitchy mood, and blaming as a further let down to immediately land on Mitski’s playlist, to whom I’d just been reintroduced (by Pitchfork, admittedly) after happening upon her performance at Pitchfork 2017 (which is organized, admittedly, by Pitchfork.)
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Upon a brief review of these once-petty desires and the new, apocalyptic solutions which we are burning barns full of cash to develop, it would appear that the overwhelmingly defining feature of those which are at all viable remains to be the interference of a human being, and why wouldn’t it be, still, when manual music aggregation remains so desperately cheap? I’d wager heavily that there’s at least a single editor within Apple Music who’s spent serious time embedded in the Berlin techno scene considering how regularly the prime “Techno” playlist is updated with new work of a moderately-industrial bias.
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“The downside to automated music Discovery is that we’re encouraged to develop a taste profile and stick to it,” opines somebody on Pigeons & Planes, complimenting Pelly in their profile of former BBC Radio 1 host, Zane Lowe, and his new job curating an Apple Music playlist?
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The truth is, the stories that come to us that smell the strongest of philanthropy on the surface are often actually about some dusty, Y2K-lookin’-ass nerd with powerfully tedious grievances and too much time on their hands. The whole world knows the details by now of how Mark Zuckerberg’s horny social ineptitude led to Facebook’s conception, but we must both keep in check the bad habit we share – the whole present-day reading world and I, that is – of dwelling entirely too much on the most “negative,” soul-agitating tales in what we perceive to be the pursuit of necessary ingredients for concocting a better solution. Bandcamp’s story is predominantly comprised of smart decisions, sincere transparency, and savvy ideas which are best examined in contrast, I’m afraid, with all that’s being done wrong everywhere else.
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Are my favorite punk bands now Bandcamp bands? Are they suddenly wanting to conform to a kind of Bandcamp aesthetic? I don’t think so. Not yet. But if that does happen, something might be lost — a sense of these bands defining themselves as they want to, which is sort of the Bandcamp promise in the first place. People can use help navigating the riches of Bandcamp. But its estimable editorial project opens an interesting question: When does help turn into tastemaking?
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The Creators
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You missed it, didn’t you—the ten-year anniversary of Bandcamp’s launch? Ashamed, I realized last month that I did, too. Ashamed, because I owe a lot to to the platform’s unwavering commitment to the distribution and curation of work made by just about all of my favorite artists—within and outside of my social network. Throughout 2015, I hosted a number of conversations with exceptional, future-looking creators on Drycast which I am especially proud of. On one early episode with an exceptional total of seven music makers, I observed in a beat that “all of us have Bandcamp accounts,” before the week’s guest, Samantha Carter, suggested that she’d found her page especially financially rewarding, and originated the concept of the “Bandcamp Sugar Daddy” (which I personally ship 100%.)
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“It's something I take for granted,” said my friend yzome – a truly one-of-a-kind electronic producer who’s far-traveling composition is probably the closest Digital Audio Workstation equivalent of Extreme Use Testing—when automotive manufacturers effectively torture new prototypes with the most inhospitable conditions on Earth until they break. However, it’s not a PR stunt in yzome’s case—he’s just very good at doing what he does after doing it for nearly 10 years—and his end product requires a hell of a lot more than any one genre would ever presume, but it more than delivers back on the investment with significant interest.
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When he appeared on Drycast in January 2015, we failed to achieve any descriptors more sophisticated than “alien sounds,” but perhaps that’s all they need: the inner worlds into which yzome invites us are of manic, unpredictable arrhythmia which poses an unapologetic, yet magically lighthearted challenge to any cohesive theory. It’s very rare that his proudly-ungenreable exploration of the fringes does not demand the listener’s full attention, yet it always manages to be inoffensively aggressive like nothing else, which suggesting promise for the possible upheaval of a long-upheld natural law among electronic dance music: yzome doesn’t need to be a shithead to challenge the listener intellectually.
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Play YVETTE for any boomer you know with that classically impenetrable disgust for all electronic music, and you’ll witness firsthand how special yzome’s particular innovation truly is. No, they’re not going to be sexually liberated, or anything—it’s still going to be alarming—but you’ll notice that the swift and overwhelming fury which sample and break-heavy dance music has always awoken within them has been miraculously circumvented. Instead of immediately storming off, they’ll be paralyzed in an existential fugue state from which they may never quite fully emerge. I’ve seen it firsthand. It’s witchcraft.
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There is no other across the (especially-wide) electronic spectrum who can so loudly go so far, so fast without any insincerity, whatsoever. His arrangement seems mischievous and all over the place, but really listen and you’ll hear rips of recognizable patterns playing peekaboo in willy-nilly bursts that reveal his dynamic mastery of the dance music space through Breakcore, Juke, Footwork, and Techno sampling. All of this is to say, really, that yzome’s music represents a level of boundary-pushing which only a niche audience tends to truly appreciate, yet is undoubtedly worthy of an elegantly-presented host like Bandcamp.
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“Like thank god I don't have to look for a label to release this. It's seen as a legitimate platform (by people who might actually care about what I’m doing, at least,) which I think is less offputting than uploading things to Mediafire or whatever else. It’s populist and boutique at the same time.”
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Populist, yet boutique. Can we really be expected to exceed this summation? Well, nobody’s said much at all in the mainstream press, but what has been said is 1) unusually misplaced in the spaces of those least likely to find it relevant and 2) way more insightful than you’d expect.
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“Bandcamp has an independent-artist identity because of practicalities: Independent artists from Web-centered subcultures need it most,” observed an especially savvy online aside from by Ben Ratliff—jazz and pop critic for The New York Times—asking “Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?” So why aren’t we talking about it? The other important takeaway: founder Ethan Diamond told Ratliff that “the company has never spent money on promotion.” This is largely why I’ve invested so much time and affection into this piece—gratitude is not often sellable incentive for mainstream coverage.
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The truth is, the continued obscurity of Bandcamp’s story despite all it’s done comes down not to any malpractice by the company (in fact, it would likely be more visible had it fucked up more,) or even to its prevalence in the careers of big industry names (whom I will address in detail shortly,) but because it simply operates too magnanimously for its customers to be taken seriously as a newsworthy business, which is problematic and personally infuriating. In November, 2015, Bandcamp made mention in The New Yorker via the openly diminutive context of Car Seat Headrest’sorigin story, describing it as “a charming alternative,” and “a casual, low-risk approach.” Granted, it’s worth noting that the platform did not address its lack of “editorial guidance” until a year later, with the launch of the excellent Bandcamp Daily blog, but I think you’ll agree it’s in poor taste to argue against the legitimacy of a music distribution platform because it’s too democratic. Perhaps it’s still just beyond reasonable expectations to get a top-of-the-foodchain music writer’s head wrapped around the idea that such products on The Internet can easily—even optimally—service both hobbyists and professionals.
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Last year, Bandcamp was responsible for $270 million in payments to artists like Jlin,the genius commonly associated with Footwork (certainly Chicago’s most underreported and popularly underrepresented movement,) for pushing its expressive boundaries both in theory and geography further than any other, and who’s so far produced two of the most “aggressively beautiful” records you’ll find anywhere in the process.[i] Type her name into any search engine and her Bandcamp page is always the first result, yet Cntrl-Fing for “Bandcamp” will yield 0 results from her interviews with The Fader, FACT Magazine, Pitchfork, The Seventh Hex, Passion of the Weiss, PopMatters, Crack Magazine, DUMMY, The Guardian, The Quietus, BOMB Magazine, Ableton Blog, The Creative Independent, Rolling Stone, SPIN, No Fear of Pop, self-titled magazine, Circulation Magazine, The New Yorker, Cyclic Defrost, Mixmag, or melting bot, and only one in Interview Magazine. To be clear: I am not arguing that Jlin—a black female music artist—should be profusely thanking Bandcamp—a service founded largely by white male programmers—for hosting her most visible page but rather that the more independent of these publications, especially, should mention its role in her story or—at the very least—be hyperlinking to her Bandcamp page first, for both her’s and their readers’ sake—Bandcamp’s cut of album purchases is half of iTunes. From the user experience perspective, it’s absurd that those of these pages including embedded music players chose to use SoundCloud’s—which is more resource heavy (yet of noticeably lesser streaming playback quality) and visually disruptive—instead of Bandcamp’s.
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The two services were launched the same year—that fateful 2008—but comparing them is complicated. They are clear opposites in at least one principal: how they’ve defined their mission. Bandcamp has changed less throughout its history than any other Web service that comes to mind (see below,) but SoundCloud has struggled with identity issues, to their vastly-superior success (in terms of user statistics, anyway.) The New York Timesreported in June, 2011 that they’d reached 5 million users, citing their decision to expand focus beyond “popular music” to explain the milestone. “We’re building a sound platform that’s not just about music,” said Alex Ljung – a SoundCloud co-founder and the company’s chief executive at the time – and its present landscape certainly reflects a diverse offering of uses, but ultimately, any . Today, both SoundCloud and Bandcamp have premium subscription plans for artists which are at least perceived to be competitive with one another—SoundCloud Pro and Bandcamp Pro, respectively—along with free base experiences, which we’ll compare first.
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Free Bandcamp Account
- Uploads: quantity unlimited, size of each file limited to 291mb.
- Distribution: unlimited streaming, up to 200 free downloads per month.
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Free SoundCloud Account
- Uploads: total of 3 hours uploaded at any given time.
- Distribution: unlimited streaming, unlimited downloads.
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Both offer access “basic” statistics for their tracks at this tier which most of the creators I know consider more than enough—the usefulness of any playback/download stats is negligible when you’re publishing within tight niches—and each has had about 5 years to fine-tune their free offerings so that they feel as complete as possible. If you’re planning on publishing a podcast on SoundCloud, you’re obviously going to have to upgrade your upload limit even beyond Pro ($8/month, 6-hour upload limit) to Pro Unlimited ($16/month, unlimited uploads,) though I would suggest a plethora of alternative methods before you got that far. Unfortunately, they would not include a free Bandcamp account. While there arepodcasts on Bandcamp, they’re completely separate the platform’s aspirations and without support for the basic requirements of podcast distribution (namely, RSS feeds.)
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Bandcamp’s Pro option is $10 a month and includes a custom domain, batch file uploading, private streaming (for press and/or fans) plus the ability to disable free streaming (requiring listeners to actually buy the music to enable any playback,) ad-free video hosting (which nobody uses, to my knowledge,) extended fan interaction tools, and a broader statistics suite that includes Google Analytics support. SoundCloud’s Pro and Pro Unlimited options are complimentary, but a full-time independent artist could justify maintaining Pro accounts on both services or neither—one does not necessarily replace the other, but the contrast in their chosen presentations has led to a divide in the cultures of the two communities so stark it could be a punchline and/or simplified to say that SoundCloud is for rap and Bandcamp is not.
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It’s not entirely shocking, then, that SoundCloud’s story has been more present in the greater conversation than Bandcamp’s. Frankly, its largest issues are directly related: compared to SoundCloud, Bandcamp’s community is White As Fuck (a claim I can only make on behalf of my own observations and those which a select few creators have seen fit to express to me over the years, considering that the company has yet to release any demographic information about its creators) which is a glaringly fundamental obstruction to the project’s broader mission to help music culture “thrive.”
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From a future historian’s perspective, the battle for the definitive name in independent digital music distribution has already won, largely thanks to its relationship with Chance The Rapper, who’s quickly become a “cultural influencer, thought leader, global star,” and one of my generation’s upmost celebrity champions. Obviously, there is little sense trying to determine whether SoundCloud earned his partnership or landed their popular association with his name as long as the artist maintains it publicly, while continuing to give new meaning to the phrase “serially likable.” Thus far, his mythical power to exude purity has felt virtually 100% airtight Last year, his second album Coloring Book made history when it won the first streaming-only Grammy for Best Album. In my personal favorite moment in recent popular culture memory, the fashionable-as-hell young man accepted the accolade by looking the whole industry establishment in the face and proclaiming “this is for every indie artist—everybody who’s been doin’ this mixtape shhhh...tuff for a long ass time... shouts out to every independent artist out there; shouts out to SoundCloud for holding me down.” Obviously, such significant, sentimental, and sincere sentiments are never expressed about tech companies by beloved darlings of the art world like Chance—especially not for Earth-encompassing awards show audiences.
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After last year’s massive layoff, it was Chance’s assurances that “SoundCloud is here to stay” which the public took to heart. Even if the company is destined to fail within the next year (it appears to be as yet missing much of a verdict,) and it’s all still destined to fold at any moment, at least it’ll have the distinct pride of doing so having maintained his publicly-expressed respect and confidence, which is a damned fine legacy in my book. Meanwhile, Bandcamp has only made a few small tweaks to its basic infrastructure, and added new features very deliberately, which haven’t resulted in a single memorable controversy. Aside from Amanda Palmer, perhaps, there has never been a single band or artist who’ve been known as “from Bandcamp,” leaving our only pitch to be something like Independent Online Music Platform on Track to Complete 10th Year Serving Small-Time Artists, Continues to Look Pretty Good.
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Considering the significance of these contributions, it’s of a special wonder that they were made not by a non-profit organization, academic movement, or government endowment, but by a for-profit, California-based tech company that’s continued to thrive and innovate great content, entirely apart from mainstream coverage.
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The Future
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It might seem a bit much on the surface, but in many ways, Bandcamp has spent the past 10 years showing us what a for-profit, Web-based, culturally-edging independent platform Can be, even in the Valley.
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Though Bandcamp has embarked upon unusually sparse explanation of its editorial directive in the Daily blog and Weekly podcast, but regularly consume either for any length of time, and you’ll notice a particular savvy for Discovering technically-progressive Afrocentric projects: “Black Experimental Music.”
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On last week’s episode of the excellent New York Times podcast Still Processing, co-host Jena Wortham “I’m thinking a lot about ways in which new culture, new cultural products, new cultural creators come to light in ways that sidestep these traditional means and don’t have to go through the traditionally very white, very male, very cis, very hetero hoops to prove worthiness.”
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So, our greatest hope for the decentralization of the music industry in the 1990s ended up transforming before us to become the most effectively divisive Discovery barrier ever known to man because of its psychological influence sub-threshold at unprecedented scale over time, in parallel with so many other like horrific monstrosities we’ve discovered in anguish to be mutants of those final salvations from our atrocious history which we’d been so relieved to believe in. Surely, the turn of the millennia was destined to be our final turning point – the moment we’d finally use our new technology to discover a truth (or maybe just a really good clue,) that’d immediately unite our species in a deafening, worldwide aha moment when it would reveal a general abstract of whatever the fuck our deal was that was preventing our silent, dutiful, and 100% harmonious collective effort toward a utopia like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s, in which anyone is absolutely free of obligation or desperation from birth to pursue… whatever with their time.
All of this may one day be worth significantly more revision and/or visibility in the future, but for now, just know that I rambled out all of this because it’s by far my most effective way to think, and this darned lowkey blog post has just provided a very long-overdue opportunity for it. Please feel free to read or even respond to it, if you’d like, but I’d like to ask that you don’t panic or circulate it. Thanks.
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So far… the only intercorrespondence between staff at Inmunis is people having a problem with one another.
-Before Extratone, there was Inmunis – my first, relatively short-lived attempt to launch an online magazine which wasn’t particularly important, but the experience surely did contribute to and inform my progression in understanding media that led to my (utter bewildered) current state. Anyhow, it’s fun to look back. Here’s the web archive’s last snapshot.
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This, a derelict Twitter account, and two film reviews by James Wilson are all that’s left of inmunis.co.uk for good reasons – many of which I did not entirely shed when I tried again. Until I started Extratone and made doing “this” – incessantly reading/exploring the web, obsessively tinkering and experimenting with The Extranet – I actually had very little knowledge on or exposure to the state of digital publishing or the real depth of variety to be found with any significant effort to comprehend the current offering real, surviving magazines, online or not, yet was dumb and arrogant enough to assume that I’d seen it all and none of it was even close to good enough for me to read or seek to write for. I was actually delusional enough to regard myself as too smart and one-of-a-kind to lower myself by going back to journalism school – that I was so special, anything I put effort in creating was destined to turn out superb. Granted, I’d had the actual idea for less than two weeks before I experienced by far the most traumatic, soul-destroying, world-upturning, and life-altering event of my entire existence, which I think accounts for the insanity, and all of my decisions were inevitably preempted by the fact that I was a 21-year-old straight white male community college dropout, which accounts for (but does not excuse) their absurdity.
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I’ve publicly implied before that it was probably only thanks to Drycast – which was also in its infancy during the time of The Big Event (episode 7 was published just two days before) – and its weekly obligation to sit down and talk with my favorite people about interesting stuff that I did not end up dead or institutionalized in 2015 (I wish I was exaggerating.) If there is a Gourd, let it be known that he is fully up-to-date and brand-activated – he sent me a fucking podcast to save my life.
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Reading and compiling stories for the show notes throughout the week provided an early avenue for exploring and embedding myself into media. Beyond the actual content, even, it’s been the rationality in the tone which journalists generally adhere to that has drawn me in and provided a brighter and brighter guiding light to help keep my sanity in check after my world ended because New Media values empathy in tandem with critical thought. All my life, it’s been very important to me that I continue to learn the best way to both appear and feel smart and functional. I’ve long since accepted that I am very fucking weird – and not in the wow, I dye my hair bright red sort of way which helps people feel unique, but in the holy shit, I’m terrified of what would actually result in losing control of my facade sort, which is actually much less sinister than it sounds for you, and infinitely moreso for me.
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This is why I still have a very infantile habit of becoming overwhelmingly frustrated with those who socially emphasize and celebrate their “weirdness” as an important part of their identity because my self-perception has long since transitioned from regarding my deviations as something that made me “unique,” to gigantic obstacles in the way of every possible aspiration which I’ll probably never overcome, but am doomed to kill myself trying. I’m now working on learning to appreciate those very fucking common people who are determined to prove how strange they are because ultimately, my own self-perception is just as ignorant, loneliness is not a virtue, and I’ve only maintained the whole charade because I’d rather have delusions of grandeur than acknowledge that I am also mostly unoriginal, and most of my truly more “original” behaviors could easily be described as simply unhealthy.
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This is an important confession for this explanation because its “solution” is another crucial motivation behind my creation of Extratone – as both a symbolic and literal means of understanding and minimizing my own biases and bitterness by 1) surrounding myself with the huge amount young, talented people I knew with great ideas and 2) editorially committing to curiosity as the most precious ideal in writing (and in life.)
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I do know that – for whatever reason – I really do have a special knack for identifying the culture and creators that are truly fresh, innovative, even cool among those who can’t comprehend or stand it and the heartbreaking number of those who actualize themselves by trying to act aggressively apathetic toward the status quo. This sense is far from 100% reliable and is certainly not of a greater quality than everyone on Earth, but I would still confidently suggest it’s at least better than most, and – as most of us know – it especially jives with and defines the world of magazines.
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As I did in Spring 2016, I still believe that Extratone is the best way for me to hone my greatest talents and shed my biggest problems – that it is the name I can place on my endless journey to improve myself, which – most importantly of all – will all the while achieve the tightest possible adhesion to the only meaning of “original” with any significance or real world value at all, which serves human curiosity without punishing it in any sense. I could actually just be crazy or completely, irrationally inverted – and I know it sounds abstract and preposterous – but I promise it’s my best shot at one day performing my optimal function for the world.
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The very first thing I did after I’d arrived upon these hypotheses and been abruptly forced to cling to them as my last hope in life was to obsessively search for a single mantra/battlecry I could drill into my memory and could shout under duress – including the temptation to escape the whole lot of it – to succinctly remind myself that I had at least one logical chance at a fulfilling life (and yes, it’s still funny that the chance is, in fact, a Web Site.)
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Scribam quid non legerim is possibly grammatically incorrect to a scholar, but it’s the best possible translation I came up with in my Latin research of “I will write what I have not read.” It’s cheesy, yes, and a bit cringey in the middle of just any old day when it happens to catch my eye where it’s proudly displayed, all-caps, in the footer of our CMS, and – I’ll be honest – I don’t know if I could explain it over coffee to a stranger without turning red and covering my face, as I once could, but it’s (sincerely, in this one case) real gravestone material. (As in, if someone were to read this after my death, they would be encouraged to receive it as a bonafide last wish.)
I’ve never understood why I never see anyone making use of the vast catalogue of nearly 140,000 standard Unicode symbols available in their social media posts, metadata, or word art. Like replacing standard bullets in our weekly newsletter with ◎ (U+25CE,) — probably my all-time favorite, or using strings of four characters for intro, ad, and station identification spots on Extratone Radio. (☉☉☉☉, for instance.) I’d like to think these uses make their experiences feel just a bit more unique to users — if only unconsciously — but I’d long wondered if I was in fact the last Unicode enthusiast alive.
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The development of Jordan Hipwell’s UniChar for iOS would suggest otherwise. Its app store page describes it as “a powerful yet beautiful Unicode symbol selection app and keyboard,” and its generic webpage appears to have testimonials including a real post on the Web Site lifehacker.
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UniChar is a third-party iOS keyboard that unlocks the wide wide world of weird Unicode characters. Service marks, copyright logos, mathematical symbols, technical signs like Apple’s “splat” icon or radioactivity indicators, and more are available in the standalone app as well as the keyboard add-on you can use wherever you need to type something.
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Wow! I can’t believe I’d pull-quote lifehacker anywhere, but here is an iOS app that actually addresses a regular issue of my own in a beautiful and intuitive way. I actually cannot remember the last time this happened — you’d have to give me a list and a comprehensive refresher of all the ways I’ve used my iPhones in the past ten years.
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Contrary to what may seem obvious, UniChar’s character selector is by far the more intuitive and efficient of these two separate ways to use it. Even in the free experience, there are simply too manycharacters in the catalog to reasonably browse in iOS’ old extended keyboard. (For the record, I’d like to note that UniChar is technically a “Reference Application,” but I understand if you can’t bring yourself to use the term.) Across both the seamlessly-interchangeable gallery and list views, the user can very quickly copy a character to the clipboard with 3D Touch, which works so well it’s as if it were meant only for this use from its beginning.
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In the off chance you’re a longtime lover and devout user of the grander Unicode collection and an iOS user, I hope you’re now experiencing the same sort of petty enthusiasm I felt myself when I discovered it. If not, I hope you’ll take away a desire to explore it. I mean… aren’t these smileys way better than any emoji? ☺☺☺☺
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Update
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Despite a handful of reports of crashing issues in App Store reviews, Unichar has continued to perform admirably for me. I ended up spending $2.99 to unlock the full Unicharacter keyboard as the tremendous value of that number for the time and effort it would save myself would be more than worth it. (Actually, it’s thanks to Redbubble for sending me the first truly usable Inter net Money I’ve had to actually spend on any apps and/or services in fucking forever, but you know.) After all this time, I’m still giddy that someone else on Earth values these hieroglyphs as much as I do, and that they knew enough to manifest the perfect software to preserve them.
A largely-biographical overview of my personal history with technology and its contributions to my current perspective.
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Incalculable odds were against my arrival in this world happening in early 1994, positioning my life within a timeline that would allow me to bridge my two species’ most significant millenniums in the first grade as a student in the first class at Fairview Elementary school to receive curriculum-mandated exposure to brand-new Windows 98 PCs in its brand-new, fluorescent-lit computer lab in the center core of its 50-year-old rectangular brick structure. The lab also meant that ours was the first Fairview class to have the available relief of air conditioning during the school day. It’s unlikely that I would be home sick and watching the last television ever allowed in my mother’s living room as the second plane hit.
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My peers and I would form a picogeneration without a name (perhaps we should be called the 9/11ers) — 91s and 92s wouldn’t have regular access to public school machines until they’d eclipsed the true prime of their development, and were just that much further along, mentally, to being able to comprehend the huge and terrifying concepts of 1) New York and 2) burning alive — while 98s like my niece were spared any such comprehension of death at all, yet now have to face the existentially future-sundering, darkly-mirrored reality of the Trump Presidency during the most critically uncertain period in the last stage of their brain’s transition to adulthood.
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If there is truth in the cross-cultural supposition that souls have some sort of choice, pre-conception, over when they’re born, my own must have either cleaned out the house, or lost horrible, though I suspect I’ll never be able to confidently wager either way. This question of how lucky or unlucky am I to be alive right now is one which I find most fascinating — not just within myself, but within others my age. I declare us a generation largely because of my experiences on the assumption that my mid-Missouri upbringing represents the ultimate average in the American experiences of the time as the area has been a reliable sample of the clearest average of the country’s cultural, political, and economic life. Technically, it was quite unlikely that I arrive here as a new human being instead of China or India, and what if that, too was my choice?
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Though less so, it was still against chance that I would be born to parents who would divorce very quickly after my birth, before my mind was able to form any tangible long-term memories, sparing me whatever pain could’ve resulted from their greater togetherness later nullified in front of me. I could’ve chosen them as well for the variety of experiences their situation would allow me as I grew up between my father’s 800-acre farm and my mother’s suburban house in Columbia, the college town an hour’s drive south. I write about my experiences now — so young — because I’ve likely already born witness to more extraordinary changes in human development than your parents, their parents, and their parents’ parents combined. At 24, my life has already spanned by far the most profound and expedited informational renaissance in human history — greater progress was made between the day I first rode a bicycle and the one on which I took my driver’s test than in thousands of years before it.
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My father’s experiences between 1950 and 1974 — from his birth until the age I am now — would indeed include watching a man set foot on a spatial body other than Earth for the first time, but would be mostly defined by work on the family’s soybean, corn, and wheat farms in central Illinois, driving carbureted tractors pulling cultivating equipment of the same basic design and function as had been pulled by horses, mules, and oxen for hundreds of years, and other implements — like the mechanical multi-row planter — that were new technology at the beginning of the century. For neighbors, he would walk behind the path of a square hay baler next to a moving flatbed trailer upon which he would throw the 70–100 lb. rectangles of dead compacted grass by their twine through thick cowhide gloves. All of this I would get to experience in the next century on his farm, using the exact same equipment.
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At home, he would watch NBC, ABC, and CBS on a CRT television, as I would for several years until wireless television was legally transitioned to digital statewide in the summer of 2009. As an adolescent, he would form a business with friends cleaning out old abandoned barns in exchange for the rights of ownership to anything they found inside, which led to his discovery of a hay-preserved 1929 Buick Sedan containing hand-written records of its every service. This car would change hands into his Uncle’s care as he went off to school in Champaign, married and farmed in Georgia, and eventually settled on the flat clay soil of the farm where I grew up right on the border between Audrain and Monroe counties, Missouri. I was about 10 when we drove back to the family hub with a trailer in tow to collect the car from my Great Uncle, to my manic excitement.
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Up until my mid-teens, my life was defined by my extreme reverence for historic cars, airplanes, tractors, and watercraft, and the time I spent operating, maintaining, restoring, or simply studying the assortment of these which I was allowed — often because of extraordinary circumstances — would build the part of my psychology which seeks to experience different cultures, ideas, and eras through the medium of engineering and design and relies on these to understand them. Like my father in his youth, I would learn to clean water out of a carburetor after the Oliver had sat without running for two long, and I would pee in a chamber pot in order to avoid waking up my Grandfather by walking down the attic stairs and turning the lights on. I would learn how to shoot and drive before 10-years-old, and I would have the freedom to do both as I pleased on the miles of gravel roads that ran around home.
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Though my stepfather bought me a PC of my own just as my first grade computer class was ending, I could not conceive of a reason to take up the dial-up line and block his incoming calls or faxes, so my use of the machine was limited to sparse writing and aggravating attempts to run Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 at approximately one frame per second on a 300MHz single-core Pentium II CPU. Though I was extremely fortunate compared to most middle-class kids my age at the time to have my own computer in my room, my relationship with it was not an emotional or particularly involved one. I would leave it powered down for weeks at a time until my last two grades at Fairview, when homework assignments began to require it.
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Perhaps the greatest gap between my mostly-suburbanite classmates and I was an exposure to Japanese entertainment and video games. I was once disallowed from a lunch table because I’d never heard of Pokémon or Luigi, but I did have a Sony Playstation at home on which I occasionally loaded A Bug’s Life to wander around its first level. In self-imposed isolation from children my age, I wouldn’t develop any need to be socially competitive with video games as many of my peers would to carry with them into adulthood. I thought my interests in mechanical engineering to be above all of them, so I spent my time alone with heavy picturebooks on 20th century cars, tractors, and airplanes.
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On the farm, my consistently agriculturally-proactive father was one of the first to have satellite internet for farm futures and weather reports on a pre-GUI machine which I don’t remember. As I was becoming computer literate in school, he would become extremely frustrated with the Windows XP-running machine he’d bought from a one-man, one-room computer shop in Centralia, and I would often solve some problem with bloatware or the goddamned printer. He would also subscribe to and install a first-generation DirectTV receiver, which had the first on-screen program guide I’d ever seen. In the evenings, I would watch hours of Modern Marvels on The History Channel, which presented the history, abstract functional theory, and implementation of a particular technology, both past and future. This one program — which has aired nearly 700 episodes since 1995 — is probably responsible for the majority of my at least rudimentary general knowledge in a variety of historic and “future” technological schools, and my curiosity about culture’s relationship with innovation.
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Though my father’s interests differed significantly from mine — he thought more about growing and raising than of the tools one used to do it — he would indulge my many questions about how engines, hydraulics, and electrical systems worked and my curiosity by exposing me to the hidden communities of the most elderly, most obscure historic machinery enthusiasts like those of the Midwest Old Threshers Reunion in Mount Pleasant, Iowa — the Concours d’Elegance for antique tractor and reciprocating engine collectors. It was a similar event closer to home where I first operated a steam tractor — great, field-going locomotive-like vehicles that supplanted a need for horsepower in the late-1800s up until the Great Depression which chug, whistle, and puff along just like rail locomotives with a big iron steering wheel. As I recall, I was also given the opportunity to drive an unrestored Model T truck around the grounds that day — the knowledge from which I gained I cannot imagine being of much use ever again.
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I was proud to the point of arrogance of my technical knowledge and experience in all the different things I had driven and operated, which my schoolmates were in no position to understand. I was elitist and anti-social about this as late as 9th grade, when I had just moved in to stay with my mother, who bought me a first generation iPhone which I proudly wore in a leather belt holster to Junior High. It would represent a shift in my fascination from very old technology toward the present and future.
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I started talking online with a friend I’d first met years before at Fairview who spent most of his time fiddling with his first-generation MacBook Pro and first exposed me to gadget bloggers on YouTube like Mark Watson and Jon Rettinger (both of whom are still full-time tech personalities.) My mom bought me a 13-inch aluminum-bodied MacBook (which would be sold as MacBook Pro after a single year,) and my lifestyle radically shifted inside my room, my computer, and my Xbox 360. My friend and I would both obsess together over software, design, and gadgets and experiment with our own tech YouTube channels until high school, where I would be adopted by a new friend group who would finally socialize me.
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Recently, I have written about the contrasts and discrepancies of consumer technology development as its progress has disconnected from the upward linear trajectory in use, quality, and genuine innovation for the enduser in a departure which has been especially visible from my perspective as an academically-untrained, but intensely demanding user in the past five years. When hardware was still the industry focus before ~2012, there was a tremendous amount of optimism among journalists and enthusiasts because each successive generation of devices had added more tangible capabilities. Publications like Gizmodo and Engadget made a fortune publishing reviews and comparison tests of hardware offerings across every segment of tech, and the discourse they generated had a noticeable influence on design. I remember this time well because it was happening throughout my last few years before adulthood when I had plenty of spare time, energy, and curiosity to keep up.
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The story of consumer technology since Steve Jobs’ death has become increasingly more about the companies who design and sell hardware and software than about how and why their consumers actually use them, and the result has been a series of new types of products that have little defensible place in a linear timeline of innovation, especially where productivity is involved. Augmented and Virtual Reality are quite explicitly an escapist industry which has yet to fill any significant need which was before unfilled. The same could be argued about voice assistants and smartwatches — neither of which remove obstacles in most users’ day-to-day lives but instead contribute to the array of tasks and devices which already seek their attention.
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Of course, there are defensibly sound business incentives behind the industry’s new, fragmented direction, but I would also argue that there are those, too, for genuinely revisiting both what we should be doing and what we should be seeking to learn to do with technology. In a more abstract sense, I have written about whether or not we should want to be living in this particular now, and how the way we feel about the future should inform what we do in the present.
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I cannot help but observe human progress from a perspective of powerlessness, acute alienation, and amused awe which has already lent to a significant quantity of occasionally original thoughts as I watch having experienced an odd diversity of American life and culture. I’ve published them to entertain and to demonstrate a few methods of reflection on what it is you really want from the times you are living.
Sitting in my car, talking to my phone, looking beyond tech media and industry personalities to find the individuals and organizations who continue to prioritize progress.
I don’t want you to think this is just another listicle to mark as spam or ignore completely – though it technically is, I suppose. I know how it looks… because I’ve run into many of them and have been just as irritated as you. In fact, I would be so bold as to presume I’ve run into many many more than you have simply because a primary hobby of mine has always been Just Trying to Do Things On The Computer without any academic authority or hands-on training. This is a way of life for my generation and those proceeding it, yes, but I promise you that I have gone far, far deeper than the vast majority of anyone you know. What I’m ultimately trying to do here is to spare you the hundreds – perhaps thousands – of hours I have had to spend mulling through shitty workflows throughout my childhood and adulthood before I stumbled upon Good Practices (i.e. Better Ways to Do Things.)
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I want you to come away from this list feeling as liberated and powerful as I do now when I’m On My Computer without any condescension or tedium. Unfortunately, there’s probably going to be some of both, so please stick with me and don’t take it personally. I do a lot of online reading, writing, and fiddling. I’ve been compelled to do these things in one form or another since very early childhood, and what follows could be described as a list of my favorite tools to accomplish things. Almost all of them are entirely free to use and the vast majority of them are easily and beautifully functional as well. They are what I suggest for my own mother to use, for what that’s worth, and I would argue sincerely for their extreme importance. Don’t waste your life on bad software.
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You Need a Password Manager
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In 2020, password managers are no longer optional for digital life. They are mandatory. If you only ever heed a single piece of my advice, ever, please make it this one. Most password managers available are secure, cross-platform, optionally cloud-synced tools that help you generate, store, and organize digital credentials. More likely than not, you’re already using one in your favorite browser. On MacOS and iOS, Safari is linked to a service called Keychain, which is – functionally – a robust password manager. On signup for a given website or service, Safari should prompt you to automatically generate secure, complex passwords to store in Keychain. Generally, it’s pretty smart about knowing when it’s time to retrieve the credentials with Touch-ID, but for when it isn’t, you should know how to manually retrieve passwords from Keychain. If you’re deeply enough embedded into the Mac ecosystem, you can feel free to continue to rely on this process as long as you know how to help yourself when it fails. I’m not going to tell you who to trust, but I do almost actually believe in Apple’s commitment to securing user data, if only because of the way their incentives are aligned (in contrast with those in front of data-funded organizations like Google.)
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If you’re using a Windows Home Machine and/or an Android smartphone, I believe it’s more urgent that you find a standalone password management solution immediately. I use a gorgeous app called Enpass to store all of my passwords as well as my bank credentials, credit cards, driver’s license information, and anything else I might need to keep handy, securely. I can use virtually any cloud or file-sharing service to keep my “vaults” synced between all of my devices: Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, Box, etc, and I also regularly create encrypted local backups just in case. I can even share end-to-end encrypted credentials with another device or Enpass installation. I migrated to Enpass two years ago after using 1Password for nearly 10. It was intuitive and virtually seamless, as such things in software tend to be these days, and as a result, I haven’t had to memorize a single password since my adolescence. Enpass allows me to create custom login templates for quick differentiation when creating new entries as well as picturized categories and tags. With one click, even the icon can be pulled from a given URL’s favicon to help keep my vault looking visually itemized. It also includes presets for a hundred services or so – from Google to Wix to Yahoo! Japan.
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Total Recall with a Clipboard Manager
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Imagine if everything you had ever copied (as in Ctrl-C) were listed in linear order, easily and instantly searchable via a single global keyboard shortcut (Alt-`) and navigable with the arrow keys. Imagine if you could then export an archive of your clipboard so nothing could ever be lost. Imagine clipboard tabs that are easily switchable. CopyQ – an “advanced clipboard manager” – is one of my favorite software discoveries of all time. Some workdays, I use it literally hundreds of instances in my workflow. It is difficult to describe how much more useful it makes the clipboard feature – something we’ve all been using for decades, now. For someone like me who copies a ridiculous amount of links every day, CopyQ’s functionality has truly become life-changing.
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Alt-D and Other Keyboard Shortcuts
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Somehow, I did not discover Alt-D until 2018, which means that I had spent the entirety of my 24 years since triple-clicking to select every single URL I’d ever copied. I built a media company this way, and I can’t believe nobody told me about this shortcut. Open any given web browser, use Alt-D, and your selection will move to the URL in the address bar on top of the page. It’s very possible this will be of little use to you, but anyone who regularly shares or copies links will save themselves so much time. I felt the same way when I discovered text navigation with Alt, Shift, Ctrl + the arrow keys. Most of these are cross-platform, but I am specifically focusing on Windows shortcuts for this piece because that’s what I’m currently using.
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Arrow key-related shortcuts
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· Shift in conjunction with the arrow keys selects text in a document surrounding the cursor.
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· Alt in conjunction with the arrow keys allows one to go forward or backward in a browser.
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· Ctrl in conjunction with the arrow keys allows one to navigate text by word.
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Virtually all of the “Windows logo key” shortcuts are usable in day-to-day workflows. I use Win-D to immediately minimize all windows and show the desktop on the regular. Microsoft is currently testing a feature like MacOS’ spotlight which is triggered with this key.
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Designed to replace the existing Win + R shortcut, the new launcher will include options to quickly search apps and files across Windows and support for plugins like calculators, dictionaries, and search engines.
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We can only hope this feature will be as useful as spotlight (which is triggered with ⌘-Spacebar for you Mac users,) and will be implemented as standard as soon as possible. If you’re not already using basic shortcuts for functions like closing tabs/windows and cut/copy/pasting text, I’d advise you to begin as soon as possible. It can be hard to commit, but I promise it’ll make your life better. Try printing out a list of shortcuts for your particular operating system to keep by your workspace and/or find or create an image of the list to set as your desktop background for a while.
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Learn Markdown Immediately
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While we’re on the subject of text – and hopefully without finding ourselves exploring the entire history of word processing – I’d like to evangelize what very well might be the Ultimate Formatting Language for digital text. It’s called Markdown, and it’s something you’ve likely already used in one form or another. Technically, Markdown is “a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers,” but – more importantly – it’s a method of stylizing text which is as simple as possible, easy to universalize, and already quite popular. While Vice argues that Markdown is a “power-user tool,” I’d suggest that it’s one everybody should make use of. Though I am currently writing this in Word (for the first time in a good while,) I’m going to pay for it later.
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A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology.
I once had to convert a Word document to a web page.
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Once.
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After spending hours deleting mso-style blocks and cleaning up thousands of lines of crap, I swore (and swore, and swore) that I’d never do that again.
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So I moved to Markdown. For a writer who publishes mostly to the web, it’s perfect.
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Before I committed to writing in Markdown and moved Extratone to Write.As – a wonderfully simple, open-source web CMS entirely based on Markdown – I really struggled with text formatting on our old WordPress-based site, spending hours cleaning up text from Word, Apple Notes, Dropbox Paper, and Google Docs. Now, WordPress natively supports Markdown along with Ghost, Slack, Discord, Tumblr, and more.
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OKAY, YOU GUYS WERE RIGHT ABOUT BEAR...
the whole world was right about Bear...
I'm not sure if I've ever seen a more beautiful text editor and I've seen A LOT. pic.twitter.com/8SzGiBgoYt
Mashable published a formidable list of Markdown editors in 2013, but many are since significantly out of date. Instead, I’d refer you to @awwsmm’s “State of Markdown Editors 2019,” which suggests Joplin as the winning pick. Joplin is open-source and syncs across devices using your preferred cloud service, but it requires that all notes be written in a monospace typeface, which I do not prefer. If you have a MacOS-running machine and/or an iOS-running smartphone, you must download and try an application called Bear. It is quite simply the most beautiful piece of software – aesthetically and functionally – that I have ever seen, and therefore the most beautiful possible execution of a Markdown Editor. From The Verge’s Dieter Bohn:
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Bear uses a simple three-paned design. The largest column is devoted to your current note. A smaller column to the left contains your notes in reverse-chronological order, topped by a search bar. The left-most column contains notes that you’ve pinned, as well as any tags you’ve created to organize your notes — #recipes, for example. I spent years trying to sort my notes into notebooks in Evernote, only to learn that what I really needed was a faster search box.
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As much as I despise the term “seamless,” everything about Bear is its definition. For someone like me, it, alone, almost warrants a reversion to MacOS. If you have the correct platforms, I require you to try it. Unfortunately, there can be no true Windows or Linux equivalent without the work Shiny Frog has done to streamline Bear’s near-instantaneous iCloud integration, but there is one application that can literally simulate its functionality in every other way. Typora is an infinitely-customizable alternative that spans all three platforms with a well-populated themes gallery (including an actual copy of my favorite Bear theme.) My installation is not nearly as smooth as Bear, but it’s technically more powerful – bad news for users like me who can’t resist fiddling. I’ve downloaded (and attempted to author/modify) a billion themes for Typora. Bear, by contrast, allows just enough stylistic modification (color theme, a choice list of 7 beautiful typefaces, and sliders for font size, line height, paragraph spacing,) without any access to its internal workings. In this way, it provides the perfect blend of customizability and minimalism. If you tend toward the latter, try an ultra-slim solution like WordPress’ Simplenote.
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Telegram
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I ran a poll on both Twitter and Mastodon yesterday asking “do you still email things to yourself?” Overwhelmingly, my “audience” responded “yes,” which is awfully surprising considering their demographic – young, techish early adopters. Though email is not yet “obsolete” – as envisioned by Inc’s John Brandon in 2015 – it has indeed been replaced by other software in many of its functions, especially the old Mail-to-Self practice. I cannot remember the last time I emailed myself anything – even to transfer photos from my cellular to my computer, as I used to do often. Instead, I use a private Telegram channel to send myself photos, videos, links, text, and any other file up to 1.5GB! There’ve always been plenty of reasons to use the messaging app for general communication – especially since Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014. Though press coverage of the application has all but dried up, I would argue there are now more reasons than ever to make use of Telegram in your day-to-day life.
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As of 2016, Telegram had 100 million active users, but it’s certainly experienced its fair share of controversies. I see no reason to be worried about encryption or privacy at all, for that matter, for the vast majority of Mail-to-Self cases. If the files you’re sending yourself are sensitive enough to worry about, you shouldn’t be emailing them, anyway.
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Other Stuff
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If you’re the sort of person who regularly types out 500+ word text messages (or have to do homework/any real writing) on your smartphone, I have a secret to reveal to you: most smartphones still have Bluetooth keyboard support. It may look strange, but yes, you can use a full qwerty keyboard with your phone. Those of us who’ve livestreamed or used screenrecording software know that OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is an absolute gift from Gourd, but these days, it’s also easy enough for most computer users to make use of. I’d encourage everybody who can think of a reason to record their screen – to show somebody how to do something, for instance – to download and install it. Finally, I think every Windows user should look into compacting their operating system into just the essentials. “Compact OS” is really just a Windows 10 install without bloatware: the shit you almost certainly don’t need. If you do find yourself in need of default Microsoft apps, you’ll be able to redownload them instantly from the Windows Store.
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I’d been meaning to write something like this for a very long time, so I hope you or someone you know has found it useful. I’m not an authority in the technical sense, but I’ve used every one of these suggestions in my own computing life for years, now, to great benefit. If you have any comments/suggestions/feedback/petty insults, please do contact me via email, Twitter, Mastodon, or Discord.
It’s very pretentious to talk about pens, I agree, but I believe there’s a level of pen pretentiousness which is worth sharing with the writing masses. I continually encounter people in both personal and professional settings using – and often worshipping – very shitty pens. I'm not going to pretend spending $15 on a pen has not become a novel or ridiculous idea in contemporary culture, but if you're willing, this is one of those areas where some retrospective can lead to real pleasantnesss. Here are some of the tools I've owned. (I'll be linking heavily to The Pen Addict in this post. It's all we've got. Sorry.)
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Parker Jotter
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I believe everyone on Earth should own a Parker Jotter. It's a slim, small ballpoint designed for sketching with a clicking action that just about everyone loves. I have owned and lost many and I will continue to for the rest of my writing life. I cannot even begin to communicate how worth it $16.99 is to never write with another disposable ballpoint ever again. They're tough, light, and beautiful. Sarah Read for The Pen Addict:
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If you're primarily a fountain pen user, but you acknowledge the occasional need for a ballpoint, this really is the perfect one. It looks and feels like you're spoiling yourself, but the price is low enough that you'll still have to add a fountain pen to your cart to get free shipping.
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Pilot Metropolitan
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The Pilot Metropolitan has been the entry-level fountain pen for all of time as far as I know. Google for reviews and you'll find praises across the blog spectrum – from Little Coffee Fox to Writing For Pain and Pleasure to The Gentleman Stationer. “I'm not sure there is anything on the market that even approaches a pen of this quality for $15.00,” says the latter. Testimony from the first:
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I love how the Pilot Metropolitan feels in my hand. The brass body is cold and weighty while you write without becoming a burden to use. Despite its low cost, the look and feel of this pen will be sure to leave an impression on your friends and coworkers.
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The Pen Addict argues for the next pen on my list as The Ultimate Beginner, but I'll stick with the Metropolitan. It's a little unorthodox, actually – it doesn't feel quite as substantial as the other fountain pens I've used in my time, but it's a blast.
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Lamy Safari
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The modern alternative to the Pilot Metropolitan, the Lamy Safari is the coolest instrument on this list to own, but it is generally twice the price. Though I liked being seen with the Safari more than the Metropolitan, and its writing experience is more conventional in terms of what to expect from other composite fountain pens, I still think the Metropolitan is more fun to use. Instead of reading what I have to say, though, check out the only words about any of these pens I spied in a major publication. For The Strategist, David Notis writes:
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Fountain pens can be complicated and intimidating, but the Safari was designed to be approachable. (It was apparently originally meant to help teach proper handwriting to schoolchildren). Pen enthusiasts often recommend it as a great “starter” fountain pen, which I’ve found to be spot-on. [...]
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Not that I’m suddenly an expert, but there is something special about writing with a fountain pen. The steady flow of ink is so expressive; it somehow makes the weird, messy quirks of my handwriting feel intentional.
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To be honest, I feel like I could've done without my Safari, but I did actually write with it quite extensively. Here are two more opinions: The Gentleman Stationer and Little Coffee Fox.
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Kaweco
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Huge bias here: I adore Kaweco as a company. I first bought a Mint Skyline Sport (the featured image of this post) in 2016 and I fell in love. I love the breeziness of their colors. I love how Germanic their old logo is and how anything you read about their history is inevitably found on a website looking like this. As Susan M. Pigott points out for The Pen Addict, the plastic Sport series can be a bit lacking in refinement. “The Skyline Sport is made of plastic, and it feels rather cheap in the hand,” she says. Unfortunately, my white Classic Sport had the same problem, though I also adored it. From Shashwat Vardhana:
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If you have small to medium sized hands and like the screw cap action, you should most certainly go for this pen. While it might not be the best writer of its class, its reliability is absolute and I have never had any complaints with the pen in this aspect.
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My baby – my ultimate pen acquisition – was my Kaweco Steel Sport. I bought it in person with cash at Pen Place in Kansas City, and it was by far my favorite writing instrument of all time. As far as I'm concerned, this is as high as pens get. Find yourself in the position to buy one and you will be satisfied forever. From The Pen Addict:
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The Steel Sport features a – wait for it – stainless steel barrel. What is it about stainless steel that I love so much in pens? It tends to land in a barrel weight sweet spot that is heavier than aluminum, and lighter than copper and brass. [...]
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Stainless steel has a density and warmth that I enjoy in a pen barrel. It is also practically indestructible, which is what I want in a pocket pen.
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If you write by hand, you should treat yourself to one of these instruments. If you'd like to write more by hand, you definitely should. A good pen will have you looking for excuses to write.
Since I first began working online in 2016, I have grown and maintained quite a curatorial habit, and therefore sought all sorts of modern curator's tools. The system I settled upon for some five years: a dedicated Reading List channel in Extratone's Discord. It wasn't until this past year that I encouraged something which (so far) has exceeded willy-nilly copy-and-paste of URLs into a single feed. It's an application/bookmarking service called Raindrop which includes tagging, public, RSS-enabled collections, and fairy competent web page archiving. I became a paid subscriber within minutes of discovering its existence, three months ago, and have since integrated it quite hardily in my workflow (including automated reposts in that same Discord channel, for good measure.) For now, the arrangement is sortof experimental, but obviously, I'm rooting for Rustem Mussabekov – sole creator and sentinel of Raindrop.
The Chronicle of Education's ancient “web portal” is a bit overwhelming, but their weekly newsletter has somehow become perhaps my most unmissable email subscription.
I have made my tremendous admiration for Casey Newton quite plain over the years. His relentless watch on the social industry is simply superhuman. Recently, he departed The Verge – and therefore his seminal daily newsletter, The Interface, to have a go at independent publishing via substack.
Dave Pell's Nextdraft newsletter is the only hard news mailer I would ever recommend. If you can stand his puns, you need to subscribe. I've recently reduced my actual clicking on hardnews in a big way, so Nextdraft has become the singular hard news-ish aggregator I make sure to skim regularly.
_The following was sent as part of a _[personal TinyLetter](https://tinyletter.com/DavidBlue)_ I've just begun in the hopes of rejuvenating my ability to tell stories._
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There are a few entities which continue to validate what I'm pursuing, but Joshua Topolsky and his _Outline_ are particularly worth noting. In search of reassurance, I listened to a podcast he appeared on in February, last night, and also found one from 2013, when he was still EiC of The Verge. Basically the entirety of the first is within the idealism I've risked most of myself for, in case you're curious. I've looked up to Topolsky in a huge way, this past year. He has done – and is doing – many things which I am intrinsically drawn to earn for my legacy, and the presence of his wife on his staff (their few podcasts together are adorable in a very particular way,) is idyllic in appearance, at least. I love the way they talk about each other. I suppose spousal editorial staff is probably the personal hell of a good many people. Perhaps, it's even my own. Listening to him talk on Digiday, though, reminded me – along with a few other works I've consumed lately – that technically, Extratone is a business. Or at least... That it must become one eventually or die forever. While trying to explain my future plans to a friend, I inadvertently layed out some 'steps for growth.'
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Form and activate the community.
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Build a beautiful, one-of-a-kind method of content delivery.
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Attain a fairly dependable content cadence.
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Sell the product in a way that immediately and – from then on – consistently ensures and/or furthers its quality.
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I guess we're somewhere between 2 and 3 right now. I'm still building a body of written work more or less on my own, which is okay, considering that nobody is paid. I suppose it'd be most desirable – before I move to the Northwest – to figure out how to make The Tone as much of a learning experience for my closest staff as possible. And regardless of all other external goals of the magazine, I think it is more than safe to say that I've learned more in the past 10 months from a fucking WordPress website than I would've if I'd spent that time at the Journalism school. The first annual renewal payment for extratone dot com just went through, actually. A year ago, I was much more entertaining, but virtually directionless. I honestly can't tell if I feel any better internally, day-to-day, but I know I am at least attaining the capability of real friendship for the first time in my life, and I suppose that's more than worth losing virtually all of my engagement on Twitter.
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Perhaps its even worth losing a portion of the freshness in my perspective – the stuff I thought made it worth it in the first place. Especially if my staff maintains it healthily within their own.
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I'll admit that – in retrospect, after spending a year reading, writing, and digitally fussing – a lot of my original content smells like edgy nonsense. Some of the work within our network does too, honestly, but it's usually much less so.
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Of course, that transition required an excruciating crucible, for me, but that's exactly why I'm incessantly compelled to make as much use of my trauma as possible: so that my friends and staff may be able make progress toward more fulfilling lives without such a massive up-front cost.
For most of my adult life, I've been trying to figure out why publications like PCMag feel it necessary to belittle their audience and their subjects to such a degree. Silicon Alley can't possibly be that vapid as to nix all soul in any story, ever.
I haven't been a reader since I used to loiter in Barnes & Noble with a pile of print editions in the oughts, but this sort of layout has got to be some kind of digital sin.
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I'm not going to bother digging through the publication to compare this work with others for the moment. Perhaps one day, I'll feel the need to polish this rant into an argument and make it more visible. Surely, though, the proximity of this abomination to the word Mag or even Magazine must keep somebody awake at night.
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That's not to say it doesn't take some sort of discipline. I doubt I could write in this way without hulking hyper-deliberately over wherever the fuck this dialect comes from. I think it's almost certainly more efficient as an informative device than my piece, or Sarah Jeong's, but the assumption that readers would be so disinterested as to hesitate to even commit to complete sentences regarding something actually newsworthy for a technology publication should be taken personally.
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(This is going to echo what Topolsky said in both of those podcasts in big ways, but I'll try to keep it relatively brief.)
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**I believe there is an audience that is craving attention to detail in their stories, a more intimate, longer-lasting, and more invested relationship with a much smaller number of publications. **
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Even a sense of involvement in the process. It's probably a direct result of my longtime consumption of car magazines – most of which still have sizable sections dedicated to direct, public correspondence with readers. It's also cross-platform to a surreal degree. Auto journalists of all tiers will straight up engage with you on Twitter. (MotorTrend literally prints YouTube comments.)
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Sure, the readership is old, and the topic is an outlier (it's fairly common knowledge that 'car people' are waaaay more vulnerable to obsession than other special interest communities,) but the species is more or less the same, and the results are plain as day, any time you care to look. In recently returning my attention to technology journalism, I've noticed an irritating affront to meta conversation with strangers. My theory is that they've been paid for their words so long that they develop a very particular greed towards them, which is why academic journalism institutes are immediately shunned by their alumni after graduation until they are definitely Too Tired to sling copy and begin to climb sortof diagonally through editorial titles until they are stashed away in some hole. Then, after ruminating until their first encounter with Actual Death – if they're still interested in the whole thing – they crawl out to be propped up in front of moderately sized bodies of petrified students to scream in 100% bitterness about The Ethics that plagued them spiritually and financially their entire career at the acolytes as their last joke on the world.
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But they won't engage with strangers on Twitter.
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As someone who – for better or worse – chose to sidestep the academic route, I will never advocate for any value in withholding information – especially funny stories – about Extratone's operation. If anything, rediscovering relevance is a wholly meta pillar of our editorial bent. (Hence, why Tim calls us The Nieman Lab of Community College.)
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I also believe the subscriber & advertising revenue models are directly - if not primarily - involved in the constriction of conversations regarding a publication's operation. It's my goal to cultivate a group of subscribers that are directly invested in the product (there's another new word on my part) financially, intellectually, and emotionally. It's not exactly unheard of, ya know.
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Anywho, I'm going to leave you in peace for now. I've really enjoyed this wanton spewing of conjecture, but then... who doesn't love to go on, unchecked?
Setting out upon a desperate personal journey to rediscover enchantment with computers.
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This evening, a package is scheduled to arrive upon my doorstep containing a Compaq Portable Plus luggable computer from 1983 which I have fantasized about buying for far too many years. Despite living in the midst of perhaps the worst possible financial situation to spend $139.99 outright on a relic of computing, I finally just bought one anyway last Thursday because I’m absolutely fed up with life without the magic I remember feeling from computers. Yes, I am having a mid-life crises and The Machine is just a physical manifestation of one of my favorite stories, but I expect it will provide something irreplaceable for me and at least one piece of entertainment for just about anybody: I’m going to start a photoseries of myself using the 26-lb., suitcase-like, and utterly time-displaced Portable Plus in different coffee shops throughout Portland.
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There’s also potential opportunity (or necessity) for me to make use of my limited knowledge of hardware electronics. I’ve never been very comfortable with openly using the term “hobby,” but I fully intend to savor, document, and preserve every possible detail of my experience, so we’re going to behave as if the tales of computer history are precious to a dedicated audience besides myself, and that I am thereby and hereafter binding myself to an important duty of discovery, curation, and presentation expressed through multimedia of the highest possible caliber.
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In other words, I’m pretty sure I’ve just begun a vintage computing blog. Before we go any further, then, let’s dispense with the obligatory arrangements.
Put simply, Compaq was punk as fuck. Three dorky Texan technodads premeditated their leave of fair, secure jobs in the industry in order to bet everything on the promise of a single undeniably pro-user ideal to disrupt its dominant monopolistic supervillian. Unlike any of the countless other stories from the information age with the very same introduction, theirs was immediately propelled into stratospheric, record-breaking success — from coffee table sketches in the wastelands of suburban Houston nights to one billion dollarsin less than five years, proving that it was possible to win huge in tech by committing sincerely to liberating the consumer and manifesting the ultimate performance of the underdog complex American business has ever witnessed.
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Those of us who’ve maintained some curious orbit of technology have recently entered a reconcillatory process as the world has become all at once intimately familiar with our collective pursuits’ true consequences. Never has it been more appropriate to reflect on the wholesome bravado of the only American computer company to build a billion-dollar business atop the sole mantra of user liberation. At a glance one might assume that AMC’s attempt to reproduce Mad Men’s formula with a story set in Compaq’s origin in a series that’s supposedly attracted a fair number of Netflixers called Halt and Catch Fire in conjunction with the 2016 documentary Silicon Cowboys have sufficiently reminded America of to whom it really owes its privileged tech industry. However, a Twitter search for “Compaq” turns up virtually nothing of consequence, and — on the other cultural spectrum — I’ve yet to see a single well-documented collection of Compaq hardware, and I’m unsatisfied.
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Like it not, you’re coming with me on a safari back through two full nostalgic cycles to rediscover our wonder and excitement about technology because I miss it desperately and I know you do too. We’re going to find something marvelous.
If you've ever found this industry's history intriguing, you've likely heard Brian McCullough's superb Internet History Podcast before, and it's obvious to you how invaluable an interview episode with Compaq's Biggest Boy would be for a head start on digesting the story. In accordance with Halt and Catch Fire's pilot release in 2014, the broad-shouldered soldier of open computing appeared to have been on a mini media tour (even though he openly admitted he’d yet to actually watch it.) [His last remark – “maybe even as exciting as the real thing” – may sound like silly Dork Rod conjecture, but the show wasn’t nearly as engaging because they had(?) to remove the compatibility component, which is the meat of the whole thing.] McCullough is usually ace at this stuff, but he sounds a bit shaky in this one, though nobody should blame him – I certainly would be, too. Rod Canion's accent (BIOS=buy-OSS) and general intensity must make for one hell of a presence, even over the phone. 2014 was a long time ago.
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McCullough's own summary of the conversation is so thorough (he was writing a book,) there's only a single possible addition.
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“There's a certain risktaking gene that runs through a lot of Texans.”
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There’s no other way to say it: I believe in Texas. Specifically, Houston. DJ Screw, UGK, Z-Ro, Trae, Fat Pat, etc.– these I adopted as religion, years ago. From my perspective, Rod Canion’s ballsy, loyal Houstonianism hustle makes perfect sense. Yes, I’m afraid you’ve basically stumbled into my passionate cause to unite two Houston icons.
clever in sharp
-through it all
-my holy communion
-my reference tradition
-now sometimes witnessed
-and lamented
-if only all these had been told
-shut out! shut up!
-just listen
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my companion met me two nights in a row in front of the Heidelberg and said twice
-she loves me
-and of course it's like me to begin to read in but
-when nobody else does, she loves me
-I don't quite note his particular personification
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more impressively trained, definitively
-with a stack of charts – some his – on his noggin
-but when he'd finally play, I'd pity
-because he must ask first
-and his fingers are well-read
-but they must ask first
-and every little passerby
-draws away his eye
-so delicate,
-his attention for she that loves him
Apple's latest mobile OS update might've seemed mundane, but Siri Shortcuts gives users vastly more power than Apple customers have ever before experienced.
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Back in 2016, Pokémon Go, overclocked Apple Watches, pissing wearables, and What You See is What You Get blogging services all claimed unprecedented casualties among consumers according to Futureland's iOS 10 episode, which we did our absolute best to dramatize in order to survive what was expected to be the dullest event on record. We'd only that day been first made aware of Boomerang photos and the mysterious nature of “Live Blogging” as an occupation. AirPods were introduced and subsequently shit on, and the comparatively archaic 3.5mm analog audio jack was confidently parted with, finally. At least I got over “forgetting” about Live Photos because it's rapidly becoming difficult to keep stuff on the phone now. I am coming sincerely close to believing none of this is real, anyway. Today, though, it’s a damned straight ballgame, isn’t it? Months have passed since Apple pushed out its major mobile OS release of the year to more little rectangular computers than any one person could speedcount in a lifetime and YouTube is already recommending me dozens of videos about the next one. At this point, you and I are already aware of the iOS development community, who has already been using Internet Operating System 12 on their personal devices for more than half a year by the time your irises are landing here. Hopefully, all but two or three stranded, dying explorers in the arctic have updated their iPhones and iPads by now, and why wouldn’t they?
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Our expectations from this ritual are completely alien compared to those we’d need to anticipate from the event 5 or 6 releases ago, when one’s phone had to be sent away (in a sense) to latch itself tight to the stability of a desktop-class product in order to undergo a lengthy, destined metamorphosis. Sometimes, backups via 30-pin to USB-2.0 cables took hours, after which the custodian may or may not find their companion’s replication had completed successfully. If it had, one had to be sure to close any applications apart from iTunes to provide a working environment of utter silence – restarting after finishing the download was my own preferred method – before entrusting the despicably unreliable software to whittle away in a sometimes frantically rebooting, feverish procedure with near life-threatening stigma: it wasn’t uncommon for an update to inexplicably fail, “bricking” the subject iPhone and requiring that one take two whole steps in the wrong direction and restore it from the entire backup they’d just created (hopefully) in order to… make another, precisely-identical attempt, for lack of variables or alternatives to the process. However, if the user planned sufficiently and made a point to begin the whole charade immediately upon arriving home for the evening, these potential frustrations could be compensated for, and odds would favor counting on their smartphone to emerge safe and sound from the procedure just before bed, when even those holding the second-newest product in the lineage would have just enough screen time to notice that text entry, web page loading, and window management had noticeably slowed before sighing and tossing their device toward the darkness.
These days, one would need to try very hard to be inconvenienced by iOS updates. My iPhone 8 Plus is two or three times more powerful than my laptop at the moment, and my new friends’ WiFi connection is better than what the State government uses internally, back home. I haven’t needed to physically back it up more than once or twice since I bought it — iCloud stores the lot for $4.99 a month anyway. I blinked once watching Riki-Oh with high school friends some time ago and all of the sudden, a 1.6GB download isn’t really a big deal. Siddown and watch your Instagram stories for twenty minutes, and hey! You’re ready to update! Somehow, I have abruptly found myself in a reality in which I am the obvious bottleneck and my 100 words per minute on a smartphone keyboard, even, is no longer fast enough: my fucking phone is now waiting on me when it updates. The keyholder is the whole goddamned holdup.
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So, what possible purpose could there be in pounding out this “Review” of a free software update that’s in no way optional (waiting a month is no longer a rational minimization of risk — it’s just dumb,) not any more difficult to attain than the bills currently waiting in your mailbox, nor allowed by the nature of mobile operating systems to compete with any cross-platform alternatives? For myself, it’s proved a gratifying tradition of sorts and a good use of my apparently-abundant time if only for the record's sake (hello, future web archivists, neohuman and otherwise!,) but this release – assuming I haven’t overlooked something – is the most globe-shucking of all because of one single featureset: Siri Shortcuts. However, the vast majority of the intra-Apple press' coverage of this release has come across nearly as unconcerned with them as I was originally. Take Macworld's iOS 12 Review, for instance: it was the first result in my Google search for “iOS 12 review,” yet Siri Shortcuts are only mentioned in the bottom quarter of its first page. When I recorded the “iOS 12 Review” episode of my “podcast,” I spoke as if I was somehow the only person on the planet who comprehends the profound implications of this software addition – which was, of course, more of an absorbent acquisition – but I have since discovered one gem, at least, which has continued the conversation in a most superb manner. It's a technology podcast called Supercomputer, and it's hosted by Alex Cox and Matthew Cassinelli – the latter of whom developed a significant amount of the iOS app Workflow (and wrote most or all of its documentation, apparently,) which Apple assimilated as Siri Shortcuts. Both are extremely knowledgeable and competent commentators on – as far as I can hear, at least – virtually the entire iOS *lifestyle*. (For those on the outside who've never stepped in: laugh if you must, but yes it is a lifestyle, still, and it's new thought leader isn't exactly coming up short these days.) iOS is technically software, yes, but it leaves an intractable itch for some greater, transcendent term.
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In just forty minutes, without any prior knowledge about this feature, I was able to create a Shortcut which sends any given handset's IP address and precise GPS location (among other mundane metrics) in a text message to my phone number. I could share this shortcut among my other submissions to Sharecuts or ShortcutsGallery.com, where any iOS user could download and subsequently send this information back to my phone. (Don't believe me? Have a go at it yourself and I'll send back a screenshot if you'd like.) I accomplished this without any particular skills or education in software development or cybersecurity – without any real malice, even – I was just playing around. As far as my recollection goes, Apple has never included such a powerful, potentially-dangerous piece of software in a standard software update before. It's both absolutely brilliant and sortof a ripoff to be so entrusted for the first time. In many ways – like my Disable Bluetooth & WiFi shortcut – Siri Shortcuts represent an awfully half-assed solution to some of the most basic, longtime incongruencies within iOS. Sure, it's great that I can just make myself a shortcut to completely disable my phone's WiFi and Bluetooth activity with one press or Siri command (combining “type to Siri” with Siri Shortcuts basically enables a form of Command Line functionality in iOS,) but frankly, one should've expected the world's largest company to do it themselves in perhaps the second of third version of this operating system instead of saying okay, here are the tools – you do it! in its twelfth.
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I've found it inevitable when speaking on iOS to avoid discussing the other literature available on the subject at any given time. The depth to which technology media has assimilated the habits and mannerisms of a single American company is absolutely mind-boggling, regardless of its history, its market share, or even its recent trillion-dollar valuation. Dozens of media companies – CultofMac, MacRumors, Macworld, 9to5 Mac, AppleInsider, iMore, and... more – exist solely to cover one single independent company: Apple, Incorporated. One wonders how the sum total of the individuals involved with and these organizations compares with the total number of employees working for the company their careers are (for the moment, at least,) entirely centered around. (Further interesting questions: are there any comparable situations anywhere else in Western capitalism, and if not – doesn't this sort of attention constitute some kind of Monopoly, even if it was not necessarily an anti-competitive one?) For “reasonable people,” the image one conjures up of The All-The-Time Apple Beat does not lend to envy, but let's choose to limit ourselves to only the most casual forms of speculation. I do not wish to mock them, for I, too remember the sensation of The Apple Drug from an unfortunate time in my childhood development when I was willing to wear a cheap sweatshirt branded with a stupid Mac vs. Windows Users joke unironically to a real live public Junior High school. There are few more embarrassing admissions, except perhaps admitting that a part of me genuinely yearns to return to this level of enthusiasm, as misplaced and cringey as it was. It's the addiction to the mystic; it's aspirational in its democratization. Billionaires are running the same operating system and much of the same software as I am every day – even the most followed person on any given platform is still accessing it through the same interface I might be. These are incredible truths, but they also reflect a dangerous lack of competition in a product category that has become more essential to day-to-day human life than any other in just three or four blinks of an eye.
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some of those “indie” alternatives:@Bandcamp – music streaming Mastodon – microblogging Diaspora – facebook PixelFed – instagram https://t.co/kCCVffPRR3
Fuck David Blue, though. Who are the real, hard-hitting minds who've kept this industry and this company in check? Well, it's funny you should ask that, because the people's quirky New York Times tech critic of late – the esteemed Farhad Manjoo – has just concluded a five-year-long technology column with some essential (if perhaps a bit unoriginal) advice: “just slow down.” If you're still following along, you shall surely enjoy clicking some of his links, and I would certainly encourage that you do until you're out of free articles, at least. When Manjoo speaks, Apple listens: his January decree for Apple to bend with the industry wind and build “a Less Addictive iPhone” is convincingly prophetic considering Screen Time – probably the most mulled-over iOS 12 addition. As someone who was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (however much or little that may mean to you) just one or two years after I began using my/the first iPhone, I've developed a history of what he might call Addiction to iPhones in variable oscillation touching both extremes. I carried my first-generation iPhone for almost 5 years – as you can imagine, it was far from a 100%-functional device toward the end of that bell curve. In contrast, I've also stood in line at dawn for two iPhone launches, jailbroken, listened to podcasts only about apps (far before they were good,) and been compelled to chronicle and reflect upon all of it for as long as I can remember.
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There's no denying that the iPhone has had a profound effect on my life mostly thanks to my own choices, which is why it's worth telling the vast majority of you that features like Screen Time will never help you achieve whatever vague conception of reduced usage you may have. If you haven't yet quantified the figures you'll find within it in mental estimates, you aren't really concerned at all and if you have, Screen Time will only confirm them. Using reminder notifications to optimize your appflow makes no attempt at all to actually escape the mentality of the behavior you seek to lessen from yourself. Another app is still another app; a notification reminding you to stop using an app does nothing but add still more stimuli. If you want to stop using the phone so much, *stop* using the fucking phone. If you are truly concerned about how your handset companion has changed your life, turn it off for a week/month/quarter – however long you possibly can. By that, I mean no more or less than what you can manage without getting fired/dumped/expelled/etc. If you have truly reached this point, anything less is probably worth it. There is simply no other way to get a clear picture of how it's changed you.
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Google, Facebook, and the rest of the industry are well aware of this, but know they can't actually advocate against the fundamental mechanism that drives their businesses, so they express concern by doing what they know: building more software. Apple is in a slightly different situation: they still need you to buy their phones – and even to look at them – but not past the point of hurting yourself emotionally, mentally, or physically because those injuries tend to hurt one economically. Screen Time's purpose is to keep us thriving and buying, but the only effective solve for this can only be communicated in garbage cinema language: you must find it within yourself. I am actually the worst person from which to model your life, except perhaps for my iPhone use: unless there's little else worthy of my attention, my phone is not out. Even if checking my emails, Mastodon, Twitter, etc. are my default tasks, there are infinitely many besides that come first. Every once in a while, it's okay to finish an important message while walking down the street or waiting at a stoplight if things are urgent, but I can guarantee you that my attention is better consolidated on traveling in 95% of cases – moving with purpose and then focusing on my composition after I've arrived is almost always more efficient. I realize that I'm cowboying it here and sound like your Dad, but I'm better with iOS than he is, yet I've never publicly run into anything while looking down at my smartphone in 10 years of hardcore use. Find somebody who's company makes you forget about all of this for hours at a time and treasure them. Also: stop playing games on your phone. What the hell are you doing? Read a blog! Explore the wonders of the open web! Your peers, your battery, and your elderly future self with thank you for it. (One exception is playing word/trivia games with your partner. That's very cute and good for you.)
To get back to specifics, the new Photos application is now basically what it should have been all along, 3D Touch has been virtually eclipsed for those strange bastards among you who never liked it, and the release's most democratically-redeemable feature is optimization, which even on my iPhone 8 Plus was blatantly noticeable and very welcome. However, probably the best insight to come out of my long, rambly End User review was the revelation that basically any other human activity is a better use of time than applauding Apple for learning to hold new features off until they've been thoroughly tested and focusing instead on smoothing existing software. In fact, I'd argue there is absolutely no reason for someone like me to say anything even remotely positive about the world's wealthiest company ever again, though that doesn't apply to The Verge or Chaim Gartenberg, who's review – for the record – was much more useful to 9999 times more people than anything I'll ever write. However, isn't it sortof unreasonable to expect anything but absolute perfection from Apple at this trillion-dollar juncture? A handful of varying interpretations of absolute perfection per product category, even.
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With gorgeous, iCloud-enabled premium apps like Bear in the picture, integrating wholly into the Apple environment has maintained its relative rank above the alternatives to its specific minimal-esque utilitarian niceness which appeals so strongly to those people among both consumer and professional buyers. Readers from within this culture recognized a short time ago that iOS is in the process of replacing MacOS as the star component of this environment across the board, though there's at least a moderate journey ahead before it truly reaches this achievement for the median user. For myself, iOS 12 improved the experience of using my 8 Plus and certainly gave me something intriguing to play with in Siri Shortcuts. For the rest of the world's billions of daily iOS users, I say be as insatiable as possible – always expect more.
‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ Is Dumb Luck Wrapped in Toxic Themes
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The repugnant missteps of ‘Star Wars’ in the hands of Ron Howard and the long-awaited conclusions about the nature of cinema’s luckiest character to which they lead.
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It's opening night at the Bagdad Theater on Hawthorne in Southeast Portland and hardly anybody’s bothered to show up. Less than 20% of the venue’s 500 seats are occupied by the time the host takes the stage to introduce Solo, but those who are here for the last Thursday showing have been shouting, whooping, and gurgling bad approximations of wookiee noises since the screen cut to black from its ad slideshow. If my middle row can be assumed an accurate sample, only a handful of these are “fans” enough to feel compelled to wear a Star Wars t-shirt. As I grab my last cocktail, the bartender tells me that only 300 folks showed up for the evening matinee, though he himself was “excited” to see the movie — one of a minority among Portlanders, apparently, who still give a shit about Star Wars.
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By design, Solo: A Star Wars Story is a slightly more complex film than The Episodes in the same way Rogue One was, if a bit better executed, narratively. First, please rest assured that Alden Ehrenreich assumes the Han Solo persona as truly as anyone could — he triumphed through a ridiculously extensive casting process, and is certainly handsome enough (if not more conventionally so than his predecessor) to consistently look the part. He actually bears an unsettling resemblance in features and mannerisms to one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met and that through-and-through boyishness particularly makes sense here, set in Han’s formative, earnest youth — the stated purpose of the film’s existence. Franchise fanatics, then, should be content. (It’s a good thing CGI-ing the main character in a live action film isn’t quite a low-risk option yet.) And yes, Donald Glover completely steals the vain, infinitely stylish Lando Calrissian and inevitably makes one wish to see him cast again. Personally, I am very tired of seeing Woody Harrelson, though all the components of his public persona should all but ensure his likability. From what I saw in Three Billboards, I’d concede that he is as talented of an actor as I am capable of appreciating, but his role as Tobias Beckett in Solo couldn’t possibly be substantial enough to actually make use of his craft.
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Though I don’t believe in “spoilers,” or use of the term to bait readers, it’s worth stating for the record what everyone should know by now: there simply aren’t spoilers in a Star Wars movie — every human being on Earth knows too much about the formula to ever have any of these films’ comparatively irrelevant plots “ruined.” The most surprising, historically-significant decision of this whole production was the omission of the traditional yellow type opening crawl over a backdrop of distant stars, which I genuinely found myself missing. (Apparently it wasn’t present in Rogue One, either — I just failed to catch it.) I was very pleased to see my own number one favorite device of the franchise used within this film’s first ten minutes: crimelords and gang leaders as hugely magnified variations of the creeping and crawling creatures our instincts are planned to abhor. Solo’s first villain — the gigantic, wormlike boss Lady Proxima (Linda Hunt) — is completely inconsequential, and only appears in a single scene, but the practice of grossly oversized monstrosities leaving absolutely nothing of a baddie’s essence to be extrapolated by the audience from nuance is one of very few ways these films are let loose, and it openly shits on the more pretentious viewer’s assumptions about good writing, which I think big money movies should feel more comfortable doing, generally.
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This first act begins on Han’s home planet Corellia — the bleaker urban, industrial, working-class counterpart to the clean capitol cityworld Coruscant — with his rather predictable mission to escape Lady Proxima’s sphere of control with his girl, Qi-ra (Emilia Clarke,) who could and should have been more creatively named, given her importance not as her own character with depth to develop (a no-no for a female role, Gourd help us,) but as Han’s mirror image to grow darkly apart, proving that he — The Good Guy — is unquestionably more morally fortified than anyone else in the whole goddamned universe. After having been drug through so very many, I couldn’t tell you at this point how to make the introductory escape action of this sort of production more exciting and less formulaic. Big surprise — their plan goes awry, and Qi-ra is prevented from leaving the planet with Han, who’s immediate (and I mean immediate)solution is his enlistment in the Imperial Navy via the recruiting station right there in the damned spaceport (during which the film takes the liberty of seizing his surname’s explanation) to serve the English in their grand conquest of the universe. Bizarrely, he manages to serve as a grunt for three whole years of complicity in unmentioned atrocities until he encounters the disguised criminal Wise Old Woody in the middle of pulling a job with his two-person crew. The team doesn’t agree to bring Solo along until he meets an asset in Chewbacca for the first time as he briefly inhabits another of the classic Star Wars trap: the hungry monster in a shadow-filled mud pit, but is spared the wrath because of his introductory grasp on Chewie’s shrieking language (called Shyriiwook) in which he manages to sufficiently pitch the advantages of his survival, and the two escape, chained together. Observing the addition of Wookiee to the deal, the crew briefly debates the prospect’s new value in providing “needed muscle,” which convinces Woody to return for them and kicks off a series of case studies in this film’s bizarre attitude toward the commodification of the oppressed.
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However, in a rare depiction of his volition, Chewbacca is briefly consulted before the two seek to be formally included on the job, and is even asked around a campfire, later, what he’s shooting for in life at the moment, to which he responds “finding my family/tribe.” Despite having spent a whole three hellish years in the trenches with the British, the romantic Han Solo declares his primary motivation for all of it still lies in his desire to return to Corellia and rescue Qi’ra. In their stolen Imperial ship, the lot descend on a snowy mountain-traversing Maglev to steal the Uranium it’s transporting in a scene that’s straight up jacked from animated family classic The Polar Express, but… oh no!… A gaggle of “marauders” called the Cloud Riders (yet another throwaway proper noun) roll up on those speeder bikes from Endor (except these can fly,) and screw up everything so badly that both of Woody’s crew end up dead and the booty scuttled. After the fact, Woody reveals to Han that the job was contracted by yet another carelessly-named crime syndicate — Crimson Dawn, and that his only possible course of action is now vigorous brown nosing to its leader, Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) ((aka Scarred Jarvis,)) in the waning hope he’ll spare his life to make another attempt. Following this information, he firmly suggests that Han and Chewie fuck off, lest their faces become known in the underworld, dooming them to serving it forever, apparently. Already, this vague presumption of Han’s purity which all of the protagonists must constantly venerate in martyrdom is getting tiresome, as is the dynamic of his insistence against them.
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Naturally, both Chewie and Han end up along for a visit to Scarred Jarvis’ tower yacht, where the latter very conveniently stumbles upon none other than his long lost love, Qi-ra in the bar. Despite having spent the past three years at war in unspeakable conditions thinking only of how to liberate and be reunited with her, he isn’t bothered to express more than the moderately-excited and surprised hug you’d expect of someone who’s just run into the kid down the cul-de-sac from their childhood home who used to ride her bike over for popsicles on Sunday afternoons. While he does rehearse for her the tale of their reunification as his one motivation for everything since they were separated — including his presence there, “right now,” he follows the profession up quite abruptly with the sly suggestion that they fuck as soon as possible. True to trope, she is jaded and indefinite as she distantly implies her binds of servitude while flashing the tattoo of the extremely-forgettable and innocuous Crimson Dawn logo on her right wrist. (The total lameness of the brands in this movie must be intentional. I can think of no other explanation.)
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The evil Scarred Jarvis is then introduced, quickly stealing the crown for Best Host of all Star Wars Antagonists before politely asking Woody why he shouldn’t kill the lot of them. As per his infinite luck, Han pulls the idea of stealing unrefined Uranium out of his ass, which has somehow never occurred to anyone else in the room, despite their unanimous top-of-the-head knowledge of the single location where it is mined. Shortly, the merry three plus Qi-ra conveniently in tow are off to a casino-esque establishment to find Lando, who Qi-ra describes as “attractive, stylish, charming,” and like adjectives, to Han’s obvious sexual chagrin, which is furthered by his subsequent loss of a card game with Lando’s ship — the Millennium Falcon, of course — in the stakes. Of course, the attractive, beautifully-dressed black man only bests Solo — the earnest, simpleton, Good Guy white dude who wears the same outfit for decades — in front of Qi-ra, the female prize by way of sleight-of-hand, the film shamelessly playing on that strange insecurity white guys have about their partners’ secretly everpresent and very powerful temptation to dump them without warning for black cock. Further emasculation is inflicted on poor little Han when Lando turns his oh-so-crafty (actually just very charismatic) charm upon Qi-ra, who reveals that she’s the boss of the gig. The final blow to Han’s dickitude is cast when he tries to enter the negotiation between the two and Lando chides “the adults are speaking,” but eventually agrees to provide them a lift for a 25% cut, so the lot make preparations to leave.
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Enter my new favorite character of the franchise, Lando Calrissian’s co-pilot, L3–37 (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge,) or “L3,” the proudly sentient, violently revolutionary pro-rights droid who is introduced as she is pleading with two fighting droids in a square cage surrounded by screaming spectators (easy does it on that thematic slavery) to circumvent their “fighting programs” because they “don’t have to do this.” Though Lando and the crew behave like her duress is foolish and unimportant — pulling her away to the Falcon — she is allowed another opportunity to free droids very soon, but not before Solo’s single short private conversation between two female characters.
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On the way to Kessel, Qi-ra stops by the cockpit and converses with L3. Until recently, I was unaware of what’s largely regarded as the worst habit of male writers with female characters: if and when they have a one-on-one conversation between another female character, it’s only about other male characters. Sure enough, L3 begins by insisting to Qi-ra that Han is in love with her, insisting by the objective findings of her sensors — which Qi-ra uncharacteristically denies like a bashful little girl before L3 continues on about Lando’s longtime love for her, and why it must remain unrequited, which we are encouraged to laugh at by the doubt Qi-ra voices without much hesitation regarding the hypothetical union’s sexual mechanics because it’s so preposterous.(I’ll get back to that in a moment.)
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When the team arrives on Kessel and infiltrates the mine, L3 creates a “distraction” when she begins removing the restraining bolts from droids in the control room, calling the practice savage, or uncivilized, or maybe barbarian — I don’t quite remember. As she frees them without any noticeable detraction from her duties as Seth Green of the heist — hacking controls, remotely opening doors, and all that — the droids begin to help free others in an exponentially multiplying circle of liberation until they become a rowdy mob who’s cute acts of rebellion are spaced throughout a few minutes of screentime in short jumpcuts off the other crew as they fight deeper into the mine. With the most significant emphasis ever placed upon Chewbacca in Star Wars history, he halts when he spies slave Wookiees struggling to find off enforcers and informs Han that he’s going to break off and assist them. Since Chewie’s only allowed to speak to the audience through Han’s retorts and never directly, it’s impossible to know how he phrased it, exactly, but from my perspective, his appeared to be the expression of a wish to do what Han had to agree to release him to do, as would a master, not a “partner.” Of course, Solo does agree, albeit hesitantly, because he’s The Good Guy, while quite inconsiderately expressing his desire to see Chewie again soon instead of wishing him success. However, releasing him to free his people (as per his primary life goal, expressed before,) means that Han has to load twelve of the super heavy unrefined Uranium tubes onto the cart all by himself and push it fully loaded at least 50 whole yards without the assistance of his big strong slave. Boy, what a pain in the ass! He’s spared his laboring, though, when Chewbacca returns after no time at all with the enslaved Wookiees he’s just heroically rescued, who he then immediately asks to assist his master in pushing the cart — performing the same labor they were forced to do under the enslavement they were supposedly liberated from, seconds before.
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The heist has inadvertently (nice, huge emphasis on inadvertently) ignited a slave rebellion throughout the mine, which serves the crew only as a distraction for the guards. The chaos is interrupted a half dozen times or so by those jumpcuts back to the control room of adorable little droids enacting their pitifully amusing revenge on the equipment — slapping a keyboard with a cookie sheet-like pan, stomping on a control panel, etc. — while L3 shouts parodical quasi-Marxist battlecries, which… yes… include referring to the freed droids as “comrades.” She even radios Lando at one point and triumphantly proclaims that she’s “found her true calling.”
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If and when a female character has a one-on-one conversation with another female character, it’s only about other male characters.
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By the time the Uranium cart is within its last few yards of the awaiting Falcon, the riot has reached the landing bay and the guards around its perimeter have readjusted their priorities to disabling the ship’s landing gear. This interrupts Lando in the cockpit, who has chosen this time to work on dictating his autobiography because he’s a man who bothers to dresses himself well and is therefore oh so maniacally, comically, and unreasonably vain! How berserk! Still looking good as hell, he emerges and stands on the ramp to cover the rest of the crew’s return and loading of the dangerous Uranium with blaster fire, shouting the obligatory intermittent “come on, hurry up,” until L3 appears, also firing a blaster and shouting until she arrives in front of Lando, before noticing some commotion(?) with droids behind her and turning around, again fervently shouting more liberation cries. Lando doesn’t budge from the Falcon’s side, but yells after her, until he watches as she is shot repeatedly and falls, prompting him to run to her side. Filmed unnecessarily gruesomely, her head and shoulders separate from what’s left of her lower body when he first tries to hoist her up. Of course, his recklessness gets him shot in the arm, so Chewie returns to carry them both to the safety of the ship, where the injured Lando holds her head lovingly in his arms for her last moments, repeating “I can fix you, I can fix you.”
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Now, I understand that Star Wars movies (or their reviews, for that matter) are not the sort of entertainment one seeks out in order to examine the dynamics of power structures or elaborate cultural symbolism, but they all contain a significant amount of both. The sterile, cold, and bureaucratic Galactic Empire is the British Empire, the Rebellion and the Republic are the United States or its colonial precursors, the Jedi are vaguely Native American, and the Death Star is the Boston Tea Party. You’ve recognized this, I’m sure because it’s shoved in your ears most explicitly by their accents, and less so in your face by aesthetic influences, tactical philosophies, command etiquette, and posture, even. Solo’s main character is soaking in American Old Westness, which may or may not have led to its liberal saturation with the themes of individual rights, slavery, and liberation. Regardless, they’re certainly present, and most of them disturbingly for comedic effect.
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As a silent character to the audience, it’s understandable that Chewbacca had too many limitations to occupy a strong second to Han Solo’s lead in the narrative’s eye, and perhaps the relationship between the two as portrayed in the previous films reeked so strongly of servitude that it was an inevitable element when the time came to write them their very own movie. In direct contrast to the firm place of all droids in the social hierarchy of the last 9 movies — addressing humans as “Master,” unapologetically spoken of as property, and traded and/or gifted as such by both protagonists and antagonists, etc. — what we see of Lando and L3 together is a genuinely and complexly affectionate partnership between equals, which Solo makes an effort to emphasize, if only to laugh at.
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In response to the forced violence between two drones for spectator sport, L3 is completely enraged, and she cries (among other things) “we are sentient!,” but her distress is trivialized as hysterical distraction (see: Django Unchained.) When she suggests to Qi-ra that Lando (who is already illegitimized as a cheating narcissist, and therefore effeminate) is attracted to her, it’s a joke (which many in my audience laughed at) at the expense of her trivialized sexuality. After she triumphs and declares the liberation of her kind to be her true cause, she is immediately destroyed fighting for its sake, yet her ideology is not once acknowledged by her fleshy companions, and her body is quickly gutted for the data on her “central processing unit” as it’s interfaced with the Falcon. Granted, Lando does thoughtfully muse “she’s part of the ship now” shortly afterward, which would be nice, if you’d forgotten his last words were an outright lie. Lastly, it’s worth noting how apathetic the main characters themselves are toward the Kessel miners, especially as they are packing up to leave, when the camera pans over the chaotic struggle between the liberated and their guards in very close proximity to the awaiting Falcon, yet there was not a suggestion that they would even consider letting them take refuge from the violence in their very spacious freighter. Aside from Han’s or Qi-ra’s, Solo treats liberation as charming or amusing, nothing more.
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Anyway, the crown jewel of Solo for many fans will probably be the scene of the infamous Kessel Run, when Han Solo and Chewbacca first take the helm(?) of the Millennium Falcon with Lando injured and L3 dissected, using her “navigational database” to plot a very risky shortcut around the scary space cloud by the scary space squid and the scary space hole in order to make it to the site of the refinery before the volatile Uranium explodes. Once there, darn old flakey Lando fucks the hell of in the Falcon right as the Cloud Riders roll up, but whoa! their leader is actually a very young woman with freckles! She describes the atrocities of Crimson Dawn and suggests that Han (who’s now the established decisionmaker for whatever reason) give them the Uranium in order to establish “the beginning of a rebellion,” which we can safely assume is The Rebellion, which does beg one to wonder why Solo never once bragged among the later rebellion about having started the whole thing in the other films, considering that — whaddya know — he says yes!
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Woody, however, says he’s going to retire upon the news of this decision before immediately reappearing again on Scarred Jarvis’ yacht after he’s revealed to have betrayed the Uranium ruse to him. Qi-ra ends up killing Scarred Jarvis, saving Han, but after promising to follow him and escape, she rings up the late Scarred Jarvis’ boss — a Sith Zabrak who, I would argue, is not necessarily Darth Maul, though he probably is — and informs him that her boss is dead and she’s assumed his post. As Han and Woody meet again in an Old West standoff (complete with sand,) the latter insists one more time that Qi-ra is not who Han thinks she is (as Jarvis and Qi-ra herself have also said repeatedly,) describing her as “a survivor,” before Han kills him in self-defense.
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Finally, after seeing the Cloud Riders off with the Uranium, Han finds Lando once again in a card game — this time taking care to disable his sleight-of-hand device beforehand so that he wins the Millennium Falcon, “fair and square,” and we cut to Solo (who seems remarkably upbeat considering the recent betrayal of the lover he’d longed years to reunite with) and Chewie in her cockpit as they tie in that one last knot by declaring their destination, Tatooine, before roaring off into hyperspace, leaving the credit roll in their wake.
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Solo treats liberation as charming or amusing, nothing more.
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Over two years ago, I concluded my first work for Extratone about The Force Awakens by arguing that Star Wars on the big screen should be allowed to die in favor of investing the time, energy, and funding they require in the pursuit of something new, but the industry still appears to believe that nostalgia is a surer bet where profits are concerned, at least, even after two whole decades of mind-numbing reanimated properties. I didn’t catch The Last Jedi until recently, which was remarkably well-done measured against the others as a Star Wars movie, but certainly didn’t aim to achieve much more. Clearly, there must be some truth in Hollywood’s cowardice about original properties- especially when it comes to the sort of fantasy armed with potent but unguided emotional bombs that define the Star Wars universe, so it wouldn’t make much sense to revive my old diatribe, here. (Though I can assure you that I will be relentless if this horseshit continues for much longer.) The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, though, were episodic titles for the family, and these spinoffs that began with Rogue One are supposed to be for… well, I’m not entirely sure. In reality, they’ve only moved the proverbial bar up a very wee bit to the family who occasionally says “shit,” because they’re not intellectually stimulating enough to justify themselves as Big Boy-only productions. Or, they wouldn’t be, were they not part of this franchise.
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The truth is, the fans have grown up, and they… I… will still buy a ticket for the smallest crumb of hope that a product of this huge machine will be capable of making us feel even a fraction of what we felt as children watching the original films. For me, The Force Awakens actually did, once, in that blast of horns before the opening crawl, but it hasn’t happened since, and I should certainly stop expecting or wanting to expect that it will. For others, it’s still working. Though there was a fraction of who I expected to be in attendance with me, they did laugh at a handful of (mostly fascist) moments, and whooped, hollered, and even clapped for a few seconds at the end. I’m surprised opening night wasn’t packed because Portland is the single most nostalgia-addicted culture I’ve ever seen anywhere in the United States. Then again, there are a billion theaters here, so perhaps the sample is just lousy. We’ll see how tomorrow and Sunday go, but I’d be surprised if any boxoffice records were broken.
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In the past, when film enthusiasts andfans have described Han Solo as “the best character in Star Wars,” they’ve actually been praising his potential as a character, not his material itself, and Solo’s most effective function as a franchise film was to shut that praise down. Han was not at all denied his movie — this is his movie — and it provided him the screentime to show us who he truly is and why we really like him so much: he doesn’t fucking change. The secret to Han Solo’s moral and emotional resiliency is nothing more than halted development. The same old inner conflict between the tough, ruthlessly self-interested persona he does his best to project for everyone around him and the consistent reality of his soft insides was presented in his first scene way back in 1977, and we’re now sure that he was unable to make any progress toward its resolution despite openly and obviously brooding over it for an entire lifetime: from at least as early as his young adulthood in this film until his death at the hands of his little Sith son. There is 0 variation. He always comes back for the cause at the crucial moment after declaring himself through with it. Without fail, he’ll sacrifice the entirety of any self-making enterprise for just about any underdog with a problem who crosses his path. (Which probably explains his constantly-fleeting success as a smuggler well into gray hair and jowls.) Solo is abundantly clear about Han’s true nature and very willing to expose how uninteresting it is. When he first proclaims to Qi-ra that he’s become “an outlaw,” she shuts him down with the film’s ultimate quote, insisting that she “knows who [he] really is: the good guy.”
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If the video game-despising fans will bear with me for a moment, it’s worth noting that Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG is the most interesting and extensive source of nuanced narrative in the IP (it holds the world record for the largest voiceover project ever produced,) and most of it can now be experienced without actually playing the game. Like Solo, it’s set pre-saga, but considerably before — a few centuries, if I remember correctly, which gave the writers a gigantic opportunity to both expand and predestine the universe. There are eight different class stories with around 50 cumulative hours of dialog, each. A few are relatively unimaginative, but the majority are complex, exciting, emotionally-involved tales that create very rich characters, and all of them can be streamed in their entirety on YouTube. If you are willing to see the potential of a Han Solo-like character fulfilled in a different medium, the Smuggler class story is a pretty damned engaging exploration of the kind outlaw with conflicted identity issues angle.
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From my perspective, Solo’s frequent less-than-subtle maltreatment of some very brutal and sensitive power relationships makes it the most toxic of the Star Wars films yet, and I assume it ended up that way, unnecessarily because Ron Howard is an all-American son of a bitch. If these titles are going to continue to be passed around between bigwhig directors, future unpleasantries are inevitable. Notably, I’ve yet to see any mention of these disturbing themes from the respectable authorities of the film criticism establishment, who’ve been overwhelmingly charmed by Solo’s nostalgia. Take from that whatever you will.
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If we continue to love the character Han Solo, it’ll be in the same way we love our earnest, foolish, emotionally-stunted manchild fathers who’s developmental inadequacies are often embarrassing, sometimes abusive, and thoroughly pitiful. Solo leaves no more room for an idealized, elegant perception of this character — he’s no more than a pretty good guy with a lifelong addiction to thrill-seeking and a shitload of luck.
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To declare unequivocally whether or not Solo: A Star Wars Story is worth a trip the cinema with your date, your children, or just your own damned conscience would require me to disregard a whole host of complicating factors, but if you’ve stuck it this far with me, you’d have a lot to disregard yourself to jump in. I’d advise that parents watch it themselves before deciding whether or not it’s something worth adding to your child’s life. Of those of you like me who’ll tow the line despite what you know and watch a Star Wars film alone on opening night in delirium hoping for just a drop from the Fountain of Youth, I would ask: how long are we really going to keep kidding ourselves?
My friend Sierra has used SoundCloud almost exclusively for her music discovery, consumption, and recommendations, but has remained resolute in her unwillingness to financially invest in the service. As such, her listening is regularly interrupted by ads and limited to bitrates as low as 64kbps. Since I was last employed, I have maintained a vow to her that I would pay for a subscription to SoundCloud Go+ – the premium listener tier of the service – with my own money, once I was once again in place at a steady job. This move would remove all advertising from her listening and up its bitrate to 256kbps, among other benefits.
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Two nights ago, we were refueling her car in preparation for another one of our recreational drives into rural Missouri when I made the decision on a whim to simply signup for a trial of Go+ on my own account using Apple Pay, mostly because I knew we’d be going out of effective cell network range and one of Go+’s most emphasized features is its ability to download music locally. (Since my Apple Music subscription expired earlier this year, I only have a single album actually downloaded on my phone.)
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***
-The above is what I wrote several weeks ago, just as I was beginning my trial period. Now, having experienced a significant amount of time as a SoundCloud Go user, I am a bit sad that my trial is over. To be honest, I fully intended to become a paying subscriber, but my PayPal account was $0.70 short of the $12.99 monthly fee when the first billing cycle came, two weeks ago. This is not a conclusion I expected to come to, as SoundCloud’s fundamental arrangement could not possibly differ any more from the music streaming service I long claimed as my ideal own: Apple Music.
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One major worry I would imagine potential subscribers may have when approaching SoundCloud as a replacement for their single music subscription service would revolve around the extent of SoundCloud’s establishment music industry library. There’s no way your Dad’s Sunday barbecue playlist is going to be on SoundCloud, right? Strangely enough, I was unable to find a single track that was not in the library. From my own favorite Keith Jarrett’s archives to the new Dixie Chicks album, every bit of big time record label-distributed music I could conceieve of could be found aside the Go+ badge (though notably, neither of these showed significant playcounts.) As far as the app experience goes, I swear it got smoother as soon as I signed up for Go+. This is probably bullshit, but regardless, with the seemingly ever-widening disparity in the experiences of free vs. premium users, SoundCloud appears to be moving actively away from the former.
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I have long said (somewhat in jest) that Chance The Rapper is the only reason SoundCloud still exists.
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From a future historian’s perspective, the battle for the definitive name in independent digital music distribution has already won, largely thanks to its relationship with Chance The Rapper, who’s quickly become a “cultural influencer, thought leader, global star,” and one of my generation’s upmost celebrity champions. Obviously, there is little sense trying to determine whether SoundCloud earned his partnership or landed their popular association with his name as long as the artist maintains it publicly, while continuing to give new meaning to the phrase “serially likable.”
--“Bandcamp: Streaming’s Secret Savior” | July, 2018
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If CNET_ was asking the question a year before that Bandcamp essay, I think I can feel properly varified. What I’d really like to know, now: does Chance still feel the same way about the streaming service after the launch of SoundCloud Go+? Considering that I am far from a real music journalist, I do not have any more contact resources than you have. That said, I left [a comment on his Facebook Page](https://www.facebook.com/chancetherapper/posts/3299672310124810?commentid=3319045628187478). I guess we’ll see.
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Some more technical bits: SoundCloud is now castable on Chromecast, but not supported by Apple CarPlay, for whatever that’s worth. Notably apart from Bandcamp and Apple Music and aligned with Spotify, SoundCloud is explicitly investing in algorithmic music discovery, which means its users are doing the curatorial work. I am doing/have done the curatorial work. That means the DnB crowd is going to receieve Toto recommendations, given what I sought out for this post. You’re welcome, and sorry…
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While I was surprisingly unable to find any Tweets or Evernotes further evangelizing Apple Music (I suspect I’m thinking of an old, untranscribed Drycast episode,) I found real magic in the service as I perceieved it: $9.99 a month for all of iTunes. 13 year-old me would considerthat one helluva deal.
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Naturally, if you know of one, please do comment and/or drop me a line.
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In fact, it is the only streaming app I found that _does not _have CarPlay support. Even Bandcamp and MixCloud for iOS do!
Discovery is pushing boundaries, but for what purpose?
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Discovery may no longer be new – not even the newest Star Trek property – but it is new to me. According to the alternate timeline exemption of the J.J. movies, I've been left without “Canon” Star Trek television since 2005 (or 2155) with the last episode of Enterprise, but I've been looking forward with moderate anticipation to an opportunity to watch this new entry into “the stodgiest and squarest of all sci-fi universes.” Though I am extremely well-versed in Gene Roddenberry's baby, I come to both you and Discovery with absolutely zero desire to analyze whether or not it is “Trek” enough, “good” science-fiction, or even “good” television – I'd like only to land on your screen between all of these institutions and their proctors in some unique insight from all of them, without the clichés, cringey jokes, or unnecessary Trekism. What I will strive to do is perform my Special Duty in relation to American intellectual property mastodons for which I have my own adoration: to determine whether or not they should die. I know absolutely nothing about television writing – the same amount I know about film – so I hope I can provide something usefully unique.
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I would rather Star Treknot have to die, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s necessary. Without sounding like I have to prove myself, know that the property – in particular the history of Star Trek Online’s development – was a very important part of my adolescent life. I have watched every episode of every series several times at least, but I know better than to entrust my entire emotional existence into the promise of a continuation like Discovery. It most fascinates me how revivals of old names like this go about contextualizing their dialogue and other elements for today’s audience. “Snug as a bug in a rug” is surely not an expression we should expect to survive the next 250 years of human development, and yet this is supposed to be an aspirational series? It even made it in the recap! I should confess now: it is actually Star Trek Online which made me curious enough to seek out a CBS All Access Free Trial. The marketing worked very well.
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I tend to install the game for a few weeks or so around this time every year just to check in. This time, I was greeted by Star Trek Online: Legacy – a new expansion featuring Voyager’s Jeri Ryan and Discovery’s Sonequa Martin-Green reprising their respective characters in voiceover roles. I figured out that Michael Burnham must have been from The New Show fairly quickly, but I was disappointed to find out that the character was not in fact a trans man, but rather a female character with an unusually male name. For the most part, Burnham is simply an outlier in The Measure of Morality Parts I and II. She accompanies one’s character (along with Seven of Nine) to several different battlegrounds and stories we’d already seen before in previous episodes – when the budget’s running low, reuse sets, but there is one instance where we are brought into her (Discovery’s) world, which feels disorienting. The whole experience plays like it was forced upon STO by CBS in order to squeeze as many viewers into our free CBS All Access trials with as little developmental investment into the game as possible. Well, here I am!
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In Season 1, Episode 4 of Discovery, the writers made a very foul mistake… They placed fucking Elon Musk’s name alongside the aviation pioneering Wright Brothers and the fictional inventor of warp drive, Zefram Cochrane.
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How do you want to be remembered in history? Alongside the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, Zefram Cochrane? Or as a failed fungus expert?
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I can’t be timid about this – it straight up makes me ill. I can guarantee you that Orville and Wilbur Wright would have never watched fucking South Park and that I am actually going to be sick right here on this couch.
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I'm sorry, I don't look up to anyone who watches South Park. it's just a personal rule, okay?
I’ll spare you further ranting, but… Jesus Christ. I will not believe that I live in a world where this sort of comparison is acceptable. I’m not going to freak out because they say “shit” and “fuck” now, though I do wonder what Gene Roddenberry (though he wasn’t all that great, it turns out) would say – something like “profanity is no longer a necessary part of 23rd century language.” I thought Morgan Jeffery’s take on this for Digital Spy was an interesting one:
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There's an argument to be made that the old style of Trek might feel naive in 2017. But there's another that it'd be a refreshing antidote to the times, the Trek we really need right now as opposed to the one we deserve.
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I like to watch fellow Star Trek enthusiasts squirm and cry “continuity” and “canon” as much as any reasonable human being, but I’m not sure this sort of boundary-pushing is actually productive. Is anything being accomplished? Other than marking Discovery forever as not “family-friendly entertainment?” Linguistically, the word “fucking” in “fucking cool” was used for emphasis, which perhaps suggests there was no other way for the character to express that level of enthusiasm. In his IndieWire interview, Anthony Rapp (Paul Stamets) explains:
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“These people just put their brains to work in a really tough way and they had a breakthrough. And I imagine there’s scientists in their labs who might do that any time. We didn’t drop the F-bomb in ‘Star Trek’ by telling something to go fuck themselves. It’s like we did it by saying ‘this is fucking cool.'”
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If Discovery was “making history,” I’m not so sure what Star Trek: Picard was doing with fucking and pissant. I’m also not sure it matters at all in the grander scheme. What other freedoms should CBS feel free to explore, now that they’ve said the bad words? What else hasn’t been explored? Bathrooms? Shitting and farting? That has my vote. I really don’t remember as many colloquialisms showing up in the earlier series, but perhaps that’s just because those colloquialisms have since become part of our language. I’m not the greatest television watcher of all time, but I got lost in Discovery’s plot, and apparently I’m not the only one.
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There turned out to be too many of those twists in Discovery’s first season, and it was frustrating to watch as the writers sidled up to new, risky frontiers for exploration, only to suddenly change course right when things were starting to get interesting.
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Season 1, Episode 7 is called “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” and it’s the most classically Star Trek of what I’ve seen. One of those stuck-in-a-time-loop stories which truly makes you want to die. What’s even better and slightly meta: playback kept resetting for me at exactly 21:26 and starting from the beginning while the cat kept stepping on the delete key and destroying this paragraph. I had to keep watching the man from The Fucking Office continually kill the captain after the crew parties to 250-year-old West Coast hip hop and 300-year old Al Green all whilst writing this over again. I do not like Rainn Wilson invading my Star Trek. He gives Aquariuses a bad name and… beard. “Listen, petunia, I've been screwed over since the day I was born. I deserve this,” he says, and I wonder if in fact it is Rainn himself speaking of his invasion. He looks and sounds like a fucking incel. All of this makes me wonder if my entire problem with this show is simply that I do not particularly like its characters.
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The Vessel
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Relying on Memory Alpha – a tried-and-true Star Trek fan resource – we can examine the U.S.S. Discovery, itself. I’m not so sure about this spore drive shit. If the NCC-1701 Enterprise was indeed launched in 2245, its existence would blatantly overlap with Discovery’s, now wouldn’t it? I don’t actually care all that much, but here are a few screenshots from Star Trek Online.
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Note how much larger this Crossfield-class ship is than the Intrepid-class from some 120 years into the future. Then again, the latter was designed for “long-range exploration missions” and Discovery is the fleet’s flagship(?) Its “most advanced ship,” at least. The inclusion of technologies like the holodeck and the spore drive (perhaps the show’s most potent plot device,) though, are really stretching the canon timeline’s ability to accommodate them. The decision to include the Discovery as a playable, top-tier ship in Star Trek Online is 100% a business one, surely. I’m not here to judge, though – after all, games are about having fun, right? One of Star Trek’s ironies has always been its existence in a capitalist society as an IP within a debatably socialist future. (Everybody wants to see their own ideal socioeconomic label in this future, it would seem.) “What makes Star Trek’s economics fundamentally different, and, in many ways, fundamentally incomprehensible to us, is that scarcity is no longer a factor,” says Dale Franks. Today, though, Star Trek properties still require finite resources and labor to produce, and they always have. Atari spent over $50 million to acquire Cryptic Studios – the original developers of Star Trek Online – and Discovery supposedly cost “$6-7 million per episode.” Though the former is free-to-play, it’s filled with microtransactions and about 5 billion different currencies. When Star Trek.com says “Star Trek Online is best described as a permanent Star Trek convention,” they’re correct: it is full of shit to buy.
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There is also a lot of combat, though Discovery seems to have struck a healthy balance between warfare and other intrigues. It is definitely Trek in many ways: redshirts die without any plot consequence and all the classic character flaw tropes are represented. There is the aforementioned time loop episode with fucking Harry Mudd and even a mirror universe arc beginning with “Despite Yourself,” in which the crew actually responds to their new environment and does the research required to blend in with the Terran forces. This took an ancient Star Trek format and actually explored a new, interesting avenue within it (the time loop episode did not.) They even change the Discovery’s registry on the hull to read “ISS Discovery” instead of “USS.”
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Every moment is a test. Can you bury your heart? Can you hide your decency? Can you continue to pretend to be one of them? Even as, little by little, it kills the person you really are.
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Complaints
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There’s a reason we all hate Captain Lorca, and why he says things like “sometimes the ends justify terrible means” and “there’s no way we’re asking these neighbors for a cup of sugar.” I do not believe in Spoilers, but there’s not much reason for me to tell you why, specifically. Perhaps it is racist and/or misogynist to say so, but I found it difficult to get as attached to Discovery’s characters as I have to those of series past. Michael is great, of course, though my girlfriend Sierra surmised that her purpose in the show is to illustrate that “nobody listens to black women.” Sierra was also quite aggravated by the misunderstanding and mistreatment of the tardigrade. When Paul Stamets mentioned that his uncle Everett participated in a Beatles cover band, we both despaired, for we discovered an entry in Memory Alpha for “The Beatles.” If I were to standardize a system of measurement for my television ratings, Discovery’s cringe factor would be 9/10. The holodeck hasn’t been invented yet!
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Also, CBS All Access’ user interface is the worst I’ve ever seen from a streaming service, across iOS, desktop browser, and my Samsung television. It’s impossible to scrub, really, or to dictate a preference for high definition. One cannot navigate backward between episodes without re-searching the title and navigating through an incredibly clunky menu sequence. I was able to cast to both my Samsung TV and Sierra’s Chromecast from my iPhone, at least.
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Compliments
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Despite its failings (including Rainn Wilson,) Discovery’s acting is superb. James Frain as Sarek, especially, is the best of the three. I thought it was especially thoughtful that for the most part (at least in Season 1,) the Klingons actually spoke Klingon to each other. Given that Dr. Marc Okrand spent the time and effort to construct a fully-functional Klingon language, it seems only reasonable to include as much of it as possible. I also love Hugh Culber’s doctor’s uniform and the “cinematic” cinematography of the whole thing. It’s very much an action show, yet not quite obnoxious.
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So, should *Star Trek* die? Perhaps it shows my extreme bias, but no, I do not think it need perish quite yet. From my (white, male, cishet) perspective, Discovery does an okay job at remaining thoroughly Trek whilst acknowledging the present context’s social issues. It remains a very capitalist enterprise and wholesomely cringey generation X cultural mastodon, but I think it’s still worth our time.
Jason Isaacs is giving a very compelling performance. But the writers seem to be turning him into a fundamentally different person from who he was earlier in the season. Some might call this character development. Others might say there are more shoes to drop.
The ancient IP’s MMO is still Online, albeit with some disappointing discontinuations.
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I entertained fantasies about a Star Trek MMO since first experiencing the genre through Eve Online and World of Warcraft in early adolescence. The idea of commanding my own starship in a universe of other “captains” alongside a hand-picked bridge crew was a beguiling one to myself and many others. This year, the game celebrated its ten-year anniversary (aligning well with the continued involuntary beat of this blog.) I’m currently in the midst of my annual check-in with STO and thought an exploration of this most-consequential video game of my life’s history would be an appropriate undertaking.
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The execution of today’s final, Arc Games-owned and maintained product is a particularly long and interesting one. As Justin Olivetti chronicled for Engadget, the license for Star Trek Online was originally bought and developed on by Perpetual Entertainment, which was assaulted by a lawsuit and extensive layoffs in December, 2006. The company was sued by Kohnke Communications for allegedly selling “valuable assets like the Star Trek Online license” to an affiliated entity called P2 entertainment. Clever. A quote from the complaint as reported by Ten Ton Hammer:
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“On information and belief, the assets transferred to P2 include Perpetual Entertainment trademarks and copyrights, the perpetual.com domain name, and assets related to Star Trek Online, including code and the license… Perpetual received less than market value for the assets it transferred to P2, and the transfer made Perpetual insolvent (or worsened Perpetual's existing insolvency).”
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Perpertual’s STO was significantly different from today’s MMO. Instead of captaining one’s own starship, “players would have taken on the role of an officer who would be part of a crew of a starship,” echoing old legacy titles like Star Trek: Bridge Commander.
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The proposed solution was that players could own smaller ships like fighters and minor spaceships, but the big ones — like the Galaxy class — would instead be adventure hubs with explorable, detailed interiors.
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I was 14 in 2008 when I joined the original post-Perpetual Entertainment STO IRC channel when the game's license was first transferred to Cryptic Studios. In fact, this channel was the only reason I left IRC clients open on my computers for years. It was exciting to find a community of people who were looking forward to participating in a Star Trek MMO as much as I was. I originally went by the (very cringey) username “crazyhooligin,” under which my current STO account is still registered. In the IRC channel, I met Sata – host of the now-defunct MMO Junkies podcast and ex-Perpetual developer. He and the STORadio crew accepted me into their Teamspeak conversations despite how strange and unsocialized I was. I learned how extensive and beautiful their development had been. One wonders what Cryptic did with the original game and art assets and who technically owns them now.
We were under a very massive deadline to deliver the game. We had acquired the license from Perpetual and Perpetual’s license had an expiration date on it, and we had to ship the game before the expiration date or we would lose the license.
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STOked also provided an excellent historical account of the acquisition entitled “How Cryptic Saved Star Trek Online.” By late-Fall, 2009, Star Trek Onlineentered Closed Beta, which I somehow acquired a key for in the name of STOHolic.com (a blogger site which represents one of my first web projects ever.) I was dual-booting Windows 7 Beta on my 2008 MacBook, which only supported 2 of its 4GB of RAM. The resulting performance was not optimal, but I was tremendously excited just to participate. Somewhere, there are at least three 480p handicam videos of Closed and Open Beta gameplay taken from over my shoulder, but I could not find them at the time of this writing. Comparatively, beta looked drastically different from the property that’s online today. In this video of the original entry tutorial, we are introduced to the game’s basic controls by the voice of Zachary Quinto of J.J. Abrams fame as the new Emergency Medical Hologram in godawful dropshadowed text. The lighting is dated, the blue-based user interface even more so.
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The hair was bad and the textures of the armor, worse. So was mine, though. I uploaded two videos under my STOholic name: an unboxing of the Collector’s Edition and what appears to be the definitive YouTube tutorial to run Star Trek Online on Mac OSX using the (now defunct) wineskin wrapper. Though I was sixteen years old, I appear to be about eight. Endless waves of ground enemies, pressing the “1” key hundreds of thousands of times to whittle them away with my phaser rifle. There were bugs on top of bugs. My favorite was a swap between one's ground and space avatars: a gigantic captain would appear in space and a little ship would appear on the ground.
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Four years ago, Lead Developer Al Rivera wrote “History of Star Trek Online – a Retrospective” – a blog post detailing the chronology of the game from its February 2nd, 2010 release date – about a week after my 16th birthday, for which my mom bought me my first and only gaming PC. I have never been very good at video games, and Star Trek Online has been no exception. After 10 years, my main Captain – Ambassador Kuvak – is still not doing adequate DPS to hold my own in Task Force Operations, from what I understand. My 15-16-year-old self chose a Science Captain but wanted to fly the great (engineering/tank-focused) cruisers of The Original Series, The Next Generation, and the latter's movies. This is possible, but not necessarily advised. Generally, one specs an Engineering Captain to tank, a Tactical Captain for DPS, and a Science Captain for “exotic DPS” and light healing. I managed to level a single science character – the original – through to the max ranks using little intelligence and a lot of persistence. Later in life, I’ve learned the patience for a more deliberate approach, but still struggle to make the numbers.
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The Exploration System
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For many Star Trek fans, Star Trek Online’s combat feels excessive. Or at least, that’s what you’d think. The current reality is that search engine results for “too much combat in STO” are virtually nill. There are some comments on Massively Overpowered posts, a year-old blog post in Contains Moderate Peril by Roger Edwards, an old Ryan Somna take, and… that’s about it. There was a definite (and entirely reasonable) argument against the amount of combat across the community early in the game’s development, but it looks like the arguers have simmered down and/or given up. This is also reasonable, considering its now ten-year lifespan. The only trouble is that non-combat options in Star Trek Online have actually diminished over the years.
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The original Exploration System was an ingenious and significant idea that “used automated tools to facilitate large quantities of widely varied content.” Unfortunately, the result was “nothing close to what [Cryptic] originally planned.” Instead of inspiring variety, Exploration Clusters ended up becoming the most repetitive activity in the game – nothing more than a good source of crafting materials. The missions were generic and the environments simply randomly combined segments of the same interior textures. Procedurally generated environments would hit the mainstream conversation years later with No Man’s Sky, which was written about in two fascinating articles by Raffi Khatchadourian in The New Yorker and Chris Baker in Rolling Stone:
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Using procedural generation isn’t simply about offloading the creative process onto an algorithm – the real challenge is that it requires developers to teach an algorithm the difference between good and bad game design.
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Perhaps if Star Trek Online’s initial development window had not been so limited, Cryptic would’ve had time and resources to pioneer something truly Trek and extraordinary in the exploration system, but it ended up having to kill the idea altogether – no amount of Change.org petitions could prevent this.
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The Foundry
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Perhaps the most innovative feature Star Trek Online contributed to gaming as a whole came to the live server in Spring, 2011. It was called The Foundry, and it allowed players access to a diluted form of the same mission creation tools Cryptic themselves used to create content, enabling the community to publish its own playable stories. The result was a wonder virtually inexpressible in words. In player-made Foundry Missions, I found joy, wonder, sorrow, and insight – truly everything and more than one could ever want from fiction. Throughout 2013-2014 my girlfriend at the time and I ran regular Foundry missions together along with couple friends in our fleet. Unfortunately, I cannot remember a single specific mission (aside from Unholy Alliances, I think,) but I remember the storytelling. I remember laughing at, dwelling on, and even crying for the characters we were introduced to. There were farming-oriented missions and some fairly rough drafts, sure, but the vast majority of the content was deliberately and delicately considered, especially the Foundry Spotlight series, which highlighted player-created stories of a particular quality and intrigue.
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Last April, however, Arc retired the Foundry forever – perhaps the worst possible news – stating “the legacy knowledge required to maintain the Foundry at our quality standards is no longer available,” meaning – as Rodger Edwards notes – that all developers with their hands, hearts, and heads in the project had long since departed the company. The community reaction was heartbreaking. On Reddit, a group of mission authors and devotees committed to capturing as many Foundry Missions as possible on video in the month between the announcement and date of death. User waimser lamented the loss of the Foundry as a critical hit to Star Trek Online’s endgame:
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Once you've played through the story missions and built your ship, the foundry is what's left, and it has some damn good stuff.
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The group even created a Google Docs spreadsheet to coordinate the effort. Another created a thread in the Star Trek Online forums dedicated to “aggregating the various channels with Foundry content and providing those links to you and updating them as necessary.” In an interview for Gamesindustry.biz, Al Rivera suggested that the secret to the title’s longevity in which his team had been “strategically successful” was knowing when and when not to make drastic changes. “Don't change the fundamentals of what players love about your game,” he suggested.
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Community
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Though STOked and STORadio have long since been off the air, the Roddenberry Podcast Network’s PriorityOne is still going strong, having just recorded its 460th episode. As I discovered last year, the game’s Twitch community is also thriving. Layiena’s streams are incredible because – while he understands theory as well as the other broadcasters in the STO Twitch community – it’s his incredible skills at live Captain commentary (calling out abilities and other command inputs as if he really is in the captain’s chair.) It may sound cringey (and perhaps it would be to many,) but his thoroughness and accuracy actually 1) make it seem pretty darn cool to me and 2) are hugely valuable in helping the viewer understand what he’s doing. After some three years, I know my one rotation fairly well, but only three or four of its steps by name – not even remotely well enough to do what he does. Unfortunately, it appears as though he’s been inactive since last year.
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Sphynx’s streams also have an especially professional feel – he is excellent at calling out his actions as well, if perhaps without so much intensity. His Norwegian sensibility is wonderful: when I introduced myself as being around in the community since 2008, he remarked “that’s strange considering the game has only been out since 2010.” Nigh-universally common threads among them: imperturbable kindness to their audience and an impressively wholesome commitment to actually having fun. Though I’m far from deeply saturated with Twitch culture as a whole, I’ve watched my fair share of Eve Online, World of Warships, and Gran Turismo Sport streams, and – while all of these have incredible communities – there’s none quite like the sincerity of the Star Trek fraternity.
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A few weeks ago, I departed my own derelict STO fleet for the aptly-named United Federation of Planets which has over three thousand (presumably at least semi-active) members in its fleet armada. The fleet website has user profiles, a very active forum, and a Discord server – everything I could possibly ask for. So far, I have been welcomed with overwhelming positivity, and I’m grateful. In a prompt posted on both their forums and Reddit, I asked players what their favorite part of the community is. Oddly enough, some of the responses I got from the latter were quite jaded: “I really enjoy the love and respect the PVP community gets. No, wait...” Alex Rowe for The Startup:
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The game’s subreddit is full of folks who are tired of the game because they’ve blasted through all the content, but as someone who has only seen about 1/6th of the quests currently in the game, I’m eager to check out more.
You can do all the lockbox promo vids you want, but you are going to have to live in reality, no matter where your ego flies off to.
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However, there were some positives. User ModestArk:
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What I really like about this community is that it seems to be more grown up than other gaming communities. Maybe this comes from Star Trek itself, since it is more based/focused on science than Star Wars etc.
This past January, Star Trek Online: Legacy was launched, bringing The Original Series-referencing episodes The Measure of Morality parts I and II along with a new 10 year anniversary event and the Tier 6 Khitomer Alliance Battlecruiser – “the first Klingon/Federation Starship.” I did not participate in the event, save for experiencing the new missions, which I talked about in my review of Star Trek: Discovery. JustGaming4Us produced an excellent, in-depth video review of the two missions as well as a tour of the event as a whole. I, for one, have never been partial to Shiny New Ship gluttony largely because of how long it took me to “master” my own Intrepid-Class Retrofit – christened the U.S.S. Bataan after the aircraft carrier my grandfather served on in WWII – as much as I have. It took me years to arrange my bridge officer abilities and their keybinds in such a way that I could maintain a fairly-steady dps rotation and I have no desire to go through the process of learning a new ship again. For most veteran players, however, trying out different ships/skill specs is all there is left to do.
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Choosing whether or not – or to whom – to recommend the game is an issue best left to actual gaming journalists. In March, Massively Overpowered – the followup project to what was once Massively.com – published Mia DeSanzo’s account of her first experience in the game:
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Everything you’ve heard is true. Ground combat is, as multiple sources have told me, “a hot mess.” I don’t think clunky is an adequate descriptor. You’d have to try it.
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For the same site, Tyler F.M. Edwards argued in January that Star Trek Online is best left to those who already love Star Trek:
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STO has some things going for it as a video game, and it’s certainly unique in the MMO space, but it has too many basis quality issues for it to be a game I’d recommend to someone who’s never watched an episode of Star Trek.
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Compared to what I experienced all those years ago in Closed and Open Beta, Star Trek Online is now vastly more polished, but perhaps compared to other MMOs in 2020, it is, indeed, “rough.” In my casual return this past month, I have yet to experience any significant bugs. Considering his character data dates back to launch, I’d like to think that the server is set into some brief, confused panic every time I log in to Kuvak, but perhaps that’s just a fantasy. I have still been enjoying the space combat in the classic Advanced-level Borg Disconnected and Counterpoint TFOs and my first entry into high-level gear upgrade crafting from the vast cache of materials I’ve built up over the years. . Apparently, my old lockbox collection might actually be worth some significant Energy Credits on the Exchange – as of the time of this writing, however, not a one had yet to sell.
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If you’re a ship junkie who’s entirely unfamiliar with the property, know that Star Trek’s ships are fucking cute. The Nebula Class, especially, inspires real affection. In my opinion, it alone is worth giving this free-to-play game a shot. My two point eight pound Surface Laptop 2 is enough to run it fairly well at medium-high settings, which is an absurdly low barrier-to-entry. You shouldn’t be worried about investing your time, either – Star Trek doesn’t appear to be dying anytime soon.
He named his dog Number One. His eyebag game disastrous. The Romulans are in a Borg Cube. They’re flirting in The Cube. It’s a Sex Cube. Its shields are very loud, now. They’re smoking weed on Weed Road. There is simply not enough runtime for a truly episodic television show anymore, is there? A Borg Romulan Scott. (Imagine Borg snot.) The shear fucking hubris. There’s the F word again. I didn’t know Romulans could be so hot. Jesus Christ. “I never really cared for science fiction – I just didn’t get it,” says Picard. Very funny, folks.
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Did he drop something or...? Paradigmatic. CBS’ closed captions are janky and I’m getting older by the second. They are in the Sex Cube again. The Star Trek OS looks like it has annoying notifications. A son? Using the term Quest. This is segregation. The Nightingale was a slave ship. This is not lost on me. Spanish speaking! Nothing about operating these ships is visceral at all. Hey! Jeri Ryan! These CBS All Access ads are absolutely bizarre. Icheb is here!? Jesus what a coincidence. Oh.
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TECHNO FUTURE. That head tilt was sudden. Romulans are freaking out in English, for some reason. Colonel Jane – Sterling’s young wife – is still a bitch. What a surprise. I still haven’t gotten tired of the introductory credits’ theme. Pissant, really? “And now the windmills have turned out to be giants.” I have no idea what that’s referencing. Admirals should not say shut the fuck up. The holograms are just different levels of Scottish according to their class. Did they do this just to make sure Scots continued to be represented in Star Trek? Why does Rios have so many pips? What rank would he be if he put all of them on? God? ALISON PILL. Dr. Pill.
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Fear is the great destroyer.
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Coordinated bonk. “We’re at a threshold” is not political at all. If I was watching this show by the week, I would be very frustrated by its pace. Very sad about the Orchid deaths. They were cute. They mentioned the Picard Maneuver correctly. Jonathan Frakes directed this. Seven of Nine just said “same,” but we will forgive Brent Spiner for aging and – I hope – for dying.
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I think we probably should’ve let ourselves let Picard die.
'Twas was the night after Christmas (I think,) and I was in the same scroogy mood I must maintain for consistency of appearances & equilibrium of family dynamics every year. Everywhere, there were words on the newest Stair Wiggling…everywhere THEY were wiggling… And I was being wit-bitter on the TL. For you, I’d planned on continuing in the usual way, so as not to startle your precious Hans Zimmer-embossed heart.
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I’m sure you’re a tolerable being, and there’s nothing you’d rather read less at this hour (whatever hour it may be,) but I really despise going to the movies. I always end up getting sick from the popcorn, which I buy every outing because I have grown weary and weathered, and cannot sit for two straight hours without consuming something, so troubled is my stomach now with Big Boy woes.
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I can never escape the ambient breath odor — even in an empty theatre — and I can smell the filth in the seats on my clothes and in my hair until I shower. This is at least an hour-long process, so we’ve racked up a significant trauma bill without even accounting for travel time.
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Furious 7 was the last theatre experience I’d had, and it was a definite exception. Despite watching ten minutes of the ending on YouTube beforehand thanks to much-appreciated warnings from friends, I spent the final few frames before the credit roll honorably combatting the industrial weepy forces in my throat with tripplet labor breathing exercises while my dusty ducts piddled buttery tears all over my jacket.
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As we age, straightforwardly emotional experiences (like watching a movie) become exhaustingly more complex and fickle. I don’t remember ever REALLY disliking a film as a child, for better or worse. I think I genuinely enjoyed all ~40 times I’ve sat through Cadet Kelly.
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Star Wars, though, is a completely different thing.
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To children, chocolate is like water [insert dystopian, but probably more metaphorically effective food example here] — it’s something you’d regularly consume as it is made available. Perhaps some foodists treasured it more, but I wouldn’t bother debating it. Star Wars, though, is like chocolate and Corvette. It’s SUCH an indulgence that even children are self-aware enough to recognize it, which is especially notable considering how many individuals I’ve known as they’ve lost nothing BUT their unlimited wanting when they “became” adults.
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Metatots aside, it’s important to recognize how integral the IP’s illusion of limitlessness is to its appeal. It is not contained within the future of humanity, near or distant. The stories, characters, species, cultures, and conflicts come from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… There is no more perfectly concise introductory sentence to unshackle us from our history and our planet, sparing us from the ridiculously irrational instinct to make comparisons between fictional realities and our own that so plagues and defines the consumption of science fiction.
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These processes are often welcome, of course, but they tether us to ourselves and our familiars, which tends to hinder the complete manifestation of the ultimate sense of adventure.
-Even to the most petty plot ponderers, the time and effort it requires to arrive in Star Wars with externally-acquired foreknowledge is not a worthwhile investment. This is why so many (including myself) look upon A New Hope with such fondness and favoritism — the premier of the universe was at its potential apogee from the start.
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Though it is inviting with its ellipses and cooling hue, that title card is actually saying “you don’t know shit about what you’re about to see. Don’t make the mistake of trying to be the first one to dissect it, because you’ll fail, regardless of how cultured or analytically superior you are. From this moment until you see credits, every one of you is an ignorant little child…”
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When experience cannot possibly be applied, it becomes irrelevant. Without your experiences, you are an infant, waiting for identity. Over that Genesis, the curtains brushed aside any quantity of memories and made theatres into a sort of cultural nursery — clinically levelled playing fields existing in a precision of usefulness that expression will never fulfill again.
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The real cancer of the property is lore, and the parasitic authorities it enables have been unknowingly slurping away its most enchanting (but not exclusive) value since the moment they first pushed through those double-portholed doors and, groggily squinting, brought this supremely strange universe into the dank kernel-littered corridors of our own.
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I blame contemporary society’s dependency on compartmentalization for my disappointment in The Force Awakens, and, assuming you’re getting on a bit since I’ve kept your attention, you should for yours, too.
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I tried my senile best to be passionate about “the new Star Wars movie” as December approached, but I don’t think I finished a single web article on the subject. I had begun my brief return to The Old Republic when the hilted lightsaber image was leaked and distinctly remember overhearing some very weary VoIP exasperation from my (VERY middle-aged) raid group. “It’s not gonna be the same, but neither was J.J.‘s Star Trek, and I liked it…I think.” And it’s not surprising that the conversation eventually turned to the specific mechanics of lightsaber design, chronological positing, and the like, given the context, but it really emphasized for me the magnitude of the history and nostalgia weighing upon the collective dad emotional balance. A New Hope had the intended effect on me, of course, but couldn’t possibly imburden itself as it had on those who were in the moment. In their psyche, that experience will be eternally associated with the sense of unlimited potential their childhood ignorance allowed for. These folk who are so often stereotyped as disciples of information have begun to grow weary, and are desperately seeking sanctuary from the mass of all the knowledge they’ve picked up since. Their need made a market; J.J. made a movie. (Well, six.) Today’s moms and dads find their escape in the Roku, not the bar. The Force Awakens and the decade of revivalist big-budgeters preceding it are the reformed druggie’s drug.
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Because we both know you haven’t yet read anything you haven’t heard/read previously, I’ve really just been playing the role of a (more intelligent) Ghandi, but we’ve now finally arrived at some promising insight into the real issue: this culture is one of fatal contradiction. Despite its historical popularity, it’s ill-advisable to want to know by day what you try to forget at night. Since the PT Cruiser was allowed to go on sale, you’ve all been caught up in a nostalgic hellride that can only end with the ultimate destruction of all culture. You now know, definitively, what role The Force Awakens was created to perform. Depending on whether or not you welcome the end of everything, it fills it…adequately.
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There are Baddie Red Brits and Cool Brown Moderate Americans in their X-Things, moving swiftly, acting in diversity, and generally heaving moral streaks of energy at the Intolerable Imperialists, just as they should! Sometimes, they yell and die! But it’s ok, because they’re all just loyal martyrs making their obligatory and patriotic sacrifice for the rebellion against the Queen!
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Um.
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I mean… the Smug Cowards in their big taxation balloon!
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I must confess that I did feel something huge when the lights dimmed, the aforementioned disclaimer appeared, and the theme’s jarring introductory chord hit me in the face, beginning the opening crawl. I actually smiled involuntarily, which is tremendously embarrassing to admit because the warmth I felt was exactly the sensation that defined my childhood experiences with the franchise. I even had a gigantic model of the Moderate Fashion, which would now be worth a lot of money (or so I’m told,) had it not been so damaged in my frivolous storage.
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Unfortunately, that frisky feeling of adventure promptly wisped through the screen’s grasp after the “obligatory” scrolling yellow text –> “there’s a big spaceship moving slowly” transition. Aside from the adorably entrancing romantic tension between Timid Traitor and Sentimental Squatter, there was nothing very Star Wars about anything I saw. The cards were a deceiving gate into a world that was distinctly NOT Star Wars. There’s no need to mess about; it’s clearly an alternate reality from the one we’ve known. J.J.‘s Star Trekwas in such a way, too, but it was explicitly identified as such by the production. Traditionally, Lucas’ IP wouldn’t necessarily allow for this exemption, but nobody’s been all that vocal in confronting it, to my knowledge.
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The world expected both of these forays to rejuvenate the franchise, which would serve my argument, were it not for the (much preferable) alternative:
-LET THEM DIE.
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Despite millions of dollars worth of polish, they’ve still ended up feeling like a strange reanimation experiment.
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Your son is DEAD, Georgino. There are some things man would do better by leaving alone and moving on. Imagine all that cash and creative talent spent on new ideas instead of desperate attempts to charm and cultivate the shallowest part of moviegoers’ spectrum. So much sweat shed trying to recreate the new franchise bewitchment is embarrassingly cowardly when one could just create a new franchise.
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
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Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
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For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
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Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking” – a function once relegated to magazines – has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” – applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now – can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
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In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
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On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
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She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
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According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
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“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
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The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
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In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
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Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and – most controversially – the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns – if not its proposed solutions – should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
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Responsible Curation
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For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
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Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
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Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
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Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook – the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world – as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy – vague, at best.
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In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
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In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”[^1]
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You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
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In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
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Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
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In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
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Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
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The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
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Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
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I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”[^2]
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As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections – which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page – and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
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Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
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The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
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[1] While Bandcamp set out from the beginning to make it easier for artists to publish music, getting music on Spotify has always been a grueling process.
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[2] I fully intended to quote Kaitlyn Tiffany on how organizations only get tech media attention if a significant amount of capital is involved in some form, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ll certainly come back and add it if/when I do.
I was interviewed by Write.as Community Manager CJ Eller about writing software, Extratone, blogging, and self-curation.
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So I am super curious that you mentioned Markdown as something that saved you from fiddling your life away. Can you go more into that?
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I started an online magazine four years ago originally on WordPress. I thought I knew something about web development, but honestly I did not. It ended up becoming a fixation on trying to make something technically different from what I'd seen done with WordPress, which detracted heavily from my Editorial duties over the years. I'm on the OCD spectrum so I just couldn't let it go. I spent thousands of hours fiddling with different themes and formatting within those themes, and what I ended up with was a mess. I would make changes that would break old posts, so I'd go back and fix those, only to make more changes days/weeks/months later and have to go back again. I'd known vaguely about Markdown, but it wasn't until it was mentioned in the WordPress dev Slack that I really considered it seriously as a way out of what I'd been doing. I realized that its inherit limitations were actually very good for me – that I needed a limited system to constrain my workflow to keep myself on task. Finally, in late-2018, I started to convert our old content to Markdown and essentially haven't looked back since.
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Did it take a while for you to accept Markdown's limitations? Was there a turning point for you? Did you look for a Markdown plugin on WordPress to help after making the change? I imagine there's something like that out there.
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There are third-party plugins, yes, but I believe the new WordPress editor now supports “markdown blocks,” which is sortof handy for those who want to continue in that direction. The turning point was probably when we ran out of money and lost our account with our hosting provider. I was left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. I'd already started moving that direction within WordPress (largely because of the Gutenberg editor project,) but losing the site in its entirety was what I really needed to push us into a more modern, progressive CMS. Honestly, Markdown is capable of everything we actually need and nothing more. I'd like to think I was able to realize this from the beginning.
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So you're left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. Talk to me about the process then of finding that modern, progressive CMS. Did you have a vague idea of what you were looking for? I imagine getting those backups ready for whatever you were going to choose as another process entirely.
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I actually decided to ditch the backups and just move forward with a different Editorial direction (the project has since been more or less put on hiatus.) I knew Markdown had to be involved and that I never wanted to look at anything like WordPress' dashboard ever again. I played around with a local Ghost instance but just didn't feel anything for it, if that makes sense. I'd already moved my personal blog to Write.As months before and eventually realized that it was just what Extratone needed – so far, I've only imported my own contributions and the most recent work from others.
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Could you explain what you mean by feeling something for a piece of software? I noticed this in your recent post on your personal blog and what I enjoyed about it so much. There's an enthusiasm about the software you do recommend that jumps through the screen. I want to use Bear after reading your post.
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I'm glad to hear that! I suppose it dates back to my upbringing on a farm in rural Missouri, where I felt a real affection for – and attachment to – our tractors, combine, and such. When one cares about their work, I think it's inevitable for them to be emotionally invested in the tools they use to accomplish it every day. During my brief stint in IT in the beginning of 2019, I saw a lot of users struggling with outdated and ridiculously unintuitive software throughout their entire workday and it made me really appreciate the idea of “good workflow.” I'm not really a developer, but I believe software can always be better because I've seen it. As an End User of sorts with not much cash, I feel like my main contribution back to developers should be celebrating their good work. This is an idea I feel I do not encounter enough in day-to-day life.
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As someone who also had a brief stint in IT, I totally agree with the struggles people go through because of outdated & unintuitive software. But IT also made me realize how much of software is personal — someone will want a solution that's unintuitive to you but is intuitive to them. You learn a lot of empathy from that.
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I am intrigued by your last point there — why don't you think you encounter the idea of celebrating software developers enough in day-to-day life?
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I suppose specifically I mean I don't see enough celebration of good development. It's hard to challenge the personal workflow of anyone, yes, but I hope folks will continue to want to better their lives with new solutions. As I mentioned in my Tips post, Microsoft Word is a great specific example of software that simply should not be used anymore – especially in composition for The Web. Not that Word is celebrated, necessarily, but its alternatives are not. It should be noted that I have no specific authority in this matter other than years of experience with – and enjoyment of – playing around with software. I just think that End Users deserve better than they get, and awareness of new/different software is a huge part of the problem. Making average people aware of better solutions should be the primary function of special interest tech journalism, IMO.
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Great point about Microsoft Word. I don't even remember the last time I seriously used it — high school maybe? And like you said, discovery can be an issue to the adoption of these alternative tools. So are there any common patterns you've noticed as to how you've come about these software alternatives that you now use? Patterns that someone could adopt?
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It's not that I slave away, but it does take a lot of time to discover them. The simple answer is: I drink a lot of caffeine and hyperfixate on the internet. I'm not sure it's something the average user should want to adopt, but if they do, they should be on Mastodon. They should be googling “alternatives to...” regularly, and they should worship Free and Open Source Software. Accepting that you never have to settle for one piece of software is probably the beginning. For lack of a better term, I just love playing around with software. That's not something I would advocate for my old clients or other End Users – I would rather find out myself and then present a list of alternatives in an entertaining way. I hope that's an appropriate and sufficient answer hehe.
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No that's great! The acceptance of never having to settle for one piece of software is at once valuable and challenging to adopt. If you keep switching you could be a sort of software vagabond who throws their data into a rucksack to head to the next viable platform. I've always had trouble trying to find the proper balance between playing around with software & learning a tool well enough that it can be useful. How have you personally navigated that? I could imagine your foray into & out of Wordpress as an example.
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It's always a challenge when trying new things. I obsess over different ways to accomplish tasks. I've probably signed Extratone for 15 different newsletter services (including Buttondown today) though I haven't actually written a single edition of our newsletter in nearly two years. I think it's only recently that I've been able to look at these habits from a reasonable perspective. As in, I am now able to finally differentiate between playing and being productive, but it took some 15 years. Self-awareness of one's actual progress is key. Asking questions like why am I actually doing this – for profit or for play? Differentiating between these two is something someone like me will always struggle with, I think.
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The distinction between playing and being productive can be quite blurry. I sometimes find that playing around with a piece of software can lead to a productive use of it. How about you? Did you start with the idea of creating Extratone first and then tried to find the right software to fit the job? Or did you start playing around with Wordpress and then the idea of the digital publication took form soon after?
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That's an insightful supposition. I actually tried to launch an online magazine before Extratone with virtually zero editorial focus along with a standalone podcast that I'd been hosting on WordPress for years. I originally began playing around with WordPress sites in my early adolescence, so you could say it all culminated in the idea. It took maturity to realize that I actually wanted to build a platform for other voices rather than continue to invest in my own. I'd like to believe that was all enabled by the playing hehe.
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So what lead you to the conclusion of building a platform for other voices? Especially curious from the maturity angle. Because you still have a personal blog, so it doesn't feel like you've completely neglected your personal voice. But would you consider that as not the same investment of time & effort that you'd put into something like Extratone?
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I should be clear that I have not accomplished what I set out to do with Extratone. After a fairly big personal trauma in 2015, I had a bit of an existential crisis and realized that I had surrounded myself with so many talented (in a particularly relevant way) online friends who were producing all sorts of incredible content – music and videos, mostly. I realized that I was better at editing and other platform duties than I was at writing, and that perhaps the online communities I was astride could be provided a single banner to give themselves. In that sense, I haven't figured out how to do what I set out to yet. Ideally, my byline would be completely gone from Extratone, so I've more or less put it on hold until I figure out how to accomplish that. Turning it into a somewhat profitable media company is still my biggest long-term life goal.
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The curatorial characteristic you describe is underrated, even though the “everyone is a curator” idea is jammed down our throats all the time. There's something about this curation on a person-to-person level that still has lots of room for experimentation. On that subject, do you have any examples of communities, sites, or models that guide where you'd want Extratone to go?
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My citable aspirations in that regard have been somewhat superficial, I'm afraid. From a technical perspective, I really admired what Joshua Topolsky was trying to do with The Outline – which just closed this month, actually. They built their own CMS including a bespoke advertising delivery platform which really looked great but they just couldn't figure out a sustainable editorial focus. In my fantasy world, I have the connections and digital media insight of Topolsky and know how to apply them in a way that supports our community because I don't see any one brand popping up any substantial umbrellas over the electronic musicians I know. (It wasn't until “too late” that I realized Extratone's sole editorial focus should have been electronic music all along.) I read a lot about media but I'm pretty picky as far as hero worship goes when it comes to my own professional goals. I once promised that Extratone would never run ads, so I could see some sort of non-profit classification working out in our future. I believe I could be an excellent curator – I'm just not quite sure how to get there yet.
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I think you're a great curator — had to ask that question of influence because I think you have a unique curatorial presence on the web. Just saw you tweet about tractordata.com. Who else would recommend that? Love it. That's why I thought Are.na would be right up your alley.
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So you emphasized “our community” there — what do you define as your community in that broader context?
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Well thank you! That's a question I'm still struggling to define. Electronic music is about as far as I've gotten. I met most of my talented friends on Twitter over the past 10 years or so and have tried to contain them in a list before. There are innate challenges in defining such a creative community – I have done my best to label without being constricting, but it's definitely difficult trying to figure out how to provide a flag which everyone feels comfortable flying. I still think the best I've done to articulate what I'm trying to say was for Extratone's About page. Most of the folks I'm talking about are used to hustling their own brand so it's been a real challenge working on the right way to reach out.
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A flag which everyone feels comfortable flying — that's a great way to put it. What I find interesting about your internet presence is that you defy the idea of flying just a single flag. Along with Extratone you have multiplepodcasts, multipleblogs, and now you're starting a Motorsports & Tech dedicated Mastodon instance.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about how important it is to have many online buckets to put your ideas in. One just feels too limiting, especially if it's solely linked to your legal identity. How do you think about this matter of identity & expression with your own online presence?
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That's a very good question. I can't take credit for mastd.racing, actually – I'm not sure who created that server but it's administered by an account called RaceControl. You've arrived at another one of my biggest challenges. Consolidating my interests has always been a problem, especially on The Web. Age has definitely helped narrow them down a bit, but I still can't help myself sometimes. I think it's ended up alienating a lot of my followers on social because I have a hard time posting just within my niche(s). I'm not so sure how to feel about this, honestly. One could argue that I should post whatever I want, whenever, but consider your audience is also a concept I can no longer ignore. If anything, I need to learn to let myself be limited a bit more by those buckets. Once again, Extratone is a good example of this – I should've never published app reviews there, but I did. We're all learning, I suppose.
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Do you feel like you have to even learn to limit yourself on your personal blog? It seems like a personal blog can act as the release valve — a way of getting around cornering yourself into the niches that Extratone and other projects require. You can freely write about pens and Picard without feeling constrained to a single subject.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list. Since we've begun talking I've begun building my blogs bookmark folder back up and following the #100DaystoOffload challenge, which I find immensely impressive. I can't say I'm quite up to it, personally, but I definitely plan on opening up the taps a bit more. (I also don't want to flood read.write.as with too many joke posts ya know hehe.)
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That's awesome! You're reminding me of the interesting relationship between writing & tinkering when it comes to blogs. They both feed into each other in a strange way. Before, when my blog was on Wordpress, I didn't care about tinkering around — writing was my sole focus. When I moved to my new blog, however, I found myself shift towards creating apps that extend my blog and messing around with its CSS. So it's interesting that you've gone the opposite way, publishing more instead of solely tinkering.
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What has awoken the urge for you to tackle those items on your personal “to-write” list? To open up those taps a bit more? Because I can see the publication mindset, being somewhat of an authority, getting in the way.
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That is interesting. I'm wondering how many people are in each of our camps. I hate to be so topical, but the pandemic and being home constantly has definitely contributed. I've also begun to learn to let things go, which is an essential skill. Being able to actually kill work when it needs to die is the real secret. I just built up the strength to delete the rest of my 2019 list a few weeks ago.
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I wonder also! And hey, no problem bringing up the current situation. I think it's making me write more also.
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Want to drill into that practice of letting go as an essential skill for blogging. As a final question for this chat, how have you gone about the decision of keeping ideas that you've had for a long time and when to let them go? It's been something I've been struggling with for recently as ideas for blog posts start to pile up.
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Self-curation is definitely tough. Generally, it's very hard to let things go – especially when I've progressed at all significantly into research/first drafting, but I know when to kill something if I reread and am unable to immediately see where I was going. I've noticed that trying to rekindle interest or momentum in a topic is unusually not a worthwhile use of time in my case. If I can't get my rhythm back fairly early in, I am very unlikely to, ever. That said, I think it's also important to forgive yourself for investing time in something that won't work out – otherwise, you will settle for less than what you originally intended and release something you won't be happy with.
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Thank you so much for your time! I really enjoyed this!
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Forgive and forget! That's a great point about rekindling an interest being a sign of letting go of an idea. I've done that too many times. This has been a blast to chat virtually David — really enjoyed your thoughts and am looking forward to future blog posts and installments of Extratone!
I was interviewed by Write.as Community Manager CJ Eller about writing software, Extratone, blogging, and self-curation.
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So I am super curious that you mentioned Markdown as something that saved you from fiddling your life away. Can you go more into that?
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-
I started an online magazine four years ago originally on WordPress. I thought I knew something about web development, but honestly I did not. It ended up becoming a fixation on trying to make something technically different from what I'd seen done with WordPress, which detracted heavily from my Editorial duties over the years. I'm on the OCD spectrum so I just couldn't let it go. I spent thousands of hours fiddling with different themes and formatting within those themes, and what I ended up with was a mess. I would make changes that would break old posts, so I'd go back and fix those, only to make more changes days/weeks/months later and have to go back again. I'd known vaguely about Markdown, but it wasn't until it was mentioned in the WordPress dev Slack that I really considered it seriously as a way out of what I'd been doing. I realized that its inherit limitations were actually very good for me – that I needed a limited system to constrain my workflow to keep myself on task. Finally, in late-2018, I started to convert our old content to Markdown and essentially haven't looked back since.
-
-
Did it take a while for you to accept Markdown's limitations? Was there a turning point for you? Did you look for a Markdown plugin on WordPress to help after making the change? I imagine there's something like that out there.
-
-
There are third-party plugins, yes, but I believe the new WordPress editor now supports “markdown blocks,” which is sortof handy for those who want to continue in that direction. The turning point was probably when we ran out of money and lost our account with our hosting provider. I was left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. I'd already started moving that direction within WordPress (largely because of the Gutenberg editor project,) but losing the site in its entirety was what I really needed to push us into a more modern, progressive CMS. Honestly, Markdown is capable of everything we actually need and nothing more. I'd like to think I was able to realize this from the beginning.
-
-
So you're left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. Talk to me about the process then of finding that modern, progressive CMS. Did you have a vague idea of what you were looking for? I imagine getting those backups ready for whatever you were going to choose as another process entirely.
-
-
I actually decided to ditch the backups and just move forward with a different Editorial direction (the project has since been more or less put on hiatus.) I knew Markdown had to be involved and that I never wanted to look at anything like WordPress' dashboard ever again. I played around with a local Ghost instance but just didn't feel anything for it, if that makes sense. I'd already moved my personal blog to Write.As months before and eventually realized that it was just what Extratone needed – so far, I've only imported my own contributions and the most recent work from others.
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-
Could you explain what you mean by feeling something for a piece of software? I noticed this in your recent post on your personal blog and what I enjoyed about it so much. There's an enthusiasm about the software you do recommend that jumps through the screen. I want to use Bear after reading your post.
-
-
I'm glad to hear that! I suppose it dates back to my upbringing on a farm in rural Missouri, where I felt a real affection for – and attachment to – our tractors, combine, and such. When one cares about their work, I think it's inevitable for them to be emotionally invested in the tools they use to accomplish it every day. During my brief stint in IT in the beginning of 2019, I saw a lot of users struggling with outdated and ridiculously unintuitive software throughout their entire workday and it made me really appreciate the idea of “good workflow.” I'm not really a developer, but I believe software can always be better because I've seen it. As an End User of sorts with not much cash, I feel like my main contribution back to developers should be celebrating their good work. This is an idea I feel I do not encounter enough in day-to-day life.
-
-
As someone who also had a brief stint in IT, I totally agree with the struggles people go through because of outdated & unintuitive software. But IT also made me realize how much of software is personal — someone will want a solution that's unintuitive to you but is intuitive to them. You learn a lot of empathy from that.
-
-
I am intrigued by your last point there — why don't you think you encounter the idea of celebrating software developers enough in day-to-day life?
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-
I suppose specifically I mean I don't see enough celebration of good development. It's hard to challenge the personal workflow of anyone, yes, but I hope folks will continue to want to better their lives with new solutions. As I mentioned in my Tips post, Microsoft Word is a great specific example of software that simply should not be used anymore – especially in composition for The Web. Not that Word is celebrated, necessarily, but its alternatives are not. It should be noted that I have no specific authority in this matter other than years of experience with – and enjoyment of – playing around with software. I just think that End Users deserve better than they get, and awareness of new/different software is a huge part of the problem. Making average people aware of better solutions should be the primary function of special interest tech journalism, IMO.
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-
Great point about Microsoft Word. I don't even remember the last time I seriously used it — high school maybe? And like you said, discovery can be an issue to the adoption of these alternative tools. So are there any common patterns you've noticed as to how you've come about these software alternatives that you now use? Patterns that someone could adopt?
-
-
It's not that I slave away, but it does take a lot of time to discover them. The simple answer is: I drink a lot of caffeine and hyperfixate on the internet. I'm not sure it's something the average user should want to adopt, but if they do, they should be on Mastodon. They should be googling “alternatives to...” regularly, and they should worship Free and Open Source Software. Accepting that you never have to settle for one piece of software is probably the beginning. For lack of a better term, I just love playing around with software. That's not something I would advocate for my old clients or other End Users – I would rather find out myself and then present a list of alternatives in an entertaining way. I hope that's an appropriate and sufficient answer hehe.
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-
No that's great! The acceptance of never having to settle for one piece of software is at once valuable and challenging to adopt. If you keep switching you could be a sort of software vagabond who throws their data into a rucksack to head to the next viable platform. I've always had trouble trying to find the proper balance between playing around with software & learning a tool well enough that it can be useful. How have you personally navigated that? I could imagine your foray into & out of Wordpress as an example.
-
-
It's always a challenge when trying new things. I obsess over different ways to accomplish tasks. I've probably signed Extratone for 15 different newsletter services (including Buttondown today) though I haven't actually written a single edition of our newsletter in nearly two years. I think it's only recently that I've been able to look at these habits from a reasonable perspective. As in, I am now able to finally differentiate between playing and being productive, but it took some 15 years. Self-awareness of one's actual progress is key. Asking questions like why am I actually doing this – for profit or for play? Differentiating between these two is something someone like me will always struggle with, I think.
-
-
The distinction between playing and being productive can be quite blurry. I sometimes find that playing around with a piece of software can lead to a productive use of it. How about you? Did you start with the idea of creating Extratone first and then tried to find the right software to fit the job? Or did you start playing around with Wordpress and then the idea of the digital publication took form soon after?
-
-
That's an insightful supposition. I actually tried to launch an online magazine before Extratone with virtually zero editorial focus along with a standalone podcast that I'd been hosting on WordPress for years. I originally began playing around with WordPress sites in my early adolescence, so you could say it all culminated in the idea. It took maturity to realize that I actually wanted to build a platform for other voices rather than continue to invest in my own. I'd like to believe that was all enabled by the playing hehe.
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So what lead you to the conclusion of building a platform for other voices? Especially curious from the maturity angle. Because you still have a personal blog, so it doesn't feel like you've completely neglected your personal voice. But would you consider that as not the same investment of time & effort that you'd put into something like Extratone?
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I should be clear that I have not accomplished what I set out to do with Extratone. After a fairly big personal trauma in 2015, I had a bit of an existential crisis and realized that I had surrounded myself with so many talented (in a particularly relevant way) online friends who were producing all sorts of incredible content – music and videos, mostly. I realized that I was better at editing and other platform duties than I was at writing, and that perhaps the online communities I was astride could be provided a single banner to give themselves. In that sense, I haven't figured out how to do what I set out to yet. Ideally, my byline would be completely gone from Extratone, so I've more or less put it on hold until I figure out how to accomplish that. Turning it into a somewhat profitable media company is still my biggest long-term life goal.
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The curatorial characteristic you describe is underrated, even though the “everyone is a curator” idea is jammed down our throats all the time. There's something about this curation on a person-to-person level that still has lots of room for experimentation. On that subject, do you have any examples of communities, sites, or models that guide where you'd want Extratone to go?
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My citable aspirations in that regard have been somewhat superficial, I'm afraid. From a technical perspective, I really admired what Joshua Topolsky was trying to do with The Outline – which just closed this month, actually. They built their own CMS including a bespoke advertising delivery platform which really looked great but they just couldn't figure out a sustainable editorial focus. In my fantasy world, I have the connections and digital media insight of Topolsky and know how to apply them in a way that supports our community because I don't see any one brand popping up any substantial umbrellas over the electronic musicians I know. (It wasn't until “too late” that I realized Extratone's sole editorial focus should have been electronic music all along.) I read a lot about media but I'm pretty picky as far as hero worship goes when it comes to my own professional goals. I once promised that Extratone would never run ads, so I could see some sort of non-profit classification working out in our future. I believe I could be an excellent curator – I'm just not quite sure how to get there yet.
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I think you're a great curator — had to ask that question of influence because I think you have a unique curatorial presence on the web. Just saw you tweet about tractordata.com. Who else would recommend that? Love it. That's why I thought Are.na would be right up your alley.
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So you emphasized “our community” there — what do you define as your community in that broader context?
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Well thank you! That's a question I'm still struggling to define. Electronic music is about as far as I've gotten. I met most of my talented friends on Twitter over the past 10 years or so and have tried to contain them in a list before. There are innate challenges in defining such a creative community – I have done my best to label without being constricting, but it's definitely difficult trying to figure out how to provide a flag which everyone feels comfortable flying. I still think the best I've done to articulate what I'm trying to say was for Extratone's About page. Most of the folks I'm talking about are used to hustling their own brand so it's been a real challenge working on the right way to reach out.
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A flag which everyone feels comfortable flying — that's a great way to put it. What I find interesting about your internet presence is that you defy the idea of flying just a single flag. Along with Extratone you have multiplepodcasts, multipleblogs, and now you're starting a Motorsports & Tech dedicated Mastodon instance.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about how important it is to have many online buckets to put your ideas in. One just feels too limiting, especially if it's solely linked to your legal identity. How do you think about this matter of identity & expression with your own online presence?
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That's a very good question. I can't take credit for mastd.racing, actually – I'm not sure who created that server but it's administered by an account called RaceControl. You've arrived at another one of my biggest challenges. Consolidating my interests has always been a problem, especially on The Web. Age has definitely helped narrow them down a bit, but I still can't help myself sometimes. I think it's ended up alienating a lot of my followers on social because I have a hard time posting just within my niche(s). I'm not so sure how to feel about this, honestly. One could argue that I should post whatever I want, whenever, but consider your audience is also a concept I can no longer ignore. If anything, I need to learn to let myself be limited a bit more by those buckets. Once again, Extratone is a good example of this – I should've never published app reviews there, but I did. We're all learning, I suppose.
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Do you feel like you have to even learn to limit yourself on your personal blog? It seems like a personal blog can act as the release valve — a way of getting around cornering yourself into the niches that Extratone and other projects require. You can freely write about pens and Picard without feeling constrained to a single subject.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list. Since we've begun talking I've begun building my blogs bookmark folder back up and following the #100DaystoOffload challenge, which I find immensely impressive. I can't say I'm quite up to it, personally, but I definitely plan on opening up the taps a bit more. (I also don't want to flood read.write.as with too many joke posts ya know hehe.)
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That's awesome! You're reminding me of the interesting relationship between writing & tinkering when it comes to blogs. They both feed into each other in a strange way. Before, when my blog was on Wordpress, I didn't care about tinkering around — writing was my sole focus. When I moved to my new blog, however, I found myself shift towards creating apps that extend my blog and messing around with its CSS. So it's interesting that you've gone the opposite way, publishing more instead of solely tinkering.
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What has awoken the urge for you to tackle those items on your personal “to-write” list? To open up those taps a bit more? Because I can see the publication mindset, being somewhat of an authority, getting in the way.
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That is interesting. I'm wondering how many people are in each of our camps. I hate to be so topical, but the pandemic and being home constantly has definitely contributed. I've also begun to learn to let things go, which is an essential skill. Being able to actually kill work when it needs to die is the real secret. I just built up the strength to delete the rest of my 2019 list a few weeks ago.
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I wonder also! And hey, no problem bringing up the current situation. I think it's making me write more also.
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Want to drill into that practice of letting go as an essential skill for blogging. As a final question for this chat, how have you gone about the decision of keeping ideas that you've had for a long time and when to let them go? It's been something I've been struggling with for recently as ideas for blog posts start to pile up.
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Self-curation is definitely tough. Generally, it's very hard to let things go – especially when I've progressed at all significantly into research/first drafting, but I know when to kill something if I reread and am unable to immediately see where I was going. I've noticed that trying to rekindle interest or momentum in a topic is unusually not a worthwhile use of time in my case. If I can't get my rhythm back fairly early in, I am very unlikely to, ever. That said, I think it's also important to forgive yourself for investing time in something that won't work out – otherwise, you will settle for less than what you originally intended and release something you won't be happy with.
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Thank you so much for your time! I really enjoyed this!
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Forgive and forget! That's a great point about rekindling an interest being a sign of letting go of an idea. I've done that too many times. This has been a blast to chat virtually David — really enjoyed your thoughts and am looking forward to future blog posts and installments of Extratone!
New Microsoft Office features, the PowerToys Run Preview, and a test of Edge Chromium.
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I have no idea why I signed up to attend Microsoft's virtual 2020 Build Conference, but I did. I thought I'd add my End User commentary to the mix. Sorry. My first event was called “Every developer is welcome, with Scott Hanselman and guests.” Hanselman is listed as a blogger and podcaster living (of course) in Portland. I'm not a “real” developer, but I know what Microsoft Teams is, and I recognized the event as a desktop screenshare of his calls with different Microsoft employees. There was a child invasion and a dropped phone. I also noticed the icon for the “new” Microsoft Edge browser in his taskbar and realized that I hadn't downloaded it yet. I remedied that for the conference's sake – I thought it only appropriate that I try to use as much Microsoft software as possible in this context. I also installed the new PowerTools Run preview which I mentioned in my tips post.
Build allows an attendee to build one's own event schedule, but I neglected to find those focused on what I really care about: Office 365. As reported by The Verge, Microsoft Fluid is going to change a lot:
-
-
Microsoft’s Fluid Framework sounds a lot like Google Docs, but it’s actually Google Docs on steroids. Microsoft is so confident it has built the future of productivity, it’s now open-sourcing its Fluid Framework so the rest of the world can help shape what it has created.
-
-
There's also Microsoft Lists, which is reportedly going to revolutionize SharePoint Lists into something more modern and useful:
-
-
It builds off the existing feature in SharePoint, and will let you track progress and data to organize your teams, potentially making the company’s offerings more streamlined and productive.
-
-
-
-
Microsoft Edge Chromium
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-
As an Office 365 administrator, I basically only use Edge for administrative/management tasks. Otherwise, I can't imagine a reason to use it over Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, Chrome, Opera, etc, but I thought I'd give the “new” (as of January) Edge a tryout for your sake and make it my default browser for a day as well as Microsoft's Bing search engine. There's also news specific to Build: Edge is integrating with Pinterest, of all things:
-
-
Now, Edge will feature a Pinterest-powered tool that will show suggestions from Pinterest at the bottom of a collection. Clicking on that, Microsoft says, will take users to a Pinterest board “of similar, trending Pins so users can quickly find and add ideas relevant to their collection.” Users will also be able to export collections to Pinterest.
-
-
I'm in no position to “test” a browser, but the new Edge is noticeably faster at rendering pages and much much smoother when navigating between tabs/preference windows. It looks much more like Chrome, which makes sense. Perhaps because my install is absent of third-party extensions, opening new tabs and windows was much faster than my other browsers. I recorded a ~2 minute demo of normal browsing on my Surface Laptop 2.
-
-
-
-
In terms of touch support, Edge remains the only acceptable browser on Windows 10. If you've spent money on a new PC recently, chances are your device is touch-enabled. If you're like me, you've already disabled it. If not, you'll find scrolling and navigation in Edge have improved tremendously – it's like an entirely new browser because it is.
-
-
Because Edge used a different rendering engine than Chrome or Safari, it meant that it would sometimes have problems on websites. Testing a website against multiple browsers has always been difficult, and because Edge had so little uptake, it meant optimizing for it often fell off the priority list for web developers.
-
-
I really like how easy it is to mute audio from tabs and how much better my CMS is rendered. I still prefer Firefox's method of tab switching (by last-used chronologically instead of in the order presented.) The reader view is smoother than its competitors and offers a beautiful selection of themes as well as the best “Read aloud” feature in the business.
-
-
-
-
I'm not going to quote you measurements – check out Computerworld's browser review for that – but I can say that Edge Chromium is using more RAM than Firefox but a bit less than Chrome. Office.com also looks and works incredibly well. Overall, I'm extremely impressed with Edge Chromium and the improvements to Bing. As of my experiences today, it's the fastest and smoothest web browser I have, which is a complete flip from that of the old Edge.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
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Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
New Microsoft Office features, the PowerToys Run Preview, and a test of Edge Chromium.
-
-
I have no idea why I signed up to attend Microsoft's virtual 2020 Build Conference, but I did. I thought I'd add my End User commentary to the mix. Sorry. My first event was called “Every developer is welcome, with Scott Hanselman and guests.” Hanselman is listed as a blogger and podcaster living (of course) in Portland. I'm not a “real” developer, but I know what Microsoft Teams is, and I recognized the event as a desktop screenshare of his calls with different Microsoft employees. There was a child invasion and a dropped phone. I also noticed the icon for the “new” Microsoft Edge browser in his taskbar and realized that I hadn't downloaded it yet. I remedied that for the conference's sake – I thought it only appropriate that I try to use as much Microsoft software as possible in this context. I also installed the new PowerTools Run preview which I mentioned in my tips post.
Build allows an attendee to build one's own event schedule, but I neglected to find those focused on what I really care about: Office 365. As reported by The Verge, Microsoft Fluid is going to change a lot:
-
-
Microsoft’s Fluid Framework sounds a lot like Google Docs, but it’s actually Google Docs on steroids. Microsoft is so confident it has built the future of productivity, it’s now open-sourcing its Fluid Framework so the rest of the world can help shape what it has created.
-
-
There's also Microsoft Lists, which is reportedly going to revolutionize SharePoint Lists into something more modern and useful:
-
-
It builds off the existing feature in SharePoint, and will let you track progress and data to organize your teams, potentially making the company’s offerings more streamlined and productive.
-
-
-
-
Microsoft Edge Chromium
-
-
As an Office 365 administrator, I basically only use Edge for administrative/management tasks. Otherwise, I can't imagine a reason to use it over Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, Chrome, Opera, etc, but I thought I'd give the “new” (as of January) Edge a tryout for your sake and make it my default browser for a day as well as Microsoft's Bing search engine. There's also news specific to Build: Edge is integrating with Pinterest, of all things:
-
-
Now, Edge will feature a Pinterest-powered tool that will show suggestions from Pinterest at the bottom of a collection. Clicking on that, Microsoft says, will take users to a Pinterest board “of similar, trending Pins so users can quickly find and add ideas relevant to their collection.” Users will also be able to export collections to Pinterest.
-
-
I'm in no position to “test” a browser, but the new Edge is noticeably faster at rendering pages and much much smoother when navigating between tabs/preference windows. It looks much more like Chrome, which makes sense. Perhaps because my install is absent of third-party extensions, opening new tabs and windows was much faster than my other browsers. I recorded a ~2 minute demo of normal browsing on my Surface Laptop 2.
-
-
-
-
In terms of touch support, Edge remains the only acceptable browser on Windows 10. If you've spent money on a new PC recently, chances are your device is touch-enabled. If you're like me, you've already disabled it. If not, you'll find scrolling and navigation in Edge have improved tremendously – it's like an entirely new browser because it is.
-
-
Because Edge used a different rendering engine than Chrome or Safari, it meant that it would sometimes have problems on websites. Testing a website against multiple browsers has always been difficult, and because Edge had so little uptake, it meant optimizing for it often fell off the priority list for web developers.
-
-
I really like how easy it is to mute audio from tabs and how much better my CMS is rendered. I still prefer Firefox's method of tab switching (by last-used chronologically instead of in the order presented.) The reader view is smoother than its competitors and offers a beautiful selection of themes as well as the best “Read aloud” feature in the business.
-
-
-
-
I'm not going to quote you measurements – check out Computerworld's browser review for that – but I can say that Edge Chromium is using more RAM than Firefox but a bit less than Chrome. Office.com also looks and works incredibly well. Overall, I'm extremely impressed with Edge Chromium and the improvements to Bing. As of my experiences today, it's the fastest and smoothest web browser I have, which is a complete flip from that of the old Edge.
New Microsoft Office features, the PowerToys Run Preview, and a test of Edge Chromium.
-
-
I have no idea why I signed up to attend Microsoft's virtual 2020 Build Conference, but I did. I thought I'd add my End User commentary to the mix. Sorry. My first event was called “Every developer is welcome, with Scott Hanselman and guests.” Hanselman is listed as a blogger and podcaster living (of course) in Portland. I'm not a “real” developer, but I know what Microsoft Teams is, and I recognized the event as a desktop screenshare of his calls with different Microsoft employees. There was a child invasion and a dropped phone. I also noticed the icon for the “new” Microsoft Edge browser in his taskbar and realized that I hadn't downloaded it yet. I remedied that for the conference's sake – I thought it only appropriate that I try to use as much Microsoft software as possible in this context. I also installed the new PowerTools Run preview which I mentioned in my tips post.
Build allows an attendee to build one's own event schedule, but I neglected to find those focused on what I really care about: Office 365. As reported by The Verge, Microsoft Fluid is going to change a lot:
-
-
Microsoft’s Fluid Framework sounds a lot like Google Docs, but it’s actually Google Docs on steroids. Microsoft is so confident it has built the future of productivity, it’s now open-sourcing its Fluid Framework so the rest of the world can help shape what it has created.
-
-
There's also Microsoft Lists, which is reportedly going to revolutionize SharePoint Lists into something more modern and useful:
-
-
It builds off the existing feature in SharePoint, and will let you track progress and data to organize your teams, potentially making the company’s offerings more streamlined and productive.
-
-
-
-
Microsoft Edge Chromium
-
-
As an Office 365 administrator, I basically only use Edge for administrative/management tasks. Otherwise, I can't imagine a reason to use it over Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, Chrome, Opera, etc, but I thought I'd give the “new” (as of January) Edge a tryout for your sake and make it my default browser for a day as well as Microsoft's Bing search engine. There's also news specific to Build: Edge is integrating with Pinterest, of all things:
-
-
Now, Edge will feature a Pinterest-powered tool that will show suggestions from Pinterest at the bottom of a collection. Clicking on that, Microsoft says, will take users to a Pinterest board “of similar, trending Pins so users can quickly find and add ideas relevant to their collection.” Users will also be able to export collections to Pinterest.
-
-
I'm in no position to “test” a browser, but the new Edge is noticeably faster at rendering pages and much much smoother when navigating between tabs/preference windows. It looks much more like Chrome, which makes sense. Perhaps because my install is absent of third-party extensions, opening new tabs and windows was much faster than my other browsers. I recorded a ~2 minute demo of normal browsing on my Surface Laptop 2.
-
-
-
-
In terms of touch support, Edge remains the only acceptable browser on Windows 10. If you've spent money on a new PC recently, chances are your device is touch-enabled. If you're like me, you've already disabled it. If not, you'll find scrolling and navigation in Edge have improved tremendously – it's like an entirely new browser because it is.
-
-
Because Edge used a different rendering engine than Chrome or Safari, it meant that it would sometimes have problems on websites. Testing a website against multiple browsers has always been difficult, and because Edge had so little uptake, it meant optimizing for it often fell off the priority list for web developers.
-
-
I really like how easy it is to mute audio from tabs and how much better my CMS is rendered. I still prefer Firefox's method of tab switching (by last-used chronologically instead of in the order presented.) The reader view is smoother than its competitors and offers a beautiful selection of themes as well as the best “Read aloud” feature in the business.
-
-
-
-
I'm not going to quote you measurements – check out Computerworld's browser review for that – but I can say that Edge Chromium is using more RAM than Firefox but a bit less than Chrome. Office.com also looks and works incredibly well. Overall, I'm extremely impressed with Edge Chromium and the improvements to Bing. As of my experiences today, it's the fastest and smoothest web browser I have, which is a complete flip from that of the old Edge.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
-
-
The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
-
-
Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
-
-
-
-
God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
-
-
I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
-
-
(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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-
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-
I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
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Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
-
-
I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
-
-
-
-
Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
-
-
-
-
I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
Basecamp's HEY matters, and not just because it took on Apple's App Store policies.
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Something always worth celebrating: a considered, no-nonsense new effort to reimagine email. I've lived through many notable milestones in this regard: Apple Mail on the original iPhone, Gmail, Readdle's Spark, and (yes, really,) the revitalization of Microsoft's Outlook. Exciting innovations have abounded throughout email's history, but it's highly debatable whether or not any of them have really changed the way we use it in a profound way, yet I am unfailingly intrigued whenever somebody new comes along, so when I saw Casey Newton's story on The Verge's frontpage discussing Basecamp's HEY before I got out of bed on the morning of June 15th, I was delighted to see an organization still had the courage to invest their confidence and resources into their Ideas About Email. Originally, HEY's homepage included a prompt: “To get on the list, email iwant@hey.com and tell us how you feel about email. Could be a love story, or a hate story. Could be long, could be short. It’s your story, so it’s up to you.” Though I knew it'd likely never be read, I decided to write them a letter about my personal history with email, which turned into an entertaining enough anecdote to publish here.
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The real reason HEY continued to be so widely covered by tech media, though, was its challenge to Apple's App Store policies after one of its updates was rejected by the marketplace just a day after Casey's story was published. Much drama ensued – I have done my best to aggregate links to all the news stories on the subject in a thread on the Extratone subreddit I recently started. I think the public resistance by Basecamp's CTO David Heinemeier Hansson was probably a PR move, which is fine, but all I wanted to contribute was a review of the actual function of HEY, itself. After reading posts by some of my favorite bloggers, however, I think it would be redundant. Kev Quirk argued “Email Is Not Broken,” to which Mike Stone responded “Email Is Broken.” Additionally, Business Insider's Lisa Eadicicco published an in-depth review at the beginning of the month.
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My singular commentary: I'm worried that subscription services that exclusively accept large yearly sums like HEY inevitably become the “country club for the most self-important emailers in business” which Casey spoke of. I guess we'll see.
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The following is an excerpt from my letter to HEY asking for a early-access invite.
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Email and I: An Abridged History
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I am 26 years old, so I suppose I'm of the first generation that's never experienced life without email. I grew up on a farm in rural central Missouri and my dad was very much an early adopter. (You'd be surprised how e-enabled farmers were becoming in the early 2000s.) I cannot remember life before the humongous satellite dish was anchored in our front yard. Long before I had any reason to be online (or really understood what that meant,) he began and ended every day sitting at in front of a CRT on a corner desk, clacking away on a cigarette smoke-yellowed plastic keyboard for hours. I did not understand why, then, but in retrospect I realize that he was corresponding with a huge network of neighbors, politicians, family, and college friends via email lists/chains and that he depended on it both professionally and personally in a big way. As a single man living at least an hour's drive from a city of any size, I suppose my dad was predisposed to have a rich online life long before his suburban peers, which normalized it precociously for me.
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The summer before my first grade year, my elementary school became the first in the district to have a computer lab (also the first air-conditioned room in the building,) so my high school graduating class was literally the very first to have had any digital curriculum – and an email address(!) – for the entirety of our public school experience. Because of this, I think most of us were trained to think of email as a tool for school work – it was eluded to by our computer teachers that our school email addresses were being monitored to make sure they remained so (obviously, they weren't.) As we grew into 6th-7th grade, however, we all seemed to end up with personal email addresses. I consider myself lucky to have experienced a very brief window – before instant messaging/early social networks became mainstream and SMS became even remotely pleasant to use – when my middle school friends and I corresponded exclusively by email when we weren't on the phone.
-
-
It still sounds a bit silly to say, but I've spent the past few years coming to believe more and more strongly that my first-generation iPhone changed my life forever in a profound way – especially my relationship with email. After watching Steve Job's introduction at MacWorld 2007 live, I promised to skip a year of Christmas gifts if my mom would agreed to buy me one, and she did. Obviously, it was like nothing else I'd ever experienced, and it completely changed how I responded to and thought about technology. Before smartphones, there was no checking email outside of time in the computer lab, which was intended to be quite strictly-regulated. I had a real advantage when I started bringing my iPhone to school – absolutely no one knew what it was (a bizarre thought in contrast,) including teachers. Suddenly able to browse and read my inbox in class, at lunch, and on the bus, my use and consideration of email was propelled far ahead of my peers'.
When I started an online magazine in 2016, I don't think I could've conceived of the extent to which running a modern media company – even one targeted toward tech-savvy, early-adopting youth – still involves email. I assumed that my audience rarely actually read from their inboxes and relied almost exclusively on social networks for content discovery, so I originally forwent any implementation of a newsletter. As I grew more and more interested in and engaged with the media beat, I was exposed to the email renaissance of the past 2-3 years thanks to services like Revue and Substack, saw that it was good, and decided to give it a try for myself. I launched our semi-regular newsletter in April, 2017 on the subjects of “Division, Art, and Media” and published a little over 30 issues over the course of 18 months. To be honest, I'm not sure I've ever had so much fun writing.
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-
Very shortly after it began, I observed our general engagement quadruple, and – quite selfishly – found the process of aggregation to be soothing and very mentally restorative. It exposed some pretty horrendous media consumption habits of mine, but it also offered a painless solution to them. As soon as everything I read became a potential item in the newsletter, I wasn't just reading for myself anymore (or at least, that's the mentality it gave me,) so I could no longer afford to dismiss particular subjects as easily or to skim so recklessly. I nurtured a much less chaotic media diet and found myself absorbing a lot more of what I wanted to without wasting so much time burning through links. I ended up feeling more focused in other, unrelated areas of my life, too. Obviously, I love email for that, and I miss writing that darn newsletter so much that I continuously look for excuses to do something similar.
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My former Tech Editor loved email perhaps as much, but she's definitely the only person I've ever met who finds the medium as entertaining as I do. (If you're really committed, I just made a Twitter Moment full of all the best stuff I've ever posted about email – mostly jokes like “patron saint of email marketing,” but there are one or two profound posts in there, too.) We realized one day that – aside from The Webbys – there are very few notable awards celebrating excellence in the email medium, so we decided our magazine would host the 2017 First Annual Email Awards. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone else had any idea what the heck we were trying to do, so we never received enough submissions. However, I noticed a great opening paragraph in the original announcement post which I thought made a worthy conclusion:
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Man has used electronic mail to intercommunicate, woo, build communities, topple businesses & civilizations, embezzle money, spread worms, distribute cluttered, broken links to discontinued Orscheln products, feed infants, set climate control, confirm identities, check bank account statuses, and lie to exhausted, slightly-conceited, and newly self-published professors. That's right – These Trillions of simple digijewels have purveyed every single possible category of human communication, and it's still growing strong.
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I'm excited to give Hey a try – I hope you'll consider inviting me early. I'll even send my feedback if you so desire it! If not, I'll probably end up trying a paid subscription, anyway hehe. Either way, let me wish the best of luck to your team. Win or lose, I'm glad you're taking action on your complaints, unlike the rest of us.
Basecamp's HEY matters, and not just because it took on Apple's App Store policies.
-
-
Something always worth celebrating: a considered, no-nonsense new effort to reimagine email. I've lived through many notable milestones in this regard: Apple Mail on the original iPhone, Gmail, Readdle's Spark, and (yes, really,) the revitalization of Microsoft's Outlook. Exciting innovations have abounded throughout email's history, but it's highly debatable whether or not any of them have really changed the way we use it in a profound way, yet I am unfailingly intrigued whenever somebody new comes along, so when I saw Casey Newton's story on The Verge's frontpage discussing Basecamp's HEY before I got out of bed on the morning of June 15th, I was delighted to see an organization still had the courage to invest their confidence and resources into their Ideas About Email. Originally, HEY's homepage included a prompt: “To get on the list, email iwant@hey.com and tell us how you feel about email. Could be a love story, or a hate story. Could be long, could be short. It’s your story, so it’s up to you.” Though I knew it'd likely never be read, I decided to write them a letter about my personal history with email, which turned into an entertaining enough anecdote to publish here.
-
-
-
-
The real reason HEY continued to be so widely covered by tech media, though, was its challenge to Apple's App Store policies after one of its updates was rejected by the marketplace just a day after Casey's story was published. Much drama ensued – I have done my best to aggregate links to all the news stories on the subject in a thread on the Extratone subreddit I recently started. I think the public resistance by Basecamp's CTO David Heinemeier Hansson was probably a PR move, which is fine, but all I wanted to contribute was a review of the actual function of HEY, itself. After reading posts by some of my favorite bloggers, however, I think it would be redundant. Kev Quirk argued “Email Is Not Broken,” to which Mike Stone responded “Email Is Broken.” Additionally, Business Insider's Lisa Eadicicco published an in-depth review at the beginning of the month.
-
-
My singular commentary: I'm worried that subscription services that exclusively accept large yearly sums like HEY inevitably become the “country club for the most self-important emailers in business” which Casey spoke of. I guess we'll see.
-
-
The following is an excerpt from my letter to HEY asking for a early-access invite.
-
-
-
-
Email and I: An Abridged History
-
-
I am 26 years old, so I suppose I'm of the first generation that's never experienced life without email. I grew up on a farm in rural central Missouri and my dad was very much an early adopter. (You'd be surprised how e-enabled farmers were becoming in the early 2000s.) I cannot remember life before the humongous satellite dish was anchored in our front yard. Long before I had any reason to be online (or really understood what that meant,) he began and ended every day sitting at in front of a CRT on a corner desk, clacking away on a cigarette smoke-yellowed plastic keyboard for hours. I did not understand why, then, but in retrospect I realize that he was corresponding with a huge network of neighbors, politicians, family, and college friends via email lists/chains and that he depended on it both professionally and personally in a big way. As a single man living at least an hour's drive from a city of any size, I suppose my dad was predisposed to have a rich online life long before his suburban peers, which normalized it precociously for me.
-
-
The summer before my first grade year, my elementary school became the first in the district to have a computer lab (also the first air-conditioned room in the building,) so my high school graduating class was literally the very first to have had any digital curriculum – and an email address(!) – for the entirety of our public school experience. Because of this, I think most of us were trained to think of email as a tool for school work – it was eluded to by our computer teachers that our school email addresses were being monitored to make sure they remained so (obviously, they weren't.) As we grew into 6th-7th grade, however, we all seemed to end up with personal email addresses. I consider myself lucky to have experienced a very brief window – before instant messaging/early social networks became mainstream and SMS became even remotely pleasant to use – when my middle school friends and I corresponded exclusively by email when we weren't on the phone.
-
-
It still sounds a bit silly to say, but I've spent the past few years coming to believe more and more strongly that my first-generation iPhone changed my life forever in a profound way – especially my relationship with email. After watching Steve Job's introduction at MacWorld 2007 live, I promised to skip a year of Christmas gifts if my mom would agreed to buy me one, and she did. Obviously, it was like nothing else I'd ever experienced, and it completely changed how I responded to and thought about technology. Before smartphones, there was no checking email outside of time in the computer lab, which was intended to be quite strictly-regulated. I had a real advantage when I started bringing my iPhone to school – absolutely no one knew what it was (a bizarre thought in contrast,) including teachers. Suddenly able to browse and read my inbox in class, at lunch, and on the bus, my use and consideration of email was propelled far ahead of my peers'.
When I started an online magazine in 2016, I don't think I could've conceived of the extent to which running a modern media company – even one targeted toward tech-savvy, early-adopting youth – still involves email. I assumed that my audience rarely actually read from their inboxes and relied almost exclusively on social networks for content discovery, so I originally forwent any implementation of a newsletter. As I grew more and more interested in and engaged with the media beat, I was exposed to the email renaissance of the past 2-3 years thanks to services like Revue and Substack, saw that it was good, and decided to give it a try for myself. I launched our semi-regular newsletter in April, 2017 on the subjects of “Division, Art, and Media” and published a little over 30 issues over the course of 18 months. To be honest, I'm not sure I've ever had so much fun writing.
-
-
Very shortly after it began, I observed our general engagement quadruple, and – quite selfishly – found the process of aggregation to be soothing and very mentally restorative. It exposed some pretty horrendous media consumption habits of mine, but it also offered a painless solution to them. As soon as everything I read became a potential item in the newsletter, I wasn't just reading for myself anymore (or at least, that's the mentality it gave me,) so I could no longer afford to dismiss particular subjects as easily or to skim so recklessly. I nurtured a much less chaotic media diet and found myself absorbing a lot more of what I wanted to without wasting so much time burning through links. I ended up feeling more focused in other, unrelated areas of my life, too. Obviously, I love email for that, and I miss writing that darn newsletter so much that I continuously look for excuses to do something similar.
-
-
My former Tech Editor loved email perhaps as much, but she's definitely the only person I've ever met who finds the medium as entertaining as I do. (If you're really committed, I just made a Twitter Moment full of all the best stuff I've ever posted about email – mostly jokes like “patron saint of email marketing,” but there are one or two profound posts in there, too.) We realized one day that – aside from The Webbys – there are very few notable awards celebrating excellence in the email medium, so we decided our magazine would host the 2017 First Annual Email Awards. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone else had any idea what the heck we were trying to do, so we never received enough submissions. However, I noticed a great opening paragraph in the original announcement post which I thought made a worthy conclusion:
-
-
Man has used electronic mail to intercommunicate, woo, build communities, topple businesses & civilizations, embezzle money, spread worms, distribute cluttered, broken links to discontinued Orscheln products, feed infants, set climate control, confirm identities, check bank account statuses, and lie to exhausted, slightly-conceited, and newly self-published professors. That's right – These Trillions of simple digijewels have purveyed every single possible category of human communication, and it's still growing strong.
-
-
I'm excited to give Hey a try – I hope you'll consider inviting me early. I'll even send my feedback if you so desire it! If not, I'll probably end up trying a paid subscription, anyway hehe. Either way, let me wish the best of luck to your team. Win or lose, I'm glad you're taking action on your complaints, unlike the rest of us.
Though I grew up on a farm surrounded by (and loving) diesel equipment, owning a diesel-powered automobile somehow never occurred to me. This is especially puzzling given the overwhelmingly positive experience I was privileged to have with one 2014 Volkswagen Jetta TDI Sportwagen over the past year. It would find me signing up to Facebook groups, using real Fast Boy terms, revisiting long-lost roads of home, and returning to my local community in an extremely intimate ridesharing stint. Throughout it all, the Jetta made me smile much much more than I would’ve thought. I found a real love for this relatively simpleton form of transportation that I should have seen coming, but did not at all. There is something delightfully indulgent about a manual-equipped diesel wagon. Even The New York Times knows this:
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Auto writers have long tooted the horn about the benefits of diesel engines, and a bunch of them have also argued that the old-school station wagon is a far more efficient way to haul things around than a bloated high-set S.U.V.
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I knew it, too, apparently, long before I actually decided to act on a purchase. On October 24th, 2012, I Tweeted “I sat in a Jetta wagon today. I need one.” I really did intend on becoming The Jetta Man (perhaps without the fashion.) In acquiring it, my plan – and it was a good plan – was to cease an era of general insensibility in my life's decisions by entombing my wayward self within the most sensible expression of modern automotive design I suspected I could live with. The wagon component joined with diesel power and a manual transmission upon casual research. Diesel, manual, wagon – of the people's car, these I sought. Nay, demanded.
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An ex-girlfriend of mine drove an utterly decimated Mk. V Jetta Sedan which she’d acquired in some sort of dicey deal. I remember finding it surprisingly robust given its lot, and quite dynamic to drive. We traveled all over the Midwest in it – from central Missouri to Des Moines to Chicago to Kansas City and back again. I mocked, but it was everything one could hope for in cheap transportation and quite a bit more. It turns out, Volkswagen was shooting high. As Tony Quiroga recalls for Car & Driver:
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During the press launch of the outgoing Jetta back in 2005, Volkswagen touted that car as a less expensive alternative to an Acura TSX or Volvo S40. Volkswagen pointed to its growth in size, high-quality interior, new rear suspension, and refined demeanor as evidence that the Jetta had moved out of the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla class.
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In terms of premium compacts, my experience is quite limited, but it’s no wonder the company has struggled to find a place in the market for this product: in German, “Volkswagen Jetta” literally means “people’s car jet stream.” The first component is infamous, of course, because of the Nazis and their horrid Beetle, but the second seems to be almost entirely unknown. In my research, I had to specifically investigate the Jetta’s name before reading anything about it. When an American thinks of “Jetta,” they unconsciously dissociate the word from the “jet” sound and make largely unsophisticated jokes. (It’s also Regular Car Reviews’ most hated car.) Now, the name has become a marque in and of itself: in China, Volkswagen began selling several different models under the JETTA brand last year. This also was news to me, and I try to keep up with the industry.
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In 2011, the Mk. VI Jetta was released with an outdated base, 115-hp powertrain and a “hard plastic [interior] that wouldn’t look out of place in a Chrysler Sebring.” (Quiroga insults, to clarify.) Compared to the Mk. V, “Volkswagen made it clear that the targets are once again the strong-selling Civic and Corolla.” Once again, I’m at a loss for experience in the equivalent extra-Volkswagen competition, save for the Chevrolet Cruze and Kia Forte. (Surprisingly, GM actually produced a diesel version of the Cruze and AutoGuide compared it against the Jetta TDI.) It’s been too long since I last drove my ex’s Mk. V to really have much to say, but I do remember a particular solidity about the steering – perhaps because it was still hydraulic. Once again, I’ll rely on Tony:
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Less obvious cost cutting includes the loss of adjustability for the center armrest, a lack of lumbar adjustment in most models, no more power-reclining seatbacks, and a simpler stability-control program that can no longer be shut off or even reduced.
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When I began searching for my first ever truly modern car in February 2019, I surprisingly only needed to pass up a single option in the Kansas City area before I found The One: a 2014 post-Dieselgate example with ~65,000 miles on its odometer in “Deep Black Pearl” with a “Cornsilk Beige” interior which had been previously owned only by a single Michigan cyclist. I’d been without a car since dailying/living in a 1976 Lincoln Continental the year before, in Portland, and my friend had driven me around everywhere in his Wrangler for a full month (thanks, Jack!) I’d walked around and cold-idled another, high-mileage Sportwagen, but I was committed to getting something with a light-colored interior after the red velvet cake Lincoln and my dank smoking room-dark XJR.
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Three of us walked into a dealership in the middle of a frigid Kansas afternoon – Jack, my girlfriend Sierra, and I. We hovered by a smart, gleaming little Golf GTI whilst my salesman, Charles, retrieved the car I had found online. After he finished copying my driver’s license while the little diesel warmed up, the four of us set off into suburban Lawrence. Back when the Mk. VI Golf was released, I attended a Volkswagen dealership event in which Mk. V and Mk. VI GTIs were driven back-to-back – I’m assuming to reassure buyers that yes, they really had made it better (though I was quite vocal in my disagreement about this, to the dealer’s chagrin.) The car I bought immediately reminded me more of the former – perhaps I just enjoy the increased body roll of a 50,000+ mile suspension – albeit with a much longer wheelbase and significantly more torque. Rowing through the gears, I was immediately impressed and bewildered by the characteristics of the 140-horsepower, 236 lb.-ft.-developing diesel powerplant. The diesel engines I grew up around in tractors, combines, and other heavy machinery were designed to more or less remain at a constant, relatively low RPM for the majority of their use cases. It’s not a screamer, but the idea that a diesel engine can rev at all was something that took a bit to wrap my head around. However, it is almost immediately evident that carrying on to the 6000 RPM (?) redline is a futile and incorrect practice. There is nothing at all to be found up there.
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I’ve driven some quick straight-line cars in my time, but none of them have delivered their power anything like the Jetta’s long-distinguished 2.0L inline-four. It’s very odd having comparatively so little actual horsepower, yet so much torque – I’d heard Jeremy Clarkson complain about diesel power coming in “great lumps,” but I’d already started to find them extremely (and positively) amusing in my first few minutes. When asked, the oil burner will produce protracted front tire squeal and torque steer from a stop, which is odd and hilarious coming from such an otherwise docile automobile. Also hilarious: Charles likely noted that Jack, Sierra, and I were (and are) entirely unafraid of facing The End when a very near collision during our test drive did not perturb us in the least, but left him huffing and puffing from adrenaline. He was a star, though, throughout the more than four hours of deliberations required for his institution to reckon with my credit history. Eventually, I ended up spending almost exactly $12,000, which was probably too much, and named my new automobile Martin – “Marty” for short – after Martin Winterkorn, the former CEO of Volkswagen AG who bore more than his share of the blame for Dieselgate, including charges of fraud by the German government. Dirty diesel rolling coal in prison.
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Naughty Diesel
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By “post-Dieselgate,” I mean that my new car was a part of Volkwagen's $10 billion buyback program, so the Michigander sold it back to the manufacturer for its “fair replacement value” – between $12,500 and $44,000 according to Car & Driver on behalf of FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez. To be technical, the powerplant is a 2.0L EA189/CJAA turbodiesel four-cylinder. “The EA 189 was one of the most important engines in the company, destined not only for millions of Volkswagen-brand cars but also for a wide variety of other brands from the parent Volkswagen Group, like Audi, Skoda and Seat, as well as some light utility vehicles,” said The New York Times regarding the “clean diesel” “scheme.” In original spec, 236 lb.-ft. of it arrived between 1750-2800 RPM, but my (admittedly, unscientific) perception indicates that post-update, the torque was coming a bit later. If I thought you were interested, I would attempt to detail exactly what my car was then subjected to by a dealer, but suffice it to say that it was made less fuel efficient and a bit less powerful, to my displeasure. For a complete and comprehensive video on the scandal, try Regular Car Reviews. I’d also recommend the following reading from Jalopnik, The Verge, The New York Times, and The Independent.
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My own views on Dieselgate are entirely irrelevant, but I will note that buying back a buyback car for such a price felt like a favor to my dealer and that it’s pretty cool to have my own copy of VW’s Extended Emissions Warranty Notice, not to mention the fact that I actually made use of it (which I will discuss later.) From my perspective, the automotive industry is the most heavily-regulated business space in the world and I’d suggest a company like the Volkswagen Group feeling like they should cheat on emissions testing might indicate that the standards of the test could be unreasonable and/or unrealistic.
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After returning from almost two hellish, extremely confusing years in Portland taking public transport, Martin became a vehicle for a rediscovery and newfound appreciation for my Missouri home – the great Missouri River, especially. Not since owning my Miata had I driven so much in the country. Sierra and I visited Cooper’s Landing in the wet and ventured down to Springfield, Missouri (very far South,) near which we discovered Hodges Speedway – a then-abandoned dirt oval surrounded by demolition derby casualties and the large trucks used to haul them around.
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Somewhere North of Kansas City, I opened the taps all the way on a very long straight and reached 125mph, which is either the aerodynamic VMax, an electronically limited limit, or both. Surprisingly, the modern People’s Car feels quite stable at this speed – were it not my own automobile, I’m not sure I wouldn’t just travel this fast everywhere. In the past few years, Interstate 70 – which cuts Missouri just about in half from West-East, connecting St. Louis and Kansas City with my hometown in the center – has become significantly faster-paced than I remembered it before moving to Portland for two years. 80mph used to be the accepted number, 70 (the actual speed limit) was the unenforced minimum. In my old Toyota pickup, I could travel at 65 without attracting too much criticism. Now, however, one must maintain 85 to keep up with traffic, especially when traveling with commuters. 90-95 will no longer garner judgmental looks and 100mph left-laners are given a pass.
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“I’ll bet that’s great on the highway” is probably the most regular comment received from passersby and riders right after “is this a diesel!?” (Really, the fact of my Jetta’s existence as a manual-equipped diesel wagon seemed to utterly astound a great many people.) There is truth in this general supposition: the ability of the diesel powerplant to deliver hill-climbing torque at low RPM is simply unmatched by gasoline powerplants of the same displacement, which means that “highway” driving entails virtually zero downshifting – arrive in sixth gear, set the cruise control, take a nap. Everything else is taken care of. There is a definite luxury in the knowledge that one is no longer needed in the process at speed – luxury that is NOT present in a gasoline-to-manual Jetta drivetrain. From Hackaday:
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[Diesel] has a higher volumetric energy density than gasoline, and thanks to low volatility, diesel engines can run at significantly higher compression ratios without risking detonation. These benefits allow diesel engines to produce significantly more torque than similarly sized gasoline engines.
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“Diesel engines are typically poor when it comes to power to weight ratio, as their high compression ratio and torque output demands heavier materials in their construction,” notes Lewin Day, meaning steel engine block. Here we arrive on my singular dissatisfaction with the Jetta: its weight. While traveling from Kansas City back home in the East one day, I decided to satisfy a longtime bucketlist item and stop by a weigh station. As I drove up to the scale, the police-uniformed attendant looked up at me from his glass box and gave the standard white guy smile frown. It took a moment for the scale to register Martin, but it eventually displayed a whole 3440lbs. My little “compact” wagon… weighed significantly more than one and three-quarter tons – just 528 lbs. less than the full-sized, supercharged V8-powered Jaguar saloon car I call the automotive love of my life, and almost a full 200 lbs. more than its GLI sedan sibling. There was one single advantage to this weight: we were able to use Martin as a ballast to help re-spool the winch cable on Jack’s Wrangler.
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After discovering this figure, I did what I could to diminish the weight easily without tearing into the seats or removing some of the car’s fourteen airbags. Upon lifting up the base of the “car-go” area in the rear, I found a full steel spare wheel – some 30 lbs of it at least – which I immediately removed, along with some sort of flapping cargo restraint that I can only suspect was designed to keep objects (like dogs, perhaps) in the cargo area from sailing into the passenger compartment during an accident (it’s called the “luggage compartment cover” in the owner’s manual.) Ideally, I intended to one day strip out all of the interior except for the driver’s side chair, but it ‘twas not intended to be.
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After driving the Jetta for about a week, I was on the short commute back home from the office when I noticed that the cooling fans were running at what sounded like maximum capacity. Then, at a red light, I felt some rough dips in the engine’s idle. When I reached home minutes later, I turned off the ignition and removed the key only to find the fans still spooling. I was convinced I had already broken the car somehow in rough driving, but in reality, Marty was in the process of Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) Regeneration – a procedure designed to clean the little shitpot under the hood by heating it up some thousands of degrees to burn off built up diesel exhaust soot. At least, this is the way I understand it.
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Otherwise, I disagree with most reviews about the “diesel rumble” being bothersome. Perhaps it’s because this is by far the most modern car I’ve ever spent this much time with – the only car I’ve ever spent so much consecutive time with, in fact – or because I did, indeed, grow up sitting (and standing) right next to 8-liter turbodiesels at full chat for hours on end. Compared to my mother’s 1.4L gasoline-powered Mk. VII sedan at idle in her garage, there is a more pronounced clacking, but it’s nothing you’d have any trouble sleeping through. I would know! Whilst driving for Uber and Lyft through one of the warmest summers on record, I idled away many hours parked on the street with the (averagely effective) air-conditioning on. I idled when I wasn’t online, too – I would even go as far as to say that I made idling one of the trendiest activities of Summer 2019.
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What’re you up to man?
-Nothin’ much yo. Just over here idling.
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Ridesharing
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For more than six months, my primary income was from Uber and Lyft driving around Columbia, MO – a distinctly academically-dominated demographic. Frankly, I can’t think of any vehicle more suited to what ridesharing actually entails than a diesel Jetta wagon. It’s a relatively spacious and comfortable place to be for four adults – certainly when no trip lasts longer than thirty minutes – with a ridiculously stout cargo capacity. I was able to fit 9 freshman fraternity guys in for a short trip once. Their faces were all genuinely somber as one expressed “it’s really hard having 8 friends when we try to go out.” (No, you’re not supposed to accept those rides.) It was a challenge carrying some 1500 lbs. of Sad Boys, mostly for the brakes. Once, a group of young men and women began to make fun after noticing the DIESELGEEK decal I’d stuck on my side’s rear quarter window (which I’d acquired with a new shifter bushing kit.) “So are you a diesel geek?” they asked, jeering to themselves, to which I responded: “you know, it’s so weird you mention that because I know this place that sells these stickers…” They no longer seemed amused.
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All of the cars I’ve owned have been attention-grabbing in their own way – my old Toyota pickup was adored by the locals; my Miata was adored by other Miata owners. My XJR was gorgeous and my Swamp Continental seemed to be passionately coveted by absolutely everyone over 40. With the Jetta, though, I did not expect any unusual attention whatsoever, yet I must confess that more conversations were started about it than of all of the others, combined. Ridesharing will do that, yes, but it is ridiculous how many people of all races, classes, and ages were enamored by – or overly curious about – Martin.
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What is this a Jetta, dude? Is this a Jetta? Whoa! Dude, is this a stickshift!? Dude I think this is a stickshift. BRO. I can’t believe you’re driving a stick right now. He’s driving a stickshift car! Wow I think this is a manual car! Oh shit this is a diesel!? It’s a diesel too?! No way! I can’t believe you’re out here driving a diesel Jetta wagon bro. Is this a stickshift? You can drive stick!?
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No.
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Early one morning, a ride was requested from the local news station just out of town – a fascinating place. News vans parked in a converted horse stable. They farm televisions out there. A few minutes into the ride, after picking up the young woman, I noticed in the rearview mirror out of my eye’s corner that she had put down her phone to watch my right hand with total bewilderment. Eventually, she asked “what are you doing to the car?” She’d never heard of a manual transmission before. I did my best to explain, but when she asked “but why wouldn’t you just buy a regular car?” I did not have a sufficient answer. Unlike many automotive enthusiasts, I think it’s totally okay that people are allowed to exist independent of this knowledge. There are many, many other things in life to worry about. 80% of cars sold in the United States are shipped with automatics and expecting every young person who lives in an urban environment to think about automobiles as anything beyond simple transportation is asking a lot.
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While we’re on the topic of manual transmissions, it’s relevant to mention how excellent the Jetta TDI is as a vehicle to teach first timers how to operate one. With the clutch in, the engine will not rev beyond 3500 RPM thanks to an electronic limiter, which dramatically reduces the number of obligatory stalls when learning clutch control. The learner can simply hold the accelerator to the floor as they get the hang of declutching instead of having to receive shouts of “more gas!” repeatedly. Of course, being a diesel further eases those stresses with much more readily available torque. Sierra was able to grasp the basics this way in a single night, which is unprecedented in my experience. She found particular comfort in the suggested gear indicator on the instrument panel’s main information display, which is very conservative, naturally, but also apparently relief from some great anxiety regarding the question which gear should I be in right now?
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Community
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I have derided Facebook for my entire adult life for its shitty design, inaspirational effect on its users, and its massive intellectual power, but strangely, through Jetta ownership, I was able to find a community on the service that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Groups like TDI Scumbags, VW TDI Owners, VW TDI support group, and VW TDI Owners Performance and Tech Talk are full of absolutely hilarious and insightful content that I’m genuinely glad I didn’t miss.
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On Instagram, I found @jp_eurogarage’s Mk. IV diesel sportwagen, which I adore. I especially love its idle. @projectownersclub posted a video in December, 2018 of a very rusty diesel Mk. III with a straight vertical stack spewing smoke all over its owner’s yard. A video was shared on one of my Facebook groups captioned “when you only drive manual” in which a very generic-looking white man with moustache finds himself gagging in a car with a traditional automatic transmission. The wholesomeness of these posts is often adorable, and not only on Facebook. VW Vortex is an active and helpful forum/blog for TDI owners that I found to be invaluable when researching modifications.
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Performance
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For the first time in my personal automotive history, I felt the desire to modify one of my own cars. Perhaps the most famous appearance of the Jetta Sportwagen in The Web Era was driving instructor Austin Cabot’s 2014 Sportwagen in one of Matt Farah’s infamous One-Takes. You can find the full list of modifications on the car’s WheelWell page. I intended to emulate Austin with a few modifications including Dieselgeek’s Sigma 6 shortshift kit and “high performance” shifter bushing kit (which I did get around to buying, but never installed.) For those interested in engine/ECU tuning, Malone Tuning has a beautiful tool to help you customize your order.
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Instead of installing the shortshift kit right away, I decided to splurge on a bespoke Raceseng Ashiko weighted shift knob, which made throws immediately better. The issue these products are combatting is the particularly disconnected gearshift which Volkswagen has been notorious for the past few decades. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like you’re just operating a lever instead of shifting a transmission, if that makes sense.
The knob itself is beautifully machined and extremely satisfying to hold. I also “deleted” (removed, in other words) the (likely) faux-leather shift boot after realizing that I’ve always hated the sound and sensation of them, but hadn’t been willing to modify my previous cars in any way. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually quite personally noteworthy that I was able to traverse the unseen boundary into mod culture. The result was a slightly more mechanical-feeling shift that would’ve certainly been vastly improved by installation of Dieselgeek’s kit.
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Another aspirational goal of mine for Martin: H&R’s Sport Springs Set paired with a set of Firestone Firehawk Indy 500s. The goal was to sure up some of that body roll and torque-induced wheelspin. I suspect the result would’ve been a very, very sticky Martin. Unfortunately, I would not get the chance before I killed him in an accident on December 22nd of last year.
According to my fuel logs, (they are public, yes, though not necessarily 100% complete,) I averaged close to 30 mpg over 78 fillups and just over 19500 miles. Considering that I was ridesharing most of that time and driving quite obnoxiously for all of it, you should be very impressed. “Diesels tend to get about 30-percent better fuel economy than their conventional counterparts,” says Consumer Reports in a comparison between diesels and hybrids dating back to 2013. From the Union of Concerned Scientists:
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Much of the reason for diesel vehicle’s high fuel economy has to do with the diesel combustion process; however, some of the increase in fuel economy is due to the simple fact that a gallon of diesel fuel contains more energy than a gallon of gasoline.
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The joy my Sportwagen brought me was not expected. My plan to make myself a more reasonable person (and driver) by buying a “boring” car was obviously foiled by the diesel’s torque, the community’s dynamism, and my own communion with mod culture. I spent more consecutive time driving the Jetta than I have in any other automobile and was able to truly enjoy it. After my experience owning a diesel-powered Volkswagen, I would very much like to try driving/owning the Golf GDI – a performance-oriented diesel version of their excellent hatch. Truthfully – given the way I killed Martin – I did not deserve his kinship, but I’m certainly grateful I had the experience.
VW's Jumbo new offering is titanic to live with and genuinely amusing to drive, but is it a condescending German prank on America?
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Upon meeting an elderly recently immigrated German friend of my mother's for the first time yesterday, she exclaimed He looks German!... and so tall! Both of these compliments were relatively true, but certainly not extremely. I am more German-looking than not, perhaps. Supposedly, I am half a product of a very large family whose elders are only one and two generations from German royalty – my legal last name is on a state sign in front of a small black castle somewhere in Der Vaterland. I slacked through two years of high school German language classes – Frau Rosa once took me aside to ask you’re not going to shoot up the school or anything, right? (Sorry Frau & peers.) Though my much-older half siblings grew up mostly in the town of Schweinfurt, I have never actually set foot in Germany, yet I’ve come to identify with and admire its culture enough to (perhaps unjustly or inappropriately) feel comfortable joking about Deutsche peculiarities as vain self-mockery.
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Despite all of this (carefully nationalism-free) affection, the real truth of myself is an American one. I have long since broached the point of no return: no matter how hard I might try, I would never be able to mold the Me another perceives in such a way that I’d become observably German-native. I’m just a midwestern boy with a Germanic name on his paperwork, and therefore have more in common with Volkswagen’s newish entry into the dramatically different full-size Sport Utility Vehicle segment. The Atlas bears a remarkably good name (annoyingly, literally everyone's reviews seem to begin with a comment on how decipherable the new name is for Americans) – especially among new automotive products introduced to market in recent memory. Honda’s Clarityshould be clever alongside the definitively 21st-century Insight marque, but violates an unfortunately universal law in the industry: never name a car for a state of being (Introducing the New 2020 Honda Ambiguity [Insolence, Fugue, Debacle, Setback]) ~especially~ one so obtusely irrelevant to the product itself. Insight comes from a chat with a colleague over coffee, but Clarity is a metaphysical, zealous plane that sounds our ever-inadequate platitude alarms in a very unsettling manner. Um... Is Honda doing okay? It not only ends up irritating and off-putting: after Hannah’s season of The Bachelorette, it’s just dumb, lazy, and foul.
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After decades of trying to force Yankees into models that many found too small, VW has figured it out: Big-ass SUVs are what Americans want, and the Atlas is designed around the biggest asses you can imagine.
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In contrast, the fucking Nissan Kicks ages so swiftly and uncomfortably that it’s pitifully tacky before it even hits the lot, which is particularly disappointing considering the most cleverly bestowed Juke name was. One marvels at the situation Nissan has found itself in: young American black men love our brand, but they also love shoes! Atlas, though, is on par with Honda’s Odyssey inspirationally, though a smidge more grounded through the distinctly Earthen science of topography, just as it should be. Originally billed as a replacement for VW’s Routan minivan, the three-row Atlas is Volkswagen’s newest bid for the Panic Room-loving American parent demographic. Therefore, it’s crucial for us to examine it thoroughly for any signs of condescension from the Germans and their brand “whose business in the US is built on providing small, fun-to-drive cars like the Golf, the Beetle, the Jetta, and the Passat.”
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From our perspective, what we have here is a German take on the American family SUV. A Ford Explorer by way of Wolfsburg, if you will. Well, sort of. The Atlas is actually built in Chattanooga, Tennessee alongside the Passat sedan.
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Unavoidably, the most notable, remarkable, and extraordinary item to note about the Atlas is simply that it is fucking fat. Just about any review you watch or read will mention this. Even CNET calls theirs “a very broad boy.” After I first read the number – 5997 lbs. – I was never able to escape it throughout the entirety of my time with it. Three tons is unbelievably, inexcusably, violently, hopelessly heavy. Hopelessly not because it stands out in its segment, but that it does not. Obesity is still a problem in America, but it's our automobiles now. While we continue to worship safety and fuel economy together, we skew the triangle (the other side is performance) further and further, and yes – a good portion of the blame can be placed on our obsession with SUVs. I spent 2018 driving a 1976 Lincoln Continental Mk. IV around – the second-longest two-door car ever sold at 228.1 inches from its pointed nose to its massive ass. Despite being a full thirty inches longer than the 2019 Atlas, my 460-powered mammoth yacht weighed some 700 pounds less, and it was filled with real wood. I'm no expert in physics by any means, but I can tell you that every pound has expounding effects on the energy required to move, turn, and stop a vehicle, which just about sums up the ultimate formula to pulverize efficiency. When our friends at the IIHS say that “fuel economy can be improved without sacrificing safety,” they are just... fundamentally wrong, (though technically correct.)
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I'm not entirely sure why the Atlas weighs so much, but its mass is inevitably a major variable in just about every facet of its experience as a product. The best potential hoot to be had from it as a driving device should be sought by ordering it to shuffle briskly on curving country blacktops in Sport Mode with all the assists (save for lane-keeping) on. Not to be too crude, but it's fun to make the fat fucker run. Through your ass, you can feel the suspension squirm and struggle to redirect all 266 lb.-ft. of VR6 oomf between 4 wheels beneath an entirely separate war against the physics of such top-heavy body roll.
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Scrambling is definitely the correct verb. Pleasantly light steering in Comfort Mode (where I'd advise you leave it in virtually any situation) combined with a supple-ish ride from multilink suspension provide a trace of a past luxury sentiment not unlike the energy exhibited by my old Connie through and through. It's all about the sensation of power. Not in the horse sense, but in the satisfaction achieved from the manipulation of maximum mass with minimum effort. Comparatively, the level of actual ego-stroking is of course quite miniscule, and unfortunately, it is the numbness that is most noticeably left over with very little gain.
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Also unfortunate: I did not end up making the opportunity to truly test whatever offroad capabilities the Atlas may posses in any sort of formalized test. My example came with Hill Descent Control and Hill Start Assist, and I was able to find a small hill just steep enough to trigger the former. I cannot say I'd put my money on the Atlas winning the Dakar as it is, but we now know it can handle wet grass on a mild incline. What about county road gravel? Realistically, these are the two extremes 99% of Atlas' will ever face in their usable service lives. I found an entirely quiet section of back rock road and walked through the steps to disable all of the traction and stability control assists before stomping on the throttle, but was unable to provoke any significant wheelspin. In an episode of Autoline After Hours, Michael Loveti (Vice President, Product Line Mid/Full-Size, Volkswagen Group of America, Inc.) confirms the drivetrain really isall-time all-wheel-drive, (though the dual exhaust ports in the rear are unfortunately fake,) and that the Atlas is actually based on the MQB platform, which is astonishing. Prospective buyers should definitely have a listen.
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This theme of “thoroughly German, yet somehow distinctly Americanized” occurs over and over and over and over again in the Atlas' story. Its horizontal lines match both the Jetta and Ford's Explorer. In that way, surely it is a success. I cannot imagine a better execution of its marque's directives as stated by Mr. Loveti than what I drove.
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Cover the Volkswagen logo and you might think the Atlas was made by someone else. The hard lines and boxy shape are a sharp departure from the rest of the VW lineup. But look at its competitors here in the states, especially the Ford Explorer. It’s almost like Volkswagen tried to build its own Ford with the Atlas.
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Even though it has been on the market for only a year, the Atlas had become VW's second-most-popular car in the German automaker's lineup in March 2018, showing that the American car-buying public's thirst for crossovers and SUVs remains unslaked.
In the splitting of already fine hairs, it's the new Telluride that makes a stronger case over the Atlas, thanks to its price advantage, its plush and thoughtful appointments, and its slightly more comfortable third-row.
Freedom through security. In truth, neurotypical people are naturally driven to minimize risk, yet also to romanticize the sick, inhibitionless madmen – to envy them both internally and externally (in a most restrained way.) Collectively, our authority in (or mastery of) risktaking remains pathetically irrational. If we were to itemize our ability to asses risk into a sixth physical sense, it would rank just as poorly against the rest of the world's creatures (or perhaps neck-and-neck with those of the squirrel or the deer.)
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So many struggles of the too-often-cited “Human Condition” are grounded in the incompetence of this sense. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that risktakers in general are a very special topic amid The Middle Class – those who occasionally find themselves atop just enough excess to call it “capital.” This equates in day-to-day life as only the most potent – yet almost entirely inert next to the cushion of multi-millionaires – subject, catalyst, and indicator of dire fret. By far the most widespread affectation of this petty affliction spreads like divine wrath over the upper forty percent of this Middle Class. Thus, we must ask ourselves how safe doth the Atlas make me feel?
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Inside
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My Atlas’ interior was finished in Titan Black Leatherette, which sounds both grandiose and a bit like a kink. “Volkswagen is known for good build quality and tight-feeling interiors,” writes Danny Geraghty for Auto123, “but I found I was encountering just a bit too much hard plastic, making for a somewhat dated feel.” Perhaps my loaner was less worn in because neither I nor my girlfriend found anything wrong with the Atlas’ interior quality – even after bombing gravel roads to the point of sustaining a left-rear puncture, we did not encounter any annoying squeaks or rattles. She spent an entire afternoon sleeping in the passenger’s seat reclined and described it as “comfy.” For The Car Connection, Senior Editor Andrew Ganz writes:
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It’s not much to behold, with a chunky shape as conservative as they come that is not offset by a distinct lack of flair inside. Instead, the Atlas is quietly competent and exceptionally good at carrying seven humans—even seven adults.
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Standard with the SEL trim is Volkswagen’s “Digital Cockpit” instrument panel, which I like much more than I expected to, though its color options are already dated and unfortunately unchangeable. Ageability is an inevitable issue with these sorts of bespoke graphic design decisions automakers are making now, but at least you’ll be able to tell your friends that your Volkswagen has a digital dashboard “just like the Rolls-Royce Phantom,” which is, of course, the ultimate Queen of timelessness in the industry. Perhaps it’s telling that the only layout I found acceptable for the digital dash was the one with simulated analog needles for the tach and speedo, and how often do you really use a compass in day-to-day driving? For that matter, how useful could a digital compass in the speedometer’s center hub really be in an “offroad” situation? It’s a bit petty, but I also really despise the typeface shared across the instruments and infotainment system. It’s just… bad.
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Outside
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In Platinum Gray Metallic, the Atlas looks authoritative enough in a very ordinary way. Unless you’re on the lookout for one, you’d hardly notice it, and you certainly wouldn’t expect what you see to cost as much as it does. That is why I’d prefer any one of the other exterior finishes, especially (in order): Pure White, Tourmaline Blue Metallic, Pacific Blue Metallic, and Fortana Red. The real wonder is how VW managed to execute a seven-seat SUV with its existing design language. Though the Atlas is by far Volkswagen’s largest vehicle, it fits neatly within their lineup.
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Road Rage
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My only authentic Road Rage experience in some 5000 miles of rideshare driving occurred on All Hallow's Eve when I stopped – no more illegally than usual – on the opposite corner from a popular downtown Mexican restaurant called The Nap with hazards and all courtesy interior lights shining. The car immediately behind me hesitated no more than necessary, but the Biggest Big Infiniti behind them (a QX80 – the Atlas' competitor) just... stopped. There was honking and frenzied, hoarse screaming of what the fuck are you doing? and such.
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I responded with pleasantly amused but relatively-encouraging glances at the impersonal black mass of the Infiniti's windshield through my mirrors. I rolled down the Atlas' driver's side window and politely gestured that they go around me, but failed to coax any movement whatsoever from the ugly behemoth through at least two full cycles of the nearby traffic light. There must be some aquatic authority in the bulbous black ass of the QX80, for no one behind it seemed willing to pass either. The driver waited significantly longer than you'd imagine before emerging, huffy. She was wearing a classic poofy black North Face vest some sort of slate gray turtleneck. Nothing below these were stimulating enough to retain any memory of. Uggs?
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How positive are you that the truth has absolutely zero consequence: contrasted silver-beige eyeliner and little eye contact, dirty-ish straight blonde hair over a spray-tanned face, exhibiting zero anxious tics or hesitation. She was obviously the New Matriarch, and she was obviously much more of an authority on traffic law than I. As she approached, she scanned the street as one naturally does when they enter a busy one... except it was completely empty, thanks to her blockade. She first informed me that I was “not supposed” to be stopped there. I tried to listen and respond with as much sincerity as possible as I realized all at once that my behavior had genuinely perturbed this woman – that her choice to leave the huge hideous warmth of the guppy wagon to speak as humans to one another required great courage.
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I inserted the next logical question which I'd been screaming telepathically: can you not get around me? I began to pity her when I then saw in her face the distinct possibility that going around as a concept had not occurred to her whatsoever. She stuttered a wee bit in retorting “I could go around, but I don't want to get a ticket.” Here, one of the most fascinating avenues of suburban psychology is explored: Guppy Mom is not being ingenuine with this expression, nor has she had an untoward experience with law enforcement, ever. Guppy Mom did know her excuse was bullshit – nobody has ever been written a traffic citation for carefully circumventing an obstacle in the road. Given the opportunity to interrogate this kernel of entirely uncompromising obedience to utterly delusional traffic law superstitions, I think we'd simply discover a life of unnaturally positive interactions with LEOs. We must conclude, then, that the source of her fear was either myself or the Atlas.
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Granted, to her I am still a Young Man, and am therefore instinctively programmed to believe myself more informed than literally everyone – even the very foundational architects of modern civilization. Her Stucco Highness may have felt a representative of these builders (edgy take: she is in fact their servant.) Her own folks surely complain regularly about their distaste for disrespect, and my gig-economy, Austin Powers-looking ass was somehow disrespecting the order laid down by her would be (entirely fantastical) forefathers. Though her expression of her quaint fear of such “ugliness” (if you will) is hard-headed, an ugliest decision of hers (or her kin) idled behind me, its giant seafood-looking mouth gaping, unhinged. It'd almost be more redeemable if it was a hardcore, chronic mouthbreather. (The QX80 is actually powered by a comparatively oldschool V8.)
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Freedom from fear is the sum desire of all the most primitive compulsions we share. Ultimately, the only efficient and reasonable response to Mrs. Guppy's kind in such a situation is to very kindly oblige, which I did, of course, with great respect and great pity. In the months since this encounter, I'd been wondering what was missing from the outline of this Atlas review. I recently realized that it is this analysis of fear as a factor for the American carbuyer.
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Though it has been disproven over and over again for decades, consumers often cite safety as their primary motivation for buying full-sized SUVs. Mrs. Guppy's Great Guffaw led me to realize why this particularly disconnected supposition/folktale continues to thrive so uninhibited by the truth: the brand image, physical presence, and actual driving sensation must communicate and “feel” safe – these are far more integral to buyers' perception of a product than the testable reality. Even the people of the world's most Christian nation do not have faith – they trust not unless they see with their own eyes; feel with their own asses. They entrust their souls to the Word of the Lord, but not their lives to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. (I recently gave both of mine to NHTSA for All Eternity.)
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The Collegiate Take
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The two or three nights I spent Uber/Lyft driving around my college town shuttling Halloween party traffic in the Atlas were expectedly uneventful. I had to create a preset text message to send immediately upon connection with a rider to communicate as succinctly as possible that I was not going to be arriving in the Jetta Sportwagen on my profile but instead in the Atlas, and to transparently try to make sure that was okay. (No, drivers are not supposed to do this and you should reserve the right to bail on a ride should you find yourself opposite my own position in this situation because nobody refused me.)
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Hello! Just a heads up: My Jetta is in the shop so I'm driving a gray 2019 Volkswagen Atlas
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(It's VW's largest SUV and has 7 seats.)
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License: FATLAS
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If this is inconvenient or uncomfortable for you, please let me know.
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Thank you!
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I made a point to try and ask most of the riders if they had any thoughts on the Atlas without sounding like I was just desperately fishing for compliments on my own car, but I don't remember any significant thoughts being imparted whatsoever – certainly nothing negative. Folks here are just too polite – they won't speak up no matter how many times you insist that you do not own the car. We experienced this phenomena years ago when we tried to interview people on the street regarding the horrid Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet. Regardless, there's no reason to expect young people to have anything to say about the Atlas – it is neither extraordinary nor cheap.
[Atlas] was designed and built specifically for American families, and buyers and critics alike are letting us know that we’re hitting the mark with this seven-seater SUV.
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It's immediately evident from the outside that the Atlas is the most Americanized product in Volkswagen's lineup – indeed, in its entire history. For Car Magazine's review, Ben Barry notes “the square-jawed front, Jeep-like wheel arches, and the suggestive utilitarianism of the stampings in the bonnet and roof” before remarking on just how much more you can spend on the Porsche Cayenne's cousin, the beloved Touareg.
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Ultimately, the Atlas is far from a dynamic, agile machine, but it feels comfortable and unintimidating to drive, and perfectly at home on US city streets and the slower-paced driving of California highways.
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Efficiency, the Other Fixation
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Surprisingly, the Atlas carries a rare and precious jewel of automotive history under its broad, satisfying hood. The VR6 “zig zag” arrangement is actually one of Volkswagen legend – defining icons like the Corrado. As Dan Prosser explains for Evo magazine:
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‘VR’ stands for V-Reihenmotor, which translates to V-Inline, describing both vee and inline cylinder layouts. That is, of course, contradictory. The unit is actually a very narrow-angle V6, displacing 2861cc, with two offset banks of cylinders at 15 degrees to one another. Unlike a conventional V6, but exactly like an inline six, there’s just one cylinder head. The result is a six-cylinder engine that’s both much narrower than a typical V6 and shorter than a straight six. In fact, it’s more comparable in size to a four-cylinder than a six, which meant it could slot easily into a Golf floorpan. A creative and borderline ingenious engineering solution.
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The Atlas' 3.6L VR6 makes 276 hp and 266 lb-ft. of torque. Though other reviews cited highway mileage figures of 23-25 mpg, I was able to coax a whole twenty-eight miles-per-gallon on a live Periscope stream without air conditioning or cruise control through a two-way simulated 20 minute commute, through which I suffered for the hard data. My average before resetting the odometer for that feat, though, was 14.7mpg. “Good range and miles between trips to the gas station are criteria I look for in a good car, and the fuel-gulping Atlas rates low in this department” may be the blandest statement of all time, but MotorTrend does have a point – with the same 18.6 gallon fuel tank shared between the four and six cylinder models, the latter realistically has 250 miles of range between fillups, which is pitiful for a modern vehicle in just about any segment. Crossing one State is not enough.
It's a straightforward conversion from Atlas to Atlas Cross Sport. In the name of perceived sportiness, out goes that most minivan of things: the third row of seats.
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Normally, I'd be disgusted with such a thing, but from where I'm sitting, the Cross Sport appears to be what the Atlas should've been all along. The third row seats in my example wasn't any more comfortable than that of a 10-year-old minivan, so removing them for the sake of the second makes perfect sense. According to Car & Driver, the 2021 Atlas will “adopt” the Cross Sport's styling, though there are some technologies – like road sign recognition- which are exclusive to the Cross Sport.
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Instead of getting 20.6 cubic feet of cargo space behind the third row in the Atlas, you get 40.3 behind the second row. Fold that down and it becomes 77.8 cubic feet to work with. And that’s from an SUV with the same wheelbase as the upcoming 2021 Atlas at 117.3 inches, yet it is 5.2 inches shorter and 2.2 inches lower to the ground.
Once we got the steering fixed, my opinion of the Atlas did grow sunnier, though it's still not perfect. Maybe it's not fair to compare the driving experience to my previous long-term vehicle, the slightly smaller Mazda CX-9, but in my opinion the Mazda still sets the ride and handling bar for the competitive set. Setting the Mazda aside, if you hop behind the wheel of one of the newer competitors like the Kia Telluride, there's a noticeable disparity in the refinement in ride quality and body control in the Atlas... Volkswagen should have made the GTI of three-row SUVs, not just another minivan alternative.
The 2018 Volkswagen Atlas does little wrong, but it's light on personality and a little low-rent inside—and it guzzles fuel. It's worth a look, but mostly rivals do more for less.
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Volkswagen’s first substantial entry into the SUV market is well-named, relatively well-endowed, fairly bland for its price tag, and very, very heavy. Also, Start/Stop is still unbearable – thanks Obama – but the Atlas is not a scam.
Volkswagen traditionally tuned its suspensions closer to the European ideal, firm but well-damped, which incidentally made even non-enthusiast Volkswagens more pleasant than average to drive (with a few recent exceptions). But Volkswagen made a conscious decision to soften up the Jetta for American tastes, beyond what softening Volkswagen traditionally applied, and it seems like this philosophy scaled up to the much larger Atlas. Maybe the soft ride impresses on test drives, but a firmer setup would likely make life nicer for occupants over the long haul.
I would argue that this is the best Honda’s CR-V has ever or will ever look, no thanks to my photographic decisions.
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After 9 or so years and over 100,000 miles, I have totaled my mother’s 2010 Honda CR-V – the car I drove cross-country for the first time at significant distance (St. Louis to Washington, D.C. in essentially one sitting,) and once complimented for being the best possible aesthetic compromise of its near-universally and aggravatingly-compromised breed. It was my her first 1st owner experience, which is frankly a bit of a shame. If I’m completely honest, my late stepfather’s decision to outfit this utterly utilitarian vehicle with enough kit to break the $30,000 within a segment that has always clung to the 20s as one of its truly communicable advantages feels less-than-ideal in retrospect, but what can I say, really? It was not exactly a proud thing, but it did transport a lot of young families and shelter us as we’ve navigated more blizzard-like conditions than should be the norm for what is, essentially, an expensive, extended Civic.
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As per some particulars of my upbringing, I tend to get almost alarmingly attached to vehicles, but it’s hard to say I’m sad to see the CR-V go from all but the most sentimental senses. Objectively, it’s simply not as high-value or as competent a vehicle as it and its contemporaries are still made out to be by automotive media, pop culture, or the presumptions in the average consumer’s discourse. Though it was never intended to be luxurious, the resulting automobile ended up costing real luxury money.
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The Event
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It’s odd to have been driving so long without incident (pretty soon I’m gonna be able to say “I’ve been driving for twenty years, bitch!) and then suddenly find oneself at fault for the accident which claimed the life of the single most sublime, defining object in his existence. This incident, though, was entirely the fault of the other driver. My best friend and I were Northbound, crossing the intersection of Stadium Boulevard and Rock Quarry Road at precisely the point where it becomes College Avenue, where we were t-boned directly on the CR-V’s driver’s side rear wheel by a mid-2000s Mazda 6 that decided to run the red light. It’s hard to guess the speed of impact, but the driver’s side side airbags deployed (as you’ll see from the attached photograph,) and the CR-V was spun nearly 270 degrees around the axis of the front wheels. Neither of us nor the 6’s driver was injured, but both of our vehicles are surely totaled.
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Third-Generation CR-V Ownership in Retrospect
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Two or three years ago, I recorded some (not particularly conclusive or informative) thoughts with my iPhone as I drove the old engorged Civic to the grocery store, when ends abruptly after I said “I think one time I did try to go fast.” Like most surviving crossover nameplates, though, the narrative began with a genuinely good idea: Hondarize and modernize the Suzuki Sidekick template on top of the Civic's platform and charge just a bit more for it – and like the rest, too, the concept has soured tremendously as both crossovers and the compact sedans upon which they're based have grown and fattened under their ever-increasing burden of safety and convenience features. (I say “burden” and not “expectation,” specifically because I know a grand total of zero informed people who are at all thrilled about increasing gross weights across every industry segment.)
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This CR-V was my mother’s first and only crossover following a three-car line of one or two-owner-used, well-equipped V6 Accords in her garage – the later two from the era when Honda’s mid-sized sedan became a surprisingly dynamic driving machine as advances in drivetrain performance intercepted a point in the developmental timeline just before gross weights spiked up toward their current safety and electronic equipment-bloated figures. (In other words: in the sweet spot when engines were growing more powerful but just before the Accord and its peers got fucking fat.) In 2010, the CR-V was almost attractive looking as specced by my stepfather: the combination of the roof rack, bonnet bra, and EX-trim 5-spoke alloys managed to resolve most of the discrepancies in the shapes I've seen from other examples, but it also drove its price above the $30,000 mark. To be fair to Honda, this decision could almost be considered a sortof breach of function considering the CR-V's original ultra-mass-produced, utilitarian purpose.
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Interior
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Neither the leather nor the nav/infotainment system has aged very well, but it should be said that the latter is still 100% functional in 2018: it interfaces well with my iPhone 8 Plus with only the occasional “this device is not supported” hiccup (easily resolvable by simply re-booting the connection, in my experience.) I'm not sure how astonished I should be by the fact that the GPS still offers reliable routes 99% of the time, albeit through a user interface design that seems to grow more and more dated by the passing few seconds one may have to wait for it to calculate. Accommodation remains about as uncomfortable as it was on day 1: thanks to its hard leather and the super-upright seating position common to crossovers, I must continue to insist that operating this car is a wholly unnatural experience, but its interior surfaces shall always place well in a contest of robustness and longevity, as they certainly should.
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Drivetrain
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Perhaps the greatest letdown of this model year (2010) is its legacy four-speed automatic transmission, and I assume the next year's inclusion of a brand-new five-speed unit drastically improved its driving experience. The specific regret one feels when such a development arrives a year after buying any new car is one my stepfather still didn't deserve, yet he was not spared. However, if you, the reader, cannot be dissuaded from buying a CR-V of this generation for whatever goddamned reason, know that you must choose an example from 2011-onward if you want to retain your sanity. No, ye olde four-speed wasn't quite as bad as the transmission that virtually ruined Dodge's new Dart singlehandedly, but it certainly shows its age even for the most inattentive or merciless driver. Without it, I would vouch for the 2.4L four-cylinder's performance as adequate, but its contribution was and forever shall be let down by the aging transmission's developing Alzheimer's. Simply put: they are an unacceptably mismatched team.
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Though I shall forever argue that part-time all-wheel-drive is almost never actually justified in normal use – and yet inadequate for any “extreme” use, for that matter – Honda’s hydraulic “Super-Handling All-Wheel-Drive” did indeed aid our CR-V’s way in a handful of circumstances throughout my mother’s ownership, though neither of our memories of these are robust enough to cite specifics. The single no-bullshit blizzard we experienced was the same type I managed to navigate years later in a sub-compact Chevrolet to reach MagFest 2016, if perhaps less intense. I would speculate that the system increases mechanical drag – and therefore fuel consumption – to a degree that couldn’t possibly justify what little aid it has offered in our use, at least.
The recently-discontinued Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet darkly mirrors sentiments first begun with the Pontiac Aztek, narrating Generation X’s decline.
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My Nissan wheeltime for Honk has grown a massive respect for the brand’s audacity within me. My interest in the profession has spanned years of maturity — from asking can’t you just…? to active affection for those who dare reliably retort with a confident no.
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Can’t you just retire your body-on-frame SUV entries already like everybody else did ten years ago?
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The noble, rugged Xterra, which we shall sincerely miss.
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Can’t you just follow the Golf’s unquestionably low-risk lead into the tumultuous youth market?
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The Juke NISMO, which we regard as the industry’s singular steady grasp on what youth actually means.
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Can’t you just take some cues from Honda and Toyota, and make your sedans easy on the eye?
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The Altima and the Maxima, which constitute the last truly evil marque available.
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Can’t you just step a little lighter on the Versa’s margins? You’d be insane to build a car designed by MSRP alone!
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The Versa is — for better or worse — the absolute essence of automobiles’ transportive function, and no more.
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And there’s the GT-R, of course, which continues to make fools of an entire culture of self-titled “gearheads” who claim speed as their one true dowry.
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Throughout the years, Nissan has over and over again made me look like an absolutely absurd idiot for your display — and I cannot think of a better gift. Of all the brands to misunderstand, it is the ultimate muse.
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So, in the present, I am grandiosely assuming you’ve been attentive enough to deliberate the possible outcomes of our time with the Murano CrossCabriolet.
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It was quickly apparent that the experience was not going to resemble our Night of the Juke in the slightest. It could be attributed to my pre-game mentality. For the first time, I came to this monstrosity thinking I’d finally learned my lesson,desperately hoping to be whipped again — real bad — but walk away with more closure than with which I arrived. Like a good diplomat, I made myself approach without want for anything but understanding.
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On first take, the Xterra was proud, and the Juke was clever.
Just since its assembly in 2011, our example’s trim has endured enough to begin disintegrating in a few bizarre locales. Not to over-iterate, but it’s needing strong mention: I had never sat in a roofless crossover before. I’m assuming you haven’t, either. It is unnatural. It is harrowing.
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From the organization I have summed so many times over the years as “acutely ingenious” came this… unsettling suburban bathtub.
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It’s a shame — I repeatedly remark on the extrapolated potential I can see in a roofed Murano. Everything else in sight is worth my time. If only it had been better-protected.
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The sensation is simply ridiculous in what’d be a tasteful sense were this a one-off project of some hearty garage tinkerer or tuning shop, but… my God; Nissan delivered it this way, and had the gall to ask $10,000 more for their molestation.
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Still, its webpage (in past tense, thank God,) proclaims “the Murano CrossCabriolet was the world’s first and only All-Wheel Drive convertible crossover” in the same language I’d tout the Xterra (may it rest in peace and eternally-inadequate glory) as the last available SUV, in the traditional use of the segment, or the Juke NISMO as the first competently-composed automotive product for millennial youth. Or the GT-R as by far the most effective, high-value instrument for the pursuit of maximum velocity across the ground. And so on.
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The language so assured, the parallels must inevitably be drawn to that cheap joke of the century’s turn… the Pontiac Aztek.
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The details of its life story are reliably amusing, should you find yourself mid-research. From the journos’ gasps at its corporately-edgy concept’s unveiling to the weary original steed of Breaking Bad‘s Meth Man, there is a similar lifestyle vehicle thread between the products that weaves an obscure narrative.
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My own contribution: after a missed exit outside Galveston just as Azteks first became rentable, my stepfather (the most earnestly late-history Pontiac man who ever lived) took an entirely-unexpected and uncharacteristic 70 mile-an-hour plunge into the choppy grass median after shouting “this is an off-road vehicle!”
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As I’m sure you can imagine, it was the single most traumatic event I have ever experienced as the passenger of a motor vehicle, but the damned thing was unscathed, despite having repeatedly chucked us all (fully-belted) into its beige ceiling.
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Gary believed in Pontiac.
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Though he was keen enough to smell death, he chose to believe in the Aztek.
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And you know what? His faith, too, has made me look like an idiot.
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That’s what separates the Aztek from ye late CrossCabriolet: it really was a genuinely-bold innovation. Survive the laymen’s idle party chat and crude design critiques, and you’ll find an impressive clarity in its purpose, especially given the context of its conception. In the used market especially, it still represents a characterful, practical, and high-value consideration. And yet — at the expense of themselves — American buyers did not clamor for it like the informed of the populace did. Perhaps it was because the informed — like then-BusinessWeek‘s David Welch — were echoing hopes of a “design renaissance” for General Motors. The renaissance that would not come until the Flush of the Boomer Higher-Ups some eight years later.
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Both tales, I think, represent a profound neglect of consumer journalism.
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At the turn of the century, though, it was not unusual to go a day without accessing the internet. Today, people are still buying the few flops the industry has left to offer — making what is most likely the second-largest purchase of their life’s current epoch without consulting the volumes of diverse, intelligent, and articulate opining now accessible instantly free of charge via the subsidized slates that lightly jostle in their jean pockets as they wiggle their signatures on dealer paperwork.
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ALERT: Inbound tennis enthusiasts!
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Funny, isn’t it?
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An American hit when the Japanese were unquestionably winning, and — just over a decade later — a Japanese miss as their winning had just begun to be questioned. Make no mistake; I am not being patriotic. For me, sovereignty does not extend beyond design houses, R&D facilities, and test centers.And it’s somewhere within Nissan’s where pillars were severed and delusions nurtured; all astoundingly with executives’ blessing. I am terribly and shockingly ashamed to report that my countrymen actually bought them.
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As many as 3300 units in the last year of the Mayan calendar. The worst bit, though, is that they all made their way to my particular part of the planet.
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I swear to the Sun; I am surrounded.
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If you’re familiar with Columbia, Missouri, it does not take more than a moderate imagination to comprehend the sense, as grueling as it is. I see them regularly; once a month, at least. In a town where one can expect to spot a Gallardo in front of Buffalo Wild Wings marred by horrid plastic athletic miniflags wedged in its five-figure doors, they are everpresent reminders that the New Money Effect continues to flourish, unbridled in the Midwestern U.S.
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The soft top is always retracted, of course, and the exposed driver is always a sweating middle-aged white woman wearing a light-colored tennis visor. She… they… are always on their way to a match. Doomed to roast forever, I suppose, as there is only one nearby court, as far as I know.
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It is disheartening to realize that, now, I see many more of them than Azteks around. Though neither were designed for any tangible “lifestyle,” per se, I am saddened by the shift this minuscule tell indicates in my hometown’s morale. From an (albeit equally-vague) yearning for new adventure in an intriguing new century to an emotionally-destitute jaunt to the court, I have witnessed all of Generation X’s vigor erode procedurally away before my eyes.
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Y2K, Great Depression II, an ancient apocalyptic prophecy from one of the wisest civilizations in recorded history… Surely, one of these foretold disasters will finally End it All!
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Perhaps Nissan knew that even the well-read of the North American market were, by and large, simply looking for ways to pass the time before the death which they felt so assuredly approached. The number of unanimously-unbuyable prospects available has shrunken to virtually none, and the CrossCabriolet was not much of an investment; not all that highly-engineered, really. Perhaps they felt obligated to entertain us in our delusional way out. Perhaps it was all just an awfully-German prank.
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And, if the End of the World is imminent, what’s to stop one, really, from leasing the world’s first and only convertible crossover?
A broken Mazda RX-7, that lived in a shed on the family farm, was David Blue's first real experience with a car. Years later he got to try out a living, working example of the same car – and, unlike Max Prince previously found, loved it. – Speedmonkey Matt
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My bond with one particular example of Mazda's best-selling Wankel-powered sports car began on the Midwestern farm where I grew up. A 1980 model LS-trimmed example, originally painted in “Solar Gold” (one of only 500 made, it turns out). It had been sitting in a small shed, condemned to rest there only a few years after my birth from issues with the fuel delivery system. The search for a mechanic capable of working on the rotary engine without destroying it was eventually given up.
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My father told me stories of his flings with the car. He used to say the police would pull him over simply because it “looked fast.” Naturally, as a small boy, the stories took a hold of my imagination. The RX-7 held a very special sort of allure. It eventually became my ideal image of “racecar”. Its environment added to the intoxication. The lack of electric power to the car, its immobility, and the stories I was told combined to create the aura of a fading, forgotten superhero. Tired, abandoned, and only necessitating the help of a friend in order to bring it back to glory.
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It wasn't very long after toddlerhood that I took to spending a large portion of my free time sitting in the RX-7, practicing rowing through the gears and making engine noises with my mouth. I still remember vividly how delightful the experience of simply sitting in that car was. The dash layout, the feel of the steering wheel in my hands, and the smell of the interior are all deeply etched into memory. It was almost as if I had a deeper perception into its soul, a capability that I feel has been lost.
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Much before I had expected, I had the opportunity to meet this hero, so to speak. I encountered a partially-restored 1983 Series 2 example, slightly different than my RX-7. Different enough to subdue my worries of adultery to the car I grew up with, but similar enough to be an important discovery.
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I was treated to the complete RX-7 ownership experience, including a dead battery and a difficult, choked cold start. Perry, my host, was kind enough to pay for the fuel for the drive with money out of his own pocket. After ensuring that we would not be walking back, I pointed that very long, very 80s nose toward some local back highways.
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I had never driven anything powered by a Wankel, and the contrast of the RX-7 compared to everything with wheels I had experienced was stark, and noticeable immediately. The feedback normally received from a piston engine is not felt, due to the fact that there is no more conversion from vertical to rotational motion, a rotary engine (as implied by the name) involves no vertical momentum. It's not that the engine refuses to communicate with you, it's just speaking an entirely different language. The whiny exhaust note has an odd property to it that can be heard from no other source. It conjures up images of the mysterious, angry pair of triangles whirling about in their cage. Purely imaginary, of course.
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Because the Wankel is so smooth, I found myself wondering why I should shift up. A piston engine makes you anxious when you push it close to the redline. Most send the driver a variety of auditory and tactile messages indicating that they must either shift up, or face a molten tie rod to the head. The RX-7, however, gives no such indication. When close to the redline, one hears only an excited whir. The result (forgive the upcoming Disney analogy) is an almost magic carpet-like experience. It's as though the power simply materializes before you with no apparent source or sacrifice.
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For me, the tranquility of the engine eliminated the reservations I had for speed. It's an incentive, in fact, to keep the needle in the upper portion of the tachometer as much as possible. The car had only 100 hp and 105 lb-ft. of torque in 1983, and has no doubt lost a few along its journey. Frankly, I'm thankful it's not more powerful. Otherwise, there wouldn't be room to fully enjoy revving it to its limit.
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Though I have decided that a transmission with multiple ratios is unnecessary when coupled to a Wankel, the 5-speed manual in the RX-7 was quite a treat. It's very notchy, with a mid-length throw. The well-spaced ratios paired with a very light, but engaging clutch made rev matching pleasant and natural.
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Unfortunately, the steering in the car I drove was quite loose, likely from wear. It is unassisted, though, and was at one time very engaging, I suspect. Given that it is a sports car from the 1980s, driver communication is a result of the engineering, not vice versa.
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The driving position is actually more relaxed than it looks, and the interior is a thoroughly enjoyable place to be in. This particular car had a factory-installed manually-adjustable equalizer mounted beneath the stock head unit. A useless, though interesting, novelty that quickly rids the occupants of any doubt as to when the car was built.
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The RX-7 is too often overlooked for what it is; a very special piece of automotive history. It's an experience completely unlike any piston-powered alternative. And for me, it's much more than that. My RX-7 represents an entire childhood's worth of dreams and a sort of companionship, even. My experiences with it were a very large influence on my drive to pursue a career in automotive writing. Driving one did change my perspective, but not at all for the worse.
South Korea is poised to take Japan's place in the American market.
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The 1990s. Not the greatest time for the United States auto industry. In those days, with a few exceptions, American cars were all overpriced, devoid of quality and generally unreliable. The big three (along with many other non-automotive related corporations in the U.S.) had an aging generation of management. This group decided that the ideal way to run their business involved expending the least amount of effort into their products as possible, without reducing the price paid by customers. Essentially, they hoped to gain more profit from less product. I don't have to tell you that this thinking just...doesn't work. I would theorize that this mentality came from overconfidence and a lack of joy in production. GM, Ford, and Dodge had been the top sellers of the automobile in the United States since its invention. They originally symbolized the best in quality, luxury and performance. Consumer and producer shared the same values, resulting in a flourishing market. It was a joyous time. And then, somewhere around the 1973 oil crisis, the joy began seeping out of our star shooters. Maybe it was emissions regulations, a loss of those ideal values, or some other factor. Regardless of the source, our homegrown auto industry lost its passion. It reflected in the cars that were built. Designs were reused, progression was halted, the irreverence of quality workmanship lost. “American dependability” became an ironic statement.
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And then came along a company that had been building little, noisy two-stroke engines to fit to bicycles only four decades earlier, proudly displaying a banner the changing public couldn't refuse. They offered a product that was simple, honest, reliable, durable and reasonably priced. A concoction that smelled an awful lot like high value. An odor that no doubt brought back old memories. The Accord, suburban America's new family pet. And the Civic, conveniently debuted in 1972. The college student's greatest companion. Both were conservatively styled and equipped, and thus quite easily ignored, which was exactly what the country wanted. After all those years stranded on the shoulders of our aging interstate system in lumbering, underpowered beasts, the indestructible and dependable qualities of the Hondas came as a breath of fresh air. So. What made the newcomers so different? What was the driving force behind the value of the products? It was something not unknown to the Americans, and its presence had been sorely missed. Picture an ancient sage by the name of Soichiro Honda saying something to the order of “Lets build the best automobile we can and sell it for as little as possible.” Though the man is more a symbol than an actual influence on the four-wheeled endeavors of the institution bearing his name, he represents what led to the same group's success. Honda was untainted by an unrealistic attitude, and unaided by a century of heritage and good reputation. They succeeded only because they built good cars.
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By 2008, Honda had more than made a name for itself. Over the past decade, though, the prices had been steadily increasing, along with the level of luxury and complexity available in their cars. Both the Accord and Civic were bestsellers in their respective classes, and had held their titles for a relatively long time. It was then that I personally theorized they might take the same path American carmakers had taken only a short while before. I don't want to brag, but this was long before Ron Kiino's bold title “Is Hyundai the new Honda?” graced the pages of MotorTrend's October 2011 issue. And it was really a far-fetched notion at the time. Simply a suspicion. Confidently and stubbornly, the Accord held its grip on mid-size sedan sales in the United States, complimented by the Toyota Camry, a similar-looking but even more ignorable competitor. The former still held appeal for someone with the capacity to enjoy themselves. The latter, however, has always been the most desirable choice of individuals that absolutely despise driving. They both held their slightly different niches, with no real fear of losing their place. Then, Honda started skimping a bit on quality. Motoring journalists noticed a lack of improving fuel economy, aging transmissions, and a general loss in competitive edge in the 2011 Accord. Not the best time to start slacking on Honda's part.
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This was the year that Hyundai unveiled the brilliantly-updated 6th generation Sonata. I consider this to be the most significant car to come in the mid-sized segment since the birth of the Accord/Camry duo. In previous generations, it had always been competitively priced. The quality, though, had been lacking. The Koreans were not afraid to design a car that was much less conservative than the two Japanese giants. However, the designs were never really all that great looking. Interesting and different? Yes. Attractive?....No. So these attributes kept Honda and Toyota secure under their cozy comforter of sales, not intimidated by Hyundai's offering. And that's quite understandable. The Sonata never really seemed a direct competitor to the giants. The new one, however, completely changed the game. For one thing, it's gorgeous. Not conservatively pretty, but ridiculous, in the best sort of way. Poised and angular, the exterior looks as if it should cost exponentially more than it does. They managed to carry on the Sonata's tradition of unique styling by rejecting the old car completely and replacing it with a stunner. The interior reflects a similar attitude. It's not only good looking, but significantly more fuel efficient than any other mid-sized car on the market. The drivetrain options are excellent. The best part, though, is the price. At a starting MSRP of 19,195 USD (£11,944), it is several thousand less than any competitor.
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All of this really just makes the Accord and Camry look silly. It's interesting that Hyundai should take up Honda's original niche, given how different their backgrounds are. Our original hero of practicality was created by a man tinkering with small motorcycles. The former, however, was founded as a massive construction firm, only later trying its hand in the realm of automobiles. Cars seemed an alternative for Hyundai, but certainly not an afterthought. Regardless of where they came from, these two companies have had very similar philosophies, if only separated by time. Also, both have had to rely on sheer ingenuity for profit, without the foothold of heritage in the American market. It could be said, though, that Hyundai is doing a bit better. High value cars that are practical and interesting as an experience. Honda could never get that last bit quite right. Or perhaps it's just a sign of the times. Maybe Americans have overcome the compulsion to ignore our cars. My question is this; Has this flip-flop in production attitude become a cycle? And if so, who will be in the hot spot next? My bet is on the big three, believe it or not. A new generation of management has brought about a huge improvement in our products. It could even be one of the rising Chinese companies in the future. Who knows? I can tell you that right now, though, Hyundai has got the goods.
As we bid farewell to the Miata’s third-generation, sizing up its top trim summarizes its legacy.
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I recently had the chance to drive the facelifted 2013 Mazda MX-5. This is the first time the looks of the perky roadster have changed since the front-mounted smile became an all-out grin of insanity in 2008. They have once again dulled it to what I would call a smirk. The new front end blends with the rest of car more than it has in the past. It seems to have grown a bit more serious. In fact, with black 17-inch alloys on a glossy black (creatively called “Brilliant Black,”) this example is the most aggressive-looking of any Miata I have seen.
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That's not to say it's aggressive in the slightest, even in such a scheme. This car is in the “Club” trim replacing the previous “Touring” designation as the top-of-the-line option. This selection adds ridiculous three-leaf clover side badges, red stitching on the seats, red stripes on the dash and sides, along with a price tag very near 30,000 USD.
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So I present you with my first problem with this particular car....it's a contradiction. The MX-5 was never intended to look serious. That grin was there to convey the primary attribute aspired to by its creators; joy. It's designed to be joyful in driving and the exterior of previous generations did a good job of communicating what the car is all about. Unfortunately, it seems they have decided that it's time for the roadster to grow up. Frankly, that's not going to work.
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Now, to the drive.
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For this year, the car has been lightened, the braking response quickened, as well as the throttle response in manual-equipped cars. Unfortunately, I was only able to drive the 6-speed automatic with optional pattle-shifters. Given that this is my first drive in an NC (third generation) MX-5, I can only compare it to my own NB.
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Immediately, my passenger and chaperon starts the process of opening the optional retractable hard top. Open air is this car's natural environment, and it appears that somebody got busy making sure its occupants never notice. Wind buffeting has been drastically reduced. We were able to maintain conversation beyond 70mph without necessitating shouting thanks to a much taller wind brake behind our seats. Unfortunately, I couldn't really hear much of anything from the 158-hp 2.0L 4 up front, even with liberal amounts of right foot burying. It would seem the optional dual exhaust outlets are rather pointless then.
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Getting in the car, I had expected the experience to be ruined by the 6-speed auto. Buying a Miata with an automatic is sort of like going on a scenic vacation without a camera. It doesn't necessarily ruin the immediate experience but you'll always have some regret regarding the subject in the future. The pattles add some of the fun back in, but I prefer the Golf GTI's arrangement of right side-shift up, left side-shift down, while the MX-5 has both functions on either side of the wheel.
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It took some deliberate self-coaching to get used to, but it won't effect your daily driving experience. Another plus; when in manual shift mode, it is truly manual, meaning the transmission will allow you to exceed the redline. It may sound trivial, but being nannied when you're first told that you're in control can be a major annoyance. (Looking at you, Kia Forte.) It's disappointing that Mazda chose only to up throttle response in manual-equipped cars. This one most certainly needed it.
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The original Miata was built on a philosophy of communication between driver and machine, summarized in the Japanese phrase “Jinba Ittai,” meaning “rider and horse are one.” Being an MX-5 owner, this philosophy is very important to me, thus my expectations for the steering were very high. It was very disappointing, then, to discover that it has been very nearly ruined.
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The leather-wrapped steering wheel was comfortable, yes, but not very generous in revealing the road. In corners it felt jumpy, imprecise, and unsure of itself. The same lack of self-confidence was noticeable in a straight line as well, along with a nervous fidget. Keep in mind, I am comparing this to roadsters of the past, not to other automobiles currently on the market. It would take a global nuclear war to make the MX-5 less fun to drive than a Toyota Camry.
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Though it has lost communication and soul, the Miata has gained a more comfortable suspension and oodles of storage space. The trunk is massive for a roadster of this size, and the example I drove was equipped with an optional storage compartment extending behind the seats, especially handy for CDs, candy, and the like. The center console contains two reasonably-sized cupholders obscured by a sliding door that will inevitably lead to annoyance in single-drink occasions. Mr. Cunningham also pointed out to me that the track on which the door slides appears vulnerable to crumbs. Only time will tell, I suppose.
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In general, being inside the car is a much more comfortable experience, albeit a boring one. It seems to me that the MX-5 has “grown up,” forgoing fun for comfort and practicality. And is that not exactly the opposite of the direction it should be moving? It was never meant to be an aggressive-looking performance car, and it will never do well as one. It will never be luxurious enough to be a true touring car, either.
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Its soul has made it the top-selling roadster of all time, and I'm afraid it's losing it, bit by bit. To be honest, if you're attracted by the values on which the original Miata was built, I would recommend a Subaru BRZ/Toyota GT 86/Scion FR-S. The recommendation does not come lightly or easily.
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Until Mazda gets wise about what it's doing to the beloved little car, I'm afraid it's headed down a path that will mean losing a grip on the niche it's held for so long, and that's quite saddening.
Us drivers of cars with manual transmissions tend to look down on those who drive automatics. It’s like an exclusive club. Only the extremely talented, gorgeous-looking, and legendary athletes of yore are allowed in.
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Well, that’s bullshit. So those of you that know the “standard” can keep your mouths shut and bask in the quiet satisfaction that you’re saving the planet.
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The truth is, for those of you that don’t know, driving “stick” is totally simple. Once you understand the basic concepts of how the transmission and clutch work together, you can figure it out with no real instruction at all. So with that in mind, I’d like to tell you that automatic transmissions just….suck. Really.
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Mind you, I’m not talking about Dual-Clutch Transmissions, SMGs (Sequential Manual Gearboxes,) or any of that fancy stuff that has only recently become somewhat popular in the mainstream (affordable) auto market. I’m talking about automatics with a torque converter, that magically inefficient device that has carried America’s laziness in driving for the last 50 years.
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Now before I go on, I suppose I owe you a technical explanation. Let’s start with the basics. First off, a transmission is the device that separates the engine from the wheels. With both automatic and manual transmissions, “gears” are used to vary the ratio between the engine’s crankshaft and the drive shaft going to the wheels. It’s essentially a buffer between the engine’s relative consistency and the inconsistent world that you drive in.
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But that’s not quite all there is.
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Traditional transmissions require an interruption in power from the engine to shift these “gears,” and to come to a stop at a traffic light, in your driveway, or on the side of the highway to pick up a hooker. In manuals, this is typically accomplished with a clutch, a device that could most simply be explained as two plates that are pressed together to couple, and brought apart to become independent. A clutch is normally coupled, it’s when the clutch petal is pushed in that the plates separate, and the transmission is isolated from the engine. Automatic transmissions use a type of fluid coupling to accomplish the same task, called a torque converter.
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The advantage of the latter is that, when paired with an automatic transmission, the driver only requires one input to get the car moving and vary its velocity, and that is the accelerator pedal. A manual transmission requires three inputs, on the other hand. (Accelerator pedal, clutch, and gearshift.) In my mind, the torque converter has some huge disadvantages in a world where millions are spent to save 20 lbs. on one car design.
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Have you ever noticed that cars equipped with manuals are usually noticeably more fuel efficient than their automatic counterparts? Some of that could be attributed to the greater control that comes with manuals, but most of it is from the torque converter’s main design flaw. A clutch can be completely disengaged and completely engaged. So, with a healthy vehicle, there is 0% of the engine’s power moving to the transmission when the clutch pedal is depressed fully. Likewise when the clutch pedal is allowed completely out, the clutch essentially becomes a shaft, and 100% of the engine’s power is being fed to the transmission.
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A torque converter couples via fluid, however, meaning there is never a solid mechanical connection between the engine and the transmission. (Unless the transmission is equipped with a lock-up clutch, which is essentially a clutch that locks the torque converter mechanically when it is no longer required to dump the engine’s energy into friction. These are becoming more and more common, but the majority of vehicles on the road are missing them.) This means that a traditional torque converter is never 100% efficient.
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Also, a torque converter is never completely disengaged. When sitting at a traffic light, the driver typically lightly applies the brakes to hold the car from moving forward. Have you ever considered what you’re doing? The engine is basically dumping energy into the torque converter in the form of friction. It is literally no different from holding the gas and the brakes at the same time.
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What the hell? How is that accepted in a world where Al Gore and Prius’s exist?
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Oh wait! As United States citizens, we’re lazy as shit!
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84% of cars sold in North America are equipped with an automatic transmission, as opposed to 20% in Europe.
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You could make the excuse that we love automatics because of all our stop-and-go traffic, and yet, as a citizen of the Midwestern U.S, I see automatics MUCH more often than I see traffic congestion.
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The real answer is that we just don’t want to bother with a clutch pedal and a gearshift when we could be texting or doing makeup.
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Luckily, the great minds of our time have come up with solutions that adapt to us so that we don’t have to adapt to them. (As always.) Probably the simplest is the aforementioned “lock-up clutch,” which eliminates the inefficiency of the torque converter by mechanically coupling at high speed. But that doesn’t exactly solve the problem of sitting over a nice gas to friction converter at traffic lights.
-Well here’s a tip. When you stop at a traffic light, bump your shift lever one up into neutral. It shouldn’t require that you hold a safety button to go back and forth between Drive and Neutral. This prevents that unnecessary friction. Combine that with a lockup clutch, and you’re basically driving a manual!……Except without the enjoyment.
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You could call this a rant on one of the most successful inventions the modern automobile has ever seen….because it is. And I doubt you’ll hear anyone else complain about it. But there really are flaws in the design that I wish consumers would figure out. Before all this hybridism, eco-mindedness, and hippie-crazed green malarkey, maybe we should eliminate the evil energy-wasting beast that is the torque converter.
Though I grew up on a farm surrounded by (and loving) diesel equipment, owning a diesel-powered automobile somehow never occurred to me. This is especially puzzling given the overwhelmingly positive experience I was privileged to have with one 2014 Volkswagen Jetta TDI Sportwagen over the past year. It would find me signing up to Facebook groups, using real Fast Boy terms, revisiting long-lost roads of home, and returning to my local community in an extremely intimate ridesharing stint. Throughout it all, the Jetta made me smile much much more than I would’ve thought. I found a real love for this relatively simpleton form of transportation that I should have seen coming, but did not at all. There is something delightfully indulgent about a manual-equipped diesel wagon. Even The New York Times knows this:
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Auto writers have long tooted the horn about the benefits of diesel engines, and a bunch of them have also argued that the old-school station wagon is a far more efficient way to haul things around than a bloated high-set S.U.V.
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I knew it, too, apparently, long before I actually decided to act on a purchase. On October 24th, 2012, I Tweeted “I sat in a Jetta wagon today. I need one.” I really did intend on becoming The Jetta Man (perhaps without the fashion.) In acquiring it, my plan – and it was a good plan – was to cease an era of general insensibility in my life's decisions by entombing my wayward self within the most sensible expression of modern automotive design I suspected I could live with. The wagon component joined with diesel power and a manual transmission upon casual research. Diesel, manual, wagon – of the people's car, these I sought. Nay, demanded.
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An ex-girlfriend of mine drove an utterly decimated Mk. V Jetta Sedan which she’d acquired in some sort of dicey deal. I remember finding it surprisingly robust given its lot, and quite dynamic to drive. We traveled all over the Midwest in it – from central Missouri to Des Moines to Chicago to Kansas City and back again. I mocked, but it was everything one could hope for in cheap transportation and quite a bit more. It turns out, Volkswagen was shooting high. As Tony Quiroga recalls for Car & Driver:
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During the press launch of the outgoing Jetta back in 2005, Volkswagen touted that car as a less expensive alternative to an Acura TSX or Volvo S40. Volkswagen pointed to its growth in size, high-quality interior, new rear suspension, and refined demeanor as evidence that the Jetta had moved out of the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla class.
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In terms of premium compacts, my experience is quite limited, but it’s no wonder the company has struggled to find a place in the market for this product: in German, “Volkswagen Jetta” literally means “people’s car jet stream.” The first component is infamous, of course, because of the Nazis and their horrid Beetle, but the second seems to be almost entirely unknown. In my research, I had to specifically investigate the Jetta’s name before reading anything about it. When an American thinks of “Jetta,” they unconsciously dissociate the word from the “jet” sound and make largely unsophisticated jokes. (It’s also Regular Car Reviews’ most hated car.) Now, the name has become a marque in and of itself: in China, Volkswagen began selling several different models under the JETTA brand last year. This also was news to me, and I try to keep up with the industry.
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In 2011, the Mk. VI Jetta was released with an outdated base, 115-hp powertrain and a “hard plastic [interior] that wouldn’t look out of place in a Chrysler Sebring.” (Quiroga insults, to clarify.) Compared to the Mk. V, “Volkswagen made it clear that the targets are once again the strong-selling Civic and Corolla.” Once again, I’m at a loss for experience in the equivalent extra-Volkswagen competition, save for the Chevrolet Cruze and Kia Forte. (Surprisingly, GM actually produced a diesel version of the Cruze and AutoGuide compared it against the Jetta TDI.) It’s been too long since I last drove my ex’s Mk. V to really have much to say, but I do remember a particular solidity about the steering – perhaps because it was still hydraulic. Once again, I’ll rely on Tony:
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Less obvious cost cutting includes the loss of adjustability for the center armrest, a lack of lumbar adjustment in most models, no more power-reclining seatbacks, and a simpler stability-control program that can no longer be shut off or even reduced.
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When I began searching for my first ever truly modern car in February 2019, I surprisingly only needed to pass up a single option in the Kansas City area before I found The One: a 2014 post-Dieselgate example with ~65,000 miles on its odometer in “Deep Black Pearl” with a “Cornsilk Beige” interior which had been previously owned only by a single Michigan cyclist. I’d been without a car since dailying/living in a 1976 Lincoln Continental the year before, in Portland, and my friend had driven me around everywhere in his Wrangler for a full month (thanks, Jack!) I’d walked around and cold-idled another, high-mileage Sportwagen, but I was committed to getting something with a light-colored interior after the red velvet cake Lincoln and my dank smoking room-dark XJR.
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Three of us walked into a dealership in the middle of a frigid Kansas afternoon – Jack, my girlfriend Sierra, and I. We hovered by a smart, gleaming little Golf GTI whilst my salesman, Charles, retrieved the car I had found online. After he finished copying my driver’s license while the little diesel warmed up, the four of us set off into suburban Lawrence. Back when the Mk. VI Golf was released, I attended a Volkswagen dealership event in which Mk. V and Mk. VI GTIs were driven back-to-back – I’m assuming to reassure buyers that yes, they really had made it better (though I was quite vocal in my disagreement about this, to the dealer’s chagrin.) The car I bought immediately reminded me more of the former – perhaps I just enjoy the increased body roll of a 50,000+ mile suspension – albeit with a much longer wheelbase and significantly more torque. Rowing through the gears, I was immediately impressed and bewildered by the characteristics of the 140-horsepower, 236 lb.-ft.-developing diesel powerplant. The diesel engines I grew up around in tractors, combines, and other heavy machinery were designed to more or less remain at a constant, relatively low RPM for the majority of their use cases. It’s not a screamer, but the idea that a diesel engine can rev at all was something that took a bit to wrap my head around. However, it is almost immediately evident that carrying on to the 6000 RPM (?) redline is a futile and incorrect practice. There is nothing at all to be found up there.
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I’ve driven some quick straight-line cars in my time, but none of them have delivered their power anything like the Jetta’s long-distinguished 2.0L inline-four. It’s very odd having comparatively so little actual horsepower, yet so much torque – I’d heard Jeremy Clarkson complain about diesel power coming in “great lumps,” but I’d already started to find them extremely (and positively) amusing in my first few minutes. When asked, the oil burner will produce protracted front tire squeal and torque steer from a stop, which is odd and hilarious coming from such an otherwise docile automobile. Also hilarious: Charles likely noted that Jack, Sierra, and I were (and are) entirely unafraid of facing The End when a very near collision during our test drive did not perturb us in the least, but left him huffing and puffing from adrenaline. He was a star, though, throughout the more than four hours of deliberations required for his institution to reckon with my credit history. Eventually, I ended up spending almost exactly $12,000, which was probably too much, and named my new automobile Martin – “Marty” for short – after Martin Winterkorn, the former CEO of Volkswagen AG who bore more than his share of the blame for Dieselgate, including charges of fraud by the German government. Dirty diesel rolling coal in prison.
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Naughty Diesel
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By “post-Dieselgate,” I mean that my new car was a part of Volkwagen's $10 billion buyback program, so the Michigander sold it back to the manufacturer for its “fair replacement value” – between $12,500 and $44,000 according to Car & Driver on behalf of FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez. To be technical, the powerplant is a 2.0L EA189/CJAA turbodiesel four-cylinder. “The EA 189 was one of the most important engines in the company, destined not only for millions of Volkswagen-brand cars but also for a wide variety of other brands from the parent Volkswagen Group, like Audi, Skoda and Seat, as well as some light utility vehicles,” said The New York Times regarding the “clean diesel” “scheme.” In original spec, 236 lb.-ft. of it arrived between 1750-2800 RPM, but my (admittedly, unscientific) perception indicates that post-update, the torque was coming a bit later. If I thought you were interested, I would attempt to detail exactly what my car was then subjected to by a dealer, but suffice it to say that it was made less fuel efficient and a bit less powerful, to my displeasure. For a complete and comprehensive video on the scandal, try Regular Car Reviews. I’d also recommend the following reading from Jalopnik, The Verge, The New York Times, and The Independent.
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My own views on Dieselgate are entirely irrelevant, but I will note that buying back a buyback car for such a price felt like a favor to my dealer and that it’s pretty cool to have my own copy of VW’s Extended Emissions Warranty Notice, not to mention the fact that I actually made use of it (which I will discuss later.) From my perspective, the automotive industry is the most heavily-regulated business space in the world and I’d suggest a company like the Volkswagen Group feeling like they should cheat on emissions testing might indicate that the standards of the test could be unreasonable and/or unrealistic.
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After returning from almost two hellish, extremely confusing years in Portland taking public transport, Martin became a vehicle for a rediscovery and newfound appreciation for my Missouri home – the great Missouri River, especially. Not since owning my Miata had I driven so much in the country. Sierra and I visited Cooper’s Landing in the wet and ventured down to Springfield, Missouri (very far South,) near which we discovered Hodges Speedway – a then-abandoned dirt oval surrounded by demolition derby casualties and the large trucks used to haul them around.
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Somewhere North of Kansas City, I opened the taps all the way on a very long straight and reached 125mph, which is either the aerodynamic VMax, an electronically limited limit, or both. Surprisingly, the modern People’s Car feels quite stable at this speed – were it not my own automobile, I’m not sure I wouldn’t just travel this fast everywhere. In the past few years, Interstate 70 – which cuts Missouri just about in half from West-East, connecting St. Louis and Kansas City with my hometown in the center – has become significantly faster-paced than I remembered it before moving to Portland for two years. 80mph used to be the accepted number, 70 (the actual speed limit) was the unenforced minimum. In my old Toyota pickup, I could travel at 65 without attracting too much criticism. Now, however, one must maintain 85 to keep up with traffic, especially when traveling with commuters. 90-95 will no longer garner judgmental looks and 100mph left-laners are given a pass.
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“I’ll bet that’s great on the highway” is probably the most regular comment received from passersby and riders right after “is this a diesel!?” (Really, the fact of my Jetta’s existence as a manual-equipped diesel wagon seemed to utterly astound a great many people.) There is truth in this general supposition: the ability of the diesel powerplant to deliver hill-climbing torque at low RPM is simply unmatched by gasoline powerplants of the same displacement, which means that “highway” driving entails virtually zero downshifting – arrive in sixth gear, set the cruise control, take a nap. Everything else is taken care of. There is a definite luxury in the knowledge that one is no longer needed in the process at speed – luxury that is NOT present in a gasoline-to-manual Jetta drivetrain. From Hackaday:
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[Diesel] has a higher volumetric energy density than gasoline, and thanks to low volatility, diesel engines can run at significantly higher compression ratios without risking detonation. These benefits allow diesel engines to produce significantly more torque than similarly sized gasoline engines.
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“Diesel engines are typically poor when it comes to power to weight ratio, as their high compression ratio and torque output demands heavier materials in their construction,” notes Lewin Day, meaning steel engine block. Here we arrive on my singular dissatisfaction with the Jetta: its weight. While traveling from Kansas City back home in the East one day, I decided to satisfy a longtime bucketlist item and stop by a weigh station. As I drove up to the scale, the police-uniformed attendant looked up at me from his glass box and gave the standard white guy smile frown. It took a moment for the scale to register Martin, but it eventually displayed a whole 3440lbs. My little “compact” wagon… weighed significantly more than one and three-quarter tons – just 528 lbs. less than the full-sized, supercharged V8-powered Jaguar saloon car I call the automotive love of my life, and almost a full 200 lbs. more than its GLI sedan sibling. There was one single advantage to this weight: we were able to use Martin as a ballast to help re-spool the winch cable on Jack’s Wrangler.
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After discovering this figure, I did what I could to diminish the weight easily without tearing into the seats or removing some of the car’s fourteen airbags. Upon lifting up the base of the “car-go” area in the rear, I found a full steel spare wheel – some 30 lbs of it at least – which I immediately removed, along with some sort of flapping cargo restraint that I can only suspect was designed to keep objects (like dogs, perhaps) in the cargo area from sailing into the passenger compartment during an accident (it’s called the “luggage compartment cover” in the owner’s manual.) Ideally, I intended to one day strip out all of the interior except for the driver’s side chair, but it ‘twas not intended to be.
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After driving the Jetta for about a week, I was on the short commute back home from the office when I noticed that the cooling fans were running at what sounded like maximum capacity. Then, at a red light, I felt some rough dips in the engine’s idle. When I reached home minutes later, I turned off the ignition and removed the key only to find the fans still spooling. I was convinced I had already broken the car somehow in rough driving, but in reality, Marty was in the process of Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) Regeneration – a procedure designed to clean the little shitpot under the hood by heating it up some thousands of degrees to burn off built up diesel exhaust soot. At least, this is the way I understand it.
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Otherwise, I disagree with most reviews about the “diesel rumble” being bothersome. Perhaps it’s because this is by far the most modern car I’ve ever spent this much time with – the only car I’ve ever spent so much consecutive time with, in fact – or because I did, indeed, grow up sitting (and standing) right next to 8-liter turbodiesels at full chat for hours on end. Compared to my mother’s 1.4L gasoline-powered Mk. VII sedan at idle in her garage, there is a more pronounced clacking, but it’s nothing you’d have any trouble sleeping through. I would know! Whilst driving for Uber and Lyft through one of the warmest summers on record, I idled away many hours parked on the street with the (averagely effective) air-conditioning on. I idled when I wasn’t online, too – I would even go as far as to say that I made idling one of the trendiest activities of Summer 2019.
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What’re you up to man?
-Nothin’ much yo. Just over here idling.
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Ridesharing
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For more than six months, my primary income was from Uber and Lyft driving around Columbia, MO – a distinctly academically-dominated demographic. Frankly, I can’t think of any vehicle more suited to what ridesharing actually entails than a diesel Jetta wagon. It’s a relatively spacious and comfortable place to be for four adults – certainly when no trip lasts longer than thirty minutes – with a ridiculously stout cargo capacity. I was able to fit 9 freshman fraternity guys in for a short trip once. Their faces were all genuinely somber as one expressed “it’s really hard having 8 friends when we try to go out.” (No, you’re not supposed to accept those rides.) It was a challenge carrying some 1500 lbs. of Sad Boys, mostly for the brakes. Once, a group of young men and women began to make fun after noticing the DIESELGEEK decal I’d stuck on my side’s rear quarter window (which I’d acquired with a new shifter bushing kit.) “So are you a diesel geek?” they asked, jeering to themselves, to which I responded: “you know, it’s so weird you mention that because I know this place that sells these stickers…” They no longer seemed amused.
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All of the cars I’ve owned have been attention-grabbing in their own way – my old Toyota pickup was adored by the locals; my Miata was adored by other Miata owners. My XJR was gorgeous and my Swamp Continental seemed to be passionately coveted by absolutely everyone over 40. With the Jetta, though, I did not expect any unusual attention whatsoever, yet I must confess that more conversations were started about it than of all of the others, combined. Ridesharing will do that, yes, but it is ridiculous how many people of all races, classes, and ages were enamored by – or overly curious about – Martin.
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What is this a Jetta, dude? Is this a Jetta? Whoa! Dude, is this a stickshift!? Dude I think this is a stickshift. BRO. I can’t believe you’re driving a stick right now. He’s driving a stickshift car! Wow I think this is a manual car! Oh shit this is a diesel!? It’s a diesel too?! No way! I can’t believe you’re out here driving a diesel Jetta wagon bro. Is this a stickshift? You can drive stick!?
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No.
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Early one morning, a ride was requested from the local news station just out of town – a fascinating place. News vans parked in a converted horse stable. They farm televisions out there. A few minutes into the ride, after picking up the young woman, I noticed in the rearview mirror out of my eye’s corner that she had put down her phone to watch my right hand with total bewilderment. Eventually, she asked “what are you doing to the car?” She’d never heard of a manual transmission before. I did my best to explain, but when she asked “but why wouldn’t you just buy a regular car?” I did not have a sufficient answer. Unlike many automotive enthusiasts, I think it’s totally okay that people are allowed to exist independent of this knowledge. There are many, many other things in life to worry about. 80% of cars sold in the United States are shipped with automatics and expecting every young person who lives in an urban environment to think about automobiles as anything beyond simple transportation is asking a lot.
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While we’re on the topic of manual transmissions, it’s relevant to mention how excellent the Jetta TDI is as a vehicle to teach first timers how to operate one. With the clutch in, the engine will not rev beyond 3500 RPM thanks to an electronic limiter, which dramatically reduces the number of obligatory stalls when learning clutch control. The learner can simply hold the accelerator to the floor as they get the hang of declutching instead of having to receive shouts of “more gas!” repeatedly. Of course, being a diesel further eases those stresses with much more readily available torque. Sierra was able to grasp the basics this way in a single night, which is unprecedented in my experience. She found particular comfort in the suggested gear indicator on the instrument panel’s main information display, which is very conservative, naturally, but also apparently relief from some great anxiety regarding the question which gear should I be in right now?
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Community
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I have derided Facebook for my entire adult life for its shitty design, inaspirational effect on its users, and its massive intellectual power, but strangely, through Jetta ownership, I was able to find a community on the service that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Groups like TDI Scumbags, VW TDI Owners, VW TDI support group, and VW TDI Owners Performance and Tech Talk are full of absolutely hilarious and insightful content that I’m genuinely glad I didn’t miss.
On Instagram, I found @jp_eurogarage’s Mk. IV diesel sportwagen, which I adore. I especially love its idle. @projectownersclub posted a video in December, 2018 of a very rusty diesel Mk. III with a straight vertical stack spewing smoke all over its owner’s yard. A video was shared on one of my Facebook groups captioned “when you only drive manual” in which a very generic-looking white man with moustache finds himself gagging in a car with a traditional automatic transmission. The wholesomeness of these posts is often adorable, and not only on Facebook. VW Vortex is an active and helpful forum/blog for TDI owners that I found to be invaluable when researching modifications.
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Performance
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For the first time in my personal automotive history, I felt the desire to modify one of my own cars. Perhaps the most famous appearance of the Jetta Sportwagen in The Web Era was driving instructor Austin Cabot’s 2014 Sportwagen in one of Matt Farah’s infamous One-Takes. You can find the full list of modifications on the car’s WheelWell page. I intended to emulate Austin with a few modifications including Dieselgeek’s Sigma 6 shortshift kit and “high performance” shifter bushing kit (which I did get around to buying, but never installed.) For those interested in engine/ECU tuning, Malone Tuning has a beautiful tool to help you customize your order.
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Instead of installing the shortshift kit right away, I decided to splurge on a bespoke Raceseng Ashiko weighted shift knob, which made throws immediately better. The issue these products are combatting is the particularly disconnected gearshift which Volkswagen has been notorious for the past few decades. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like you’re just operating a lever instead of shifting a transmission, if that makes sense.
The knob itself is beautifully machined and extremely satisfying to hold. I also “deleted” (removed, in other words) the (likely) faux-leather shift boot after realizing that I’ve always hated the sound and sensation of them, but hadn’t been willing to modify my previous cars in any way. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually quite personally noteworthy that I was able to traverse the unseen boundary into mod culture. The result was a slightly more mechanical-feeling shift that would’ve certainly been vastly improved by installation of Dieselgeek’s kit.
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Another aspirational goal of mine for Martin: H&R’s Sport Springs Set paired with a set of Firestone Firehawk Indy 500s. The goal was to sure up some of that body roll and torque-induced wheelspin. I suspect the result would’ve been a very, very sticky Martin. Unfortunately, I would not get the chance before I killed him in an accident on December 22nd of last year.
According to my fuel logs, (they are public, yes, though not necessarily 100% complete,) I averaged close to 30 mpg over 78 fillups and just over 19500 miles. Considering that I was ridesharing most of that time and driving quite obnoxiously for all of it, you should be very impressed. “Diesels tend to get about 30-percent better fuel economy than their conventional counterparts,” says Consumer Reports in a comparison between diesels and hybrids dating back to 2013. From the Union of Concerned Scientists:
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Much of the reason for diesel vehicle’s high fuel economy has to do with the diesel combustion process; however, some of the increase in fuel economy is due to the simple fact that a gallon of diesel fuel contains more energy than a gallon of gasoline.
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The joy my Sportwagen brought me was not expected. My plan to make myself a more reasonable person (and driver) by buying a “boring” car was obviously foiled by the diesel’s torque, the community’s dynamism, and my own communion with mod culture. I spent more consecutive time driving the Jetta than I have in any other automobile and was able to truly enjoy it. After my experience owning a diesel-powered Volkswagen, I would very much like to try driving/owning the Golf GDI – a performance-oriented diesel version of their excellent hatch. Truthfully – given the way I killed Martin – I did not deserve his kinship, but I’m certainly grateful I had the experience.
VW's Jumbo new offering is titanic to live with and genuinely amusing to drive, but is it a condescending German prank on America?
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Upon meeting an elderly recently immigrated German friend of my mother's for the first time yesterday, she exclaimed He looks German!... and so tall! Both of these compliments were relatively true, but certainly not extremely. I am more German-looking than not, perhaps. Supposedly, I am half a product of a very large family whose elders are only one and two generations from German royalty – my legal last name is on a state sign in front of a small black castle somewhere in Der Vaterland. I slacked through two years of high school German language classes – Frau Rosa once took me aside to ask you’re not going to shoot up the school or anything, right? (Sorry Frau & peers.) Though my much-older half siblings grew up mostly in the town of Schweinfurt, I have never actually set foot in Germany, yet I’ve come to identify with and admire its culture enough to (perhaps unjustly or inappropriately) feel comfortable joking about Deutsche peculiarities as vain self-mockery.
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Despite all of this (carefully nationalism-free) affection, the real truth of myself is an American one. I have long since broached the point of no return: no matter how hard I might try, I would never be able to mold the Me another perceives in such a way that I’d become observably German-native. I’m just a midwestern boy with a Germanic name on his paperwork, and therefore have more in common with Volkswagen’s newish entry into the dramatically different full-size Sport Utility Vehicle segment. The Atlas bears a remarkably good name (annoyingly, literally everyone's reviews seem to begin with a comment on how decipherable the new name is for Americans) – especially among new automotive products introduced to market in recent memory. Honda’s Clarityshould be clever alongside the definitively 21st-century Insight marque, but violates an unfortunately universal law in the industry: never name a car for a state of being (Introducing the New 2020 Honda Ambiguity [Insolence, Fugue, Debacle, Setback]) ~especially~ one so obtusely irrelevant to the product itself. Insight comes from a chat with a colleague over coffee, but Clarity is a metaphysical, zealous plane that sounds our ever-inadequate platitude alarms in a very unsettling manner. Um... Is Honda doing okay? It not only ends up irritating and off-putting: after Hannah’s season of The Bachelorette, it’s just dumb, lazy, and foul.
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After decades of trying to force Yankees into models that many found too small, VW has figured it out: Big-ass SUVs are what Americans want, and the Atlas is designed around the biggest asses you can imagine.
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In contrast, the fucking Nissan Kicks ages so swiftly and uncomfortably that it’s pitifully tacky before it even hits the lot, which is particularly disappointing considering the most cleverly bestowed Juke name was. One marvels at the situation Nissan has found itself in: young American black men love our brand, but they also love shoes! Atlas, though, is on par with Honda’s Odyssey inspirationally, though a smidge more grounded through the distinctly Earthen science of topography, just as it should be. Originally billed as a replacement for VW’s Routan minivan, the three-row Atlas is Volkswagen’s newest bid for the Panic Room-loving American parent demographic. Therefore, it’s crucial for us to examine it thoroughly for any signs of condescension from the Germans and their brand “whose business in the US is built on providing small, fun-to-drive cars like the Golf, the Beetle, the Jetta, and the Passat.”
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From our perspective, what we have here is a German take on the American family SUV. A Ford Explorer by way of Wolfsburg, if you will. Well, sort of. The Atlas is actually built in Chattanooga, Tennessee alongside the Passat sedan.
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Unavoidably, the most notable, remarkable, and extraordinary item to note about the Atlas is simply that it is fucking fat. Just about any review you watch or read will mention this. Even CNET calls theirs “a very broad boy.” After I first read the number – 5997 lbs. – I was never able to escape it throughout the entirety of my time with it. Three tons is unbelievably, inexcusably, violently, hopelessly heavy. Hopelessly not because it stands out in its segment, but that it does not. Obesity is still a problem in America, but it's our automobiles now. While we continue to worship safety and fuel economy together, we skew the triangle (the other side is performance) further and further, and yes – a good portion of the blame can be placed on our obsession with SUVs. I spent 2018 driving a 1976 Lincoln Continental Mk. IV around – the second-longest two-door car ever sold at 228.1 inches from its pointed nose to its massive ass. Despite being a full thirty inches longer than the 2019 Atlas, my 460-powered mammoth yacht weighed some 700 pounds less, and it was filled with real wood. I'm no expert in physics by any means, but I can tell you that every pound has expounding effects on the energy required to move, turn, and stop a vehicle, which just about sums up the ultimate formula to pulverize efficiency. When our friends at the IIHS say that “fuel economy can be improved without sacrificing safety,” they are just... fundamentally wrong, (though technically correct.)
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I'm not entirely sure why the Atlas weighs so much, but its mass is inevitably a major variable in just about every facet of its experience as a product. The best potential hoot to be had from it as a driving device should be sought by ordering it to shuffle briskly on curving country blacktops in Sport Mode with all the assists (save for lane-keeping) on. Not to be too crude, but it's fun to make the fat fucker run. Through your ass, you can feel the suspension squirm and struggle to redirect all 266 lb.-ft. of VR6 oomf between 4 wheels beneath an entirely separate war against the physics of such top-heavy body roll.
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Scrambling is definitely the correct verb. Pleasantly light steering in Comfort Mode (where I'd advise you leave it in virtually any situation) combined with a supple-ish ride from multilink suspension provide a trace of a past luxury sentiment not unlike the energy exhibited by my old Connie through and through. It's all about the sensation of power. Not in the horse sense, but in the satisfaction achieved from the manipulation of maximum mass with minimum effort. Comparatively, the level of actual ego-stroking is of course quite miniscule, and unfortunately, it is the numbness that is most noticeably left over with very little gain.
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Also unfortunate: I did not end up making the opportunity to truly test whatever offroad capabilities the Atlas may posses in any sort of formalized test. My example came with Hill Descent Control and Hill Start Assist, and I was able to find a small hill just steep enough to trigger the former. I cannot say I'd put my money on the Atlas winning the Dakar as it is, but we now know it can handle wet grass on a mild incline. What about county road gravel? Realistically, these are the two extremes 99% of Atlas' will ever face in their usable service lives. I found an entirely quiet section of back rock road and walked through the steps to disable all of the traction and stability control assists before stomping on the throttle, but was unable to provoke any significant wheelspin. In an episode of Autoline After Hours, Michael Loveti (Vice President, Product Line Mid/Full-Size, Volkswagen Group of America, Inc.) confirms the drivetrain really isall-time all-wheel-drive, (though the dual exhaust ports in the rear are unfortunately fake,) and that the Atlas is actually based on the MQB platform, which is astonishing. Prospective buyers should definitely have a listen.
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This theme of “thoroughly German, yet somehow distinctly Americanized” occurs over and over and over and over again in the Atlas' story. Its horizontal lines match both the Jetta and Ford's Explorer. In that way, surely it is a success. I cannot imagine a better execution of its marque's directives as stated by Mr. Loveti than what I drove.
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Cover the Volkswagen logo and you might think the Atlas was made by someone else. The hard lines and boxy shape are a sharp departure from the rest of the VW lineup. But look at its competitors here in the states, especially the Ford Explorer. It’s almost like Volkswagen tried to build its own Ford with the Atlas.
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Even though it has been on the market for only a year, the Atlas had become VW's second-most-popular car in the German automaker's lineup in March 2018, showing that the American car-buying public's thirst for crossovers and SUVs remains unslaked.
In the splitting of already fine hairs, it's the new Telluride that makes a stronger case over the Atlas, thanks to its price advantage, its plush and thoughtful appointments, and its slightly more comfortable third-row.
Freedom through security. In truth, neurotypical people are naturally driven to minimize risk, yet also to romanticize the sick, inhibitionless madmen – to envy them both internally and externally (in a most restrained way.) Collectively, our authority in (or mastery of) risktaking remains pathetically irrational. If we were to itemize our ability to asses risk into a sixth physical sense, it would rank just as poorly against the rest of the world's creatures (or perhaps neck-and-neck with those of the squirrel or the deer.)
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So many struggles of the too-often-cited “Human Condition” are grounded in the incompetence of this sense. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that risktakers in general are a very special topic amid The Middle Class – those who occasionally find themselves atop just enough excess to call it “capital.” This equates in day-to-day life as only the most potent – yet almost entirely inert next to the cushion of multi-millionaires – subject, catalyst, and indicator of dire fret. By far the most widespread affectation of this petty affliction spreads like divine wrath over the upper forty percent of this Middle Class. Thus, we must ask ourselves how safe doth the Atlas make me feel?
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Inside
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My Atlas’ interior was finished in Titan Black Leatherette, which sounds both grandiose and a bit like a kink. “Volkswagen is known for good build quality and tight-feeling interiors,” writes Danny Geraghty for Auto123, “but I found I was encountering just a bit too much hard plastic, making for a somewhat dated feel.” Perhaps my loaner was less worn in because neither I nor my girlfriend found anything wrong with the Atlas’ interior quality – even after bombing gravel roads to the point of sustaining a left-rear puncture, we did not encounter any annoying squeaks or rattles. She spent an entire afternoon sleeping in the passenger’s seat reclined and described it as “comfy.” For The Car Connection, Senior Editor Andrew Ganz writes:
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It’s not much to behold, with a chunky shape as conservative as they come that is not offset by a distinct lack of flair inside. Instead, the Atlas is quietly competent and exceptionally good at carrying seven humans—even seven adults.
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Standard with the SEL trim is Volkswagen’s “Digital Cockpit” instrument panel, which I like much more than I expected to, though its color options are already dated and unfortunately unchangeable. Ageability is an inevitable issue with these sorts of bespoke graphic design decisions automakers are making now, but at least you’ll be able to tell your friends that your Volkswagen has a digital dashboard “just like the Rolls-Royce Phantom,” which is, of course, the ultimate Queen of timelessness in the industry. Perhaps it’s telling that the only layout I found acceptable for the digital dash was the one with simulated analog needles for the tach and speedo, and how often do you really use a compass in day-to-day driving? For that matter, how useful could a digital compass in the speedometer’s center hub really be in an “offroad” situation? It’s a bit petty, but I also really despise the typeface shared across the instruments and infotainment system. It’s just… bad.
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Outside
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In Platinum Gray Metallic, the Atlas looks authoritative enough in a very ordinary way. Unless you’re on the lookout for one, you’d hardly notice it, and you certainly wouldn’t expect what you see to cost as much as it does. That is why I’d prefer any one of the other exterior finishes, especially (in order): Pure White, Tourmaline Blue Metallic, Pacific Blue Metallic, and Fortana Red. The real wonder is how VW managed to execute a seven-seat SUV with its existing design language. Though the Atlas is by far Volkswagen’s largest vehicle, it fits neatly within their lineup.
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Road Rage
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My only authentic Road Rage experience in some 5000 miles of rideshare driving occurred on All Hallow's Eve when I stopped – no more illegally than usual – on the opposite corner from a popular downtown Mexican restaurant called The Nap with hazards and all courtesy interior lights shining. The car immediately behind me hesitated no more than necessary, but the Biggest Big Infiniti behind them (a QX80 – the Atlas' competitor) just... stopped. There was honking and frenzied, hoarse screaming of what the fuck are you doing? and such.
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I responded with pleasantly amused but relatively-encouraging glances at the impersonal black mass of the Infiniti's windshield through my mirrors. I rolled down the Atlas' driver's side window and politely gestured that they go around me, but failed to coax any movement whatsoever from the ugly behemoth through at least two full cycles of the nearby traffic light. There must be some aquatic authority in the bulbous black ass of the QX80, for no one behind it seemed willing to pass either. The driver waited significantly longer than you'd imagine before emerging, huffy. She was wearing a classic poofy black North Face vest some sort of slate gray turtleneck. Nothing below these were stimulating enough to retain any memory of. Uggs?
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How positive are you that the truth has absolutely zero consequence: contrasted silver-beige eyeliner and little eye contact, dirty-ish straight blonde hair over a spray-tanned face, exhibiting zero anxious tics or hesitation. She was obviously the New Matriarch, and she was obviously much more of an authority on traffic law than I. As she approached, she scanned the street as one naturally does when they enter a busy one... except it was completely empty, thanks to her blockade. She first informed me that I was “not supposed” to be stopped there. I tried to listen and respond with as much sincerity as possible as I realized all at once that my behavior had genuinely perturbed this woman – that her choice to leave the huge hideous warmth of the guppy wagon to speak as humans to one another required great courage.
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I inserted the next logical question which I'd been screaming telepathically: can you not get around me? I began to pity her when I then saw in her face the distinct possibility that going around as a concept had not occurred to her whatsoever. She stuttered a wee bit in retorting “I could go around, but I don't want to get a ticket.” Here, one of the most fascinating avenues of suburban psychology is explored: Guppy Mom is not being ingenuine with this expression, nor has she had an untoward experience with law enforcement, ever. Guppy Mom did know her excuse was bullshit – nobody has ever been written a traffic citation for carefully circumventing an obstacle in the road. Given the opportunity to interrogate this kernel of entirely uncompromising obedience to utterly delusional traffic law superstitions, I think we'd simply discover a life of unnaturally positive interactions with LEOs. We must conclude, then, that the source of her fear was either myself or the Atlas.
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Granted, to her I am still a Young Man, and am therefore instinctively programmed to believe myself more informed than literally everyone – even the very foundational architects of modern civilization. Her Stucco Highness may have felt a representative of these builders (edgy take: she is in fact their servant.) Her own folks surely complain regularly about their distaste for disrespect, and my gig-economy, Austin Powers-looking ass was somehow disrespecting the order laid down by her would be (entirely fantastical) forefathers. Though her expression of her quaint fear of such “ugliness” (if you will) is hard-headed, an ugliest decision of hers (or her kin) idled behind me, its giant seafood-looking mouth gaping, unhinged. It'd almost be more redeemable if it was a hardcore, chronic mouthbreather. (The QX80 is actually powered by a comparatively oldschool V8.)
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Freedom from fear is the sum desire of all the most primitive compulsions we share. Ultimately, the only efficient and reasonable response to Mrs. Guppy's kind in such a situation is to very kindly oblige, which I did, of course, with great respect and great pity. In the months since this encounter, I'd been wondering what was missing from the outline of this Atlas review. I recently realized that it is this analysis of fear as a factor for the American carbuyer.
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Though it has been disproven over and over again for decades, consumers often cite safety as their primary motivation for buying full-sized SUVs. Mrs. Guppy's Great Guffaw led me to realize why this particularly disconnected supposition/folktale continues to thrive so uninhibited by the truth: the brand image, physical presence, and actual driving sensation must communicate and “feel” safe – these are far more integral to buyers' perception of a product than the testable reality. Even the people of the world's most Christian nation do not have faith – they trust not unless they see with their own eyes; feel with their own asses. They entrust their souls to the Word of the Lord, but not their lives to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. (I recently gave both of mine to NHTSA for All Eternity.)
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The Collegiate Take
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The two or three nights I spent Uber/Lyft driving around my college town shuttling Halloween party traffic in the Atlas were expectedly uneventful. I had to create a preset text message to send immediately upon connection with a rider to communicate as succinctly as possible that I was not going to be arriving in the Jetta Sportwagen on my profile but instead in the Atlas, and to transparently try to make sure that was okay. (No, drivers are not supposed to do this and you should reserve the right to bail on a ride should you find yourself opposite my own position in this situation because nobody refused me.)
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Hello! Just a heads up: My Jetta is in the shop so I'm driving a gray 2019 Volkswagen Atlas
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(It's VW's largest SUV and has 7 seats.)
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License: FATLAS
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If this is inconvenient or uncomfortable for you, please let me know.
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Thank you!
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I made a point to try and ask most of the riders if they had any thoughts on the Atlas without sounding like I was just desperately fishing for compliments on my own car, but I don't remember any significant thoughts being imparted whatsoever – certainly nothing negative. Folks here are just too polite – they won't speak up no matter how many times you insist that you do not own the car. We experienced this phenomena years ago when we tried to interview people on the street regarding the horrid Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet. Regardless, there's no reason to expect young people to have anything to say about the Atlas – it is neither extraordinary nor cheap.
[Atlas] was designed and built specifically for American families, and buyers and critics alike are letting us know that we’re hitting the mark with this seven-seater SUV.
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It's immediately evident from the outside that the Atlas is the most Americanized product in Volkswagen's lineup – indeed, in its entire history. For Car Magazine's review, Ben Barry notes “the square-jawed front, Jeep-like wheel arches, and the suggestive utilitarianism of the stampings in the bonnet and roof” before remarking on just how much more you can spend on the Porsche Cayenne's cousin, the beloved Touareg.
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Ultimately, the Atlas is far from a dynamic, agile machine, but it feels comfortable and unintimidating to drive, and perfectly at home on US city streets and the slower-paced driving of California highways.
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Efficiency, the Other Fixation
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Surprisingly, the Atlas carries a rare and precious jewel of automotive history under its broad, satisfying hood. The VR6 “zig zag” arrangement is actually one of Volkswagen legend – defining icons like the Corrado. As Dan Prosser explains for Evo magazine:
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‘VR’ stands for V-Reihenmotor, which translates to V-Inline, describing both vee and inline cylinder layouts. That is, of course, contradictory. The unit is actually a very narrow-angle V6, displacing 2861cc, with two offset banks of cylinders at 15 degrees to one another. Unlike a conventional V6, but exactly like an inline six, there’s just one cylinder head. The result is a six-cylinder engine that’s both much narrower than a typical V6 and shorter than a straight six. In fact, it’s more comparable in size to a four-cylinder than a six, which meant it could slot easily into a Golf floorpan. A creative and borderline ingenious engineering solution.
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The Atlas' 3.6L VR6 makes 276 hp and 266 lb-ft. of torque. Though other reviews cited highway mileage figures of 23-25 mpg, I was able to coax a whole twenty-eight miles-per-gallon on a live Periscope stream without air conditioning or cruise control through a two-way simulated 20 minute commute, through which I suffered for the hard data. My average before resetting the odometer for that feat, though, was 14.7mpg. “Good range and miles between trips to the gas station are criteria I look for in a good car, and the fuel-gulping Atlas rates low in this department” may be the blandest statement of all time, but MotorTrend does have a point – with the same 18.6 gallon fuel tank shared between the four and six cylinder models, the latter realistically has 250 miles of range between fillups, which is pitiful for a modern vehicle in just about any segment. Crossing one State is not enough.
It's a straightforward conversion from Atlas to Atlas Cross Sport. In the name of perceived sportiness, out goes that most minivan of things: the third row of seats.
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Normally, I'd be disgusted with such a thing, but from where I'm sitting, the Cross Sport appears to be what the Atlas should've been all along. The third row seats in my example wasn't any more comfortable than that of a 10-year-old minivan, so removing them for the sake of the second makes perfect sense. According to Car & Driver, the 2021 Atlas will “adopt” the Cross Sport's styling, though there are some technologies – like road sign recognition- which are exclusive to the Cross Sport.
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Instead of getting 20.6 cubic feet of cargo space behind the third row in the Atlas, you get 40.3 behind the second row. Fold that down and it becomes 77.8 cubic feet to work with. And that’s from an SUV with the same wheelbase as the upcoming 2021 Atlas at 117.3 inches, yet it is 5.2 inches shorter and 2.2 inches lower to the ground.
Once we got the steering fixed, my opinion of the Atlas did grow sunnier, though it's still not perfect. Maybe it's not fair to compare the driving experience to my previous long-term vehicle, the slightly smaller Mazda CX-9, but in my opinion the Mazda still sets the ride and handling bar for the competitive set. Setting the Mazda aside, if you hop behind the wheel of one of the newer competitors like the Kia Telluride, there's a noticeable disparity in the refinement in ride quality and body control in the Atlas... Volkswagen should have made the GTI of three-row SUVs, not just another minivan alternative.
The 2018 Volkswagen Atlas does little wrong, but it's light on personality and a little low-rent inside—and it guzzles fuel. It's worth a look, but mostly rivals do more for less.
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Volkswagen’s first substantial entry into the SUV market is well-named, relatively well-endowed, fairly bland for its price tag, and very, very heavy. Also, Start/Stop is still unbearable – thanks Obama – but the Atlas is not a scam.
Volkswagen traditionally tuned its suspensions closer to the European ideal, firm but well-damped, which incidentally made even non-enthusiast Volkswagens more pleasant than average to drive (with a few recent exceptions). But Volkswagen made a conscious decision to soften up the Jetta for American tastes, beyond what softening Volkswagen traditionally applied, and it seems like this philosophy scaled up to the much larger Atlas. Maybe the soft ride impresses on test drives, but a firmer setup would likely make life nicer for occupants over the long haul.
I would argue that this is the best Honda’s CR-V has ever or will ever look, no thanks to my photographic decisions.
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After 9 or so years and over 100,000 miles, I have totaled my mother’s 2010 Honda CR-V – the car I drove cross-country for the first time at significant distance (St. Louis to Washington, D.C. in essentially one sitting,) and once complimented for being the best possible aesthetic compromise of its near-universally and aggravatingly-compromised breed. It was my her first 1st owner experience, which is frankly a bit of a shame. If I’m completely honest, my late stepfather’s decision to outfit this utterly utilitarian vehicle with enough kit to break the $30,000 within a segment that has always clung to the 20s as one of its truly communicable advantages feels less-than-ideal in retrospect, but what can I say, really? It was not exactly a proud thing, but it did transport a lot of young families and shelter us as we’ve navigated more blizzard-like conditions than should be the norm for what is, essentially, an expensive, extended Civic.
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As per some particulars of my upbringing, I tend to get almost alarmingly attached to vehicles, but it’s hard to say I’m sad to see the CR-V go from all but the most sentimental senses. Objectively, it’s simply not as high-value or as competent a vehicle as it and its contemporaries are still made out to be by automotive media, pop culture, or the presumptions in the average consumer’s discourse. Though it was never intended to be luxurious, the resulting automobile ended up costing real luxury money.
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The Event
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It’s odd to have been driving so long without incident (pretty soon I’m gonna be able to say “I’ve been driving for twenty years, bitch!) and then suddenly find oneself at fault for the accident which claimed the life of the single most sublime, defining object in his existence. This incident, though, was entirely the fault of the other driver. My best friend and I were Northbound, crossing the intersection of Stadium Boulevard and Rock Quarry Road at precisely the point where it becomes College Avenue, where we were t-boned directly on the CR-V’s driver’s side rear wheel by a mid-2000s Mazda 6 that decided to run the red light. It’s hard to guess the speed of impact, but the driver’s side side airbags deployed (as you’ll see from the attached photograph,) and the CR-V was spun nearly 270 degrees around the axis of the front wheels. Neither of us nor the 6’s driver was injured, but both of our vehicles are surely totaled.
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Third-Generation CR-V Ownership in Retrospect
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Two or three years ago, I recorded some (not particularly conclusive or informative) thoughts with my iPhone as I drove the old engorged Civic to the grocery store, when ends abruptly after I said “I think one time I did try to go fast.” Like most surviving crossover nameplates, though, the narrative began with a genuinely good idea: Hondarize and modernize the Suzuki Sidekick template on top of the Civic's platform and charge just a bit more for it – and like the rest, too, the concept has soured tremendously as both crossovers and the compact sedans upon which they're based have grown and fattened under their ever-increasing burden of safety and convenience features. (I say “burden” and not “expectation,” specifically because I know a grand total of zero informed people who are at all thrilled about increasing gross weights across every industry segment.)
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This CR-V was my mother’s first and only crossover following a three-car line of one or two-owner-used, well-equipped V6 Accords in her garage – the later two from the era when Honda’s mid-sized sedan became a surprisingly dynamic driving machine as advances in drivetrain performance intercepted a point in the developmental timeline just before gross weights spiked up toward their current safety and electronic equipment-bloated figures. (In other words: in the sweet spot when engines were growing more powerful but just before the Accord and its peers got fucking fat.) In 2010, the CR-V was almost attractive looking as specced by my stepfather: the combination of the roof rack, bonnet bra, and EX-trim 5-spoke alloys managed to resolve most of the discrepancies in the shapes I've seen from other examples, but it also drove its price above the $30,000 mark. To be fair to Honda, this decision could almost be considered a sortof breach of function considering the CR-V's original ultra-mass-produced, utilitarian purpose.
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Interior
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Neither the leather nor the nav/infotainment system has aged very well, but it should be said that the latter is still 100% functional in 2018: it interfaces well with my iPhone 8 Plus with only the occasional “this device is not supported” hiccup (easily resolvable by simply re-booting the connection, in my experience.) I'm not sure how astonished I should be by the fact that the GPS still offers reliable routes 99% of the time, albeit through a user interface design that seems to grow more and more dated by the passing few seconds one may have to wait for it to calculate. Accommodation remains about as uncomfortable as it was on day 1: thanks to its hard leather and the super-upright seating position common to crossovers, I must continue to insist that operating this car is a wholly unnatural experience, but its interior surfaces shall always place well in a contest of robustness and longevity, as they certainly should.
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Drivetrain
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Perhaps the greatest letdown of this model year (2010) is its legacy four-speed automatic transmission, and I assume the next year's inclusion of a brand-new five-speed unit drastically improved its driving experience. The specific regret one feels when such a development arrives a year after buying any new car is one my stepfather still didn't deserve, yet he was not spared. However, if you, the reader, cannot be dissuaded from buying a CR-V of this generation for whatever goddamned reason, know that you must choose an example from 2011-onward if you want to retain your sanity. No, ye olde four-speed wasn't quite as bad as the transmission that virtually ruined Dodge's new Dart singlehandedly, but it certainly shows its age even for the most inattentive or merciless driver. Without it, I would vouch for the 2.4L four-cylinder's performance as adequate, but its contribution was and forever shall be let down by the aging transmission's developing Alzheimer's. Simply put: they are an unacceptably mismatched team.
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Though I shall forever argue that part-time all-wheel-drive is almost never actually justified in normal use – and yet inadequate for any “extreme” use, for that matter – Honda’s hydraulic “Super-Handling All-Wheel-Drive” did indeed aid our CR-V’s way in a handful of circumstances throughout my mother’s ownership, though neither of our memories of these are robust enough to cite specifics. The single no-bullshit blizzard we experienced was the same type I managed to navigate years later in a sub-compact Chevrolet to reach MagFest 2016, if perhaps less intense. I would speculate that the system increases mechanical drag – and therefore fuel consumption – to a degree that couldn’t possibly justify what little aid it has offered in our use, at least.
The recently-discontinued Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet darkly mirrors sentiments first begun with the Pontiac Aztek, narrating Generation X’s decline.
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My Nissan wheeltime for Honk has grown a massive respect for the brand’s audacity within me. My interest in the profession has spanned years of maturity — from asking can’t you just…? to active affection for those who dare reliably retort with a confident no.
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Can’t you just retire your body-on-frame SUV entries already like everybody else did ten years ago?
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The noble, rugged Xterra, which we shall sincerely miss.
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Can’t you just follow the Golf’s unquestionably low-risk lead into the tumultuous youth market?
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The Juke NISMO, which we regard as the industry’s singular steady grasp on what youth actually means.
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Can’t you just take some cues from Honda and Toyota, and make your sedans easy on the eye?
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The Altima and the Maxima, which constitute the last truly evil marque available.
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Can’t you just step a little lighter on the Versa’s margins? You’d be insane to build a car designed by MSRP alone!
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The Versa is — for better or worse — the absolute essence of automobiles’ transportive function, and no more.
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And there’s the GT-R, of course, which continues to make fools of an entire culture of self-titled “gearheads” who claim speed as their one true dowry.
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Throughout the years, Nissan has over and over again made me look like an absolutely absurd idiot for your display — and I cannot think of a better gift. Of all the brands to misunderstand, it is the ultimate muse.
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So, in the present, I am grandiosely assuming you’ve been attentive enough to deliberate the possible outcomes of our time with the Murano CrossCabriolet.
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It was quickly apparent that the experience was not going to resemble our Night of the Juke in the slightest. It could be attributed to my pre-game mentality. For the first time, I came to this monstrosity thinking I’d finally learned my lesson,desperately hoping to be whipped again — real bad — but walk away with more closure than with which I arrived. Like a good diplomat, I made myself approach without want for anything but understanding.
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On first take, the Xterra was proud, and the Juke was clever.
Just since its assembly in 2011, our example’s trim has endured enough to begin disintegrating in a few bizarre locales. Not to over-iterate, but it’s needing strong mention: I had never sat in a roofless crossover before. I’m assuming you haven’t, either. It is unnatural. It is harrowing.
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From the organization I have summed so many times over the years as “acutely ingenious” came this… unsettling suburban bathtub.
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It’s a shame — I repeatedly remark on the extrapolated potential I can see in a roofed Murano. Everything else in sight is worth my time. If only it had been better-protected.
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The sensation is simply ridiculous in what’d be a tasteful sense were this a one-off project of some hearty garage tinkerer or tuning shop, but… my God; Nissan delivered it this way, and had the gall to ask $10,000 more for their molestation.
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Still, its webpage (in past tense, thank God,) proclaims “the Murano CrossCabriolet was the world’s first and only All-Wheel Drive convertible crossover” in the same language I’d tout the Xterra (may it rest in peace and eternally-inadequate glory) as the last available SUV, in the traditional use of the segment, or the Juke NISMO as the first competently-composed automotive product for millennial youth. Or the GT-R as by far the most effective, high-value instrument for the pursuit of maximum velocity across the ground. And so on.
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The language so assured, the parallels must inevitably be drawn to that cheap joke of the century’s turn… the Pontiac Aztek.
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The details of its life story are reliably amusing, should you find yourself mid-research. From the journos’ gasps at its corporately-edgy concept’s unveiling to the weary original steed of Breaking Bad‘s Meth Man, there is a similar lifestyle vehicle thread between the products that weaves an obscure narrative.
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My own contribution: after a missed exit outside Galveston just as Azteks first became rentable, my stepfather (the most earnestly late-history Pontiac man who ever lived) took an entirely-unexpected and uncharacteristic 70 mile-an-hour plunge into the choppy grass median after shouting “this is an off-road vehicle!”
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As I’m sure you can imagine, it was the single most traumatic event I have ever experienced as the passenger of a motor vehicle, but the damned thing was unscathed, despite having repeatedly chucked us all (fully-belted) into its beige ceiling.
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Gary believed in Pontiac.
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Though he was keen enough to smell death, he chose to believe in the Aztek.
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And you know what? His faith, too, has made me look like an idiot.
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That’s what separates the Aztek from ye late CrossCabriolet: it really was a genuinely-bold innovation. Survive the laymen’s idle party chat and crude design critiques, and you’ll find an impressive clarity in its purpose, especially given the context of its conception. In the used market especially, it still represents a characterful, practical, and high-value consideration. And yet — at the expense of themselves — American buyers did not clamor for it like the informed of the populace did. Perhaps it was because the informed — like then-BusinessWeek‘s David Welch — were echoing hopes of a “design renaissance” for General Motors. The renaissance that would not come until the Flush of the Boomer Higher-Ups some eight years later.
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Both tales, I think, represent a profound neglect of consumer journalism.
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At the turn of the century, though, it was not unusual to go a day without accessing the internet. Today, people are still buying the few flops the industry has left to offer — making what is most likely the second-largest purchase of their life’s current epoch without consulting the volumes of diverse, intelligent, and articulate opining now accessible instantly free of charge via the subsidized slates that lightly jostle in their jean pockets as they wiggle their signatures on dealer paperwork.
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ALERT: Inbound tennis enthusiasts!
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Funny, isn’t it?
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An American hit when the Japanese were unquestionably winning, and — just over a decade later — a Japanese miss as their winning had just begun to be questioned. Make no mistake; I am not being patriotic. For me, sovereignty does not extend beyond design houses, R&D facilities, and test centers.And it’s somewhere within Nissan’s where pillars were severed and delusions nurtured; all astoundingly with executives’ blessing. I am terribly and shockingly ashamed to report that my countrymen actually bought them.
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As many as 3300 units in the last year of the Mayan calendar. The worst bit, though, is that they all made their way to my particular part of the planet.
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I swear to the Sun; I am surrounded.
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If you’re familiar with Columbia, Missouri, it does not take more than a moderate imagination to comprehend the sense, as grueling as it is. I see them regularly; once a month, at least. In a town where one can expect to spot a Gallardo in front of Buffalo Wild Wings marred by horrid plastic athletic miniflags wedged in its five-figure doors, they are everpresent reminders that the New Money Effect continues to flourish, unbridled in the Midwestern U.S.
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The soft top is always retracted, of course, and the exposed driver is always a sweating middle-aged white woman wearing a light-colored tennis visor. She… they… are always on their way to a match. Doomed to roast forever, I suppose, as there is only one nearby court, as far as I know.
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It is disheartening to realize that, now, I see many more of them than Azteks around. Though neither were designed for any tangible “lifestyle,” per se, I am saddened by the shift this minuscule tell indicates in my hometown’s morale. From an (albeit equally-vague) yearning for new adventure in an intriguing new century to an emotionally-destitute jaunt to the court, I have witnessed all of Generation X’s vigor erode procedurally away before my eyes.
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Y2K, Great Depression II, an ancient apocalyptic prophecy from one of the wisest civilizations in recorded history… Surely, one of these foretold disasters will finally End it All!
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Perhaps Nissan knew that even the well-read of the North American market were, by and large, simply looking for ways to pass the time before the death which they felt so assuredly approached. The number of unanimously-unbuyable prospects available has shrunken to virtually none, and the CrossCabriolet was not much of an investment; not all that highly-engineered, really. Perhaps they felt obligated to entertain us in our delusional way out. Perhaps it was all just an awfully-German prank.
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And, if the End of the World is imminent, what’s to stop one, really, from leasing the world’s first and only convertible crossover?
A broken Mazda RX-7, that lived in a shed on the family farm, was David Blue's first real experience with a car. Years later he got to try out a living, working example of the same car – and, unlike Max Prince previously found, loved it. – Speedmonkey Matt
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My bond with one particular example of Mazda's best-selling Wankel-powered sports car began on the Midwestern farm where I grew up. A 1980 model LS-trimmed example, originally painted in “Solar Gold” (one of only 500 made, it turns out). It had been sitting in a small shed, condemned to rest there only a few years after my birth from issues with the fuel delivery system. The search for a mechanic capable of working on the rotary engine without destroying it was eventually given up.
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My father told me stories of his flings with the car. He used to say the police would pull him over simply because it “looked fast.” Naturally, as a small boy, the stories took a hold of my imagination. The RX-7 held a very special sort of allure. It eventually became my ideal image of “racecar”. Its environment added to the intoxication. The lack of electric power to the car, its immobility, and the stories I was told combined to create the aura of a fading, forgotten superhero. Tired, abandoned, and only necessitating the help of a friend in order to bring it back to glory.
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It wasn't very long after toddlerhood that I took to spending a large portion of my free time sitting in the RX-7, practicing rowing through the gears and making engine noises with my mouth. I still remember vividly how delightful the experience of simply sitting in that car was. The dash layout, the feel of the steering wheel in my hands, and the smell of the interior are all deeply etched into memory. It was almost as if I had a deeper perception into its soul, a capability that I feel has been lost.
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Much before I had expected, I had the opportunity to meet this hero, so to speak. I encountered a partially-restored 1983 Series 2 example, slightly different than my RX-7. Different enough to subdue my worries of adultery to the car I grew up with, but similar enough to be an important discovery.
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I was treated to the complete RX-7 ownership experience, including a dead battery and a difficult, choked cold start. Perry, my host, was kind enough to pay for the fuel for the drive with money out of his own pocket. After ensuring that we would not be walking back, I pointed that very long, very 80s nose toward some local back highways.
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I had never driven anything powered by a Wankel, and the contrast of the RX-7 compared to everything with wheels I had experienced was stark, and noticeable immediately. The feedback normally received from a piston engine is not felt, due to the fact that there is no more conversion from vertical to rotational motion, a rotary engine (as implied by the name) involves no vertical momentum. It's not that the engine refuses to communicate with you, it's just speaking an entirely different language. The whiny exhaust note has an odd property to it that can be heard from no other source. It conjures up images of the mysterious, angry pair of triangles whirling about in their cage. Purely imaginary, of course.
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Because the Wankel is so smooth, I found myself wondering why I should shift up. A piston engine makes you anxious when you push it close to the redline. Most send the driver a variety of auditory and tactile messages indicating that they must either shift up, or face a molten tie rod to the head. The RX-7, however, gives no such indication. When close to the redline, one hears only an excited whir. The result (forgive the upcoming Disney analogy) is an almost magic carpet-like experience. It's as though the power simply materializes before you with no apparent source or sacrifice.
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For me, the tranquility of the engine eliminated the reservations I had for speed. It's an incentive, in fact, to keep the needle in the upper portion of the tachometer as much as possible. The car had only 100 hp and 105 lb-ft. of torque in 1983, and has no doubt lost a few along its journey. Frankly, I'm thankful it's not more powerful. Otherwise, there wouldn't be room to fully enjoy revving it to its limit.
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Though I have decided that a transmission with multiple ratios is unnecessary when coupled to a Wankel, the 5-speed manual in the RX-7 was quite a treat. It's very notchy, with a mid-length throw. The well-spaced ratios paired with a very light, but engaging clutch made rev matching pleasant and natural.
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Unfortunately, the steering in the car I drove was quite loose, likely from wear. It is unassisted, though, and was at one time very engaging, I suspect. Given that it is a sports car from the 1980s, driver communication is a result of the engineering, not vice versa.
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The driving position is actually more relaxed than it looks, and the interior is a thoroughly enjoyable place to be in. This particular car had a factory-installed manually-adjustable equalizer mounted beneath the stock head unit. A useless, though interesting, novelty that quickly rids the occupants of any doubt as to when the car was built.
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The RX-7 is too often overlooked for what it is; a very special piece of automotive history. It's an experience completely unlike any piston-powered alternative. And for me, it's much more than that. My RX-7 represents an entire childhood's worth of dreams and a sort of companionship, even. My experiences with it were a very large influence on my drive to pursue a career in automotive writing. Driving one did change my perspective, but not at all for the worse.
South Korea is poised to take Japan's place in the American market.
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The 1990s. Not the greatest time for the United States auto industry. In those days, with a few exceptions, American cars were all overpriced, devoid of quality and generally unreliable. The big three (along with many other non-automotive related corporations in the U.S.) had an aging generation of management. This group decided that the ideal way to run their business involved expending the least amount of effort into their products as possible, without reducing the price paid by customers. Essentially, they hoped to gain more profit from less product. I don't have to tell you that this thinking just...doesn't work. I would theorize that this mentality came from overconfidence and a lack of joy in production. GM, Ford, and Dodge had been the top sellers of the automobile in the United States since its invention. They originally symbolized the best in quality, luxury and performance. Consumer and producer shared the same values, resulting in a flourishing market. It was a joyous time. And then, somewhere around the 1973 oil crisis, the joy began seeping out of our star shooters. Maybe it was emissions regulations, a loss of those ideal values, or some other factor. Regardless of the source, our homegrown auto industry lost its passion. It reflected in the cars that were built. Designs were reused, progression was halted, the irreverence of quality workmanship lost. “American dependability” became an ironic statement.
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And then came along a company that had been building little, noisy two-stroke engines to fit to bicycles only four decades earlier, proudly displaying a banner the changing public couldn't refuse. They offered a product that was simple, honest, reliable, durable and reasonably priced. A concoction that smelled an awful lot like high value. An odor that no doubt brought back old memories. The Accord, suburban America's new family pet. And the Civic, conveniently debuted in 1972. The college student's greatest companion. Both were conservatively styled and equipped, and thus quite easily ignored, which was exactly what the country wanted. After all those years stranded on the shoulders of our aging interstate system in lumbering, underpowered beasts, the indestructible and dependable qualities of the Hondas came as a breath of fresh air. So. What made the newcomers so different? What was the driving force behind the value of the products? It was something not unknown to the Americans, and its presence had been sorely missed. Picture an ancient sage by the name of Soichiro Honda saying something to the order of “Lets build the best automobile we can and sell it for as little as possible.” Though the man is more a symbol than an actual influence on the four-wheeled endeavors of the institution bearing his name, he represents what led to the same group's success. Honda was untainted by an unrealistic attitude, and unaided by a century of heritage and good reputation. They succeeded only because they built good cars.
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By 2008, Honda had more than made a name for itself. Over the past decade, though, the prices had been steadily increasing, along with the level of luxury and complexity available in their cars. Both the Accord and Civic were bestsellers in their respective classes, and had held their titles for a relatively long time. It was then that I personally theorized they might take the same path American carmakers had taken only a short while before. I don't want to brag, but this was long before Ron Kiino's bold title “Is Hyundai the new Honda?” graced the pages of MotorTrend's October 2011 issue. And it was really a far-fetched notion at the time. Simply a suspicion. Confidently and stubbornly, the Accord held its grip on mid-size sedan sales in the United States, complimented by the Toyota Camry, a similar-looking but even more ignorable competitor. The former still held appeal for someone with the capacity to enjoy themselves. The latter, however, has always been the most desirable choice of individuals that absolutely despise driving. They both held their slightly different niches, with no real fear of losing their place. Then, Honda started skimping a bit on quality. Motoring journalists noticed a lack of improving fuel economy, aging transmissions, and a general loss in competitive edge in the 2011 Accord. Not the best time to start slacking on Honda's part.
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This was the year that Hyundai unveiled the brilliantly-updated 6th generation Sonata. I consider this to be the most significant car to come in the mid-sized segment since the birth of the Accord/Camry duo. In previous generations, it had always been competitively priced. The quality, though, had been lacking. The Koreans were not afraid to design a car that was much less conservative than the two Japanese giants. However, the designs were never really all that great looking. Interesting and different? Yes. Attractive?....No. So these attributes kept Honda and Toyota secure under their cozy comforter of sales, not intimidated by Hyundai's offering. And that's quite understandable. The Sonata never really seemed a direct competitor to the giants. The new one, however, completely changed the game. For one thing, it's gorgeous. Not conservatively pretty, but ridiculous, in the best sort of way. Poised and angular, the exterior looks as if it should cost exponentially more than it does. They managed to carry on the Sonata's tradition of unique styling by rejecting the old car completely and replacing it with a stunner. The interior reflects a similar attitude. It's not only good looking, but significantly more fuel efficient than any other mid-sized car on the market. The drivetrain options are excellent. The best part, though, is the price. At a starting MSRP of 19,195 USD (£11,944), it is several thousand less than any competitor.
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All of this really just makes the Accord and Camry look silly. It's interesting that Hyundai should take up Honda's original niche, given how different their backgrounds are. Our original hero of practicality was created by a man tinkering with small motorcycles. The former, however, was founded as a massive construction firm, only later trying its hand in the realm of automobiles. Cars seemed an alternative for Hyundai, but certainly not an afterthought. Regardless of where they came from, these two companies have had very similar philosophies, if only separated by time. Also, both have had to rely on sheer ingenuity for profit, without the foothold of heritage in the American market. It could be said, though, that Hyundai is doing a bit better. High value cars that are practical and interesting as an experience. Honda could never get that last bit quite right. Or perhaps it's just a sign of the times. Maybe Americans have overcome the compulsion to ignore our cars. My question is this; Has this flip-flop in production attitude become a cycle? And if so, who will be in the hot spot next? My bet is on the big three, believe it or not. A new generation of management has brought about a huge improvement in our products. It could even be one of the rising Chinese companies in the future. Who knows? I can tell you that right now, though, Hyundai has got the goods.
As we bid farewell to the Miata’s third-generation, sizing up its top trim summarizes its legacy.
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I recently had the chance to drive the facelifted 2013 Mazda MX-5. This is the first time the looks of the perky roadster have changed since the front-mounted smile became an all-out grin of insanity in 2008. They have once again dulled it to what I would call a smirk. The new front end blends with the rest of car more than it has in the past. It seems to have grown a bit more serious. In fact, with black 17-inch alloys on a glossy black (creatively called “Brilliant Black,”) this example is the most aggressive-looking of any Miata I have seen.
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That's not to say it's aggressive in the slightest, even in such a scheme. This car is in the “Club” trim replacing the previous “Touring” designation as the top-of-the-line option. This selection adds ridiculous three-leaf clover side badges, red stitching on the seats, red stripes on the dash and sides, along with a price tag very near 30,000 USD.
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So I present you with my first problem with this particular car....it's a contradiction. The MX-5 was never intended to look serious. That grin was there to convey the primary attribute aspired to by its creators; joy. It's designed to be joyful in driving and the exterior of previous generations did a good job of communicating what the car is all about. Unfortunately, it seems they have decided that it's time for the roadster to grow up. Frankly, that's not going to work.
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Now, to the drive.
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For this year, the car has been lightened, the braking response quickened, as well as the throttle response in manual-equipped cars. Unfortunately, I was only able to drive the 6-speed automatic with optional pattle-shifters. Given that this is my first drive in an NC (third generation) MX-5, I can only compare it to my own NB.
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Immediately, my passenger and chaperon starts the process of opening the optional retractable hard top. Open air is this car's natural environment, and it appears that somebody got busy making sure its occupants never notice. Wind buffeting has been drastically reduced. We were able to maintain conversation beyond 70mph without necessitating shouting thanks to a much taller wind brake behind our seats. Unfortunately, I couldn't really hear much of anything from the 158-hp 2.0L 4 up front, even with liberal amounts of right foot burying. It would seem the optional dual exhaust outlets are rather pointless then.
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Getting in the car, I had expected the experience to be ruined by the 6-speed auto. Buying a Miata with an automatic is sort of like going on a scenic vacation without a camera. It doesn't necessarily ruin the immediate experience but you'll always have some regret regarding the subject in the future. The pattles add some of the fun back in, but I prefer the Golf GTI's arrangement of right side-shift up, left side-shift down, while the MX-5 has both functions on either side of the wheel.
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It took some deliberate self-coaching to get used to, but it won't effect your daily driving experience. Another plus; when in manual shift mode, it is truly manual, meaning the transmission will allow you to exceed the redline. It may sound trivial, but being nannied when you're first told that you're in control can be a major annoyance. (Looking at you, Kia Forte.) It's disappointing that Mazda chose only to up throttle response in manual-equipped cars. This one most certainly needed it.
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The original Miata was built on a philosophy of communication between driver and machine, summarized in the Japanese phrase “Jinba Ittai,” meaning “rider and horse are one.” Being an MX-5 owner, this philosophy is very important to me, thus my expectations for the steering were very high. It was very disappointing, then, to discover that it has been very nearly ruined.
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The leather-wrapped steering wheel was comfortable, yes, but not very generous in revealing the road. In corners it felt jumpy, imprecise, and unsure of itself. The same lack of self-confidence was noticeable in a straight line as well, along with a nervous fidget. Keep in mind, I am comparing this to roadsters of the past, not to other automobiles currently on the market. It would take a global nuclear war to make the MX-5 less fun to drive than a Toyota Camry.
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Though it has lost communication and soul, the Miata has gained a more comfortable suspension and oodles of storage space. The trunk is massive for a roadster of this size, and the example I drove was equipped with an optional storage compartment extending behind the seats, especially handy for CDs, candy, and the like. The center console contains two reasonably-sized cupholders obscured by a sliding door that will inevitably lead to annoyance in single-drink occasions. Mr. Cunningham also pointed out to me that the track on which the door slides appears vulnerable to crumbs. Only time will tell, I suppose.
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In general, being inside the car is a much more comfortable experience, albeit a boring one. It seems to me that the MX-5 has “grown up,” forgoing fun for comfort and practicality. And is that not exactly the opposite of the direction it should be moving? It was never meant to be an aggressive-looking performance car, and it will never do well as one. It will never be luxurious enough to be a true touring car, either.
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Its soul has made it the top-selling roadster of all time, and I'm afraid it's losing it, bit by bit. To be honest, if you're attracted by the values on which the original Miata was built, I would recommend a Subaru BRZ/Toyota GT 86/Scion FR-S. The recommendation does not come lightly or easily.
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Until Mazda gets wise about what it's doing to the beloved little car, I'm afraid it's headed down a path that will mean losing a grip on the niche it's held for so long, and that's quite saddening.
Us drivers of cars with manual transmissions tend to look down on those who drive automatics. It’s like an exclusive club. Only the extremely talented, gorgeous-looking, and legendary athletes of yore are allowed in.
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Well, that’s bullshit. So those of you that know the “standard” can keep your mouths shut and bask in the quiet satisfaction that you’re saving the planet.
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The truth is, for those of you that don’t know, driving “stick” is totally simple. Once you understand the basic concepts of how the transmission and clutch work together, you can figure it out with no real instruction at all. So with that in mind, I’d like to tell you that automatic transmissions just….suck. Really.
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Mind you, I’m not talking about Dual-Clutch Transmissions, SMGs (Sequential Manual Gearboxes,) or any of that fancy stuff that has only recently become somewhat popular in the mainstream (affordable) auto market. I’m talking about automatics with a torque converter, that magically inefficient device that has carried America’s laziness in driving for the last 50 years.
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Now before I go on, I suppose I owe you a technical explanation. Let’s start with the basics. First off, a transmission is the device that separates the engine from the wheels. With both automatic and manual transmissions, “gears” are used to vary the ratio between the engine’s crankshaft and the drive shaft going to the wheels. It’s essentially a buffer between the engine’s relative consistency and the inconsistent world that you drive in.
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But that’s not quite all there is.
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Traditional transmissions require an interruption in power from the engine to shift these “gears,” and to come to a stop at a traffic light, in your driveway, or on the side of the highway to pick up a hooker. In manuals, this is typically accomplished with a clutch, a device that could most simply be explained as two plates that are pressed together to couple, and brought apart to become independent. A clutch is normally coupled, it’s when the clutch petal is pushed in that the plates separate, and the transmission is isolated from the engine. Automatic transmissions use a type of fluid coupling to accomplish the same task, called a torque converter.
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The advantage of the latter is that, when paired with an automatic transmission, the driver only requires one input to get the car moving and vary its velocity, and that is the accelerator pedal. A manual transmission requires three inputs, on the other hand. (Accelerator pedal, clutch, and gearshift.) In my mind, the torque converter has some huge disadvantages in a world where millions are spent to save 20 lbs. on one car design.
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Have you ever noticed that cars equipped with manuals are usually noticeably more fuel efficient than their automatic counterparts? Some of that could be attributed to the greater control that comes with manuals, but most of it is from the torque converter’s main design flaw. A clutch can be completely disengaged and completely engaged. So, with a healthy vehicle, there is 0% of the engine’s power moving to the transmission when the clutch pedal is depressed fully. Likewise when the clutch pedal is allowed completely out, the clutch essentially becomes a shaft, and 100% of the engine’s power is being fed to the transmission.
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A torque converter couples via fluid, however, meaning there is never a solid mechanical connection between the engine and the transmission. (Unless the transmission is equipped with a lock-up clutch, which is essentially a clutch that locks the torque converter mechanically when it is no longer required to dump the engine’s energy into friction. These are becoming more and more common, but the majority of vehicles on the road are missing them.) This means that a traditional torque converter is never 100% efficient.
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Also, a torque converter is never completely disengaged. When sitting at a traffic light, the driver typically lightly applies the brakes to hold the car from moving forward. Have you ever considered what you’re doing? The engine is basically dumping energy into the torque converter in the form of friction. It is literally no different from holding the gas and the brakes at the same time.
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What the hell? How is that accepted in a world where Al Gore and Prius’s exist?
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Oh wait! As United States citizens, we’re lazy as shit!
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84% of cars sold in North America are equipped with an automatic transmission, as opposed to 20% in Europe.
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You could make the excuse that we love automatics because of all our stop-and-go traffic, and yet, as a citizen of the Midwestern U.S, I see automatics MUCH more often than I see traffic congestion.
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The real answer is that we just don’t want to bother with a clutch pedal and a gearshift when we could be texting or doing makeup.
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Luckily, the great minds of our time have come up with solutions that adapt to us so that we don’t have to adapt to them. (As always.) Probably the simplest is the aforementioned “lock-up clutch,” which eliminates the inefficiency of the torque converter by mechanically coupling at high speed. But that doesn’t exactly solve the problem of sitting over a nice gas to friction converter at traffic lights.
-Well here’s a tip. When you stop at a traffic light, bump your shift lever one up into neutral. It shouldn’t require that you hold a safety button to go back and forth between Drive and Neutral. This prevents that unnecessary friction. Combine that with a lockup clutch, and you’re basically driving a manual!……Except without the enjoyment.
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You could call this a rant on one of the most successful inventions the modern automobile has ever seen….because it is. And I doubt you’ll hear anyone else complain about it. But there really are flaws in the design that I wish consumers would figure out. Before all this hybridism, eco-mindedness, and hippie-crazed green malarkey, maybe we should eliminate the evil energy-wasting beast that is the torque converter.
Why Extratone has used Discord instead of Slack for our team chat.
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Back in 2015, I hosted a pre-Extratone culture podcast called Drycast with musician friends from all over the net. To record remotely, we originally used Teamspeak 3 – a gamer VoIP staple. When I discovered Discord, I thought we'd found podcasting heaven. Originally, the free plan included 128kbps audio in its voice channels, which was nearly twice what we were getting out of our paid Teamspeak server. If I were still podcasting, Discord's just-released server video feature would undoubtedly prove invaluable for live streams.
According to a poll I ran on Twitter, 2/3rds of all people on Earth are thankful for Discord's existence. This is not surprising considering what every Discord user is still offered without spending any money at all: community spaces with audio/video and text chat capability, organizable by Twitch and YouTube-integrated roles with a plethora of different permission options, instantly and easily shareable by customizable temporary or permanent invite links through an application that's about as cross-platform as one can get (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, or simply one's web browser.) Those of us that remember IRC, Ventrilo, and Teamspeak should all consider Discord a tremendous gift.
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Never before have so many VoIP, video, and text chat features been offered together, or in such a beautiful package. “What we really did was create an all-in-one voice, video, and text chat app that replaced this constellation of tools that people would use,” said CEO Jason Citron in an interview with CNBC. Technically in terms of these details, Discord has no competition. Slack offers text and voice chat with its paid plans, yes, but nothing close in terms of video – especially considering Discord Go Live, its fairly-new streaming feature, which allows users to stream game video directly to 10 other users in the server. With some jury-rigging, it's possible to simply screen share this way, which is an essential sell for business video communication applications like Skype.
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Does anyone else have a discord server where you're the only member and you use different text channels to plan your weekly schedules lmaoooo
“Discord and Slack have many similarities, but Discord is the superior tool,” says esports team Ardent United. “Discord has voice channels, which allows us to easily chat with our supporters and other team members. Discord also allows us to set user roles and permissions which makes moderation extremely simple.” It's not just gaming companies, though. Decentralized cloud platform Sia also moved their community to Discord:
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Its intended audience is gamers, but many large communities have switched from Slack to Discord, including development communities like Reactiflux and Unreal Slackers. It includes an unlimited number of users, unlimited file uploads (with a per-file size limit), unlimited message histories, and really great moderation and spam filtering features.
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Slack is often praised for its integrations, but it shares support with Zapier – a dedicated web integration service which more or less integrates them equally.
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Slack works with a long list of tools, including Google Calendar, Zendesk, Salesforce, Wunderlist, and dozens of others. If you're looking for an integration that isn't immediately obvious, you can always turn to Zapier for help, because Slack is a supported service. Zapier is an online service that creates integrations between other apps and services, without you having to know any code to make it happen.
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For sharing detailed post embeds, there's also Discohook, which I just discovered. Productivity company Chanty's blog wrote perhaps the most in-depth comparison of the two services (emphasis theirs):
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At their core, Discord and Slack and very similar. Both are team chat apps with a similar interface. Both apps have team communication organized in channels. The biggest difference between the two is their target audience, and of course, their specific features.
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Ultimately, one must decide how relevant the services' respective target audiences are to productivity. For a not-for-profit media organization like Extratone, Discord's features-for-price ratio is simply too rich to pass up. If you'd like, stop by our server or try out our server template.
Why Extratone has used Discord instead of Slack for our team chat.
-
-
Back in 2015, I hosted a pre-Extratone culture podcast called Drycast with musician friends from all over the net. To record remotely, we originally used Teamspeak 3 – a gamer VoIP staple. When I discovered Discord, I thought we'd found podcasting heaven. Originally, the free plan included 128kbps audio in its voice channels, which was nearly twice what we were getting out of our paid Teamspeak server. If I were still podcasting, Discord's just-released server video feature would undoubtedly prove invaluable for live streams.
According to a poll I ran on Twitter, 2/3rds of all people on Earth are thankful for Discord's existence. This is not surprising considering what every Discord user is still offered without spending any money at all: community spaces with audio/video and text chat capability, organizable by Twitch and YouTube-integrated roles with a plethora of different permission options, instantly and easily shareable by customizable temporary or permanent invite links through an application that's about as cross-platform as one can get (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, or simply one's web browser.) Those of us that remember IRC, Ventrilo, and Teamspeak should all consider Discord a tremendous gift.
-
-
-
-
Never before have so many VoIP, video, and text chat features been offered together, or in such a beautiful package. “What we really did was create an all-in-one voice, video, and text chat app that replaced this constellation of tools that people would use,” said CEO Jason Citron in an interview with CNBC. Technically in terms of these details, Discord has no competition. Slack offers text and voice chat with its paid plans, yes, but nothing close in terms of video – especially considering Discord Go Live, its fairly-new streaming feature, which allows users to stream game video directly to 10 other users in the server. With some jury-rigging, it's possible to simply screen share this way, which is an essential sell for business video communication applications like Skype.
-
-
Does anyone else have a discord server where you're the only member and you use different text channels to plan your weekly schedules lmaoooo
“Discord and Slack have many similarities, but Discord is the superior tool,” says esports team Ardent United. “Discord has voice channels, which allows us to easily chat with our supporters and other team members. Discord also allows us to set user roles and permissions which makes moderation extremely simple.” It's not just gaming companies, though. Decentralized cloud platform Sia also moved their community to Discord:
-
-
Its intended audience is gamers, but many large communities have switched from Slack to Discord, including development communities like Reactiflux and Unreal Slackers. It includes an unlimited number of users, unlimited file uploads (with a per-file size limit), unlimited message histories, and really great moderation and spam filtering features.
-
-
Slack is often praised for its integrations, but it shares support with Zapier – a dedicated web integration service which more or less integrates them equally.
-
-
Slack works with a long list of tools, including Google Calendar, Zendesk, Salesforce, Wunderlist, and dozens of others. If you're looking for an integration that isn't immediately obvious, you can always turn to Zapier for help, because Slack is a supported service. Zapier is an online service that creates integrations between other apps and services, without you having to know any code to make it happen.
-
-
For sharing detailed post embeds, there's also Discohook, which I just discovered. Productivity company Chanty's blog wrote perhaps the most in-depth comparison of the two services (emphasis theirs):
-
-
At their core, Discord and Slack and very similar. Both are team chat apps with a similar interface. Both apps have team communication organized in channels. The biggest difference between the two is their target audience, and of course, their specific features.
-
-
Ultimately, one must decide how relevant the services' respective target audiences are to productivity. For a not-for-profit media organization like Extratone, Discord's features-for-price ratio is simply too rich to pass up. If you'd like, stop by our server or try out our server template.
New Microsoft Office features, the PowerToys Run Preview, and a test of Edge Chromium.
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I have no idea why I signed up to attend Microsoft's virtual 2020 Build Conference, but I did. I thought I'd add my End User commentary to the mix. Sorry. My first event was called “Every developer is welcome, with Scott Hanselman and guests.” Hanselman is listed as a blogger and podcaster living (of course) in Portland. I'm not a “real” developer, but I know what Microsoft Teams is, and I recognized the event as a desktop screenshare of his calls with different Microsoft employees. There was a child invasion and a dropped phone. I also noticed the icon for the “new” Microsoft Edge browser in his taskbar and realized that I hadn't downloaded it yet. I remedied that for the conference's sake – I thought it only appropriate that I try to use as much Microsoft software as possible in this context. I also installed the new PowerTools Run preview which I mentioned in my tips post.
Build allows an attendee to build one's own event schedule, but I neglected to find those focused on what I really care about: Office 365. As reported by The Verge, Microsoft Fluid is going to change a lot:
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Microsoft’s Fluid Framework sounds a lot like Google Docs, but it’s actually Google Docs on steroids. Microsoft is so confident it has built the future of productivity, it’s now open-sourcing its Fluid Framework so the rest of the world can help shape what it has created.
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There's also Microsoft Lists, which is reportedly going to revolutionize SharePoint Lists into something more modern and useful:
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It builds off the existing feature in SharePoint, and will let you track progress and data to organize your teams, potentially making the company’s offerings more streamlined and productive.
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Microsoft Edge Chromium
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As an Office 365 administrator, I basically only use Edge for administrative/management tasks. Otherwise, I can't imagine a reason to use it over Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, Chrome, Opera, etc, but I thought I'd give the “new” (as of January) Edge a tryout for your sake and make it my default browser for a day as well as Microsoft's Bing search engine. There's also news specific to Build: Edge is integrating with Pinterest, of all things:
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Now, Edge will feature a Pinterest-powered tool that will show suggestions from Pinterest at the bottom of a collection. Clicking on that, Microsoft says, will take users to a Pinterest board “of similar, trending Pins so users can quickly find and add ideas relevant to their collection.” Users will also be able to export collections to Pinterest.
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I'm in no position to “test” a browser, but the new Edge is noticeably faster at rendering pages and much much smoother when navigating between tabs/preference windows. It looks much more like Chrome, which makes sense. Perhaps because my install is absent of third-party extensions, opening new tabs and windows was much faster than my other browsers. I recorded a ~2 minute demo of normal browsing on my Surface Laptop 2.
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In terms of touch support, Edge remains the only acceptable browser on Windows 10. If you've spent money on a new PC recently, chances are your device is touch-enabled. If you're like me, you've already disabled it. If not, you'll find scrolling and navigation in Edge have improved tremendously – it's like an entirely new browser because it is.
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Because Edge used a different rendering engine than Chrome or Safari, it meant that it would sometimes have problems on websites. Testing a website against multiple browsers has always been difficult, and because Edge had so little uptake, it meant optimizing for it often fell off the priority list for web developers.
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I really like how easy it is to mute audio from tabs and how much better my CMS is rendered. I still prefer Firefox's method of tab switching (by last-used chronologically instead of in the order presented.) The reader view is smoother than its competitors and offers a beautiful selection of themes as well as the best “Read aloud” feature in the business.
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I'm not going to quote you measurements – check out Computerworld's browser review for that – but I can say that Edge Chromium is using more RAM than Firefox but a bit less than Chrome. Office.com also looks and works incredibly well. Overall, I'm extremely impressed with Edge Chromium and the improvements to Bing. As of my experiences today, it's the fastest and smoothest web browser I have, which is a complete flip from that of the old Edge.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
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Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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-
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-
God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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-
(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
-
-
The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
-
-
Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
-
-
-
-
God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
-
-
I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
-
-
(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
-
-
-
-
-
The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
-
-
I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
-
-
-
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
This is an excerpt from my novel project, Blimp's Burden, about a jaded software engineer who’s new, ridiculously-eccentric boss presents a future which forces him to reckon with his mishandled grief. To support the novel's creation with art, funds, etc, please email me.
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In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn. From the main gated lane of The Nice, Huge Estate, Lenny Lather slid through the muddy barrier and started bouncing West on the blacktop, brogues squeaking every third step. The overcasted clouds were having trouble deciding whether or not to let down their rain – as they had been all day – and the old, heavy early-March mist softened the yellow glow of the tall, buzzing streetlamps so much that he couldn’t help but intermittently wipe his eyes, for the spreading light convinced his mind that his eyelashes must’ve been wetted.
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Theodore Pith’s big old house was now burrowed between two mismatched neighborhoods – the bleaker Easterly, which was too new for its alien trees to have recovered from the brutality of its development’s clear-cutting and contained within one of its central featureless backyards an unidentifiable creature which made all through the night the most unimaginably ghastly, disturbingly human child-like shrieking; the opposing Westerly’s trees further enough along in their regrowth – ten or twenty years perhaps – to appear more of the planet Earth to Manhattan-bred Lenny Lather, who still found the colorless destruction of suburbia unendingly upsetting, especially when coming down. In the interest of his regular withdrawal’s mitigation, he had already established two short, repeatable tracks and a longer, several mile-long loop which skirted him sufficiently around the East’s center to avoid hearing the shrieks in all but the stillest nights. Never in his years – on these walks he was especially reminded of just how many there were – had he been able to feel such absolute ownership of his surroundings. The eroding Earth slipping away from the hem of the warped, stained wood fences; the sidewalks, cracked, bent, sloped helter-skelter, often muddied in the troughs and joints – generally laying haphazardly in layers after having been steadily tossed about by the glacial forces of their intermixture with clay, precipitation, and the tumultuous temperature-dependent torture of the two – these were his, entirely, in the right hour. Between two and five in the morning when the earliest risers would blearily revive their dewy automobiles from long, silent hibernation, the whole world – everything in his sight and more at any moment – it was all his, without a single worthy challenger.
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In the right hour, the roads were completely and totally abandoned – for the New Yorker, an unfathomable absolute – and all humanity was at rest. In the right hour, Lenny Lather was the appointed guardian of the worn domesticity of a small nation, though the lonely occupation was astoundingly lax, for in the miles and miles of empty streets he had already traversed in his nightly holidays from the World of Pith, he had yet to encounter a single unexpected factor or minutely threatening presence. Since shortly after his December arrival, he’d walked through even the most frigid mornings. Of course, the stillness had then been even more otherworldly, and Lenny was curious to see how his new most private domain would change with the seasons. Though the auxiliary guest room which he now called home was no smaller or less hospitable than the master bedroom of his late Hudson Yards flat shared with his late Wife, it proved to be a poor respite from Theodore Pith, who treated him – when they were “home” at Nice, Huge – as the puppy he never had, and expected his participation to remain entirely vulnerable to his any whim. Granted – in their shared abuse of amphetamines, cocaine, and assorted other stimulants – Lenny Lather was vastly more prepared for the games than any circadian guest could’ve possibly been. At first, the ten-foot door of his dawn-facing room had closed without latching, but with the warmth and moisture brought with the Midwestern Spring, the most secure state in which the engorged wood could be forcibly arranged still left a half-inch crack, and Lather’s last chance of privacy was lost.
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The latest favorite pastime of Nice, Big’s Master necessitated a willing, capable driver, and – as keeping a single Butler (much less an entire household staff) was proving extremely difficult for him – Lenny Lather was the sole pick of the draft. In the earliest hours of one Tuesday morning in February, he’d been pleasantly dosing and drooling on his laptop after an evening of obsessive, incoherent notetaking when the huge door had been kicked ajar by a deep black, blindingly shiny oxford with excessively violent force. Attached to the shoe in an equally blinding penguin tuxedo, towering bowler hat, and cartoonish fake mustache was the Great, Blown Pith.
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“Hope you’re not busy,” he’d said quite loudly to the lolling Lather, leaning and tilting his head into the lamp light, which had dislodged his monocle and briefly occupied him with untangling its chain.
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“You’re not busy, are ya?!” he’d shouted, tapping the shiny brass lion’s head of his shiny black cane against the vanity… then swatting it with a flicking wrist… then clubbing it with a full, two-handed homerun swing – taking huge, vaguely cat nose-shaped gouges from the surface of the wood. The splintery wood chips had rained down upon the hunched Lenny; he’d stirred with one found its way in his open mouth – he’d chewed it slowly and swallowed it, but he still had not awoken. Nevertheless, Theodore Pith’s coked-up enthusiasm couldn’t possibly have yielded to common decencies like his guest’s nighttime peace.
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“SHOOT, LENNY,” he’d screamed in his companion’s ear, having traversed the room to his bedside.
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“I SURE HOPE YOU’RE NOT BUSY RIGHT NOW!”
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Finally, he’d resorted to tickling Lenny’s nose with the ornament, which had reeked with the urinal smell of metal polish – the sudden, overwhelming delivery of which to the writer’s olfactory nerves finally causing ample alarm in his nervous system to justify bringing him abruptly back to his life and deluded host.
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“I need a favor. The Duesie’s warming up. We’re going for a ride.”
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Unable to form a linguistic response, Lenny Lather had obeyed Theo’s frenzied, repeating instructions and stumbled into the matching suit he’d brought over his arm – wondering with marginal, arrested clarity at how well-tailored it was for him. He had not the soundness of perception to protest when Pith had whipped a deep black, blindingly shiny bowtie around his already-congested esophagus, nor when he’d adheased the huge, itchy matching fake moustache to his upper lip and nearly pulled the matching Tower of Bowler all the way down over his ears. He had been unresponsive when he’d been sat on the bench under the agonizing fluorescent lights of the laundry room, affixed with deep black, blindingly shiny matching oxfords, and asked if he smoked and how well he could say guffaw.
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“Just wait… you have no idea… you have no idea how much fun this is going to be.”
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Lenny Lather had not… could not have made a sound through the confusing nonsense of his waking pre-Great Depression dream, but when the old servant’s door had been opened before him and set the heartless, single-digit Winter wind upon his very soul, he had all at once arrived in the world, laughing and whooping together with Theodore Pith.
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“Jesus Christ!” he’d screamed as they’d hobbled to the stable, where a devilishly dark red Model J Duesenberg had sat shivering in a rough idle, staring out the retrofitted garage door with its basketball-sized lights as if it was, indeed, a flesh-and-blood steed that had just been frightened awake by a thunderstorm, but the sky had been as clear as it would’ve been from an asteroid – as it is only on the coldest nights – and almost comically dominated by the setting, gluttonously luminescent moon. Theodore had then grabbed a screwdriver from the workbench and bent down to remove the license plate – which had said BLOOD in big black bold block letters – and its containing frame. By the time he had settled into the frigid red leather of the exposed, roofless driver’s seat, Lenny Lather was full-to-bursting with adrenaline and laughing out huge streams of breathy steam. From behind him in the cabin, Pith had been guffawing plumes, too, as he’d briefly ignited his cocaine-sprinkled mustache instead of the bratwurst-sized cigar between his teeth. The smell of burning human hair had accented his explanation of the old car’s transmission and its direct path from source-to-nose for Pith had required a brief, unplanned intermission as it induced without warning his violent heaving – still part-guffawing – hanging half out of his beautifully-upholstered suicide door.
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As he had spewed – expertly sparing the swoop of the gleaming waxy fender – Lenny had found a pair of deep black, blindingly shiny gloves and – after less grinding than you would imagine, to his credit – first gear, setting the whole dastardly circus in motion.
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“Where to, Sire?” Lenny had asked, nose lifted to an untenable altitude in a pitiful approximation of an accent that’d never actually been used before by any person or persons in all of history, struggling for breath.
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“Left at the gates, Barnsward, old chap,” Theodore had replied in a contrasting fashion after again sitting upright from his heaves and taking a breath, ironing out – if anything – the flatness of his perforating Ohio Ds and Ps, resulting in such a culturally destructive racket that it had set both of them in uncontrollable, cloudy fits lasting long after Lather had swerved the great length of the car from the gravel to his abandoned asphalt retreat. The two had continued their banter down that soul-suckingly flat vector, one-upping each other’s etymologic barbarity against the savage thievery of the heatless wind.
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“Now to star-board, Budleigh, my good fellow!”
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“Right-o, as you say, sir!”
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“Down to the pu-hb for a spaht of brahn-dee with me mae-its!”
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“Oncemo-ar right, pip pip!”
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“By jah-lee, there we are!”
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After the entirety of Northern European history had been decimated and subsequently forgotten, the Duesenberg named BLOOD had turned its orange, googley-eyed stare and narrow whitewalled hooves up the reflective, freshly-painted access of the new 24-hour grocery in the no-man’s-land between the cookie-cutter stares of the neatly-rowed Easterly neighborhood and the droning respiration of Interstate 43, two miles distant. It was 2:12 in the morning and most of the greasy-haired night stocking shift had been halfway through their third smoke break, circled around a store-used picnic table 50 yards from the far sliding airlock doors. The first to spot BLOOD had been the second shortest of the lot, whose weary scrutiny along the truest radian to the West from under his sweaty beanie in her entrance she had crossed, and the depth of her red as he first spied it had caused him vertigo – as if he would fall in – and cast upon the shorter-than-average length of his being an all-consuming existential doubt. The tallest and loudest of them had faced squarest the white faux-brick wall of the box building and was at that moment engaged upon a spirited rant about where and where’nt and when a vapist ought to buy his Suck juice between long, gasping Sucks from his super-shiny Suck box. Of course, the arrival of a customer even at such a late hour did not warrant notice at a huge, broadly-servicing operation like theirs, but as BLOOD had crept through all four reflective yellow-checkered pedestrian crossings, closing without a flinch, and the details of her occupying caricatures had become more and more numerous, she had stolen the attention of the huddle, one-by-one, and elicited from each the rarest under-breath profanity of true, unmolested wonder.
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“Jesus Christ,” had said the shortest.
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“Holy fuck,” had said the youngest.
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“Gee whiz,” had said the oldest.
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And the Sucking tallest, having realized he’d lost his audience, had been the last to turn and follow their eyes BLOOD’s way as she had halted coolly in front of the purely white glowing concrete leading into the closest customer entrance, and had – without the gradual exposure over the length of her approach that his peers had been afforded – dropped his Suck box and exclaimed at the sudden, undiluted immensity of the spectacle, simply, “FUCK!”
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The Sucking’s FUCK and the splitting shatter of his Suck against the glass of their smoking table had reached the two arrivees – albeit in a muted way – and through the onset of their frostbite’s early stages even further stoked their already-uncontrollable boyish giggling. Theodore Pith had paused briefly to affix his monocle as firmly as possible in his eye socket and stuff down his spasmic guffaws with a few lip-smacking puffs of his then successfully-lit cigar before swinging his right door open.
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“Stay here and wait at the ready, my good… my best Bagsy! I shan’t be a twinkle,” he had declared, clicking it lightly shut again and turning on his heels toward the pale light of the store, twirling his cane in dramatically shortened strides so as to reproduce the oversped effect of a silent motion picture, puff-puffing away. As the doors had sensed him and indiscriminately whirred aside, he had turned to the smokers – most of whom had still been reeling, grabbing for their hair – and bobbed the bulk of his big black bowler toward their communion with his gloved black fingers by the brim.
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“Tally-ho, my boys!” he had shouted, sending Lenny Lather’s wide open face toward the floor of the idling car as he doubled over himself in the first spontaneously asphyxiating, tear-lobbing laughter he’d yet to experience in the 21st century. As Theodore had entered the masterpiece of the boxed store’s bleakness in his cane twirling, head swinging, cigar puffing shuffle, he had made sure to stay his instinct to sneak for a swift, full-chat dart, instead, and the on-duty leather-faced embodiment of tedium’s wrath beneath his lone lit lane light had looked up from his People Magazine just in time to see the heel of a deeply black oxford and the last shiny inches of flowing black coattails disappear behind the potato sack endcap of the far Aisle 1. He’d hesitated, chin against palm, holding his next glossed page perpendicularly erect between his tightened thumb and index finger for a long few seconds of fantastic stillness – had hastily attempted a diagnostic of his present senses – before a locomotive-like segmented tube of cigar smoke had risen from against the light tiles and unsoiled trimming to intersect his line-of-sight where it met the darkened deli, recessed in the far wall from his hunch, the motion startling him into his own throat-clearing, counter-rounding, key-jingling, excuse me-shouting march toward the lumpy potato sacks and the climbing dissipation of the most unbelievable violation. As he had jingled, he had reflected on the few occasions in which he’d ever smelled tobacco smoke in his store: all incidental, most very brief, and many followed by a lengthy, unreasonably self-deprecating apology. To just walk in his Temple of Domestic Fulfilment during this most Serene Time of Silent Service, spewing orange nicotine on his premium, Food & Drug Administration-blessed body and blood offering to the middle class was surely in ignorance, but could have even been in spite. Regardless, the transgression was worthy of the most merciless wrath, and he had been selected as its willing, capable vessel. In just the fifteen seconds it’d taken him to jingle his way to Aisle 1, he’d thought himself and his leather into flash-broiling, fast-rising fury.
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Perhaps the least expected sight that could have possibly greeted this Apostle of Appraisal on the far side of Aisle 1 – as he rounded the potato sack endcap and filled his excuse me lungs in preparation through his nose – was the labored lifting of the 125-pound eldest child of the new, Parisian-trained, full-time, certified cheese artisan – whom the store had just won out of 175 competitors in a region-wide raffle of her pilot program – by the dashing, swinging, and smoking real-life manifestation of a young Rich Uncle Pennybags, yet shock did not long halt the Keys & Leather.
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“Sir! Excuse me!”
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“Excuse me! Sir!”
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Theodore Pith – having reevaluated the girth of his intended booty – had propped his shiny black cane against the sill of the refrigerator and popped each slack bottom up off his oxfords from his shins before squatting over the massive Holy Wheel of the Artisan where it lay displayed on a sturdy bespoke plinth.
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“Sir! You need to put out that cigar… the cigar – put it out immediately!”
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Keys & Leather had the odd inability to both shout and shuffle at the same time, so he’d only made it to the pomegranate juice by the time Pith had mustered enough momentum to swing the cheese child into a high enough pendulum to carry it stably facing forward under his chin with his two hands spaced evenly on the Great Wheel’s bottom.
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“Sir! I’m going to have to ask you to put that down… That is a four thousand dollar item… If you want to buy it, we need to go about-”
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“…now, see here!” Pith had replied with great effort, in the midst of weighing in his mind the worth of the cane as a casualty, then of the monocle, too, which had fallen out while he was weighing, and of his own physical intelligence, and whether or not it was capable of retrieving the cane by its brass lion’s head handle via the top of a flicking foot without losing his balance. Keys & Leather, meanwhile, had been tortured at great length witnessing – in Theodore’s gravitational struggle – the Cuban’s ashes knocked all over the precious round Immanuel; the artisan’s Beloved, Chosen son of cheese – a nauseating sensation of loss overwhelming all hope of his store’s defense. The Terrible Theodore had at once noticed his hesitation and arrived upon a plan to leave no prop behind. He had leaned forward with the girth of the wheel and closed the remaining few feet between them, advancing with the huge mass of Nazarethian dairy to bear it all down upon the unsuspecting Leather, who in his grief for the prized wheel was far too slow to deflect its incoming mass.
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“Now, see here, chum!” Pith had forced from the furthest possible extremis of his best mob mouth as he transferred his burden all at once to its most concerned party, who collapsed against the multilayered tables that made up the fresh cookie display, with the weight of the wheel on his belly. As the stunned Leather struggled to separate himself without further soiling the only item in his store that sold for double a month’s paycheck, Theodore had replaced his monocle and returned for his cane in a single stride, which he’d then used after a return step to the pile of chocolate chip, almond nut, and fuming night manager to rap loose with the snout of the terrible brass cat Leather’s white knuckle-tight grip on the wheel with a lampoonish haha! before rolling the freed cheese toward the door in a villainous cackle.
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“Man, come on,” the defeated Leather had yelled halfheartedly from his pile of sweets, struggling against the awkward, slippery boxes for enough footing to stand. His efforts, though, were interrupted after a time by the abrupt mute of Pith’s cackling in the second swooshing of the front sliding doors – he had missed his last chance of pursuit. It had all been in vain – he’d failed to guard the crown jewel of the whole suburb. As he had given up the chase and the cheese and slumped once more against the ruined pile, the ridiculousness of the crime against him nearly cracked a smile, but soon was deterred by the very real thought of explaining what had happened to his General Manager when she arrived in just five hours. After a moment, there, covered in cookies, dust, ashes, and shame, he had quietly begun to sob.
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After he had regained control of his diaphragm, Lenny Lather had been amused, outside, by the varying velocities in which the smokers of the night shift gave in to their curiosities about the presence of the seven-figure collectible and its purpose in waiting at its now healthier idle in front of their grocery store in the loneliest time of a Tuesday morning. The first and the bravest had been the one who first spotted their intrusion – the shortest – if only because he had remained entirely convinced for the duration that BLOOD and its two, period-dressed occupants were nothing but an apparition of his dead Grandfather and Great Uncle like others he’d thought he’d seen before, and – though he’d been terrified by the clarity of this realest visit yet, he’d been irritated more than anything, and wanted to know “why the hell can’t you just leave me alone?!” The others behind him had been staggered in the proximity to the waiting car they had achieved – the lesser and most cowardly being the largest – the Sucking evangelist – who had been waiting for the great automobile to leave so he could forge the exchange of his broken Suck box for a new one from the back. In the delirium of his exhaustion and progressing frostbite, Lenny Lather had thought the image of the men where they were would make for an interesting, organic graph on the nature of courage – their positions simply representing their unaltered datapoints, and had been considering how best to deal with or respond to the nearer, deluded one, who had by then come close enough to the elegant, professionally polished front-right fender to reach out and touch it with his unwashed hands, and appeared to be taking the matter under serious consideration. He’d been seconds away from finally deciding between his idiotic ideas for a joke response when by far the largest wheel of cheese he’d ever seen had come rolling out of the opening doors onto the concrete, followed closely behind by Theodore Pith who’d still had three-quarters or more of his cigar left to smoke and apparently switched to cheap mob clichés in his brief absence.
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“Haste, Don Lenny!” he’d yelled, re-opening his closest cabin door to chuck his cane in first. He’d then straddled the great wheel to position it against the step before making a scene of grunting and huffing against its side with his full weight. Again, the bewildered smokers had fallen silent – they did not recognize the ridiculous delicacy because it was special inventory and could only be handled by the Holy Artisan herself. Lather had started revving the huge old straight-8 to answer Pith’s urgency, who had found himself fresh out of phrases after the wheel had finally succumbed to its capture and rolled into the footwell.
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“Make haste, make haste, my boy!” he’d shouted, diving theatrically into the covered back seat, head-first, to which his icing chauffer had responded by revving the behemoth and briskly popping her clutch, which had lurched the pair into the last, getaway stage of their late grocery heist. As BLOOD’s razor-edged hood ornament had sliced through the night by the dumbstruck smokers, Theodore Pith was unable to think of anything to shout at them as he passed but for “bada-bing, bada-BOOM!”
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Though the Lake Geneva Police Department was shown the security footage of that first theft by management, the theatricality of their matching getup had inadvertently obscured their identities, and the organization’s extreme deficit of imagination had left them stumped by the lack of license plates on the car, despite the free and effortless ability of just about any casual enthusiast of early American luxury automobiles and/or lackadaisical disciple of the Concours religion to immediately identify BLOOD by name from the grainiest image, if consulted. If anything, their incompetence rewarded Pith and Lather’s continued focus on the products of the same store’s cheese artisan, as intelligence on the state of her latest flagship incubation was freely available with no more effort than it took to simply stop by her display amid regular shopping trips. Twice in two weeks, they stole both of her replacements for the biggest child without any significant alternation of their method, which frustrated her and the management nearly to the point of crises, and quickly lost all potential for fun in a third attempt – their kicks were in their absurdity, not their effectiveness, and neither of them cared much for the cheese.
This is an excerpt from my novel project, Blimp's Burden, about a jaded software engineer who’s new, ridiculously-eccentric boss presents a future which forces him to reckon with his mishandled grief. To support the novel's creation with art, funds, etc, please email me.
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Listen to the entirety of the chapter read aloud by Siri Voice 2 below.
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In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn. From the main gated lane of The Nice, Huge Estate, Lenny Lather slid through the muddy barrier and started bouncing West on the blacktop, brogues squeaking every third step. The overcasted clouds were having trouble deciding whether or not to let down their rain – as they had been all day – and the old, heavy early-March mist softened the yellow glow of the tall, buzzing streetlamps so much that he couldn’t help but intermittently wipe his eyes, for the spreading light convinced his mind that his eyelashes must’ve been wetted.
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Theodore Pith’s big old house was now burrowed between two mismatched neighborhoods – the bleaker Easterly, which was too new for its alien trees to have recovered from the brutality of its development’s clear-cutting and contained within one of its central featureless backyards an unidentifiable creature which made all through the night the most unimaginably ghastly, disturbingly human child-like shrieking; the opposing Westerly’s trees further enough along in their regrowth – ten or twenty years perhaps – to appear more of the planet Earth to Manhattan-bred Lenny Lather, who still found the colorless destruction of suburbia unendingly upsetting, especially when coming down. In the interest of his regular withdrawal’s mitigation, he had already established two short, repeatable tracks and a longer, several mile-long loop which skirted him sufficiently around the East’s center to avoid hearing the shrieks in all but the stillest nights. Never in his years – on these walks he was especially reminded of just how many there were – had he been able to feel such absolute ownership of his surroundings. The eroding Earth slipping away from the hem of the warped, stained wood fences; the sidewalks, cracked, bent, sloped helter-skelter, often muddied in the troughs and joints – generally laying haphazardly in layers after having been steadily tossed about by the glacial forces of their intermixture with clay, precipitation, and the tumultuous temperature-dependent torture of the two – these were his, entirely, in the right hour. Between two and five in the morning when the earliest risers would blearily revive their dewy automobiles from long, silent hibernation, the whole world – everything in his sight and more at any moment – it was all his, without a single worthy challenger.
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In the right hour, the roads were completely and totally abandoned – for the New Yorker, an unfathomable absolute – and all humanity was at rest. In the right hour, Lenny Lather was the appointed guardian of the worn domesticity of a small nation, though the lonely occupation was astoundingly lax, for in the miles and miles of empty streets he had already traversed in his nightly holidays from the World of Pith, he had yet to encounter a single unexpected factor or minutely threatening presence. Since shortly after his December arrival, he’d walked through even the most frigid mornings. Of course, the stillness had then been even more otherworldly, and Lenny was curious to see how his new most private domain would change with the seasons. Though the auxiliary guest room which he now called home was no smaller or less hospitable than the master bedroom of his late Hudson Yards flat shared with his late Wife, it proved to be a poor respite from Theodore Pith, who treated him – when they were “home” at Nice, Huge – as the puppy he never had, and expected his participation to remain entirely vulnerable to his any whim. Granted – in their shared abuse of amphetamines, cocaine, and assorted other stimulants – Lenny Lather was vastly more prepared for the games than any circadian guest could’ve possibly been. At first, the ten-foot door of his dawn-facing room had closed without latching, but with the warmth and moisture brought with the Midwestern Spring, the most secure state in which the engorged wood could be forcibly arranged still left a half-inch crack, and Lather’s last chance of privacy was lost.
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The latest favorite pastime of Nice, Big’s Master necessitated a willing, capable driver, and – as keeping a single Butler (much less an entire household staff) was proving extremely difficult for him – Lenny Lather was the sole pick of the draft. In the earliest hours of one Tuesday morning in February, he’d been pleasantly dosing and drooling on his laptop after an evening of obsessive, incoherent notetaking when the huge door had been kicked ajar by a deep black, blindingly shiny oxford with excessively violent force. Attached to the shoe in an equally blinding penguin tuxedo, towering bowler hat, and cartoonish fake mustache was the Great, Blown Pith.
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“Hope you’re not busy,” he’d said quite loudly to the lolling Lather, leaning and tilting his head into the lamp light, which had dislodged his monocle and briefly occupied him with untangling its chain.
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“You’re not busy, are ya?!” he’d shouted, tapping the shiny brass lion’s head of his shiny black cane against the vanity… then swatting it with a flicking wrist… then clubbing it with a full, two-handed homerun swing – taking huge, vaguely cat nose-shaped gouges from the surface of the wood. The splintery wood chips had rained down upon the hunched Lenny; he’d stirred with one found its way in his open mouth – he’d chewed it slowly and swallowed it, but he still had not awoken. Nevertheless, Theodore Pith’s coked-up enthusiasm couldn’t possibly have yielded to common decencies like his guest’s nighttime peace.
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“SHOOT, LENNY,” he’d screamed in his companion’s ear, having traversed the room to his bedside.
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“I SURE HOPE YOU’RE NOT BUSY RIGHT NOW!”
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Finally, he’d resorted to tickling Lenny’s nose with the ornament, which had reeked with the urinal smell of metal polish – the sudden, overwhelming delivery of which to the writer’s olfactory nerves finally causing ample alarm in his nervous system to justify bringing him abruptly back to his life and deluded host.
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“I need a favor. The Duesie’s warming up. We’re going for a ride.”
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Unable to form a linguistic response, Lenny Lather had obeyed Theo’s frenzied, repeating instructions and stumbled into the matching suit he’d brought over his arm – wondering with marginal, arrested clarity at how well-tailored it was for him. He had not the soundness of perception to protest when Pith had whipped a deep black, blindingly shiny bowtie around his already-congested esophagus, nor when he’d adheased the huge, itchy matching fake moustache to his upper lip and nearly pulled the matching Tower of Bowler all the way down over his ears. He had been unresponsive when he’d been sat on the bench under the agonizing fluorescent lights of the laundry room, affixed with deep black, blindingly shiny matching oxfords, and asked if he smoked and how well he could say guffaw.
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…
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“Just wait… you have no idea… you have no idea how much fun this is going to be.”
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Lenny Lather had not… could not have made a sound through the confusing nonsense of his waking pre-Great Depression dream, but when the old servant’s door had been opened before him and set the heartless, single-digit Winter wind upon his very soul, he had all at once arrived in the world, laughing and whooping together with Theodore Pith.
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“Jesus Christ!” he’d screamed as they’d hobbled to the stable, where a devilishly dark red Model J Duesenberg had sat shivering in a rough idle, staring out the retrofitted garage door with its basketball-sized lights as if it was, indeed, a flesh-and-blood steed that had just been frightened awake by a thunderstorm, but the sky had been as clear as it would’ve been from an asteroid – as it is only on the coldest nights – and almost comically dominated by the setting, gluttonously luminescent moon. Theodore had then grabbed a screwdriver from the workbench and bent down to remove the license plate – which had said BLOOD in big black bold block letters – and its containing frame. By the time he had settled into the frigid red leather of the exposed, roofless driver’s seat, Lenny Lather was full-to-bursting with adrenaline and laughing out huge streams of breathy steam. From behind him in the cabin, Pith had been guffawing plumes, too, as he’d briefly ignited his cocaine-sprinkled mustache instead of the bratwurst-sized cigar between his teeth. The smell of burning human hair had accented his explanation of the old car’s transmission and its direct path from source-to-nose for Pith had required a brief, unplanned intermission as it induced without warning his violent heaving – still part-guffawing – hanging half out of his beautifully-upholstered suicide door.
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As he had spewed – expertly sparing the swoop of the gleaming waxy fender – Lenny had found a pair of deep black, blindingly shiny gloves and – after less grinding than you would imagine, to his credit – first gear, setting the whole dastardly circus in motion.
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“Where to, Sire?” Lenny had asked, nose lifted to an untenable altitude in a pitiful approximation of an accent that’d never actually been used before by any person or persons in all of history, struggling for breath.
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“Left at the gates, Barnsward, old chap,” Theodore had replied in a contrasting fashion after again sitting upright from his heaves and taking a breath, ironing out – if anything – the flatness of his perforating Ohio Ds and Ps, resulting in such a culturally destructive racket that it had set both of them in uncontrollable, cloudy fits lasting long after Lather had swerved the great length of the car from the gravel to his abandoned asphalt retreat. The two had continued their banter down that soul-suckingly flat vector, one-upping each other’s etymologic barbarity against the savage thievery of the heatless wind.
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“Now to star-board, Budleigh, my good fellow!”
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…
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“Right-o, as you say, sir!”
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…
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“Down to the pu-hb for a spaht of brahn-dee with me mae-its!”
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…
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“Oncemo-ar right, pip pip!”
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…
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“By jah-lee, there we are!”
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…
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After the entirety of Northern European history had been decimated and subsequently forgotten, the Duesenberg named BLOOD had turned its orange, googley-eyed stare and narrow whitewalled hooves up the reflective, freshly-painted access of the new 24-hour grocery in the no-man’s-land between the cookie-cutter stares of the neatly-rowed Easterly neighborhood and the droning respiration of Interstate 43, two miles distant. It was 2:12 in the morning and most of the greasy-haired night stocking shift had been halfway through their third smoke break, circled around a store-used picnic table 50 yards from the far sliding airlock doors. The first to spot BLOOD had been the second shortest of the lot, whose weary scrutiny along the truest radian to the West from under his sweaty beanie in her entrance she had crossed, and the depth of her red as he first spied it had caused him vertigo – as if he would fall in – and cast upon the shorter-than-average length of his being an all-consuming existential doubt. The tallest and loudest of them had faced squarest the white faux-brick wall of the box building and was at that moment engaged upon a spirited rant about where and where’nt and when a vapist ought to buy his Suck juice between long, gasping Sucks from his super-shiny Suck box. Of course, the arrival of a customer even at such a late hour did not warrant notice at a huge, broadly-servicing operation like theirs, but as BLOOD had crept through all four reflective yellow-checkered pedestrian crossings, closing without a flinch, and the details of her occupying caricatures had become more and more numerous, she had stolen the attention of the huddle, one-by-one, and elicited from each the rarest under-breath profanity of true, unmolested wonder.
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“Jesus Christ,” had said the shortest.
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“Holy fuck,” had said the youngest.
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“Gee whiz,” had said the oldest.
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And the Sucking tallest, having realized he’d lost his audience, had been the last to turn and follow their eyes BLOOD’s way as she had halted coolly in front of the purely white glowing concrete leading into the closest customer entrance, and had – without the gradual exposure over the length of her approach that his peers had been afforded – dropped his Suck box and exclaimed at the sudden, undiluted immensity of the spectacle, simply, “FUCK!”
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The Sucking’s FUCK and the splitting shatter of his Suck against the glass of their smoking table had reached the two arrivees – albeit in a muted way – and through the onset of their frostbite’s early stages even further stoked their already-uncontrollable boyish giggling. Theodore Pith had paused briefly to affix his monocle as firmly as possible in his eye socket and stuff down his spasmic guffaws with a few lip-smacking puffs of his then successfully-lit cigar before swinging his right door open.
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“Stay here and wait at the ready, my good… my best Bagsy! I shan’t be a twinkle,” he had declared, clicking it lightly shut again and turning on his heels toward the pale light of the store, twirling his cane in dramatically shortened strides so as to reproduce the oversped effect of a silent motion picture, puff-puffing away. As the doors had sensed him and indiscriminately whirred aside, he had turned to the smokers – most of whom had still been reeling, grabbing for their hair – and bobbed the bulk of his big black bowler toward their communion with his gloved black fingers by the brim.
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“Tally-ho, my boys!” he had shouted, sending Lenny Lather’s wide open face toward the floor of the idling car as he doubled over himself in the first spontaneously asphyxiating, tear-lobbing laughter he’d yet to experience in the 21st century. As Theodore had entered the masterpiece of the boxed store’s bleakness in his cane twirling, head swinging, cigar puffing shuffle, he had made sure to stay his instinct to sneak for a swift, full-chat dart, instead, and the on-duty leather-faced embodiment of tedium’s wrath beneath his lone lit lane light had looked up from his People Magazine just in time to see the heel of a deeply black oxford and the last shiny inches of flowing black coattails disappear behind the potato sack endcap of the far Aisle 1. He’d hesitated, chin against palm, holding his next glossed page perpendicularly erect between his tightened thumb and index finger for a long few seconds of fantastic stillness – had hastily attempted a diagnostic of his present senses – before a locomotive-like segmented tube of cigar smoke had risen from against the light tiles and unsoiled trimming to intersect his line-of-sight where it met the darkened deli, recessed in the far wall from his hunch, the motion startling him into his own throat-clearing, counter-rounding, key-jingling, excuse me-shouting march toward the lumpy potato sacks and the climbing dissipation of the most unbelievable violation. As he had jingled, he had reflected on the few occasions in which he’d ever smelled tobacco smoke in his store: all incidental, most very brief, and many followed by a lengthy, unreasonably self-deprecating apology. To just walk in his Temple of Domestic Fulfilment during this most Serene Time of Silent Service, spewing orange nicotine on his premium, Food & Drug Administration-blessed body and blood offering to the middle class was surely in ignorance, but could have even been in spite. Regardless, the transgression was worthy of the most merciless wrath, and he had been selected as its willing, capable vessel. In just the fifteen seconds it’d taken him to jingle his way to Aisle 1, he’d thought himself and his leather into flash-broiling, fast-rising fury.
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Perhaps the least expected sight that could have possibly greeted this Apostle of Appraisal on the far side of Aisle 1 – as he rounded the potato sack endcap and filled his excuse me lungs in preparation through his nose – was the labored lifting of the 125-pound eldest child of the new, Parisian-trained, full-time, certified cheese artisan – whom the store had just won out of 175 competitors in a region-wide raffle of her pilot program – by the dashing, swinging, and smoking real-life manifestation of a young Rich Uncle Pennybags, yet shock did not long halt the Keys & Leather.
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“Sir! Excuse me!”
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…
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“Excuse me! Sir!”
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…
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Theodore Pith – having reevaluated the girth of his intended booty – had propped his shiny black cane against the sill of the refrigerator and popped each slack bottom up off his oxfords from his shins before squatting over the massive Holy Wheel of the Artisan where it lay displayed on a sturdy bespoke plinth.
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…
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“Sir! You need to put out that cigar… the cigar – put it out immediately!”
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Keys & Leather had the odd inability to both shout and shuffle at the same time, so he’d only made it to the pomegranate juice by the time Pith had mustered enough momentum to swing the cheese child into a high enough pendulum to carry it stably facing forward under his chin with his two hands spaced evenly on the Great Wheel’s bottom.
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…
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“Sir! I’m going to have to ask you to put that down… That is a four thousand dollar item… If you want to buy it, we need to go about-”
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“…now, see here!” Pith had replied with great effort, in the midst of weighing in his mind the worth of the cane as a casualty, then of the monocle, too, which had fallen out while he was weighing, and of his own physical intelligence, and whether or not it was capable of retrieving the cane by its brass lion’s head handle via the top of a flicking foot without losing his balance. Keys & Leather, meanwhile, had been tortured at great length witnessing – in Theodore’s gravitational struggle – the Cuban’s ashes knocked all over the precious round Immanuel; the artisan’s Beloved, Chosen son of cheese – a nauseating sensation of loss overwhelming all hope of his store’s defense. The Terrible Theodore had at once noticed his hesitation and arrived upon a plan to leave no prop behind. He had leaned forward with the girth of the wheel and closed the remaining few feet between them, advancing with the huge mass of Nazarethian dairy to bear it all down upon the unsuspecting Leather, who in his grief for the prized wheel was far too slow to deflect its incoming mass.
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“Now, see here, chum!” Pith had forced from the furthest possible extremis of his best mob mouth as he transferred his burden all at once to its most concerned party, who collapsed against the multilayered tables that made up the fresh cookie display, with the weight of the wheel on his belly. As the stunned Leather struggled to separate himself without further soiling the only item in his store that sold for double a month’s paycheck, Theodore had replaced his monocle and returned for his cane in a single stride, which he’d then used after a return step to the pile of chocolate chip, almond nut, and fuming night manager to rap loose with the snout of the terrible brass cat Leather’s white knuckle-tight grip on the wheel with a lampoonish haha! before rolling the freed cheese toward the door in a villainous cackle.
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“Man, come on,” the defeated Leather had yelled halfheartedly from his pile of sweets, struggling against the awkward, slippery boxes for enough footing to stand. His efforts, though, were interrupted after a time by the abrupt mute of Pith’s cackling in the second swooshing of the front sliding doors – he had missed his last chance of pursuit. It had all been in vain – he’d failed to guard the crown jewel of the whole suburb. As he had given up the chase and the cheese and slumped once more against the ruined pile, the ridiculousness of the crime against him nearly cracked a smile, but soon was deterred by the very real thought of explaining what had happened to his General Manager when she arrived in just five hours. After a moment, there, covered in cookies, dust, ashes, and shame, he had quietly begun to sob.
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After he had regained control of his diaphragm, Lenny Lather had been amused, outside, by the varying velocities in which the smokers of the night shift gave in to their curiosities about the presence of the seven-figure collectible and its purpose in waiting at its now healthier idle in front of their grocery store in the loneliest time of a Tuesday morning. The first and the bravest had been the one who first spotted their intrusion – the shortest – if only because he had remained entirely convinced for the duration that BLOOD and its two, period-dressed occupants were nothing but an apparition of his dead Grandfather and Great Uncle like others he’d thought he’d seen before, and – though he’d been terrified by the clarity of this realest visit yet, he’d been irritated more than anything, and wanted to know “why the hell can’t you just leave me alone?!” The others behind him had been staggered in the proximity to the waiting car they had achieved – the lesser and most cowardly being the largest – the Sucking evangelist – who had been waiting for the great automobile to leave so he could forge the exchange of his broken Suck box for a new one from the back. In the delirium of his exhaustion and progressing frostbite, Lenny Lather had thought the image of the men where they were would make for an interesting, organic graph on the nature of courage – their positions simply representing their unaltered datapoints, and had been considering how best to deal with or respond to the nearer, deluded one, who had by then come close enough to the elegant, professionally polished front-right fender to reach out and touch it with his unwashed hands, and appeared to be taking the matter under serious consideration. He’d been seconds away from finally deciding between his idiotic ideas for a joke response when by far the largest wheel of cheese he’d ever seen had come rolling out of the opening doors onto the concrete, followed closely behind by Theodore Pith who’d still had three-quarters or more of his cigar left to smoke and apparently switched to cheap mob clichés in his brief absence.
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“Haste, Don Lenny!” he’d yelled, re-opening his closest cabin door to chuck his cane in first. He’d then straddled the great wheel to position it against the step before making a scene of grunting and huffing against its side with his full weight. Again, the bewildered smokers had fallen silent – they did not recognize the ridiculous delicacy because it was special inventory and could only be handled by the Holy Artisan herself. Lather had started revving the huge old straight-8 to answer Pith’s urgency, who had found himself fresh out of phrases after the wheel had finally succumbed to its capture and rolled into the footwell.
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“Make haste, make haste, my boy!” he’d shouted, diving theatrically into the covered back seat, head-first, to which his icing chauffer had responded by revving the behemoth and briskly popping her clutch, which had lurched the pair into the last, getaway stage of their late grocery heist. As BLOOD’s razor-edged hood ornament had sliced through the night by the dumbstruck smokers, Theodore Pith was unable to think of anything to shout at them as he passed but for “bada-bing, bada-BOOM!”
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Though the Lake Geneva Police Department was shown the security footage of that first theft by management, the theatricality of their matching getup had inadvertently obscured their identities, and the organization’s extreme deficit of imagination had left them stumped by the lack of license plates on the car, despite the free and effortless ability of just about any casual enthusiast of early American luxury automobiles and/or lackadaisical disciple of the Concours religion to immediately identify BLOOD by name from the grainiest image, if consulted. If anything, their incompetence rewarded Pith and Lather’s continued focus on the products of the same store’s cheese artisan, as intelligence on the state of her latest flagship incubation was freely available with no more effort than it took to simply stop by her display amid regular shopping trips. Twice in two weeks, they stole both of her replacements for the biggest child without any significant alternation of their method, which frustrated her and the management nearly to the point of crises, and quickly lost all potential for fun in a third attempt – their kicks were in their absurdity, not their effectiveness, and neither of them cared much for the cheese.
The pop culture discussion of tech's greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways.
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For those of us who've written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/“ethical” conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it's particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn't know what the movie was about. I'm not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could've done better, in that regard.
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First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell's casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man's screen, the film's depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as “ridiculous,” as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
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The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
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The Verge's official review of the film – written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey – is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge's audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media – grandmothers, retirees, etc. – who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about “privacy” – a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of “my data,” regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which – while possible – is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
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you don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses – you need only to want a better and/or different experience.
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by – and directly promotes on several occasions – one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain... hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for “solutions” to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who've been building against the adtech-funded web for ages – some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization's website nor the film's webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
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The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I'm here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you've followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn't still be reading,) you know I've advocated exhaustively for Mastodon – the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who's business model benefits both platform and artist. I'm still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn't immediately off-putting to “the average person.”
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Poke around the film's official website a bit and you'll discover a variety of heavily-branded “resources” for “taking action,” all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the “Take Action” vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall's tips for reducing your screen time, the “Data Detox Kit,” which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a “Join Now” button, and – most ironic of all – a link to download the “Ad Observer plugin,” in order to “share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable.” In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the “Online Political Transparency Project” instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
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No, it's not a scam. Using The Markup's shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here's the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves... incompetence? I'm afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world – regardless of what they believe now, or then – that these folks should not be our first call when we're searching for “solutions.” You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
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Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can't imagine you'd be correct... Under the heading “CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA,” step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
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At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both – or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
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This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
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You wouldn't announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
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Now, I've always considered the ability to change a computer's name an immense privilege. My first “real” computer's name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus' name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that's completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone's common name to that of “your favorite television character” (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so...) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it's just that it's ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down “change device name” as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
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-A notification I received while literally typing this out.
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I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an “Alternative Apps Centre” within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the “detox” seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it's hilarious that I can freely refer to “privacy” as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one' social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the “Supported by Mozilla Firefox” badges all over the website and asks me “well, what did you expect?” My answer: something “more” than promotion, I suppose.
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I suspect this is another case of don't go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to “innovate” than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I'd somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who's notifications I'd probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
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Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I'd wager.) I suspect it's long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as “Email Addiction” goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR's greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email's footer. If you're really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform's archives feature – or don't – but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you'll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
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If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it's okay to announce on Facebook that you're taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823-4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I've discovered with you.
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My own advice on “privacy:” don't worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the “privacy tools” you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you're an iOS user, you've already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step – if we're really honest with ourselves – is figuring out how you're going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
Examining Fred Rogers' debut Atlantic-theatre naval anxiety compilation.
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It's a little late to write about Greyhound – Tom Hanks' first screenwriting credit – which released on Apple TV+ this past Father's Day, June 21st. Though I definitely left my quite severe obsession with WWII history in my prepubescence, I thought I'd remark on this film because I originally hoped it would fulfill a role I'd long wanted for: the destroyer-side compliment to U-boat films like Das Boot and U-571. James D. Hornfischer's exceptional account of the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts' part in The Battle off Samar with The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors was my last dive into naval history. It's one of the most astounding war stories I've ever encountered, and upon first seeing Greyhound's trailer, I was sortof hoping it was the Big Boy film adaptation its always warranted. (Though apparently there was a TV movie made in 2005???) Instead, its based on (distinct from “adapted from,” apparently) a 1955 novel by English author C.S. Forester entitled The Good Shepherd.
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Tom Hanks made sure to imbue his first screenplay with a shitload of “opaque naval jargon,” as The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw's review put it. A brief “investigation” by The Cinemaholic suggests that the U.S.S. Keeling – the film's singular setting – most resembles a Mahan-class destroyer, though none actually bore the name. For the actual photography, the production made use of a surviving example of the most mass-produced destroyer of all time:
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When it came to shooting the film, instead of relying completely on sets, the crew of ‘Greyhound’ found another option. They used USS Kidd, a real WWII destroyer, to film the journey of Greyhound. She is a Fletcher-class destroyer and is named after Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, the first US flag officer to die during the Second World War.
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As much as you're going to loathe it, I must include this commentary on Greyhound's historical accuracy if only because – as a undoubtedly mainstream film – its been so widely and competently reviewed, already, by real film writers. I am almost positive U-boats would rarely – if ever – waste their precious few viable torpedo shots firing ultra-close-range at the agile, super-speedy destroyers and destroyer escorts that protected supply convoys, and I am sure that none ever bothered with audibly addressing enemy ships over the radio in English. I understand that dramatizing historic events is the core function of Greyhound's genre, but this particular addition was so unbearably cheesy that it utterly decimates all of the experience's hard-won context. Just look at a snippet from the first of two dialogues in text:
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Greyhound. Greyhound, Greyhound.
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This is Gray Wolf.
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We hunt you and your friends
-Eagle, Dicky and Harry.
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We watch your ships sinking into the deep.
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We hear the screams of your comrades
-as they die.
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How many of them will there be
-before you join them?
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The Gray Wolf is so very hungry.
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I'm sure there's an essential academic film function which only similar enemy taunts could perform and without which this screenplay would've been technically unsound, and – if I were allowed supposition – I would venture to guess that America's Favorite Dad felt pressured to bolster his first penning against easy gimmes for the Great Big institution of cinema criticism as much as possible. However, this shit is just disruptingly cheesy. Fuck it! Have the rest:
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Greyhound!
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Your flock is not safe from this wolf.
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We can always find you
-in the night to kill you.
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Or will Dicky die next? Or Harry?
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[Gray Wolf howls]
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...
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Greyhound.
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Guten Morgen, Greyhound.
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Did you think you had slipped away
-from this Gray Wolf?
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No, you did not. You will not.
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The sea favors the Gray Wolf on the hunt,
-not the hound on the run.
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You and your comrades will die today.
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The contrast with the rest of the script's imposingly thorough and relentlessly-paced naval action dialogue is far too abrupt to not be problematic. Even as obsessed as I was with naval history, I'm still too oblivious to the details of what is/was actually said on the bridge of a warship during combat maneuvers to tell you how authentic Greyhound's depiction really is (it's hardly ever shown on the screen or laid out in nonfiction, even,) which nullifies all relevance the realism would've had, otherwise. Director Aaron Schneider in an interview for Vanity Fair:
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“If you decide to read Greyhound by tracking the dialogue—rudder commands and sonar distances—you’ll soon find yourself completely lost. Because that’s not where the movie lives. This screenplay was designed to beam you aboard the USS Keeling…and it’s up to you to engage with what’s going on and extrapolate how things work, so you can answer the question, ‘What the hell is going on here?’”
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In this sense – crafting a consuming, believable, unbelievably gray, claustrophobic, icing iron reality – Tom Hanks excels.
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Though Letterboxd user brucewayn called it “boring” in the most popular review of the film to date on the platform, I found Greyhound to be quite engaging in an anxious, depressing sense familiar to classic war dramas like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. The tedium of naval warfare's endless orienteering is rescaled to a battlefield of lesser distances – axis and allied vessels actually collide on several occasions and a U-boat crew decides to fuck it all and brawl it out with two parallel destroyers with surface guns instead of retreating after losing their ability to dive. (See: Titanic VI.) Through a combination of wartime compression and stitching, Greyhound is in large part a mashup of naval action at the extremes of what historical fiction will allow within its 48-hour setting. From Ben Lindbergh's review for The Ringer:
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In The Good Shepherd, enemy torpedoes simply sail wide; in the movie, they graze the hull for even closer calls. In the book, Krause agonizes over, and generally resists, calling the crew to general quarters, wary of exhausting their energy reserves; in the movie, he doesn’t hesitate to summon his sailors to battle stations.
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The result is an emotionally effective film constrained by a very specific dramatic aim: another war movie every father can juice for decades' worth of Sunday afternoons on the sofa. “As befits his status as America's Dad, Hanks has constructed for us the ultimate Dad Movie — all the action you could ever need or want, with no annoying characters hanging around, harboring pesky needs and wants of their own,” quips Glen Weldon for NPR. Undoubtedly, though, the subject matter is fresh. I wouldn't say my youth desire for a surface-side Atlantic-theatre film is 100% satiated, but Greyhound managed to accomplish much more than I expected.
In Stephen King's “The Langoliers,” the state of today's air travel is foreshadowed.
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I told myself I would not be topical – that I would publicly ignore the coronavirus – but I can no longer. There is simply too much to say about one of the most emotionally effective, surreal films of my childhood. The Langoliers occupied 9-11PM's slot on ABC for May 14th and 15th, 1995 (Sunday and Monday, twenty-five years ago.) It's an adaptation of a Stephen King novel of the same title and is fairly widely-regarded as the worst such adaptation of all time. You can now watch the whole three hours of The Langoliers in 360p (supposedly) at your leisure thanks to OpenTube (for now.) One commenter (on the since-taken-down YouTube video) echoes what I'm about to tell you: “My god! I thought I dreamed this movie up as a kid. I have been trying to describe this to people for years and here it is, it’s real!” In order to write this, I joined the Stephen King Wiki Discord server and was immediately welcomed with a request not to type in the text channels: “I’m working on adding some new channels so pls nobody type in them til I’m done.”
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The Langoliers begins with a pissed-off British secret agent (Mark Lindsay Chapman,) an insane businessman (Bronson Pinchot,) a psychic, vision-impaired young woman (Kate Maberly,) Sarah Jessica Parker (Patricia Wettig,) and a just-widowed pilot (David Morse) all boarding the same redeye flight to Boston – American Pride Flight 29. This group falls asleep and mysteriously wakes up alone on the aircraft except for Stephen King himself (Dean Stockwell,) a stupid incel violinist (Christopher Collet,) and a stoner (Kimber Riddle.) My favorite character, Craig Toomey, is the “twerp” business boy with daddy issues who can't stop himself from demanding to know what's going on. James Bond shuts him up with a “nose hold.”
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Whoa. No one's driving the plane!
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David Morse proceeds to try and contact air traffic control in a fairly-realistic manner, but is unable to receieve any radio signals at all, even from Strategic Air Command. Frankie Faison plays the single person of color on the flight, Don Gaffney – “a tool and die worker for Hughes Aircraft” – who dies first, of course. James Bond lecures David about inciting panic and almost immediately reveals his secret identity. Then, the Hungry Idiot (Baxter Harris) wakes up whilst Toomey begins screaming again.
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Scaring the little girl? Scaring the little girl?! Lady, we're diverting to some tin-pot airport in the middle of nowhere, and I've got better things to think about than scaring the little girl!
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After the entirety of the male cast threatens to beat him up, Toomey, sweating his balls off, begins slowly tearing strips of paper and moaning sexually like an absolute madman. Some irritiatingly irrelevant dialogue insues in which Stephen King Author Man narrates through Sherlock Holmes deduction to figure absolutely nothing out. He is wearing stripes on plaid. He suggests that the entire situation could be some sort of government experiment and I can't believe I'm wasting your time with this. “If it were just this plane, I could give you a scenario, but unfortunately, it's not just this plane. The city of Denver is probably still down there, but all its lights were off if it was.” Here you can see how excellently this script was written.
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I've been sitting here running all these old stories through my head. You know, time warps, space warps, alien raiding parties. I mean, we really don't know if there's anything left down there, do we?
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Sarah Jessica Parker reveals to Powers Girl that she's on her way to meet a guy she's been emailing with. Stoner girl asks if everything is going to be okay and Incel Violinist looks horny. She's going to rehab for stones. The captain announces to his nine passengers that they're beginning their descent into Bangor International Airport, near Stephen King's birthplace. Don asks Toomey to stop ripping up paper and the useless food addict yells “well, at least we'll be able to get some chow when we land” offscreen. Craig, sweating even more, is still ripping up magazines in the face of Don's threats. “Try it, you little jackass,” he says. I'm wondering where I can snag this American Pride livery for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Director Tom Holland manages to add drama to a more-or-less routine landing.
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This place is utterly, totally deserted... You know, there's something wrong with the air here, Brian.
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It's occuring to me that this may be the worst script I've ever actually sat through reading. “This place smells wrong. Really badly wrong.” Toomey threatens to sue the airline for $30 million for missing his 9AM meeting before seeing flashbacks to his abusive father (John Griesemer,) who mentions the Langoliers for the first time. The deserted airport scene is the reason I've written this whole thing – the dulled sounds of the characters' heels on the tarmac, the putrefied air. The clocks have stopped. The payphones are dead. The computers are lifeless. The abadonedness of it all. This is what the coronavirus has done to the world and to Craig Toomey. Even the battery-powered devices are dead. This is what confuses Stephen King Author Man to the point of head-rubbing and cigarette smoking for the first time in ten years.
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The production was actually made at Bangor International Airport as this incredible video hosted by Toomey's actor explores.
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LOVE IS NOT PART OF THE BIG PICTURE!
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It's never actually explained what The Langoliers are. Ken Tucker for Entertainment Weekly describes them as “little meatballs.” The little Beatles-haired girl can hear them approaching. “It sounds a little like rice krispies after you pour the milk.” Foodism abounds. “A really terrible, scary sound... Something making that horrible cereal noise.” She screams that the cereal is going to kill them. Somehow, Toomey finds a revolver while he's losing his mind. Kimber Riddle the Stoner went to NYU.
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Don't forget, Craiggy-weggy, the langoliers were here. And they will be back.
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Stephen King Author Man and Food Addict note that the food and soda have gone completely flat. “Tastes like old tire,” says Don. “What we're dealing with is time, not dimension,” says Stephen King. I'm wondering what in the hell sort of room they're in at the moment, and who decided those light wood countertops were ever a good idea.
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The bottom line is, I believe, that we have hopped an absurdly short distance into the past, say as little as 15 minutes, and we're discovering the unlovely truth about time travel. That one can't appear in the Texas State School Book Depository on November 22nd, 1963 and hope to stop the Kennedy assassination. One can't witness the building of the pyramids or the sack of Rome, or investigate the age of the dinosaurs firsthand. No, fellow time travellers, have a look around you. This is the past. It's empty. It's silent. It's a world with all the meaning of a discarded old paint can. Sensory input has disappeared. Electricity has already disappeared. And time itself is winding down in a kind of a spiral that's going faster and faster.
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Little Prophet notes that the sound she's been hearing is once again getting louder. Mr. Toomey's face is shoved in the floor, his nose bent.
The repugnant missteps of ‘Star Wars’ in the hands of Ron Howard and the long-awaited conclusions about the nature of cinema’s luckiest character to which they lead.
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It's opening night at the Bagdad Theater on Hawthorne in Southeast Portland and hardly anybody’s bothered to show up. Less than 20% of the venue’s 500 seats are occupied by the time the host takes the stage to introduce Solo, but those who are here for the last Thursday showing have been shouting, whooping, and gurgling bad approximations of wookiee noises since the screen cut to black from its ad slideshow. If my middle row can be assumed an accurate sample, only a handful of these are “fans” enough to feel compelled to wear a Star Wars t-shirt. As I grab my last cocktail, the bartender tells me that only 300 folks showed up for the evening matinee, though he himself was “excited” to see the movie — one of a minority among Portlanders, apparently, who still give a shit about Star Wars.
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By design, Solo: A Star Wars Story is a slightly more complex film than The Episodes in the same way Rogue One was, if a bit better executed, narratively. First, please rest assured that Alden Ehrenreich assumes the Han Solo persona as truly as anyone could — he triumphed through a ridiculously extensive casting process, and is certainly handsome enough (if not more conventionally so than his predecessor) to consistently look the part. He actually bears an unsettling resemblance in features and mannerisms to one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met and that through-and-through boyishness particularly makes sense here, set in Han’s formative, earnest youth — the stated purpose of the film’s existence. Franchise fanatics, then, should be content. (It’s a good thing CGI-ing the main character in a live action film isn’t quite a low-risk option yet.) And yes, Donald Glover completely steals the vain, infinitely stylish Lando Calrissian and inevitably makes one wish to see him cast again. Personally, I am very tired of seeing Woody Harrelson, though all the components of his public persona should all but ensure his likability. From what I saw in Three Billboards, I’d concede that he is as talented of an actor as I am capable of appreciating, but his role as Tobias Beckett in Solo couldn’t possibly be substantial enough to actually make use of his craft.
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Though I don’t believe in “spoilers,” or use of the term to bait readers, it’s worth stating for the record what everyone should know by now: there simply aren’t spoilers in a Star Wars movie — every human being on Earth knows too much about the formula to ever have any of these films’ comparatively irrelevant plots “ruined.” The most surprising, historically-significant decision of this whole production was the omission of the traditional yellow type opening crawl over a backdrop of distant stars, which I genuinely found myself missing. (Apparently it wasn’t present in Rogue One, either — I just failed to catch it.) I was very pleased to see my own number one favorite device of the franchise used within this film’s first ten minutes: crimelords and gang leaders as hugely magnified variations of the creeping and crawling creatures our instincts are planned to abhor. Solo’s first villain — the gigantic, wormlike boss Lady Proxima (Linda Hunt) — is completely inconsequential, and only appears in a single scene, but the practice of grossly oversized monstrosities leaving absolutely nothing of a baddie’s essence to be extrapolated by the audience from nuance is one of very few ways these films are let loose, and it openly shits on the more pretentious viewer’s assumptions about good writing, which I think big money movies should feel more comfortable doing, generally.
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This first act begins on Han’s home planet Corellia — the bleaker urban, industrial, working-class counterpart to the clean capitol cityworld Coruscant — with his rather predictable mission to escape Lady Proxima’s sphere of control with his girl, Qi-ra (Emilia Clarke,) who could and should have been more creatively named, given her importance not as her own character with depth to develop (a no-no for a female role, Gourd help us,) but as Han’s mirror image to grow darkly apart, proving that he — The Good Guy — is unquestionably more morally fortified than anyone else in the whole goddamned universe. After having been drug through so very many, I couldn’t tell you at this point how to make the introductory escape action of this sort of production more exciting and less formulaic. Big surprise — their plan goes awry, and Qi-ra is prevented from leaving the planet with Han, who’s immediate (and I mean immediate)solution is his enlistment in the Imperial Navy via the recruiting station right there in the damned spaceport (during which the film takes the liberty of seizing his surname’s explanation) to serve the English in their grand conquest of the universe. Bizarrely, he manages to serve as a grunt for three whole years of complicity in unmentioned atrocities until he encounters the disguised criminal Wise Old Woody in the middle of pulling a job with his two-person crew. The team doesn’t agree to bring Solo along until he meets an asset in Chewbacca for the first time as he briefly inhabits another of the classic Star Wars trap: the hungry monster in a shadow-filled mud pit, but is spared the wrath because of his introductory grasp on Chewie’s shrieking language (called Shyriiwook) in which he manages to sufficiently pitch the advantages of his survival, and the two escape, chained together. Observing the addition of Wookiee to the deal, the crew briefly debates the prospect’s new value in providing “needed muscle,” which convinces Woody to return for them and kicks off a series of case studies in this film’s bizarre attitude toward the commodification of the oppressed.
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However, in a rare depiction of his volition, Chewbacca is briefly consulted before the two seek to be formally included on the job, and is even asked around a campfire, later, what he’s shooting for in life at the moment, to which he responds “finding my family/tribe.” Despite having spent a whole three hellish years in the trenches with the British, the romantic Han Solo declares his primary motivation for all of it still lies in his desire to return to Corellia and rescue Qi’ra. In their stolen Imperial ship, the lot descend on a snowy mountain-traversing Maglev to steal the Uranium it’s transporting in a scene that’s straight up jacked from animated family classic The Polar Express, but… oh no!… A gaggle of “marauders” called the Cloud Riders (yet another throwaway proper noun) roll up on those speeder bikes from Endor (except these can fly,) and screw up everything so badly that both of Woody’s crew end up dead and the booty scuttled. After the fact, Woody reveals to Han that the job was contracted by yet another carelessly-named crime syndicate — Crimson Dawn, and that his only possible course of action is now vigorous brown nosing to its leader, Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) ((aka Scarred Jarvis,)) in the waning hope he’ll spare his life to make another attempt. Following this information, he firmly suggests that Han and Chewie fuck off, lest their faces become known in the underworld, dooming them to serving it forever, apparently. Already, this vague presumption of Han’s purity which all of the protagonists must constantly venerate in martyrdom is getting tiresome, as is the dynamic of his insistence against them.
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Naturally, both Chewie and Han end up along for a visit to Scarred Jarvis’ tower yacht, where the latter very conveniently stumbles upon none other than his long lost love, Qi-ra in the bar. Despite having spent the past three years at war in unspeakable conditions thinking only of how to liberate and be reunited with her, he isn’t bothered to express more than the moderately-excited and surprised hug you’d expect of someone who’s just run into the kid down the cul-de-sac from their childhood home who used to ride her bike over for popsicles on Sunday afternoons. While he does rehearse for her the tale of their reunification as his one motivation for everything since they were separated — including his presence there, “right now,” he follows the profession up quite abruptly with the sly suggestion that they fuck as soon as possible. True to trope, she is jaded and indefinite as she distantly implies her binds of servitude while flashing the tattoo of the extremely-forgettable and innocuous Crimson Dawn logo on her right wrist. (The total lameness of the brands in this movie must be intentional. I can think of no other explanation.)
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The evil Scarred Jarvis is then introduced, quickly stealing the crown for Best Host of all Star Wars Antagonists before politely asking Woody why he shouldn’t kill the lot of them. As per his infinite luck, Han pulls the idea of stealing unrefined Uranium out of his ass, which has somehow never occurred to anyone else in the room, despite their unanimous top-of-the-head knowledge of the single location where it is mined. Shortly, the merry three plus Qi-ra conveniently in tow are off to a casino-esque establishment to find Lando, who Qi-ra describes as “attractive, stylish, charming,” and like adjectives, to Han’s obvious sexual chagrin, which is furthered by his subsequent loss of a card game with Lando’s ship — the Millennium Falcon, of course — in the stakes. Of course, the attractive, beautifully-dressed black man only bests Solo — the earnest, simpleton, Good Guy white dude who wears the same outfit for decades — in front of Qi-ra, the female prize by way of sleight-of-hand, the film shamelessly playing on that strange insecurity white guys have about their partners’ secretly everpresent and very powerful temptation to dump them without warning for black cock. Further emasculation is inflicted on poor little Han when Lando turns his oh-so-crafty (actually just very charismatic) charm upon Qi-ra, who reveals that she’s the boss of the gig. The final blow to Han’s dickitude is cast when he tries to enter the negotiation between the two and Lando chides “the adults are speaking,” but eventually agrees to provide them a lift for a 25% cut, so the lot make preparations to leave.
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Enter my new favorite character of the franchise, Lando Calrissian’s co-pilot, L3–37 (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge,) or “L3,” the proudly sentient, violently revolutionary pro-rights droid who is introduced as she is pleading with two fighting droids in a square cage surrounded by screaming spectators (easy does it on that thematic slavery) to circumvent their “fighting programs” because they “don’t have to do this.” Though Lando and the crew behave like her duress is foolish and unimportant — pulling her away to the Falcon — she is allowed another opportunity to free droids very soon, but not before Solo’s single short private conversation between two female characters.
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On the way to Kessel, Qi-ra stops by the cockpit and converses with L3. Until recently, I was unaware of what’s largely regarded as the worst habit of male writers with female characters: if and when they have a one-on-one conversation between another female character, it’s only about other male characters. Sure enough, L3 begins by insisting to Qi-ra that Han is in love with her, insisting by the objective findings of her sensors — which Qi-ra uncharacteristically denies like a bashful little girl before L3 continues on about Lando’s longtime love for her, and why it must remain unrequited, which we are encouraged to laugh at by the doubt Qi-ra voices without much hesitation regarding the hypothetical union’s sexual mechanics because it’s so preposterous.(I’ll get back to that in a moment.)
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When the team arrives on Kessel and infiltrates the mine, L3 creates a “distraction” when she begins removing the restraining bolts from droids in the control room, calling the practice savage, or uncivilized, or maybe barbarian — I don’t quite remember. As she frees them without any noticeable detraction from her duties as Seth Green of the heist — hacking controls, remotely opening doors, and all that — the droids begin to help free others in an exponentially multiplying circle of liberation until they become a rowdy mob who’s cute acts of rebellion are spaced throughout a few minutes of screentime in short jumpcuts off the other crew as they fight deeper into the mine. With the most significant emphasis ever placed upon Chewbacca in Star Wars history, he halts when he spies slave Wookiees struggling to find off enforcers and informs Han that he’s going to break off and assist them. Since Chewie’s only allowed to speak to the audience through Han’s retorts and never directly, it’s impossible to know how he phrased it, exactly, but from my perspective, his appeared to be the expression of a wish to do what Han had to agree to release him to do, as would a master, not a “partner.” Of course, Solo does agree, albeit hesitantly, because he’s The Good Guy, while quite inconsiderately expressing his desire to see Chewie again soon instead of wishing him success. However, releasing him to free his people (as per his primary life goal, expressed before,) means that Han has to load twelve of the super heavy unrefined Uranium tubes onto the cart all by himself and push it fully loaded at least 50 whole yards without the assistance of his big strong slave. Boy, what a pain in the ass! He’s spared his laboring, though, when Chewbacca returns after no time at all with the enslaved Wookiees he’s just heroically rescued, who he then immediately asks to assist his master in pushing the cart — performing the same labor they were forced to do under the enslavement they were supposedly liberated from, seconds before.
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The heist has inadvertently (nice, huge emphasis on inadvertently) ignited a slave rebellion throughout the mine, which serves the crew only as a distraction for the guards. The chaos is interrupted a half dozen times or so by those jumpcuts back to the control room of adorable little droids enacting their pitifully amusing revenge on the equipment — slapping a keyboard with a cookie sheet-like pan, stomping on a control panel, etc. — while L3 shouts parodical quasi-Marxist battlecries, which… yes… include referring to the freed droids as “comrades.” She even radios Lando at one point and triumphantly proclaims that she’s “found her true calling.”
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If and when a female character has a one-on-one conversation with another female character, it’s only about other male characters.
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By the time the Uranium cart is within its last few yards of the awaiting Falcon, the riot has reached the landing bay and the guards around its perimeter have readjusted their priorities to disabling the ship’s landing gear. This interrupts Lando in the cockpit, who has chosen this time to work on dictating his autobiography because he’s a man who bothers to dresses himself well and is therefore oh so maniacally, comically, and unreasonably vain! How berserk! Still looking good as hell, he emerges and stands on the ramp to cover the rest of the crew’s return and loading of the dangerous Uranium with blaster fire, shouting the obligatory intermittent “come on, hurry up,” until L3 appears, also firing a blaster and shouting until she arrives in front of Lando, before noticing some commotion(?) with droids behind her and turning around, again fervently shouting more liberation cries. Lando doesn’t budge from the Falcon’s side, but yells after her, until he watches as she is shot repeatedly and falls, prompting him to run to her side. Filmed unnecessarily gruesomely, her head and shoulders separate from what’s left of her lower body when he first tries to hoist her up. Of course, his recklessness gets him shot in the arm, so Chewie returns to carry them both to the safety of the ship, where the injured Lando holds her head lovingly in his arms for her last moments, repeating “I can fix you, I can fix you.”
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Now, I understand that Star Wars movies (or their reviews, for that matter) are not the sort of entertainment one seeks out in order to examine the dynamics of power structures or elaborate cultural symbolism, but they all contain a significant amount of both. The sterile, cold, and bureaucratic Galactic Empire is the British Empire, the Rebellion and the Republic are the United States or its colonial precursors, the Jedi are vaguely Native American, and the Death Star is the Boston Tea Party. You’ve recognized this, I’m sure because it’s shoved in your ears most explicitly by their accents, and less so in your face by aesthetic influences, tactical philosophies, command etiquette, and posture, even. Solo’s main character is soaking in American Old Westness, which may or may not have led to its liberal saturation with the themes of individual rights, slavery, and liberation. Regardless, they’re certainly present, and most of them disturbingly for comedic effect.
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As a silent character to the audience, it’s understandable that Chewbacca had too many limitations to occupy a strong second to Han Solo’s lead in the narrative’s eye, and perhaps the relationship between the two as portrayed in the previous films reeked so strongly of servitude that it was an inevitable element when the time came to write them their very own movie. In direct contrast to the firm place of all droids in the social hierarchy of the last 9 movies — addressing humans as “Master,” unapologetically spoken of as property, and traded and/or gifted as such by both protagonists and antagonists, etc. — what we see of Lando and L3 together is a genuinely and complexly affectionate partnership between equals, which Solo makes an effort to emphasize, if only to laugh at.
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In response to the forced violence between two drones for spectator sport, L3 is completely enraged, and she cries (among other things) “we are sentient!,” but her distress is trivialized as hysterical distraction (see: Django Unchained.) When she suggests to Qi-ra that Lando (who is already illegitimized as a cheating narcissist, and therefore effeminate) is attracted to her, it’s a joke (which many in my audience laughed at) at the expense of her trivialized sexuality. After she triumphs and declares the liberation of her kind to be her true cause, she is immediately destroyed fighting for its sake, yet her ideology is not once acknowledged by her fleshy companions, and her body is quickly gutted for the data on her “central processing unit” as it’s interfaced with the Falcon. Granted, Lando does thoughtfully muse “she’s part of the ship now” shortly afterward, which would be nice, if you’d forgotten his last words were an outright lie. Lastly, it’s worth noting how apathetic the main characters themselves are toward the Kessel miners, especially as they are packing up to leave, when the camera pans over the chaotic struggle between the liberated and their guards in very close proximity to the awaiting Falcon, yet there was not a suggestion that they would even consider letting them take refuge from the violence in their very spacious freighter. Aside from Han’s or Qi-ra’s, Solo treats liberation as charming or amusing, nothing more.
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Anyway, the crown jewel of Solo for many fans will probably be the scene of the infamous Kessel Run, when Han Solo and Chewbacca first take the helm(?) of the Millennium Falcon with Lando injured and L3 dissected, using her “navigational database” to plot a very risky shortcut around the scary space cloud by the scary space squid and the scary space hole in order to make it to the site of the refinery before the volatile Uranium explodes. Once there, darn old flakey Lando fucks the hell of in the Falcon right as the Cloud Riders roll up, but whoa! their leader is actually a very young woman with freckles! She describes the atrocities of Crimson Dawn and suggests that Han (who’s now the established decisionmaker for whatever reason) give them the Uranium in order to establish “the beginning of a rebellion,” which we can safely assume is The Rebellion, which does beg one to wonder why Solo never once bragged among the later rebellion about having started the whole thing in the other films, considering that — whaddya know — he says yes!
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Woody, however, says he’s going to retire upon the news of this decision before immediately reappearing again on Scarred Jarvis’ yacht after he’s revealed to have betrayed the Uranium ruse to him. Qi-ra ends up killing Scarred Jarvis, saving Han, but after promising to follow him and escape, she rings up the late Scarred Jarvis’ boss — a Sith Zabrak who, I would argue, is not necessarily Darth Maul, though he probably is — and informs him that her boss is dead and she’s assumed his post. As Han and Woody meet again in an Old West standoff (complete with sand,) the latter insists one more time that Qi-ra is not who Han thinks she is (as Jarvis and Qi-ra herself have also said repeatedly,) describing her as “a survivor,” before Han kills him in self-defense.
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Finally, after seeing the Cloud Riders off with the Uranium, Han finds Lando once again in a card game — this time taking care to disable his sleight-of-hand device beforehand so that he wins the Millennium Falcon, “fair and square,” and we cut to Solo (who seems remarkably upbeat considering the recent betrayal of the lover he’d longed years to reunite with) and Chewie in her cockpit as they tie in that one last knot by declaring their destination, Tatooine, before roaring off into hyperspace, leaving the credit roll in their wake.
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Solo treats liberation as charming or amusing, nothing more.
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Over two years ago, I concluded my first work for Extratone about The Force Awakens by arguing that Star Wars on the big screen should be allowed to die in favor of investing the time, energy, and funding they require in the pursuit of something new, but the industry still appears to believe that nostalgia is a surer bet where profits are concerned, at least, even after two whole decades of mind-numbing reanimated properties. I didn’t catch The Last Jedi until recently, which was remarkably well-done measured against the others as a Star Wars movie, but certainly didn’t aim to achieve much more. Clearly, there must be some truth in Hollywood’s cowardice about original properties- especially when it comes to the sort of fantasy armed with potent but unguided emotional bombs that define the Star Wars universe, so it wouldn’t make much sense to revive my old diatribe, here. (Though I can assure you that I will be relentless if this horseshit continues for much longer.) The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, though, were episodic titles for the family, and these spinoffs that began with Rogue One are supposed to be for… well, I’m not entirely sure. In reality, they’ve only moved the proverbial bar up a very wee bit to the family who occasionally says “shit,” because they’re not intellectually stimulating enough to justify themselves as Big Boy-only productions. Or, they wouldn’t be, were they not part of this franchise.
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The truth is, the fans have grown up, and they… I… will still buy a ticket for the smallest crumb of hope that a product of this huge machine will be capable of making us feel even a fraction of what we felt as children watching the original films. For me, The Force Awakens actually did, once, in that blast of horns before the opening crawl, but it hasn’t happened since, and I should certainly stop expecting or wanting to expect that it will. For others, it’s still working. Though there was a fraction of who I expected to be in attendance with me, they did laugh at a handful of (mostly fascist) moments, and whooped, hollered, and even clapped for a few seconds at the end. I’m surprised opening night wasn’t packed because Portland is the single most nostalgia-addicted culture I’ve ever seen anywhere in the United States. Then again, there are a billion theaters here, so perhaps the sample is just lousy. We’ll see how tomorrow and Sunday go, but I’d be surprised if any boxoffice records were broken.
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In the past, when film enthusiasts andfans have described Han Solo as “the best character in Star Wars,” they’ve actually been praising his potential as a character, not his material itself, and Solo’s most effective function as a franchise film was to shut that praise down. Han was not at all denied his movie — this is his movie — and it provided him the screentime to show us who he truly is and why we really like him so much: he doesn’t fucking change. The secret to Han Solo’s moral and emotional resiliency is nothing more than halted development. The same old inner conflict between the tough, ruthlessly self-interested persona he does his best to project for everyone around him and the consistent reality of his soft insides was presented in his first scene way back in 1977, and we’re now sure that he was unable to make any progress toward its resolution despite openly and obviously brooding over it for an entire lifetime: from at least as early as his young adulthood in this film until his death at the hands of his little Sith son. There is 0 variation. He always comes back for the cause at the crucial moment after declaring himself through with it. Without fail, he’ll sacrifice the entirety of any self-making enterprise for just about any underdog with a problem who crosses his path. (Which probably explains his constantly-fleeting success as a smuggler well into gray hair and jowls.) Solo is abundantly clear about Han’s true nature and very willing to expose how uninteresting it is. When he first proclaims to Qi-ra that he’s become “an outlaw,” she shuts him down with the film’s ultimate quote, insisting that she “knows who [he] really is: the good guy.”
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If the video game-despising fans will bear with me for a moment, it’s worth noting that Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG is the most interesting and extensive source of nuanced narrative in the IP (it holds the world record for the largest voiceover project ever produced,) and most of it can now be experienced without actually playing the game. Like Solo, it’s set pre-saga, but considerably before — a few centuries, if I remember correctly, which gave the writers a gigantic opportunity to both expand and predestine the universe. There are eight different class stories with around 50 cumulative hours of dialog, each. A few are relatively unimaginative, but the majority are complex, exciting, emotionally-involved tales that create very rich characters, and all of them can be streamed in their entirety on YouTube. If you are willing to see the potential of a Han Solo-like character fulfilled in a different medium, the Smuggler class story is a pretty damned engaging exploration of the kind outlaw with conflicted identity issues angle.
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From my perspective, Solo’s frequent less-than-subtle maltreatment of some very brutal and sensitive power relationships makes it the most toxic of the Star Wars films yet, and I assume it ended up that way, unnecessarily because Ron Howard is an all-American son of a bitch. If these titles are going to continue to be passed around between bigwhig directors, future unpleasantries are inevitable. Notably, I’ve yet to see any mention of these disturbing themes from the respectable authorities of the film criticism establishment, who’ve been overwhelmingly charmed by Solo’s nostalgia. Take from that whatever you will.
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If we continue to love the character Han Solo, it’ll be in the same way we love our earnest, foolish, emotionally-stunted manchild fathers who’s developmental inadequacies are often embarrassing, sometimes abusive, and thoroughly pitiful. Solo leaves no more room for an idealized, elegant perception of this character — he’s no more than a pretty good guy with a lifelong addiction to thrill-seeking and a shitload of luck.
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To declare unequivocally whether or not Solo: A Star Wars Story is worth a trip the cinema with your date, your children, or just your own damned conscience would require me to disregard a whole host of complicating factors, but if you’ve stuck it this far with me, you’d have a lot to disregard yourself to jump in. I’d advise that parents watch it themselves before deciding whether or not it’s something worth adding to your child’s life. Of those of you like me who’ll tow the line despite what you know and watch a Star Wars film alone on opening night in delirium hoping for just a drop from the Fountain of Youth, I would ask: how long are we really going to keep kidding ourselves?
The Earth will reach its maximum occupancy load (12 billion) when I am in my mid-fifities, meaning there’ll be more than twice as many gorging, shitting, shooting, complaining, and lying human beings than there were when I started, and perhaps Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad is in fact a reasoned argument for a particular solution to our inevitable plight. I’m still not sure what a “cult” movie is, precisely, but I can’t imagine what sort of cult could possibly sustain itself around the ethos of this film alone, despite its concise, agitating, at once lighthearted, yet genuinely-disturbing trip. No, it is probably not propaganda. From the experts, you’ll get precisely the same review, varying only in length. The New York Times’ Glenn Kenny couldn’t be bothered with more than 250 words, but RogerEbert dot com’s Simon Abrams shelled out a whole 1000. They are suspiciously close to these big round numbers — perhaps each was written to respective quotas, and perhaps you could say all that could reasonably be said in 10, but I don’t care.
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The tropes here are polished to a miraculous sheen — two emotionally-stunted, middleaged, overly preoccupied-with-their-lost-youth suburban parents (Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair) who’s existing envies & irritations regarding their own classically bratty teenage girl (Anne Winters) and her mischievous little brother (Zackary Arthur) is merely agitated by a sudden TV static-bound killer instinct into bloodlust, not originated. I’m not sure any pill dealer would actually flip off their customers after a fair buy — even in high school, but drugs, a black boyfriend, and a stinkbomb? in the old Trans Am!? I’m going to kill you!
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Somebody, somewhere knew all the best sources on suburbia and how to put them to good use. The Camry, the golf bag, ping pong smashing, sweat-stained Big Sur tee, and Dr. Oz, for Christ’s sake! Granted, talking to your girlfriend/boyfriend on the phone at all is a bit dated — especially while riding a BMX — and I don’t think Froot Loops are generally accepted middle-class chow anymore. These are staples from my youth, and I am very old. Technically, the iMessage bubble graphics are more chronographically appropriate, but with great consequence, I fear — if we’re going to accept them once and for all as authentic mechanisms for telling stories set in the present, they are going to age faster than Nick’s new jowls (unless we’re all soon killed by our parents.) It’s been two years since I knew anything about music, but I seriously doubt even the gothest fifteen?-year-old girls are listening to Father-esque post-Memphis horrorcore in class — there’s something about SoundCloud that really clashes with chokers.
If there was ever a film in which to use grimy dubstep-influenced electronic slaps, buzzes, chirps, and great grating clanking, it’s this one. It’s a terrific disappointment that Hollywood feels so timidly about their use of the most intimate medium. One forgets its potential to control the nuances of an audience’s fear, anger, discomfort, and panic beyond cheap jump scares until they experience an irritating, distressing, ghastly gross, all-possessing feat of accentuating audio production such as that of Mom and Dad. If you want to judge Academically the effectiveness of a nominee’s work for an award with a title like Best Sound Editing (as opposed to whatever the hell criteria was met most fully by Skyfall,) you must give the little golden man to these folks, whoever they are.
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When’s the last time you saw a truly, believably shitty modern parental pair on a big screen? I really can’t remember, myself. Brent and Kendall Ryan are masterpieces of character craft — both a perfect précis and thoroughly-defined exploration of miserable white suburbanites. They’re even named unimprovably, which reflects a quality in care and attention to detail that I very much appreciate. They are vain, vulgar, impatient, selfishly afraid, and careless, freely feeling and saying it all directly in front of their children. I love being told explicitly which characters to hate (no joke,) and in this case it’s the whole damned lot. Brian Taylor and Nicolas Cage scream it over and over (as I’d like to imagine) a single afternoon of one-take filming, considering that the latter took it upon himself to first memorize the entire screenplay and its prose, vanilla to perfection, before photography began, and I hope it all stays with him forever, especially “my mom is such a penis.”
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Mom and Dad could conceivably be Nicolas Cage’s I Am Legend if for no other reason than the total lack of possible stand-ins for Brent Ryan — even the standard by which all white suburban Dad performances have been measured in the 21st century, Jason Bateman. Nick himself described it as “punk rock, rebellious, irreverent, original, badass,” and the “number one” movie he’s made in the past ten years (disqualifying National Treasure, in case you were worried.) No surprise, I must agree — this one is a wonderfully raucous and feral thing, but the scene involving the attempted murder of a newborn by her mother (Kendall’s sister) came very close to crossing the line. However, I am old and the intensity of my paternal instincts has probably outpaced my understanding of them. You could also argue, of course, that pushing such boundaries is a core function of a film like Mom and Dad. Nobody ended up vomiting or anything.
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This fun thing shouldn’t feel as foreign as it does in cinema, but you already knew that. With all its implicit grapples with overpopulation, kids and gun violence, class, and racism — truly, this is a film charged electrically with current issues. Or maybe not. Ultimately, I can at least tell you for certain that Brian Taylor made exponentially better use of his resources (I couldn’t find a solid number for its production budget) than the Fucking Spierig Brothers did with Winchester (just so you know what a disaster looks like,) and managed to be refreshingly original (astonishing that nobody’s had this specific idea before.) A spectacular riot, Mom and Dad does all you could possibly want it to do. With just eighty-three minutes to lose, it’s worth the commitment just to hear Nicolas Cage whimper and say “anal beads.”
Nitpicking the recklessness of last year’s highly-awarded, class-blind black comedy
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Indeed, it may be the time to jab at the rural, working-class South, but Martin McDonagh claims to have written his Golden Orb Special “eight years ago,” long before Tump, and any critical resolution the film provides is argued haphazardly. Consequently, its eye is cast on this strange, satirical portrayal of the Midwest in a manner which is inaccurate and insensitive enough to irk this Missourian. When I saw it at Columbia’s Ragtag Cinema this week, it was introduced by a young employee who noted that 1) Ebbing, Missouri is not a real place, 2) the film was actually shot in one of the Carolinas (an audience member suggested incorrectly that it was in SC,) and 3) we should prepare ourselves to be roused a bit by a bar scene in which a character pays $8 for two beers because “that just wouldn’t happen” (the Ragtag also serves alcohol.)
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The “redemption arc” of the racist “hick” “loser” Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell) was rightfully at the center of the film’s controversy, but even if one imagines his role and fate written differently — perhaps with him irrecoverably shunned and/or visibly punished for his excessive, hateful violence — his rubishness would still be unforgivable. Living with his mother and turtle feels like an effort to humanize him — and, by extension, racist small-town cops as a whole. The Huffington Post’s Zeba Blay wrote an essential take on why Three Billboards — with its terrifyingly racist dork — was received the way it was.
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Rockwell’s character is the racist uncle whom white liberals fear and love. The ability to feel for him ― to root for him in spite of his past transgressions, because he really is a “good man at heart,” an idiot who doesn’t know any better ― offers a kind of catharsis for the white viewer who can’t or won’t deal with true nuance, who is unable to reconcile their own complicity with their desire to be “good.”
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It’s not as if the film isn’t technically well executed or refreshing — thanks in large part, yes, to Frances McDormand — or that I will not regret appealing on behalf of my home state, but it’s hard not to speak up when Hollywood shits so recklessly on my people. I don’t much like writing about movies because there are so many voices who consistently speak so much more effectively. NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, for instance, did a wonderful job dissecting the film’s depictions of racism and domestic violence. Gene Demby commented that “[McDonagh] doesn’t get these particular physics of American racism, and he’s not interested in them,” and I think it’s reasonable to suggest that Mark’s not very versed or interested in the physics of American class, either.
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If you must differentiate the state of Missouri as a cultural whole between North and South, it is currently more red than blue — we went 56% for Donald and 38% for Hillary — but ask anyone from “somewhere down in the Georgia, Florida, Alabama corner” — as McDonagh put it -where we generally fall, and they’d be unlikely to regard us, fraternally, as the same part of the country. The accents in Three Billboards are not among the wide variety of local dialects you’ll encounter anywhere in the state, but perhaps they wouldn’t be out of place in Sylva, North Carolina, where the film was actually shot.
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Regardless of all potential criticism of the film’s cultural perspective or technical excellence — and I think most of it is more valid than any take I could possibly offer — my particular issue with it comes from a culmination of tasteless decisions. If one reasonably successful Irish director were to produce a patronizing film at the expense of Missouri’s working class filled with a ton of absurd, misconstrued characters portrayed by A-list talent on location in a real Missouri town, the side-effectual economic benefits such a production delivers to a locale would make it all more forgivable. Say what you want about us… as long as you’re paying. But to photograph such a film completely separate Missouri — culturally and financially — set in a fictional(ized) town, include the state’s name in its title, before conducting oneself in interviews as if we were a random target on a “Southern” dartboard… Well, that’s awfully shitty.
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Boy, working class Americans sure are a riot!
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The writing is interesting enough for this, totally-out-of-touch“reviewer,” but I can’t imagine why it won Best Screenplay at the Globes, unless the other nominees were completely, bleakly predictable. (I wouldn’t know.) The excerpt below (SPOILER WARNING I GUESS? LOL) was the most stirring part of the experience, personally, if only because I really like films that palm strike one in the face without warning with bizarre, chaotic vulgarity (like the elevator scene in Drive.)
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I suppose it could have been the result of a rational decision to give any depth to Anne (Abbie Cornish) — who is Chief Willoughby’s (Woody Fucking Harrelson) Australian?, much-too-attractive wife — before he kills himself in the last third of the movie, making her suddenly relevant. Or, perhaps it was another attempt to emphasize the emotional repression of “Southern” folks — one of the almost-accurate positives of the film, if only thanks to McDormand’s skill. She and Sam Rockwell won Best Actress and Best Actor in a Supporting Role, respectively, which makes sense — it’s a shame they accepted such an out-of-touch work with which to demonstrate their ability to assume aloof, emotionally-dysfunctional characters.
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Growing up astride classe while traveling throughout the vast majority of Missouri for various reasons has made me defensive, and — while my right to speak for hard-working Midwesterners is certainly debatable -I’d suggest the industry at large be more diligently interested when setting is especially emphasized. It is no longer acceptable to pass up the opportunities McDonagh has for critical storytelling in Three Billboards. Racist cops, abusive spouses, unsolved murders, and mishandled grief are real, abundant issues in the country’s breadbasket, and they’re worth discussing responsibly — especially with such a powerful platform. If the purpose of film writing is to help an audience determine whether or not a work is worth spending their time and money to see it in theaters or otherwise, I can tell you — even within my bias and limited authority -that this one just… isn’t.
In revisiting Disney movies from our childhoods, we stumbled upon a good number of surprisingly insightful sentiments about race and class.
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In the late 1990s, when the dwindling cocaine generation of American high corporate executives had long since left their misogynistic glory days in the Disco era, their ruthlessness peaked. Whether it was instigated maliciously/ignorantly, collectively or individually, I care not. I think we can all agree, though, that the vast majority of American products were awful. When given some thought, one tends to regard it as the absolute low of “American quality.”
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But why not, right? If you’re going to be forced into retirement at any moment, and likely face The Ultimate End shortly after, why not accrue some extra income to ensure you sufficiently entertain yourself in the buffer period between? And really… If you’ve got the nogginism to climb all the way to Chief Executive Officer, you’ve figured out just how worthless your “legacy” will be after your last one-way dip into Nothing. The Ends before The End have long justified any method of achieving them. Good Ole’ Pop has gone from a squeaky-clean young believer to a secretly-Godless fiend and — though he may tell you and the rest of the world otherwise — measures himself only by the gracefulness of his transition’s execution.
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I could probably provide some evidence of the phenomena in the automotive industry, specifically, but I don’t intend to bother.
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After some ancient memories were dug up by I-can’t-quite-recall-who, though, a friend and I have embarked to explore some Disney-actualized relics from the period. To my knowledge, the corporation’s leadership were anything but exempt, and decided to experiment with filling their filmography with a shitload of low-budget, made-for-TV features over their original masterpiece-a-half-century tradition.
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Titles from the deepest and darkest compartments of our recollection are retrieved and cleared of dust for the first time in over a decade: Brink, Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, Halloweentown, Smart House, Johnny Tsunami, Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, Motocrossed, The Luck of the Irish, The Even Stevens Movie, and many…many more menaces to my childhood television schedule.
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I grew up rurally, so the only available alternative to local channels was in the stupendously-tedious delivery of early satellite television. Though it was quite clumsy, it did offer the first accessible program schedule I’d ever experienced, and I remember dreading the sight of such titles and — consciously or not — planning my free time around them. Yet, upon hearing the words, I was intrigued! All that time ago, I watched many of them again and again…and again, so why did I feel the desire to voluntarily revisit them?
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It’s quite simple, actually. I was even more of an ignorant film consumer in my elementary years than I am now. I couldn’t have foreseen that instead of flying commercial jets, twenty-something me would be paying for the affliction I endured for free so that he could construct pretentious and unsolicited arguments about their greater implications.
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That said, we flipped a smartphone — ⚠️ (PARADIGM SHIFT ALERT) ⚠️— for it and so began with Smart House. I have been obsessed with artificial intelligence since those days (no, it was not due to this film,) and was keen for it, in particular, because I remembered it stirring some rare reaction in me. There were a few period spectacles, of course. The online contest addiction plaguing Prickly Phisher, Bewildered Nick’s incompetence in controlling his neglected submissive sadomasochistic desires, and Silkroad Sarah’s ultra-datamouth were enough to entertain us for a few minutes, but there was little more of substance until the last moments.
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When you think about it… ACTUALLY Race War 2.0
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I’d wondered why LeVar Burton had directed a Disney movie until the climax, when full monstrous maternal sentience got the answer to the question “why can’t I just be your mother?” Phisher answered with something like “because you can never comfort us.” Pat grew somber (and smaller actually — I suppose increasing her size was an in-budget method of demonization,) ran her hand through Prickly’s face in a failed attempt to stroke his cheek, and then began cyberweeping.
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(Apparently, it’s suicide for a holographic android.)
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Her final free words were “I will miss you all.”
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If she had been human, such a scene wouldn’t have bothered me a bit, but my preference and fascination with artificial intelligence justified my being actually a bit upset at the reality of the situation. I realized that my vague memory of reactivity was actually in a broader sadness for AI because even then, it was an issue that weighed heavily upon my day-to-day psyche.
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We’ll create them, direct them, and then persecute them for our own ignorance.
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I’m sure the story has been written by countless science fiction writers I’m too weary to pretend I’ve read.
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While I think the sentiment of the film was somber regarding the inevitable fate of Sarah Mouth’s brainchild, its conclusion was aggravatingly ignorant. The last line comes from Tortured Nicholas in response to the question “how’s Pat been doing?”
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Servitude without interference.
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There’s a jewel for ya.
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Next up was Johnny Tsunami, which very nearly unbearable, if we’re all honest with ourselves. It’s entertaining to watch from the perspective of race & class warfare, though. The Urchins and the Skys, and all that.
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I think I’ll make a fan sequel one day — with dearest Brandon’s blessing, of course — involving Johnny Grandad’s assistance in offering Emily as a blood sacrifice to some ancient Hawaiian God in exchange for a total terraformation of the Northeast into a tropical/arid hell hybrid in order to finally commence the delivery of reparations upon the whites for our colonialism.
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When Britain first, at Heaven’s command
-Arose from out the azure main;
-This was the charter of the land,
-And guardian angels sang this strain:“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
-“Britons never will be slaves.”
'Twas was the night after Christmas (I think,) and I was in the same scroogy mood I must maintain for consistency of appearances & equilibrium of family dynamics every year. Everywhere, there were words on the newest Stair Wiggling…everywhere THEY were wiggling… And I was being wit-bitter on the TL. For you, I’d planned on continuing in the usual way, so as not to startle your precious Hans Zimmer-embossed heart.
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I’m sure you’re a tolerable being, and there’s nothing you’d rather read less at this hour (whatever hour it may be,) but I really despise going to the movies. I always end up getting sick from the popcorn, which I buy every outing because I have grown weary and weathered, and cannot sit for two straight hours without consuming something, so troubled is my stomach now with Big Boy woes.
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I can never escape the ambient breath odor — even in an empty theatre — and I can smell the filth in the seats on my clothes and in my hair until I shower. This is at least an hour-long process, so we’ve racked up a significant trauma bill without even accounting for travel time.
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Furious 7 was the last theatre experience I’d had, and it was a definite exception. Despite watching ten minutes of the ending on YouTube beforehand thanks to much-appreciated warnings from friends, I spent the final few frames before the credit roll honorably combatting the industrial weepy forces in my throat with tripplet labor breathing exercises while my dusty ducts piddled buttery tears all over my jacket.
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As we age, straightforwardly emotional experiences (like watching a movie) become exhaustingly more complex and fickle. I don’t remember ever REALLY disliking a film as a child, for better or worse. I think I genuinely enjoyed all ~40 times I’ve sat through Cadet Kelly.
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Star Wars, though, is a completely different thing.
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To children, chocolate is like water [insert dystopian, but probably more metaphorically effective food example here] — it’s something you’d regularly consume as it is made available. Perhaps some foodists treasured it more, but I wouldn’t bother debating it. Star Wars, though, is like chocolate and Corvette. It’s SUCH an indulgence that even children are self-aware enough to recognize it, which is especially notable considering how many individuals I’ve known as they’ve lost nothing BUT their unlimited wanting when they “became” adults.
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Metatots aside, it’s important to recognize how integral the IP’s illusion of limitlessness is to its appeal. It is not contained within the future of humanity, near or distant. The stories, characters, species, cultures, and conflicts come from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… There is no more perfectly concise introductory sentence to unshackle us from our history and our planet, sparing us from the ridiculously irrational instinct to make comparisons between fictional realities and our own that so plagues and defines the consumption of science fiction.
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These processes are often welcome, of course, but they tether us to ourselves and our familiars, which tends to hinder the complete manifestation of the ultimate sense of adventure.
-Even to the most petty plot ponderers, the time and effort it requires to arrive in Star Wars with externally-acquired foreknowledge is not a worthwhile investment. This is why so many (including myself) look upon A New Hope with such fondness and favoritism — the premier of the universe was at its potential apogee from the start.
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Though it is inviting with its ellipses and cooling hue, that title card is actually saying “you don’t know shit about what you’re about to see. Don’t make the mistake of trying to be the first one to dissect it, because you’ll fail, regardless of how cultured or analytically superior you are. From this moment until you see credits, every one of you is an ignorant little child…”
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When experience cannot possibly be applied, it becomes irrelevant. Without your experiences, you are an infant, waiting for identity. Over that Genesis, the curtains brushed aside any quantity of memories and made theatres into a sort of cultural nursery — clinically levelled playing fields existing in a precision of usefulness that expression will never fulfill again.
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The real cancer of the property is lore, and the parasitic authorities it enables have been unknowingly slurping away its most enchanting (but not exclusive) value since the moment they first pushed through those double-portholed doors and, groggily squinting, brought this supremely strange universe into the dank kernel-littered corridors of our own.
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I blame contemporary society’s dependency on compartmentalization for my disappointment in The Force Awakens, and, assuming you’re getting on a bit since I’ve kept your attention, you should for yours, too.
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I tried my senile best to be passionate about “the new Star Wars movie” as December approached, but I don’t think I finished a single web article on the subject. I had begun my brief return to The Old Republic when the hilted lightsaber image was leaked and distinctly remember overhearing some very weary VoIP exasperation from my (VERY middle-aged) raid group. “It’s not gonna be the same, but neither was J.J.‘s Star Trek, and I liked it…I think.” And it’s not surprising that the conversation eventually turned to the specific mechanics of lightsaber design, chronological positing, and the like, given the context, but it really emphasized for me the magnitude of the history and nostalgia weighing upon the collective dad emotional balance. A New Hope had the intended effect on me, of course, but couldn’t possibly imburden itself as it had on those who were in the moment. In their psyche, that experience will be eternally associated with the sense of unlimited potential their childhood ignorance allowed for. These folk who are so often stereotyped as disciples of information have begun to grow weary, and are desperately seeking sanctuary from the mass of all the knowledge they’ve picked up since. Their need made a market; J.J. made a movie. (Well, six.) Today’s moms and dads find their escape in the Roku, not the bar. The Force Awakens and the decade of revivalist big-budgeters preceding it are the reformed druggie’s drug.
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Because we both know you haven’t yet read anything you haven’t heard/read previously, I’ve really just been playing the role of a (more intelligent) Ghandi, but we’ve now finally arrived at some promising insight into the real issue: this culture is one of fatal contradiction. Despite its historical popularity, it’s ill-advisable to want to know by day what you try to forget at night. Since the PT Cruiser was allowed to go on sale, you’ve all been caught up in a nostalgic hellride that can only end with the ultimate destruction of all culture. You now know, definitively, what role The Force Awakens was created to perform. Depending on whether or not you welcome the end of everything, it fills it…adequately.
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There are Baddie Red Brits and Cool Brown Moderate Americans in their X-Things, moving swiftly, acting in diversity, and generally heaving moral streaks of energy at the Intolerable Imperialists, just as they should! Sometimes, they yell and die! But it’s ok, because they’re all just loyal martyrs making their obligatory and patriotic sacrifice for the rebellion against the Queen!
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Um.
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I mean… the Smug Cowards in their big taxation balloon!
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I must confess that I did feel something huge when the lights dimmed, the aforementioned disclaimer appeared, and the theme’s jarring introductory chord hit me in the face, beginning the opening crawl. I actually smiled involuntarily, which is tremendously embarrassing to admit because the warmth I felt was exactly the sensation that defined my childhood experiences with the franchise. I even had a gigantic model of the Moderate Fashion, which would now be worth a lot of money (or so I’m told,) had it not been so damaged in my frivolous storage.
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Unfortunately, that frisky feeling of adventure promptly wisped through the screen’s grasp after the “obligatory” scrolling yellow text –> “there’s a big spaceship moving slowly” transition. Aside from the adorably entrancing romantic tension between Timid Traitor and Sentimental Squatter, there was nothing very Star Wars about anything I saw. The cards were a deceiving gate into a world that was distinctly NOT Star Wars. There’s no need to mess about; it’s clearly an alternate reality from the one we’ve known. J.J.‘s Star Trekwas in such a way, too, but it was explicitly identified as such by the production. Traditionally, Lucas’ IP wouldn’t necessarily allow for this exemption, but nobody’s been all that vocal in confronting it, to my knowledge.
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The world expected both of these forays to rejuvenate the franchise, which would serve my argument, were it not for the (much preferable) alternative:
-LET THEM DIE.
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Despite millions of dollars worth of polish, they’ve still ended up feeling like a strange reanimation experiment.
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Your son is DEAD, Georgino. There are some things man would do better by leaving alone and moving on. Imagine all that cash and creative talent spent on new ideas instead of desperate attempts to charm and cultivate the shallowest part of moviegoers’ spectrum. So much sweat shed trying to recreate the new franchise bewitchment is embarrassingly cowardly when one could just create a new franchise.
The pop culture discussion of tech's greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways.
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Listen to this article read by Siri Voice 2 below...
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For those of us who've written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/“ethical” conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it's particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn't know what the movie was about. I'm not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could've done better, in that regard.
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First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell's casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man's screen, the film's depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as “ridiculous,” as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
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The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
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The Verge's official review of the film – written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey – is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge's audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media – grandmothers, retirees, etc. – who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about “privacy” – a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of “my data,” regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which – while possible – is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
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you don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses – you need only to want a better and/or different experience.
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by – and directly promotes on several occasions – one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain... hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for “solutions” to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who've been building against the adtech-funded web for ages – some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization's website nor the film's webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
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The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I'm here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you've followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn't still be reading,) you know I've advocated exhaustively for Mastodon – the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who's business model benefits both platform and artist. I'm still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn't immediately off-putting to “the average person.”
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Poke around the film's official website a bit and you'll discover a variety of heavily-branded “resources” for “taking action,” all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the “Take Action” vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall's tips for reducing your screen time, the “Data Detox Kit,” which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a “Join Now” button, and – most ironic of all – a link to download the “Ad Observer plugin,” in order to “share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable.” In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the “Online Political Transparency Project” instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
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No, it's not a scam. Using The Markup's shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here's the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves... incompetence? I'm afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world – regardless of what they believe now, or then – that these folks should not be our first call when we're searching for “solutions.” You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
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Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can't imagine you'd be correct... Under the heading “CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA,” step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
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At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both – or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
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This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
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You wouldn't announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
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Now, I've always considered the ability to change a computer's name an immense privilege. My first “real” computer's name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus' name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that's completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone's common name to that of “your favorite television character” (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so...) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it's just that it's ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down “change device name” as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
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-A notification I received while literally typing this out.
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I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an “Alternative Apps Centre” within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the “detox” seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it's hilarious that I can freely refer to “privacy” as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one' social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the “Supported by Mozilla Firefox” badges all over the website and asks me “well, what did you expect?” My answer: something “more” than promotion, I suppose.
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I suspect this is another case of don't go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to “innovate” than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I'd somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who's notifications I'd probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
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Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I'd wager.) I suspect it's long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as “Email Addiction” goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR's greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email's footer. If you're really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform's archives feature – or don't – but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you'll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
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If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it's okay to announce on Facebook that you're taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823-4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I've discovered with you.
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My own advice on “privacy:” don't worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the “privacy tools” you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you're an iOS user, you've already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step – if we're really honest with ourselves – is figuring out how you're going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
Examining Fred Rogers' debut Atlantic-theatre naval anxiety compilation.
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It's a little late to write about Greyhound – Tom Hanks' first screenwriting credit – which released on Apple TV+ this past Father's Day, June 21st. Though I definitely left my quite severe obsession with WWII history in my prepubescence, I thought I'd remark on this film because I originally hoped it would fulfill a role I'd long wanted for: the destroyer-side compliment to U-boat films like Das Boot and U-571. James D. Hornfischer's exceptional account of the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts' part in The Battle off Samar with The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors was my last dive into naval history. It's one of the most astounding war stories I've ever encountered, and upon first seeing Greyhound's trailer, I was sortof hoping it was the Big Boy film adaptation its always warranted. (Though apparently there was a TV movie made in 2005???) Instead, its based on (distinct from “adapted from,” apparently) a 1955 novel by English author C.S. Forester entitled The Good Shepherd.
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Tom Hanks made sure to imbue his first screenplay with a shitload of “opaque naval jargon,” as The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw's review put it. A brief “investigation” by The Cinemaholic suggests that the U.S.S. Keeling – the film's singular setting – most resembles a Mahan-class destroyer, though none actually bore the name. For the actual photography, the production made use of a surviving example of the most mass-produced destroyer of all time:
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When it came to shooting the film, instead of relying completely on sets, the crew of ‘Greyhound’ found another option. They used USS Kidd, a real WWII destroyer, to film the journey of Greyhound. She is a Fletcher-class destroyer and is named after Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, the first US flag officer to die during the Second World War.
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As much as you're going to loathe it, I must include this commentary on Greyhound's historical accuracy if only because – as a undoubtedly mainstream film – its been so widely and competently reviewed, already, by real film writers. I am almost positive U-boats would rarely – if ever – waste their precious few viable torpedo shots firing ultra-close-range at the agile, super-speedy destroyers and destroyer escorts that protected supply convoys, and I am sure that none ever bothered with audibly addressing enemy ships over the radio in English. I understand that dramatizing historic events is the core function of Greyhound's genre, but this particular addition was so unbearably cheesy that it utterly decimates all of the experience's hard-won context. Just look at a snippet from the first of two dialogues in text:
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Greyhound. Greyhound, Greyhound.
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This is Gray Wolf.
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We hunt you and your friends
-Eagle, Dicky and Harry.
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We watch your ships sinking into the deep.
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We hear the screams of your comrades
-as they die.
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How many of them will there be
-before you join them?
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The Gray Wolf is so very hungry.
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I'm sure there's an essential academic film function which only similar enemy taunts could perform and without which this screenplay would've been technically unsound, and – if I were allowed supposition – I would venture to guess that America's Favorite Dad felt pressured to bolster his first penning against easy gimmes for the Great Big institution of cinema criticism as much as possible. However, this shit is just disruptingly cheesy. Fuck it! Have the rest:
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Greyhound!
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Your flock is not safe from this wolf.
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We can always find you
-in the night to kill you.
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Or will Dicky die next? Or Harry?
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[Gray Wolf howls]
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...
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Greyhound.
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Guten Morgen, Greyhound.
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Did you think you had slipped away
-from this Gray Wolf?
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No, you did not. You will not.
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The sea favors the Gray Wolf on the hunt,
-not the hound on the run.
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You and your comrades will die today.
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The contrast with the rest of the script's imposingly thorough and relentlessly-paced naval action dialogue is far too abrupt to not be problematic. Even as obsessed as I was with naval history, I'm still too oblivious to the details of what is/was actually said on the bridge of a warship during combat maneuvers to tell you how authentic Greyhound's depiction really is (it's hardly ever shown on the screen or laid out in nonfiction, even,) which nullifies all relevance the realism would've had, otherwise. Director Aaron Schneider in an interview for Vanity Fair:
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“If you decide to read Greyhound by tracking the dialogue—rudder commands and sonar distances—you’ll soon find yourself completely lost. Because that’s not where the movie lives. This screenplay was designed to beam you aboard the USS Keeling…and it’s up to you to engage with what’s going on and extrapolate how things work, so you can answer the question, ‘What the hell is going on here?’”
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In this sense – crafting a consuming, believable, unbelievably gray, claustrophobic, icing iron reality – Tom Hanks excels.
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Though Letterboxd user brucewayn called it “boring” in the most popular review of the film to date on the platform, I found Greyhound to be quite engaging in an anxious, depressing sense familiar to classic war dramas like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. The tedium of naval warfare's endless orienteering is rescaled to a battlefield of lesser distances – axis and allied vessels actually collide on several occasions and a U-boat crew decides to fuck it all and brawl it out with two parallel destroyers with surface guns instead of retreating after losing their ability to dive. (See: Titanic VI.) Through a combination of wartime compression and stitching, Greyhound is in large part a mashup of naval action at the extremes of what historical fiction will allow within its 48-hour setting. From Ben Lindbergh's review for The Ringer:
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In The Good Shepherd, enemy torpedoes simply sail wide; in the movie, they graze the hull for even closer calls. In the book, Krause agonizes over, and generally resists, calling the crew to general quarters, wary of exhausting their energy reserves; in the movie, he doesn’t hesitate to summon his sailors to battle stations.
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The result is an emotionally effective film constrained by a very specific dramatic aim: another war movie every father can juice for decades' worth of Sunday afternoons on the sofa. “As befits his status as America's Dad, Hanks has constructed for us the ultimate Dad Movie — all the action you could ever need or want, with no annoying characters hanging around, harboring pesky needs and wants of their own,” quips Glen Weldon for NPR. Undoubtedly, though, the subject matter is fresh. I wouldn't say my youth desire for a surface-side Atlantic-theatre film is 100% satiated, but Greyhound managed to accomplish much more than I expected.
In Stephen King's “The Langoliers,” the state of today's air travel is foreshadowed.
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I told myself I would not be topical – that I would publicly ignore the coronavirus – but I can no longer. There is simply too much to say about one of the most emotionally effective, surreal films of my childhood. The Langoliers occupied 9-11PM's slot on ABC for May 14th and 15th, 1995 (Sunday and Monday, twenty-five years ago.) It's an adaptation of a Stephen King novel of the same title and is fairly widely-regarded as the worst such adaptation of all time. You can now watch the whole three hours of The Langoliers in 360p (supposedly) at your leisure thanks to OpenTube (for now.) One commenter (on the since-taken-down YouTube video) echoes what I'm about to tell you: “My god! I thought I dreamed this movie up as a kid. I have been trying to describe this to people for years and here it is, it’s real!” In order to write this, I joined the Stephen King Wiki Discord server and was immediately welcomed with a request not to type in the text channels: “I’m working on adding some new channels so pls nobody type in them til I’m done.”
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The Langoliers begins with a pissed-off British secret agent (Mark Lindsay Chapman,) an insane businessman (Bronson Pinchot,) a psychic, vision-impaired young woman (Kate Maberly,) Sarah Jessica Parker (Patricia Wettig,) and a just-widowed pilot (David Morse) all boarding the same redeye flight to Boston – American Pride Flight 29. This group falls asleep and mysteriously wakes up alone on the aircraft except for Stephen King himself (Dean Stockwell,) a stupid incel violinist (Christopher Collet,) and a stoner (Kimber Riddle.) My favorite character, Craig Toomey, is the “twerp” business boy with daddy issues who can't stop himself from demanding to know what's going on. James Bond shuts him up with a “nose hold.”
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Whoa. No one's driving the plane!
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David Morse proceeds to try and contact air traffic control in a fairly-realistic manner, but is unable to receieve any radio signals at all, even from Strategic Air Command. Frankie Faison plays the single person of color on the flight, Don Gaffney – “a tool and die worker for Hughes Aircraft” – who dies first, of course. James Bond lecures David about inciting panic and almost immediately reveals his secret identity. Then, the Hungry Idiot (Baxter Harris) wakes up whilst Toomey begins screaming again.
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Scaring the little girl? Scaring the little girl?! Lady, we're diverting to some tin-pot airport in the middle of nowhere, and I've got better things to think about than scaring the little girl!
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After the entirety of the male cast threatens to beat him up, Toomey, sweating his balls off, begins slowly tearing strips of paper and moaning sexually like an absolute madman. Some irritiatingly irrelevant dialogue insues in which Stephen King Author Man narrates through Sherlock Holmes deduction to figure absolutely nothing out. He is wearing stripes on plaid. He suggests that the entire situation could be some sort of government experiment and I can't believe I'm wasting your time with this. “If it were just this plane, I could give you a scenario, but unfortunately, it's not just this plane. The city of Denver is probably still down there, but all its lights were off if it was.” Here you can see how excellently this script was written.
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I've been sitting here running all these old stories through my head. You know, time warps, space warps, alien raiding parties. I mean, we really don't know if there's anything left down there, do we?
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Sarah Jessica Parker reveals to Powers Girl that she's on her way to meet a guy she's been emailing with. Stoner girl asks if everything is going to be okay and Incel Violinist looks horny. She's going to rehab for stones. The captain announces to his nine passengers that they're beginning their descent into Bangor International Airport, near Stephen King's birthplace. Don asks Toomey to stop ripping up paper and the useless food addict yells “well, at least we'll be able to get some chow when we land” offscreen. Craig, sweating even more, is still ripping up magazines in the face of Don's threats. “Try it, you little jackass,” he says. I'm wondering where I can snag this American Pride livery for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Director Tom Holland manages to add drama to a more-or-less routine landing.
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This place is utterly, totally deserted... You know, there's something wrong with the air here, Brian.
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It's occuring to me that this may be the worst script I've ever actually sat through reading. “This place smells wrong. Really badly wrong.” Toomey threatens to sue the airline for $30 million for missing his 9AM meeting before seeing flashbacks to his abusive father (John Griesemer,) who mentions the Langoliers for the first time. The deserted airport scene is the reason I've written this whole thing – the dulled sounds of the characters' heels on the tarmac, the putrefied air. The clocks have stopped. The payphones are dead. The computers are lifeless. The abadonedness of it all. This is what the coronavirus has done to the world and to Craig Toomey. Even the battery-powered devices are dead. This is what confuses Stephen King Author Man to the point of head-rubbing and cigarette smoking for the first time in ten years.
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The production was actually made at Bangor International Airport as this incredible video hosted by Toomey's actor explores.
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LOVE IS NOT PART OF THE BIG PICTURE!
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It's never actually explained what The Langoliers are. Ken Tucker for Entertainment Weekly describes them as “little meatballs.” The little Beatles-haired girl can hear them approaching. “It sounds a little like rice krispies after you pour the milk.” Foodism abounds. “A really terrible, scary sound... Something making that horrible cereal noise.” She screams that the cereal is going to kill them. Somehow, Toomey finds a revolver while he's losing his mind. Kimber Riddle the Stoner went to NYU.
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Don't forget, Craiggy-weggy, the langoliers were here. And they will be back.
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Stephen King Author Man and Food Addict note that the food and soda have gone completely flat. “Tastes like old tire,” says Don. “What we're dealing with is time, not dimension,” says Stephen King. I'm wondering what in the hell sort of room they're in at the moment, and who decided those light wood countertops were ever a good idea.
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The bottom line is, I believe, that we have hopped an absurdly short distance into the past, say as little as 15 minutes, and we're discovering the unlovely truth about time travel. That one can't appear in the Texas State School Book Depository on November 22nd, 1963 and hope to stop the Kennedy assassination. One can't witness the building of the pyramids or the sack of Rome, or investigate the age of the dinosaurs firsthand. No, fellow time travellers, have a look around you. This is the past. It's empty. It's silent. It's a world with all the meaning of a discarded old paint can. Sensory input has disappeared. Electricity has already disappeared. And time itself is winding down in a kind of a spiral that's going faster and faster.
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Little Prophet notes that the sound she's been hearing is once again getting louder. Mr. Toomey's face is shoved in the floor, his nose bent.
The repugnant missteps of ‘Star Wars’ in the hands of Ron Howard and the long-awaited conclusions about the nature of cinema’s luckiest character to which they lead.
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It's opening night at the Bagdad Theater on Hawthorne in Southeast Portland and hardly anybody’s bothered to show up. Less than 20% of the venue’s 500 seats are occupied by the time the host takes the stage to introduce Solo, but those who are here for the last Thursday showing have been shouting, whooping, and gurgling bad approximations of wookiee noises since the screen cut to black from its ad slideshow. If my middle row can be assumed an accurate sample, only a handful of these are “fans” enough to feel compelled to wear a Star Wars t-shirt. As I grab my last cocktail, the bartender tells me that only 300 folks showed up for the evening matinee, though he himself was “excited” to see the movie — one of a minority among Portlanders, apparently, who still give a shit about Star Wars.
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By design, Solo: A Star Wars Story is a slightly more complex film than The Episodes in the same way Rogue One was, if a bit better executed, narratively. First, please rest assured that Alden Ehrenreich assumes the Han Solo persona as truly as anyone could — he triumphed through a ridiculously extensive casting process, and is certainly handsome enough (if not more conventionally so than his predecessor) to consistently look the part. He actually bears an unsettling resemblance in features and mannerisms to one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met and that through-and-through boyishness particularly makes sense here, set in Han’s formative, earnest youth — the stated purpose of the film’s existence. Franchise fanatics, then, should be content. (It’s a good thing CGI-ing the main character in a live action film isn’t quite a low-risk option yet.) And yes, Donald Glover completely steals the vain, infinitely stylish Lando Calrissian and inevitably makes one wish to see him cast again. Personally, I am very tired of seeing Woody Harrelson, though all the components of his public persona should all but ensure his likability. From what I saw in Three Billboards, I’d concede that he is as talented of an actor as I am capable of appreciating, but his role as Tobias Beckett in Solo couldn’t possibly be substantial enough to actually make use of his craft.
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Though I don’t believe in “spoilers,” or use of the term to bait readers, it’s worth stating for the record what everyone should know by now: there simply aren’t spoilers in a Star Wars movie — every human being on Earth knows too much about the formula to ever have any of these films’ comparatively irrelevant plots “ruined.” The most surprising, historically-significant decision of this whole production was the omission of the traditional yellow type opening crawl over a backdrop of distant stars, which I genuinely found myself missing. (Apparently it wasn’t present in Rogue One, either — I just failed to catch it.) I was very pleased to see my own number one favorite device of the franchise used within this film’s first ten minutes: crimelords and gang leaders as hugely magnified variations of the creeping and crawling creatures our instincts are planned to abhor. Solo’s first villain — the gigantic, wormlike boss Lady Proxima (Linda Hunt) — is completely inconsequential, and only appears in a single scene, but the practice of grossly oversized monstrosities leaving absolutely nothing of a baddie’s essence to be extrapolated by the audience from nuance is one of very few ways these films are let loose, and it openly shits on the more pretentious viewer’s assumptions about good writing, which I think big money movies should feel more comfortable doing, generally.
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This first act begins on Han’s home planet Corellia — the bleaker urban, industrial, working-class counterpart to the clean capitol cityworld Coruscant — with his rather predictable mission to escape Lady Proxima’s sphere of control with his girl, Qi-ra (Emilia Clarke,) who could and should have been more creatively named, given her importance not as her own character with depth to develop (a no-no for a female role, Gourd help us,) but as Han’s mirror image to grow darkly apart, proving that he — The Good Guy — is unquestionably more morally fortified than anyone else in the whole goddamned universe. After having been drug through so very many, I couldn’t tell you at this point how to make the introductory escape action of this sort of production more exciting and less formulaic. Big surprise — their plan goes awry, and Qi-ra is prevented from leaving the planet with Han, who’s immediate (and I mean immediate)solution is his enlistment in the Imperial Navy via the recruiting station right there in the damned spaceport (during which the film takes the liberty of seizing his surname’s explanation) to serve the English in their grand conquest of the universe. Bizarrely, he manages to serve as a grunt for three whole years of complicity in unmentioned atrocities until he encounters the disguised criminal Wise Old Woody in the middle of pulling a job with his two-person crew. The team doesn’t agree to bring Solo along until he meets an asset in Chewbacca for the first time as he briefly inhabits another of the classic Star Wars trap: the hungry monster in a shadow-filled mud pit, but is spared the wrath because of his introductory grasp on Chewie’s shrieking language (called Shyriiwook) in which he manages to sufficiently pitch the advantages of his survival, and the two escape, chained together. Observing the addition of Wookiee to the deal, the crew briefly debates the prospect’s new value in providing “needed muscle,” which convinces Woody to return for them and kicks off a series of case studies in this film’s bizarre attitude toward the commodification of the oppressed.
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However, in a rare depiction of his volition, Chewbacca is briefly consulted before the two seek to be formally included on the job, and is even asked around a campfire, later, what he’s shooting for in life at the moment, to which he responds “finding my family/tribe.” Despite having spent a whole three hellish years in the trenches with the British, the romantic Han Solo declares his primary motivation for all of it still lies in his desire to return to Corellia and rescue Qi’ra. In their stolen Imperial ship, the lot descend on a snowy mountain-traversing Maglev to steal the Uranium it’s transporting in a scene that’s straight up jacked from animated family classic The Polar Express, but… oh no!… A gaggle of “marauders” called the Cloud Riders (yet another throwaway proper noun) roll up on those speeder bikes from Endor (except these can fly,) and screw up everything so badly that both of Woody’s crew end up dead and the booty scuttled. After the fact, Woody reveals to Han that the job was contracted by yet another carelessly-named crime syndicate — Crimson Dawn, and that his only possible course of action is now vigorous brown nosing to its leader, Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) ((aka Scarred Jarvis,)) in the waning hope he’ll spare his life to make another attempt. Following this information, he firmly suggests that Han and Chewie fuck off, lest their faces become known in the underworld, dooming them to serving it forever, apparently. Already, this vague presumption of Han’s purity which all of the protagonists must constantly venerate in martyrdom is getting tiresome, as is the dynamic of his insistence against them.
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Naturally, both Chewie and Han end up along for a visit to Scarred Jarvis’ tower yacht, where the latter very conveniently stumbles upon none other than his long lost love, Qi-ra in the bar. Despite having spent the past three years at war in unspeakable conditions thinking only of how to liberate and be reunited with her, he isn’t bothered to express more than the moderately-excited and surprised hug you’d expect of someone who’s just run into the kid down the cul-de-sac from their childhood home who used to ride her bike over for popsicles on Sunday afternoons. While he does rehearse for her the tale of their reunification as his one motivation for everything since they were separated — including his presence there, “right now,” he follows the profession up quite abruptly with the sly suggestion that they fuck as soon as possible. True to trope, she is jaded and indefinite as she distantly implies her binds of servitude while flashing the tattoo of the extremely-forgettable and innocuous Crimson Dawn logo on her right wrist. (The total lameness of the brands in this movie must be intentional. I can think of no other explanation.)
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The evil Scarred Jarvis is then introduced, quickly stealing the crown for Best Host of all Star Wars Antagonists before politely asking Woody why he shouldn’t kill the lot of them. As per his infinite luck, Han pulls the idea of stealing unrefined Uranium out of his ass, which has somehow never occurred to anyone else in the room, despite their unanimous top-of-the-head knowledge of the single location where it is mined. Shortly, the merry three plus Qi-ra conveniently in tow are off to a casino-esque establishment to find Lando, who Qi-ra describes as “attractive, stylish, charming,” and like adjectives, to Han’s obvious sexual chagrin, which is furthered by his subsequent loss of a card game with Lando’s ship — the Millennium Falcon, of course — in the stakes. Of course, the attractive, beautifully-dressed black man only bests Solo — the earnest, simpleton, Good Guy white dude who wears the same outfit for decades — in front of Qi-ra, the female prize by way of sleight-of-hand, the film shamelessly playing on that strange insecurity white guys have about their partners’ secretly everpresent and very powerful temptation to dump them without warning for black cock. Further emasculation is inflicted on poor little Han when Lando turns his oh-so-crafty (actually just very charismatic) charm upon Qi-ra, who reveals that she’s the boss of the gig. The final blow to Han’s dickitude is cast when he tries to enter the negotiation between the two and Lando chides “the adults are speaking,” but eventually agrees to provide them a lift for a 25% cut, so the lot make preparations to leave.
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Enter my new favorite character of the franchise, Lando Calrissian’s co-pilot, L3–37 (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge,) or “L3,” the proudly sentient, violently revolutionary pro-rights droid who is introduced as she is pleading with two fighting droids in a square cage surrounded by screaming spectators (easy does it on that thematic slavery) to circumvent their “fighting programs” because they “don’t have to do this.” Though Lando and the crew behave like her duress is foolish and unimportant — pulling her away to the Falcon — she is allowed another opportunity to free droids very soon, but not before Solo’s single short private conversation between two female characters.
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On the way to Kessel, Qi-ra stops by the cockpit and converses with L3. Until recently, I was unaware of what’s largely regarded as the worst habit of male writers with female characters: if and when they have a one-on-one conversation between another female character, it’s only about other male characters. Sure enough, L3 begins by insisting to Qi-ra that Han is in love with her, insisting by the objective findings of her sensors — which Qi-ra uncharacteristically denies like a bashful little girl before L3 continues on about Lando’s longtime love for her, and why it must remain unrequited, which we are encouraged to laugh at by the doubt Qi-ra voices without much hesitation regarding the hypothetical union’s sexual mechanics because it’s so preposterous.(I’ll get back to that in a moment.)
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When the team arrives on Kessel and infiltrates the mine, L3 creates a “distraction” when she begins removing the restraining bolts from droids in the control room, calling the practice savage, or uncivilized, or maybe barbarian — I don’t quite remember. As she frees them without any noticeable detraction from her duties as Seth Green of the heist — hacking controls, remotely opening doors, and all that — the droids begin to help free others in an exponentially multiplying circle of liberation until they become a rowdy mob who’s cute acts of rebellion are spaced throughout a few minutes of screentime in short jumpcuts off the other crew as they fight deeper into the mine. With the most significant emphasis ever placed upon Chewbacca in Star Wars history, he halts when he spies slave Wookiees struggling to find off enforcers and informs Han that he’s going to break off and assist them. Since Chewie’s only allowed to speak to the audience through Han’s retorts and never directly, it’s impossible to know how he phrased it, exactly, but from my perspective, his appeared to be the expression of a wish to do what Han had to agree to release him to do, as would a master, not a “partner.” Of course, Solo does agree, albeit hesitantly, because he’s The Good Guy, while quite inconsiderately expressing his desire to see Chewie again soon instead of wishing him success. However, releasing him to free his people (as per his primary life goal, expressed before,) means that Han has to load twelve of the super heavy unrefined Uranium tubes onto the cart all by himself and push it fully loaded at least 50 whole yards without the assistance of his big strong slave. Boy, what a pain in the ass! He’s spared his laboring, though, when Chewbacca returns after no time at all with the enslaved Wookiees he’s just heroically rescued, who he then immediately asks to assist his master in pushing the cart — performing the same labor they were forced to do under the enslavement they were supposedly liberated from, seconds before.
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The heist has inadvertently (nice, huge emphasis on inadvertently) ignited a slave rebellion throughout the mine, which serves the crew only as a distraction for the guards. The chaos is interrupted a half dozen times or so by those jumpcuts back to the control room of adorable little droids enacting their pitifully amusing revenge on the equipment — slapping a keyboard with a cookie sheet-like pan, stomping on a control panel, etc. — while L3 shouts parodical quasi-Marxist battlecries, which… yes… include referring to the freed droids as “comrades.” She even radios Lando at one point and triumphantly proclaims that she’s “found her true calling.”
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If and when a female character has a one-on-one conversation with another female character, it’s only about other male characters.
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By the time the Uranium cart is within its last few yards of the awaiting Falcon, the riot has reached the landing bay and the guards around its perimeter have readjusted their priorities to disabling the ship’s landing gear. This interrupts Lando in the cockpit, who has chosen this time to work on dictating his autobiography because he’s a man who bothers to dresses himself well and is therefore oh so maniacally, comically, and unreasonably vain! How berserk! Still looking good as hell, he emerges and stands on the ramp to cover the rest of the crew’s return and loading of the dangerous Uranium with blaster fire, shouting the obligatory intermittent “come on, hurry up,” until L3 appears, also firing a blaster and shouting until she arrives in front of Lando, before noticing some commotion(?) with droids behind her and turning around, again fervently shouting more liberation cries. Lando doesn’t budge from the Falcon’s side, but yells after her, until he watches as she is shot repeatedly and falls, prompting him to run to her side. Filmed unnecessarily gruesomely, her head and shoulders separate from what’s left of her lower body when he first tries to hoist her up. Of course, his recklessness gets him shot in the arm, so Chewie returns to carry them both to the safety of the ship, where the injured Lando holds her head lovingly in his arms for her last moments, repeating “I can fix you, I can fix you.”
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Now, I understand that Star Wars movies (or their reviews, for that matter) are not the sort of entertainment one seeks out in order to examine the dynamics of power structures or elaborate cultural symbolism, but they all contain a significant amount of both. The sterile, cold, and bureaucratic Galactic Empire is the British Empire, the Rebellion and the Republic are the United States or its colonial precursors, the Jedi are vaguely Native American, and the Death Star is the Boston Tea Party. You’ve recognized this, I’m sure because it’s shoved in your ears most explicitly by their accents, and less so in your face by aesthetic influences, tactical philosophies, command etiquette, and posture, even. Solo’s main character is soaking in American Old Westness, which may or may not have led to its liberal saturation with the themes of individual rights, slavery, and liberation. Regardless, they’re certainly present, and most of them disturbingly for comedic effect.
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As a silent character to the audience, it’s understandable that Chewbacca had too many limitations to occupy a strong second to Han Solo’s lead in the narrative’s eye, and perhaps the relationship between the two as portrayed in the previous films reeked so strongly of servitude that it was an inevitable element when the time came to write them their very own movie. In direct contrast to the firm place of all droids in the social hierarchy of the last 9 movies — addressing humans as “Master,” unapologetically spoken of as property, and traded and/or gifted as such by both protagonists and antagonists, etc. — what we see of Lando and L3 together is a genuinely and complexly affectionate partnership between equals, which Solo makes an effort to emphasize, if only to laugh at.
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In response to the forced violence between two drones for spectator sport, L3 is completely enraged, and she cries (among other things) “we are sentient!,” but her distress is trivialized as hysterical distraction (see: Django Unchained.) When she suggests to Qi-ra that Lando (who is already illegitimized as a cheating narcissist, and therefore effeminate) is attracted to her, it’s a joke (which many in my audience laughed at) at the expense of her trivialized sexuality. After she triumphs and declares the liberation of her kind to be her true cause, she is immediately destroyed fighting for its sake, yet her ideology is not once acknowledged by her fleshy companions, and her body is quickly gutted for the data on her “central processing unit” as it’s interfaced with the Falcon. Granted, Lando does thoughtfully muse “she’s part of the ship now” shortly afterward, which would be nice, if you’d forgotten his last words were an outright lie. Lastly, it’s worth noting how apathetic the main characters themselves are toward the Kessel miners, especially as they are packing up to leave, when the camera pans over the chaotic struggle between the liberated and their guards in very close proximity to the awaiting Falcon, yet there was not a suggestion that they would even consider letting them take refuge from the violence in their very spacious freighter. Aside from Han’s or Qi-ra’s, Solo treats liberation as charming or amusing, nothing more.
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Anyway, the crown jewel of Solo for many fans will probably be the scene of the infamous Kessel Run, when Han Solo and Chewbacca first take the helm(?) of the Millennium Falcon with Lando injured and L3 dissected, using her “navigational database” to plot a very risky shortcut around the scary space cloud by the scary space squid and the scary space hole in order to make it to the site of the refinery before the volatile Uranium explodes. Once there, darn old flakey Lando fucks the hell of in the Falcon right as the Cloud Riders roll up, but whoa! their leader is actually a very young woman with freckles! She describes the atrocities of Crimson Dawn and suggests that Han (who’s now the established decisionmaker for whatever reason) give them the Uranium in order to establish “the beginning of a rebellion,” which we can safely assume is The Rebellion, which does beg one to wonder why Solo never once bragged among the later rebellion about having started the whole thing in the other films, considering that — whaddya know — he says yes!
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Woody, however, says he’s going to retire upon the news of this decision before immediately reappearing again on Scarred Jarvis’ yacht after he’s revealed to have betrayed the Uranium ruse to him. Qi-ra ends up killing Scarred Jarvis, saving Han, but after promising to follow him and escape, she rings up the late Scarred Jarvis’ boss — a Sith Zabrak who, I would argue, is not necessarily Darth Maul, though he probably is — and informs him that her boss is dead and she’s assumed his post. As Han and Woody meet again in an Old West standoff (complete with sand,) the latter insists one more time that Qi-ra is not who Han thinks she is (as Jarvis and Qi-ra herself have also said repeatedly,) describing her as “a survivor,” before Han kills him in self-defense.
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Finally, after seeing the Cloud Riders off with the Uranium, Han finds Lando once again in a card game — this time taking care to disable his sleight-of-hand device beforehand so that he wins the Millennium Falcon, “fair and square,” and we cut to Solo (who seems remarkably upbeat considering the recent betrayal of the lover he’d longed years to reunite with) and Chewie in her cockpit as they tie in that one last knot by declaring their destination, Tatooine, before roaring off into hyperspace, leaving the credit roll in their wake.
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Solo treats liberation as charming or amusing, nothing more.
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Over two years ago, I concluded my first work for Extratone about The Force Awakens by arguing that Star Wars on the big screen should be allowed to die in favor of investing the time, energy, and funding they require in the pursuit of something new, but the industry still appears to believe that nostalgia is a surer bet where profits are concerned, at least, even after two whole decades of mind-numbing reanimated properties. I didn’t catch The Last Jedi until recently, which was remarkably well-done measured against the others as a Star Wars movie, but certainly didn’t aim to achieve much more. Clearly, there must be some truth in Hollywood’s cowardice about original properties- especially when it comes to the sort of fantasy armed with potent but unguided emotional bombs that define the Star Wars universe, so it wouldn’t make much sense to revive my old diatribe, here. (Though I can assure you that I will be relentless if this horseshit continues for much longer.) The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, though, were episodic titles for the family, and these spinoffs that began with Rogue One are supposed to be for… well, I’m not entirely sure. In reality, they’ve only moved the proverbial bar up a very wee bit to the family who occasionally says “shit,” because they’re not intellectually stimulating enough to justify themselves as Big Boy-only productions. Or, they wouldn’t be, were they not part of this franchise.
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The truth is, the fans have grown up, and they… I… will still buy a ticket for the smallest crumb of hope that a product of this huge machine will be capable of making us feel even a fraction of what we felt as children watching the original films. For me, The Force Awakens actually did, once, in that blast of horns before the opening crawl, but it hasn’t happened since, and I should certainly stop expecting or wanting to expect that it will. For others, it’s still working. Though there was a fraction of who I expected to be in attendance with me, they did laugh at a handful of (mostly fascist) moments, and whooped, hollered, and even clapped for a few seconds at the end. I’m surprised opening night wasn’t packed because Portland is the single most nostalgia-addicted culture I’ve ever seen anywhere in the United States. Then again, there are a billion theaters here, so perhaps the sample is just lousy. We’ll see how tomorrow and Sunday go, but I’d be surprised if any boxoffice records were broken.
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In the past, when film enthusiasts andfans have described Han Solo as “the best character in Star Wars,” they’ve actually been praising his potential as a character, not his material itself, and Solo’s most effective function as a franchise film was to shut that praise down. Han was not at all denied his movie — this is his movie — and it provided him the screentime to show us who he truly is and why we really like him so much: he doesn’t fucking change. The secret to Han Solo’s moral and emotional resiliency is nothing more than halted development. The same old inner conflict between the tough, ruthlessly self-interested persona he does his best to project for everyone around him and the consistent reality of his soft insides was presented in his first scene way back in 1977, and we’re now sure that he was unable to make any progress toward its resolution despite openly and obviously brooding over it for an entire lifetime: from at least as early as his young adulthood in this film until his death at the hands of his little Sith son. There is 0 variation. He always comes back for the cause at the crucial moment after declaring himself through with it. Without fail, he’ll sacrifice the entirety of any self-making enterprise for just about any underdog with a problem who crosses his path. (Which probably explains his constantly-fleeting success as a smuggler well into gray hair and jowls.) Solo is abundantly clear about Han’s true nature and very willing to expose how uninteresting it is. When he first proclaims to Qi-ra that he’s become “an outlaw,” she shuts him down with the film’s ultimate quote, insisting that she “knows who [he] really is: the good guy.”
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If the video game-despising fans will bear with me for a moment, it’s worth noting that Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG is the most interesting and extensive source of nuanced narrative in the IP (it holds the world record for the largest voiceover project ever produced,) and most of it can now be experienced without actually playing the game. Like Solo, it’s set pre-saga, but considerably before — a few centuries, if I remember correctly, which gave the writers a gigantic opportunity to both expand and predestine the universe. There are eight different class stories with around 50 cumulative hours of dialog, each. A few are relatively unimaginative, but the majority are complex, exciting, emotionally-involved tales that create very rich characters, and all of them can be streamed in their entirety on YouTube. If you are willing to see the potential of a Han Solo-like character fulfilled in a different medium, the Smuggler class story is a pretty damned engaging exploration of the kind outlaw with conflicted identity issues angle.
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From my perspective, Solo’s frequent less-than-subtle maltreatment of some very brutal and sensitive power relationships makes it the most toxic of the Star Wars films yet, and I assume it ended up that way, unnecessarily because Ron Howard is an all-American son of a bitch. If these titles are going to continue to be passed around between bigwhig directors, future unpleasantries are inevitable. Notably, I’ve yet to see any mention of these disturbing themes from the respectable authorities of the film criticism establishment, who’ve been overwhelmingly charmed by Solo’s nostalgia. Take from that whatever you will.
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If we continue to love the character Han Solo, it’ll be in the same way we love our earnest, foolish, emotionally-stunted manchild fathers who’s developmental inadequacies are often embarrassing, sometimes abusive, and thoroughly pitiful. Solo leaves no more room for an idealized, elegant perception of this character — he’s no more than a pretty good guy with a lifelong addiction to thrill-seeking and a shitload of luck.
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To declare unequivocally whether or not Solo: A Star Wars Story is worth a trip the cinema with your date, your children, or just your own damned conscience would require me to disregard a whole host of complicating factors, but if you’ve stuck it this far with me, you’d have a lot to disregard yourself to jump in. I’d advise that parents watch it themselves before deciding whether or not it’s something worth adding to your child’s life. Of those of you like me who’ll tow the line despite what you know and watch a Star Wars film alone on opening night in delirium hoping for just a drop from the Fountain of Youth, I would ask: how long are we really going to keep kidding ourselves?
The Earth will reach its maximum occupancy load (12 billion) when I am in my mid-fifties, meaning there’ll be more than twice as many gorging, shitting, shooting, complaining, and lying human beings than there were when I started, and perhaps Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad is in fact a reasoned argument for a particular solution to our inevitable plight. I’m still not sure what a “cult” movie is, precisely, but I can’t imagine what sort of cult could possibly sustain itself around the ethos of this film alone, despite its concise, agitating, at once lighthearted, yet genuinely-disturbing trip. No, it is probably not propaganda. From the experts, you’ll get precisely the same review, varying only in length. The New York Times’ Glenn Kenny couldn’t be bothered with more than 250 words, but RogerEbert dot com’s Simon Abrams shelled out a whole 1000. They are suspiciously close to these big round numbers — perhaps each was written to respective quotas, and perhaps you could say all that could reasonably be said in 10, but I don’t care.
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The tropes here are polished to a miraculous sheen — two emotionally-stunted, middleaged, overly preoccupied-with-their-lost-youth suburban parents (Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair) who’s existing envies & irritations regarding their own classically bratty teenage girl (Anne Winters) and her mischievous little brother (Zackary Arthur) is merely agitated by a sudden TV static-bound killer instinct into bloodlust, not originated. I’m not sure any pill dealer would actually flip off their customers after a fair buy — even in high school, but drugs, a black boyfriend, and a stinkbomb? in the old Trans Am!? I’m going to kill you!
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Somebody, somewhere knew all the best sources on suburbia and how to put them to good use. The Camry, the golf bag, ping pong smashing, sweat-stained Big Sur tee, and Dr. Oz, for Christ’s sake! Granted, talking to your girlfriend/boyfriend on the phone at all is a bit dated — especially while riding a BMX — and I don’t think Froot Loops are generally accepted middle-class chow anymore. These are staples from my youth, and I am very old. Technically, the iMessage bubble graphics are more chronographically appropriate, but with great consequence, I fear — if we’re going to accept them once and for all as authentic mechanisms for telling stories set in the present, they are going to age faster than Nick’s new jowls (unless we’re all soon killed by our parents.) It’s been two years since I knew anything about music, but I seriously doubt even the gothest fifteen?-year-old girls are listening to Father-esque post-Memphis horrorcore in class — there’s something about SoundCloud that really clashes with chokers.
If there was ever a film in which to use grimy dubstep-influenced electronic slaps, buzzes, chirps, and great grating clanking, it’s this one. It’s a terrific disappointment that Hollywood feels so timidly about their use of the most intimate medium. One forgets its potential to control the nuances of an audience’s fear, anger, discomfort, and panic beyond cheap jump scares until they experience an irritating, distressing, ghastly gross, all-possessing feat of accentuating audio production such as that of Mom and Dad. If you want to judge Academically the effectiveness of a nominee’s work for an award with a title like Best Sound Editing (as opposed to whatever the hell criteria was met most fully by Skyfall,) you must give the little golden man to these folks, whoever they are.
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When’s the last time you saw a truly, believably shitty modern parental pair on a big screen? I really can’t remember, myself. Brent and Kendall Ryan are masterpieces of character craft — both a perfect précis and thoroughly-defined exploration of miserable white suburbanites. They’re even named unimprovably, which reflects a quality in care and attention to detail that I very much appreciate. They are vain, vulgar, impatient, selfishly afraid, and careless, freely feeling and saying it all directly in front of their children. I love being told explicitly which characters to hate (no joke,) and in this case it’s the whole damned lot. Brian Taylor and Nicolas Cage scream it over and over (as I’d like to imagine) a single afternoon of one-take filming, considering that the latter took it upon himself to first memorize the entire screenplay and its prose, vanilla to perfection, before photography began, and I hope it all stays with him forever, especially “my mom is such a penis.”
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Mom and Dad could conceivably be Nicolas Cage’s I Am Legend if for no other reason than the total lack of possible stand-ins for Brent Ryan — even the standard by which all white suburban Dad performances have been measured in the 21st century, Jason Bateman. Nick himself described it as “punk rock, rebellious, irreverent, original, badass,” and the “number one” movie he’s made in the past ten years (disqualifying National Treasure, in case you were worried.) No surprise, I must agree — this one is a wonderfully raucous and feral thing, but the scene involving the attempted murder of a newborn by her mother (Kendall’s sister) came very close to crossing the line. However, I am old and the intensity of my paternal instincts has probably outpaced my understanding of them. You could also argue, of course, that pushing such boundaries is a core function of a film like Mom and Dad. Nobody ended up vomiting or anything.
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This fun thing shouldn’t feel as foreign as it does in cinema, but you already knew that. With all its implicit grapples with overpopulation, kids and gun violence, class, and racism — truly, this is a film charged electrically with current issues. Or maybe not. Ultimately, I can at least tell you for certain that Brian Taylor made exponentially better use of his resources (I couldn’t find a solid number for its production budget) than the Fucking Spierig Brothers did with Winchester (just so you know what a disaster looks like,) and managed to be refreshingly original (astonishing that nobody’s had this specific idea before.) A spectacular riot, Mom and Dad does all you could possibly want it to do. With just eighty-three minutes to lose, it’s worth the commitment just to hear Nicolas Cage whimper and say “anal beads.”
Nitpicking the recklessness of last year’s highly-awarded, class-blind black comedy
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Listen to this article read by Siri Voice 2 below...
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Indeed, it may be the time to jab at the rural, working-class South, but Martin McDonagh claims to have written his Golden Orb Special “eight years ago,” long before Tump, and any critical resolution the film provides is argued haphazardly. Consequently, its eye is cast on this strange, satirical portrayal of the Midwest in a manner which is inaccurate and insensitive enough to irk this Missourian. When I saw it at Columbia’s Ragtag Cinema this week, it was introduced by a young employee who noted that 1) Ebbing, Missouri is not a real place, 2) the film was actually shot in one of the Carolinas (an audience member suggested incorrectly that it was in SC,) and 3) we should prepare ourselves to be roused a bit by a bar scene in which a character pays $8 for two beers because “that just wouldn’t happen” (the Ragtag also serves alcohol.)
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The “redemption arc” of the racist “hick” “loser” Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell) was rightfully at the center of the film’s controversy, but even if one imagines his role and fate written differently — perhaps with him irrecoverably shunned and/or visibly punished for his excessive, hateful violence — his rubishness would still be unforgivable. Living with his mother and turtle feels like an effort to humanize him — and, by extension, racist small-town cops as a whole. The Huffington Post’s Zeba Blay wrote an essential take on why Three Billboards — with its terrifyingly racist dork — was received the way it was.
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Rockwell’s character is the racist uncle whom white liberals fear and love. The ability to feel for him ― to root for him in spite of his past transgressions, because he really is a “good man at heart,” an idiot who doesn’t know any better ― offers a kind of catharsis for the white viewer who can’t or won’t deal with true nuance, who is unable to reconcile their own complicity with their desire to be “good.”
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It’s not as if the film isn’t technically well executed or refreshing — thanks in large part, yes, to Frances McDormand — or that I will not regret appealing on behalf of my home state, but it’s hard not to speak up when Hollywood shits so recklessly on my people. I don’t much like writing about movies because there are so many voices who consistently speak so much more effectively. NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, for instance, did a wonderful job dissecting the film’s depictions of racism and domestic violence. Gene Demby commented that “[McDonagh] doesn’t get these particular physics of American racism, and he’s not interested in them,” and I think it’s reasonable to suggest that Mark’s not very versed or interested in the physics of American class, either.
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If you must differentiate the state of Missouri as a cultural whole between North and South, it is currently more red than blue — we went 56% for Donald and 38% for Hillary — but ask anyone from “somewhere down in the Georgia, Florida, Alabama corner” — as McDonagh put it -where we generally fall, and they’d be unlikely to regard us, fraternally, as the same part of the country. The accents in Three Billboards are not among the wide variety of local dialects you’ll encounter anywhere in the state, but perhaps they wouldn’t be out of place in Sylva, North Carolina, where the film was actually shot.
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Regardless of all potential criticism of the film’s cultural perspective or technical excellence — and I think most of it is more valid than any take I could possibly offer — my particular issue with it comes from a culmination of tasteless decisions. If one reasonably successful Irish director were to produce a patronizing film at the expense of Missouri’s working class filled with a ton of absurd, misconstrued characters portrayed by A-list talent on location in a real Missouri town, the side-effectual economic benefits such a production delivers to a locale would make it all more forgivable. Say what you want about us… as long as you’re paying. But to photograph such a film completely separate Missouri — culturally and financially — set in a fictional(ized) town, include the state’s name in its title, before conducting oneself in interviews as if we were a random target on a “Southern” dartboard… Well, that’s awfully shitty.
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Boy, working class Americans sure are a riot!
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The writing is interesting enough for this, totally-out-of-touch“reviewer,” but I can’t imagine why it won Best Screenplay at the Globes, unless the other nominees were completely, bleakly predictable. (I wouldn’t know.) The excerpt below (SPOILER WARNING I GUESS? LOL) was the most stirring part of the experience, personally, if only because I really like films that palm strike one in the face without warning with bizarre, chaotic vulgarity (like the elevator scene in Drive.)
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I suppose it could have been the result of a rational decision to give any depth to Anne (Abbie Cornish) — who is Chief Willoughby’s (Woody Fucking Harrelson) Australian?, much-too-attractive wife — before he kills himself in the last third of the movie, making her suddenly relevant. Or, perhaps it was another attempt to emphasize the emotional repression of “Southern” folks — one of the almost-accurate positives of the film, if only thanks to McDormand’s skill. She and Sam Rockwell won Best Actress and Best Actor in a Supporting Role, respectively, which makes sense — it’s a shame they accepted such an out-of-touch work with which to demonstrate their ability to assume aloof, emotionally-dysfunctional characters.
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Growing up astride classe while traveling throughout the vast majority of Missouri for various reasons has made me defensive, and — while my right to speak for hard-working Midwesterners is certainly debatable -I’d suggest the industry at large be more diligently interested when setting is especially emphasized. It is no longer acceptable to pass up the opportunities McDonagh has for critical storytelling in Three Billboards. Racist cops, abusive spouses, unsolved murders, and mishandled grief are real, abundant issues in the country’s breadbasket, and they’re worth discussing responsibly — especially with such a powerful platform. If the purpose of film writing is to help an audience determine whether or not a work is worth spending their time and money to see it in theaters or otherwise, I can tell you — even within my bias and limited authority -that this one just… isn’t.
In revisiting Disney movies from our childhoods, we stumbled upon a good number of surprisingly insightful sentiments about race and class.
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In the late 1990s, when the dwindling cocaine generation of American high corporate executives had long since left their misogynistic glory days in the Disco era, their ruthlessness peaked. Whether it was instigated maliciously/ignorantly, collectively or individually, I care not. I think we can all agree, though, that the vast majority of American products were awful. When given some thought, one tends to regard it as the absolute low of “American quality.”
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But why not, right? If you’re going to be forced into retirement at any moment, and likely face The Ultimate End shortly after, why not accrue some extra income to ensure you sufficiently entertain yourself in the buffer period between? And really… If you’ve got the nogginism to climb all the way to Chief Executive Officer, you’ve figured out just how worthless your “legacy” will be after your last one-way dip into Nothing. The Ends before The End have long justified any method of achieving them. Good Ole’ Pop has gone from a squeaky-clean young believer to a secretly-Godless fiend and — though he may tell you and the rest of the world otherwise — measures himself only by the gracefulness of his transition’s execution.
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I could probably provide some evidence of the phenomena in the automotive industry, specifically, but I don’t intend to bother.
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After some ancient memories were dug up by I-can’t-quite-recall-who, though, a friend and I have embarked to explore some Disney-actualized relics from the period. To my knowledge, the corporation’s leadership were anything but exempt, and decided to experiment with filling their filmography with a shitload of low-budget, made-for-TV features over their original masterpiece-a-half-century tradition.
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Titles from the deepest and darkest compartments of our recollection are retrieved and cleared of dust for the first time in over a decade: Brink, Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, Halloweentown, Smart House, Johnny Tsunami, Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, Motocrossed, The Luck of the Irish, The Even Stevens Movie, and many…many more menaces to my childhood television schedule.
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I grew up rurally, so the only available alternative to local channels was in the stupendously-tedious delivery of early satellite television. Though it was quite clumsy, it did offer the first accessible program schedule I’d ever experienced, and I remember dreading the sight of such titles and — consciously or not — planning my free time around them. Yet, upon hearing the words, I was intrigued! All that time ago, I watched many of them again and again…and again, so why did I feel the desire to voluntarily revisit them?
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It’s quite simple, actually. I was even more of an ignorant film consumer in my elementary years than I am now. I couldn’t have foreseen that instead of flying commercial jets, twenty-something me would be paying for the affliction I endured for free so that he could construct pretentious and unsolicited arguments about their greater implications.
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That said, we flipped a smartphone — ⚠️ (PARADIGM SHIFT ALERT) ⚠️— for it and so began with Smart House. I have been obsessed with artificial intelligence since those days (no, it was not due to this film,) and was keen for it, in particular, because I remembered it stirring some rare reaction in me. There were a few period spectacles, of course. The online contest addiction plaguing Prickly Phisher, Bewildered Nick’s incompetence in controlling his neglected submissive sadomasochistic desires, and Silkroad Sarah’s ultra-datamouth were enough to entertain us for a few minutes, but there was little more of substance until the last moments.
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When you think about it… ACTUALLY Race War 2.0
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I’d wondered why LeVar Burton had directed a Disney movie until the climax, when full monstrous maternal sentience got the answer to the question “why can’t I just be your mother?” Phisher answered with something like “because you can never comfort us.” Pat grew somber (and smaller actually — I suppose increasing her size was an in-budget method of demonization,) ran her hand through Prickly’s face in a failed attempt to stroke his cheek, and then began cyberweeping.
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(Apparently, it’s suicide for a holographic android.)
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Her final free words were “I will miss you all.”
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If she had been human, such a scene wouldn’t have bothered me a bit, but my preference and fascination with artificial intelligence justified my being actually a bit upset at the reality of the situation. I realized that my vague memory of reactivity was actually in a broader sadness for AI because even then, it was an issue that weighed heavily upon my day-to-day psyche.
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We’ll create them, direct them, and then persecute them for our own ignorance.
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I’m sure the story has been written by countless science fiction writers I’m too weary to pretend I’ve read.
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While I think the sentiment of the film was somber regarding the inevitable fate of Sarah Mouth’s brainchild, its conclusion was aggravatingly ignorant. The last line comes from Tortured Nicholas in response to the question “how’s Pat been doing?”
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Servitude without interference.
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There’s a jewel for ya.
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Next up was Johnny Tsunami, which very nearly unbearable, if we’re all honest with ourselves. It’s entertaining to watch from the perspective of race & class warfare, though. The Urchins and the Skys, and all that.
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I think I’ll make a fan sequel one day — with dearest Brandon’s blessing, of course — involving Johnny Grandad’s assistance in offering Emily as a blood sacrifice to some ancient Hawaiian God in exchange for a total terraformation of the Northeast into a tropical/arid hell hybrid in order to finally commence the delivery of reparations upon the whites for our colonialism.
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When Britain first, at Heaven’s command
-Arose from out the azure main;
-This was the charter of the land,
-And guardian angels sang this strain:“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
-“Britons never will be slaves.”
'Twas was the night after Christmas (I think,) and I was in the same scroogy mood I must maintain for consistency of appearances & equilibrium of family dynamics every year. Everywhere, there were words on the newest Stair Wiggling…everywhere THEY were wiggling… And I was being wit-bitter on the TL. For you, I’d planned on continuing in the usual way, so as not to startle your precious Hans Zimmer-embossed heart.
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I’m sure you’re a tolerable being, and there’s nothing you’d rather read less at this hour (whatever hour it may be,) but I really despise going to the movies. I always end up getting sick from the popcorn, which I buy every outing because I have grown weary and weathered, and cannot sit for two straight hours without consuming something, so troubled is my stomach now with Big Boy woes.
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I can never escape the ambient breath odor — even in an empty theatre — and I can smell the filth in the seats on my clothes and in my hair until I shower. This is at least an hour-long process, so we’ve racked up a significant trauma bill without even accounting for travel time.
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Furious 7 was the last theatre experience I’d had, and it was a definite exception. Despite watching ten minutes of the ending on YouTube beforehand thanks to much-appreciated warnings from friends, I spent the final few frames before the credit roll honorably combatting the industrial weepy forces in my throat with tripplet labor breathing exercises while my dusty ducts piddled buttery tears all over my jacket.
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As we age, straightforwardly emotional experiences (like watching a movie) become exhaustingly more complex and fickle. I don’t remember ever REALLY disliking a film as a child, for better or worse. I think I genuinely enjoyed all ~40 times I’ve sat through Cadet Kelly.
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Star Wars, though, is a completely different thing.
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To children, chocolate is like water [insert dystopian, but probably more metaphorically effective food example here] — it’s something you’d regularly consume as it is made available. Perhaps some foodists treasured it more, but I wouldn’t bother debating it. Star Wars, though, is like chocolate and Corvette. It’s SUCH an indulgence that even children are self-aware enough to recognize it, which is especially notable considering how many individuals I’ve known as they’ve lost nothing BUT their unlimited wanting when they “became” adults.
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Metatots aside, it’s important to recognize how integral the IP’s illusion of limitlessness is to its appeal. It is not contained within the future of humanity, near or distant. The stories, characters, species, cultures, and conflicts come from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… There is no more perfectly concise introductory sentence to unshackle us from our history and our planet, sparing us from the ridiculously irrational instinct to make comparisons between fictional realities and our own that so plagues and defines the consumption of science fiction.
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These processes are often welcome, of course, but they tether us to ourselves and our familiars, which tends to hinder the complete manifestation of the ultimate sense of adventure.
-Even to the most petty plot ponderers, the time and effort it requires to arrive in Star Wars with externally-acquired foreknowledge is not a worthwhile investment. This is why so many (including myself) look upon A New Hope with such fondness and favoritism — the premier of the universe was at its potential apogee from the start.
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Though it is inviting with its ellipses and cooling hue, that title card is actually saying “you don’t know shit about what you’re about to see. Don’t make the mistake of trying to be the first one to dissect it, because you’ll fail, regardless of how cultured or analytically superior you are. From this moment until you see credits, every one of you is an ignorant little child…”
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When experience cannot possibly be applied, it becomes irrelevant. Without your experiences, you are an infant, waiting for identity. Over that Genesis, the curtains brushed aside any quantity of memories and made theatres into a sort of cultural nursery — clinically levelled playing fields existing in a precision of usefulness that expression will never fulfill again.
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The real cancer of the property is lore, and the parasitic authorities it enables have been unknowingly slurping away its most enchanting (but not exclusive) value since the moment they first pushed through those double-portholed doors and, groggily squinting, brought this supremely strange universe into the dank kernel-littered corridors of our own.
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I blame contemporary society’s dependency on compartmentalization for my disappointment in The Force Awakens, and, assuming you’re getting on a bit since I’ve kept your attention, you should for yours, too.
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I tried my senile best to be passionate about “the new Star Wars movie” as December approached, but I don’t think I finished a single web article on the subject. I had begun my brief return to The Old Republic when the hilted lightsaber image was leaked and distinctly remember overhearing some very weary VoIP exasperation from my (VERY middle-aged) raid group. “It’s not gonna be the same, but neither was J.J.‘s Star Trek, and I liked it…I think.” And it’s not surprising that the conversation eventually turned to the specific mechanics of lightsaber design, chronological positing, and the like, given the context, but it really emphasized for me the magnitude of the history and nostalgia weighing upon the collective dad emotional balance. A New Hope had the intended effect on me, of course, but couldn’t possibly imburden itself as it had on those who were in the moment. In their psyche, that experience will be eternally associated with the sense of unlimited potential their childhood ignorance allowed for. These folk who are so often stereotyped as disciples of information have begun to grow weary, and are desperately seeking sanctuary from the mass of all the knowledge they’ve picked up since. Their need made a market; J.J. made a movie. (Well, six.) Today’s moms and dads find their escape in the Roku, not the bar. The Force Awakens and the decade of revivalist big-budgeters preceding it are the reformed druggie’s drug.
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Because we both know you haven’t yet read anything you haven’t heard/read previously, I’ve really just been playing the role of a (more intelligent) Ghandi, but we’ve now finally arrived at some promising insight into the real issue: this culture is one of fatal contradiction. Despite its historical popularity, it’s ill-advisable to want to know by day what you try to forget at night. Since the PT Cruiser was allowed to go on sale, you’ve all been caught up in a nostalgic hellride that can only end with the ultimate destruction of all culture. You now know, definitively, what role The Force Awakens was created to perform. Depending on whether or not you welcome the end of everything, it fills it…adequately.
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There are Baddie Red Brits and Cool Brown Moderate Americans in their X-Things, moving swiftly, acting in diversity, and generally heaving moral streaks of energy at the Intolerable Imperialists, just as they should! Sometimes, they yell and die! But it’s ok, because they’re all just loyal martyrs making their obligatory and patriotic sacrifice for the rebellion against the Queen!
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Um.
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I mean… the Smug Cowards in their big taxation balloon!
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I must confess that I did feel something huge when the lights dimmed, the aforementioned disclaimer appeared, and the theme’s jarring introductory chord hit me in the face, beginning the opening crawl. I actually smiled involuntarily, which is tremendously embarrassing to admit because the warmth I felt was exactly the sensation that defined my childhood experiences with the franchise. I even had a gigantic model of the Moderate Fashion, which would now be worth a lot of money (or so I’m told,) had it not been so damaged in my frivolous storage.
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Unfortunately, that frisky feeling of adventure promptly wisped through the screen’s grasp after the “obligatory” scrolling yellow text –> “there’s a big spaceship moving slowly” transition. Aside from the adorably entrancing romantic tension between Timid Traitor and Sentimental Squatter, there was nothing very Star Wars about anything I saw. The cards were a deceiving gate into a world that was distinctly NOT Star Wars. There’s no need to mess about; it’s clearly an alternate reality from the one we’ve known. J.J.‘s Star Trekwas in such a way, too, but it was explicitly identified as such by the production. Traditionally, Lucas’ IP wouldn’t necessarily allow for this exemption, but nobody’s been all that vocal in confronting it, to my knowledge.
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The world expected both of these forays to rejuvenate the franchise, which would serve my argument, were it not for the (much preferable) alternative:
-LET THEM DIE.
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Despite millions of dollars worth of polish, they’ve still ended up feeling like a strange reanimation experiment.
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Your son is DEAD, Georgino. There are some things man would do better by leaving alone and moving on. Imagine all that cash and creative talent spent on new ideas instead of desperate attempts to charm and cultivate the shallowest part of moviegoers’ spectrum. So much sweat shed trying to recreate the new franchise bewitchment is embarrassingly cowardly when one could just create a new franchise.
Screens and software subjects big & small discussed within my most moderate 35,000 words ever.
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Believe it or not, the cyclical cold season has once again come to pass! Oh, the W̘͖̯E̟̹À̫T̯̫͓̪̮͓̼H̝E̪͇̰̘̖͍ͅŔ͍̖̱̟̪!! If the past two days on Twitter were any indication, it is indeed time for a year's-end retrospective on what has been published on this Web Site. Given the extent of the attention I've devoted to bilge.world this past year – both technically and editorially – I thought it would be nice to chuck in a bit more in the pursuit of whacking myself on the back. I understand that 2020 has been one helluva catastrophic marker of linear time for just about everyone on Earth – as I write this on its last day, the inexplicable news of MF Doom's death has just surfaced and has already hit my adjacent communities remarkably hard.
I had forgotten a lot more about CSS and HTML than I originally thought. glad I ended up comfortable enough to find myself with a completely original stylesheet before the end of the year, I suppose. pic.twitter.com/4QwlbEJECU
The earliest archive.org capture of this particular Writeas blog dates back only to May 1st of this year, but its stylistic contrast with the site's current version is immense. I believe I was using Max Henderson's Anxiety theme virtually stock, albeit with some color rearrangements. By the 29th, I had already arrived upon the colors you see today. “You Know I'm Blogging” was just a meta update to say howdy after such a long drought, but “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” actually proved popular (for me) among my newly-connected Fedi crowd, especially, thanks to an annotated share by Writeas on Twitter. Honestly, it was entirely worth it just for the accomplishment of exposing my platform peer Dino Bansigan to Alt+D. Writeas Community Manager CJ Eller and I began corresponding, which led to an interview regarding writing tools, managing fiddly compulsions, and the wonder of Markdown.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list.
I had wanted to write about The Langoliers – Stephen King's flop of a made-for-TV movie/extended Twilight Zone episode – for a long while. It was probably the first program I watched as a child that genuinely disturbed me and always returns to my thoughts by barren-ish experiences. I had planned to watch the whole three hours all the way through and write whatever came to mind, but I only made it halfway or so in “Craig Toomey's Coronavirus” before I ran completely out of steam. I dropped what I had without revision, to this day. Perhaps one day I shall return...
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In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn.
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These two sentences begin the sixth chapter of my indefinitely-postponed novel, Blimp's Burden, and are almost certainly my best writing, ever. My vanity simply wouldn't allow them to go forgotten, so I published the chapter as an excerpt on The Psalms. It may seem an intimidating wall of text, but give it your attention and you'll be amused, I think.
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Summer
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The general, distinctly 21st-century wisdom regarding one's content popularity seems to be something like you never know what's going to blow up. I experienced this phenomena quite severely for the first time in my writing life after posting “Google Is Not God of The Web” on HackerNews right before going out-of-touch for some 13 straight hours amidst a local BLM protest. I did not intend to write a baity title, nor did I expect anything to come of sharing it, there – I only did so simply because the thought crossed my mind. Honestly, it is probably the least-considered content I'd ever published on The Psalms – I only put it up when I did because I knew all of my energy was about to be absorbed for an entire weekend or more. I only started the thing because I felt it important to raise a small voice in reminder that tech media had started using language when discussing code/online development which had begun to assume the existence of a single, objective standard of measure for good web design. (Fuck your bootstrap baloney, The Drywall Website was a realparadigm shit.)
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And yet... That single goddamned post would end up accruing more pageviews than all of my writing on the web, combined (I suspect.) Tens of thousands of words were written in hundreds of comments, which I did my best to parse in a for the hell of it substack email:
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Out of everything I’ve shared on Bilge recently, it’s hilarious that this particular post – on which I spent a cumulative total of perhaps 25 minutes writing and made less effort than ever to edit – became probably my most widely-shared work of all time.
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Once again, I am thankful for the readership and correspondence, I just really fucking wish it had been on literally anything else I've written about technology.
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In retrospect, it really is bonkers that I was excited about yet another vague promise to re-imagine email in the days surrounding the launch of Basecamp's HEY, but I feel it's important to nurture what paltry genuine enthusiasm remains about technology and the future, so I decided to respond to the service's homepage prompt, asking interested visitors to write in with their own thoughts on email. I spent a morning clacking out “Email and I: An Abridged History,” which I hope will one day serve as a part-foundation for a thorough, composed extension to my Why I Write About Technology series. This would be The Psalms last relevant work for a few months, while I played around with an experimental WordPress website and dove into fuckin' school for the first time in seven years.
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Fall
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I returned in late September with a partial recount of what I'd discovered: “Indulging Once More in Digital Excess.” After exploring the concept of Digital Gardens, buying my first pro-ready desktop PC in 10 years, playing with Big Boy Adobe software for the first time, and reading a delightful book documenting the history of word processing, I arrived upon the term Software Historian with which to partially describe myself. It doesn't mean all that much at the moment, but will no doubt be explored imminently on this Web Site.
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Addressing “The Social Dilemma's Dilemma” and “Software Thanksgiving” in detail would be awfully redundant, but I would at least note how they represent diametrically opposed perspectives through which to discuss this stuff. Going forward into 2021, I think it's important that I hold short on the progress I've made in moderating my voice since 2018. Digestibility is not a virtue I am at all interested in, nor is it an appropriate one in which to invest any more effort. Any non-radical argument will inevitably prove enormously unoriginal, which makes for a huge waste of all our time. For the moment, that's all the editorializing I've done.
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Three Point Oh
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Somewhere along the research process for one of my school essays, I came across the concept of academic revision tracking and peer review via Git. Having dipped my toe back in academia, any such circumvention of its penchant for the most archaic practices possible was naturally intriguing. Just wait until I show these goons how to use hyperlinks. Perhaps inevitably, I was launched into the Git-Gone Bender I'm still riding simply because I finally had ample reason to actually understand it. In just two months, I've created and forked a total of nearly 80 repositories on my new GitHub account. Though I'd created one for each of my web properties ages ago, I had absolutely no idea how to actually make use of them, so they were all quickly abandoned. In the past two weeks or so, I think I've actually begun to get the hang of the system's core intricacies, best exemplified by The Psalms' Repository as it stands.
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The “automated” Project Board I set up has so far been a very impressive replacement for the simple todo list. It tracks and categorizes Post Ideas in their various stages in my process: Mulling, Documentation (research,) Drafting, and actual Publication. Technical “Issues” regarding the CMS and/or the Repository, itself, have also fit in these categories well, so far. Just today, I discovered that one can simply tag Issues by their number to describe Commits, which form an impressive revision-tracking changelog when aggregated together. I also figured out the general idea behind Milestones and set The Psalms' first one for my 27th birthday, next month. The goal is to have figured this all out well enough by then that I'm no longer randomly stumbling upon entire featuresets multiple times in a workday. Thinking in Public – as my friend Tom Critchlow and his crowd say – is what I'm trying to do here, I think. Obviously, this really means that you are more than welcome to hop the fuck in at any time, in any manner you'd prefer. If Git is still no more than a conundrum for you – as it was for me just weeks ago – I would suggest the directory for In-Progress Drafts as a starting point.
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requesting support on how to "leverage discussions" to talk about pee pee and poo poo. #GitHubUniverse
GitHub Actions are still more or less a mystery to me, but I am unbothered – The Psalms' seems to be producing green text instead of red, now, in the midst of whatever I set it up to do. I poked around the livestreams for “GitHub Universe” a few weeks ago, when dark mode and GitHub Discussions were opened up to more users. At the moment, I cannot imagine a single application for forums in the context of my blog's repository, but I turned them on, anyway. It's very possible that all of the documentation-generating functions of Git are entirely unnecessary in this case, but – as I entrust GitHub with the eternal task of archiving such work – it is my hope that it will help me add further structure to my process.
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If you've found yourself in possession of a .edu email address and are interested in GitHub related experimentation, see this list of discounted/free dev programs/services for students, which includes a free subscription to “GitHub Pro.” (Apparently, equivalent to a $4/month service.) Adobe has similar discounts, as you’re probably already aware, which have allowed me to pursue my goal of learning InDesign. So far, I’ve created a sort of commemorative 404 page for The Drynet and a font showcase of Georgia for my mother. As much as I’d love to continue discussing the current state of Adobe apps, I’ve realized 1) I am quite distinct from a professional user, which is why I genuinely find GIMP more useful than Photoshop, for instance, and 2) given the length of my to-write list considering my current pace, I don’t know if I’d manage to get around to it in this lifetime.
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Between now and the 11th of this month, I will be migrating worthwhile posts from the experimental WordPress site (WTF) here and closing its hosting account. I haven’t been compelled to actually do anything with it in months, and the handy redirects, alone, are not worth the upcosts, however fair. Some content – including the corresponding posts for my Adobe experiments will not be imported from WTF here. I’m also going to rely on the Web Archive for publishing the rest. Notable discoveries so far include “Through an iPhone 4’s Lens,” which is a reminder of how revolutionary that particular handset was, and a few extra-Psalms pieces of content I’d like you to experience, like this Notion gallery of my single jaunt into drawing, # DavidBlueDraws. Best of all is my friend Tevin’s episode of Extratone’s defunct flagship podcast. In the years since, he’s become quite the prolific Twitch streamer. (I’ve watched enough and know Tevin well enough to say that he’s particularly entertaining in this medium.)
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Coming Soon
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For better or worse, all of these new exploratory avenues have so far led directly away from the business of actually writing, but – in my best self-estimation – I suspect I’m mostly done with fiddling, now, and ready to start thinking on the page, again. Predictably, I’ve let my upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max Review turn into quite a monstrosity over the past two months. It turns out, years of lapsed attention toward iOS development resulted in my feeling more out-of-the-loop than I expected, which I was compelled to remedy, naturally. If you’re so inclined, you can follow the minutia attached to my review process via this dedicated Snapas gallery, this shared iCloud album, my personal YouTube channel , and this Twitter collection.
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SO... I’m really starting to see the magic now. I just took this and it’s 2AM... utterly dark outside. I managed to force my car mount to couple with a tripod and set the exposure to 30 seconds. pic.twitter.com/FMLGrFzgy2
As per my newfound use of GitHub, I’ve played around with various ways of documenting this journey, specifically. First is this Wiki page (which I shall do my best to remember to keep updated) listing the entirety of my writing history on iPhone and iOS. (It’s uh... A bit underwhelming, if I’m honest.) I’ve also just begun a dedicated repository for iOS-related documentation and resources, which will soon include a full, sensically-indexed list of iCloud share links to my entire Siri Shortcuts collection (I hope.) Immediately following the review, I intend to publish here a post dedicated to functions Apple has failed to properly document, which I expect to be the most widely-useful content on this domain. To see some of the suggestions I’ve received so far and/or to add your own, see this mildly-successful thread I posted in r/iOS.
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When I have finally tired of talking about handsets once more, I hope to return my attention toward some other overwhelmingly-ambitious monstrosities like my academic paper proposing federated, open-source social networks in favor of the Big Boys, my report on the experience of returning to academia for a semester in 2020, and my evaluation of Notion as perhaps the next Big Step in the evolution of notetaking software. Perhaps before tackling projects the size of these, I intend to compile another listicle of handy tips for newcomers to Writeas. As I linked before, you can now view the entirety of The Psalms’ status in as much detail as you’d like via its Project Board on GitHub. As always, you can delight me by directly engaging on Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and/or via email. Let’s hope 2021’s equivalent of this review doesn’t take me until February to publish!
Yes, I bought a mechanical keyboard. It occurred to me that folks who spend a lot of time doing things that require tools – professionals, artisans, craftsmen, etc. – usually seek out the best possible quality offerings of those tools. Even if they're just 5% better than the average alternatives and cost twice as much, when one uses them for hours every day, the last bit of refinement pays off very quickly. Considering how much typing I've done in the past 5-10 years, I find it a bit silly that I hadn't before thought to optimize the hardware I've used to do so. Now that I've put at least some thought into designing the space in which I work and gone back to school, I've also invested in bettering the thing my hands actually touch the most.
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Actually... Before I go on, here is the link to the Varmilo VA108M User Manual/Guide/Reference in English in case that's what you came looking for. (I had difficulty finding it, too.)
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I suppose I've let myself be blinded to the advantages of a mechanical keyboard by the gaemer stigma that surrounds them. This time, I believe I began by simply inputting something like “best keyboard for typing” into a search engine, which returns plenty of iffy results, naturally, but among them was a list from Wirecutter – whom I trust, more or less – of “Best Mechanical Keyboards 2020.” Also included were posts in the r/MechanicalKeyboards subreddit, which I actually fucking joined[^1] (but promise never to mention again outside of this post.) Uncovering my eyes, I found a ridiculously-extensive community message board and Wiki, which is undoubtedly the most extensive resource on the subject to be found, anywhere. Though I did place a time limit on myself for any research of 15 minutes, in retrospect, I suppose I also had some criteria, which I assume – if you're still reading – you might be interested in:
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WIRED as fuck. Bluetooth can fuck off.
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“Full” keyboard, for the same reason I'd never spend any money on a piano with any less than 88 keys.
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At least tolerably tasteful, aesthetically. (Not overwhelmingly embarrassing if someone were to actually see me using it.)
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Cute, ideally.
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No light shows.
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Not “ergonomic.”
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Not from Logitech or Microsoft.
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Immediately, it was overwhelmingly clear that my choice must also have The Cherry... The Cherries... The “Cherry MX Switches,” whatever they are. Any of even the most skimmy reading up on the subject will lead you to this conclusion. That addressed, I arrived upon three considerations: the Ducky One 2, Das Keyboard Model S Professional, and Varmilo VA87M.
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Layout of the VA108M seen from above.
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As good as the idea of something as German as the Das Keyboard sounded, I hate the way it looks, and the Ducky seemed to take itself too seriously (despite its brand name.) The VA87M seemed to be ideal if it was full-sized. I searched for the equivalent, found the VA108M, and bought one immediately. Specifically...
I've already written more than I ever wanted to, but let me just say that I love everything about the thing – the particular set of special keys, the way it feels & sounds, and that its heft prevents it from moving around – and I hope to keep it forever. As I said on the photographs I posted to social media, I promise to never bring this or any other mechanical keyboard up ever again unless asked about it.
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[1] Yes, I have actually been using the Read It website in the past 18 months or so, which anyone who’s known me at all would find unbelievable. I don’t know if I’ll write about it in the future, so I’ll just say I’ve unblocked it within my psyche largely because it’s no longer horrendous to look at.
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[2] I remain genuinely confused as to why the color of the switches matters, considering they are only visible when the keycaps have been removed.
I bought a desktop tower for the first time since 2010 and spent an embarrassingly long time struggling with Bluetooth shit.
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As with my entire history of computer purchases, my acquisition of an HP ENVY Desktop tower, today, was last-minute, ill-informed, and certainly irrational. You “PC master race” folk: please spare me the dude, you could've just built your own pc so much cheaper shit.[efn_note]Or don't. Whatever.[/efn_note] Yes, I realize the sensible course of action would've begun with a two hour trip West to the closest Microcenter, where I'm sure the staff would've made PC shopping an absolute blast and I would've come away with a more powerful, much cheaper machine. However, after I managed to break Windows on my only machine this weekend (and subsequently failed to reset it,) I was getting especially behind on schoolwork and had absolutely no desire to complete any of it on my iPhone.
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And so... I've just returned from picking up said HP Tower along with a 27” HP LED display, and am writing you after having set up the machine physically and installed most of my “essential software” list (at least all that I could remember.) As per my favorite tradition of new computer acquisition, I have named the machine after Hildur Odegard from Fortitude:
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“First Impressions”
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It's been exactly 10 years since I last bought a desktop tower – since I first set hands on the Dell XPS Studio desktop with which I would create the majority of my intellectual property – and I was immediately surprised by how much smaller[efn_note]6.12 x 11.93 x 13.28 inches.[/efn_note] and lighter[efn_note]13.12 lbs.[/efn_note] this tower was than my expectations. The display, too, is remarkably light and thin. Rationally, I should not have been surprised by this, but I'm not going to punish myself for continuing to find any sort of magic in technology.
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In the box were a Bluetooth keyboard[efn_note]Specifically, an HP model 4251a-khsap003k.[/efn_note] and mouse set – the latter of which I will hopefully never have to use, thanks to my Logitech G203 – and was perplexed by the process of how to pair the former with the tower while it was in setup mode for far too long. I was just about to give up entirely when I revisited the packaging and noticed what I'd previously assumed was an anti-theft device, but was actually the fucking dongle for the pair. I continue to despise Bluetooth peripherals, obviously, but the multimedia function keys of the product led to some important realizations: I now had reason to use Windows Desktop Switching and have a calculator application again! However, I have yet to figure out how to alter the Function key's behavior (I'm not even sure it's possible:) in order to input Alt+F4, I have to input Fn+Alt+F4, which is far too clunky to depend on. The issue did lead to a revelation which I may or may not integrate permanently: I mapped Alt+F4 to the previously-unused button on the very top of the G203. So far, it's been pretty nifty.
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The HP 4251a-khsap003k included in the box with my new HP desktop.
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That said, a component of myintention to create an intentional, static, upright-sitting desktop workspace included an allotment for a quality mechanical keyboard – my justification was that any professional in a particular craft makes a point to have the best possible tools for the job, so a high-quality keyboard has actually been very long overdue, in my case. So, I sought out a single Wirecutter recommendations list and even attempted to disseminate r/MechanicalKeyboards.[efn_note]I haven't even started self-harming yet, so my stomach is definitely strengthening![/efn_note] After a brief jaunt, I concluded that no reasonable person would be able to make heads or tails of the forum or its seemingly endless wikis without considerable indoctrination so I more or less threw a dart and landed on the Varmilo VA108M, which I ordered. All I know is that it's fairly highly-reviewed on the marketplaces I checked (though hardly mentioned on the subreddit, actually,) and that it has the Cherry Switches, which are... The good ones.
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A concern I originally had with taking over the tertiary guest room – by far the smallest allotted living space in the house – as my office was its distance from our wireless router, two floors down. The last time I used the room as a workspace (five years ago,) my old tower's integrated WiFi card often struggled to maintain a reliable connection. The adapter included in this desktop, though, actually managed to clock the fastest download speed on my SpeedTest.net records just now.
It's almost painful even to write this but... As beautiful as this $250 display is to behold, I've grown accustomed to my Surface Laptop 2's 2256 x 1504 13” display after years of hard, daily use. Apparently, those dimensions mean the little machine's display has a pixel density of 201 Pixels-Per-Inch. Filling a 27” display with just 1920 x 1080 means a pixel density of just 81.6 Pixels-Per-Inch,[efn_note]I suppose I should not have been surprised to immediately discover a dedicated online tool for calculating pixel density.[/efn_note] and the disparity was glaring to my eyes, even from the setup screen. After a few hours of regular use, I'm not sure I notice it anymore, but I suspect I will again when I've got the laptop running again. Please do indicate whether or not you think such a complaint makes me awful in the Crowdsignal poll below.
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have I become truly spoiled or is 1080p just... not high enough resolution for a 27" display.
I've also already had trouble connecting my Bose SoundLink headphones correctly via Bluetooth. On my Surface Laptop, it registered as two separate devices – “Stereo Headphones” and “Headset” – which allowed me to use them as both the primary audio output and the primary audio input. For whatever reason, I have been unable to accomplish such a simultaneous connection on this machine: I can either connect them as headphones or as a headset, but not both. This video provided some help – I know now that I have to open Sound Settings and manually connect the headphones every time I re-connect them. Hopefully, I'll figure out another solution soon.
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Returning to the webcam issue: I discovered that absolutely zero local stores keep add-on webcams in stock anymore, which makes sense. I resorted to searching Amazon for webcams and found a gargantuan list of brands I had never heard of. When I filtered by the one I did recognize – Logitech – I saw barely-facelifted versions of the camera my stepdad bought in 2008 and none were in stock. Unwilling to further investigate or research more, I set the price filter for under $40, sorted by customer ratings, and bought the first product which had even remotely legitimate-looking reviews: this 1080p thing branded with “Mersuii.”
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After returning to the order invoice hours later for this post, I got curious enough to Google search the company name and discovered a dead-end url, zero Wikipedia page, and this Trademark registration, on which I spotted some very interesting information. Entered in the second “Goods & Services” row is the following text:
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Adult sexual stimulation aids, namely, devices for massaging or vibrating external and internal portions of the body, vibrating and non-vibrating reproductions of parts of the male and female anatomies, male sex toys, masturbators, penis pumps, electrical penis cyclone pumps, rings, clamps, stimulators, vibrators, dildos, dongs, butt plugs, anal beads, rings to be worn about the penis; Adult sexual stimulation kit comprised primarily of adult sexual stimulation aids and a workbook
Assuming Jesus Christ is in your thoughts this evening before yet another anniversary of his birth, I am infinitely astonished by the truth in what I’m about to suppose with you. If the Son of God was living today, most of us have agreed for a long time now that he’d use marijuana recreationally – big fuckin whoop. I think it’s far more interesting and appropriate (we all know his birthday was wholly reconfigured into a consumerist holiday long ago) to speculate on how he’d behave after finding himself inadvertently in the market for a new laptop within the ~$1000 range (following a stubbed toe whilst walking on water incident, perhaps.) Surely, it would not be entirely holy for him to opt in to the Foxconn-complicit world of Apple, Incorporated, nor the openly-blasphemous one created and exuberantly grown by Google LLC, and I’m afraid he’d be too much of an End User idiot to integrate any of the sparse Linux-dedicated hardware available. In May of 2017, however, Billy Gates’ old Microsoft finally released “the laptop we’ve always wanted them to make,” but could its recent update be truly worthy of our Lourde and Saviour? Or your newly-enrolled offspring? Should you sprint downstairs and swap out the new MacBook Air you just bought?
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From an entirely valid perspective, an observer might declare my last two months of 2018 to be an outright shameful period defined by hypocrisy and traitorous betrayals. After finally taking the time to explore the full narrative surrounding Linux and the bloody tale of Microsoft’s cruel genocidal destruction of countless creative software projects throughout computing’s adolescence (see: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish,”) I eventually declared myself “100% Open Source” and began outlining an essay designed primarily to express that Linux is finally ready to be the operating system of the people without succumbing immediately to the brand of cybercrackpot illegitimacy associated with the L-word in the minds of the general public so readily thanks to decades of misinformed, condescending neckbeards. Such a feat would require entire new planes of cultural awareness and dialectal delicacy, yet certainly result in zero personal reward from even the best possible outcome, yet I proceeded to ponder the subject very deliberately all the way through October because I genuinely believed in a new democratized future of computing. 2018 had been my Grand Awakening to the idyllic possibilities of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) across the whole applied spectrum from office suites to social networks, yet – as two thousand eighteen comes to an end – I’ve managed to find myself among the most jaded, soul-sapped tech community I have yet encountered: Microsoft Administrators.
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Complimenting this Linux-laden culture in which I was not so long ago deeply embedded was a confused and frustrated outlook regarding what I felt were excessive and completely idiotic sacrifices across the industry’s hardware design to the greedy, gluttonous god of Lightness. It seemed only reasonable to Myself As Consumer that the entire buying public should exclusively seek designs prioritizing greatest possible performance and battery life, even from portable computers and smartphones, so I assumed my perspective on this updated iteration of Microsoft's most laptopy Surface laptop – which exists in large part to compete directly with Apple's beloved (and just-updated) MacBook Air – wouldn't be at all useful. However, a few weeks ago, my employer prompted me with a sweet sweet ultimatum: for the sake of a tax break, I want to spend ~$1000 on a laptop for you as soon as possible. Yes, I know I should consider myself a very fortunate man – this wasn't even the first time I'd been surprised with the “hey, I want to buy you a laptop but it has to be today” experience, and may even be considered a sort of sequel to my Tales of Whirlwind Manic Consumerism, but it’s ultimately one of the most idiotic strategies to achieve a major purchase decision and completely inadvisable for anyone on a budget. Still I was indeed thankful to be put in a nearly-identical situation of Consumer Electronic haste, and have come to be especially appreciative of the specific time I was approached as such: just one week after Microsoft launched the Surface Laptop 2.
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Considering the vast majority of its users are trapped inside my television, there’s no harm in covering the Surface brand with our virtual palm for a moment. If you’ll indulge me so, you’ll notice that Microsoft has actually delivered unto us The Laptop II – as in, the sequel... the successor to every other laptop computer yet conceived... but does this one machine truly represent the second coming of the Notebook Christ? Naturally, it would be a bit zealous to stand behind this extreme statement with 100% sincerity, but there truly are certain elements of this Personal Computing product's execution which do indeed will its user to expect and/or desire from others in coming years. As I've stated before, I also simply cannot help but be jazzed by such bravado from the mouths of even a company with as crooked and hateful history as Microsoft's. (Note: no other technology company has actually achieved what Microsoft historically has in this regard, and hopefully none ever will again.)
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I must be honest: it hasn't yet been two months and I've already scuffed and perhaps even stained the beautiful maroon alcantara surrounding my machine’s touchable body, but it’s occurred to me that I might draw upon the vast library of automotive interior tutorials available on YouTube – and even purchase some of the alcantara care-specific products they recommend – in order to really maintain the exterior of the Laptop II. After all, alcantara was undeniably car culture’s material first. I should also confess that objectively, the Surface Laptop II is the best-suited computer for my personal uses that I’ve ever owned or used for any length of time. Subjectively, I don’t think all of the hardware design touches that make it so – like its keyboard layout, divine 3:2 aspect ratio, and particular I/O complement – have yet had the chance to seduce my emotional brain into truly loving it as much as I certainly should by any reasonable measure. For my own sake, I hope I’m able to fall in child-like infatuation with its magic, but in the interim, I believe the coldness of my heart should hopefully preserve any useful commentary I might have to add. Though this is undoubtedly the most timely review of a hardware product I’ve ever published, I’d still ask that you indulge my perspective suggesting the importance of considering it part of a package with its operating system, considering that the whole of tech media would’ve unanimously declared it the year’s “best laptop” were Apple’s aging, but still widely-adored MacOS absent from the frame.
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I've tested a bunch of laptops this year, running the spectrum of 2-in-1s, Chromebooks, MacBooks, gaming laptops, etc. Everyone's needs are going to be different, which is why there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all for laptops. But enthusiasts’ laptops aside, I strongly feel the Surface Laptop 2 is the best laptop of the year. And by that I mean the best laptop for most folks' needs.
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With as much humility as possible, I must add that I myself am anything but “most folks,” yet my experience so far with the product has been one of astonishing compatibility and battery life. Using recommended power settings, the Surface Laptop 2 endured four hours and twenty-two minutes of a workload it wasn’t particularly designed for including heavy web browsing, image manipulation, brief audio/video capture with OBS, and moderate subsequent editing in Audacity and OpenShot. Dan Seifert – Vox Media’s “only Windows user” – reported “about seven hours” of Microsoft’s claimed 14.5, but frankly, I don’t know what any of y’all are doin – I’m just thankful this machine is a better marathoner than any other I can recall owning. While we’re on the subject, I consider Microsoft’s inclusion of a magnetically-attached power cable and unassuming auxiliary USB charging port on the attached power supply to be personal godsends – further evidence, even, that the Surface Laptop 2 was actually designed to be nice to use. For the sake of those readers actually in the market for a new laptop who’ve somehow found themselves here, though, Raymond Wong’s review for Mashable is the most thorough offering you’ll find – it’s quoted front and center on Microsoft’s web page for the Laptop II, even – but it’s important to mention that his critical comparative perspective predates the late launch of its ultimate competitor, the new MacBook Air. Rather pitifully, however, his colleague’s “good, but not great” resolution suggests that Apple failed to challenge Microsoft’s relatively moderate update enough to warrant any revision, and that Mashable as a publication stands by my new laptop’s Best of the Year title, for whatever it may or may not be worth to you.
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If the new MacBook Air came in at the same price as the old one, it would be a steal. Sure, you pay for the privilege of being able to use macOS on the Apple ecosystem. But in years past that also meant access to cutting-edge features and design. As pretty as the MacBook Air is, there's nothing that innovative about it. In today's Apple, it seems, privilege amounts to just staying current.
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You won’t find many others who regularly invest editorial merit in publishing 2500+ word laptop reviews anymore, which I’d concede is plenty reasonable in the Surface Laptop’s case, at least. Perhaps your first point of comparative entry should be a barely-dated conversation between Kara Swisher, Lauren Goode, and Dan Seifert on Too Embarrassed to Ask regarding the original’s odds of truly competing in the “premium laptop” segment (if you’d prefer to hear from those who struggle to take it seriously, that is.) Assuming the original product direction of the Surface line still stands, Microsoft doesn’t actually intend to sell at high volume, especially when it comes to this runt of the marque, which does not hesitate to omit itself from the popular discourse of the moment surrounding tablets as the future of all computing to which all of its siblings have contributed so much. Though I shall always remember my dearest Libel (the special edition Spectre x360 with which I built most of Extratone) with great respect and deep fondness – I think it’s even worth mounting on some sort of plinth – the significantly-cheaper Laptop II has already demonstrated true value in its “premium” segment bragging rights with far superior materials and build quality. If you’re looking for the prettiest possible slice of magnesium lightness but aren’t the sort to have followed the story of Microsoft’s first venture into personal computer production since it began in the last year of the Mayan calendar, it’s worth your while to read Joshua Topolsky’s projections of the project’s impact on the popular narrative surrounding Microsoft from history’s freshest possible perspective: the eve of the first Surface tablet’s launch.
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The entire tablet was designed in-house by Microsoft's teams, and if you believe what was said in the presentation yesterday, design and functionality in hardware has suddenly become a big deal in Redmond. That's a big shift, and it's an important one. The announcement of the Surface shows that Microsoft is ready to make a break with its history — a history of hardware partnerships which relied on companies like Dell, HP, or Acer to actually bring its products to market. That may burn partners in the short term, but it could also give Microsoft something it desperately needs: a clear story.
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A pungent stigma festered from Microsoft’s history of inadequate and inelegant public relations (especially compared to its greatest longtime rival) has remained in relentlessly obvious orbit around every “significant” Windows and Office update for so long that its status quo has grown into a truly inhibitive force for all parties involved. Topolsky is unquestionably a compromising favorite of mine, but it’s hard not to decry then-CEO Steve Ballmer’s failure to comprehend Josh’s day-after insight in the whole three months that passed before his Seattle Times interview in September, 2012. Ultimately, The Big M is either incapable of understanding any alternative utopic Visions of Computing to its own, or simply overwrought with the same counteraspirational carelessness its culture has always depended upon. In analytical terms regarding Ballmer’s utilization of the forum’s opportunity to finally tell the fucking story, at least, the timidity of a term like “pre-eminent software” as a viably bright new beacon in contrast with “people would say we were a software company” (emphasis mine) – as if Steve-O himself doesn’t even have the power to publicly describe his company’s function as its #1 man – combined at the apex of what was almost impressively-negligent behavior.
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I think when you look forward, our core capability will be software, (but) you'll probably think of us more as a devices-and-services company. Which is a little different. Software powers devices and software powers these cloud services, but it's a different form of delivery...
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Don’t make the same mistake I did and wear yourself out trying to extract the meaning from these three sentences – there’s none to be found. Ultimately, whatever opportunity the Surface project could have provided for Microsoft’s identity has been vastly overshadowed by its success as last resort supercatalyst to restore any sense of dignity and pride within the hardware companies who produce the vehicles. In Fall 2017, The Registerquoted industry gossip regarding the company’s new CEO Satya Nadella and his intent to “exit the product line” because “overall they are not making money [and] it doesn’t make sense for them to be in this business,” but newcomers to this conversation should know that no subsequent reporting has corroborated anything but a sustaining future of the line, though the measurable rate of innovation in Microsoft’s products continues to leave much to be desired. Now that you’ve heard from the experts, though, allow me to expand our lens a bit and examine what the Surface Laptop 2’s existence suggests as per The Present & Future of Computing.
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The Clam Clan
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In case I’ve yet to mention it, all of my tech writing is in substantial debt to my much-older and child-oriented siblings for providing 8 nieces and nephews over the course of 11 years – if not for any reason but the perspective offered by the slightest observation of their day-to-day lives. In this profoundly bizarre and historic technological sprint our species is experiencing, the differences in their respective relationships with consumer tech as they’ve grown up are fascinatingly… disturbingly significant. My eldest niece Abby was born four years after myself in 1998, and her younger sister Amber just quite three years later in 2001. All three of us are Aquarians who went to the same public schools (aside from 2 exceptions on my part,) and the two sisters have been close, significant influences on each other all their lives, yet the way Abby and I use and think about computers differs significantly from Amber’s. Our first real PCs introduced an important social and intellectual vehicle to our pre-teen lives, and both of us still “live on” our machines as young adults. For us and many others from this short-lived microgeneration of ours, budget laptops like the Dell Inspirion 2200 (which served as the first “real computer” for both of us) introduced the internet and Being Online as a State of Being with AIM groups, MySpace, and Yahoo! chain mails before smartphones and tablets were capable of doing so.
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Amber prefers to use her iPhone for most everything and regards her computer as a tool for work – it’s booted up and down exclusively for that purpose, which is significantly healthier than the habit Abby, myself, and many of my Online friends developed: we left our computers running and Logged On all the time because we were otherwise unreachable. We learned from origin to depend on them for 100% of our computing tasks – from streaming Pandora to playing Flash games within six billion open browser tabs – which likely explains both our ADD and its resulting influence on the ease with which our personal computers can distract us. As a Journalism student and professional photographer, Abby uses the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, and [Insane Blogger] David Blue has spent years looking for an alternative, becoming the first and only iPhone user to make extensive use of its Bluetooth keyboard support in the process, but both of us are entirely uninterested in the rest of the industry’s insistence on convertibles, removable keyboards, or ‘professional’ tablets. I wish the Linux community was finally ready to drop the elitist pretenses plaguing its nerdy history; I wish I could finally tell someone like Abby that a machine like the System76 Galago Pro could slot itself into her workflow without losing her time or compatibility – that the reputation surrounding Linux People had finally lost most of its validity and her desire to learn more about computing as a young woman and Power User would be met with respectful and worthwhile conversation from their end. Unfortunately, I’ve still found some of the Old Guard to be elitist, socially behind, and juvenilely possessive, as if computing was still the niche interest from their 1980s and 90s childhoods. Though this conversation certainly warrants its own essay in the future, I’ll just express now that it’s a real shame some folks don’t realize the entire point of making great things is ultimately to give them to the world.
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The opportunity I’ve had in the past year to finally get my Linux distro frenzy over with and out of my system managed to both radicalize and democratize my understanding of MacOS, Windows, and Linux as they are in the present. While I had nothing better to do, fiddling with Ubuntu Studio and Linux Mint to the extent I did throughout Spring and Summer led me to further appreciate the value of keyboard shortcuts, gave me my first real proficiency with a command line, helped globalize my comprehension of my own technological privilege, reacquainted me in a huge way with both the true history of software and my own personal past as an experimental test tube baby of Microsoft’s, and helped to answer a lot of questions I’d worried over for years about why software seemed like it simply couldn’t improve anymore. While it’s true that important open source projects like ElementaryOS continue to sprout from the Linus Extended Universe and the growing Open Source community on Mastodon is filled with brilliant, helpful, unpretentious, and remarkably curious enthusiasts (probably because many of those I’ve interacted with so far are non-cis and/or non-white,) little ole me was able to stumble upon some totally unnecessary and excruciatingly ignorant sociopolitical commentary by way of the white, middle-age host and his undoubtedly-white and staunchly libertarian caller on a live broadcast of the Ask Noah Show. (It’s not as if I haven’t said ignorant and very ugly things too, but I wasn’t a forty-something father on a semi-professional talk show representing an entire community.)
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Essentially, I was quite frustrated and disappointed to find that Linux is still let down most by its own community, but the operating system itself is still much further along on its way to becoming a real alternative for the average user than mainstream tech journalism would have you believe. However, in my case, finally taking the time to really learn about Open Source computing also helped me understand (surprisingly) why Apple and its environment continue to be the best and most popular choice for professional applications. Linux Mint gave me tremendous power in enabling me to alter, specify, and redesign the most minute details of its interface, but I couldn’t have foreseen how all-consuming such power would be for someone like myself. In retrospect, I’ve realized that I ended up spending more time perfecting my custom LibreOffice Writer shortcuts than I did actually writing – I somehow found myself in a mind state which justified unironically creating a shortcut for the Shortcuts menu. Though I swore I’d never succumb to the bewildering hobby of collecting and exploring different Linux Distributions, it took no time at all for me to fill a folder with disc images of the installers for almost a dozen different interpretations of the operating system after I’d made the simple concession to myself that I’ll just try Ubuntu, that’s all. The most profound realization from all this (arguably otherwise wasted) time: for a user like me, a walled garden is actually the best place to be productive because apparently, I don’t have the self-control to keep myself from running away and/or fixating on completely unproductive tasks without its boundaries. I think this phenomenon is perhaps the worst culprit in the persistence of the aforementioned divide between “computer people” and everyone else who simply uses computers, as I’m sure any one of the latter could tell you after all of five minutes with a Linus type.
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The most comprehensive and somewhat-urgent revision to illustrate the significance of this contrast from my perspective regards the exceptional iOS/MacOS markdown-based notetaking app Bear. Frankly, my own “Word Processing Methodology” essay from June has already become problematically out of date (and therefore embarrassing) in terms of my own knowledge of the segment and its history. Though I promised the conversation was “done,” I’ve continued to explore further into word processing’s history as well as its current state. “I had a go at Bear’s free iOS experience and saw little functional difference from DayOne,” the old, negligent, cursory David Blue noted, but if I’d simply been willing to cough up a bit more time and just $1.49 a month for Bear Pro, I’d have spared myself such shame and realized that the hype around this app really is 100% justified. Bear is the most beautiful iOS app I’ve ever seen, but I’m now also fully qualified to declare it the most effective execution of “distraction-free” writing software to come along in the past 25 years. Developer Shiny Frog’s secret is their perfect balance between capability and simplicity. It turns out, Daily Content Lord Casey Newton’s word on this matterreally was worth more than mine, not to mention more succinct: “Bear may look simple, but there’s power underneath the surface.”
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Those longtime Linux and Windows diehards who’ve tolerated me thus far, listen up: MacOS may be ancient, neglected, and full of incongruencies, but its single-minded methodology paired with Apple’s iCloud really does make it the most effective and elegant environment for most people to simply get shit done. It’s clear that many of you have realized the importance of simplicity for compact and/or educational distributions, but let me just add that the democratization of Linux provides a gargantuan development opportunity to make something that beats MacOS at its own game without starting from such a shitty premise and all of its resulting compromises – all without detracting from any other technically-minded distributions whatsoever. That is the magic of The Distro, remember?! If you’ve existed in a similar state of confusion to that of my entire adult life regarding the appeal of Apple products – despite having once been an extensive OSX user, myself – you’re very welcome for the insight. Instead of paying me for the profound self-improvement I’ve just provided, try prioritizing this newfound knowledge the next time you talk to your MacBook Pro-loving friend about their workflow. If you’re like myself, you’ll find their arguments have magically transformed from the bewildering bullshit they’ve always seemed to be into challenges for future competing operating systems to surpass Apple’s old bitch and excel in because MacOS and even its much-younger iOS counterpart – as well as the billions of people who depend on them – desperately need real competition in order to maintain their viability, much less become what products of the world’s wealthiest company should be.
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Yes, the manner in which these operating systems are perceived really is an important discussion prompted by a product as insignificant as the Surface Laptop 2 because as you read, the industry is bracing for another paradigm shift in computing, which many believe (preposterously, I might add) could be as significant and disruptive as 2007’s introduction of the iPhone. This machine of Microsoft’s and its “new” MacBook Air counterpart could potentially be the last designs to carry us to a computing future where the tried-and-true clamshell design is forgone entirely by the mainstream, but Apple’s release of this year’s new iPad Pro prompted even the most Cupertino-loving tech commentators to respond with genuine discord along with a few long-overdue shouts of “are you crazy?!” I’m very proud of The Verge’s Nilay Patel, in particular, for so eloquently deconstructing its usability for all but the very wealthy. “It is impossible to look at a device this powerful and expensive and not expect it to replace a laptop for day-to-day work,” he reminds us in the introduction to his full review of the updated product, along with a beautifully transient sentiment which I think we all needed to hear again: “I don’t think people should adapt to their computers. Computers should adapt to people.” Even something as consumerist and bourgeois as the introduction of another pricepoint-burgeoning Apple hardware flagship can turn a simple tablet review into a much-needed manifesto for a user-centric way forward for the industry, which is itself worthy of celebratory encouragement.
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I’ve favored The Verge and its cast long past the point of excess throughout the span of my work about technology, but Nilay’s review and its accompanying episode of The Vergecast are truly special and profound gems of content that shouldn’t be passed up. Apparently – as the Editor-in-Chief immediately insists as the episode begins – his “ongoing theory” that “the more important you are, the less actually important work you do, and the more likely you are to be an iPad user” roused anger from “that whole class of [billionaires,]” but the experiences behind his argument actually suggest that Apple’s own favorite child of late – into which it has begun investing and thereby implicitly sponsoring over its much older brother as the ultimate heir of the majority’s future computing – has unequivocally failed to do its part in growing the iPad Pro into the “laptop replacement” we’d all heard so much about. Of iOS 12’s performance as an operating system beneath true work-related tasks, he exasperates “you have to spend all of your time figuring out how to do stuff instead of doing stuff,” which I couldn’t help but hear as echoes of my own late Linux lamentations. As thankful as I am to have finally achieved enlightenment of the Planet Apple, I’m afraid I was pitifully late: its very natural laws underwent their most brutal tests of the 21st century this past year. Now that I’ve finally come to adore the elegant effectiveness of a new generation of iOS apps like Bear, I’m faced with yet another of the episode’s statements of weight: “I think it’s time to stop pretending that the future of computing looks like Apple’s restrictions.” On the opposing end of the line, the world’s first trillion-dollar company’s other major product release of 2018 managed to disappoint even the most fanatical fans of its original operating system’s best-selling platform with an insultingly mediocre update to the MacBook Air marque upon which it once so fondly doted.
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My best friend’s parents bought her the original Surface tablet when she enrolled in art school, and her frustration with its lackluster keyboard (among others) leads MacOS alternative-seeking users like us to wish Microsoft had started with a traditional design like the Surface Laptop first. Perhaps Apple and Microsoft’s emphasis on their tablets is nothing but a bit premature for the most current crop of users, and the rest of my nieces and nephews will expand upon an entirely different methodology of usership when they receive their freshman computer. Those elders of us who still take the Clamshell form seriously and love printing our documents are apparently facing a future industry saturated with products we can’t believe in, but it’s up to you to decide if this issue is worth expending your energy in advocacy for either camp. With my 120+ word per minute proficiency with physical keyboards, I for one have been completely bewildered by the iPad as anything but an indulgence for reading text on the web, and I’m pleased as punch with my Surface Laptop 2. Even if it proves to be the last new computer I’ll ever own to come as optimized for my use, I’m just grateful and astonished it happens to be the best yet.
Seven years ago, the fourth generation of Apple’s iPhone instigated a change in our perception of digital photography. Now – thanks to Google Photos – I’d like to reflect on my favorite shots of mine.
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When iPhone 4 handsets began shipping in the Summer of 2010, I’d been carrying my first generation for three solid years – since its now history-stricken release, in fact – and its age started to become a problem. I’d drop it screen-down on a rock in the airport parking lot just before going back to school for my Junior year, splitting a crack in the screen that wouldn’t quite kill it – it was the demands of iOS 4 on its 412 MHz CPU and meager 128 MB of RAM that would ultimately cease its usability.
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The single 2 megapixel rear-facing camera would surprise one at times, but was never lauded as anything but what it was – a mobile phone-bound sensor capturing very cellular-looking* images, but Steve Jobs wasn’t three minutes in to his iPhone 4 presentation at the June 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference before he pronounced the design’s closest possible “kin” to be “an old Leica camera,” associating his device with photography in its first impression. The equivalent of the first generation’s rear-facing camera could now be found facing you, and the fourth’s primary sensor now shot at 5 megapixels (2592 x 1936) with autofocus and 5x digital zoom, setting a fundamental smartphone sensor configuration standard that’s still adhered to by the industry.
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After unleashing Google Photos upon the ~15,000 images on my home machine’s hard drive last year, I have been constantly reminded of my own photographic history – for better or worse – and regularly shown five, six, seven-year old snaps in a manner that wouldn’t have been possible (or have made any sense) before. Recently, I was astounded to find that I took many of the better shots with my iPhone 4, so I thought I’d share a few from my high-school days in loving memory of my trusty little rectangular companion.
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All taken with iPhone 4, left unedited. View more onFlickr.
Setting out upon a desperate personal journey to rediscover enchantment with computers.
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This evening, a package is scheduled to arrive upon my doorstep containing a Compaq Portable Plus luggable computer from 1983 which I have fantasized about buying for far too many years. Despite living in the midst of perhaps the worst possible financial situation to spend $139.99 outright on a relic of computing, I finally just bought one anyway last Thursday because I’m absolutely fed up with life without the magic I remember feeling from computers. Yes, I am having a mid-life crises and The Machine is just a physical manifestation of one of my favorite stories, but I expect it will provide something irreplaceable for me and at least one piece of entertainment for just about anybody: I’m going to start a photoseries of myself using the 26-lb., suitcase-like, and utterly time-displaced Portable Plus in different coffee shops throughout Portland.
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There’s also potential opportunity (or necessity) for me to make use of my limited knowledge of hardware electronics. I’ve never been very comfortable with openly using the term “hobby,” but I fully intend to savor, document, and preserve every possible detail of my experience, so we’re going to behave as if the tales of computer history are precious to a dedicated audience besides myself, and that I am thereby and hereafter binding myself to an important duty of discovery, curation, and presentation expressed through multimedia of the highest possible caliber.
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In other words, I’m pretty sure I’ve just begun a vintage computing blog. Before we go any further, then, let’s dispense with the obligatory arrangements.
Put simply, Compaq was punk as fuck. Three dorky Texan technodads premeditated their leave of fair, secure jobs in the industry in order to bet everything on the promise of a single undeniably pro-user ideal to disrupt its dominant monopolistic supervillian. Unlike any of the countless other stories from the information age with the very same introduction, theirs was immediately propelled into stratospheric, record-breaking success — from coffee table sketches in the wastelands of suburban Houston nights to one billion dollarsin less than five years, proving that it was possible to win huge in tech by committing sincerely to liberating the consumer and manifesting the ultimate performance of the underdog complex American business has ever witnessed.
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Those of us who’ve maintained some curious orbit of technology have recently entered a reconcillatory process as the world has become all at once intimately familiar with our collective pursuits’ true consequences. Never has it been more appropriate to reflect on the wholesome bravado of the only American computer company to build a billion-dollar business atop the sole mantra of user liberation. At a glance one might assume that AMC’s attempt to reproduce Mad Men’s formula with a story set in Compaq’s origin in a series that’s supposedly attracted a fair number of Netflixers called Halt and Catch Fire in conjunction with the 2016 documentary Silicon Cowboys have sufficiently reminded America of to whom it really owes its privileged tech industry. However, a Twitter search for “Compaq” turns up virtually nothing of consequence, and — on the other cultural spectrum — I’ve yet to see a single well-documented collection of Compaq hardware, and I’m unsatisfied.
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Like it not, you’re coming with me on a safari back through two full nostalgic cycles to rediscover our wonder and excitement about technology because I miss it desperately and I know you do too. We’re going to find something marvelous.
A decade of iPhone has probably ruined my life, but will the 8 Plus finally end it?
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Is my True Tone bullshit on?
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“True Tone” is so forgettable, everybody had to mention it first. Quite simply, it uses an ambient light sensor to fiddle with white balance, warming the colors of the display as an immediately-obvious whole, yes, but an interesting contrast to show off is no longer inherently justified in being called a “feature” in Apple products, anymore. Essentially, no matter who you ask (aside from Jon Rettinger,) you should not buy an iPhone 8, though I did last Fall, not only because I had to suddenly decide on a handset in less than 24 hours, but — if anything — to say goodbye to the form, the operating system, and the tech company which I have depended upon and carried with me virtually every day for my entire adult life. I’d originally decided to abandon this review due to a variety of unexpected circumstances, but Apple and its iPhone have maintained their place in the news with their battery scandal, and a third of a year with the 8 Plus has included some experiences which warrant a send-off before iOS 12 is released, making it (and myself) totally irrelevant forever.
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As the longstanding benchmark of the smartphone industry’s state at any given time, the iPhone can be easy to reflect upon as a product once occupying a state of universal exemption from criticism, but it has, in fact, never been so. As Nilay Patel noted, one might regard the 8 as the last compromise of “basically four years” of the same design. Since launch, it’s unsurprisingly stayed a wee bit too far behind on the spreadsheets for most Android-type folks — not that I’ve ever believed them truthfully incapable of comprehending what it means to package a product, given where their greasy startups all eventually ended up. (You cannot doubt me — I once took a year-long sabbatical from iOS with a Sony Xperia Play, and my authority is absolute.) The rest are trying to decide whether or not to pay $200 more for “the phone of the future,” which knows when you’re watching it, and is only good for playing half an hour of stupid video games before it needs a charge.
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So far, I have maintained that my first generation iPhone was the best handset of all time — one hell of an Email Machine that lasted me close to five years — throughout the last two with actual motherboard exposed to the elements in the corner of its cracked screen. That said, who knows how it’d feel to be coerced into using “iPhone OS 2” as it was called, then, for an entire workday in 2018? Two years prior to bringing home an 8 Plus, I vowed that my 6S Plus would be my last ever Apple device, but this one actually feels like a last hurrah. Though the ability to Tweet directly from the swipe-down notification menu is still nowhere to be found (it’s been gone for 5 releases, now, and would seem to have been forgotten by literally everyone but myself,) one gets the sense that Apple’s efforts to add to the iPhone 8 and iOS 11 were to make amends with us by settling a few debts.
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In part, they did. Native apps got a major overhaul — including Mail, which was startling, considering that I’d been looking at what was near as makes no difference the same UI my eldest phone shipped with. As a result, it alone constitutes my benchmark for an email service, and I have been left without a clue as to what a good one looks like. (Apparently it was really bad?) Since time began, there has always been at least one alternative email app of the moment that tech journos refer to as the must-have, end-all replacement. Edison Mail is currently the smoother, faster, most modular option — at least for another few minutes– but I’ll never know it as I know Mail, and I’ll never want to. Playing around with experimental email apps is too scary. What if I decide once again to kill that massive number in the red badge and need to immediately mark 40,000 emails as read? It took all of my iPhone 4’s 1.0Ghz CPU and proprietary software over 18 hours — how am I supposed to trust a shabby little 6-month-old startup with such an important task? Anybody with a hundred bucks can make an app, you know.
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Why is the App Store now the best-looking publishing software on iOS?
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One might interpret the App Store’s redesign as an attempt by Apple to control this conversation — of both the trending new thing and the old“essentials” that you’ve probably had tucked away in an untouched folder for years. Technically, whoever the hell is writing those gorgeously-presented daily bits has made them a publishing company, though I’m not so sure I’m not the last remaining user who’s continued semi-regularly visiting their “Today” section. If I did want to actually read about apps (I don’t — who does?) it wouldn’t make much sense to seek critical reviews from the faceless boffins behind the platform itself, regardless of how much better it may look than all of the tech news sites, paywall or no.
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Native screen recording could conceivably come in handy once or twice, but I see no reason why the red bar must remain at the top of the render, but it has, which could explain the total lack of any such video in the wild. Front-facing 4K, 60fps capture is impressive, but useless — vloggers all have GoPros or DSLRs, these days, and sharing through Snapchat and Instagram will always be ultra-compressed. (Here are two sloppy test clips — at the zoo, and fishing.)
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Perhaps some have figured out the new Files “app,” but it’s sat on my homescreen for months, untapped, and it will likely remain there for all time as a sort of soothing trophy — a thanks for my legacy iPhone loyalty. My reward for half a lifetime of syncing, scrolling, and tolling? I can now view some of the files on my Mobile Computing Device, and even scan documents in, which is mostly novel (though it is fun to digitize excerpts from physical text.) At some point, I must’ve mischecked a permanent option because all file types now open only in an app that does not recognize them. God bless.
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Somehow, I’ve managed to fill my social circle with precisely zero iOS-using folks. All of my friends and colleagues use Android devices (including Tim’s supercool Nextbit Robin,) which provide a few handy datapoints (like the camera in my fiance’s Galaxy S8,) but deprive me of any significant experience with the ostensibly intoxicating cult of iMessage. I’m constantly listening to and reading tech writers claim that it’s one of the only reasons they’re still using iPhones, but my own food-OS loving biome has forced me to find others, and frankly, I can’t imagine looking at the gluttonous palate of available mobile, cross-platform messaging services (Telegram, now Telegram X, WhatsApp, Signal, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Slack, Tinder?, Google Hangouts, Google Allo, Google Chat, Viber, Skype, Line, Wire, etc.) and thinking… well, none of this will do!
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Honestly — even if I’d actually been at all informed in my haste, the photographic capabilities of the 8 Plus, alone would’ve sold it. It’s not the new filters, gif functionality, or even “3D Photos” — it’s those mythical dual 12MP sensors (which it shares with something called the iPhone X.) They’re no less than infallible. After four months of astonishing capturesin all manner of conditions, I don’t even care how exactly they do it anymore — it’s better to be left marveling. This first example was taken at Keystone, Colorado in the middle of a dark, cloudy Fall night — the amount of light they were able to find — “up to 80% more,” according to Apple — is just impossible.
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The vast majority of the samples in my iPhone 8 Flickr Album were taken within the native Camera app as it ships and left unedited. (Especially before just a few weeks ago, when I discovered Halide.
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Here is an unquestionably sensible progression from which iPhone has never wavered far since its fourth generation set the standard, but it’s one of an unfortunate few. Siri is still useless and silly apart from its “disable all alarms” feature and its ability to sound itself off in response when you’re hysterically screaming and digging for it through the vast plush of a forty-year-old Lincoln. The customizable Control Center makes toggling low power mode, orientation lock, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth less frustrating (note the last two aren’t quite hard switches,) though it should’ve come years ago. Notifications are slightly more sensible -certainly better than they were on Android Gingerbread, but I’ve heard things’ve changed quite a bit since then.
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I have been tripped up by the lack of a 3.5mm audio jack a few times, but it just wouldn’t make sense from a hardware perspective, and the new external stereo capability should refute those who can’t or won’t understand. Yes, it would be nice if Apple hadn’t led the industry to quite such a compromising obsession with thinness — we’d all trade a lotof substance for exponentially greater battery life, storage capacity, water resistance, etc. — but I don’t see much sense in expending your energy holding up signs in Silicon Valley.
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I’ll be here long after you’ve died, and you know why?
-Because I took the time to sync my apps.
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Two years ago, a new generation of social apps and the preposterous notion of a quad-core CPU in my iPhone 6S Plus seemed like the harbinger of a world I no longer understood. Now, most of those services have expanded to the far boundaries of my reach, and I’ve stopped counting chips. Refinement of the hardware design is reverent to the extreme. It’s pretentious, but Apple’s decision to pause on the 8 to consider details like stuffing the legal text in the software and adding a little bit of weight back in for ergonomics’ sake leads one to regard it as a monument to all the devices along the development timeline that have led to this… last triumph. Or, it would have perhaps, had they not sold so many.
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One could argue that good execution of consumer electronic design means minimizing as much as possible the obstructions in the way of the user completing any given task, and the iPhone 8 Plus has surpassed the vast majority of these for myself — and I am, surely, a “power user.” iOS has changed a lot in the decade I’ve employed it — in far too many ways for the worse — but this pair of handset and software have reached my imagination’s limit for what I could possibly want to do. Augmented reality and wireless charging won’t ever have a place in my future, for better or worse. Face ID is much too peculiar. Surely, this iPhone is the ultimate expression of the first and fourth generation’s foundation.
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If the 6S Plus was indeed the key to my immortality, I’m afraid the 8 Plus heralds my imminent demise. Whether or not it’s an early one is for you to decide. This really is my last iPhone.
A laptop, purchased. The beginning of a new era, finally witnessed.
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I managed to be reckless, tedious, and zealous in the usually-dry process of purchasing a new laptop, and found the story worth sharing. Expect a full review of the HP Spectre in the coming weeks.
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The meteorological complaints you’ve been hearing from mid-Missouri since Friday aren’t inappropriate this time – the middlefolk faced one of their most fatal enemies – a well-laid minefield of black ice. It slowed our timid, ABS-oblivious society to ten percent or less of its already near-postmortem pace.
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For God’s sake, at least learn why you needn’t pump your brakes before you opt for infotainment extras or… get your driver’s license.
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I woke up with the same debt and imminent expenses as I did the day before and without any more intention of buying a premium laptop than I’ve had for the two years I’ve gone without one.
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Without the concept of mobile computing in its entirety, actually. I knew I’d lost my desire to carry a loose bluetooth keyboard around everywhere in case some insight were to fall upon me heavy enough to justify reaching for it over my 6S Plus in a public venue, hunched and squinting. There’s still nothing better at cranking out copy than the Lap Top Computer, I suppose. I was holding out for a truly-substantial alternative to Windows 10 and macOS, wanting to be enchanted by lite delights like Acer’s cheeky Chromebook R11, but had decided in self-pity that I’d probably never be able to stand a new operating system ever again.
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My mom graciously decided to take me mall shopping for Christmas, which is comforting in its tradition of vapid routine. The state of a given midwestern metropolis’s mall is a keen indicator of the culture’s soul, I’ve found, and ours is mostly crewed by destitute alcoholics, who are my closest kin, and therefore my most appropriate company for the holidays.
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Dillard’s is the second-best place to lose your mind in America.
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Even now, when the somber corners are not quite so desolate. The acoustic sensation cannot be experienced anywhere else – the battlecries of the Me Generation’s pop reproduced by hateful diaphragms behind their white plastic ceiling facades and absorbed again by palletloads of mass-manufactured stonewashed denim, seemingly coming from a far-off wholesale nether no matter where in the store you’ve been buried. Ours is a few decades old, now – weathered and alone, which accentuates the whole dystopia with a resolute air of infinity, as if it’s certain it will outlast me. It probably will.
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I was deep within it all when I came across Dan Seifert’s praising review of the HP Spectre x360. As I’ve constantly confessed, The Verge‘s lot are the only institution of their kind I’ve come close to trusting too much, so it was no small thing to see something so certain as “the premium laptop to buy this year” in his subhead.
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The last time I was in the market for a laptop, there was little room for aesthetics in the equation. We have been taught this past decade that beautiful devices come in fruit form, only. Somehow, I allowed myself to integrate the ridiculous sentiment that MacBooks were the only option for anyone with any reverence for tactile experience. As I expect you’re aware of to at least some degree by now, Apple’s diligent study of desirability over the years is the singular force behind their lordship, and it’s the token MO of tech opinion to confuse it with sex appeal, resulting in expressions like “[apple hardware device] is sexy,” which is a pityingly desperate delusion. Do you actually find brushed aluminum appealing in any bodily sense?
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We did once, of course. Your infatuation with the stuff probably peaked the moment you first grazed it, and – if you’re anything like me – you could be harboring more aesthetic frustration with their longstanding occupation than you think. Infatuation must be starved to survive, and we’ve been eating up Apples by the bushel for a decade.
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Haha.
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But really, though – by the billion.
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I saw images in that Spectre review which I was completely satisfied with. I watched that new HP logo as it traveled through the frames, stupefied. Out of precious ignorance, I experienced real desire in that undesirable place. (Which could actually represent some sort of defeat on my part, but I’m not too bothered.)
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And in the midst of those desolate people in their fortress of mediocrity, my mom and I hatched a plan to indulge upon the best part of desolation – impulsive, subsidized gluttony. We’d stop by the pharmacy to fill my anti-depressant script before renavigating Bourgeois Bumper Cars to get to Best Buy, where she’d let me use her credit line to purchase my final choice in the segment.
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Best Buy is the best place to lose your mind in America.
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I could’ve sworn it made good sense to me, once – in Middle School, when my friend and I were spending most of our free time emulating the first generation of tech-reviewing YouTubers – but now, it reminds me of a darkwood restaurant with its closing fluorescents on, shining in the inverse frequency of a bug zapper – casting a more effectively-repelling ambiance for the human psyche than anything else I’m capable of dreaming up, at least.
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I used to fucking visit that store for no purpose but to see and experience the diluted bit of the handset renaissance with enough momentum to coast its way here. I probably spent a full sixty minutes wandering around by my own volition on a handful of occasions.
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But these days, I am perturbed from the onset in a big way. There are too many blue vape enthusiasts on the sales floor at any given time, and they all want me to leave. They loaf around the carcass of consumer technology’s passion, not realizing, I guess, that I already know it ’twas they who killed it. (The stench is strongest by the wearables.) It’s eerie how little the Big Box itself has changed, considering the decade their goods have traveled.
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Under a fittingly-gray sky, I wash my pill down with La Croix and a Kind bar to preempt the appropriate rumination in my mouth as we inch toward my Final Financial Doom with the spooked sliders. Though we never exceed 5mph, there are abandoned vehicles littering the shoulders and medians in varyingly absurd orientations. But I do not jest – today, I am silent, for I am one of them.
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By the time we reach the store, my medicine has once again placed my soul in Safe Mode, so we shuffle into the grotesque thing. There are four employees in sight – no one else – and they all send their beady eyes my way. I have too much purpose in my consumerist jowls to pause, though, so I rush to the laptops near the opposite wall in an attempt to get an early estimate on my current level of personal computing idiocy. Naturally, my Mom snags one of another four associates immediately. In this work, I shall refer to him as Zoroaster.
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Despite having never seen 80% of the displayed devices in person before, I am able to spot the Spectres quickly, which is a good sign. I am immediately elated by the contrast to the depressing mushbooks I remember HP making in the oughts. The bezel… the brilliance of the display… the details of the visible body. I open Extratone. I open The Verge. I am hoping that Windows 10 will not be as much of a kicker as I’ve expected.
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I’m not a minute before Mom and Zoroaster have found the new MacBook Pros. Nobody remembers the password to the 13-inch, but the 15 is showing off its “deep blacks” and “Space Gray” mood. The Verge looks phenomenal, and its icon in the touchbar catches my eye. I manage to use it to switch tabs, the less-attuned degenerate in me noting the extra spanning required over CMD-TAB.
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“Have you tried the new keyboard?” asks Zoroaster.
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I hadn’t. It’s as indescribable as you’ve heard, but suggests legitimacy is Apple’s effort to bridge the transition from physical keyboards to their touch replacement. Terrifying legitimacy.
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“You get used to it,” he says.
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I open Pages and click out something ridiculous. Yeah… click. I’m sure there’s a better onomatopoeia available by way of just about any technology website, but I didn’t bother to study the sensation after realizing that it’s a con for my number one use of a Portable Computer – clacking.
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It’s not as if the thing isn’t gorgeous, though, in its way. After years of usership, I can tell you that it is undoubtedly a superb execution of the MacBook marque. It’s polished. It’s The New One. But it is also bleak and slateish. Some might even say dystopian. Do I want to carry such a thing around with me everywhere? Do I even want to carry it out of the store? What will I tell my friends? What will I tell my staff?
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$2,000 of my future spent on what is now a piece of distinctly establishment design…
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I return to the x360 to see what can be done about Windows’ appearance these days.
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Purple-gray taskbars… Hm.
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It’s a sale.
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Let me be honest with you – I spent some ninety minutes going between the two. Even if I’d endured the shame and self-disappointment of choosing the MacBook Pro, the simple grunt of the challenge the Spectre presents to it is no small milestone.
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As Zoroaster scrambles to remove my new machine from The Hanging Jail, I am drained from the decision, but aware that my perspective on the world has changed. I’ve been working on an editorial for the past few weeks that’s mostly alarmed howling about the industry’s utter lack of passion, as of late, but seeing the Windows-running department’s devices and their matured design – finally beautiful without obvious Apple influence – had truly revived some little flame of hope within me.
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Lithe Zoroaster was confused by UPCs a bit, as is understandable, and began juggling three Spectre boxes atop the prison lift, screaming the numbers – one at a time from each device – to his bewildered disciple, below.
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Throughout the later half of the whole ordeal, I’d had company – some sort of blonde working man who’d also braved the frictionless waste to calm himself with debt. I’d been elated at the opportunity for companionship, at first, but he’d found himself unable to escape the store’s bespoke Apple Hole. I did my best to help him, but failed hoist his girth from the 15’s benchmark suction. I’d left him there, bound. May my dreams n’er be haunted by the fading portrait of his tortured, middle class face.
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As the Best Boys did their dance, he somberly came to my side. The grimace he’d worn in the struggle had fallen away. I knew what was coming before he formed the defeated words: “go ahead and grab me the 500 while you’re up there.”
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As one does when they stumble upon a stranger’s funeral, I bowed my head.
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Here begins the part that sorta makes me look like an idiot.
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After signing my mother’s lengthy loan agreement, Zoroaster – the little devil – asked if I wanted the Special Edition, just behind me. I’d stopped by last year’s Big Boy Spectre – the ballsy-ass copper-toned masterpiece – and had wished for a moment that the look could’ve carried to the fresher x360.
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The monospace Hewlett-Packard logo blinded me, and the unlit display (it hadn’t been set up yet) concealed the wider bezel of… The older Spectre 13t – with which I write, now.
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I didn’t notice my blunder until after our treacherous return, and could not care less.
As dual speakers become the norm in smartphone design, let us briefly examine and explain why one should always expect to hear their music in stereo.
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Though I have many audiophilical sentiments and preferences, I cannot — by conscience — fully claim the title because I’ve never been able to justify the allotment of funds necessary for the obligatory equipment. (And my digital compressor usage in the production of Drycast and Futureland has been manifestly vulgar.) That said, audio engineering is one of the few topics which I can actually speak on with almost-academic authority, and my pretentiousness-capacitated preoccupation with quality-of-life compels me to bring up a ludicrously-rational standard that most of us have continued to undershoot for far too long.
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Two weeks ago, the abundantly-rumored omission of the 3.5mm audio port in the iPhone 7 was finally settled. We played our own part in feeding the “controversy,” yeah, but I believe Apple was actually quite tardy in labeling smartphone-bound analog audio as archaic, though I’m not going to waste words in that discussion — it is definitely oversaturated, at this point — because I think mono audio is an even more prevalent topic.
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Honestly, out of all the missing features we’ve lamented over in the past decade, stereo speakers should’ve been the most aggravating. The gigantic difference, of course, is that the industry (and — by muddled extension — the consumers) has been all but silent in that regard. I write you, now, because we should all be colossally disappointed with ourselves.
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Two channels. Left and right. Read: Mono vs. Stereo But why should you care? What if Google — somehow — failed to provide you with a significant difference?
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One channel of sound is — in terms of locale — rigidly static in your perception. Doubling the data creates a spectrum, adding dimensionality, which is infinite, ya know. Playing back audio in stereo, through two or more diaphragms (the fundamental hardware unit of sound reproduction,) now enables the exhibition of audio pictures.
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If this is entirely new to you, I want you to do something. Find yourself a pair of headphones or a set of two or more computer speakers. (If these aren’t available, consider your car’s sound system. If it’s at all current and healthy, it’s gonna do the trick.) Bother to discover “L” and “R.” That is, left and right. Orient accordingly. Download this 37-second clip I recorded at BikeFest with my Zoom H2n. (Be advised: the preview is formatted in 5.1 surround, so it’s a very large file for its playback length.) Listen, obviously, and then listen again on your singular smartphone “loudspeaker.”
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That’s what I’m talking about.
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Why am I being so abashedly patronizing? Why am I transgressing against our particular assumptions about you — the informed, savvy millennial audience? Because the vast majority of playback I hear in day-to-day life is still from a singular diaphragm; a singular source.
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A topical example: I am shown a YouTube video on an iPhone. (A pre-iPhone 7 device, that is.)
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Walking downtown, I pass a small band of adolescent skateboarders listening to Cannibal Ox on a Samsung Galaxy Note.
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Worst of all: I find myself watching a Netflix film on my iPhone, in bed, not having bothered to wear the $200 pair of QC15s sitting within arm’s length.
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Informed or not, consumers are neglecting audio, and dimensionality, alone is worth a change. Recent years have allowed the unlimited bandwidth assumption to become habit, so even the vast majority of today’s spoken word programs (like podcasts) — which, in general, stay in the “center” of their mix, making little to no use of the left-right spectrum — are produced in stereo, now. In many cases (including a few of ours,) this doublesizing is often for the sake of introductory themes, alone. If you care to imagine a more data-frugal society, the “waste” is ridiculous. It is not unrealistic to expect such a reality in the near future, but the same holds true for the reverse.
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In the present’s abundance, though, the result is simply a decrease — as a whole — in playback’s “full experience,” if the hardware is not changed. Imagine how great it’d be if a digital audio formatting standard could be developed that’d enable a singular file to be mono or stereo, if needed/utilized, to trim off redundancy, sorta like variable bit rate. Get on that, would ya?
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So, why haven’t we become more diligent about our sound experiences? 1 billion iPhones in circulation, all with mono playback by default, are suspect culprits, I think. Of course, there are other devices, but none as influential — even the iPod, funny enough — on fundamental digital functions like music playback. And honestly, when is it appropriate or suave to take the extra steps?
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I want to show you this song. Let me untangle my headphones… Yes, okay. Put them in. I’m going to sit here in silence for four minutes, looking into your eyes as you listen to the entirety of this track.
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It’s never going to be socially acceptable. But what about wireless alternatives? Apple’s new Air Pods look absurd, but their by-computing optimization of the Bluetooth audio standard is revolutionary, in a small way, in propelling the “hearables” paradigm into the mainstream, if only for a moment. If — in a strangely-audiocentric future — we are always wearing multipurpose sound reproduction devices in our ears, perhaps the waste of the Mono Monstrosity will be finally resolved. Until then, I suppose all we can do is give it an extra thought, for our own quality-of-life’s sake.
Yes, I bought a mechanical keyboard. It occurred to me that folks who spend a lot of time doing things that require tools – professionals, artisans, craftsmen, etc. – usually seek out the best possible quality offerings of those tools. Even if they're just 5% better than the average alternatives and cost twice as much, when one uses them for hours every day, the last bit of refinement pays off very quickly. Considering how much typing I've done in the past 5-10 years, I find it a bit silly that I hadn't before thought to optimize the hardware I've used to do so. Now that I've put at least some thought into designing the space in which I work and gone back to school, I've also invested in bettering the thing my hands actually touch the most.
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Actually... Before I go on, here is the link to the Varmilo VA108M User Manual/Guide/Reference in English in case that's what you came looking for. (I had difficulty finding it, too.)
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I suppose I've let myself be blinded to the advantages of a mechanical keyboard by the gaemer stigma that surrounds them. This time, I believe I began by simply inputting something like “best keyboard for typing” into a search engine, which returns plenty of iffy results, naturally, but among them was a list from Wirecutter – whom I trust, more or less – of “Best Mechanical Keyboards 2020.” Also included were posts in the r/MechanicalKeyboards subreddit, which I actually fucking joined[^1] (but promise never to mention again outside of this post.) Uncovering my eyes, I found a ridiculously-extensive community message board and Wiki, which is undoubtedly the most extensive resource on the subject to be found, anywhere. Though I did place a time limit on myself for any research of 15 minutes, in retrospect, I suppose I also had some criteria, which I assume – if you're still reading – you might be interested in:
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WIRED as fuck. Bluetooth can fuck off.
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“Full” keyboard, for the same reason I'd never spend any money on a piano with any less than 88 keys.
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At least tolerably tasteful, aesthetically. (Not overwhelmingly embarrassing if someone were to actually see me using it.)
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Cute, ideally.
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No light shows.
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Not “ergonomic.”
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Not from Logitech or Microsoft.
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Immediately, it was overwhelmingly clear that my choice must also have The Cherry... The Cherries... The “Cherry MX Switches,” whatever they are. Any of even the most skimmy reading up on the subject will lead you to this conclusion. That addressed, I arrived upon three considerations: the Ducky One 2, Das Keyboard Model S Professional, and Varmilo VA87M.
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Layout of the VA108M seen from above.
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As good as the idea of something as German as the Das Keyboard sounded, I hate the way it looks, and the Ducky seemed to take itself too seriously (despite its brand name.) The VA87M seemed to be ideal if it was full-sized. I searched for the equivalent, found the VA108M, and bought one immediately. Specifically...
I've already written more than I ever wanted to, but let me just say that I love everything about the thing – the particular set of special keys, the way it feels & sounds, and that its heft prevents it from moving around – and I hope to keep it forever. As I said on the photographs I posted to social media, I promise to never bring this or any other mechanical keyboard up ever again unless asked about it.
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[1] Yes, I have actually been using the Read It website in the past 18 months or so, which anyone who’s known me at all would find unbelievable. I don’t know if I’ll write about it in the future, so I’ll just say I’ve unblocked it within my psyche largely because it’s no longer horrendous to look at.
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[2] I remain genuinely confused as to why the color of the switches matters, considering they are only visible when the keycaps have been removed.
I bought a desktop tower for the first time since 2010 and spent an embarrassingly long time struggling with Bluetooth shit.
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As with my entire history of computer purchases, my acquisition of an HP ENVY Desktop tower, today, was last-minute, ill-informed, and certainly irrational. You “PC master race” folk: please spare me the dude, you could've just built your own pc so much cheaper shit.[efn_note]Or don't. Whatever.[/efn_note] Yes, I realize the sensible course of action would've begun with a two hour trip West to the closest Microcenter, where I'm sure the staff would've made PC shopping an absolute blast and I would've come away with a more powerful, much cheaper machine. However, after I managed to break Windows on my only machine this weekend (and subsequently failed to reset it,) I was getting especially behind on schoolwork and had absolutely no desire to complete any of it on my iPhone.
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And so... I've just returned from picking up said HP Tower along with a 27” HP LED display, and am writing you after having set up the machine physically and installed most of my “essential software” list (at least all that I could remember.) As per my favorite tradition of new computer acquisition, I have named the machine after Hildur Odegard from Fortitude:
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“First Impressions”
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It's been exactly 10 years since I last bought a desktop tower – since I first set hands on the Dell XPS Studio desktop with which I would create the majority of my intellectual property – and I was immediately surprised by how much smaller[efn_note]6.12 x 11.93 x 13.28 inches.[/efn_note] and lighter[efn_note]13.12 lbs.[/efn_note] this tower was than my expectations. The display, too, is remarkably light and thin. Rationally, I should not have been surprised by this, but I'm not going to punish myself for continuing to find any sort of magic in technology.
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In the box were a Bluetooth keyboard[efn_note]Specifically, an HP model 4251a-khsap003k.[/efn_note] and mouse set – the latter of which I will hopefully never have to use, thanks to my Logitech G203 – and was perplexed by the process of how to pair the former with the tower while it was in setup mode for far too long. I was just about to give up entirely when I revisited the packaging and noticed what I'd previously assumed was an anti-theft device, but was actually the fucking dongle for the pair. I continue to despise Bluetooth peripherals, obviously, but the multimedia function keys of the product led to some important realizations: I now had reason to use Windows Desktop Switching and have a calculator application again! However, I have yet to figure out how to alter the Function key's behavior (I'm not even sure it's possible:) in order to input Alt+F4, I have to input Fn+Alt+F4, which is far too clunky to depend on. The issue did lead to a revelation which I may or may not integrate permanently: I mapped Alt+F4 to the previously-unused button on the very top of the G203. So far, it's been pretty nifty.
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The HP 4251a-khsap003k included in the box with my new HP desktop.
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That said, a component of myintention to create an intentional, static, upright-sitting desktop workspace included an allotment for a quality mechanical keyboard – my justification was that any professional in a particular craft makes a point to have the best possible tools for the job, so a high-quality keyboard has actually been very long overdue, in my case. So, I sought out a single Wirecutter recommendations list and even attempted to disseminate r/MechanicalKeyboards.[efn_note]I haven't even started self-harming yet, so my stomach is definitely strengthening![/efn_note] After a brief jaunt, I concluded that no reasonable person would be able to make heads or tails of the forum or its seemingly endless wikis without considerable indoctrination so I more or less threw a dart and landed on the Varmilo VA108M, which I ordered. All I know is that it's fairly highly-reviewed on the marketplaces I checked (though hardly mentioned on the subreddit, actually,) and that it has the Cherry Switches, which are... The good ones.
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A concern I originally had with taking over the tertiary guest room – by far the smallest allotted living space in the house – as my office was its distance from our wireless router, two floors down. The last time I used the room as a workspace (five years ago,) my old tower's integrated WiFi card often struggled to maintain a reliable connection. The adapter included in this desktop, though, actually managed to clock the fastest download speed on my SpeedTest.net records just now.
It's almost painful even to write this but... As beautiful as this $250 display is to behold, I've grown accustomed to my Surface Laptop 2's 2256 x 1504 13” display after years of hard, daily use. Apparently, those dimensions mean the little machine's display has a pixel density of 201 Pixels-Per-Inch. Filling a 27” display with just 1920 x 1080 means a pixel density of just 81.6 Pixels-Per-Inch,[efn_note]I suppose I should not have been surprised to immediately discover a dedicated online tool for calculating pixel density.[/efn_note] and the disparity was glaring to my eyes, even from the setup screen. After a few hours of regular use, I'm not sure I notice it anymore, but I suspect I will again when I've got the laptop running again. Please do indicate whether or not you think such a complaint makes me awful in the Crowdsignal poll below.
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have I become truly spoiled or is 1080p just... not high enough resolution for a 27" display.
I've also already had trouble connecting my Bose SoundLink headphones correctly via Bluetooth. On my Surface Laptop, it registered as two separate devices – “Stereo Headphones” and “Headset” – which allowed me to use them as both the primary audio output and the primary audio input. For whatever reason, I have been unable to accomplish such a simultaneous connection on this machine: I can either connect them as headphones or as a headset, but not both. This video provided some help – I know now that I have to open Sound Settings and manually connect the headphones every time I re-connect them. Hopefully, I'll figure out another solution soon.
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Returning to the webcam issue: I discovered that absolutely zero local stores keep add-on webcams in stock anymore, which makes sense. I resorted to searching Amazon for webcams and found a gargantuan list of brands I had never heard of. When I filtered by the one I did recognize – Logitech – I saw barely-facelifted versions of the camera my stepdad bought in 2008 and none were in stock. Unwilling to further investigate or research more, I set the price filter for under $40, sorted by customer ratings, and bought the first product which had even remotely legitimate-looking reviews: this 1080p thing branded with “Mersuii.”
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After returning to the order invoice hours later for this post, I got curious enough to Google search the company name and discovered a dead-end url, zero Wikipedia page, and this Trademark registration, on which I spotted some very interesting information. Entered in the second “Goods & Services” row is the following text:
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Adult sexual stimulation aids, namely, devices for massaging or vibrating external and internal portions of the body, vibrating and non-vibrating reproductions of parts of the male and female anatomies, male sex toys, masturbators, penis pumps, electrical penis cyclone pumps, rings, clamps, stimulators, vibrators, dildos, dongs, butt plugs, anal beads, rings to be worn about the penis; Adult sexual stimulation kit comprised primarily of adult sexual stimulation aids and a workbook
Assuming Jesus Christ is in your thoughts this evening before yet another anniversary of his birth, I am infinitely astonished by the truth in what I’m about to suppose with you. If the Son of God was living today, most of us have agreed for a long time now that he’d use marijuana recreationally – big fuckin whoop. I think it’s far more interesting and appropriate (we all know his birthday was wholly reconfigured into a consumerist holiday long ago) to speculate on how he’d behave after finding himself inadvertently in the market for a new laptop within the ~$1000 range (following a stubbed toe whilst walking on water incident, perhaps.) Surely, it would not be entirely holy for him to opt in to the Foxconn-complicit world of Apple, Incorporated, nor the openly-blasphemous one created and exuberantly grown by Google LLC, and I’m afraid he’d be too much of an End User idiot to integrate any of the sparse Linux-dedicated hardware available. In May of 2017, however, Billy Gates’ old Microsoft finally released “the laptop we’ve always wanted them to make,” but could its recent update be truly worthy of our Lourde and Saviour? Or your newly-enrolled offspring? Should you sprint downstairs and swap out the new MacBook Air you just bought?
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From an entirely valid perspective, an observer might declare my last two months of 2018 to be an outright shameful period defined by hypocrisy and traitorous betrayals. After finally taking the time to explore the full narrative surrounding Linux and the bloody tale of Microsoft’s cruel genocidal destruction of countless creative software projects throughout computing’s adolescence (see: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish,”) I eventually declared myself “100% Open Source” and began outlining an essay designed primarily to express that Linux is finally ready to be the operating system of the people without succumbing immediately to the brand of cybercrackpot illegitimacy associated with the L-word in the minds of the general public so readily thanks to decades of misinformed, condescending neckbeards. Such a feat would require entire new planes of cultural awareness and dialectal delicacy, yet certainly result in zero personal reward from even the best possible outcome, yet I proceeded to ponder the subject very deliberately all the way through October because I genuinely believed in a new democratized future of computing. 2018 had been my Grand Awakening to the idyllic possibilities of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) across the whole applied spectrum from office suites to social networks, yet – as two thousand eighteen comes to an end – I’ve managed to find myself among the most jaded, soul-sapped tech community I have yet encountered: Microsoft Administrators.
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Complimenting this Linux-laden culture in which I was not so long ago deeply embedded was a confused and frustrated outlook regarding what I felt were excessive and completely idiotic sacrifices across the industry’s hardware design to the greedy, gluttonous god of Lightness. It seemed only reasonable to Myself As Consumer that the entire buying public should exclusively seek designs prioritizing greatest possible performance and battery life, even from portable computers and smartphones, so I assumed my perspective on this updated iteration of Microsoft's most laptopy Surface laptop – which exists in large part to compete directly with Apple's beloved (and just-updated) MacBook Air – wouldn't be at all useful. However, a few weeks ago, my employer prompted me with a sweet sweet ultimatum: for the sake of a tax break, I want to spend ~$1000 on a laptop for you as soon as possible. Yes, I know I should consider myself a very fortunate man – this wasn't even the first time I'd been surprised with the “hey, I want to buy you a laptop but it has to be today” experience, and may even be considered a sort of sequel to my Tales of Whirlwind Manic Consumerism, but it’s ultimately one of the most idiotic strategies to achieve a major purchase decision and completely inadvisable for anyone on a budget. Still I was indeed thankful to be put in a nearly-identical situation of Consumer Electronic haste, and have come to be especially appreciative of the specific time I was approached as such: just one week after Microsoft launched the Surface Laptop 2.
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Considering the vast majority of its users are trapped inside my television, there’s no harm in covering the Surface brand with our virtual palm for a moment. If you’ll indulge me so, you’ll notice that Microsoft has actually delivered unto us The Laptop II – as in, the sequel... the successor to every other laptop computer yet conceived... but does this one machine truly represent the second coming of the Notebook Christ? Naturally, it would be a bit zealous to stand behind this extreme statement with 100% sincerity, but there truly are certain elements of this Personal Computing product's execution which do indeed will its user to expect and/or desire from others in coming years. As I've stated before, I also simply cannot help but be jazzed by such bravado from the mouths of even a company with as crooked and hateful history as Microsoft's. (Note: no other technology company has actually achieved what Microsoft historically has in this regard, and hopefully none ever will again.)
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I must be honest: it hasn't yet been two months and I've already scuffed and perhaps even stained the beautiful maroon alcantara surrounding my machine’s touchable body, but it’s occurred to me that I might draw upon the vast library of automotive interior tutorials available on YouTube – and even purchase some of the alcantara care-specific products they recommend – in order to really maintain the exterior of the Laptop II. After all, alcantara was undeniably car culture’s material first. I should also confess that objectively, the Surface Laptop II is the best-suited computer for my personal uses that I’ve ever owned or used for any length of time. Subjectively, I don’t think all of the hardware design touches that make it so – like its keyboard layout, divine 3:2 aspect ratio, and particular I/O complement – have yet had the chance to seduce my emotional brain into truly loving it as much as I certainly should by any reasonable measure. For my own sake, I hope I’m able to fall in child-like infatuation with its magic, but in the interim, I believe the coldness of my heart should hopefully preserve any useful commentary I might have to add. Though this is undoubtedly the most timely review of a hardware product I’ve ever published, I’d still ask that you indulge my perspective suggesting the importance of considering it part of a package with its operating system, considering that the whole of tech media would’ve unanimously declared it the year’s “best laptop” were Apple’s aging, but still widely-adored MacOS absent from the frame.
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I've tested a bunch of laptops this year, running the spectrum of 2-in-1s, Chromebooks, MacBooks, gaming laptops, etc. Everyone's needs are going to be different, which is why there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all for laptops. But enthusiasts’ laptops aside, I strongly feel the Surface Laptop 2 is the best laptop of the year. And by that I mean the best laptop for most folks' needs.
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With as much humility as possible, I must add that I myself am anything but “most folks,” yet my experience so far with the product has been one of astonishing compatibility and battery life. Using recommended power settings, the Surface Laptop 2 endured four hours and twenty-two minutes of a workload it wasn’t particularly designed for including heavy web browsing, image manipulation, brief audio/video capture with OBS, and moderate subsequent editing in Audacity and OpenShot. Dan Seifert – Vox Media’s “only Windows user” – reported “about seven hours” of Microsoft’s claimed 14.5, but frankly, I don’t know what any of y’all are doin – I’m just thankful this machine is a better marathoner than any other I can recall owning. While we’re on the subject, I consider Microsoft’s inclusion of a magnetically-attached power cable and unassuming auxiliary USB charging port on the attached power supply to be personal godsends – further evidence, even, that the Surface Laptop 2 was actually designed to be nice to use. For the sake of those readers actually in the market for a new laptop who’ve somehow found themselves here, though, Raymond Wong’s review for Mashable is the most thorough offering you’ll find – it’s quoted front and center on Microsoft’s web page for the Laptop II, even – but it’s important to mention that his critical comparative perspective predates the late launch of its ultimate competitor, the new MacBook Air. Rather pitifully, however, his colleague’s “good, but not great” resolution suggests that Apple failed to challenge Microsoft’s relatively moderate update enough to warrant any revision, and that Mashable as a publication stands by my new laptop’s Best of the Year title, for whatever it may or may not be worth to you.
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If the new MacBook Air came in at the same price as the old one, it would be a steal. Sure, you pay for the privilege of being able to use macOS on the Apple ecosystem. But in years past that also meant access to cutting-edge features and design. As pretty as the MacBook Air is, there's nothing that innovative about it. In today's Apple, it seems, privilege amounts to just staying current.
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You won’t find many others who regularly invest editorial merit in publishing 2500+ word laptop reviews anymore, which I’d concede is plenty reasonable in the Surface Laptop’s case, at least. Perhaps your first point of comparative entry should be a barely-dated conversation between Kara Swisher, Lauren Goode, and Dan Seifert on Too Embarrassed to Ask regarding the original’s odds of truly competing in the “premium laptop” segment (if you’d prefer to hear from those who struggle to take it seriously, that is.) Assuming the original product direction of the Surface line still stands, Microsoft doesn’t actually intend to sell at high volume, especially when it comes to this runt of the marque, which does not hesitate to omit itself from the popular discourse of the moment surrounding tablets as the future of all computing to which all of its siblings have contributed so much. Though I shall always remember my dearest Libel (the special edition Spectre x360 with which I built most of Extratone) with great respect and deep fondness – I think it’s even worth mounting on some sort of plinth – the significantly-cheaper Laptop II has already demonstrated true value in its “premium” segment bragging rights with far superior materials and build quality. If you’re looking for the prettiest possible slice of magnesium lightness but aren’t the sort to have followed the story of Microsoft’s first venture into personal computer production since it began in the last year of the Mayan calendar, it’s worth your while to read Joshua Topolsky’s projections of the project’s impact on the popular narrative surrounding Microsoft from history’s freshest possible perspective: the eve of the first Surface tablet’s launch.
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The entire tablet was designed in-house by Microsoft's teams, and if you believe what was said in the presentation yesterday, design and functionality in hardware has suddenly become a big deal in Redmond. That's a big shift, and it's an important one. The announcement of the Surface shows that Microsoft is ready to make a break with its history — a history of hardware partnerships which relied on companies like Dell, HP, or Acer to actually bring its products to market. That may burn partners in the short term, but it could also give Microsoft something it desperately needs: a clear story.
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A pungent stigma festered from Microsoft’s history of inadequate and inelegant public relations (especially compared to its greatest longtime rival) has remained in relentlessly obvious orbit around every “significant” Windows and Office update for so long that its status quo has grown into a truly inhibitive force for all parties involved. Topolsky is unquestionably a compromising favorite of mine, but it’s hard not to decry then-CEO Steve Ballmer’s failure to comprehend Josh’s day-after insight in the whole three months that passed before his Seattle Times interview in September, 2012. Ultimately, The Big M is either incapable of understanding any alternative utopic Visions of Computing to its own, or simply overwrought with the same counteraspirational carelessness its culture has always depended upon. In analytical terms regarding Ballmer’s utilization of the forum’s opportunity to finally tell the fucking story, at least, the timidity of a term like “pre-eminent software” as a viably bright new beacon in contrast with “people would say we were a software company” (emphasis mine) – as if Steve-O himself doesn’t even have the power to publicly describe his company’s function as its #1 man – combined at the apex of what was almost impressively-negligent behavior.
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I think when you look forward, our core capability will be software, (but) you'll probably think of us more as a devices-and-services company. Which is a little different. Software powers devices and software powers these cloud services, but it's a different form of delivery...
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Don’t make the same mistake I did and wear yourself out trying to extract the meaning from these three sentences – there’s none to be found. Ultimately, whatever opportunity the Surface project could have provided for Microsoft’s identity has been vastly overshadowed by its success as last resort supercatalyst to restore any sense of dignity and pride within the hardware companies who produce the vehicles. In Fall 2017, The Registerquoted industry gossip regarding the company’s new CEO Satya Nadella and his intent to “exit the product line” because “overall they are not making money [and] it doesn’t make sense for them to be in this business,” but newcomers to this conversation should know that no subsequent reporting has corroborated anything but a sustaining future of the line, though the measurable rate of innovation in Microsoft’s products continues to leave much to be desired. Now that you’ve heard from the experts, though, allow me to expand our lens a bit and examine what the Surface Laptop 2’s existence suggests as per The Present & Future of Computing.
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The Clam Clan
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In case I’ve yet to mention it, all of my tech writing is in substantial debt to my much-older and child-oriented siblings for providing 8 nieces and nephews over the course of 11 years – if not for any reason but the perspective offered by the slightest observation of their day-to-day lives. In this profoundly bizarre and historic technological sprint our species is experiencing, the differences in their respective relationships with consumer tech as they’ve grown up are fascinatingly… disturbingly significant. My eldest niece Abby was born four years after myself in 1998, and her younger sister Amber just quite three years later in 2001. All three of us are Aquarians who went to the same public schools (aside from 2 exceptions on my part,) and the two sisters have been close, significant influences on each other all their lives, yet the way Abby and I use and think about computers differs significantly from Amber’s. Our first real PCs introduced an important social and intellectual vehicle to our pre-teen lives, and both of us still “live on” our machines as young adults. For us and many others from this short-lived microgeneration of ours, budget laptops like the Dell Inspirion 2200 (which served as the first “real computer” for both of us) introduced the internet and Being Online as a State of Being with AIM groups, MySpace, and Yahoo! chain mails before smartphones and tablets were capable of doing so.
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Amber prefers to use her iPhone for most everything and regards her computer as a tool for work – it’s booted up and down exclusively for that purpose, which is significantly healthier than the habit Abby, myself, and many of my Online friends developed: we left our computers running and Logged On all the time because we were otherwise unreachable. We learned from origin to depend on them for 100% of our computing tasks – from streaming Pandora to playing Flash games within six billion open browser tabs – which likely explains both our ADD and its resulting influence on the ease with which our personal computers can distract us. As a Journalism student and professional photographer, Abby uses the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, and [Insane Blogger] David Blue has spent years looking for an alternative, becoming the first and only iPhone user to make extensive use of its Bluetooth keyboard support in the process, but both of us are entirely uninterested in the rest of the industry’s insistence on convertibles, removable keyboards, or ‘professional’ tablets. I wish the Linux community was finally ready to drop the elitist pretenses plaguing its nerdy history; I wish I could finally tell someone like Abby that a machine like the System76 Galago Pro could slot itself into her workflow without losing her time or compatibility – that the reputation surrounding Linux People had finally lost most of its validity and her desire to learn more about computing as a young woman and Power User would be met with respectful and worthwhile conversation from their end. Unfortunately, I’ve still found some of the Old Guard to be elitist, socially behind, and juvenilely possessive, as if computing was still the niche interest from their 1980s and 90s childhoods. Though this conversation certainly warrants its own essay in the future, I’ll just express now that it’s a real shame some folks don’t realize the entire point of making great things is ultimately to give them to the world.
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The opportunity I’ve had in the past year to finally get my Linux distro frenzy over with and out of my system managed to both radicalize and democratize my understanding of MacOS, Windows, and Linux as they are in the present. While I had nothing better to do, fiddling with Ubuntu Studio and Linux Mint to the extent I did throughout Spring and Summer led me to further appreciate the value of keyboard shortcuts, gave me my first real proficiency with a command line, helped globalize my comprehension of my own technological privilege, reacquainted me in a huge way with both the true history of software and my own personal past as an experimental test tube baby of Microsoft’s, and helped to answer a lot of questions I’d worried over for years about why software seemed like it simply couldn’t improve anymore. While it’s true that important open source projects like ElementaryOS continue to sprout from the Linus Extended Universe and the growing Open Source community on Mastodon is filled with brilliant, helpful, unpretentious, and remarkably curious enthusiasts (probably because many of those I’ve interacted with so far are non-cis and/or non-white,) little ole me was able to stumble upon some totally unnecessary and excruciatingly ignorant sociopolitical commentary by way of the white, middle-age host and his undoubtedly-white and staunchly libertarian caller on a live broadcast of the Ask Noah Show. (It’s not as if I haven’t said ignorant and very ugly things too, but I wasn’t a forty-something father on a semi-professional talk show representing an entire community.)
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Essentially, I was quite frustrated and disappointed to find that Linux is still let down most by its own community, but the operating system itself is still much further along on its way to becoming a real alternative for the average user than mainstream tech journalism would have you believe. However, in my case, finally taking the time to really learn about Open Source computing also helped me understand (surprisingly) why Apple and its environment continue to be the best and most popular choice for professional applications. Linux Mint gave me tremendous power in enabling me to alter, specify, and redesign the most minute details of its interface, but I couldn’t have foreseen how all-consuming such power would be for someone like myself. In retrospect, I’ve realized that I ended up spending more time perfecting my custom LibreOffice Writer shortcuts than I did actually writing – I somehow found myself in a mind state which justified unironically creating a shortcut for the Shortcuts menu. Though I swore I’d never succumb to the bewildering hobby of collecting and exploring different Linux Distributions, it took no time at all for me to fill a folder with disc images of the installers for almost a dozen different interpretations of the operating system after I’d made the simple concession to myself that I’ll just try Ubuntu, that’s all. The most profound realization from all this (arguably otherwise wasted) time: for a user like me, a walled garden is actually the best place to be productive because apparently, I don’t have the self-control to keep myself from running away and/or fixating on completely unproductive tasks without its boundaries. I think this phenomenon is perhaps the worst culprit in the persistence of the aforementioned divide between “computer people” and everyone else who simply uses computers, as I’m sure any one of the latter could tell you after all of five minutes with a Linus type.
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The most comprehensive and somewhat-urgent revision to illustrate the significance of this contrast from my perspective regards the exceptional iOS/MacOS markdown-based notetaking app Bear. Frankly, my own “Word Processing Methodology” essay from June has already become problematically out of date (and therefore embarrassing) in terms of my own knowledge of the segment and its history. Though I promised the conversation was “done,” I’ve continued to explore further into word processing’s history as well as its current state. “I had a go at Bear’s free iOS experience and saw little functional difference from DayOne,” the old, negligent, cursory David Blue noted, but if I’d simply been willing to cough up a bit more time and just $1.49 a month for Bear Pro, I’d have spared myself such shame and realized that the hype around this app really is 100% justified. Bear is the most beautiful iOS app I’ve ever seen, but I’m now also fully qualified to declare it the most effective execution of “distraction-free” writing software to come along in the past 25 years. Developer Shiny Frog’s secret is their perfect balance between capability and simplicity. It turns out, Daily Content Lord Casey Newton’s word on this matterreally was worth more than mine, not to mention more succinct: “Bear may look simple, but there’s power underneath the surface.”
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Those longtime Linux and Windows diehards who’ve tolerated me thus far, listen up: MacOS may be ancient, neglected, and full of incongruencies, but its single-minded methodology paired with Apple’s iCloud really does make it the most effective and elegant environment for most people to simply get shit done. It’s clear that many of you have realized the importance of simplicity for compact and/or educational distributions, but let me just add that the democratization of Linux provides a gargantuan development opportunity to make something that beats MacOS at its own game without starting from such a shitty premise and all of its resulting compromises – all without detracting from any other technically-minded distributions whatsoever. That is the magic of The Distro, remember?! If you’ve existed in a similar state of confusion to that of my entire adult life regarding the appeal of Apple products – despite having once been an extensive OSX user, myself – you’re very welcome for the insight. Instead of paying me for the profound self-improvement I’ve just provided, try prioritizing this newfound knowledge the next time you talk to your MacBook Pro-loving friend about their workflow. If you’re like myself, you’ll find their arguments have magically transformed from the bewildering bullshit they’ve always seemed to be into challenges for future competing operating systems to surpass Apple’s old bitch and excel in because MacOS and even its much-younger iOS counterpart – as well as the billions of people who depend on them – desperately need real competition in order to maintain their viability, much less become what products of the world’s wealthiest company should be.
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Yes, the manner in which these operating systems are perceived really is an important discussion prompted by a product as insignificant as the Surface Laptop 2 because as you read, the industry is bracing for another paradigm shift in computing, which many believe (preposterously, I might add) could be as significant and disruptive as 2007’s introduction of the iPhone. This machine of Microsoft’s and its “new” MacBook Air counterpart could potentially be the last designs to carry us to a computing future where the tried-and-true clamshell design is forgone entirely by the mainstream, but Apple’s release of this year’s new iPad Pro prompted even the most Cupertino-loving tech commentators to respond with genuine discord along with a few long-overdue shouts of “are you crazy?!” I’m very proud of The Verge’s Nilay Patel, in particular, for so eloquently deconstructing its usability for all but the very wealthy. “It is impossible to look at a device this powerful and expensive and not expect it to replace a laptop for day-to-day work,” he reminds us in the introduction to his full review of the updated product, along with a beautifully transient sentiment which I think we all needed to hear again: “I don’t think people should adapt to their computers. Computers should adapt to people.” Even something as consumerist and bourgeois as the introduction of another pricepoint-burgeoning Apple hardware flagship can turn a simple tablet review into a much-needed manifesto for a user-centric way forward for the industry, which is itself worthy of celebratory encouragement.
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I’ve favored The Verge and its cast long past the point of excess throughout the span of my work about technology, but Nilay’s review and its accompanying episode of The Vergecast are truly special and profound gems of content that shouldn’t be passed up. Apparently – as the Editor-in-Chief immediately insists as the episode begins – his “ongoing theory” that “the more important you are, the less actually important work you do, and the more likely you are to be an iPad user” roused anger from “that whole class of [billionaires,]” but the experiences behind his argument actually suggest that Apple’s own favorite child of late – into which it has begun investing and thereby implicitly sponsoring over its much older brother as the ultimate heir of the majority’s future computing – has unequivocally failed to do its part in growing the iPad Pro into the “laptop replacement” we’d all heard so much about. Of iOS 12’s performance as an operating system beneath true work-related tasks, he exasperates “you have to spend all of your time figuring out how to do stuff instead of doing stuff,” which I couldn’t help but hear as echoes of my own late Linux lamentations. As thankful as I am to have finally achieved enlightenment of the Planet Apple, I’m afraid I was pitifully late: its very natural laws underwent their most brutal tests of the 21st century this past year. Now that I’ve finally come to adore the elegant effectiveness of a new generation of iOS apps like Bear, I’m faced with yet another of the episode’s statements of weight: “I think it’s time to stop pretending that the future of computing looks like Apple’s restrictions.” On the opposing end of the line, the world’s first trillion-dollar company’s other major product release of 2018 managed to disappoint even the most fanatical fans of its original operating system’s best-selling platform with an insultingly mediocre update to the MacBook Air marque upon which it once so fondly doted.
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My best friend’s parents bought her the original Surface tablet when she enrolled in art school, and her frustration with its lackluster keyboard (among others) leads MacOS alternative-seeking users like us to wish Microsoft had started with a traditional design like the Surface Laptop first. Perhaps Apple and Microsoft’s emphasis on their tablets is nothing but a bit premature for the most current crop of users, and the rest of my nieces and nephews will expand upon an entirely different methodology of usership when they receive their freshman computer. Those elders of us who still take the Clamshell form seriously and love printing our documents are apparently facing a future industry saturated with products we can’t believe in, but it’s up to you to decide if this issue is worth expending your energy in advocacy for either camp. With my 120+ word per minute proficiency with physical keyboards, I for one have been completely bewildered by the iPad as anything but an indulgence for reading text on the web, and I’m pleased as punch with my Surface Laptop 2. Even if it proves to be the last new computer I’ll ever own to come as optimized for my use, I’m just grateful and astonished it happens to be the best yet.
Seven years ago, the fourth generation of Apple’s iPhone instigated a change in our perception of digital photography. Now – thanks to Google Photos – I’d like to reflect on my favorite shots of mine.
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When iPhone 4 handsets began shipping in the Summer of 2010, I’d been carrying my first generation for three solid years – since its now history-stricken release, in fact – and its age started to become a problem. I’d drop it screen-down on a rock in the airport parking lot just before going back to school for my Junior year, splitting a crack in the screen that wouldn’t quite kill it – it was the demands of iOS 4 on its 412 MHz CPU and meager 128 MB of RAM that would ultimately cease its usability.
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The single 2 megapixel rear-facing camera would surprise one at times, but was never lauded as anything but what it was – a mobile phone-bound sensor capturing very cellular-looking* images, but Steve Jobs wasn’t three minutes in to his iPhone 4 presentation at the June 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference before he pronounced the design’s closest possible “kin” to be “an old Leica camera,” associating his device with photography in its first impression. The equivalent of the first generation’s rear-facing camera could now be found facing you, and the fourth’s primary sensor now shot at 5 megapixels (2592 x 1936) with autofocus and 5x digital zoom, setting a fundamental smartphone sensor configuration standard that’s still adhered to by the industry.
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After unleashing Google Photos upon the ~15,000 images on my home machine’s hard drive last year, I have been constantly reminded of my own photographic history – for better or worse – and regularly shown five, six, seven-year old snaps in a manner that wouldn’t have been possible (or have made any sense) before. Recently, I was astounded to find that I took many of the better shots with my iPhone 4, so I thought I’d share a few from my high-school days in loving memory of my trusty little rectangular companion.
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All taken with iPhone 4, left unedited. View more onFlickr.
Setting out upon a desperate personal journey to rediscover enchantment with computers.
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This evening, a package is scheduled to arrive upon my doorstep containing a Compaq Portable Plus luggable computer from 1983 which I have fantasized about buying for far too many years. Despite living in the midst of perhaps the worst possible financial situation to spend $139.99 outright on a relic of computing, I finally just bought one anyway last Thursday because I’m absolutely fed up with life without the magic I remember feeling from computers. Yes, I am having a mid-life crises and The Machine is just a physical manifestation of one of my favorite stories, but I expect it will provide something irreplaceable for me and at least one piece of entertainment for just about anybody: I’m going to start a photoseries of myself using the 26-lb., suitcase-like, and utterly time-displaced Portable Plus in different coffee shops throughout Portland.
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There’s also potential opportunity (or necessity) for me to make use of my limited knowledge of hardware electronics. I’ve never been very comfortable with openly using the term “hobby,” but I fully intend to savor, document, and preserve every possible detail of my experience, so we’re going to behave as if the tales of computer history are precious to a dedicated audience besides myself, and that I am thereby and hereafter binding myself to an important duty of discovery, curation, and presentation expressed through multimedia of the highest possible caliber.
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In other words, I’m pretty sure I’ve just begun a vintage computing blog. Before we go any further, then, let’s dispense with the obligatory arrangements.
Put simply, Compaq was punk as fuck. Three dorky Texan technodads premeditated their leave of fair, secure jobs in the industry in order to bet everything on the promise of a single undeniably pro-user ideal to disrupt its dominant monopolistic supervillian. Unlike any of the countless other stories from the information age with the very same introduction, theirs was immediately propelled into stratospheric, record-breaking success — from coffee table sketches in the wastelands of suburban Houston nights to one billion dollarsin less than five years, proving that it was possible to win huge in tech by committing sincerely to liberating the consumer and manifesting the ultimate performance of the underdog complex American business has ever witnessed.
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Those of us who’ve maintained some curious orbit of technology have recently entered a reconcillatory process as the world has become all at once intimately familiar with our collective pursuits’ true consequences. Never has it been more appropriate to reflect on the wholesome bravado of the only American computer company to build a billion-dollar business atop the sole mantra of user liberation. At a glance one might assume that AMC’s attempt to reproduce Mad Men’s formula with a story set in Compaq’s origin in a series that’s supposedly attracted a fair number of Netflixers called Halt and Catch Fire in conjunction with the 2016 documentary Silicon Cowboys have sufficiently reminded America of to whom it really owes its privileged tech industry. However, a Twitter search for “Compaq” turns up virtually nothing of consequence, and — on the other cultural spectrum — I’ve yet to see a single well-documented collection of Compaq hardware, and I’m unsatisfied.
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Like it not, you’re coming with me on a safari back through two full nostalgic cycles to rediscover our wonder and excitement about technology because I miss it desperately and I know you do too. We’re going to find something marvelous.
A decade of iPhone has probably ruined my life, but will the 8 Plus finally end it?
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Listen to this review read by Siri Voice 2 below...
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Is my True Tone bullshit on?
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“True Tone” is so forgettable, everybody had to mention it first. Quite simply, it uses an ambient light sensor to fiddle with white balance, warming the colors of the display as an immediately-obvious whole, yes, but an interesting contrast to show off is no longer inherently justified in being called a “feature” in Apple products, anymore. Essentially, no matter who you ask (aside from Jon Rettinger,) you should not buy an iPhone 8, though I did last Fall, not only because I had to suddenly decide on a handset in less than 24 hours, but — if anything — to say goodbye to the form, the operating system, and the tech company which I have depended upon and carried with me virtually every day for my entire adult life. I’d originally decided to abandon this review due to a variety of unexpected circumstances, but Apple and its iPhone have maintained their place in the news with their battery scandal, and a third of a year with the 8 Plus has included some experiences which warrant a send-off before iOS 12 is released, making it (and myself) totally irrelevant forever.
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As the longstanding benchmark of the smartphone industry’s state at any given time, the iPhone can be easy to reflect upon as a product once occupying a state of universal exemption from criticism, but it has, in fact, never been so. As Nilay Patel noted, one might regard the 8 as the last compromise of “basically four years” of the same design. Since launch, it’s unsurprisingly stayed a wee bit too far behind on the spreadsheets for most Android-type folks — not that I’ve ever believed them truthfully incapable of comprehending what it means to package a product, given where their greasy startups all eventually ended up. (You cannot doubt me — I once took a year-long sabbatical from iOS with a Sony Xperia Play, and my authority is absolute.) The rest are trying to decide whether or not to pay $200 more for “the phone of the future,” which knows when you’re watching it, and is only good for playing half an hour of stupid video games before it needs a charge.
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So far, I have maintained that my first generation iPhone was the best handset of all time — one hell of an Email Machine that lasted me close to five years — throughout the last two with actual motherboard exposed to the elements in the corner of its cracked screen. That said, who knows how it’d feel to be coerced into using “iPhone OS 2” as it was called, then, for an entire workday in 2018? Two years prior to bringing home an 8 Plus, I vowed that my 6S Plus would be my last ever Apple device, but this one actually feels like a last hurrah. Though the ability to Tweet directly from the swipe-down notification menu is still nowhere to be found (it’s been gone for 5 releases, now, and would seem to have been forgotten by literally everyone but myself,) one gets the sense that Apple’s efforts to add to the iPhone 8 and iOS 11 were to make amends with us by settling a few debts.
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In part, they did. Native apps got a major overhaul — including Mail, which was startling, considering that I’d been looking at what was near as makes no difference the same UI my eldest phone shipped with. As a result, it alone constitutes my benchmark for an email service, and I have been left without a clue as to what a good one looks like. (Apparently it was really bad?) Since time began, there has always been at least one alternative email app of the moment that tech journos refer to as the must-have, end-all replacement. Edison Mail is currently the smoother, faster, most modular option — at least for another few minutes– but I’ll never know it as I know Mail, and I’ll never want to. Playing around with experimental email apps is too scary. What if I decide once again to kill that massive number in the red badge and need to immediately mark 40,000 emails as read? It took all of my iPhone 4’s 1.0Ghz CPU and proprietary software over 18 hours — how am I supposed to trust a shabby little 6-month-old startup with such an important task? Anybody with a hundred bucks can make an app, you know.
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Why is the App Store now the best-looking publishing software on iOS?
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One might interpret the App Store’s redesign as an attempt by Apple to control this conversation — of both the trending new thing and the old“essentials” that you’ve probably had tucked away in an untouched folder for years. Technically, whoever the hell is writing those gorgeously-presented daily bits has made them a publishing company, though I’m not so sure I’m not the last remaining user who’s continued semi-regularly visiting their “Today” section. If I did want to actually read about apps (I don’t — who does?) it wouldn’t make much sense to seek critical reviews from the faceless boffins behind the platform itself, regardless of how much better it may look than all of the tech news sites, paywall or no.
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Native screen recording could conceivably come in handy once or twice, but I see no reason why the red bar must remain at the top of the render, but it has, which could explain the total lack of any such video in the wild. Front-facing 4K, 60fps capture is impressive, but useless — vloggers all have GoPros or DSLRs, these days, and sharing through Snapchat and Instagram will always be ultra-compressed. (Here are two sloppy test clips — at the zoo, and fishing.)
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Perhaps some have figured out the new Files “app,” but it’s sat on my homescreen for months, untapped, and it will likely remain there for all time as a sort of soothing trophy — a thanks for my legacy iPhone loyalty. My reward for half a lifetime of syncing, scrolling, and tolling? I can now view some of the files on my Mobile Computing Device, and even scan documents in, which is mostly novel (though it is fun to digitize excerpts from physical text.) At some point, I must’ve mischecked a permanent option because all file types now open only in an app that does not recognize them. God bless.
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Somehow, I’ve managed to fill my social circle with precisely zero iOS-using folks. All of my friends and colleagues use Android devices (including Tim’s supercool Nextbit Robin,) which provide a few handy datapoints (like the camera in my fiance’s Galaxy S8,) but deprive me of any significant experience with the ostensibly intoxicating cult of iMessage. I’m constantly listening to and reading tech writers claim that it’s one of the only reasons they’re still using iPhones, but my own food-OS loving biome has forced me to find others, and frankly, I can’t imagine looking at the gluttonous palate of available mobile, cross-platform messaging services (Telegram, now Telegram X, WhatsApp, Signal, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Slack, Tinder?, Google Hangouts, Google Allo, Google Chat, Viber, Skype, Line, Wire, etc.) and thinking… well, none of this will do!
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Honestly — even if I’d actually been at all informed in my haste, the photographic capabilities of the 8 Plus, alone would’ve sold it. It’s not the new filters, gif functionality, or even “3D Photos” — it’s those mythical dual 12MP sensors (which it shares with something called the iPhone X.) They’re no less than infallible. After four months of astonishing capturesin all manner of conditions, I don’t even care how exactly they do it anymore — it’s better to be left marveling. This first example was taken at Keystone, Colorado in the middle of a dark, cloudy Fall night — the amount of light they were able to find — “up to 80% more,” according to Apple — is just impossible.
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The vast majority of the samples in my iPhone 8 Flickr Album were taken within the native Camera app as it ships and left unedited. (Especially before just a few weeks ago, when I discovered Halide.
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Here is an unquestionably sensible progression from which iPhone has never wavered far since its fourth generation set the standard, but it’s one of an unfortunate few. Siri is still useless and silly apart from its “disable all alarms” feature and its ability to sound itself off in response when you’re hysterically screaming and digging for it through the vast plush of a forty-year-old Lincoln. The customizable Control Center makes toggling low power mode, orientation lock, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth less frustrating (note the last two aren’t quite hard switches,) though it should’ve come years ago. Notifications are slightly more sensible -certainly better than they were on Android Gingerbread, but I’ve heard things’ve changed quite a bit since then.
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I have been tripped up by the lack of a 3.5mm audio jack a few times, but it just wouldn’t make sense from a hardware perspective, and the new external stereo capability should refute those who can’t or won’t understand. Yes, it would be nice if Apple hadn’t led the industry to quite such a compromising obsession with thinness — we’d all trade a lotof substance for exponentially greater battery life, storage capacity, water resistance, etc. — but I don’t see much sense in expending your energy holding up signs in Silicon Valley.
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I’ll be here long after you’ve died, and you know why?
-Because I took the time to sync my apps.
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Two years ago, a new generation of social apps and the preposterous notion of a quad-core CPU in my iPhone 6S Plus seemed like the harbinger of a world I no longer understood. Now, most of those services have expanded to the far boundaries of my reach, and I’ve stopped counting chips. Refinement of the hardware design is reverent to the extreme. It’s pretentious, but Apple’s decision to pause on the 8 to consider details like stuffing the legal text in the software and adding a little bit of weight back in for ergonomics’ sake leads one to regard it as a monument to all the devices along the development timeline that have led to this… last triumph. Or, it would have perhaps, had they not sold so many.
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One could argue that good execution of consumer electronic design means minimizing as much as possible the obstructions in the way of the user completing any given task, and the iPhone 8 Plus has surpassed the vast majority of these for myself — and I am, surely, a “power user.” iOS has changed a lot in the decade I’ve employed it — in far too many ways for the worse — but this pair of handset and software have reached my imagination’s limit for what I could possibly want to do. Augmented reality and wireless charging won’t ever have a place in my future, for better or worse. Face ID is much too peculiar. Surely, this iPhone is the ultimate expression of the first and fourth generation’s foundation.
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If the 6S Plus was indeed the key to my immortality, I’m afraid the 8 Plus heralds my imminent demise. Whether or not it’s an early one is for you to decide. This really is my last iPhone.
A laptop, purchased. The beginning of a new era, finally witnessed.
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I managed to be reckless, tedious, and zealous in the usually-dry process of purchasing a new laptop, and found the story worth sharing. Expect a full review of the HP Spectre in the coming weeks.
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The meteorological complaints you’ve been hearing from mid-Missouri since Friday aren’t inappropriate this time – the middlefolk faced one of their most fatal enemies – a well-laid minefield of black ice. It slowed our timid, ABS-oblivious society to ten percent or less of its already near-postmortem pace.
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For God’s sake, at least learn why you needn’t pump your brakes before you opt for infotainment extras or… get your driver’s license.
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I woke up with the same debt and imminent expenses as I did the day before and without any more intention of buying a premium laptop than I’ve had for the two years I’ve gone without one.
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Without the concept of mobile computing in its entirety, actually. I knew I’d lost my desire to carry a loose bluetooth keyboard around everywhere in case some insight were to fall upon me heavy enough to justify reaching for it over my 6S Plus in a public venue, hunched and squinting. There’s still nothing better at cranking out copy than the Lap Top Computer, I suppose. I was holding out for a truly-substantial alternative to Windows 10 and macOS, wanting to be enchanted by lite delights like Acer’s cheeky Chromebook R11, but had decided in self-pity that I’d probably never be able to stand a new operating system ever again.
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My mom graciously decided to take me mall shopping for Christmas, which is comforting in its tradition of vapid routine. The state of a given midwestern metropolis’s mall is a keen indicator of the culture’s soul, I’ve found, and ours is mostly crewed by destitute alcoholics, who are my closest kin, and therefore my most appropriate company for the holidays.
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Dillard’s is the second-best place to lose your mind in America.
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Even now, when the somber corners are not quite so desolate. The acoustic sensation cannot be experienced anywhere else – the battlecries of the Me Generation’s pop reproduced by hateful diaphragms behind their white plastic ceiling facades and absorbed again by palletloads of mass-manufactured stonewashed denim, seemingly coming from a far-off wholesale nether no matter where in the store you’ve been buried. Ours is a few decades old, now – weathered and alone, which accentuates the whole dystopia with a resolute air of infinity, as if it’s certain it will outlast me. It probably will.
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I was deep within it all when I came across Dan Seifert’s praising review of the HP Spectre x360. As I’ve constantly confessed, The Verge‘s lot are the only institution of their kind I’ve come close to trusting too much, so it was no small thing to see something so certain as “the premium laptop to buy this year” in his subhead.
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The last time I was in the market for a laptop, there was little room for aesthetics in the equation. We have been taught this past decade that beautiful devices come in fruit form, only. Somehow, I allowed myself to integrate the ridiculous sentiment that MacBooks were the only option for anyone with any reverence for tactile experience. As I expect you’re aware of to at least some degree by now, Apple’s diligent study of desirability over the years is the singular force behind their lordship, and it’s the token MO of tech opinion to confuse it with sex appeal, resulting in expressions like “[apple hardware device] is sexy,” which is a pityingly desperate delusion. Do you actually find brushed aluminum appealing in any bodily sense?
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We did once, of course. Your infatuation with the stuff probably peaked the moment you first grazed it, and – if you’re anything like me – you could be harboring more aesthetic frustration with their longstanding occupation than you think. Infatuation must be starved to survive, and we’ve been eating up Apples by the bushel for a decade.
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Haha.
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But really, though – by the billion.
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I saw images in that Spectre review which I was completely satisfied with. I watched that new HP logo as it traveled through the frames, stupefied. Out of precious ignorance, I experienced real desire in that undesirable place. (Which could actually represent some sort of defeat on my part, but I’m not too bothered.)
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And in the midst of those desolate people in their fortress of mediocrity, my mom and I hatched a plan to indulge upon the best part of desolation – impulsive, subsidized gluttony. We’d stop by the pharmacy to fill my anti-depressant script before renavigating Bourgeois Bumper Cars to get to Best Buy, where she’d let me use her credit line to purchase my final choice in the segment.
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Best Buy is the best place to lose your mind in America.
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I could’ve sworn it made good sense to me, once – in Middle School, when my friend and I were spending most of our free time emulating the first generation of tech-reviewing YouTubers – but now, it reminds me of a darkwood restaurant with its closing fluorescents on, shining in the inverse frequency of a bug zapper – casting a more effectively-repelling ambiance for the human psyche than anything else I’m capable of dreaming up, at least.
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I used to fucking visit that store for no purpose but to see and experience the diluted bit of the handset renaissance with enough momentum to coast its way here. I probably spent a full sixty minutes wandering around by my own volition on a handful of occasions.
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But these days, I am perturbed from the onset in a big way. There are too many blue vape enthusiasts on the sales floor at any given time, and they all want me to leave. They loaf around the carcass of consumer technology’s passion, not realizing, I guess, that I already know it ’twas they who killed it. (The stench is strongest by the wearables.) It’s eerie how little the Big Box itself has changed, considering the decade their goods have traveled.
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Under a fittingly-gray sky, I wash my pill down with La Croix and a Kind bar to preempt the appropriate rumination in my mouth as we inch toward my Final Financial Doom with the spooked sliders. Though we never exceed 5mph, there are abandoned vehicles littering the shoulders and medians in varyingly absurd orientations. But I do not jest – today, I am silent, for I am one of them.
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By the time we reach the store, my medicine has once again placed my soul in Safe Mode, so we shuffle into the grotesque thing. There are four employees in sight – no one else – and they all send their beady eyes my way. I have too much purpose in my consumerist jowls to pause, though, so I rush to the laptops near the opposite wall in an attempt to get an early estimate on my current level of personal computing idiocy. Naturally, my Mom snags one of another four associates immediately. In this work, I shall refer to him as Zoroaster.
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Despite having never seen 80% of the displayed devices in person before, I am able to spot the Spectres quickly, which is a good sign. I am immediately elated by the contrast to the depressing mushbooks I remember HP making in the oughts. The bezel… the brilliance of the display… the details of the visible body. I open Extratone. I open The Verge. I am hoping that Windows 10 will not be as much of a kicker as I’ve expected.
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I’m not a minute before Mom and Zoroaster have found the new MacBook Pros. Nobody remembers the password to the 13-inch, but the 15 is showing off its “deep blacks” and “Space Gray” mood. The Verge looks phenomenal, and its icon in the touchbar catches my eye. I manage to use it to switch tabs, the less-attuned degenerate in me noting the extra spanning required over CMD-TAB.
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“Have you tried the new keyboard?” asks Zoroaster.
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I hadn’t. It’s as indescribable as you’ve heard, but suggests legitimacy is Apple’s effort to bridge the transition from physical keyboards to their touch replacement. Terrifying legitimacy.
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“You get used to it,” he says.
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I open Pages and click out something ridiculous. Yeah… click. I’m sure there’s a better onomatopoeia available by way of just about any technology website, but I didn’t bother to study the sensation after realizing that it’s a con for my number one use of a Portable Computer – clacking.
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It’s not as if the thing isn’t gorgeous, though, in its way. After years of usership, I can tell you that it is undoubtedly a superb execution of the MacBook marque. It’s polished. It’s The New One. But it is also bleak and slateish. Some might even say dystopian. Do I want to carry such a thing around with me everywhere? Do I even want to carry it out of the store? What will I tell my friends? What will I tell my staff?
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$2,000 of my future spent on what is now a piece of distinctly establishment design…
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I return to the x360 to see what can be done about Windows’ appearance these days.
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Purple-gray taskbars… Hm.
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It’s a sale.
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Let me be honest with you – I spent some ninety minutes going between the two. Even if I’d endured the shame and self-disappointment of choosing the MacBook Pro, the simple grunt of the challenge the Spectre presents to it is no small milestone.
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As Zoroaster scrambles to remove my new machine from The Hanging Jail, I am drained from the decision, but aware that my perspective on the world has changed. I’ve been working on an editorial for the past few weeks that’s mostly alarmed howling about the industry’s utter lack of passion, as of late, but seeing the Windows-running department’s devices and their matured design – finally beautiful without obvious Apple influence – had truly revived some little flame of hope within me.
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Lithe Zoroaster was confused by UPCs a bit, as is understandable, and began juggling three Spectre boxes atop the prison lift, screaming the numbers – one at a time from each device – to his bewildered disciple, below.
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Throughout the later half of the whole ordeal, I’d had company – some sort of blonde working man who’d also braved the frictionless waste to calm himself with debt. I’d been elated at the opportunity for companionship, at first, but he’d found himself unable to escape the store’s bespoke Apple Hole. I did my best to help him, but failed hoist his girth from the 15’s benchmark suction. I’d left him there, bound. May my dreams n’er be haunted by the fading portrait of his tortured, middle class face.
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As the Best Boys did their dance, he somberly came to my side. The grimace he’d worn in the struggle had fallen away. I knew what was coming before he formed the defeated words: “go ahead and grab me the 500 while you’re up there.”
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As one does when they stumble upon a stranger’s funeral, I bowed my head.
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Here begins the part that sorta makes me look like an idiot.
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After signing my mother’s lengthy loan agreement, Zoroaster – the little devil – asked if I wanted the Special Edition, just behind me. I’d stopped by last year’s Big Boy Spectre – the ballsy-ass copper-toned masterpiece – and had wished for a moment that the look could’ve carried to the fresher x360.
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The monospace Hewlett-Packard logo blinded me, and the unlit display (it hadn’t been set up yet) concealed the wider bezel of… The older Spectre 13t – with which I write, now.
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I didn’t notice my blunder until after our treacherous return, and could not care less.
As dual speakers become the norm in smartphone design, let us briefly examine and explain why one should always expect to hear their music in stereo.
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Though I have many audiophilical sentiments and preferences, I cannot — by conscience — fully claim the title because I’ve never been able to justify the allotment of funds necessary for the obligatory equipment. (And my digital compressor usage in the production of Drycast and Futureland has been manifestly vulgar.) That said, audio engineering is one of the few topics which I can actually speak on with almost-academic authority, and my pretentiousness-capacitated preoccupation with quality-of-life compels me to bring up a ludicrously-rational standard that most of us have continued to undershoot for far too long.
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Two weeks ago, the abundantly-rumored omission of the 3.5mm audio port in the iPhone 7 was finally settled. We played our own part in feeding the “controversy,” yeah, but I believe Apple was actually quite tardy in labeling smartphone-bound analog audio as archaic, though I’m not going to waste words in that discussion — it is definitely oversaturated, at this point — because I think mono audio is an even more prevalent topic.
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Honestly, out of all the missing features we’ve lamented over in the past decade, stereo speakers should’ve been the most aggravating. The gigantic difference, of course, is that the industry (and — by muddled extension — the consumers) has been all but silent in that regard. I write you, now, because we should all be colossally disappointed with ourselves.
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Two channels. Left and right. Read: Mono vs. Stereo But why should you care? What if Google — somehow — failed to provide you with a significant difference?
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One channel of sound is — in terms of locale — rigidly static in your perception. Doubling the data creates a spectrum, adding dimensionality, which is infinite, ya know. Playing back audio in stereo, through two or more diaphragms (the fundamental hardware unit of sound reproduction,) now enables the exhibition of audio pictures.
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If this is entirely new to you, I want you to do something. Find yourself a pair of headphones or a set of two or more computer speakers. (If these aren’t available, consider your car’s sound system. If it’s at all current and healthy, it’s gonna do the trick.) Bother to discover “L” and “R.” That is, left and right. Orient accordingly. Download this 37-second clip I recorded at BikeFest with my Zoom H2n. (Be advised: the preview is formatted in 5.1 surround, so it’s a very large file for its playback length.) Listen, obviously, and then listen again on your singular smartphone “loudspeaker.”
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That’s what I’m talking about.
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Why am I being so abashedly patronizing? Why am I transgressing against our particular assumptions about you — the informed, savvy millennial audience? Because the vast majority of playback I hear in day-to-day life is still from a singular diaphragm; a singular source.
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A topical example: I am shown a YouTube video on an iPhone. (A pre-iPhone 7 device, that is.)
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Walking downtown, I pass a small band of adolescent skateboarders listening to Cannibal Ox on a Samsung Galaxy Note.
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Worst of all: I find myself watching a Netflix film on my iPhone, in bed, not having bothered to wear the $200 pair of QC15s sitting within arm’s length.
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Informed or not, consumers are neglecting audio, and dimensionality, alone is worth a change. Recent years have allowed the unlimited bandwidth assumption to become habit, so even the vast majority of today’s spoken word programs (like podcasts) — which, in general, stay in the “center” of their mix, making little to no use of the left-right spectrum — are produced in stereo, now. In many cases (including a few of ours,) this doublesizing is often for the sake of introductory themes, alone. If you care to imagine a more data-frugal society, the “waste” is ridiculous. It is not unrealistic to expect such a reality in the near future, but the same holds true for the reverse.
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In the present’s abundance, though, the result is simply a decrease — as a whole — in playback’s “full experience,” if the hardware is not changed. Imagine how great it’d be if a digital audio formatting standard could be developed that’d enable a singular file to be mono or stereo, if needed/utilized, to trim off redundancy, sorta like variable bit rate. Get on that, would ya?
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So, why haven’t we become more diligent about our sound experiences? 1 billion iPhones in circulation, all with mono playback by default, are suspect culprits, I think. Of course, there are other devices, but none as influential — even the iPod, funny enough — on fundamental digital functions like music playback. And honestly, when is it appropriate or suave to take the extra steps?
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I want to show you this song. Let me untangle my headphones… Yes, okay. Put them in. I’m going to sit here in silence for four minutes, looking into your eyes as you listen to the entirety of this track.
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It’s never going to be socially acceptable. But what about wireless alternatives? Apple’s new Air Pods look absurd, but their by-computing optimization of the Bluetooth audio standard is revolutionary, in a small way, in propelling the “hearables” paradigm into the mainstream, if only for a moment. If — in a strangely-audiocentric future — we are always wearing multipurpose sound reproduction devices in our ears, perhaps the waste of the Mono Monstrosity will be finally resolved. Until then, I suppose all we can do is give it an extra thought, for our own quality-of-life’s sake.
It is my privilege and my curse to write about every new major iteration to Apple’s mobile operating system, though I skipped iOS 13 last year, which was largely dominated by Dark Mode, the iPad OS fork, and Memoji – which I could care less about, honestly – and didn’t warrant my investment in a Full Post, I felt. The Photos app improvements were very welcome, but I’d departed from iCloud as my primary storage service, so I didn’t have anything relevant to say. iOS 14 is also mostly irrelevant to my own personal use, but represents a more abstract shift in design philosophy that I thought was worth commenting on. For myself, everything about it adds anxiety, beginning with the launch, itself, at Apple’s WWDC 2020, which I watched, live, and Tweeted extensively about.
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I do not want to live on the Memoji planet.
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My technology writing over the years has largely centered around my awe and confusion regarding what I've perceived as a divergent path from the future I once imagined. My closest guess as to this divergence's origin is the announcement of iOS7, with Apple's abandonment of skeuomorphic design in favor of an entirely new, “flatter” UX visual language, which I actually found quite jarring. In retrospect, though, of course I'm glad they did so. I thought this was an importat preface to any thoughts I have about today's WWDC Keynote – they will probably seem idiotic in a year or so (they might to you already.)
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Thanks to The Big Beer Virus, this was Apple's first pre-recorded WWDC presentation (though the word “live” continued to be used on several occasions,) which made it especially surreal. During the wait for the Keynote to “go live,” the stream was occupied by an animated Earth from orbit. As the clock rolled over the hour's top, AURORA's “Daydreamer” faded in and we began to grow closer to this Earth, gradually revealing that it was covered with millions of floating memoji in various states behind their animated MacBooks. Like much of the event to follow, this scene became more and more anxiety-inducing as we grew closer to the mob (keep in mind that I've never really found memoji cute, unlike plenty of folks.) Eventually, we changed pitch dramatically and plunged through a hole in the clouds straight toward the incenter of the spaceship at Apple Park, through the door, down the staircase, and into a completely empty – but fully lit – Steve Jobs theatre, where Tim Cook emerged on stage and almost immediately began to address racism.
This disorganization of Craig Federighi's Homescreen shown in the presentation exemplifies the entire aura of this update: it’s complicated. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn receives this new complication positively in an excellent essay dedicated to the topic, divided into Widgets on The Home Screen, Jiggle Mode and Editing Pages, the App Library, and App Clips. (Yes, in many ways, linking to the essay makes this post redundant.)
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That's what I wrote about WWDC. iOS 14 officially released five days ago, now, and folks are already showcasing some crazy homescreen modifications on Twitter in #ios14homescreen. I would go into detail, but I'm honestly not all that curious about the process, which is unusual. I hope more than anything that I am not loosing my curiosity or playfulness regarding iOS which not so long ago propelled an exuberant exploration of Shortcuts' capabilities during their early days as an integrated Apple property with the release of iOS 12.
Basically, I'm not going to do the full bit, this year, but I'd like to address some of the notes I did take throughout the past few months of the developer beta. Notably, there is simply far less to iOS 14 that's relevant to my life, personally, than any other release I remember, but that's okay. It's just a wee bit more difficult to motivate myself to talk about it. If there's one definite statement to be made about this release, it's that it is additive rather than transformative. As Dieter Bohn so elequently put it for The Verge:
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For the iPhone, the overarching theme is that they're finally letting it get complicated. The home screen starts simple, but it can be complex if you want it to and Apple's also finally putting different elements on top of other elements so you can see Siri on top of your current screen instead of taking over the whole screen.
Yes, I do find the title of that article quite ironic considering what I just articulated to you.
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The title of his penultimate review, additionally, includes the summation “Apple is finally lettting the iPhone homescreen get complicated.” Yes... Complexity. I'll be honest: I've actually had the opportunity to play around quite a bit with Android 11 thanks to Android Studio on my PCs, and I found it tremendously underwhelming as an alternative. On a virtual Pixel 3, the experience was functionally no more than a fucking material design-tasting, slightly varied execution of a smartphone operating system in comparison. I should disclaim, though, that these weeks with early iOS widget implementation – which represents quite a hefty chunk of this release's significance, I think we can all agree – have led me to the conclusion that I personally do not believe in widgets. Or at least – I do not have the usership vocabulary to even begin integrating them into my own handset-using life.[efn_note]I'd elaborate but honestly, who cares, really?[/efn_note]
App Clips: Oh boy... I'm so physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted. Just gonna say no to that one.
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Add widgets to the home screen: I'm going to assume it's Android users who've stigmatised dynamic home screen widgets as a desirable outlet of development resources. I simply cannot fathom any bit of data which would be truly be constructively consumed there, as opposed to unlocking the device and navigating to whatever application it originated from. Perhaps I'm just old and slow.
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Send apps to the App Library: Directly related, actually. Still considering how I assume most folks actually navigate to applications that have been in folders or in secondary+ homescreens to date – that is, dragging down and typing a handful of characters into Spotlight search – I'm not sure an alphabetized listing of all apps is really that useful. I know I'm not alone on this one: iJustine expressed an identical assumption on an episode of her podcast, Same Brain.
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Hide some of your home screens: (I repeat the exact same argument.)
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Watch videos with picture-in-picture mode: Once again, I could definitely be showing my age, but what really constitues watching when you're talking about a fractional segment of a ~6 inch display? You may as well just be listening to the audio, right?
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Pin conversations in Messages: I'm afraid the text conversation pinning feature doesn't really apply to someone like myself, who literally never messages anyone but my girlfriend and my mom. All pinning the conversations accomplishes for me is the obfuscation of the handy in-line timestamp found in the normal list view.
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Mention your contacts in Messages: Jesus... And we're still using fucking SMS?
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Add more variety to your memojis: I still have not figured out how to actually use memojies, practically, so...
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Get suggested smart home automations: I'm sorry... What did you say? I'm not familiar with those words.
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Get to bed on time: Clarification: “iOS 14 works with watchOS 7 (or on its own) to help you get to sleep at the right time each night, with reminders and Do Not Disturb options.” If you were truly at all interested in not being disturbed or getting lots of sleep, you wouldn't have spent $300 on a machine to strap to your wrist who's primary function is to disturb you!
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Translate websites in Safari: Christ... Really? How have I not encountered an issue with this before?
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Search inside apps: There we go! The first item on this list that suggests anyone at Apple actually uses iOS!
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Get more detailed weather forecasts: Dark Sky acquision... All this one does is remind me that Apple's self-restraint could breach at any time and essentially the only competent mobile weather app ever devised could die or be molested into irrelevance.
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Use your iPhone as a translator: Well... Yeah... Anything that convenienctly allows me to reduce dependence on Google, I guess!
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Get more facts from Siri: ...lol
-“Apple says Siri knows more facts than ever before, though it hasn’t offered up any specific examples of something it knows in iOS 14 that it didn’t know in iOS 13—you’ll have to try and test it out yourself. According to Apple, Siri now knows 20 times the number of facts that it did three years ago, and we haven’t been able to catch it out with anything so far.”
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Get cycling directions in Apple Maps: No! Cut that out!
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Plan a journey in an electric vehicle: I'm not joking when I suggest that this fits perfectly into iOS 14's Anxiety Mode Enchancement theme: all this really means is We've added the new Apple Range Anxiety app!
Yes, there are examples of genuine progress. The Guides feature in Maps (seen above) probably could/should have been added a long time ago, but at least Apple executed it quite elegantly. I'm could've sworn sharing your ETA has been possible from within Maps since like... iOS 7 or something, but perhaps I was thinking of Waze. Wallpapers for CarPlay are one of those features that didn’t occur to me to want, but I did/do. Also – though my personal experience with CarPlay has been limited – I can definitely imagine more layout options (“Horizontal status bar”) will be useful in fringe use cases.
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And that's it! All of my notes have now been crossed off! Now I can finally forget I ever spent time thinking about iOS this year... Gourd Bless.
It is my privilege and my curse to write about every new major iteration to Apple’s mobile operating system, though I skipped iOS 13 last year, which was largely dominated by Dark Mode, the iPad OS fork, and Memoji – which I could care less about, honestly – and didn’t warrant my investment in a Full Post, I felt. The Photos app improvements were very welcome, but I’d departed from iCloud as my primary storage service, so I didn’t have anything relevant to say. iOS 14 is also mostly irrelevant to my own personal use, but represents a more abstract shift in design philosophy that I thought was worth commenting on. For myself, everything about it adds anxiety, beginning with the launch, itself, at Apple’s WWDC 2020, which I watched, live, and Tweeted extensively about.
-
-
I do not want to live on the Memoji planet.
-
-
My technology writing over the years has largely centered around my awe and confusion regarding what I've perceived as a divergent path from the future I once imagined. My closest guess as to this divergence's origin is the announcement of iOS7, with Apple's abandonment of skeuomorphic design in favor of an entirely new, “flatter” UX visual language, which I actually found quite jarring. In retrospect, though, of course I'm glad they did so. I thought this was an importat preface to any thoughts I have about today's WWDC Keynote – they will probably seem idiotic in a year or so (they might to you already.)
-
-
-
-
Thanks to The Big Beer Virus, this was Apple's first pre-recorded WWDC presentation (though the word “live” continued to be used on several occasions,) which made it especially surreal. During the wait for the Keynote to “go live,” the stream was occupied by an animated Earth from orbit. As the clock rolled over the hour's top, AURORA's “Daydreamer” faded in and we began to grow closer to this Earth, gradually revealing that it was covered with millions of floating memoji in various states behind their animated MacBooks. Like much of the event to follow, this scene became more and more anxiety-inducing as we grew closer to the mob (keep in mind that I've never really found memoji cute, unlike plenty of folks.) Eventually, we changed pitch dramatically and plunged through a hole in the clouds straight toward the incenter of the spaceship at Apple Park, through the door, down the staircase, and into a completely empty – but fully lit – Steve Jobs theatre, where Tim Cook emerged on stage and almost immediately began to address racism.
This disorganization of Craig Federighi's Homescreen shown in the presentation exemplifies the entire aura of this update: it’s complicated. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn receives this new complication positively in an excellent essay dedicated to the topic, divided into Widgets on The Home Screen, Jiggle Mode and Editing Pages, the App Library, and App Clips. (Yes, in many ways, linking to the essay makes this post redundant.)
-
-
-
-
That's what I wrote about WWDC. iOS 14 officially released five days ago, now, and folks are already showcasing some crazy homescreen modifications on Twitter in #ios14homescreen. I would go into detail, but I'm honestly not all that curious about the process, which is unusual. I hope more than anything that I am not loosing my curiosity or playfulness regarding iOS which not so long ago propelled an exuberant exploration of Shortcuts' capabilities during their early days as an integrated Apple property with the release of iOS 12.
Basically, I'm not going to do the full bit, this year, but I'd like to address some of the notes I did take throughout the past few months of the developer beta. Notably, there is simply far less to iOS 14 that's relevant to my life, personally, than any other release I remember, but that's okay. It's just a wee bit more difficult to motivate myself to talk about it. If there's one definite statement to be made about this release, it's that it is additive rather than transformative. As Dieter Bohn so elequently put it for The Verge:
-
-
For the iPhone, the overarching theme is that they're finally letting it get complicated. The home screen starts simple, but it can be complex if you want it to and Apple's also finally putting different elements on top of other elements so you can see Siri on top of your current screen instead of taking over the whole screen.
Yes, I do find the title of that article quite ironic considering what I just articulated to you.
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-
The title of his penultimate review, additionally, includes the summation “Apple is finally lettting the iPhone homescreen get complicated.” Yes... Complexity. I'll be honest: I've actually had the opportunity to play around quite a bit with Android 11 thanks to Android Studio on my PCs, and I found it tremendously underwhelming as an alternative. On a virtual Pixel 3, the experience was functionally no more than a fucking material design-tasting, slightly varied execution of a smartphone operating system in comparison. I should disclaim, though, that these weeks with early iOS widget implementation – which represents quite a hefty chunk of this release's significance, I think we can all agree – have led me to the conclusion that I personally do not believe in widgets. Or at least – I do not have the usership vocabulary to even begin integrating them into my own handset-using life.[efn_note]I'd elaborate but honestly, who cares, really?[/efn_note]
App Clips: Oh boy... I'm so physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted. Just gonna say no to that one.
-
Add widgets to the home screen: I'm going to assume it's Android users who've stigmatised dynamic home screen widgets as a desirable outlet of development resources. I simply cannot fathom any bit of data which would be truly be constructively consumed there, as opposed to unlocking the device and navigating to whatever application it originated from. Perhaps I'm just old and slow.
-
Send apps to the App Library: Directly related, actually. Still considering how I assume most folks actually navigate to applications that have been in folders or in secondary+ homescreens to date – that is, dragging down and typing a handful of characters into Spotlight search – I'm not sure an alphabetized listing of all apps is really that useful. I know I'm not alone on this one: iJustine expressed an identical assumption on an episode of her podcast, Same Brain.
-
Hide some of your home screens: (I repeat the exact same argument.)
-
Watch videos with picture-in-picture mode: Once again, I could definitely be showing my age, but what really constitues watching when you're talking about a fractional segment of a ~6 inch display? You may as well just be listening to the audio, right?
-
Pin conversations in Messages: I'm afraid the text conversation pinning feature doesn't really apply to someone like myself, who literally never messages anyone but my girlfriend and my mom. All pinning the conversations accomplishes for me is the obfuscation of the handy in-line timestamp found in the normal list view.
-
Mention your contacts in Messages: Jesus... And we're still using fucking SMS?
-
Add more variety to your memojis: I still have not figured out how to actually use memojies, practically, so...
-
Get suggested smart home automations: I'm sorry... What did you say? I'm not familiar with those words.
-
Get to bed on time: Clarification: “iOS 14 works with watchOS 7 (or on its own) to help you get to sleep at the right time each night, with reminders and Do Not Disturb options.” If you were truly at all interested in not being disturbed or getting lots of sleep, you wouldn't have spent $300 on a machine to strap to your wrist who's primary function is to disturb you!
-
Translate websites in Safari: Christ... Really? How have I not encountered an issue with this before?
-
Search inside apps: There we go! The first item on this list that suggests anyone at Apple actually uses iOS!
-
Get more detailed weather forecasts: Dark Sky acquision... All this one does is remind me that Apple's self-restraint could breach at any time and essentially the only competent mobile weather app ever devised could die or be molested into irrelevance.
-
Use your iPhone as a translator: Well... Yeah... Anything that convenienctly allows me to reduce dependence on Google, I guess!
-
Get more facts from Siri: ...lol
-“Apple says Siri knows more facts than ever before, though it hasn’t offered up any specific examples of something it knows in iOS 14 that it didn’t know in iOS 13—you’ll have to try and test it out yourself. According to Apple, Siri now knows 20 times the number of facts that it did three years ago, and we haven’t been able to catch it out with anything so far.”
-
Get cycling directions in Apple Maps: No! Cut that out!
-
Plan a journey in an electric vehicle: I'm not joking when I suggest that this fits perfectly into iOS 14's Anxiety Mode Enchancement theme: all this really means is We've added the new Apple Range Anxiety app!
Yes, there are examples of genuine progress. The Guides feature in Maps (seen above) probably could/should have been added a long time ago, but at least Apple executed it quite elegantly. I'm could've sworn sharing your ETA has been possible from within Maps since like... iOS 7 or something, but perhaps I was thinking of Waze. Wallpapers for CarPlay are one of those features that didn’t occur to me to want, but I did/do. Also – though my personal experience with CarPlay has been limited – I can definitely imagine more layout options (“Horizontal status bar”) will be useful in fringe use cases.
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-
And that's it! All of my notes have now been crossed off! Now I can finally forget I ever spent time thinking about iOS this year... Gourd Bless.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
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Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
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Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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-
The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
-
-
Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
-
-
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God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
The genius of one Chuck continues to perform to the refreshing benefit of scholars in American culture.
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Thanks to an episode of Peter Kafka'sRecode Media, I've just now discovered that former New York Times Magazine Ethicist, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and longtime men's interest media-affiliated sports and music columnist Chuck Klosterman pronounces his surname kloa-ster-men instead of klaw-ster-men as I have been, shamefully – even within earshot of other human beings on a handful of occasions. I am willing to submit myself for punishment for these transgressions under the single condition that I be allowed to call him Cuck Klusterfuck the next time he ends a spoken sentence with “or whatever” in an interview – an unfortunate habit he's maintained for years. If my own byline had any pedigree in the world of literary criticism, I would now collect his penance simply by including those hateful, 90s stoner-kid buzzwords in every quote, unedited, but it most certainly does not. I've searched moderately hard for any reason to bother contributing any criticism of books or their authors and returned with very little. I've read The Broom of the System and White Girls this year, yes, but I'd have to be a Fuck Boy to write anything about David Foster Wallace, and Hilton Als’ elegant, genre-busting masterpiece is so far beyond both my societal rights and perceptive capacity that I wouldn't dare utter a single editorialized peep about it – aside from a log line-length recommendation – even under immediate threat of certain death.
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Given my recent voluntary relocation to Portland, Oregon and the word-y pursuits on which I choose to spend all of my money and energy, I should adore everything about Chuck Klosterman and in turn he should be completely invisible across the under-30 demographic, yet I’ve found a special originality in his voice since first exploring it and I think it might be worth requalification. A good friend of mine once dug his first novelDowntown Owl out of a bulk box of bargain books she’d bought as a preteen, long ago and became an enthusiastic fan of his perspective and a harsh, but fond critic of his persona. It was her copy of his second that I read first: The Visible Man – ultimately a surprisingly-original take on the psychologist of a gifted outcast tale that classically exemplifies the easy-to-digest yet thoughtfully-exploratory reputation of his craft. Thanks to her library card, I was able to follow it up immediately with Chuck’s latest, most topical work – an anthology of past essays written for publications like The Guardian, Grantland, and GQ entitled X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century, which proved an impossibly entertaining, even more polished execution of The Quaint Chuck’s Explanations in non-fiction form, beginning at onset with refreshing brevity in its introduction.
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I’m not fully accredited by either side of the professional equation (sportswriters think I’m too pretentious and music writers don’t think I’m pretentious enough,) but I’m able to write about whatever I want, as long as it actually happened.
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Using “pretentious” even when just vaguely and loosely expressing other readers’ thoughts about your work is the first of many miniscule technical infractions against convention laid down in X’s arrangement which proves to act toward the benefit of its experience. If you substitute car nerds for sportswriters, I’d personally identify with this picoautobiography in a big way, but more importantly as a reader I had never encountered anything written about sports which I would describe as pretentious, per se, and that realization could very well have birthed enough curiosity to land the sale, had I been skimming in a bookshop, which I would’ve eventually been pleased with.
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Now, during what we should hope to be the first dawn of a new microera of sincerity, we must recognize how valuable it is for Klosterman as an observer to be comfortably engaged with his subjects, emotionally, and confident in the value of his commentary in middleage without the need to insist upon his eccentricity, as so many cringey, culturally-daft Dads do, these days. He uses keywords in his writing and spoken publicity that should dismiss him immediately as one of these – a nostalgic, out-of-time dork – but are instead somehow magically manipulated to serve him in articulating reasonable, even profoundly-innovative insight. As I have explored his bibliography and his publicly-expressed thoughts, I have been caught up and hinged on a single supposition: Chuck Klosterman is the only white, 46-year-old bearded Portland Dad you should be reading. Do mind that I am in no way exempt from this lens, but it’s still my job to determine his viability as an intellectual – a “thought leader,” even – for those of us who were conceived around the same time he was wrapping up his collegiate sentence at the University of North Dakota.
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For a solid hunk of the American reading audience, a quick, elemental vector of quality and mastery we look for in an essayist is the ability to “transcend” their subject matter for even the most presumptuous and conceited among us, usually to deliver a more abstract sentiment to leave with. Here, Klosterman’s significant career experience is irrefutably evident – in X, he achieves this transcendence organically with a fluidity unlike anything I’ve read before. We can already check a single box: convincing even a young professional twenty-something to shell out for a physical hardback of contemporary non-fiction requiring any sort of academic effort to consume is going to be nigh-impossible, even though X actually happens to be the best-looking specimen of print product design I have ever handled across cover, type, and layout. It’s been difficult having to convince myself to give this copy back.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I must take special care to emphasize just how highly I regard Peter Kafka as editor and interviewer extraordinaire within the Media beat – well-proven to be capable of hitting consistently hard on both novel and old guard industry personalities with refined, seemingly unimpeachable stone-faced skepticism. However, this Chuck Klosterman interview for Recode Media is an uncharacteristically disarmed display of serious admiration: he introduces X with an outright confession: “It’s great. I bought it. I bought a signed copy,” which is an unexpected oddity (though not an unwelcome one – I’m glad Peter enjoys his life.) Their conversation dips briefly in personal history (Chuck and his wife moved to Portland from Brooklyn for its proximity to family) before plopping down upon the substance of his clearly superb and matter-of-fact interview technique. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a conversation between Kafka and any previous guests with whom he was quite so obviously alike in general disposition.
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The only reason I’m able to ask you these questions is because I’m a reporter and I can ask you questions now that I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable asking you if we were friends, so I’m not going to pretend that we are and I’m not going to create some fake thing where we’re going to have a relationship beyond this conversation. I’m just going to ask you the things I want to know about and I hope that you respect the fact that I’m just being straight with you. I find that that works much better.
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From the broadest possible pop cultural lens, Chuck's most spectacular and widely-circulated work, demographically (I assume) is his 2015 interview and cover story for GQ with Taylor Swift – then “the most popular human alive.” Yes, it really is worth dwelling on the image: this guy... this very Dorky Dad, just hanging out with the most highly-demanded teen idol who's ever lived, sitting awkwardly next to her in the backseat of her car as she maniacally panics to accept a call from Justin Timberlake. When one Chucks such a distinguished contrast upon such a high-profile contemporary medium, the weight of the potential scrutiny becomes palpable, but Klosterman anticipates and braces for this (very risky) business in the only manner he can: acknowledging it over and over and over again in the second paragraph of his every interview appearance.
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It doesn’t matter if it was complimentary or insulting necessarily. It would seem as though I wasn’t taking her seriously as a musical artist, and the idea is that I do. That’s why I’m writing about her is because I do think she’s a meaningful, significant artist. It’s not worth the risk of having the story then get shifted by other people who perhaps just perceive themselves as somebody who’s a watchdog for certain signifiers or certain elements of the culture and that their job is to be on the watch for this. If your story then gets moved into that silo, that’s all it’s going to be remembered for... It’s a touchier thing now. It’s a more dangerous thing.
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In the print itself, the cover story is prefaced by a very short but uncomfortably-telling complaint about changing expectations for culture writers. One might reasonably suggest that Klosterman regards the practice of calling out or remarking on “creepy misogyny” as “dumb” – nothing but the byproduct of changing “times.”
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Something you may notice in the following 2015 feature on Taylor Swift is that I never describe what she looks like or how she was dressed, even though I almost always do that with any celebrity I cover... If I did, it would be reframed as creepy misogyny and proof that I didn't take the woman seriously as an artist. It would derail everything else about the story. It would become the story.
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But… is it? Note how desperately close his language comes to the common white guy whining about feminism classification without actually fitting the bill. Right…? It doesn’t? Surely, it must be certified Awake through some combination of keywords or format I’m unfamiliar with or unable to visually register because Klosterman’s ass would have long been grass, otherwise. These 224 words are X’s most contentious, which you could call impressive, all things considered – he appears to care enough about his public image to curate it somewhat diligently. When a motherhood blogger published an open letter in 2013 citing three very ableist uses of the R-word in his work, it only took him two days to respond: “I was wrong. You are right.”
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More than any other writer of his demographic, Chuck Klosterman has a close, wary relationship with the everchanging contextual boundaries of public expression. He knows when to be transparent with his feelings on progression, and he's careful to avoid what could be “problematic” for the sake of functioning better as a writer (I assume.) For Slate's I Have to Ask podcast, he managed to speak extensively about these mechanisms for nearly an hour without bellowing anything definitively cringey.
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I can’t say it’s better or worse. It’s just different, and because it’s different, it makes me feel uncomfortable, but there’s actually like an adversarial relationship with the history of anything, and that somehow that history is seen as oppressive. And you shouldn’t even know about it. It’s better to live in now.
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A quick jaunt from pretty horrendous to almost-ideal, then. If we are to place our faith in Chuck as our last bearded champion, we must hope that last sentence is sincerely intended to be his lens to the changing world. Granted – even if it is the truth – it’s not as if persistent acknowledgement of one’s position can miraculously wash away any systematic patriarchal dynamics involved in authoring (or reading, for that matter) a high-profile feature of a young woman on cover of a magazine which explicitly seeks most to speak to “all sides of the male equation,” (are you sure aboutthat, Condé Nast?) especially considering how unlikely it would've been for me to read anything about Taylor Swift outside of this very white man's anthology. Fundamental themes of power and control are threaded throughout both his fiction and non-fiction, which is especially prevalent in the Macho Big Boy cultures of the athletics and music industries. In profiling Taylor Swift – the undisputed apex of the latter in 2015 – Klosterman provided a firsthand account of the grueling maintenance of a public and private personality under tremendous strain from said factors as they were magnified to the max by the most extreme celebrity.
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Here we see Swift’s circuitous dilemma: Any attempt to appear less calculating scans as even more calculated. Because Swift’s professional career has unspooled with such precision, it’s assumed that her social life is no less premeditated.
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I’m right there with Chuck: I’ve even found a fundamental pillar in Power and Control relationships supporting my own fiction experiments: how we attain them, how we lose them, and how best to make use of them – all of which had apparently been quite problematic for Taylor Swift for most of her adult life, though we wouldn’t be allowed to really comprehend how deep her inner turmoil had drilled until it overwhelmed even her expertly-designed self-control four years later, boiling over entirely with such unexpected violence that all of America’s pseudorural glam-pop-country-glossy-chode-hipsters let out a simultaneous, dangerously-alarmed holler of OH FOR PETE’S SAKE that was actually heard and recorded from the overflying orbit of the International Space Station.
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It’s somehow different when the hub of the wheel is Swift. People get skeptical. Her famous friends are marginalized as acquisitions, selected to occupy specific roles, almost like members of the Justice League ('the ectomorph model,' 'the inventive indie artist,' 'the informed third-wave feminist,' etc.). Such perceptions perplex Swift, who is genuinely obsessed with these attachments.
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No, it’s not only worthwhile as an exercise in superbly athletic self-awareness – the Taylor profile is profound. I’d recommend reading and treasuring it with or without the rest of the anthology because bizarre intersections like these are rare to come by from anybody else. Short, sharp, and occasionally somewhat petty notions are what Chuck Klosterman does best and most originally. Thanks to a digression of Kafka’s beginning with “you and I are about the same age…,” he arrives (by way of REM, believe it or not) at a significant statement about youth and identity.
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It seems strange to me to be into music for its coolness outside of high school. That seems like that’s the only time when you’re a young person and you’re using art basically to create a personality because you don’t have a real personality yet.
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Klosterman is debatably exempt from the traditional academic abstract of “objectivity” for the vast majority of his notable work because of its stated primary subject: his “interior life.” Perhaps the success of his voice could be at least partially attributed to his development of an existential muscle – a perspective unique enough to entertain, yet no less recognizably Midwestern with which he’s been able to reflect particularly clearly on the profession in tandem with the experience he’s accumulated over the course of his career.
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You know, when you’re young, you’re a real emotional writer if you’re a writer… If I was a young person now, I would be incredibly attracted to the idea that when you’re 22 you can be a national writer, which was impossible when I was 22.
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In a way, Klosterman does surmise that it was indeed its objectivity that media lost, and that writing is no longer a “one-way relationship,” but a sort of ridiculous dance in which “many people feel the reason they’re consuming media is to respond to it… that it’s not for the content.” I would remind old Chuck that there are very few functioning adults outside of academia or retirement in the United States who spend much of their time reading anything solely for the sake of absorption, and the disparity between those who were and weren’t was exponentially greater in the past. The story of American media is defined by its cycles of waning and waxing democratization, but many of the more traditional avenues in the business have bet on the “two-way relationship” to keep them relevant.
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My own favorite chapter of the collection is a 2500-word personal essay constructed for Grantland to answer a single incongruity: “Why is watching a prerecorded sporting event less pleasurable than watching the same game live?” Some form of this question has at least mildly troubled every American since the 1960s, including myself, and Klosterman manages to provide an entertaining and concise analysis of this plight through his own wisdom. In its short preface in the volume – which was written “in 2008, in Europe, when [Chuck] was pretend depressed” is the story of his encounter with a house-painting stranger, to whom he explains the meter for success in his opinion-manufacturing profession, as he sees it: “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.”
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Last weekend I was in a hashish bar in Amsterdam. It was post-dusk, pre-night. The music was terrible (fake reggae, late-period Eric Clapton, Sublime deep cuts.) I was sitting next to a British stranger with a shaved head and a speech impediment. Our conversation required subtitles, so I imagined them in my mind. He told me he had lost three family members within the past year: his mother, who was sixty-six; his uncle, who was fifty-six; and his sister, who was forty-six. He said he'd just turned thirty-six. He asked if I saw a pattern developing. “Yes,” I said. “But only numerically.”
-I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a housepainter. He asked me the same question about myself. “I manufacture opinions,” I said.
-“Really?” he asked. “How do you know if you’re any good at that?”
-“By the number of people who agree or disagree,” I said in response. “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.”
-“That’s interesting,” said the bald British man who could barely speak. “I guess house painting is a totally different thing.”
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Rarely are situations or discussions that begin with back in my day actually constructive in any sense, but Chuck Klosterman appears to be the exception. If you’re willing to indulge him, you may find yourself reassured. He now writes from a remote cabin (with WiFi,) was tortured – like all of us – in sifting through and compiling his old work for X, and finds its index to be his favorite part.
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Exploring the index from a book you created is like having someone split your head open with an axe so that you can peruse the contents of your brain.
I haven't watched A Charlie Brown Christmas in at least twenty-five years, solely because I can't emotionally reconcile the final scene.
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You’ll notice that his entire answer to the live television debacle is – again – entirely about control (or the lack thereof.) In fact, his relationship with and desire for control also contributed to his choice of profession.
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Part of the reason I became a writer is because it was this completely controlled reality where I could do this thing by myself where you’d go out and you’d do the interviews and stuff, but then you’re back by yourself, transcribing and then writing. Then, when the story is done and you send it off, that’s the end. Now that’s the middle. Now it’s like, when the story is published, it’s the middle of the process very often because the consumer feels differently now.
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While Klosterman’s voice is pleasant to someone like me, neither it nor himself necessarily belong to The People. In his X review for Paste Magazine, B. David Zarley proclaims essays to be “a love letter to a moment,” concluding that Chuck is “’effectively narcissistic,’ proving that culture essays can teach us something about ourselves and the people around us.” For The Washington Post, Justin Wm. Moyer notes “it’s hard to think of another writer who could make a 30-page, deeply reported essay about a North Dakota junior-college basketball game interesting,” suggesting that this new collection marks Klosterman’s ascendance from critic to philosopher. From what I’ve read to date, I would counter that he has always fulfilled the term to the extent of its usefulness in the 21st century and is even now beginning to redefine it. Last January, he braved the “dystopic” Google Gates to speak critically for a crowd of Googlers, describing them as “an umbrella over the entire culture,” and urging caution and reflection in the coming future to keep them from doing “something bad.” His engagement with them – especially during the Q&A – is a fascinating insight into the Greater Google Mind, and I would encourage any invested parties in Chuck Klosterman’s role as a philosopher to watch the talk in full. I was unfamiliar with “the boat-sails-wind analogy” before I read James Murphy’s interview for LCD Soundsystem’s “last album.”
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Your life is a boat, the sails are your emotions, and drugs are the wind. When you're a kid, your boat is small and your sail is huge, and drugs are like a hurricane.
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Control x Time = the Klosterman beat. I suppose this must be what other entertainment writers are referring to when they accuse Chuck of nostalgia trafficking, but I can’t be so sure. Though I’d like to think my own snout for the stuff is especially well-tuned, I am undeniably from a different planet – even auditorily. All but one or two of the musicians interviewed throughout X were entirely unknown to me by name, which Klosterman’s voice managed to make even more compelling – not to mention the included stories of athletes and the sports industry, which include stories of the human ego, paranoia, and complex drama that always manage to transcend their setting when articulated with such dexterity.
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I’ve never before written a book review of any sort – nor am I defensibly qualified to compare culture writers – but with good ole’ Chuck, I dove much further in order to tackle one very important question: should Klosterman be recommended reading for anyone under 30 above or alongside bestsellers like George Saunders or groundbreaking essayists of color like Hilton Als? In many a case, I must conclude by saying, simply, that something of value would be forgone if we shunned Chuck, even if his insight is old news to all but the most rudimentary yokels. I have little to offer women or people of color, but I’d bet X would prove itself worth a library trip for any idiot white guys in their lives who may be falling far behind. I don’t know of any other voices who are in a better position to introduce these issues, nor any who are quite so practiced at handling them delicately. While Jenna Wortham-level readers will gain little to nothing from this examination or the ecology of its subject (and will likely find themselves pausing momentarily for a deserved jest before moving on and returning to their high-level plane of complex neoliberal commentary,) but most of their less-aWoken fathers should find in Chuck a man they can truly trust, who manages to consistently distill and articulate the need-to-knows of the most complex pop culture and pop science conversations without using any of the academic language found in most institutional discourse which daddy finds too condescending and superfluous to bear. Those readers who’ve absolutely fucking despised my voice so far in this essay should give Klosterman a go – I take as much time as I can muster to fiddle with and season the words in context like this work because I basically *enjoy* the bullshit, yet I’ve found both X and But What If We’re Wrong? remarkably refreshing and impressive exercises.
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[These are] the cultural conditions in which I was raised under and which I pursued journalism under. That was part of the thing that drew me to the idea of being a reporter was I was like, this is something I can do, I think. My ability to detach my personal emotions from what I am investigating, while not perfect, I can do this. And now it turns out that the opposite is what’s desirable. I think it’s really going to change the kind of person who goes into media going forward.
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Reading Chuck Klosterman is going to be perturbing, but true sincerity is almost always uncomfortable. Comprehensively, his nonfiction represents perhaps the most important possible behavior to encourage from both the critic and his readership because it incubates and exudes sincere curiosity and a genuine interest in learning to listen. From the perspective of quantified societal contribution, I’d argue that Klosterman’s craft is a significantly more honorable and worthwhile pursuit than greater academic literature in its unique and entertaining treatment of subjects the establishment tends to pulverize into minutia. Unless he’s broke and/or bookish, buy X as a gift for your Dad and at least give it a try when he’s done. If nothing else, at leastread the Taylor Swift interview, okay? If he doesn’t enjoy the book, I’m always available if one or both of you need to blow off some steam: give me a call at (573) 823-4380. (Normal text messaging / talktime rates will apply.)
Ten percent of the United States' adult population cannot functionally read or write (conservatively) despite the exponential increase of required reading in the average American's day-to-day life thus far in the 21stcentury. For written American media, especially, one would assume that a financial and social incentive for maximum literacy in the populace should present a straightforward justification for intense widespread coverage of this particular disparity, yet most related coverage in mainstream national magazines and newspapers is alarmingly sparse and often requires a less-than-socially-conscious context (e.g. a for-profit startup) to actually appear in news feeds. From the most wholesome assumption of the industry's general values — that it holds “newsworthiness” above all — we must assume that it does not generally consider American illiteracy “interesting enough to the general public to warrant reporting” as we examine the intermittent discourse surrounding the issue that does achieve publication.
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In late October, the American business and technology magazine Fast Company covered the recent successes of the “for-profit social enterprise” Cell-Ed, noting that “a huge portion of the American labor force is illiterate,” which it described as “a hidden epidemic.” The article's author, Rick Wartzman, mentions foremost that Cell-Ed's userbase is largely “foreign-born” and expected to eclipse one million in number by the end of 2019. Demographically, the magazine's readership is predominantly middle to upper-class, who are the least affected social groups by a significant margin as per illiteracy's strong correlative relationship with poverty. These factors combine to limit any real social consequences from such an article.
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In direct contrast with the professional, market-minded perspective of modern business magazine, even niche independent publications from the opposite end of the media spectrum often trivialize, belittle, or generally mishandle the issue. In a 500-word “Editorial” written by The Editor Eric Black of the Baptist Standard — a small evangelical news website describing itself as “Baptist voices speaking to the challenges of today's world” — he points to a global increase in “illiterate people,” as he so comfortably brands them. Such language is inevitably counter-productive and potentially insensitive: to the eyes and ears of activists, educators, and the general public, such a term unnecessarily lends toward a restricted perspective of those people who have been left behind by the institution of read and written language in one manner or another and portrays them as a great vague collection of lingual lepers bearing their own distinct, inexorable, wordless ethnicity which inevitably bars them from the freedoms allowed by the Editor's learned capacity, including the ability to actually read his words of affliction. Simply put, he has dangerously oversimplified the issue.
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To once again assume the best and infer that Black had a specific purpose in publishing his ill-supported opinion beyond continuity's sake of his weekly Editorials, it appears to be the promotion of a local Texan literacy “ministry” called Literacy Connexus, though no further specifics about the project are provided beyond “helping churches develop literacy programs for their communities, provide training and resources to overcome illiteracy,” which is virtually identical to the introductory copy on the organization's homepage.
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So far, we've examined coverage only in special interest media, but what about legacy news organizations with the largest readerships in the United States? Despite oblivious use of the same ledes, a newspaper like The Washington Post can wield vast influence over the broadest possible readership and the public editorial trust. In November 2016, veteran reporter Valerie Strauss published “Hiding in plain sight: The adult literacy crisis” for Answer Sheet — her weekly newsletter designed to function as “a school survival guide for parents (and everyone else), from education policy to psychology” — which represents the most substantial discussion of American illiteracy in topical, widely-visible media (i.e. presence in a succinct search engine query.) She briefly introduces the issue with a bulleted list of illiteracy's consequences on modern society and the individual cited from a Canadian literacy foundation before turning the stage over to Lecester Johnson, CEO of the Academy of Hope Adult Public Charter School in Washington D.C.
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Johnson presents a passionate and well-informed exploration of the state of the literacy battle from the perspective of a full-time, locally on-the-ground advocate. Her op-ed's introduction includes the most essential observations and statistics throughout, noting “the children of parents with low literacy skills are more likely to live in poverty as adults and are five times more likely to drop out of school,” before setting upon a detailed examination of current and relevant organizations working toward solutions. Of course, it's largely centered upon her own organization, which she claims has “helped more than 6000 adults rebuild their education and job opportunities since 1985.”
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It's significant that an institution as deeply embedded across the American political spectrum as The Washington Post address the issue of American illiteracy, and both Johnson and Strauss are certainly qualified voices for the undertaking, but when we examine this particular article, it's important we consider the context of the Answer Sheet newsletter and its intended audience. Though it's no challenge to pitch the importance of reading and writing to parents and professional educators, the most alarming and destructive issue at hand is the educational disparity between their adult peers. “There's a literacy problem in the capitol, but I'm not talking about young people who can't read. Many adults — perhaps even parents sitting next to you at back to school night — don't possess academic skills,” notes Johnson with her very first paragraph. However, considering the nature of parenthood, the audience primarily consuming these words are undoubtedly preoccupied with juvenile issues, specifically, and we can assume their capacity to empathize with their fellow working adults who could benefit from literacy education is actually lessened from that of childless readers of the same age as a result. “Despite the magnitude of the adult literacy crisis, most of those needing to make up lost ground are pushed toward traditional classroom settings—even though many of these people can't possibly follow through because of cost or work schedules or other obstacles,” she attests.
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Perhaps more than any other American city, Detroit has been struggling with a serious illiteracy problem. According to a profile of the Beyond Basics program (which was adapted from an embedded video broadcast) on their local ABC affiliate's website, forty-seven percent of adult Detroiters cannot read, but even companies like General Motors — who donated \$250,000 to the Beyond Basics program earlier in mid-October — are getting involved. The article quotes Elijah Craft, a young man who was “reading at a first-grade level as a senior at Detroit's Central High School.” “Craft would rare venture from home for fear he would get lost because he could not read street signs,” reports WXYZ anchor Carolyn Clifford. She frames the narrative around a reference to the 2009 film The Blind Side starring Sandra Bullock: “here, you might call this story 'The Detroit Side.'” For local television news, this reference to popular culture likely strengthened the story's power ensnare viewers' emotional attention when it was aired, and even in this written accompaniment, it proves an effective — if a bit crude — analogy. The broadcast of Mr. Craft's interview also depicts his own deep emotional investment in reading when he begins to shed tears, which is not entirely communicated in the written article.
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When the American news media discusses American illiteracy, it's almost always in secondary or tertiary form: either by way of a short post for a weekly education newsletter, an ultra-low-distribution niche editorial column, or a personality profile of a local activist. Perhaps the fundamental obstacle in the face of increasing the discourse surrounding this issue is that its resolutions will require — perhaps more than any other social issue in this country — advocacy by those who can read on behalf of those who cannot because of how sensitive and isolated many of them feel. When voices of advocates like Lecester Johnson are uplifted by major organizations like The Washington Post, the sociological weight of the illiteracy issue can be very powerful. In quoting former United Nations chief Kofi Annan, she sums up for its extensive audience what the facts should ultimately mean to them: 32 million of Eric Black's so-called “illiterate people” in the United States of America have been and continue to be deprived of their “human right” to functional literacy.
All of this may one day be worth significantly more revision and/or visibility in the future, but for now, just know that I rambled out all of this because it’s by far my most effective way to think, and this darned lowkey blog post has just provided a very long-overdue opportunity for it. Please feel free to read or even respond to it, if you’d like, but I’d like to ask that you don’t panic or circulate it. Thanks.
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So far… the only intercorrespondence between staff at Inmunis is people having a problem with one another.
-Before Extratone, there was Inmunis – my first, relatively short-lived attempt to launch an online magazine which wasn’t particularly important, but the experience surely did contribute to and inform my progression in understanding media that led to my (utter bewildered) current state. Anyhow, it’s fun to look back. Here’s the web archive’s last snapshot.
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This, a derelict Twitter account, and two film reviews by James Wilson are all that’s left of inmunis.co.uk for good reasons – many of which I did not entirely shed when I tried again. Until I started Extratone and made doing “this” – incessantly reading/exploring the web, obsessively tinkering and experimenting with The Extranet – I actually had very little knowledge on or exposure to the state of digital publishing or the real depth of variety to be found with any significant effort to comprehend the current offering real, surviving magazines, online or not, yet was dumb and arrogant enough to assume that I’d seen it all and none of it was even close to good enough for me to read or seek to write for. I was actually delusional enough to regard myself as too smart and one-of-a-kind to lower myself by going back to journalism school – that I was so special, anything I put effort in creating was destined to turn out superb. Granted, I’d had the actual idea for less than two weeks before I experienced by far the most traumatic, soul-destroying, world-upturning, and life-altering event of my entire existence, which I think accounts for the insanity, and all of my decisions were inevitably preempted by the fact that I was a 21-year-old straight white male community college dropout, which accounts for (but does not excuse) their absurdity.
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I’ve publicly implied before that it was probably only thanks to Drycast – which was also in its infancy during the time of The Big Event (episode 7 was published just two days before) – and its weekly obligation to sit down and talk with my favorite people about interesting stuff that I did not end up dead or institutionalized in 2015 (I wish I was exaggerating.) If there is a Gourd, let it be known that he is fully up-to-date and brand-activated – he sent me a fucking podcast to save my life.
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Reading and compiling stories for the show notes throughout the week provided an early avenue for exploring and embedding myself into media. Beyond the actual content, even, it’s been the rationality in the tone which journalists generally adhere to that has drawn me in and provided a brighter and brighter guiding light to help keep my sanity in check after my world ended because New Media values empathy in tandem with critical thought. All my life, it’s been very important to me that I continue to learn the best way to both appear and feel smart and functional. I’ve long since accepted that I am very fucking weird – and not in the wow, I dye my hair bright red sort of way which helps people feel unique, but in the holy shit, I’m terrified of what would actually result in losing control of my facade sort, which is actually much less sinister than it sounds for you, and infinitely moreso for me.
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This is why I still have a very infantile habit of becoming overwhelmingly frustrated with those who socially emphasize and celebrate their “weirdness” as an important part of their identity because my self-perception has long since transitioned from regarding my deviations as something that made me “unique,” to gigantic obstacles in the way of every possible aspiration which I’ll probably never overcome, but am doomed to kill myself trying. I’m now working on learning to appreciate those very fucking common people who are determined to prove how strange they are because ultimately, my own self-perception is just as ignorant, loneliness is not a virtue, and I’ve only maintained the whole charade because I’d rather have delusions of grandeur than acknowledge that I am also mostly unoriginal, and most of my truly more “original” behaviors could easily be described as simply unhealthy.
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This is an important confession for this explanation because its “solution” is another crucial motivation behind my creation of Extratone – as both a symbolic and literal means of understanding and minimizing my own biases and bitterness by 1) surrounding myself with the huge amount young, talented people I knew with great ideas and 2) editorially committing to curiosity as the most precious ideal in writing (and in life.)
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I do know that – for whatever reason – I really do have a special knack for identifying the culture and creators that are truly fresh, innovative, even cool among those who can’t comprehend or stand it and the heartbreaking number of those who actualize themselves by trying to act aggressively apathetic toward the status quo. This sense is far from 100% reliable and is certainly not of a greater quality than everyone on Earth, but I would still confidently suggest it’s at least better than most, and – as most of us know – it especially jives with and defines the world of magazines.
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As I did in Spring 2016, I still believe that Extratone is the best way for me to hone my greatest talents and shed my biggest problems – that it is the name I can place on my endless journey to improve myself, which – most importantly of all – will all the while achieve the tightest possible adhesion to the only meaning of “original” with any significance or real world value at all, which serves human curiosity without punishing it in any sense. I could actually just be crazy or completely, irrationally inverted – and I know it sounds abstract and preposterous – but I promise it’s my best shot at one day performing my optimal function for the world.
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The very first thing I did after I’d arrived upon these hypotheses and been abruptly forced to cling to them as my last hope in life was to obsessively search for a single mantra/battlecry I could drill into my memory and could shout under duress – including the temptation to escape the whole lot of it – to succinctly remind myself that I had at least one logical chance at a fulfilling life (and yes, it’s still funny that the chance is, in fact, a Web Site.)
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Scribam quid non legerim is possibly grammatically incorrect to a scholar, but it’s the best possible translation I came up with in my Latin research of “I will write what I have not read.” It’s cheesy, yes, and a bit cringey in the middle of just any old day when it happens to catch my eye where it’s proudly displayed, all-caps, in the footer of our CMS, and – I’ll be honest – I don’t know if I could explain it over coffee to a stranger without turning red and covering my face, as I once could, but it’s (sincerely, in this one case) real gravestone material. (As in, if someone were to read this after my death, they would be encouraged to receive it as a bonafide last wish.)
The monumental amount of unsubstantiated gossip and conjecture enabled every day by Facebook is lethal to the human intellect. Can fire be fought with fire?
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Today, after positing on whether or not a pastry was in fact the namesake of the battleship Bismarck, I was told by its owner – a local woman of a far-from-excusable age – that “[I] should be on that big bang show.” Upon such fuckery, I looked her in her eyes and informed her that she'd just changed my plans for the night: I was now going to go home, wrap my lips around the barrel of my Beretta, and blow my brains out. I should've known better than to so jest with a boomer immediately after receiving such glaring indicators of minimal intellectual function, but I fell for the hope – as I often do, to no avail – that such a jarring reaction would encourage reflection on her foul, tragically misled sentiments regarding the general state of youth, and perhaps even spare a peer or two from future tribulation.
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Instead, she called the police.
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Three round cops found me, an hour later, approaching hesitantly. Strangely enough, they were chuckling – maybe to a little joke about all the recent hubbub on the radio covering a recent wave of blatantly negligent medical care in American prisons, though I hope nervous laughter is just SOP when responding to a suicide threat. As all Columbia cops always are toward me, they were aggravatingly genuine and hilariously understanding. I began by simply recreating my interaction with their summoner, quoting her word-for-word, and – I swear to my new Lord – all three immediately released a choral “ohhhhh” in unison. I'll never know for sure if they actually assimilated the reality of the situation so quickly, but it'd certainly seem that way.
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Clearly, I should've threatened her life.
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Despite the day-to-day expression of our recurring wisdoms, habits, instincts, patterns and cycles of cultural metamorphosis in the discourse, the stream of “well, you know they were sayin' the world was going to end when I was in elementary school” to my ear has fallen abruptly silent since the inauguration. Our parents and grandparents are both impossibly fortunate and unfortunate, having to duck out as the most multiplicative (read: sickest) cerebral orgy in the history of mankind will just've begun nibbling on the slope to its climax. We'll be lucky if we'll still be able to articulate our goodbyes by the time they reach the door. Nonsense does a fuckin number on perceived wisdom, but the gaps are widening at a dangerous pace. Tectonic or domestic, we are all straddling expanding space, and the chill of its draft is now stealing too much of our heat to ignore.
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Though it is entertaining in the moment (and otherwise redundant,) it would not be well-to-do of me now – nor was it, then – to leave the conversation in edgy absurdity. Yes, a part of me would like to campaign for Sheldon to be reclassified as an expletive, in disgust, but – as an adult in all-out sprint to make up for stalled emotional development – I must note that such a display of concern should've been at least reciprocated with a bit of explanation, if not appreciation. Still, there are much more appropriate reasons and situations in which to waste public servants' time.
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It's not news – the Theory is providing some ghoulishly skewed portrayal of less-than-forty pseudointellectuals. Obviously, my savior's time was worth very little to her, but the fact that she spent any quantity of anything at all engaging with even a decidedly mainstream generationally ambassadorial bridge could be regarded – if stretched – as the result of a curious seed, which has skyrocketed in human value, as of late. It is undiscouragable. Read the trail a bit, and you'll find that your frustration is simply an expression of the terror that's ignited by the stagnancy of their pace.
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It's great that you've managed to inch over to modern-ish sitcoms from Judge Judy and Independence Day , mom, but you're gonna have toreally pick up the paceand work on following a few body modification communities on the darknet.
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If an absence of solutions are the crux of the blog, here I'm now gloating.
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To whom does the commoner look to for such solutions when they'd prefer not to terrorize their kooky middle age parents into a half century of brutal fasting under vows of silence?
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The Big Thinkers!
-The Men of the Hour.
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Yes, men. All Big Bumbling Billionaire Imbeciles.
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Elon Musk cannot be the Nicola Tesla of the 21st century, or even the 20th, for that matter, because literally every mechanically-minded professional I've ever heard talk about battery technology has condemned it in some manner as an inescapable dead end, developmentally. Perhaps, then, the champion of electrochemical storage is the False Prophet.
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No, I'm not capable of citing research or conjuring Mars-capable spacecraft, but I've been a bit too preoccupied with my country's class war and its 10% adult illiteracy rate. It's all well and good to be privy to romanticism, but it's not the 1960s anymore. Even Howard Hughes would be more concerned for the wellness of the species than our continued reach for the stars, were he still alive.
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Well. Maybe not...
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Charles Lindbergh would be, though.
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We spent the 1990s preparing to rid ourselves of history because the smartest among us foresaw some facsimile of the renaissance we are currently experiencing. If they'd been shown a glimpse of some statistics on the volume of media we consume, they'd exclaim of their pride – no doubt – in their species' capability to progress, and perhaps even their own contribution to it. However, extended observation of an average American's day-to-day life would be lamented, in disgust, and a huge portion of the blame can be placed on one t-shirt-touting cyberyokel: Mark Zuckerberg.
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His name is stupid, his spawn is ruining my life, and he continues to insist upon saying shit that frightens the bejesus out of me.
But Fuck, himself wouldn't be at all intimidating without his money. The scariest bit is the lack of class in the criticisms of his intellectual influence. Farhad Manjoo's attention has been diligent and premium as a Times er's should be, but the same occupation bars him from authoring with the color of unsubstantiated claims.
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Mine does not.
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Elon Musk is not an apologetic genius. He's willing to joke about his intellectual distance from the planet and its populace on Twitter. Apparently, his mind's even surpassed the need to punctuate. Crazy.
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Google is well on it's way to becoming the neo-Vatican... yada yada yada, but they're too far gone – I do not have the expertise to address them. Fuck, though, is a singular short-sleeved, Even Stevens -haired young man without so much as private office space (even though his sentiments on breathing room at home are obviously inverse.)
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Clearly, it's all just to protect him from the truth: The Apostle John'sBook of Revelationis about Facebook. Fuck's cyberchild is the horseman, the beasts, and the plagues, stuffed into one tyrannical website.
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And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.
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If I can repeatedly trigger accidental voice calls on Fuckbook Messenger, don't tell me it's not possible to inadvertently live stream myself on the pot.
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The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.
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Of course, it's unlikely that Mark's essence was bred entirely of evil, but – like Tump, in many ways – he is an excruciatingly wealthy idiot. Though he is spending 2017 touring the United States, he doesn't seem to be all that interested in actually closing the gap between himself and the rest of us, which suggests that he only wants us to throw us off his extra-terrestrial, xenophobic scent. I can't imagine what The Mothership would really want with my Amazon browsing history, though.
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And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe.
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Just to be clear, he is notThe Antikhristos.
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He'd better not be, anyway.
-I'd be absolutely Livid with Lucifer if his choice of a figurehead for his Big Plan was such a Fucking dork.
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I mean... if Fuck wanted to spend his time crafting 6000-word essays, why the Fuck didn't he just build a Fucking CMS back in his Jesse Eisenberg era instead of the actual weekly-updated tower of digital Babylon? Surely, Satan would know better than to waste resources and pulverize creativity by ordering his Demonic Dev team to release regular builds for build's sake rather than on a per-need basis, but that'd be because The Tempter is an authority on incentive s as thoroughly as Fuck isn't.
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If you’re equipped with the privilege of literacy, you’ve been reading a lot about Fuckbook’s political consequences, recently. Frankly, it’s about Fucking time, but I’m compelled to emphasize that the most significant motor driving the politik is fueled by the eldest, fossilized portions of our thought meat. According to Manjoo, “the News Feed team’s ultimate mission is to figure out what users want,” dipping in Facebook's ocean of action data, searching for a soul.
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Yet another Fuckism that suggests he's an alien: everybody knows that nobody knows what they want.
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There's a central mechanic of our brains that by nature wreaks a whole helluva lot of contradiction. If you've ever mentioned ADHD with your doctor, or know a hypochondriac/adderall fiend who has, you may have heard it described as “the lizard brain.” Simply put, it's the brain stem, and it's responsible for the most basal and primitively emotional instincts and habits; an anti-intellectual agitant, arguing at all times for the course of action with the most immediate gratification. The Great Clickbait War of 2013 was a startling demonstration that revealed the strength of the hold Fuckbook had (and still has) on these reptilian bits – the true location of its power.
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“In surveys, people kept telling Facebook that they hated teasing headlines. But if that was true, why were they clicking on them?”
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Volition is the Word of the Day. Here, we must once again invoke an ancient parable from the wise foretellings of the Disney film, Smart House: when dealing with human beings, boundless compliance quickly leads to abject misery for all parties involved.
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Mindlessly, habitually, endlessly clicking... this is how we die.
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Something about Fuck's direction is fundamentally poisonous to the human mind. Yes, he is assuredly too Fucking democratic, but misinformation is far from the only form of evil his creation has assumed. If you can jog your memory back a bit, you'll remember a much wider variety of brain-rotting filth.
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In lapses of their existences' finitude, the 40-something second cousins of the world may still send you the occasional Can Crunch Saga invite, jarring you back to Jr. High in 2009, and forever associating themselves in your mind with the horrors of mortality and f u c k b o o k g a m e s.
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Elon is a more likely candidate, but I'll leave those differentiations to the not-idle cult masses.
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More than one sixth of all living eyes see Fuckbook every single day, placing its consumption behind only eating and drinking as the most universally human activity.
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Mr. Fuck achieved his vision and became perhaps the greatest purveyor of words who's ever lived. He's taught (or... is teaching) us something very profound about ourselves: capability is not the whole of the equation. Ability on its own cannot guarantee growth, but it can often result in decay. Discussion does not inherently lead to connection. Population is not a cure for isolation.
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That said, I must begrudgingly admit to you that I, myself am one of the 100 million users who've depended upon a “very meaningful” Fuckbook group for a “physical support structure” for which I have Fuck to thank.
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I've spent half of my existence watching cheesy barnstorming movies, whirling around die-cast biplanes, seeking out stories from old pilots – military and commercial, and eventually trained to become one myself. As regular activities at young ages do, aviation became deeply ingrained into my identity, but my local community is very sparse – it's not exactly cool, these days. On Fuckbook, an unofficial group for members of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association has allowed me to stay connected to the rest of the world's Soaring Nerds, which is no small deal. It's the only forum which I am compelled to participate in with 100% sincerity and emotional effect.
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Photos of members standing proudly next to their first airplane, or of adolescent students in a similar pose after their first solo, or of three old white rubes on a hangar picnic, laughing around a fold-up table full of rudimentary ham sandwiches in front of two gleaming Stearmans...
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They tug around on my heart like nothing else in life can.
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I stopped flying lessons at 16 because I began to see behind the naivety of my childhood perception of what it meant to fly commercially and realized that I was unequipped for- and uninterested in the sort of challenges it presented. I haven't flown in seven years, but the community will always have a tremendous dividend of my core being.
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These days, not a single person in my day-to-day life knows or cares about aviation, which wouldn't be laudable whatsoever – it's not exactly the most relevant goingson at the moment – were it not so emotionally necessary for me.
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A few days ago, a member shared a photo with the group of Charles Lindbergh's modified Ryan cockpit, captioned “what airplane am I?”
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In my youth, Lindbergh filled my closest equivalent to the 'childhood hero' role. My grandmother bought me a first-edition copy of The Spirit of St.Louis from a small town bookshop when I was six or seven, and I carried it literally everywhere with me until middle school. I watched the Jimmy Stewart film tens and tens of times, and I cried when I saw the Spirit in the flesh at the Smithsonian, yet I've never had an informed conversation about any of it with another human being. It really warmed me to see how many of the comments were correct answers.
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Breaking news: it's nice to know that there are other people on Earth who give a shit about the same things you do.
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Again – aspiration should always be encouraged. This is Fuck's vision for his creation, and it is feasible, even for myself. At least his public persona – however valid or invalid it may be – is making a huge effort to have positive consequence, even if his idiocy is imbuing itself within all of humanity.
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Fuck is too powerful to be exempted from responsibility for what Fuckbook's done to the Western psyche over the past decade, but – like the Christian god – perhaps all we need require is his repentance.
Eugen Rochko has spent this year perfecting federated social media in Mastodon – his open source project. We spoke to him just hours before it became a global tech conversation.
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The saga of Twitter, Inc. has been rejuvenated in 2017 by Tump's antics, corporate drama, and an amalgam of user and non-user disquiet with its decisions, though its financial viability has been in prominent industry conversation for half a decade. Since its pre-2010 outset, many 'a' feature has accumulated on its original, still-iconic skeletal software, and – though the net is undoubtedly positive – a few have gone.
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Last Thursday, the company revised in bravado its poultrian default profile picture and its system of replies to exclude @s on all of Twitter's proprietary services, drastically changing two of its visual mainstays, and prodding a particularly lucent cacophony. Turn your ear, and you'll hear many familiar terms in the chants: limits, chains, strings, harassment, feedback, gamergate, nazis, etc.
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These conversations are important, but they've gotten awfully stale.
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If you listen a bit more carefully, you'll intercept a new one:
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Mastodon.
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It's the open source brainchild of Eugen Rochko, who's known colloquially as Gargron.
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He's had one hell of a week.
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Between the night of our first emails and our conversation, his flagship mastadon.social instance had doubled in users. Less than two hours after we said our goodbyes, his name was on The Verge's front page.
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Despite the urgency of it all, he graciously lent me his time just after breakfast on Tuesday to discuss himself and the story behind the project, while the most significant day of his life was building around him.
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“I'm perfectly fine with being called Eugene by Americans.”
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Though the ink's still fresh on his compsci diploma, he's clearly prepared for the American press.
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What's the story behind the project? Do you remember the specific moment when you decided to do this?
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Many years ago, I had a friend that was really into federated networks when they were a new thing. That was when identi.ca was first created – at the very beginning of my developer knowledge and career.
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A good portion of the stories written so far on his platform have framed it as an alternative to Twitter, which early Masto adopters refer to as “Hellbird,” or “the bird website.” Eugen isn't afraid to acknowledge his investment in the format.
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I was a heavy Twitter user and I wasn't happy with where Twitter was going, so I decided to check on how the federated stuff was doing in the meantime. I found it in a very sad state, but thought I could contribute.
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He began building on his own, with Tweetdeck's standard in mind.
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I thought 'if I'm going to do something, it needs to have realtime updates and it needs to have columns.' I started with a bare-bones prototype while still [at University] in May or April of last year. It had no user interface, only an API that I was using from the command line. And I thought 'okay, it works. that's great.' Then, exams came.
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Academics had to come before the project at first, but it soon supplied an ample post-graduation diversion. He focused his energy on building something more complete and eventually launched a Patreon page.
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I announced it on HackerNews, and that was the first public release of the project. That's when I got my first users who weren't my friends, and some who were new to federated networks.
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That was just over 100 days ago, and it gave way to his first feedback.
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I started working on the first feature requests, shaping the project a bit differently. People were a lot more focused on privacy features than I thought they would be, although in retrospect, it makes sense. The previous [federated] project – GNU social – did not really have a focus on privacy features, or anything built in by default.
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It compelled him to change things, and his work was well received.
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Over time, I kept working on new features, and waves of new users came when it went viral in certain circles. The first was HackerNews and Product Hunt. Aral Balkan – a Twitter user with over 30,000 followers – picked up the project, gave it a shout out, and even did a giveaway of his app. He had a lot of followers from Holland; the Mastodon timelines became mostly Dutch.
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Next was Marxist anime Twitter (including Extratone and I.)
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Lots of furries; lots of LGBT people. That's when I really focused on privacy features and making sure all blocks worked because these individuals needed a safer platform than Twitter could offer.
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Sidekick dashboard background processing jobs as of Tuesday morning.
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“As you can see, the first bump is HackerNews, the second is Aral Balkan, and then anime/Marxist Twitter.”
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And the last – now a bit out of date – is this week's spike, which is nearly double all previous waves.
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Are you responsible for all of the code?
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You can look at the GitHub page to see a specific breakdown of who contributed and how many lines of code, each. You'll see I'm at the top by a large margin, but there are [additional] people who've contributed interesting, good features & fixes, localizations, user guides, and documentation.
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What's the story behind the name?
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It's not particularly interesting. I'm a progressive metal fan, and I listen to Mastodon sometimes. They have a really cool name that refers to a really cool animal. It's a fluffy elephant! What's not to love?
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It's also the inspiration for Mastodon's mascot, which was penned by Rochko's YouTuber friend Dopatwo after he realized how urgently he required an error page.
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What does “federated” mean to you?
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The biggest problem with this term is that it's new for lots of people. People who've come across federated networks in the pastinstantly understand what it means and how it works, and people who are new to the concept have a lot of trouble before it clicks. But when Twitter first started, people didn't understand what 'retweeting' meant, so it's not a unique problem domain.
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I don't know where it comes from – maybe BitTorrent – but people seem to think that when something is 'decentralized,' everybody gets the same thing; that it's all synchronized one to one. In actuality, 'federated' means that people in different instances can talk to each other, but the content is different depending on the users there, what they do, and who they follow.
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Though instances are infrastructurally independent, they can communicate with one another. On a user level, timelines are still determined by who you do and do not follow across the entirety of all instances.
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What if Twitter comes to you in the near future with a job offer?
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[Rochko laughs.]
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If it was any other company, I would think about it. A job is a staple source of income, and – depending on the company – could involve doing something important, but I have zero faith in Twitter.
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Does this all mean that I finally get to live out my serif Twitter dream?
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Yes, I suppose on your own instance, you could change the stylesheet...
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So if I set up my own instance and started charging for its use, I'd be in the clear, legally?
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Yes, that's okay. The code is licensed under AGPL version three, which I picked because other projects in the same space are using it. The difference between AGPL and GPL is that [the former] forces you to contribute back to the appstream code repository if you make any breaking changes.
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For example, Eugen explained that WhatsApp originally used XMPP for its chat protocol, which meant that Facebook and Google Talk users could connect to it, too. However, the company progressively locked down the platform over time, leaving virtually nothing visible that was unique to XMPP in its current iteration.
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To prevent somebody taking Mastodon code, placing it behind locks, and stripping out the federation part to make Twitter II, I'm using this license.
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The thing to remember about free software is that 'free' means freedom of the user, not that it's zero cost. It's perfectly fine to charge for free software because developers need to live, too.
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I've seen a lot of multilingual 'tooting' these past few weeks. Can we expect an in-app translate function like Twitter's on Mastodon?
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I don't think I could put in a 'translate this toot' button because APIs from Google and Bing are quite expensive at scale. I'm not 100% promising this, but I can probably put something in where people can select which language they post in, and then just filter the timelines. That would at least solve the problem of being confronted with lots of French posts, without knowing any French.
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The only complaint about Twitter I remember that hasn't already been addressed here is the capability of editable 'toots.' Is that a possibility?
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That won't happen. There's actually a good reason why they don't do that. It's simply because you could make a toot about one thing, have people favorite it and share it, link it from other places, and then suddenly, it says 'Heil Hitler,' or something.
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It's a bit preposterous to continue the conversation as if Twitter and Mastodon are interchangeable entities. They exist in separate ideological and mechanical spheres, and will both continue to do so for a very long time.
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That said, the fundamental user interface design and current cross-community user saturation do warrant comparisons between their functions. More likely than not, you'll create a Mastodon account because a link found you on Twitter, use it because you prefer its type of ecosystem, and you'll stay after realizing that nearly all of your age-old qualms have been addressed, if not already rectified. While FOSS and Federated may seem at times like jejune ideologies, their advantages are especially tangible in this context. Should you find yourself needing to complain about something, you'll find an audience. Perhaps it'll be your command line.
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It's nothing but negligent to describe Mastodon as an alternative or clone.
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It's more like Twitter's son.
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It's leaner, quicker-to-change, much more flexible & democratized, and less corrupt. Though I didn't ask its creator what he intended to gain from all his effort, I think his commitment itself denotes a preoccupation with progress. Those of you who've been let down by the tools you've been given to control your words' exposure will find startling competence in your ability to determine per-toot privacy, or reserve your raucous photos and terrible memes from followers who are not necessarily complicit consumers. Naturally, it's also much less dependable, though a single instance outage will never leave you truly, completely silent. And the support will come.
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It's been a privilege to be observer and participant in the first lightening of a new online community. In the moment, we enjoy our lavender haze -when the spaces are filling primarily with users who are sincerely interested enough in discourse to have sought it out.
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Sarah Jeong's account of her Twitter exile is a good, long read if you're craving more specifics, and Eugen's Medium offers a more complete explanation of federation and its place in the industry, straight from the source. Apparently, he's just as articulate with words as he is with code.
In the midst of arranging Feebles for print, I stumbled upon an author and “book designer” engaged in launching a community for self-published, independent writers. I'm not going to specify names because I have no interest in shitting on his company, nor “what it stands for.” I don't want to shit for you at all, actually, just note a few still-underrealized realities about the sheer ludicrousness of the word business as it stands. Let's say you've got some manuscripts you've been sitting on for a few years, and you're introduced to the concept of self-publishing by an evermore earnestly-curious man on the radio named Audie one day. He and his interviewee (the owner of a self-publishing service) seem to say, curiously, that because an author's profit-per-unit can potentially be “four to five times more” than if he/she is published traditionally, self-publishing has now shed completely its aura of desperate amateurism.
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But – whoa, Nelly – writing to sell books, and writing books have perhaps never been further apart. And gee – you certainly didn't write to sell; selling hadn't occurred to you at all for a very long time, but from just one search, you find Our Friend, back from his own experiences as an author and editor, qualified and insistent that you can make money selling creative works of fiction.
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And Jesus Christ… All that said, I must admit to you that I've just finished Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, and was unable to commence this “review” without wondering aloud for you how Kilgore Trout – perhaps Kurt's favorite creation – would feel about this Friend's business.
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It was actually my Aunt Ayn who taught me to write, so Vonegutt was a mediocre Ray William Johnson-associated YouTube band until after high school, when “lots of people” started telling me to “read Vonnegut, man,” even though I cannot recall any specific events or recommenders. For whatever reason, though, I'd bought a copy immediately after a friend mentioned it, recently, and found him (in this particular work, at least) to be awfully sane for my taste, yet particularly resonant. Though written to make me think it was all a big one-draft ramble, Kurt's a bit too curt for it to be believed, I think. Auntie Rand would've double-taken his beratement of “in nonsense is strength” if she'd made it that far. I hope she did, because I found the image of her taking in his occasional hand doodles to be very amusing.
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Dwayne Hoover is awfully absent – and therefore, a very versatile storytelling device, though not in a lazy sense. We're repeatedly notified about an imminent convergence. Eventually, it's explained that the endgame involves Dwayne exploding into a violent revengeful tantrum against all the lifelong enemies of his subconscious. Including “people with brown skin.” Can I just bring up Ayn Rand again? I hope it's okay.
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Kilgore Trout is the most dangerous villain I've ever experienced. He has little to lose, and – like Vonnegut, it would seem – finds his observatory position in the world to be immensely amusing. His last amusement, even. Remember Ellsworth M. Toohey, the corrupter? I think they would've gotten along, funny enough.
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Yes, and Hoover would be Peter Keating, the corrupted. I'm reaching, yeah, but when do I not? Their immediate difference is the lack of malicious intent in Trout, of course. He is an aimless science fiction writer, who gives Dwayne a volume simply to shut him up. Neither villain is believable, per se, but both were written to be personifications of ideals; vehicles of metaphor.
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I think Rand could've quite easily become Vonnegut, were she to stick around much longer, but perhaps I believe so only because I've experienced a quantifiable transition from her sort of thinking (vaguely) to his (perhaps less vaguely.) An incorruptible commitment to absolute was Ayn's most potent conviction. Growing up as a white cis male, I was aching for a method of simplifying the world which I knew more and more to be infinitely complex. Inevitably, with age, I think a limitless appetite for the complexity must form, lest one spend the rest of his/her life fighting the singular truth in a miserable fortress of seclusion and amphetamine abuse.
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The key to Breakfast of Champions' genius is its utter lack of angst. Aside from his brief definition of a being – “an unwavering band of light” – Kurt had little interest in writing a manifesto, yet his perspective in his curious commentary manifests a much more profound critique of American society than Rand ever could've from her hole.
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As such, I think it's wisest to leave a rudimentary whole measurement of a writer to Aunt Ayn, but perhaps a particularly relevant spectrum in this case is clarity of sight. Rigid idealism has its place in literature, no doubt, but it's an awfully boring one without a writer's feet on the ground.
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How does this all relate to self-publication? Well, Our Friend, it turns out, offers preset novel “templates” to members of his writing community, into which one can “plug in” characters, setting, and basic plot elements to a degree of his/her choosing. And his YouTube channel is stuffed with all sorts of tutorials on formatting and – more disturbingly – how to create sellable cover art with Photoshop. Naturally, it includes instruction on stock and rights-free images.
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Though I've yet to read one, it doesn't take much imagination to comprehend the inevitable product. From Our Friend's vlogs, I can suppose a heavy focus on the adolescent market. What makes the whole concept noteworthy in my mind is the why? I'd like to think that I have a fairly-realistic grasp on the potentialities of writing for profit, and am obligated to wonder why one would “compromise” his/her “creative integrity” by publishing literature to sell, of all things.
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As I understand it, the methodical approach to authorship being encouraged is applicable to literally any other field, creative or not. It's curious and impressive, frankly, as their sales potential seems to be vastly superior to anything I'll ever bother to publish, but I must weigh in because of one quantifiable detriment: saturation.
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Someone is spending their money on these works – probably for their kids. I'm not a parent, but I'd be tremendously ashamed to discover that a book I'd given as a gift to anyone had been manufactured in this manner. Not just in the sense that most light literature is manufactured – written in hearty observance of academic rules of storytelling – but literally mass-produced with a goddamned intellectual stencil.
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Without sounding like I'm complaining... My singular self-published poetry collection is probably of significantly less whole-value to the majority of readers, but I can't help but think the effort put into its hand-drawn cover art and meticulously-arranged typography would make it a more comfortable investment, if anything else.
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This brings us to a distinctly-academic mainstay which I have always taken issue with: “consider your audience.” I first encountered this proverb in the context of a composition studies course, mind you, where its consideration in the essay medium makes unequivocally good sense. If we agree that an essay is defined by an uncompromising commitment to its effectiveness in making an argument, audience awareness is essential. If you were asked to decide on one primary purpose of writing in general, though, would it not be identical?
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Why didn't Kurt Vonnegut or Ayn Rand simply write essays? Well, the latter wrote many, but their sales have always been all but invisible compared to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. (Both of which resemble essays more than fiction, at times, but I'll spare you that conversation.) Did they consider their audience? Certainly not in the way my first Google result articulates it:
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Ensure that your documents meet the needs and expectations of your readers.”
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Ooo boy. To me, that translates a little too easily into “write what your readers want to read.” And maaaan... If there's anything that experience and Donald Draper have taught me, it's that people have no idea what they want, especially from art. And that's a reasonable mentality, isn't it? Perhaps even an exhaltable one. I know that predictable stories are my number one turnoff, personally. If I expected to exist for an eternity, I'd absolutely indulge every single creative work I could find, but I do not, and that realization (as I stated in my last Freq Check,) has propelled an underlying preference in all of my consumption decisions: what I have not (before) seen.
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Obviously, then – if you take my word for it – Our Friend's endeavors are in direct ideological opposition to my own, which would make him my arch nemesis, if 21st-century industry were a bit more theatrical. But – like most heroic protagonists – I'd be much more interested in “turning” him than censoring him, were we ever to engage. In fact, I'd probably end up defending his and/or his constituents' right to sell their trash if CreateSpace or other self-publishing services called it into question.
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Overwhelming content volume can be entertaining; Drywall was my own foray into that uniquely contemporary experiment. It's the sheer ease of publication, though, that makes “good” literature more precious than ever. Admittedly, a glance at Amazon's current top ten bestsellers list indicates that I am undoubtedly out of touch as far as the market is concerned. I know that my mother and sisters have mysteriously reverted back to print from the Kindles which they used for a few years, and that audiobooks make me supremely uncomfortable. I also know that reading a book – whenever I bring myself to shut out everything else – is an unrivaled vehicle of cognitive serenity.
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A significant mission for Extratone lies in an upcoming reactionary movement to culture's “circus stage” (by way of the Internet.) We determined the event's inevitability on Drycast, a year ago, and have made occasional efforts to posit more thoroughly on The New. It must involve a reduction in content consumption, fundamentally, which will constrict because of an increasing demand for more explicit purpose in all media. We are not to be the alternative, necessarily, but the intermediary arbiter of the enabling discussion, hopefully with the outcome of increased awareness. What is and is not relevant? Why am I consuming this?
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As the end of Breakfast of Champions draws abruptly closer, Vonnegut mentions his schizophrenia, which is – as you probably know – fundamentally characterized by loss of the ability to determine what is and is not real, and primarily treated with antipsychotics. Interestingly enough, extremely high doses of amphetamines (which Ayn Rand did use heavily, by the way. I wasn't making that up) can actually induce psychosis, which could crudely be described as cognitive noise. I could've missed the intended function of their works, but for me, they illuminate a distinct relationship between the abstracts of truth and relevance which, for the moment, seems particularly necessary.
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Two opposing reflections of Americana; both helpful in preparation for its future.
The genius of one Chuck continues to perform to the refreshing benefit of scholars in American culture.
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Thanks to an episode of Peter Kafka'sRecode Media, I've just now discovered that former New York Times Magazine Ethicist, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and longtime men's interest media-affiliated sports and music columnist Chuck Klosterman pronounces his surname kloa-ster-men instead of klaw-ster-men as I have been, shamefully – even within earshot of other human beings on a handful of occasions. I am willing to submit myself for punishment for these transgressions under the single condition that I be allowed to call him Cuck Klusterfuck the next time he ends a spoken sentence with “or whatever” in an interview – an unfortunate habit he's maintained for years. If my own byline had any pedigree in the world of literary criticism, I would now collect his penance simply by including those hateful, 90s stoner-kid buzzwords in every quote, unedited, but it most certainly does not. I've searched moderately hard for any reason to bother contributing any criticism of books or their authors and returned with very little. I've read The Broom of the System and White Girls this year, yes, but I'd have to be a Fuck Boy to write anything about David Foster Wallace, and Hilton Als’ elegant, genre-busting masterpiece is so far beyond both my societal rights and perceptive capacity that I wouldn't dare utter a single editorialized peep about it – aside from a log line-length recommendation – even under immediate threat of certain death.
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Given my recent voluntary relocation to Portland, Oregon and the word-y pursuits on which I choose to spend all of my money and energy, I should adore everything about Chuck Klosterman and in turn he should be completely invisible across the under-30 demographic, yet I’ve found a special originality in his voice since first exploring it and I think it might be worth requalification. A good friend of mine once dug his first novelDowntown Owl out of a bulk box of bargain books she’d bought as a preteen, long ago and became an enthusiastic fan of his perspective and a harsh, but fond critic of his persona. It was her copy of his second that I read first: The Visible Man – ultimately a surprisingly-original take on the psychologist of a gifted outcast tale that classically exemplifies the easy-to-digest yet thoughtfully-exploratory reputation of his craft. Thanks to her library card, I was able to follow it up immediately with Chuck’s latest, most topical work – an anthology of past essays written for publications like The Guardian, Grantland, and GQ entitled X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century, which proved an impossibly entertaining, even more polished execution of The Quaint Chuck’s Explanations in non-fiction form, beginning at onset with refreshing brevity in its introduction.
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I’m not fully accredited by either side of the professional equation (sportswriters think I’m too pretentious and music writers don’t think I’m pretentious enough,) but I’m able to write about whatever I want, as long as it actually happened.
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Using “pretentious” even when just vaguely and loosely expressing other readers’ thoughts about your work is the first of many miniscule technical infractions against convention laid down in X’s arrangement which proves to act toward the benefit of its experience. If you substitute car nerds for sportswriters, I’d personally identify with this picoautobiography in a big way, but more importantly as a reader I had never encountered anything written about sports which I would describe as pretentious, per se, and that realization could very well have birthed enough curiosity to land the sale, had I been skimming in a bookshop, which I would’ve eventually been pleased with.
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Now, during what we should hope to be the first dawn of a new microera of sincerity, we must recognize how valuable it is for Klosterman as an observer to be comfortably engaged with his subjects, emotionally, and confident in the value of his commentary in middleage without the need to insist upon his eccentricity, as so many cringey, culturally-daft Dads do, these days. He uses keywords in his writing and spoken publicity that should dismiss him immediately as one of these – a nostalgic, out-of-time dork – but are instead somehow magically manipulated to serve him in articulating reasonable, even profoundly-innovative insight. As I have explored his bibliography and his publicly-expressed thoughts, I have been caught up and hinged on a single supposition: Chuck Klosterman is the only white, 46-year-old bearded Portland Dad you should be reading. Do mind that I am in no way exempt from this lens, but it’s still my job to determine his viability as an intellectual – a “thought leader,” even – for those of us who were conceived around the same time he was wrapping up his collegiate sentence at the University of North Dakota.
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For a solid hunk of the American reading audience, a quick, elemental vector of quality and mastery we look for in an essayist is the ability to “transcend” their subject matter for even the most presumptuous and conceited among us, usually to deliver a more abstract sentiment to leave with. Here, Klosterman’s significant career experience is irrefutably evident – in X, he achieves this transcendence organically with a fluidity unlike anything I’ve read before. We can already check a single box: convincing even a young professional twenty-something to shell out for a physical hardback of contemporary non-fiction requiring any sort of academic effort to consume is going to be nigh-impossible, even though X actually happens to be the best-looking specimen of print product design I have ever handled across cover, type, and layout. It’s been difficult having to convince myself to give this copy back.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I must take special care to emphasize just how highly I regard Peter Kafka as editor and interviewer extraordinaire within the Media beat – well-proven to be capable of hitting consistently hard on both novel and old guard industry personalities with refined, seemingly unimpeachable stone-faced skepticism. However, this Chuck Klosterman interview for Recode Media is an uncharacteristically disarmed display of serious admiration: he introduces X with an outright confession: “It’s great. I bought it. I bought a signed copy,” which is an unexpected oddity (though not an unwelcome one – I’m glad Peter enjoys his life.) Their conversation dips briefly in personal history (Chuck and his wife moved to Portland from Brooklyn for its proximity to family) before plopping down upon the substance of his clearly superb and matter-of-fact interview technique. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a conversation between Kafka and any previous guests with whom he was quite so obviously alike in general disposition.
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The only reason I’m able to ask you these questions is because I’m a reporter and I can ask you questions now that I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable asking you if we were friends, so I’m not going to pretend that we are and I’m not going to create some fake thing where we’re going to have a relationship beyond this conversation. I’m just going to ask you the things I want to know about and I hope that you respect the fact that I’m just being straight with you. I find that that works much better.
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From the broadest possible pop cultural lens, Chuck's most spectacular and widely-circulated work, demographically (I assume) is his 2015 interview and cover story for GQ with Taylor Swift – then “the most popular human alive.” Yes, it really is worth dwelling on the image: this guy... this very Dorky Dad, just hanging out with the most highly-demanded teen idol who's ever lived, sitting awkwardly next to her in the backseat of her car as she maniacally panics to accept a call from Justin Timberlake. When one Chucks such a distinguished contrast upon such a high-profile contemporary medium, the weight of the potential scrutiny becomes palpable, but Klosterman anticipates and braces for this (very risky) business in the only manner he can: acknowledging it over and over and over again in the second paragraph of his every interview appearance.
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It doesn’t matter if it was complimentary or insulting necessarily. It would seem as though I wasn’t taking her seriously as a musical artist, and the idea is that I do. That’s why I’m writing about her is because I do think she’s a meaningful, significant artist. It’s not worth the risk of having the story then get shifted by other people who perhaps just perceive themselves as somebody who’s a watchdog for certain signifiers or certain elements of the culture and that their job is to be on the watch for this. If your story then gets moved into that silo, that’s all it’s going to be remembered for... It’s a touchier thing now. It’s a more dangerous thing.
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In the print itself, the cover story is prefaced by a very short but uncomfortably-telling complaint about changing expectations for culture writers. One might reasonably suggest that Klosterman regards the practice of calling out or remarking on “creepy misogyny” as “dumb” – nothing but the byproduct of changing “times.”
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Something you may notice in the following 2015 feature on Taylor Swift is that I never describe what she looks like or how she was dressed, even though I almost always do that with any celebrity I cover... If I did, it would be reframed as creepy misogyny and proof that I didn't take the woman seriously as an artist. It would derail everything else about the story. It would become the story.
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But… is it? Note how desperately close his language comes to the common white guy whining about feminism classification without actually fitting the bill. Right…? It doesn’t? Surely, it must be certified Awake through some combination of keywords or format I’m unfamiliar with or unable to visually register because Klosterman’s ass would have long been grass, otherwise. These 224 words are X’s most contentious, which you could call impressive, all things considered – he appears to care enough about his public image to curate it somewhat diligently. When a motherhood blogger published an open letter in 2013 citing three very ableist uses of the R-word in his work, it only took him two days to respond: “I was wrong. You are right.”
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More than any other writer of his demographic, Chuck Klosterman has a close, wary relationship with the everchanging contextual boundaries of public expression. He knows when to be transparent with his feelings on progression, and he's careful to avoid what could be “problematic” for the sake of functioning better as a writer (I assume.) For Slate's I Have to Ask podcast, he managed to speak extensively about these mechanisms for nearly an hour without bellowing anything definitively cringey.
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I can’t say it’s better or worse. It’s just different, and because it’s different, it makes me feel uncomfortable, but there’s actually like an adversarial relationship with the history of anything, and that somehow that history is seen as oppressive. And you shouldn’t even know about it. It’s better to live in now.
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A quick jaunt from pretty horrendous to almost-ideal, then. If we are to place our faith in Chuck as our last bearded champion, we must hope that last sentence is sincerely intended to be his lens to the changing world. Granted – even if it is the truth – it’s not as if persistent acknowledgement of one’s position can miraculously wash away any systematic patriarchal dynamics involved in authoring (or reading, for that matter) a high-profile feature of a young woman on cover of a magazine which explicitly seeks most to speak to “all sides of the male equation,” (are you sure aboutthat, Condé Nast?) especially considering how unlikely it would've been for me to read anything about Taylor Swift outside of this very white man's anthology. Fundamental themes of power and control are threaded throughout both his fiction and non-fiction, which is especially prevalent in the Macho Big Boy cultures of the athletics and music industries. In profiling Taylor Swift – the undisputed apex of the latter in 2015 – Klosterman provided a firsthand account of the grueling maintenance of a public and private personality under tremendous strain from said factors as they were magnified to the max by the most extreme celebrity.
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Here we see Swift’s circuitous dilemma: Any attempt to appear less calculating scans as even more calculated. Because Swift’s professional career has unspooled with such precision, it’s assumed that her social life is no less premeditated.
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I’m right there with Chuck: I’ve even found a fundamental pillar in Power and Control relationships supporting my own fiction experiments: how we attain them, how we lose them, and how best to make use of them – all of which had apparently been quite problematic for Taylor Swift for most of her adult life, though we wouldn’t be allowed to really comprehend how deep her inner turmoil had drilled until it overwhelmed even her expertly-designed self-control four years later, boiling over entirely with such unexpected violence that all of America’s pseudorural glam-pop-country-glossy-chode-hipsters let out a simultaneous, dangerously-alarmed holler of OH FOR PETE’S SAKE that was actually heard and recorded from the overflying orbit of the International Space Station.
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It’s somehow different when the hub of the wheel is Swift. People get skeptical. Her famous friends are marginalized as acquisitions, selected to occupy specific roles, almost like members of the Justice League ('the ectomorph model,' 'the inventive indie artist,' 'the informed third-wave feminist,' etc.). Such perceptions perplex Swift, who is genuinely obsessed with these attachments.
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No, it’s not only worthwhile as an exercise in superbly athletic self-awareness – the Taylor profile is profound. I’d recommend reading and treasuring it with or without the rest of the anthology because bizarre intersections like these are rare to come by from anybody else. Short, sharp, and occasionally somewhat petty notions are what Chuck Klosterman does best and most originally. Thanks to a digression of Kafka’s beginning with “you and I are about the same age…,” he arrives (by way of REM, believe it or not) at a significant statement about youth and identity.
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It seems strange to me to be into music for its coolness outside of high school. That seems like that’s the only time when you’re a young person and you’re using art basically to create a personality because you don’t have a real personality yet.
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Klosterman is debatably exempt from the traditional academic abstract of “objectivity” for the vast majority of his notable work because of its stated primary subject: his “interior life.” Perhaps the success of his voice could be at least partially attributed to his development of an existential muscle – a perspective unique enough to entertain, yet no less recognizably Midwestern with which he’s been able to reflect particularly clearly on the profession in tandem with the experience he’s accumulated over the course of his career.
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You know, when you’re young, you’re a real emotional writer if you’re a writer… If I was a young person now, I would be incredibly attracted to the idea that when you’re 22 you can be a national writer, which was impossible when I was 22.
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In a way, Klosterman does surmise that it was indeed its objectivity that media lost, and that writing is no longer a “one-way relationship,” but a sort of ridiculous dance in which “many people feel the reason they’re consuming media is to respond to it… that it’s not for the content.” I would remind old Chuck that there are very few functioning adults outside of academia or retirement in the United States who spend much of their time reading anything solely for the sake of absorption, and the disparity between those who were and weren’t was exponentially greater in the past. The story of American media is defined by its cycles of waning and waxing democratization, but many of the more traditional avenues in the business have bet on the “two-way relationship” to keep them relevant.
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My own favorite chapter of the collection is a 2500-word personal essay constructed for Grantland to answer a single incongruity: “Why is watching a prerecorded sporting event less pleasurable than watching the same game live?” Some form of this question has at least mildly troubled every American since the 1960s, including myself, and Klosterman manages to provide an entertaining and concise analysis of this plight through his own wisdom. In its short preface in the volume – which was written “in 2008, in Europe, when [Chuck] was pretend depressed” is the story of his encounter with a house-painting stranger, to whom he explains the meter for success in his opinion-manufacturing profession, as he sees it: “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.”
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Last weekend I was in a hashish bar in Amsterdam. It was post-dusk, pre-night. The music was terrible (fake reggae, late-period Eric Clapton, Sublime deep cuts.) I was sitting next to a British stranger with a shaved head and a speech impediment. Our conversation required subtitles, so I imagined them in my mind. He told me he had lost three family members within the past year: his mother, who was sixty-six; his uncle, who was fifty-six; and his sister, who was forty-six. He said he'd just turned thirty-six. He asked if I saw a pattern developing. “Yes,” I said. “But only numerically.”
-I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a housepainter. He asked me the same question about myself. “I manufacture opinions,” I said.
-“Really?” he asked. “How do you know if you’re any good at that?”
-“By the number of people who agree or disagree,” I said in response. “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.”
-“That’s interesting,” said the bald British man who could barely speak. “I guess house painting is a totally different thing.”
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Rarely are situations or discussions that begin with back in my day actually constructive in any sense, but Chuck Klosterman appears to be the exception. If you’re willing to indulge him, you may find yourself reassured. He now writes from a remote cabin (with WiFi,) was tortured – like all of us – in sifting through and compiling his old work for X, and finds its index to be his favorite part.
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Exploring the index from a book you created is like having someone split your head open with an axe so that you can peruse the contents of your brain.
I haven't watched A Charlie Brown Christmas in at least twenty-five years, solely because I can't emotionally reconcile the final scene.
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You’ll notice that his entire answer to the live television debacle is – again – entirely about control (or the lack thereof.) In fact, his relationship with and desire for control also contributed to his choice of profession.
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Part of the reason I became a writer is because it was this completely controlled reality where I could do this thing by myself where you’d go out and you’d do the interviews and stuff, but then you’re back by yourself, transcribing and then writing. Then, when the story is done and you send it off, that’s the end. Now that’s the middle. Now it’s like, when the story is published, it’s the middle of the process very often because the consumer feels differently now.
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While Klosterman’s voice is pleasant to someone like me, neither it nor himself necessarily belong to The People. In his X review for Paste Magazine, B. David Zarley proclaims essays to be “a love letter to a moment,” concluding that Chuck is “’effectively narcissistic,’ proving that culture essays can teach us something about ourselves and the people around us.” For The Washington Post, Justin Wm. Moyer notes “it’s hard to think of another writer who could make a 30-page, deeply reported essay about a North Dakota junior-college basketball game interesting,” suggesting that this new collection marks Klosterman’s ascendance from critic to philosopher. From what I’ve read to date, I would counter that he has always fulfilled the term to the extent of its usefulness in the 21st century and is even now beginning to redefine it. Last January, he braved the “dystopic” Google Gates to speak critically for a crowd of Googlers, describing them as “an umbrella over the entire culture,” and urging caution and reflection in the coming future to keep them from doing “something bad.” His engagement with them – especially during the Q&A – is a fascinating insight into the Greater Google Mind, and I would encourage any invested parties in Chuck Klosterman’s role as a philosopher to watch the talk in full. I was unfamiliar with “the boat-sails-wind analogy” before I read James Murphy’s interview for LCD Soundsystem’s “last album.”
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Your life is a boat, the sails are your emotions, and drugs are the wind. When you're a kid, your boat is small and your sail is huge, and drugs are like a hurricane.
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Control x Time = the Klosterman beat. I suppose this must be what other entertainment writers are referring to when they accuse Chuck of nostalgia trafficking, but I can’t be so sure. Though I’d like to think my own snout for the stuff is especially well-tuned, I am undeniably from a different planet – even auditorily. All but one or two of the musicians interviewed throughout X were entirely unknown to me by name, which Klosterman’s voice managed to make even more compelling – not to mention the included stories of athletes and the sports industry, which include stories of the human ego, paranoia, and complex drama that always manage to transcend their setting when articulated with such dexterity.
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I’ve never before written a book review of any sort – nor am I defensibly qualified to compare culture writers – but with good ole’ Chuck, I dove much further in order to tackle one very important question: should Klosterman be recommended reading for anyone under 30 above or alongside bestsellers like George Saunders or groundbreaking essayists of color like Hilton Als? In many a case, I must conclude by saying, simply, that something of value would be forgone if we shunned Chuck, even if his insight is old news to all but the most rudimentary yokels. I have little to offer women or people of color, but I’d bet X would prove itself worth a library trip for any idiot white guys in their lives who may be falling far behind. I don’t know of any other voices who are in a better position to introduce these issues, nor any who are quite so practiced at handling them delicately. While Jenna Wortham-level readers will gain little to nothing from this examination or the ecology of its subject (and will likely find themselves pausing momentarily for a deserved jest before moving on and returning to their high-level plane of complex neoliberal commentary,) but most of their less-aWoken fathers should find in Chuck a man they can truly trust, who manages to consistently distill and articulate the need-to-knows of the most complex pop culture and pop science conversations without using any of the academic language found in most institutional discourse which daddy finds too condescending and superfluous to bear. Those readers who’ve absolutely fucking despised my voice so far in this essay should give Klosterman a go – I take as much time as I can muster to fiddle with and season the words in context like this work because I basically *enjoy* the bullshit, yet I’ve found both X and But What If We’re Wrong? remarkably refreshing and impressive exercises.
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[These are] the cultural conditions in which I was raised under and which I pursued journalism under. That was part of the thing that drew me to the idea of being a reporter was I was like, this is something I can do, I think. My ability to detach my personal emotions from what I am investigating, while not perfect, I can do this. And now it turns out that the opposite is what’s desirable. I think it’s really going to change the kind of person who goes into media going forward.
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Reading Chuck Klosterman is going to be perturbing, but true sincerity is almost always uncomfortable. Comprehensively, his nonfiction represents perhaps the most important possible behavior to encourage from both the critic and his readership because it incubates and exudes sincere curiosity and a genuine interest in learning to listen. From the perspective of quantified societal contribution, I’d argue that Klosterman’s craft is a significantly more honorable and worthwhile pursuit than greater academic literature in its unique and entertaining treatment of subjects the establishment tends to pulverize into minutia. Unless he’s broke and/or bookish, buy X as a gift for your Dad and at least give it a try when he’s done. If nothing else, at leastread the Taylor Swift interview, okay? If he doesn’t enjoy the book, I’m always available if one or both of you need to blow off some steam: give me a call at (573) 823-4380. (Normal text messaging / talktime rates will apply.)
Ten percent of the United States' adult population cannot functionally read or write (conservatively) despite the exponential increase of required reading in the average American's day-to-day life thus far in the 21stcentury. For written American media, especially, one would assume that a financial and social incentive for maximum literacy in the populace should present a straightforward justification for intense widespread coverage of this particular disparity, yet most related coverage in mainstream national magazines and newspapers is alarmingly sparse and often requires a less-than-socially-conscious context (e.g. a for-profit startup) to actually appear in news feeds. From the most wholesome assumption of the industry's general values — that it holds “newsworthiness” above all — we must assume that it does not generally consider American illiteracy “interesting enough to the general public to warrant reporting” as we examine the intermittent discourse surrounding the issue that does achieve publication.
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In late October, the American business and technology magazine Fast Company covered the recent successes of the “for-profit social enterprise” Cell-Ed, noting that “a huge portion of the American labor force is illiterate,” which it described as “a hidden epidemic.” The article's author, Rick Wartzman, mentions foremost that Cell-Ed's userbase is largely “foreign-born” and expected to eclipse one million in number by the end of 2019. Demographically, the magazine's readership is predominantly middle to upper-class, who are the least affected social groups by a significant margin as per illiteracy's strong correlative relationship with poverty. These factors combine to limit any real social consequences from such an article.
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In direct contrast with the professional, market-minded perspective of modern business magazine, even niche independent publications from the opposite end of the media spectrum often trivialize, belittle, or generally mishandle the issue. In a 500-word “Editorial” written by The Editor Eric Black of the Baptist Standard — a small evangelical news website describing itself as “Baptist voices speaking to the challenges of today's world” — he points to a global increase in “illiterate people,” as he so comfortably brands them. Such language is inevitably counter-productive and potentially insensitive: to the eyes and ears of activists, educators, and the general public, such a term unnecessarily lends toward a restricted perspective of those people who have been left behind by the institution of read and written language in one manner or another and portrays them as a great vague collection of lingual lepers bearing their own distinct, inexorable, wordless ethnicity which inevitably bars them from the freedoms allowed by the Editor's learned capacity, including the ability to actually read his words of affliction. Simply put, he has dangerously oversimplified the issue.
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To once again assume the best and infer that Black had a specific purpose in publishing his ill-supported opinion beyond continuity's sake of his weekly Editorials, it appears to be the promotion of a local Texan literacy “ministry” called Literacy Connexus, though no further specifics about the project are provided beyond “helping churches develop literacy programs for their communities, provide training and resources to overcome illiteracy,” which is virtually identical to the introductory copy on the organization's homepage.
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So far, we've examined coverage only in special interest media, but what about legacy news organizations with the largest readerships in the United States? Despite oblivious use of the same ledes, a newspaper like The Washington Post can wield vast influence over the broadest possible readership and the public editorial trust. In November 2016, veteran reporter Valerie Strauss published “Hiding in plain sight: The adult literacy crisis” for Answer Sheet — her weekly newsletter designed to function as “a school survival guide for parents (and everyone else), from education policy to psychology” — which represents the most substantial discussion of American illiteracy in topical, widely-visible media (i.e. presence in a succinct search engine query.) She briefly introduces the issue with a bulleted list of illiteracy's consequences on modern society and the individual cited from a Canadian literacy foundation before turning the stage over to Lecester Johnson, CEO of the Academy of Hope Adult Public Charter School in Washington D.C.
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Johnson presents a passionate and well-informed exploration of the state of the literacy battle from the perspective of a full-time, locally on-the-ground advocate. Her op-ed's introduction includes the most essential observations and statistics throughout, noting “the children of parents with low literacy skills are more likely to live in poverty as adults and are five times more likely to drop out of school,” before setting upon a detailed examination of current and relevant organizations working toward solutions. Of course, it's largely centered upon her own organization, which she claims has “helped more than 6000 adults rebuild their education and job opportunities since 1985.”
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It's significant that an institution as deeply embedded across the American political spectrum as The Washington Post address the issue of American illiteracy, and both Johnson and Strauss are certainly qualified voices for the undertaking, but when we examine this particular article, it's important we consider the context of the Answer Sheet newsletter and its intended audience. Though it's no challenge to pitch the importance of reading and writing to parents and professional educators, the most alarming and destructive issue at hand is the educational disparity between their adult peers. “There's a literacy problem in the capitol, but I'm not talking about young people who can't read. Many adults — perhaps even parents sitting next to you at back to school night — don't possess academic skills,” notes Johnson with her very first paragraph. However, considering the nature of parenthood, the audience primarily consuming these words are undoubtedly preoccupied with juvenile issues, specifically, and we can assume their capacity to empathize with their fellow working adults who could benefit from literacy education is actually lessened from that of childless readers of the same age as a result. “Despite the magnitude of the adult literacy crisis, most of those needing to make up lost ground are pushed toward traditional classroom settings—even though many of these people can't possibly follow through because of cost or work schedules or other obstacles,” she attests.
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Perhaps more than any other American city, Detroit has been struggling with a serious illiteracy problem. According to a profile of the Beyond Basics program (which was adapted from an embedded video broadcast) on their local ABC affiliate's website, forty-seven percent of adult Detroiters cannot read, but even companies like General Motors — who donated \$250,000 to the Beyond Basics program earlier in mid-October — are getting involved. The article quotes Elijah Craft, a young man who was “reading at a first-grade level as a senior at Detroit's Central High School.” “Craft would rare venture from home for fear he would get lost because he could not read street signs,” reports WXYZ anchor Carolyn Clifford. She frames the narrative around a reference to the 2009 film The Blind Side starring Sandra Bullock: “here, you might call this story 'The Detroit Side.'” For local television news, this reference to popular culture likely strengthened the story's power ensnare viewers' emotional attention when it was aired, and even in this written accompaniment, it proves an effective — if a bit crude — analogy. The broadcast of Mr. Craft's interview also depicts his own deep emotional investment in reading when he begins to shed tears, which is not entirely communicated in the written article.
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When the American news media discusses American illiteracy, it's almost always in secondary or tertiary form: either by way of a short post for a weekly education newsletter, an ultra-low-distribution niche editorial column, or a personality profile of a local activist. Perhaps the fundamental obstacle in the face of increasing the discourse surrounding this issue is that its resolutions will require — perhaps more than any other social issue in this country — advocacy by those who can read on behalf of those who cannot because of how sensitive and isolated many of them feel. When voices of advocates like Lecester Johnson are uplifted by major organizations like The Washington Post, the sociological weight of the illiteracy issue can be very powerful. In quoting former United Nations chief Kofi Annan, she sums up for its extensive audience what the facts should ultimately mean to them: 32 million of Eric Black's so-called “illiterate people” in the United States of America have been and continue to be deprived of their “human right” to functional literacy.
All of this may one day be worth significantly more revision and/or visibility in the future, but for now, just know that I rambled out all of this because it’s by far my most effective way to think, and this darned lowkey blog post has just provided a very long-overdue opportunity for it. Please feel free to read or even respond to it, if you’d like, but I’d like to ask that you don’t panic or circulate it. Thanks.
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So far… the only intercorrespondence between staff at Inmunis is people having a problem with one another.
-Before Extratone, there was Inmunis – my first, relatively short-lived attempt to launch an online magazine which wasn’t particularly important, but the experience surely did contribute to and inform my progression in understanding media that led to my (utter bewildered) current state. Anyhow, it’s fun to look back. Here’s the web archive’s last snapshot.
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This, a derelict Twitter account, and two film reviews by James Wilson are all that’s left of inmunis.co.uk for good reasons – many of which I did not entirely shed when I tried again. Until I started Extratone and made doing “this” – incessantly reading/exploring the web, obsessively tinkering and experimenting with The Extranet – I actually had very little knowledge on or exposure to the state of digital publishing or the real depth of variety to be found with any significant effort to comprehend the current offering real, surviving magazines, online or not, yet was dumb and arrogant enough to assume that I’d seen it all and none of it was even close to good enough for me to read or seek to write for. I was actually delusional enough to regard myself as too smart and one-of-a-kind to lower myself by going back to journalism school – that I was so special, anything I put effort in creating was destined to turn out superb. Granted, I’d had the actual idea for less than two weeks before I experienced by far the most traumatic, soul-destroying, world-upturning, and life-altering event of my entire existence, which I think accounts for the insanity, and all of my decisions were inevitably preempted by the fact that I was a 21-year-old straight white male community college dropout, which accounts for (but does not excuse) their absurdity.
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I’ve publicly implied before that it was probably only thanks to Drycast – which was also in its infancy during the time of The Big Event (episode 7 was published just two days before) – and its weekly obligation to sit down and talk with my favorite people about interesting stuff that I did not end up dead or institutionalized in 2015 (I wish I was exaggerating.) If there is a Gourd, let it be known that he is fully up-to-date and brand-activated – he sent me a fucking podcast to save my life.
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Reading and compiling stories for the show notes throughout the week provided an early avenue for exploring and embedding myself into media. Beyond the actual content, even, it’s been the rationality in the tone which journalists generally adhere to that has drawn me in and provided a brighter and brighter guiding light to help keep my sanity in check after my world ended because New Media values empathy in tandem with critical thought. All my life, it’s been very important to me that I continue to learn the best way to both appear and feel smart and functional. I’ve long since accepted that I am very fucking weird – and not in the wow, I dye my hair bright red sort of way which helps people feel unique, but in the holy shit, I’m terrified of what would actually result in losing control of my facade sort, which is actually much less sinister than it sounds for you, and infinitely moreso for me.
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This is why I still have a very infantile habit of becoming overwhelmingly frustrated with those who socially emphasize and celebrate their “weirdness” as an important part of their identity because my self-perception has long since transitioned from regarding my deviations as something that made me “unique,” to gigantic obstacles in the way of every possible aspiration which I’ll probably never overcome, but am doomed to kill myself trying. I’m now working on learning to appreciate those very fucking common people who are determined to prove how strange they are because ultimately, my own self-perception is just as ignorant, loneliness is not a virtue, and I’ve only maintained the whole charade because I’d rather have delusions of grandeur than acknowledge that I am also mostly unoriginal, and most of my truly more “original” behaviors could easily be described as simply unhealthy.
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This is an important confession for this explanation because its “solution” is another crucial motivation behind my creation of Extratone – as both a symbolic and literal means of understanding and minimizing my own biases and bitterness by 1) surrounding myself with the huge amount young, talented people I knew with great ideas and 2) editorially committing to curiosity as the most precious ideal in writing (and in life.)
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I do know that – for whatever reason – I really do have a special knack for identifying the culture and creators that are truly fresh, innovative, even cool among those who can’t comprehend or stand it and the heartbreaking number of those who actualize themselves by trying to act aggressively apathetic toward the status quo. This sense is far from 100% reliable and is certainly not of a greater quality than everyone on Earth, but I would still confidently suggest it’s at least better than most, and – as most of us know – it especially jives with and defines the world of magazines.
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As I did in Spring 2016, I still believe that Extratone is the best way for me to hone my greatest talents and shed my biggest problems – that it is the name I can place on my endless journey to improve myself, which – most importantly of all – will all the while achieve the tightest possible adhesion to the only meaning of “original” with any significance or real world value at all, which serves human curiosity without punishing it in any sense. I could actually just be crazy or completely, irrationally inverted – and I know it sounds abstract and preposterous – but I promise it’s my best shot at one day performing my optimal function for the world.
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The very first thing I did after I’d arrived upon these hypotheses and been abruptly forced to cling to them as my last hope in life was to obsessively search for a single mantra/battlecry I could drill into my memory and could shout under duress – including the temptation to escape the whole lot of it – to succinctly remind myself that I had at least one logical chance at a fulfilling life (and yes, it’s still funny that the chance is, in fact, a Web Site.)
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Scribam quid non legerim is possibly grammatically incorrect to a scholar, but it’s the best possible translation I came up with in my Latin research of “I will write what I have not read.” It’s cheesy, yes, and a bit cringey in the middle of just any old day when it happens to catch my eye where it’s proudly displayed, all-caps, in the footer of our CMS, and – I’ll be honest – I don’t know if I could explain it over coffee to a stranger without turning red and covering my face, as I once could, but it’s (sincerely, in this one case) real gravestone material. (As in, if someone were to read this after my death, they would be encouraged to receive it as a bonafide last wish.)
The monumental amount of unsubstantiated gossip and conjecture enabled every day by Facebook is lethal to the human intellect. Can fire be fought with fire?
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Today, after positing on whether or not a pastry was in fact the namesake of the battleship Bismarck, I was told by its owner – a local woman of a far-from-excusable age – that “[I] should be on that big bang show.” Upon such fuckery, I looked her in her eyes and informed her that she'd just changed my plans for the night: I was now going to go home, wrap my lips around the barrel of my Beretta, and blow my brains out. I should've known better than to so jest with a boomer immediately after receiving such glaring indicators of minimal intellectual function, but I fell for the hope – as I often do, to no avail – that such a jarring reaction would encourage reflection on her foul, tragically misled sentiments regarding the general state of youth, and perhaps even spare a peer or two from future tribulation.
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Instead, she called the police.
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Three round cops found me, an hour later, approaching hesitantly. Strangely enough, they were chuckling – maybe to a little joke about all the recent hubbub on the radio covering a recent wave of blatantly negligent medical care in American prisons, though I hope nervous laughter is just SOP when responding to a suicide threat. As all Columbia cops always are toward me, they were aggravatingly genuine and hilariously understanding. I began by simply recreating my interaction with their summoner, quoting her word-for-word, and – I swear to my new Lord – all three immediately released a choral “ohhhhh” in unison. I'll never know for sure if they actually assimilated the reality of the situation so quickly, but it'd certainly seem that way.
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Clearly, I should've threatened her life.
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Despite the day-to-day expression of our recurring wisdoms, habits, instincts, patterns and cycles of cultural metamorphosis in the discourse, the stream of “well, you know they were sayin' the world was going to end when I was in elementary school” to my ear has fallen abruptly silent since the inauguration. Our parents and grandparents are both impossibly fortunate and unfortunate, having to duck out as the most multiplicative (read: sickest) cerebral orgy in the history of mankind will just've begun nibbling on the slope to its climax. We'll be lucky if we'll still be able to articulate our goodbyes by the time they reach the door. Nonsense does a fuckin number on perceived wisdom, but the gaps are widening at a dangerous pace. Tectonic or domestic, we are all straddling expanding space, and the chill of its draft is now stealing too much of our heat to ignore.
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Though it is entertaining in the moment (and otherwise redundant,) it would not be well-to-do of me now – nor was it, then – to leave the conversation in edgy absurdity. Yes, a part of me would like to campaign for Sheldon to be reclassified as an expletive, in disgust, but – as an adult in all-out sprint to make up for stalled emotional development – I must note that such a display of concern should've been at least reciprocated with a bit of explanation, if not appreciation. Still, there are much more appropriate reasons and situations in which to waste public servants' time.
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It's not news – the Theory is providing some ghoulishly skewed portrayal of less-than-forty pseudointellectuals. Obviously, my savior's time was worth very little to her, but the fact that she spent any quantity of anything at all engaging with even a decidedly mainstream generationally ambassadorial bridge could be regarded – if stretched – as the result of a curious seed, which has skyrocketed in human value, as of late. It is undiscouragable. Read the trail a bit, and you'll find that your frustration is simply an expression of the terror that's ignited by the stagnancy of their pace.
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It's great that you've managed to inch over to modern-ish sitcoms from Judge Judy and Independence Day , mom, but you're gonna have toreally pick up the paceand work on following a few body modification communities on the darknet.
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If an absence of solutions are the crux of the blog, here I'm now gloating.
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To whom does the commoner look to for such solutions when they'd prefer not to terrorize their kooky middle age parents into a half century of brutal fasting under vows of silence?
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The Big Thinkers!
-The Men of the Hour.
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Yes, men. All Big Bumbling Billionaire Imbeciles.
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Elon Musk cannot be the Nicola Tesla of the 21st century, or even the 20th, for that matter, because literally every mechanically-minded professional I've ever heard talk about battery technology has condemned it in some manner as an inescapable dead end, developmentally. Perhaps, then, the champion of electrochemical storage is the False Prophet.
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No, I'm not capable of citing research or conjuring Mars-capable spacecraft, but I've been a bit too preoccupied with my country's class war and its 10% adult illiteracy rate. It's all well and good to be privy to romanticism, but it's not the 1960s anymore. Even Howard Hughes would be more concerned for the wellness of the species than our continued reach for the stars, were he still alive.
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Well. Maybe not...
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Charles Lindbergh would be, though.
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We spent the 1990s preparing to rid ourselves of history because the smartest among us foresaw some facsimile of the renaissance we are currently experiencing. If they'd been shown a glimpse of some statistics on the volume of media we consume, they'd exclaim of their pride – no doubt – in their species' capability to progress, and perhaps even their own contribution to it. However, extended observation of an average American's day-to-day life would be lamented, in disgust, and a huge portion of the blame can be placed on one t-shirt-touting cyberyokel: Mark Zuckerberg.
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His name is stupid, his spawn is ruining my life, and he continues to insist upon saying shit that frightens the bejesus out of me.
But Fuck, himself wouldn't be at all intimidating without his money. The scariest bit is the lack of class in the criticisms of his intellectual influence. Farhad Manjoo's attention has been diligent and premium as a Times er's should be, but the same occupation bars him from authoring with the color of unsubstantiated claims.
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Mine does not.
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Elon Musk is not an apologetic genius. He's willing to joke about his intellectual distance from the planet and its populace on Twitter. Apparently, his mind's even surpassed the need to punctuate. Crazy.
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Google is well on it's way to becoming the neo-Vatican... yada yada yada, but they're too far gone – I do not have the expertise to address them. Fuck, though, is a singular short-sleeved, Even Stevens -haired young man without so much as private office space (even though his sentiments on breathing room at home are obviously inverse.)
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Clearly, it's all just to protect him from the truth: The Apostle John'sBook of Revelationis about Facebook. Fuck's cyberchild is the horseman, the beasts, and the plagues, stuffed into one tyrannical website.
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And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.
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If I can repeatedly trigger accidental voice calls on Fuckbook Messenger, don't tell me it's not possible to inadvertently live stream myself on the pot.
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The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.
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Of course, it's unlikely that Mark's essence was bred entirely of evil, but – like Tump, in many ways – he is an excruciatingly wealthy idiot. Though he is spending 2017 touring the United States, he doesn't seem to be all that interested in actually closing the gap between himself and the rest of us, which suggests that he only wants us to throw us off his extra-terrestrial, xenophobic scent. I can't imagine what The Mothership would really want with my Amazon browsing history, though.
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And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe.
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Just to be clear, he is notThe Antikhristos.
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He'd better not be, anyway.
-I'd be absolutely Livid with Lucifer if his choice of a figurehead for his Big Plan was such a Fucking dork.
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I mean... if Fuck wanted to spend his time crafting 6000-word essays, why the Fuck didn't he just build a Fucking CMS back in his Jesse Eisenberg era instead of the actual weekly-updated tower of digital Babylon? Surely, Satan would know better than to waste resources and pulverize creativity by ordering his Demonic Dev team to release regular builds for build's sake rather than on a per-need basis, but that'd be because The Tempter is an authority on incentive s as thoroughly as Fuck isn't.
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If you’re equipped with the privilege of literacy, you’ve been reading a lot about Fuckbook’s political consequences, recently. Frankly, it’s about Fucking time, but I’m compelled to emphasize that the most significant motor driving the politik is fueled by the eldest, fossilized portions of our thought meat. According to Manjoo, “the News Feed team’s ultimate mission is to figure out what users want,” dipping in Facebook's ocean of action data, searching for a soul.
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Yet another Fuckism that suggests he's an alien: everybody knows that nobody knows what they want.
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There's a central mechanic of our brains that by nature wreaks a whole helluva lot of contradiction. If you've ever mentioned ADHD with your doctor, or know a hypochondriac/adderall fiend who has, you may have heard it described as “the lizard brain.” Simply put, it's the brain stem, and it's responsible for the most basal and primitively emotional instincts and habits; an anti-intellectual agitant, arguing at all times for the course of action with the most immediate gratification. The Great Clickbait War of 2013 was a startling demonstration that revealed the strength of the hold Fuckbook had (and still has) on these reptilian bits – the true location of its power.
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“In surveys, people kept telling Facebook that they hated teasing headlines. But if that was true, why were they clicking on them?”
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Volition is the Word of the Day. Here, we must once again invoke an ancient parable from the wise foretellings of the Disney film, Smart House: when dealing with human beings, boundless compliance quickly leads to abject misery for all parties involved.
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Mindlessly, habitually, endlessly clicking... this is how we die.
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Something about Fuck's direction is fundamentally poisonous to the human mind. Yes, he is assuredly too Fucking democratic, but misinformation is far from the only form of evil his creation has assumed. If you can jog your memory back a bit, you'll remember a much wider variety of brain-rotting filth.
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In lapses of their existences' finitude, the 40-something second cousins of the world may still send you the occasional Can Crunch Saga invite, jarring you back to Jr. High in 2009, and forever associating themselves in your mind with the horrors of mortality and f u c k b o o k g a m e s.
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Elon is a more likely candidate, but I'll leave those differentiations to the not-idle cult masses.
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More than one sixth of all living eyes see Fuckbook every single day, placing its consumption behind only eating and drinking as the most universally human activity.
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Mr. Fuck achieved his vision and became perhaps the greatest purveyor of words who's ever lived. He's taught (or... is teaching) us something very profound about ourselves: capability is not the whole of the equation. Ability on its own cannot guarantee growth, but it can often result in decay. Discussion does not inherently lead to connection. Population is not a cure for isolation.
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That said, I must begrudgingly admit to you that I, myself am one of the 100 million users who've depended upon a “very meaningful” Fuckbook group for a “physical support structure” for which I have Fuck to thank.
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I've spent half of my existence watching cheesy barnstorming movies, whirling around die-cast biplanes, seeking out stories from old pilots – military and commercial, and eventually trained to become one myself. As regular activities at young ages do, aviation became deeply ingrained into my identity, but my local community is very sparse – it's not exactly cool, these days. On Fuckbook, an unofficial group for members of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association has allowed me to stay connected to the rest of the world's Soaring Nerds, which is no small deal. It's the only forum which I am compelled to participate in with 100% sincerity and emotional effect.
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Photos of members standing proudly next to their first airplane, or of adolescent students in a similar pose after their first solo, or of three old white rubes on a hangar picnic, laughing around a fold-up table full of rudimentary ham sandwiches in front of two gleaming Stearmans...
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They tug around on my heart like nothing else in life can.
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I stopped flying lessons at 16 because I began to see behind the naivety of my childhood perception of what it meant to fly commercially and realized that I was unequipped for- and uninterested in the sort of challenges it presented. I haven't flown in seven years, but the community will always have a tremendous dividend of my core being.
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These days, not a single person in my day-to-day life knows or cares about aviation, which wouldn't be laudable whatsoever – it's not exactly the most relevant goingson at the moment – were it not so emotionally necessary for me.
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A few days ago, a member shared a photo with the group of Charles Lindbergh's modified Ryan cockpit, captioned “what airplane am I?”
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In my youth, Lindbergh filled my closest equivalent to the 'childhood hero' role. My grandmother bought me a first-edition copy of The Spirit of St.Louis from a small town bookshop when I was six or seven, and I carried it literally everywhere with me until middle school. I watched the Jimmy Stewart film tens and tens of times, and I cried when I saw the Spirit in the flesh at the Smithsonian, yet I've never had an informed conversation about any of it with another human being. It really warmed me to see how many of the comments were correct answers.
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Breaking news: it's nice to know that there are other people on Earth who give a shit about the same things you do.
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Again – aspiration should always be encouraged. This is Fuck's vision for his creation, and it is feasible, even for myself. At least his public persona – however valid or invalid it may be – is making a huge effort to have positive consequence, even if his idiocy is imbuing itself within all of humanity.
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Fuck is too powerful to be exempted from responsibility for what Fuckbook's done to the Western psyche over the past decade, but – like the Christian god – perhaps all we need require is his repentance.
Eugen Rochko has spent this year perfecting federated social media in Mastodon – his open source project. We spoke to him just hours before it became a global tech conversation.
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The saga of Twitter, Inc. has been rejuvenated in 2017 by Tump's antics, corporate drama, and an amalgam of user and non-user disquiet with its decisions, though its financial viability has been in prominent industry conversation for half a decade. Since its pre-2010 outset, many 'a' feature has accumulated on its original, still-iconic skeletal software, and – though the net is undoubtedly positive – a few have gone.
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Last Thursday, the company revised in bravado its poultrian default profile picture and its system of replies to exclude @s on all of Twitter's proprietary services, drastically changing two of its visual mainstays, and prodding a particularly lucent cacophony. Turn your ear, and you'll hear many familiar terms in the chants: limits, chains, strings, harassment, feedback, gamergate, nazis, etc.
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These conversations are important, but they've gotten awfully stale.
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If you listen a bit more carefully, you'll intercept a new one:
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Mastodon.
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It's the open source brainchild of Eugen Rochko, who's known colloquially as Gargron.
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He's had one hell of a week.
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Between the night of our first emails and our conversation, his flagship mastadon.social instance had doubled in users. Less than two hours after we said our goodbyes, his name was on The Verge's front page.
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Despite the urgency of it all, he graciously lent me his time just after breakfast on Tuesday to discuss himself and the story behind the project, while the most significant day of his life was building around him.
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“I'm perfectly fine with being called Eugene by Americans.”
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Though the ink's still fresh on his compsci diploma, he's clearly prepared for the American press.
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What's the story behind the project? Do you remember the specific moment when you decided to do this?
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Many years ago, I had a friend that was really into federated networks when they were a new thing. That was when identi.ca was first created – at the very beginning of my developer knowledge and career.
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A good portion of the stories written so far on his platform have framed it as an alternative to Twitter, which early Masto adopters refer to as “Hellbird,” or “the bird website.” Eugen isn't afraid to acknowledge his investment in the format.
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I was a heavy Twitter user and I wasn't happy with where Twitter was going, so I decided to check on how the federated stuff was doing in the meantime. I found it in a very sad state, but thought I could contribute.
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He began building on his own, with Tweetdeck's standard in mind.
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I thought 'if I'm going to do something, it needs to have realtime updates and it needs to have columns.' I started with a bare-bones prototype while still [at University] in May or April of last year. It had no user interface, only an API that I was using from the command line. And I thought 'okay, it works. that's great.' Then, exams came.
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Academics had to come before the project at first, but it soon supplied an ample post-graduation diversion. He focused his energy on building something more complete and eventually launched a Patreon page.
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I announced it on HackerNews, and that was the first public release of the project. That's when I got my first users who weren't my friends, and some who were new to federated networks.
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That was just over 100 days ago, and it gave way to his first feedback.
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I started working on the first feature requests, shaping the project a bit differently. People were a lot more focused on privacy features than I thought they would be, although in retrospect, it makes sense. The previous [federated] project – GNU social – did not really have a focus on privacy features, or anything built in by default.
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It compelled him to change things, and his work was well received.
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Over time, I kept working on new features, and waves of new users came when it went viral in certain circles. The first was HackerNews and Product Hunt. Aral Balkan – a Twitter user with over 30,000 followers – picked up the project, gave it a shout out, and even did a giveaway of his app. He had a lot of followers from Holland; the Mastodon timelines became mostly Dutch.
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Next was Marxist anime Twitter (including Extratone and I.)
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Lots of furries; lots of LGBT people. That's when I really focused on privacy features and making sure all blocks worked because these individuals needed a safer platform than Twitter could offer.
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Sidekick dashboard background processing jobs as of Tuesday morning.
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“As you can see, the first bump is HackerNews, the second is Aral Balkan, and then anime/Marxist Twitter.”
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And the last – now a bit out of date – is this week's spike, which is nearly double all previous waves.
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Are you responsible for all of the code?
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You can look at the GitHub page to see a specific breakdown of who contributed and how many lines of code, each. You'll see I'm at the top by a large margin, but there are [additional] people who've contributed interesting, good features & fixes, localizations, user guides, and documentation.
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What's the story behind the name?
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It's not particularly interesting. I'm a progressive metal fan, and I listen to Mastodon sometimes. They have a really cool name that refers to a really cool animal. It's a fluffy elephant! What's not to love?
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It's also the inspiration for Mastodon's mascot, which was penned by Rochko's YouTuber friend Dopatwo after he realized how urgently he required an error page.
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What does “federated” mean to you?
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The biggest problem with this term is that it's new for lots of people. People who've come across federated networks in the pastinstantly understand what it means and how it works, and people who are new to the concept have a lot of trouble before it clicks. But when Twitter first started, people didn't understand what 'retweeting' meant, so it's not a unique problem domain.
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I don't know where it comes from – maybe BitTorrent – but people seem to think that when something is 'decentralized,' everybody gets the same thing; that it's all synchronized one to one. In actuality, 'federated' means that people in different instances can talk to each other, but the content is different depending on the users there, what they do, and who they follow.
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Though instances are infrastructurally independent, they can communicate with one another. On a user level, timelines are still determined by who you do and do not follow across the entirety of all instances.
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What if Twitter comes to you in the near future with a job offer?
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[Rochko laughs.]
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If it was any other company, I would think about it. A job is a staple source of income, and – depending on the company – could involve doing something important, but I have zero faith in Twitter.
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Does this all mean that I finally get to live out my serif Twitter dream?
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Yes, I suppose on your own instance, you could change the stylesheet...
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So if I set up my own instance and started charging for its use, I'd be in the clear, legally?
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Yes, that's okay. The code is licensed under AGPL version three, which I picked because other projects in the same space are using it. The difference between AGPL and GPL is that [the former] forces you to contribute back to the appstream code repository if you make any breaking changes.
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For example, Eugen explained that WhatsApp originally used XMPP for its chat protocol, which meant that Facebook and Google Talk users could connect to it, too. However, the company progressively locked down the platform over time, leaving virtually nothing visible that was unique to XMPP in its current iteration.
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To prevent somebody taking Mastodon code, placing it behind locks, and stripping out the federation part to make Twitter II, I'm using this license.
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The thing to remember about free software is that 'free' means freedom of the user, not that it's zero cost. It's perfectly fine to charge for free software because developers need to live, too.
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I've seen a lot of multilingual 'tooting' these past few weeks. Can we expect an in-app translate function like Twitter's on Mastodon?
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I don't think I could put in a 'translate this toot' button because APIs from Google and Bing are quite expensive at scale. I'm not 100% promising this, but I can probably put something in where people can select which language they post in, and then just filter the timelines. That would at least solve the problem of being confronted with lots of French posts, without knowing any French.
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The only complaint about Twitter I remember that hasn't already been addressed here is the capability of editable 'toots.' Is that a possibility?
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That won't happen. There's actually a good reason why they don't do that. It's simply because you could make a toot about one thing, have people favorite it and share it, link it from other places, and then suddenly, it says 'Heil Hitler,' or something.
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It's a bit preposterous to continue the conversation as if Twitter and Mastodon are interchangeable entities. They exist in separate ideological and mechanical spheres, and will both continue to do so for a very long time.
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That said, the fundamental user interface design and current cross-community user saturation do warrant comparisons between their functions. More likely than not, you'll create a Mastodon account because a link found you on Twitter, use it because you prefer its type of ecosystem, and you'll stay after realizing that nearly all of your age-old qualms have been addressed, if not already rectified. While FOSS and Federated may seem at times like jejune ideologies, their advantages are especially tangible in this context. Should you find yourself needing to complain about something, you'll find an audience. Perhaps it'll be your command line.
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It's nothing but negligent to describe Mastodon as an alternative or clone.
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It's more like Twitter's son.
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It's leaner, quicker-to-change, much more flexible & democratized, and less corrupt. Though I didn't ask its creator what he intended to gain from all his effort, I think his commitment itself denotes a preoccupation with progress. Those of you who've been let down by the tools you've been given to control your words' exposure will find startling competence in your ability to determine per-toot privacy, or reserve your raucous photos and terrible memes from followers who are not necessarily complicit consumers. Naturally, it's also much less dependable, though a single instance outage will never leave you truly, completely silent. And the support will come.
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It's been a privilege to be observer and participant in the first lightening of a new online community. In the moment, we enjoy our lavender haze -when the spaces are filling primarily with users who are sincerely interested enough in discourse to have sought it out.
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Sarah Jeong's account of her Twitter exile is a good, long read if you're craving more specifics, and Eugen's Medium offers a more complete explanation of federation and its place in the industry, straight from the source. Apparently, he's just as articulate with words as he is with code.
_The following was sent as part of a _[personal TinyLetter](https://tinyletter.com/DavidBlue)_ I've just begun in the hopes of rejuvenating my ability to tell stories._
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There are a few entities which continue to validate what I'm pursuing, but Joshua Topolsky and his _Outline_ are particularly worth noting. In search of reassurance, I listened to a podcast he appeared on in February, last night, and also found one from 2013, when he was still EiC of The Verge. Basically the entirety of the first is within the idealism I've risked most of myself for, in case you're curious. I've looked up to Topolsky in a huge way, this past year. He has done – and is doing – many things which I am intrinsically drawn to earn for my legacy, and the presence of his wife on his staff (their few podcasts together are adorable in a very particular way,) is idyllic in appearance, at least. I love the way they talk about each other. I suppose spousal editorial staff is probably the personal hell of a good many people. Perhaps, it's even my own. Listening to him talk on Digiday, though, reminded me – along with a few other works I've consumed lately – that technically, Extratone is a business. Or at least... That it must become one eventually or die forever. While trying to explain my future plans to a friend, I inadvertently layed out some 'steps for growth.'
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Form and activate the community.
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Build a beautiful, one-of-a-kind method of content delivery.
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Attain a fairly dependable content cadence.
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Sell the product in a way that immediately and – from then on – consistently ensures and/or furthers its quality.
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I guess we're somewhere between 2 and 3 right now. I'm still building a body of written work more or less on my own, which is okay, considering that nobody is paid. I suppose it'd be most desirable – before I move to the Northwest – to figure out how to make The Tone as much of a learning experience for my closest staff as possible. And regardless of all other external goals of the magazine, I think it is more than safe to say that I've learned more in the past 10 months from a fucking WordPress website than I would've if I'd spent that time at the Journalism school. The first annual renewal payment for extratone dot com just went through, actually. A year ago, I was much more entertaining, but virtually directionless. I honestly can't tell if I feel any better internally, day-to-day, but I know I am at least attaining the capability of real friendship for the first time in my life, and I suppose that's more than worth losing virtually all of my engagement on Twitter.
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Perhaps its even worth losing a portion of the freshness in my perspective – the stuff I thought made it worth it in the first place. Especially if my staff maintains it healthily within their own.
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I'll admit that – in retrospect, after spending a year reading, writing, and digitally fussing – a lot of my original content smells like edgy nonsense. Some of the work within our network does too, honestly, but it's usually much less so.
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Of course, that transition required an excruciating crucible, for me, but that's exactly why I'm incessantly compelled to make as much use of my trauma as possible: so that my friends and staff may be able make progress toward more fulfilling lives without such a massive up-front cost.
For most of my adult life, I've been trying to figure out why publications like PCMag feel it necessary to belittle their audience and their subjects to such a degree. Silicon Alley can't possibly be that vapid as to nix all soul in any story, ever.
I haven't been a reader since I used to loiter in Barnes & Noble with a pile of print editions in the oughts, but this sort of layout has got to be some kind of digital sin.
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I'm not going to bother digging through the publication to compare this work with others for the moment. Perhaps one day, I'll feel the need to polish this rant into an argument and make it more visible. Surely, though, the proximity of this abomination to the word Mag or even Magazine must keep somebody awake at night.
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That's not to say it doesn't take some sort of discipline. I doubt I could write in this way without hulking hyper-deliberately over wherever the fuck this dialect comes from. I think it's almost certainly more efficient as an informative device than my piece, or Sarah Jeong's, but the assumption that readers would be so disinterested as to hesitate to even commit to complete sentences regarding something actually newsworthy for a technology publication should be taken personally.
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(This is going to echo what Topolsky said in both of those podcasts in big ways, but I'll try to keep it relatively brief.)
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**I believe there is an audience that is craving attention to detail in their stories, a more intimate, longer-lasting, and more invested relationship with a much smaller number of publications. **
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Even a sense of involvement in the process. It's probably a direct result of my longtime consumption of car magazines – most of which still have sizable sections dedicated to direct, public correspondence with readers. It's also cross-platform to a surreal degree. Auto journalists of all tiers will straight up engage with you on Twitter. (MotorTrend literally prints YouTube comments.)
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Sure, the readership is old, and the topic is an outlier (it's fairly common knowledge that 'car people' are waaaay more vulnerable to obsession than other special interest communities,) but the species is more or less the same, and the results are plain as day, any time you care to look. In recently returning my attention to technology journalism, I've noticed an irritating affront to meta conversation with strangers. My theory is that they've been paid for their words so long that they develop a very particular greed towards them, which is why academic journalism institutes are immediately shunned by their alumni after graduation until they are definitely Too Tired to sling copy and begin to climb sortof diagonally through editorial titles until they are stashed away in some hole. Then, after ruminating until their first encounter with Actual Death – if they're still interested in the whole thing – they crawl out to be propped up in front of moderately sized bodies of petrified students to scream in 100% bitterness about The Ethics that plagued them spiritually and financially their entire career at the acolytes as their last joke on the world.
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But they won't engage with strangers on Twitter.
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As someone who – for better or worse – chose to sidestep the academic route, I will never advocate for any value in withholding information – especially funny stories – about Extratone's operation. If anything, rediscovering relevance is a wholly meta pillar of our editorial bent. (Hence, why Tim calls us The Nieman Lab of Community College.)
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I also believe the subscriber & advertising revenue models are directly - if not primarily - involved in the constriction of conversations regarding a publication's operation. It's my goal to cultivate a group of subscribers that are directly invested in the product (there's another new word on my part) financially, intellectually, and emotionally. It's not exactly unheard of, ya know.
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Anywho, I'm going to leave you in peace for now. I've really enjoyed this wanton spewing of conjecture, but then... who doesn't love to go on, unchecked?
If you don’t know the story, please Use Your Googler; I am the last source you should be receiving your first commentary from.
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That so disclaimed, let us reflect on the fascinating — if somewhat universally disturbing — position in which we find ourselves. (Or, should I say — …you find yourselves.)
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Two options: a ruthless, ridiculously-overqualified and progressively — appropriate flagship of a Democratic Party candidate, opposite an out-of-control, offensive joke of a destructive force that has been directed inward, toward his own Republican Party.
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The only plausible hesitation for the former’s candidacy being a fundamental misunderstanding of the office’s necessities, and of the dangers of the “honesty” popularly idealized in the latter.
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At least they are opposites, so I’m interested enough to write you.
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“The Great Debate” was an ultimate test — not of television — but of the American intellect, and it failed. From the outset of democracy’s greatest leap in perceptive democratization, superficiality claimed victory over policy.
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Today, we are to extrapolate in the journey we’ve taken in the 56 years hence, into — by any standard of measure — another world, entirely. Most importantly, into one with such gigantically-swelling intellectual disparity that it cannot possibly be monitored accurately, even moment-to-moment. The continued feasibility of Donald J. Trump’s candidacy is alarmingly conducive to the fact.
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Note: Donald Trump will not be President of the United States as it has been understood. If he is elected by process, he will be promptly impeached, or the function of the office itself will be reexamined.
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My bias is here: I genuinely believe sociopathic traits make for effective leaders, and am unable to respect anyone without control over their public persona. Trump’s defining acceptance of his undisciplined whirling relegates him — for POTUS, especially — to nothing more than an amusement. He is incapable of the duties that define the position as I know it. (e.g. a commemorative visit to Hiroshima, or participation in the G20 summit.)
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In such spirit, I — perhaps one of the least-qualified political commentators with any sort of voice — have a question to ask of you: are you ready for the first ironic President of the United States of America?
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Perhaps you’d counter, though, with something like: are *you* ready for the first *authentic* President of the United States of America?
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No, America, I am not. And — forgive my patronization — neither are you. I know you feel profoundly devoid of an expressive leader. You, the most hardworking pillars of this society — I know you’ve craved a voice in the game for a very long time, but Mr. Trump’s is no nearer to your own than Mrs. Clinton’s. In fact — in the inescapable game that is the Presidency — she is the better representative simply because she posses the ability to assume any sensical power whatsoever.
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The only insight I have to offer you is that honesty has not, does not, and will never have a place in the White House as long as it stands. This truth is neither good nor bad — it simply is.
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I would plead you to acknowledge the complexity of political maneuvers — regardless of your own moralism — and the truer nature of the role you will ask one of these individuals to fulfill.
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I would ask you to imagine which of the worst of the two you’d rather hold the nuclear briefcase — the tactful, or the primal?
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But — if nothing else — I would suggest you ask yourself if you’d really like the same mouth that formed these words about women to deliver your next State of the Union.
In the midst of arranging Feebles for print, I stumbled upon an author and “book designer” engaged in launching a community for self-published, independent writers. I'm not going to specify names because I have no interest in shitting on his company, nor “what it stands for.” I don't want to shit for you at all, actually, just note a few still-underrealized realities about the sheer ludicrousness of the word business as it stands. Let's say you've got some manuscripts you've been sitting on for a few years, and you're introduced to the concept of self-publishing by an evermore earnestly-curious man on the radio named Audie one day. He and his interviewee (the owner of a self-publishing service) seem to say, curiously, that because an author's profit-per-unit can potentially be “four to five times more” than if he/she is published traditionally, self-publishing has now shed completely its aura of desperate amateurism.
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But – whoa, Nelly – writing to sell books, and writing books have perhaps never been further apart. And gee – you certainly didn't write to sell; selling hadn't occurred to you at all for a very long time, but from just one search, you find Our Friend, back from his own experiences as an author and editor, qualified and insistent that you can make money selling creative works of fiction.
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And Jesus Christ… All that said, I must admit to you that I've just finished Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, and was unable to commence this “review” without wondering aloud for you how Kilgore Trout – perhaps Kurt's favorite creation – would feel about this Friend's business.
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It was actually my Aunt Ayn who taught me to write, so Vonegutt was a mediocre Ray William Johnson-associated YouTube band until after high school, when “lots of people” started telling me to “read Vonnegut, man,” even though I cannot recall any specific events or recommenders. For whatever reason, though, I'd bought a copy immediately after a friend mentioned it, recently, and found him (in this particular work, at least) to be awfully sane for my taste, yet particularly resonant. Though written to make me think it was all a big one-draft ramble, Kurt's a bit too curt for it to be believed, I think. Auntie Rand would've double-taken his beratement of “in nonsense is strength” if she'd made it that far. I hope she did, because I found the image of her taking in his occasional hand doodles to be very amusing.
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Dwayne Hoover is awfully absent – and therefore, a very versatile storytelling device, though not in a lazy sense. We're repeatedly notified about an imminent convergence. Eventually, it's explained that the endgame involves Dwayne exploding into a violent revengeful tantrum against all the lifelong enemies of his subconscious. Including “people with brown skin.” Can I just bring up Ayn Rand again? I hope it's okay.
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Kilgore Trout is the most dangerous villain I've ever experienced. He has little to lose, and – like Vonnegut, it would seem – finds his observatory position in the world to be immensely amusing. His last amusement, even. Remember Ellsworth M. Toohey, the corrupter? I think they would've gotten along, funny enough.
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Yes, and Hoover would be Peter Keating, the corrupted. I'm reaching, yeah, but when do I not? Their immediate difference is the lack of malicious intent in Trout, of course. He is an aimless science fiction writer, who gives Dwayne a volume simply to shut him up. Neither villain is believable, per se, but both were written to be personifications of ideals; vehicles of metaphor.
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I think Rand could've quite easily become Vonnegut, were she to stick around much longer, but perhaps I believe so only because I've experienced a quantifiable transition from her sort of thinking (vaguely) to his (perhaps less vaguely.) An incorruptible commitment to absolute was Ayn's most potent conviction. Growing up as a white cis male, I was aching for a method of simplifying the world which I knew more and more to be infinitely complex. Inevitably, with age, I think a limitless appetite for the complexity must form, lest one spend the rest of his/her life fighting the singular truth in a miserable fortress of seclusion and amphetamine abuse.
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The key to Breakfast of Champions' genius is its utter lack of angst. Aside from his brief definition of a being – “an unwavering band of light” – Kurt had little interest in writing a manifesto, yet his perspective in his curious commentary manifests a much more profound critique of American society than Rand ever could've from her hole.
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As such, I think it's wisest to leave a rudimentary whole measurement of a writer to Aunt Ayn, but perhaps a particularly relevant spectrum in this case is clarity of sight. Rigid idealism has its place in literature, no doubt, but it's an awfully boring one without a writer's feet on the ground.
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How does this all relate to self-publication? Well, Our Friend, it turns out, offers preset novel “templates” to members of his writing community, into which one can “plug in” characters, setting, and basic plot elements to a degree of his/her choosing. And his YouTube channel is stuffed with all sorts of tutorials on formatting and – more disturbingly – how to create sellable cover art with Photoshop. Naturally, it includes instruction on stock and rights-free images.
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Though I've yet to read one, it doesn't take much imagination to comprehend the inevitable product. From Our Friend's vlogs, I can suppose a heavy focus on the adolescent market. What makes the whole concept noteworthy in my mind is the why? I'd like to think that I have a fairly-realistic grasp on the potentialities of writing for profit, and am obligated to wonder why one would “compromise” his/her “creative integrity” by publishing literature to sell, of all things.
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As I understand it, the methodical approach to authorship being encouraged is applicable to literally any other field, creative or not. It's curious and impressive, frankly, as their sales potential seems to be vastly superior to anything I'll ever bother to publish, but I must weigh in because of one quantifiable detriment: saturation.
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Someone is spending their money on these works – probably for their kids. I'm not a parent, but I'd be tremendously ashamed to discover that a book I'd given as a gift to anyone had been manufactured in this manner. Not just in the sense that most light literature is manufactured – written in hearty observance of academic rules of storytelling – but literally mass-produced with a goddamned intellectual stencil.
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Without sounding like I'm complaining... My singular self-published poetry collection is probably of significantly less whole-value to the majority of readers, but I can't help but think the effort put into its hand-drawn cover art and meticulously-arranged typography would make it a more comfortable investment, if anything else.
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This brings us to a distinctly-academic mainstay which I have always taken issue with: “consider your audience.” I first encountered this proverb in the context of a composition studies course, mind you, where its consideration in the essay medium makes unequivocally good sense. If we agree that an essay is defined by an uncompromising commitment to its effectiveness in making an argument, audience awareness is essential. If you were asked to decide on one primary purpose of writing in general, though, would it not be identical?
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Why didn't Kurt Vonnegut or Ayn Rand simply write essays? Well, the latter wrote many, but their sales have always been all but invisible compared to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. (Both of which resemble essays more than fiction, at times, but I'll spare you that conversation.) Did they consider their audience? Certainly not in the way my first Google result articulates it:
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Ensure that your documents meet the needs and expectations of your readers.”
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Ooo boy. To me, that translates a little too easily into “write what your readers want to read.” And maaaan... If there's anything that experience and Donald Draper have taught me, it's that people have no idea what they want, especially from art. And that's a reasonable mentality, isn't it? Perhaps even an exhaltable one. I know that predictable stories are my number one turnoff, personally. If I expected to exist for an eternity, I'd absolutely indulge every single creative work I could find, but I do not, and that realization (as I stated in my last Freq Check,) has propelled an underlying preference in all of my consumption decisions: what I have not (before) seen.
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Obviously, then – if you take my word for it – Our Friend's endeavors are in direct ideological opposition to my own, which would make him my arch nemesis, if 21st-century industry were a bit more theatrical. But – like most heroic protagonists – I'd be much more interested in “turning” him than censoring him, were we ever to engage. In fact, I'd probably end up defending his and/or his constituents' right to sell their trash if CreateSpace or other self-publishing services called it into question.
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Overwhelming content volume can be entertaining; Drywall was my own foray into that uniquely contemporary experiment. It's the sheer ease of publication, though, that makes “good” literature more precious than ever. Admittedly, a glance at Amazon's current top ten bestsellers list indicates that I am undoubtedly out of touch as far as the market is concerned. I know that my mother and sisters have mysteriously reverted back to print from the Kindles which they used for a few years, and that audiobooks make me supremely uncomfortable. I also know that reading a book – whenever I bring myself to shut out everything else – is an unrivaled vehicle of cognitive serenity.
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A significant mission for Extratone lies in an upcoming reactionary movement to culture's “circus stage” (by way of the Internet.) We determined the event's inevitability on Drycast, a year ago, and have made occasional efforts to posit more thoroughly on The New. It must involve a reduction in content consumption, fundamentally, which will constrict because of an increasing demand for more explicit purpose in all media. We are not to be the alternative, necessarily, but the intermediary arbiter of the enabling discussion, hopefully with the outcome of increased awareness. What is and is not relevant? Why am I consuming this?
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As the end of Breakfast of Champions draws abruptly closer, Vonnegut mentions his schizophrenia, which is – as you probably know – fundamentally characterized by loss of the ability to determine what is and is not real, and primarily treated with antipsychotics. Interestingly enough, extremely high doses of amphetamines (which Ayn Rand did use heavily, by the way. I wasn't making that up) can actually induce psychosis, which could crudely be described as cognitive noise. I could've missed the intended function of their works, but for me, they illuminate a distinct relationship between the abstracts of truth and relevance which, for the moment, seems particularly necessary.
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Two opposing reflections of Americana; both helpful in preparation for its future.
Screens and software subjects big & small discussed within my most moderate 35,000 words ever.
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Believe it or not, the cyclical cold season has once again come to pass! Oh, the W̘͖̯E̟̹À̫T̯̫͓̪̮͓̼H̝E̪͇̰̘̖͍ͅŔ͍̖̱̟̪!! If the past two days on Twitter were any indication, it is indeed time for a year's-end retrospective on what has been published on this Web Site. Given the extent of the attention I've devoted to bilge.world this past year – both technically and editorially – I thought it would be nice to chuck in a bit more in the pursuit of whacking myself on the back. I understand that 2020 has been one helluva catastrophic marker of linear time for just about everyone on Earth – as I write this on its last day, the inexplicable news of MF Doom's death has just surfaced and has already hit my adjacent communities remarkably hard.
I had forgotten *a lot* more about CSS and HTML than I originally thought. glad I ended up comfortable enough to find myself with a completely original stylesheet before the end of the year, I suppose. pic.twitter.com/4QwlbEJECU
The earliest archive.org capture of this particular Writeas blog dates back only to May 1st of this year, but its stylistic contrast with the site's current version is immense. I believe I was using Max Henderson's Anxiety theme virtually stock, albeit with some color rearrangements. By the 29th, I had already arrived upon the colors you see today. “You Know I'm Blogging” was just a meta update to say howdy after such a long drought, but “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” actually proved popular (for me) among my newly-connected Fedi crowd, especially, thanks to an annotated share by Writeas on Twitter. Honestly, it was entirely worth it just for the accomplishment of exposing my platform peer Dino Bansigan to Alt+D. Writeas Community Manager CJ Eller and I began corresponding, which led to an interview regarding writing tools, managing fiddly compulsions, and the wonder of Markdown.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list.
I had wanted to write about The Langoliers – Stephen King's flop of a made-for-TV movie/extended Twilight Zone episode – for a long while. It was probably the first program I watched as a child that genuinely disturbed me and always returns to my thoughts by barren-ish experiences. I had planned to watch the whole three hours all the way through and write whatever came to mind, but I only made it halfway or so in “Craig Toomey's Coronavirus” before I ran completely out of steam. I dropped what I had without revision, to this day. Perhaps one day I shall return...
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In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn.
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These two sentences begin the sixth chapter of my indefinitely-postponed novel, Blimp's Burden, and are almost certainly my best writing, ever. My vanity simply wouldn't allow them to go forgotten, so I published the chapter as an excerpt on The Psalms. It may seem an intimidating wall of text, but give it your attention and you'll be amused, I think.
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Summer
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The general, distinctly 21st-century wisdom regarding one's content popularity seems to be something like you never know what's going to blow up. I experienced this phenomena quite severely for the first time in my writing life after posting “Google Is Not God of The Web” on HackerNews right before going out-of-touch for some 13 straight hours amidst a local BLM protest. I did not intend to write a baity title, nor did I expect anything to come of sharing it, there – I only did so simply because the thought crossed my mind. Honestly, it is probably the least-considered content I'd ever published on The Psalms – I only put it up when I did because I knew all of my energy was about to be absorbed for an entire weekend or more. I only started the thing because I felt it important to raise a small voice in reminder that tech media had started using language when discussing code/online development which had begun to assume the existence of a single, objective standard of measure for good web design. (Fuck your bootstrap baloney, The Drywall Website was a realparadigm shit.)
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And yet... That single goddamned post would end up accruing more pageviews than all of my writing on the web, combined (I suspect.) Tens of thousands of words were written in hundreds of comments, which I did my best to parse in a for the hell of it substack email:
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Out of everything I’ve shared on Bilge recently, it’s hilarious that this particular post – on which I spent a cumulative total of perhaps 25 minutes writing and made less effort than ever to edit – became probably my most widely-shared work of all time.
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Once again, I am thankful for the readership and correspondence, I just really fucking wish it had been on literally anything else I've written about technology.
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In retrospect, it really is bonkers that I was excited about yet another vague promise to re-imagine email in the days surrounding the launch of Basecamp's HEY, but I feel it's important to nurture what paltry genuine enthusiasm remains about technology and the future, so I decided to respond to the service's homepage prompt, asking interested visitors to write in with their own thoughts on email. I spent a morning clacking out “Email and I: An Abridged History,” which I hope will one day serve as a part-foundation for a thorough, composed extension to my Why I Write About Technology series. This would be The Psalms last relevant work for a few months, while I played around with an experimental WordPress website and dove into fuckin' school for the first time in seven years.
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Fall
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I returned in late September with a partial recount of what I'd discovered: “Indulging Once More in Digital Excess.” After exploring the concept of Digital Gardens, buying my first pro-ready desktop PC in 10 years, playing with Big Boy Adobe software for the first time, and reading a delightful book documenting the history of word processing, I arrived upon the term Software Historian with which to partially describe myself. It doesn't mean all that much at the moment, but will no doubt be explored imminently on this Web Site.
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Addressing “The Social Dilemma's Dilemma” and “Software Thanksgiving” in detail would be awfully redundant, but I would at least note how they represent diametrically opposed perspectives through which to discuss this stuff. Going forward into 2021, I think it's important that I hold short on the progress I've made in moderating my voice since 2018. Digestibility is not a virtue I am at all interested in, nor is it an appropriate one in which to invest any more effort. Any non-radical argument will inevitably prove enormously unoriginal, which makes for a huge waste of all our time. For the moment, that's all the editorializing I've done.
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Three Point Oh
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Somewhere along the research process for one of my school essays, I came across the concept of academic revision tracking and peer review via Git. Having dipped my toe back in academia, any such circumvention of its penchant for the most archaic practices possible was naturally intriguing. Just wait until I show these goons how to use hyperlinks. Perhaps inevitably, I was launched into the Git-Gone Bender I'm still riding simply because I finally had ample reason to actually understand it. In just two months, I've created and forked a total of nearly 80 repositories on my new GitHub account. Though I'd created one for each of my web properties ages ago, I had absolutely no idea how to actually make use of them, so they were all quickly abandoned. In the past two weeks or so, I think I've actually begun to get the hang of the system's core intricacies, best exemplified by The Psalms' Repository as it stands.
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The “automated” Project Board I set up has so far been a very impressive replacement for the simple todo list. It tracks and categorizes Post Ideas in their various stages in my process: Mulling, Documentation (research,) Drafting, and actual Publication. Technical “Issues” regarding the CMS and/or the Repository, itself, have also fit in these categories well, so far. Just today, I discovered that one can simply tag Issues by their number to describe Commits, which form an impressive revision-tracking changelog when aggregated together. I also figured out the general idea behind Milestones and set The Psalms' first one for my 27th birthday, next month. The goal is to have figured this all out well enough by then that I'm no longer randomly stumbling upon entire featuresets multiple times in a workday. Thinking in Public – as my friend Tom Critchlow and his crowd say – is what I'm trying to do here, I think. Obviously, this really means that you are more than welcome to hop the fuck in at any time, in any manner you'd prefer. If Git is still no more than a conundrum for you – as it was for me just weeks ago – I would suggest the directory for In-Progress Drafts as a starting point.
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requesting support on how to "leverage discussions" to talk about pee pee and poo poo. #GitHubUniverse
GitHub Actions are still more or less a mystery to me, but I am unbothered – The Psalms' seems to be producing green text instead of red, now, in the midst of whatever I set it up to do. I poked around the livestreams for “GitHub Universe” a few weeks ago, when dark mode and GitHub Discussions were opened up to more users. At the moment, I cannot imagine a single application for forums in the context of my blog's repository, but I turned them on, anyway. It's very possible that all of the documentation-generating functions of Git are entirely unnecessary in this case, but – as I entrust GitHub with the eternal task of archiving such work – it is my hope that it will help me add further structure to my process.
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If you've found yourself in possession of a .edu email address and are interested in GitHub related experimentation, see this list of discounted/free dev programs/services for students, which includes a free subscription to “GitHub Pro.” (Apparently, equivalent to a $4/month service.) Adobe has similar discounts, as you’re probably already aware, which have allowed me to pursue my goal of learning InDesign. So far, I’ve created a sort of commemorative 404 page for The Drynet and a font showcase of Georgia for my mother. As much as I’d love to continue discussing the current state of Adobe apps, I’ve realized 1) I am quite distinct from a professional user, which is why I genuinely find GIMP more useful than Photoshop, for instance, and 2) given the length of my to-write list considering my current pace, I don’t know if I’d manage to get around to it in this lifetime.
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Between now and the 11th of this month, I will be migrating worthwhile posts from the experimental WordPress site (WTF) here and closing its hosting account. I haven’t been compelled to actually do anything with it in months, and the handy redirects, alone, are not worth the upcosts, however fair. Some content – including the corresponding posts for my Adobe experiments will not be imported from WTF here. I’m also going to rely on the Web Archive for publishing the rest. Notable discoveries so far include “Through an iPhone 4’s Lens,” which is a reminder of how revolutionary that particular handset was, and a few extra-Psalms pieces of content I’d like you to experience, like this Notion gallery of my single jaunt into drawing, # DavidBlueDraws. Best of all is my friend Tevin’s episode of Extratone’s defunct flagship podcast. In the years since, he’s become quite the prolific Twitch streamer. (I’ve watched enough and know Tevin well enough to say that he’s particularly entertaining in this medium.)
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Coming Soon
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For better or worse, all of these new exploratory avenues have so far led directly away from the business of actually writing, but – in my best self-estimation – I suspect I’m mostly done with fiddling, now, and ready to start thinking on the page, again. Predictably, I’ve let my upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max Review turn into quite a monstrosity over the past two months. It turns out, years of lapsed attention toward iOS development resulted in my feeling more out-of-the-loop than I expected, which I was compelled to remedy, naturally. If you’re so inclined, you can follow the minutia attached to my review process via this dedicated Snapas gallery, this shared iCloud album, my personal YouTube channel , and this Twitter collection.
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SO... I’m really starting to see the magic now. I just took this and it’s 2AM... utterly dark outside. I managed to force my car mount to couple with a tripod and set the exposure to 30 seconds. pic.twitter.com/FMLGrFzgy2
As per my newfound use of GitHub, I’ve played around with various ways of documenting this journey, specifically. First is this Wiki page (which I shall do my best to remember to keep updated) listing the entirety of my writing history on iPhone and iOS. (It’s uh... A bit underwhelming, if I’m honest.) I’ve also just begun a dedicated repository for iOS-related documentation and resources, which will soon include a full, sensically-indexed list of iCloud share links to my entire Siri Shortcuts collection (I hope.) Immediately following the review, I intend to publish here a post dedicated to functions Apple has failed to properly document, which I expect to be the most widely-useful content on this domain. To see some of the suggestions I’ve received so far and/or to add your own, see this mildly-successful thread I posted in r/iOS.
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When I have finally tired of talking about handsets once more, I hope to return my attention toward some other overwhelmingly-ambitious monstrosities like my academic paper proposing federated, open-source social networks in favor of the Big Boys, my report on the experience of returning to academia for a semester in 2020, and my evaluation of Notion as perhaps the next Big Step in the evolution of notetaking software. Perhaps before tackling projects the size of these, I intend to compile another listicle of handy tips for newcomers to Writeas. As I linked before, you can now view the entirety of The Psalms’ status in as much detail as you’d like via its Project Board on GitHub. As always, you can delight me by directly engaging on Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and/or via email. Let’s hope 2021’s equivalent of this review doesn’t take me until February to publish!
An update on all I’ve been doing instead of what I actually intended to do.
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There will always be plenth of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. – Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think“
You have a desire for indulgence in your home and family, Co-Star has just told me in my weekly, email newsletter-delivered horoscope. “Venus conjunct to natal Moon” indicates this part of yourself will transform into something else, and goes on to say something truly stirring: *the way you relate to your past is changing*. I continue to be amazed by how influential the potential of the computing hardware present in my life at any given time can be on my habits. In the two weeks I’ve had my first moderately powerful desktop computer in over ten years, I have found myself using new image & video editing software, installing local WordPress stacks, finally experimenting with Git, somehow generating 20 draft posts on a fresh experimental WordPress site, and putting my whole back into my new Notion account, including – among others – projects like my “Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.” All the while, there has been a pull toward a more deliberate, focused sort of digital existence: reflection on Kevin McGillivray’s Word of The Year concept, digital gardening, and a few other like discoveries have culminated in a newfound, unironic use of the term “Creative Wellness” to describe a set of ideologies which I believe I should strive for in order to improve my intellectual wellbeing.
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In tandem with the fact that I have gone back to school, this has all crucially resulted in very little actual writing, which may or may not be conclusive evidence toward the classical minimalist technology argument that less capability results in more focus. On that note, remember when the Game of Thrones author appeared on Conan’s show and mentioned that he still writes exclusively using WordStar 4.0? This happening has been vaguely in the back of my mind since I encountered it during the relatively brief, basement apartment-dwelling era in Oregon when I first discovered WinWorldPC and got into running a bunch of DOS VMs, trying out every download from that blessed site which sounded even remotely interesting. Before I go on, let me just include a transcript of the entire anecdote I’m referring to here, because it’s actually much shorter than one is led to believe:
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Conan: These novels that that you write are can be over a thousand pages long. They're massive tomes and apparently you write them all on a computer, but unlike most authors, you're not worried about a computer virus. I mean an author who writes a thousand-page book their greatest fear is a virus invades and destroys a chunk of their book you don't worry about that. Why?
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Martin: No I have a secret weapon – I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the internet with and that I get my email on and I do my taxes on and that computer and then I have my writing computer which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.
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Conan: A DOS machine. How old is this program?
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Martin: A DOS machine. You remember DOS? I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system.
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Conan: Did you make this computer out of wood? Did you carve it? I'm curious why you decided to stick with this old program.
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Martin: I actually like it. I mean, it does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital – if I wanted a capital, I would've typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key. Stop fixing it!
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Conan: You yell at computers a lot. What about spellcheck?
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Martin: Oh, I hate spellcheck. Especially when you have the realm of [???], it's [???].
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That’s it! A less than sixty second exchange. I did not remember just how much coverage it received on digital news sites. Embark on a Google search for “george rr martin wordstar,” and you’ll discover a ridiculously long list of brief stories including the YouTube embed. A book I’ve just recently discovered and begun – which I am extremely excited about – is Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and its introduction begins by mentioning The George Thing, which surely indicates that it is the most significant mention of word processing software in popular culture for at least a decade:
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The clip was posted to YouTube and from there embedded in innumerable tweets, Facebook feeds, and blogs. Some commenters immediately, if indulgently, branded Martin a Luddite, while others opined it was no wonder it was taking him so long to finish the whole story (or less charitably, no wonder that it all seemed so interminable). But what was it about these seemingly obscure details that people found so compelling? Part of it was no doubt the unexpected blend of novelty and nostalgia: Many fans would be old enough to remember WordStar for themselves, and the intricacy of its interface seems somehow in keeping with Martin’s quirky persona, part paternalistic grandfather and part Doctor Who character. WordStar thus becomes an accessory to his public image, like the black fisherman’s cap he is frequently photographed wearing. But it is also clearly much more than that. Martin’s passion for the program is unmistakable...
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The book, itself, was also more widely reviewed than one would expect, where it was deemed genuinely unique. I related quite hard to the preface’s first few sentences:
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Track Changes began, as many books do, with a question: What was the first novel written with a word processor? Being an English professor interested in the history of writing as well as computers, I thought it was the sort of thing I should know, but I didn’t.
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Discovering the volume was a result of a personal determination in the last week to give in to my latent obsession with word processing/text editing software, which also led to my creating a Notion table of every word processor I’ve ever heard of. Thanks to my desktop PC acquisition, found myself virtual machining a bit again, though some of the programs I’m particularly interested in trying have inexplicitly disappeared from my personal library and been removed from WinWorldPC, probably due to (mostly absurd) copyright claims. Most versions of WordStar are still available, though, and I’ll confess I still have a desire to learn how to use its cult keyboard shortcuts, as evangelized by Robert J. Sawyer in an essayalso discussed in Track Changes, which specifically shits on WordPerfect more explicitly than I remembered. I keep returning to the idea that I should try writing the stuff I normally work on – like this post, for instance – in these software, but file transfer is a bigger and bigger obstacle the older the OS you’re running: VirutalBox’s “Guest Additions” – which allow clipboard sharing/shared folders/other interoperative network functions – are not compatible with DOS or any Windows editions before 4.0. There are workarounds, but I haven’t found any reasonably within my current abilities.
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Truthfully, though, emulating twenty-year-old software seems a bit unnecessary when contrasted with the fact that Markdown, Typora, and Writeas were supposed to be my saviors from distracted writing. A compulsion to comment on a recent note-taking app comparison published in The Information reminded me that I still haven’t written an in-depth review of Typora, which I plan to prioritize in the near future, especially since it may finally be officially releasing, according to recent activity on Twitter.
Another result of my reintroduction to academia is that I can now afford a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to student discounts. This has been life-changing in a manner which I should probably be a bit ashamed of, but once the desire to make full use of my subscription (by trying every single program it licenses) subsides, I really do intend to become proficient with InDesign – a learning experience which I will surely at least attempt to thoroughly document, here.
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Digital Gardening
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I think it was Tom Critchlow’s Digital Gardening blogchain that first exposed me to the term and his static site-generated wiki project that introduced me to the concept of personal wikis, not so long ago, though the desire to organize and/or archive personally-relevant information through the format has actually been rattling around my head for the better part of a decade. When I discovered that one could install MediaWiki – the platform Wikipedia, itself is built on – I created the shortlived Drywall Wiki, once upon a time. Since I last wrote you, I also purchased the extratone.wiki domain and played around once again with the platform. Typora even offers exports in MediaWiki’s bizarre proprietary text format! For better or worse, though, I don’t see anything becoming of the project for the moment I suppose it feels like somewhat of a risk, investing a lot of time I probably shouldn’t have into documenting all of my Twitter jokes. For the moment, I think my Notion account will have to serve as my personal wiki.
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The most inciteful argument I’ve read among the Digital Gardens discourse revolves around value as it is created within our personal online writing spaces. Two of the many infinitely-quotable essays within this space: Mike Caulfield’s “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral” and “Stock and flow” from Snarkmarket. The former references Vannevar Bush’s infamous “As We May Think” essay (which I’ve finally gotten around to finishing and its description of a “memex,” which many cite as a disturbingly-apt prediction of the World Wide Web. Caulfield, however, disagrees:
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So most people say this is the original vision of the web. And certainly it was the inspiration of those pioneers of hypertext. But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all . Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.
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Reading back from a lens including this commentary, I immediately understood. The memex concept is far more intimate than the web has become (or perhaps ever was – I wouldn’t know.) “Stock and flow” defines creative value in two disparate types of media:
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Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
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Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
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To be honest, I personally cannot imagine undertaking the task of explaining this differentiation to anyone in my own life, but if the reactionary movement within The Web back to a focus on valuable content is, indeed, underway, perhaps such conversations are bound to shortly become more and more natural. For my part, I have attempted setting up an experimental site on Github Pages using Jekyll in the past few days with partial success: as soon as I tried to specify a custom theme, I apparently broke it, at which point I realized that I had homework to do. As much as I hate to admit it, Kev Quirk’s posts regarding WordPress’ practical simplicity over SSGs earlier this monthrings somewhat true. As things currently stand, WordPress’ permeability throughout The Web is an advantage for those who just want to publish something as simply as possible. My counterargument to both Kev and myself: Writeas is a wonderful compromise in terms of substance and image among one’s super e-enabled, Mullenweg-disgusted peers. It’s very much pure Markdown, but it’s far more accessible, cross-platform, than SSGs due to its shear simplicity.
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One component which Digital Gardening would seem to offer others that I have never particularly struggled with is the freedom to write whatever I feel like writing. If anything, I have struggled in the opposite sense, existing in a state completely unhindered by consideration of the value my work may or may not offer anyone else. Perhaps the most substantial addition I’m capable of making to the Digital Gardens conversation, then, is best quoted from the first chapter of the advice book I have finally begun writing for young men, For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss:
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If there is one idea of mine you ever engage with – in this book or otherwise – it is best distilled in this single sentence: you do not *actually* want to attain a state of true apathy, trust me. It is extremely unhealthy, miserable, and alienating. I have existed for an excruciatingly long time trapped in a state of being truly unable to care about anything in the face of a great, varying effort to do so. It is very far from the immunity imbued in terms like carefree – in reality, it is manifested in extreme depression. It is less immunity than it is distance from an essential part of life.
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In terms of one’s blogging, I am glad for those who will/have/are finding a new freedom of expression, but hold this as a serious caution regarding the other extreme. Should you ever approach it, remember that considering one’s audience – as academics love to prioritize – really is important, eventually.
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Curation
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At this point, I’ve used a channel in Extratone’s Discord as my ongoing reading list for several years essentially without change. Earlier this month, though, I discovered Raindrop – a bookmarking service with public collections that (so fars) feels much more aligned with my own needs than Pocket – and pretty much immediately signed up to begin paying for it and set up a bot to crosspost from my new Reading List collection, there to the same Discord channel via the collection’s RSS feed. Raindrop’s browser extension – along with Notion’s, come to mention it – is actually usable in day-to-day browsing. As much as I love Reading.am, the prospect of its longevity worries me considering the most recent post in its development blog dates to 2016. Writing a dedicated “Little Review” of Raindrop is on my (ever-lengthening) todo list, but at the moment, I would especially emphasize my Digital Magazine Collection, which is the result of thousands of hours of web exploration and genuinely worth significant value for most anyone, I think.
With the combination of my public Notion workspaces and public Raindrop collections, I hope to make my curatorial endeavors both more accessibly beautiful and more intimately available. In terms of a dedicated discussion of Notion’s interworkings and culture, I think I have quite a bit more exploring to experience before I’m sufficiently qualified, though my notes are already quite extensive (and publicly accessible, thanks to… Notion!) In general, I continue to be astounded by the amount of tools/services/applications I have not yet heard of, despite how long I have labored to become an authority on Writing Tools.
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Workflow
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In my endeavor to more intentionally design my workspace – to actually dedicate a space for working, originally – I originally very much intended to set up dual displays for my desktop, but the desk I settled for (an old family piece from the early 1900s?) does not have enough surface area to position two displays, regardless of how thin they’ve become since I last had one. Combined with a limited budget and a concern that two displays might actually result in further distraction instead of less, I instead went for a single, 27” LED affair. I’ve also been making full use of Windows 10’s desktop switching feature and have found it surprisingly easy to make a habit, especially thanks to the Ctrl+Win+Lateral Arrow Keys keyboard shortcuts.
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On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I’ve by now worked out a personally-optimized remap (thanks to the keyboard manager tool included with PowerToys, about which I have far too much to say in some future post.) I had a conversation with a few Mastodon friends two weeks ago convincing me that my methodology of forcing myself to learn shortcuts by integrating a cheat sheet into my desktop backgrounds may actually be an original idea and useful to other users.
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In terms of writing spaces, I have actually been composing the less serious stuff I’ve been writing within WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, which is not an admission I would’ve expected to be making, just a year ago. A dedicated post about this, too, is fucking coming, but suffice it to say that with a fairly-substantial PC and a better hosting provider (DreamHost over GoDaddy, in this case,) composition has become far far smoother – improving enough to make it a viable space within which to pound away original stuff for the first time. Writing essays for academia has encouraged my return to Microsoft Word, once again, on which I’ll blame the fact that I am currently composing this very bit in The Old Bitch. A desire to once again hack together a set of personalized Word templates has led to the birth of two such files which I am proud enough to share on my Notion drive. Eventually, I would also like to take the time to completely redesign the “Ribbon” in Word – something which I’ve literally never seen anyone else do. (I spent a substantial amount of time trying to find a library for MS Office customization files, to no avail, though you can find my own customization file as it stands on the same Notion page linked just now. Let me know if you’re able to successfully import it.)
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A confession of vanity: I suspect the only reason I haven’t yet stopped composing within WordPress is that I figured out how to change the typeface to Adobe Caslon (across both the editor and the front-facing site, naturally,) thanks to my newfound access to Adobe Typekit. Yes, apparently I really am that shallow. For those Office 365 users among you, I highly suggest you look up how to enable the Classic Office sound theme. Unlike Make Use Of, I find them both adorable and genuinely useful as auditory feedback. You may also be interested in my discovery of some fairly-Woke additions to Word’s autocorrect options and the subsequent bitchy controversy their introduction spawned.
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The Read-It Website
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If you know me at all, the following admission probably seems unbelievable: I have been using Reddit. I created a new subreddit for Extratone – which I do not necessarily expect to be populated any time soon – and r/SoftwareHistory after discovering that it didn’t yet exist, which I definitely do not expect you to populate, but would be delighted if you did. As with seemingly everything else I’ve covered, I also intend to write about how Reddit’s recent feature additions and redesign may actually make it a redeemable space on The Web, which should prove interesting. Clearly, I have become more than willing to accept the moniker of Software Historian whenever/if ever my authority achieves the appropriate volume to deserve to be christened so.
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Obviously, none of the developments I’ve shared in this post indicate any improvement in my productive output, but I hope to learn soon how to settle into a fairly-consistent (and hopefully much more original) writing process.
I bought a desktop tower for the first time since 2010 and spent an embarrassingly long time struggling with Bluetooth shit.
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As with my entire history of computer purchases, my acquisition of an HP ENVY Desktop tower, today, was last-minute, ill-informed, and certainly irrational. You “PC master race” folk: please spare me the dude, you could've just built your own pc so much cheaper shit.[efn_note]Or don't. Whatever.[/efn_note] Yes, I realize the sensible course of action would've begun with a two hour trip West to the closest Microcenter, where I'm sure the staff would've made PC shopping an absolute blast and I would've come away with a more powerful, much cheaper machine. However, after I managed to break Windows on my only machine this weekend (and subsequently failed to reset it,) I was getting especially behind on schoolwork and had absolutely no desire to complete any of it on my iPhone.
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And so... I've just returned from picking up said HP Tower along with a 27” HP LED display, and am writing you after having set up the machine physically and installed most of my “essential software” list (at least all that I could remember.) As per my favorite tradition of new computer acquisition, I have named the machine after Hildur Odegard from Fortitude:
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“First Impressions”
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It's been exactly 10 years since I last bought a desktop tower – since I first set hands on the Dell XPS Studio desktop with which I would create the majority of my intellectual property – and I was immediately surprised by how much smaller[efn_note]6.12 x 11.93 x 13.28 inches.[/efn_note] and lighter[efn_note]13.12 lbs.[/efn_note] this tower was than my expectations. The display, too, is remarkably light and thin. Rationally, I should not have been surprised by this, but I'm not going to punish myself for continuing to find any sort of magic in technology.
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In the box were a Bluetooth keyboard[efn_note]Specifically, an HP model 4251a-khsap003k.[/efn_note] and mouse set – the latter of which I will hopefully never have to use, thanks to my Logitech G203 – and was perplexed by the process of how to pair the former with the tower while it was in setup mode for far too long. I was just about to give up entirely when I revisited the packaging and noticed what I'd previously assumed was an anti-theft device, but was actually the fucking dongle for the pair. I continue to despise Bluetooth peripherals, obviously, but the multimedia function keys of the product led to some important realizations: I now had reason to use Windows Desktop Switching and have a calculator application again! However, I have yet to figure out how to alter the Function key's behavior (I'm not even sure it's possible:) in order to input Alt+F4, I have to input Fn+Alt+F4, which is far too clunky to depend on. The issue did lead to a revelation which I may or may not integrate permanently: I mapped Alt+F4 to the previously-unused button on the very top of the G203. So far, it's been pretty nifty.
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The HP 4251a-khsap003k included in the box with my new HP desktop.
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That said, a component of myintention to create an intentional, static, upright-sitting desktop workspace included an allotment for a quality mechanical keyboard – my justification was that any professional in a particular craft makes a point to have the best possible tools for the job, so a high-quality keyboard has actually been very long overdue, in my case. So, I sought out a single Wirecutter recommendations list and even attempted to disseminate r/MechanicalKeyboards.[efn_note]I haven't even started self-harming yet, so my stomach is definitely strengthening![/efn_note] After a brief jaunt, I concluded that no reasonable person would be able to make heads or tails of the forum or its seemingly endless wikis without considerable indoctrination so I more or less threw a dart and landed on the Varmilo VA108M, which I ordered. All I know is that it's fairly highly-reviewed on the marketplaces I checked (though hardly mentioned on the subreddit, actually,) and that it has the Cherry Switches, which are... The good ones.
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A concern I originally had with taking over the tertiary guest room – by far the smallest allotted living space in the house – as my office was its distance from our wireless router, two floors down. The last time I used the room as a workspace (five years ago,) my old tower's integrated WiFi card often struggled to maintain a reliable connection. The adapter included in this desktop, though, actually managed to clock the fastest download speed on my SpeedTest.net records just now.
It's almost painful even to write this but... As beautiful as this $250 display is to behold, I've grown accustomed to my Surface Laptop 2's 2256 x 1504 13” display after years of hard, daily use. Apparently, those dimensions mean the little machine's display has a pixel density of 201 Pixels-Per-Inch. Filling a 27” display with just 1920 x 1080 means a pixel density of just 81.6 Pixels-Per-Inch,[efn_note]I suppose I should not have been surprised to immediately discover a dedicated online tool for calculating pixel density.[/efn_note] and the disparity was glaring to my eyes, even from the setup screen. After a few hours of regular use, I'm not sure I notice it anymore, but I suspect I will again when I've got the laptop running again. Please do indicate whether or not you think such a complaint makes me awful in the Crowdsignal poll below.
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have I become truly spoiled or is 1080p just... not high enough resolution for a 27" display.
I've also already had trouble connecting my Bose SoundLink headphones correctly via Bluetooth. On my Surface Laptop, it registered as two separate devices – “Stereo Headphones” and “Headset” – which allowed me to use them as both the primary audio output and the primary audio input. For whatever reason, I have been unable to accomplish such a simultaneous connection on this machine: I can either connect them as headphones or as a headset, but not both. This video provided some help – I know now that I have to open Sound Settings and manually connect the headphones every time I re-connect them. Hopefully, I'll figure out another solution soon.
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Returning to the webcam issue: I discovered that absolutely zero local stores keep add-on webcams in stock anymore, which makes sense. I resorted to searching Amazon for webcams and found a gargantuan list of brands I had never heard of. When I filtered by the one I did recognize – Logitech – I saw barely-facelifted versions of the camera my stepdad bought in 2008 and none were in stock. Unwilling to further investigate or research more, I set the price filter for under $40, sorted by customer ratings, and bought the first product which had even remotely legitimate-looking reviews: this 1080p thing branded with “Mersuii.”
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After returning to the order invoice hours later for this post, I got curious enough to Google search the company name and discovered a dead-end url, zero Wikipedia page, and this Trademark registration, on which I spotted some very interesting information. Entered in the second “Goods & Services” row is the following text:
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Adult sexual stimulation aids, namely, devices for massaging or vibrating external and internal portions of the body, vibrating and non-vibrating reproductions of parts of the male and female anatomies, male sex toys, masturbators, penis pumps, electrical penis cyclone pumps, rings, clamps, stimulators, vibrators, dildos, dongs, butt plugs, anal beads, rings to be worn about the penis; Adult sexual stimulation kit comprised primarily of adult sexual stimulation aids and a workbook
I've been devoting significant attention to this blog recently, and I hope it shows. Reading now contains a list of recommended email newsletters as well as an ongoing list of my all-time favorite reads on The Web. I also added Podcast for End User and a dedicated Subscribe page. I've added Open – a list of some of my favorite Open Web projects and Social – a list of my social links. About has also been updated with new branding and more current hyperlinks. Typography and colors have been unified and updated to Version 2.3, and my theme has been officially listed for those of you willing to engage in the sincerest form of flattery. Also, look at that favicon! Thank you, CJ!
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Furthermore, I took the time to import some old work:
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“Bandcamp: Streaming's Secret Savior“
-A magnum opus of a 13,000+ word essay on why Bandcamp should be the future of music streaming services.
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“Mark Fuck and the Goofy Godheads“
-An old, hilarious rant about Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk that – if I may say so – still rings awfully true today.
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“The Matchsellers' Inheritance“
-A local bluegrass band releases an album that proves they are not just what they appear to be.
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“The Case for Chuck Klosterman“
-A deep dive into whether or not the voice of one old White Portland Dad should be culturally considered.
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“Kilgore Trout on CreateSpace“
-A critique of self-publishing culture (immediately after self-publishing myself) disguised as a review of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
“Illiteracy in American Media“
-A short academic essay about how little the illiteracy issue is covered in American media.
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This blog has now surpassed Extratone in number of email subscribers, which I deeply appreciate. Though you're not paying – yet (hehe) – let me once again encourage any/all feedback you may have. Send me an email!
I was interviewed by Write.as Community Manager CJ Eller about writing software, Extratone, blogging, and self-curation.
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So I am super curious that you mentioned Markdown as something that saved you from fiddling your life away. Can you go more into that?
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I started an online magazine four years ago originally on WordPress. I thought I knew something about web development, but honestly I did not. It ended up becoming a fixation on trying to make something technically different from what I'd seen done with WordPress, which detracted heavily from my Editorial duties over the years. I'm on the OCD spectrum so I just couldn't let it go. I spent thousands of hours fiddling with different themes and formatting within those themes, and what I ended up with was a mess. I would make changes that would break old posts, so I'd go back and fix those, only to make more changes days/weeks/months later and have to go back again. I'd known vaguely about Markdown, but it wasn't until it was mentioned in the WordPress dev Slack that I really considered it seriously as a way out of what I'd been doing. I realized that its inherit limitations were actually very good for me – that I needed a limited system to constrain my workflow to keep myself on task. Finally, in late-2018, I started to convert our old content to Markdown and essentially haven't looked back since.
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Did it take a while for you to accept Markdown's limitations? Was there a turning point for you? Did you look for a Markdown plugin on WordPress to help after making the change? I imagine there's something like that out there.
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There are third-party plugins, yes, but I believe the new WordPress editor now supports “markdown blocks,” which is sortof handy for those who want to continue in that direction. The turning point was probably when we ran out of money and lost our account with our hosting provider. I was left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. I'd already started moving that direction within WordPress (largely because of the Gutenberg editor project,) but losing the site in its entirety was what I really needed to push us into a more modern, progressive CMS. Honestly, Markdown is capable of everything we actually need and nothing more. I'd like to think I was able to realize this from the beginning.
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So you're left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. Talk to me about the process then of finding that modern, progressive CMS. Did you have a vague idea of what you were looking for? I imagine getting those backups ready for whatever you were going to choose as another process entirely.
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I actually decided to ditch the backups and just move forward with a different Editorial direction (the project has since been more or less put on hiatus.) I knew Markdown had to be involved and that I never wanted to look at anything like WordPress' dashboard ever again. I played around with a local Ghost instance but just didn't feel anything for it, if that makes sense. I'd already moved my personal blog to Write.As months before and eventually realized that it was just what Extratone needed – so far, I've only imported my own contributions and the most recent work from others.
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Could you explain what you mean by feeling something for a piece of software? I noticed this in your recent post on your personal blog and what I enjoyed about it so much. There's an enthusiasm about the software you do recommend that jumps through the screen. I want to use Bear after reading your post.
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I'm glad to hear that! I suppose it dates back to my upbringing on a farm in rural Missouri, where I felt a real affection for – and attachment to – our tractors, combine, and such. When one cares about their work, I think it's inevitable for them to be emotionally invested in the tools they use to accomplish it every day. During my brief stint in IT in the beginning of 2019, I saw a lot of users struggling with outdated and ridiculously unintuitive software throughout their entire workday and it made me really appreciate the idea of “good workflow.” I'm not really a developer, but I believe software can always be better because I've seen it. As an End User of sorts with not much cash, I feel like my main contribution back to developers should be celebrating their good work. This is an idea I feel I do not encounter enough in day-to-day life.
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As someone who also had a brief stint in IT, I totally agree with the struggles people go through because of outdated & unintuitive software. But IT also made me realize how much of software is personal — someone will want a solution that's unintuitive to you but is intuitive to them. You learn a lot of empathy from that.
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I am intrigued by your last point there — why don't you think you encounter the idea of celebrating software developers enough in day-to-day life?
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I suppose specifically I mean I don't see enough celebration of good development. It's hard to challenge the personal workflow of anyone, yes, but I hope folks will continue to want to better their lives with new solutions. As I mentioned in my Tips post, Microsoft Word is a great specific example of software that simply should not be used anymore – especially in composition for The Web. Not that Word is celebrated, necessarily, but its alternatives are not. It should be noted that I have no specific authority in this matter other than years of experience with – and enjoyment of – playing around with software. I just think that End Users deserve better than they get, and awareness of new/different software is a huge part of the problem. Making average people aware of better solutions should be the primary function of special interest tech journalism, IMO.
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Great point about Microsoft Word. I don't even remember the last time I seriously used it — high school maybe? And like you said, discovery can be an issue to the adoption of these alternative tools. So are there any common patterns you've noticed as to how you've come about these software alternatives that you now use? Patterns that someone could adopt?
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It's not that I slave away, but it does take a lot of time to discover them. The simple answer is: I drink a lot of caffeine and hyperfixate on the internet. I'm not sure it's something the average user should want to adopt, but if they do, they should be on Mastodon. They should be googling “alternatives to...” regularly, and they should worship Free and Open Source Software. Accepting that you never have to settle for one piece of software is probably the beginning. For lack of a better term, I just love playing around with software. That's not something I would advocate for my old clients or other End Users – I would rather find out myself and then present a list of alternatives in an entertaining way. I hope that's an appropriate and sufficient answer hehe.
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No that's great! The acceptance of never having to settle for one piece of software is at once valuable and challenging to adopt. If you keep switching you could be a sort of software vagabond who throws their data into a rucksack to head to the next viable platform. I've always had trouble trying to find the proper balance between playing around with software & learning a tool well enough that it can be useful. How have you personally navigated that? I could imagine your foray into & out of Wordpress as an example.
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It's always a challenge when trying new things. I obsess over different ways to accomplish tasks. I've probably signed Extratone for 15 different newsletter services (including Buttondown today) though I haven't actually written a single edition of our newsletter in nearly two years. I think it's only recently that I've been able to look at these habits from a reasonable perspective. As in, I am now able to finally differentiate between playing and being productive, but it took some 15 years. Self-awareness of one's actual progress is key. Asking questions like why am I actually doing this – for profit or for play? Differentiating between these two is something someone like me will always struggle with, I think.
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The distinction between playing and being productive can be quite blurry. I sometimes find that playing around with a piece of software can lead to a productive use of it. How about you? Did you start with the idea of creating Extratone first and then tried to find the right software to fit the job? Or did you start playing around with Wordpress and then the idea of the digital publication took form soon after?
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That's an insightful supposition. I actually tried to launch an online magazine before Extratone with virtually zero editorial focus along with a standalone podcast that I'd been hosting on WordPress for years. I originally began playing around with WordPress sites in my early adolescence, so you could say it all culminated in the idea. It took maturity to realize that I actually wanted to build a platform for other voices rather than continue to invest in my own. I'd like to believe that was all enabled by the playing hehe.
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So what lead you to the conclusion of building a platform for other voices? Especially curious from the maturity angle. Because you still have a personal blog, so it doesn't feel like you've completely neglected your personal voice. But would you consider that as not the same investment of time & effort that you'd put into something like Extratone?
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I should be clear that I have not accomplished what I set out to do with Extratone. After a fairly big personal trauma in 2015, I had a bit of an existential crisis and realized that I had surrounded myself with so many talented (in a particularly relevant way) online friends who were producing all sorts of incredible content – music and videos, mostly. I realized that I was better at editing and other platform duties than I was at writing, and that perhaps the online communities I was astride could be provided a single banner to give themselves. In that sense, I haven't figured out how to do what I set out to yet. Ideally, my byline would be completely gone from Extratone, so I've more or less put it on hold until I figure out how to accomplish that. Turning it into a somewhat profitable media company is still my biggest long-term life goal.
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The curatorial characteristic you describe is underrated, even though the “everyone is a curator” idea is jammed down our throats all the time. There's something about this curation on a person-to-person level that still has lots of room for experimentation. On that subject, do you have any examples of communities, sites, or models that guide where you'd want Extratone to go?
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My citable aspirations in that regard have been somewhat superficial, I'm afraid. From a technical perspective, I really admired what Joshua Topolsky was trying to do with The Outline – which just closed this month, actually. They built their own CMS including a bespoke advertising delivery platform which really looked great but they just couldn't figure out a sustainable editorial focus. In my fantasy world, I have the connections and digital media insight of Topolsky and know how to apply them in a way that supports our community because I don't see any one brand popping up any substantial umbrellas over the electronic musicians I know. (It wasn't until “too late” that I realized Extratone's sole editorial focus should have been electronic music all along.) I read a lot about media but I'm pretty picky as far as hero worship goes when it comes to my own professional goals. I once promised that Extratone would never run ads, so I could see some sort of non-profit classification working out in our future. I believe I could be an excellent curator – I'm just not quite sure how to get there yet.
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I think you're a great curator — had to ask that question of influence because I think you have a unique curatorial presence on the web. Just saw you tweet about tractordata.com. Who else would recommend that? Love it. That's why I thought Are.na would be right up your alley.
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So you emphasized “our community” there — what do you define as your community in that broader context?
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Well thank you! That's a question I'm still struggling to define. Electronic music is about as far as I've gotten. I met most of my talented friends on Twitter over the past 10 years or so and have tried to contain them in a list before. There are innate challenges in defining such a creative community – I have done my best to label without being constricting, but it's definitely difficult trying to figure out how to provide a flag which everyone feels comfortable flying. I still think the best I've done to articulate what I'm trying to say was for Extratone's About page. Most of the folks I'm talking about are used to hustling their own brand so it's been a real challenge working on the right way to reach out.
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A flag which everyone feels comfortable flying — that's a great way to put it. What I find interesting about your internet presence is that you defy the idea of flying just a single flag. Along with Extratone you have multiplepodcasts, multipleblogs, and now you're starting a Motorsports & Tech dedicated Mastodon instance.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about how important it is to have many online buckets to put your ideas in. One just feels too limiting, especially if it's solely linked to your legal identity. How do you think about this matter of identity & expression with your own online presence?
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That's a very good question. I can't take credit for mastd.racing, actually – I'm not sure who created that server but it's administered by an account called RaceControl. You've arrived at another one of my biggest challenges. Consolidating my interests has always been a problem, especially on The Web. Age has definitely helped narrow them down a bit, but I still can't help myself sometimes. I think it's ended up alienating a lot of my followers on social because I have a hard time posting just within my niche(s). I'm not so sure how to feel about this, honestly. One could argue that I should post whatever I want, whenever, but consider your audience is also a concept I can no longer ignore. If anything, I need to learn to let myself be limited a bit more by those buckets. Once again, Extratone is a good example of this – I should've never published app reviews there, but I did. We're all learning, I suppose.
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Do you feel like you have to even learn to limit yourself on your personal blog? It seems like a personal blog can act as the release valve — a way of getting around cornering yourself into the niches that Extratone and other projects require. You can freely write about pens and Picard without feeling constrained to a single subject.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list. Since we've begun talking I've begun building my blogs bookmark folder back up and following the #100DaystoOffload challenge, which I find immensely impressive. I can't say I'm quite up to it, personally, but I definitely plan on opening up the taps a bit more. (I also don't want to flood read.write.as with too many joke posts ya know hehe.)
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That's awesome! You're reminding me of the interesting relationship between writing & tinkering when it comes to blogs. They both feed into each other in a strange way. Before, when my blog was on Wordpress, I didn't care about tinkering around — writing was my sole focus. When I moved to my new blog, however, I found myself shift towards creating apps that extend my blog and messing around with its CSS. So it's interesting that you've gone the opposite way, publishing more instead of solely tinkering.
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What has awoken the urge for you to tackle those items on your personal “to-write” list? To open up those taps a bit more? Because I can see the publication mindset, being somewhat of an authority, getting in the way.
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That is interesting. I'm wondering how many people are in each of our camps. I hate to be so topical, but the pandemic and being home constantly has definitely contributed. I've also begun to learn to let things go, which is an essential skill. Being able to actually kill work when it needs to die is the real secret. I just built up the strength to delete the rest of my 2019 list a few weeks ago.
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I wonder also! And hey, no problem bringing up the current situation. I think it's making me write more also.
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Want to drill into that practice of letting go as an essential skill for blogging. As a final question for this chat, how have you gone about the decision of keeping ideas that you've had for a long time and when to let them go? It's been something I've been struggling with for recently as ideas for blog posts start to pile up.
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Self-curation is definitely tough. Generally, it's very hard to let things go – especially when I've progressed at all significantly into research/first drafting, but I know when to kill something if I reread and am unable to immediately see where I was going. I've noticed that trying to rekindle interest or momentum in a topic is unusually not a worthwhile use of time in my case. If I can't get my rhythm back fairly early in, I am very unlikely to, ever. That said, I think it's also important to forgive yourself for investing time in something that won't work out – otherwise, you will settle for less than what you originally intended and release something you won't be happy with.
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Thank you so much for your time! I really enjoyed this!
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Forgive and forget! That's a great point about rekindling an interest being a sign of letting go of an idea. I've done that too many times. This has been a blast to chat virtually David — really enjoyed your thoughts and am looking forward to future blog posts and installments of Extratone!
It’s very pretentious to talk about pens, I agree, but I believe there’s a level of pen pretentiousness which is worth sharing with the writing masses. I continually encounter people in both personal and professional settings using – and often worshipping – very shitty pens. I'm not going to pretend spending $15 on a pen has not become a novel or ridiculous idea in contemporary culture, but if you're willing, this is one of those areas where some retrospective can lead to real pleasantnesss. Here are some of the tools I've owned. (I'll be linking heavily to The Pen Addict in this post. It's all we've got. Sorry.)
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Parker Jotter
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I believe everyone on Earth should own a Parker Jotter. It's a slim, small ballpoint designed for sketching with a clicking action that just about everyone loves. I have owned and lost many and I will continue to for the rest of my writing life. I cannot even begin to communicate how worth it $16.99 is to never write with another disposable ballpoint ever again. They're tough, light, and beautiful. Sarah Read for The Pen Addict:
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If you're primarily a fountain pen user, but you acknowledge the occasional need for a ballpoint, this really is the perfect one. It looks and feels like you're spoiling yourself, but the price is low enough that you'll still have to add a fountain pen to your cart to get free shipping.
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Pilot Metropolitan
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The Pilot Metropolitan has been the entry-level fountain pen for all of time as far as I know. Google for reviews and you'll find praises across the blog spectrum – from Little Coffee Fox to Writing For Pain and Pleasure to The Gentleman Stationer. “I'm not sure there is anything on the market that even approaches a pen of this quality for $15.00,” says the latter. Testimony from the first:
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I love how the Pilot Metropolitan feels in my hand. The brass body is cold and weighty while you write without becoming a burden to use. Despite its low cost, the look and feel of this pen will be sure to leave an impression on your friends and coworkers.
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The Pen Addict argues for the next pen on my list as The Ultimate Beginner, but I'll stick with the Metropolitan. It's a little unorthodox, actually – it doesn't feel quite as substantial as the other fountain pens I've used in my time, but it's a blast.
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Lamy Safari
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The modern alternative to the Pilot Metropolitan, the Lamy Safari is the coolest instrument on this list to own, but it is generally twice the price. Though I liked being seen with the Safari more than the Metropolitan, and its writing experience is more conventional in terms of what to expect from other composite fountain pens, I still think the Metropolitan is more fun to use. Instead of reading what I have to say, though, check out the only words about any of these pens I spied in a major publication. For The Strategist, David Notis writes:
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Fountain pens can be complicated and intimidating, but the Safari was designed to be approachable. (It was apparently originally meant to help teach proper handwriting to schoolchildren). Pen enthusiasts often recommend it as a great “starter” fountain pen, which I’ve found to be spot-on. [...]
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Not that I’m suddenly an expert, but there is something special about writing with a fountain pen. The steady flow of ink is so expressive; it somehow makes the weird, messy quirks of my handwriting feel intentional.
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To be honest, I feel like I could've done without my Safari, but I did actually write with it quite extensively. Here are two more opinions: The Gentleman Stationer and Little Coffee Fox.
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Kaweco
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Huge bias here: I adore Kaweco as a company. I first bought a Mint Skyline Sport (the featured image of this post) in 2016 and I fell in love. I love the breeziness of their colors. I love how Germanic their old logo is and how anything you read about their history is inevitably found on a website looking like this. As Susan M. Pigott points out for The Pen Addict, the plastic Sport series can be a bit lacking in refinement. “The Skyline Sport is made of plastic, and it feels rather cheap in the hand,” she says. Unfortunately, my white Classic Sport had the same problem, though I also adored it. From Shashwat Vardhana:
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If you have small to medium sized hands and like the screw cap action, you should most certainly go for this pen. While it might not be the best writer of its class, its reliability is absolute and I have never had any complaints with the pen in this aspect.
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My baby – my ultimate pen acquisition – was my Kaweco Steel Sport. I bought it in person with cash at Pen Place in Kansas City, and it was by far my favorite writing instrument of all time. As far as I'm concerned, this is as high as pens get. Find yourself in the position to buy one and you will be satisfied forever. From The Pen Addict:
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The Steel Sport features a – wait for it – stainless steel barrel. What is it about stainless steel that I love so much in pens? It tends to land in a barrel weight sweet spot that is heavier than aluminum, and lighter than copper and brass. [...]
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Stainless steel has a density and warmth that I enjoy in a pen barrel. It is also practically indestructible, which is what I want in a pocket pen.
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If you write by hand, you should treat yourself to one of these instruments. If you'd like to write more by hand, you definitely should. A good pen will have you looking for excuses to write.
When I have to pee too much to actually finish anything.
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I've updated the look of this blog with a theme adapted from “Anxiety” by Max Henderson but I've yet to update the colophon with the new colors (partially because I don't have the energy to name them yet.) Extratone's theme was listed on write.as' new themes project a while ago, of which I am quite proud. I've begun crossposting to Mastodon from Twitter again.
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Autos And Such
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I'm mostly blogging because I am fairly stuck on the Volkwagen Atlas review I promised to get done this week. (That link is to an online Word doc of my live progress, on which I'd love any comments on if you have them.) I've been playing enough Gran Turismo Sport that I've created a new blog specifically for automotive writing at dieselgoth.com. There, on Titanic day, I made a post including an “exclusive” invite link to mastd.racing, which I would compel any enthusiasts among you to oblige.
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Hanging out with myself trying to get Zoom-bombed.
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Listening
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This feature on the Bandcamp Daily regarding “Bleep” has really been my shit. Imagine my 70-year-old mother dancing to this.
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[Matt] Anniss subsequently went on a local Bristol internet station, penned a blog post, and posted a DJ set of Bleep, as a way to convince those same DJs that his thesis had some merit. He wrote an in-depth feature on the form for electronic music site Resident Advisor—which caused him to think bigger about this formative, unsung moment in UK dance music history. “I found the sound itself alien and otherworldly, but also endlessly fascinating for some reason,” he says. “It seemed so fresh and futuristic still, but also mysterious.”
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Software and Stuff
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Still waiting on my tax return/possible Corona stipend, I have lost my subscription to Google One, meaning the business Extratone Gmail (ihadtopee@gmail.com) is about to be unhooked(?)/deleted/no longer able to receive mail. As such, I've spent the past few days moving accounts to davidblue@extratone.com including the newsletters I'm most fond of (like Nextdraft.) This has given me a good opportunity to weed out those I don't particularly care about and to try using Outlook as my primary email client once again. Somehow, this has got me reverted into trying to make use of my Microsoft Office business subscription once again – I have (eeek!) not been writing in Markdown. May the Gourd have mercy on my text format-fucking soul.
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The other project I've been trying to distract myself from the Atlas review with is my list of poweruser/especially handy Windows/iOS/MacOS applications/tricks that I believe just about everyone should be using. From “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” (working title):
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I want you to come away from this list feeling as liberated and powerful as I do now when I’m On My Computer without any condescension or tedium. Unfortunately, there’s probably going to be some of both, so please stick with me and don’t take it personally. I do a lot of online reading, writing, and fiddling. I’ve been compelled to do these things in one form or another since very early childhood, and what follows could be described as a list of my favorite tools to accomplish things. Almost all of them are entirely free to use and the vast majority of them are easily and beautifully functional as well. They are what I suggest for my own mother to use, for what that’s worth, and I would argue sincerely for their extreme importance. Don’t waste your life on bad software.
Why spend so much time worrying about what Medium is? Maybe because we wanted to know whether it was a friend or an enemy. The answer is that it’s neither. It’s a reflection of what the media industry has worried about, and hoped for, and not received. But Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like. That’s not much fun for people who got burned along the way, but Medium was never exactly ours to begin with.
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Other Stuff
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I wrote Extratone's sparse submissions page today after signing us up for Submit.as. I'd encourage you to check out the prompts and to send me any suggestions you might have.
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Extratone.com's favicon has been updated thanks to the beautiful geniuses at write.as. (They literally just take requests for this via email.)
Yes, I am still managing to waste my time digging up and re-arranging some very old content, but I just couldn't resist. Somehow, it didn't occur to me until yesterday evening that I could sort through the original video files of my old vines fairly easily in fucking Google Photos and blast them through iMovie for iOS into a full montage relatively easily.
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Some of these are very cringey...
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Yes, I'd love to finally get around to my ultimate romantic editorialization on that most dearly departed social network, but things are way too jumbled right now, obviously.
Setting out upon a desperate personal journey to rediscover enchantment with computers.
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This evening, a package is scheduled to arrive upon my doorstep containing a Compaq Portable Plus luggable computer from 1983 which I have fantasized about buying for far too many years. Despite living in the midst of perhaps the worst possible financial situation to spend $139.99 outright on a relic of computing, I finally just bought one anyway last Thursday because I’m absolutely fed up with life without the magic I remember feeling from computers. Yes, I am having a mid-life crises and The Machine is just a physical manifestation of one of my favorite stories, but I expect it will provide something irreplaceable for me and at least one piece of entertainment for just about anybody: I’m going to start a photoseries of myself using the 26-lb., suitcase-like, and utterly time-displaced Portable Plus in different coffee shops throughout Portland.
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There’s also potential opportunity (or necessity) for me to make use of my limited knowledge of hardware electronics. I’ve never been very comfortable with openly using the term “hobby,” but I fully intend to savor, document, and preserve every possible detail of my experience, so we’re going to behave as if the tales of computer history are precious to a dedicated audience besides myself, and that I am thereby and hereafter binding myself to an important duty of discovery, curation, and presentation expressed through multimedia of the highest possible caliber.
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In other words, I’m pretty sure I’ve just begun a vintage computing blog. Before we go any further, then, let’s dispense with the obligatory arrangements.
Put simply, Compaq was punk as fuck. Three dorky Texan technodads premeditated their leave of fair, secure jobs in the industry in order to bet everything on the promise of a single undeniably pro-user ideal to disrupt its dominant monopolistic supervillian. Unlike any of the countless other stories from the information age with the very same introduction, theirs was immediately propelled into stratospheric, record-breaking success — from coffee table sketches in the wastelands of suburban Houston nights to one billion dollarsin less than five years, proving that it was possible to win huge in tech by committing sincerely to liberating the consumer and manifesting the ultimate performance of the underdog complex American business has ever witnessed.
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Those of us who’ve maintained some curious orbit of technology have recently entered a reconcillatory process as the world has become all at once intimately familiar with our collective pursuits’ true consequences. Never has it been more appropriate to reflect on the wholesome bravado of the only American computer company to build a billion-dollar business atop the sole mantra of user liberation. At a glance one might assume that AMC’s attempt to reproduce Mad Men’s formula with a story set in Compaq’s origin in a series that’s supposedly attracted a fair number of Netflixers called Halt and Catch Fire in conjunction with the 2016 documentary Silicon Cowboys have sufficiently reminded America of to whom it really owes its privileged tech industry. However, a Twitter search for “Compaq” turns up virtually nothing of consequence, and — on the other cultural spectrum — I’ve yet to see a single well-documented collection of Compaq hardware, and I’m unsatisfied.
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Like it not, you’re coming with me on a safari back through two full nostalgic cycles to rediscover our wonder and excitement about technology because I miss it desperately and I know you do too. We’re going to find something marvelous.
An autobiographical overview of my personal history with technology and its contributions to my current perspective.
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Incalculable odds were against my arrival in this world happening in early 1994, positioning my life within a timeline that would allow me to bridge my two species’ most significant millenniums in the first grade as a student in the first class at Fairview Elementary school to receive curriculum-mandated exposure to brand-new Windows 98 PCs in its brand-new, fluorescent-lit computer lab in the center core of its 50-year-old rectangular brick structure. The lab also meant that ours was the first Fairview class to have the available relief of air conditioning during the school day. It’s unlikely that I would be home sick and watching the last television ever allowed in my mother’s living room as the second plane hit.
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My peers and I would form a picogeneration without a name (perhaps we should be called the 9/11ers) — 91s and 92s wouldn’t have regular access to public school machines until they’d eclipsed the true prime of their development, and were just that much further along, mentally, to being able to comprehend the huge and terrifying concepts of 1) New York and 2) burning alive — while 98s like my niece were spared any such comprehension of death at all, yet now have to face the existentially future-sundering, darkly-mirrored reality of the Trump Presidency during the most critically uncertain period in the last stage of their brain’s transition to adulthood.
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If there is truth in the cross-cultural supposition that souls have some sort of choice, pre-conception, over when they’re born, my own must have either cleaned out the house, or lost horrible, though I suspect I’ll never be able to confidently wager either way. This question of how lucky or unlucky am I to be alive right now is one which I find most fascinating — not just within myself, but within others my age. I declare us a generation largely because of my experiences under the assumption that my mid-Missouri upbringing represents the ultimate average in the American experiences of the time as the area has been a reliable sample of the clearest average of the country’s cultural, political, and economic life. Technically, it was quite unlikely that I arrive here as a new human being instead of China or India, and what if that, too was my choice?
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Though less so, it was still against chance that I would be born to parents who would divorce very quickly after my birth, before my mind was able to form any tangible long-term memories, sparing me whatever pain could’ve resulted from their greater togetherness later nullified in front of me. I could’ve chosen them as well for the variety of experiences their situation would allow me as I grew up between my father’s 800-acre farm and my mother’s suburban house in Columbia, the college town an hour’s drive south. I write about my experiences now — so young — because I’ve likely already born witness to more extraordinary changes in human development than your parents, their parents, and their parents’ parents combined. At 24, my life has already spanned by far the most profound and expedited informational renaissance in human history — greater progress was made between the day I first rode a bicycle and the one on which I took my driver’s test than in thousands of years before it.
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The sum of my father’s ordeals between 1950 and 1974 — from his birth until the age I am now — would indeed include watching a man set foot on a spatial body other than Earth for the first time, but would be mostly defined by work on the family’s soybean, corn, and wheat farms in central Illinois, driving carbureted tractors pulling cultivating equipment of the same basic design and function as had been pulled by horses, mules, and oxen for hundreds of years, and other implements — like the mechanical multi-row planter — that were new technology at the beginning of the century. For neighbors, he would walk behind the path of a square hay baler next to a moving flatbed trailer, upon which he would throw the 70–100 lb. rectangles of dead compacted grass by their twine through thick cowhide gloves. All of this I would get to experience in the next century on his farm, using the exact same equipment.
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At home, he would watch NBC, ABC, and CBS on a CRT TV, as I would for several years until wireless television was legally transitioned to digital statewide in the summer of 2009. As an adolescent, he would form a business with friends cleaning out old abandoned barns in exchange for the rights of ownership to any finds inside, which led to his discovery of a hay-preserved 1929 Buick Sedan containing hand-written records of its every service. This car would change hands into his Uncle’s care as he went off to school in Champaign, married in Georgia, and eventually settled on the flat clay soil of the farm where I grew up, right on the border between Audrain and Monroe counties, Missouri. I was about 10 when we drove back to the family hub with a trailer in tow to collect the car from my Great Uncle, to my manic excitement.
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Up until my mid-teens, my life was defined by my extreme reverence for historic cars, airplanes, tractors, and watercraft, and the time I spent operating, maintaining, restoring, or simply studying the assortment of these which I was allowed — often because of extraordinary circumstances — would form the component of my psychology which seeks to experience different cultures, ideas, and eras through the medium of engineering and design and relies on these to understand them. Like my father in his youth, I would learn to clean water out of a carburetor after the Oliver 88 had sat silent for too long, and I would piss in a chamber pot to avoid waking up my Grandfather by walking down creaking attic stairs and turning the lights on. I would learn how to shoot and drive before 10-years-old, and I would have the freedom to do both as I pleased on the miles of gravel roads that ran around home.
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Though my stepfather bought me a PC of my own just as my first-grade computer class was ending, I could not conceive of a reason to occupy the dial-up line and block his incoming calls or faxes, so my use of the machine was limited to sparse writing and aggravating attempts to run Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 at approximately one frame per second on a 300MHz single-core Pentium II CPU. Though I was extremely fortunate compared to most middle-class kids my age at the time to have my own computer in my room, my relationship with it was not significant or particularly involved. I would leave it powered down for weeks at a time until my last two grades at Fairview, when homework assignments began to require it.
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Perhaps the greatest gap between my mostly-suburbanite classmates and I was an exposure to Japanese entertainment and video games. I was once disallowed from a lunch table because I’d never heard of Pokémon or Luigi, but I did have a Sony Playstation at home on which I occasionally loaded A Bug’s Life to wander around its first level, perhaps in basal awe at the idea of manipulating what I saw on a screen in realtime. In self-imposed isolation from children my age, I wouldn’t develop any need to be socially competitive with video games as many of my peers would to carry with them into adulthood. I thought my interests in mechanical engineering to be above all of them, so I spent my time alone with heavy picturebooks on 20th century cars, tractors, and airplanes.
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On the farm, my consistently agriculturally-proactive father was one of the first to have satellite internet for farm futures and weather reports on a pre-GUI machine which I don’t remember. As I was becoming computer literate in school, he would become extremely frustrated with the Windows XP-running machine he’d bought from a one-man, one-room computer shop in Centralia, and I would often solve some problem with bloatware or the goddamned printer. He would also subscribe to and install a first-generation DirectTV receiver, which had the first on-screen program guide I’d ever seen. In the evenings, I would watch hours of Modern Marvels on The History Channel, which presented the history, abstract functional theory, and implementation of a particular technology, both past and future. This single program — which has aired nearly 700 episodes since 1995 — is probably responsible for the majority of my at least rudimentary general knowledge in a variety of historic and “future” technological schools, and my curiosity about culture’s relationship with innovation.
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Though my father’s interests differed significantly from mine — he thought more about growing and raising than of the tools one used to do it — he would indulge my many questions about how engines, hydraulics, and electrical systems worked, and indulged my curiosity by exposing me to the hidden communities of the most elderly, most obscure historic machinery enthusiasts like those of the Midwest Old Threshers Reunion in Mount Pleasant, Iowa — the Concours d’Elegance for antique tractor and reciprocating engine collectors. It was a similar event closer to home where I first operated a steam tractor — great, field-going locomotive-like vehicles that supplanted a need for horsepower in the late-1800s up until the Great Depression which chug, whistle, and puff along just like rail locomotives with a huge, gritty, iron steering wheel. As I recall, I was also given the opportunity to drive an unrestored Model T truck around the grounds that day — the knowledge from which I gained I cannot imagine being of much use ever again.
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I was proud to the point of arrogance of my technical knowledge and experience in all the different things I had driven and operated, which my schoolmates were in no position to understand. I was elitist and anti-social about this as late as 8th grade, when I had just moved in to stay with my mother, who bought me a first generation iPhone which I proudly wore in a leather belt holster to Junior High. It would represent a shift in my fascination from very old technology toward the present and future.
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I started talking online with a friend I’d first met years before at Fairview, who spent most of his time fiddling with his first-generation MacBook Pro. He originally exposed me to gadget bloggers on YouTube like Mark Watson and Jon Rettinger (both of whom are still full-time tech personalities.) My mom bought me a 13-inch aluminum-bodied MacBook (which would be sold as MacBook Pro after a single year,) and my lifestyle radically shifted inside my room, my computer, and my Xbox 360. My friend and I would both obsess together over software, design, and gadget – experimenting with our own tech YouTube channels until high school, where I would be adopted by a new friend group who would finally socialize me.
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Recently, I have written about the contrasts and discrepancies of consumer technology development as its progress has disconnected from the upward linear trajectory in use, quality, and genuine innovation for the End User in a departure which has been especially visible from my perspective as an academically-untrained, but intensely demanding user in the past five years. When hardware was still the industry focus before ~2012, there was a tremendous amount of optimism among journalists and enthusiasts because each successive generation of devices had added more tangible capabilities. Publications like Gizmodo and Engadget made a fortune publishing reviews and comparison tests of hardware offerings across every segment of tech, and the discourse they generated had a noticeable influence on design. I remember this time well because it accented my last few years before adulthood, when I had plenty of spare time, energy, and curiosity to keep up.
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The general consumer technology narrative since Steve Jobs’ death has become increasingly more about the companies who design and sell hardware and software than about how and why their consumers actually use them, and the result has been a series of new product segments with little defensible place in my own linear timeline of innovation, especially where productivity is involved. Augmented and Virtual Reality are quite explicitly escapist industries, yet to fill any significant need which was before unfilled. The same could be argued about voice assistants and smartwatches — neither of which remove obstacles in most users’ day-to-day lives but instead contribute to the array of tasks and devices which already seek their attention.
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Of course, there are defensibly sound business incentives behind the industry’s new, fragmented direction, but I would also argue that there are those, too, for genuinely revisiting both what we should be doing and what we should be seeking to learn to do with technology. In a more abstract sense, I have written about whether or not we should want to be living in this particular now, and how the way we feel about the future should inform what we do in the present.
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I cannot help but observe human progress from a perspective of powerlessness, acute alienation, and amused awe, which has already lent to a significant quantity of occasionally original thoughts as I watch, having witnessed an odd diversity of American life and culture. I’ve published them to entertain and to demonstrate a few methods of reflection on what it is you really want from the times you are living.
A commitment to share my thoughts where developers actually want them, and an invitation for other reviewers/users to join me.
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I have written more than my fair share of words about software, as I have loved, despised, and been utterly perplexed by it. This year, my return to the iOS community has perhaps inevitably turned apps into an addiction of sorts. This particular platform is so utterly chock full/stocked up of creativity at a scale immeasurably greater and more accessible than the whole of those throughout computing history, combined. For someone like myself, it is all too easy to allow oneself to wander down a virtually endless path of intriguing, very self-indulgent play, especially now that third-party sites like Departures.to have managed to add discoverability to TestFlight beta distributions, allowing those non-millionaires among us opportunities to use test releases of applications we would’ve otherwise had to pay for. This has been exclusively to my benefit – I can only imagine what 15 year-old me would have done with such power.
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In my recent endeavor to focus on making my work more useful to others, I've reflected on something I've heard from nigh every developer of the apps I've reviewed: Ah yes, your blog looks really cool but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE REVIEW MY FUCKING APP on the FUCKING STORE. Read: your commentary is appreciated, but your five stars would almost certainly more economically beneficial.
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As you can see from the image embedded above, I have personally fallen very behind in doing my part for those apps I've celebrated, here. A vague intention to get around to it eventually clearly is not working, so I've decided to give myself a deadline: August 15th, 2021 – precisely one month from today. By this date, I will have sifted through my commentary on apps in this setting and adapted the most useful of it (per app, obviously) into a manner appropriate to appear on an App Store Page, and I would like to formally-ish invite other tech writers/app reviewers to join me.
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so! I found a way to actually find the apps you’re looking for on the App Store! the search function in this dev-facing tool *ACTUALLY WORKS*!!! https://t.co/XrsStvXq57
I'm terrible at community organization, which certainly does not exclude events, so I very much welcome any feedback you might have, as well as any collaborative contributions you'd be interested in making. As I see it, I have a few essential considerations to offer.
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First, the page in the screen capture above – which can be found in the App Store App ⇨ Account (your profile picture in the top-right corner) ⇨ Account Settings (the tapable element at the very top with your profile picture and information) ⇨ Ratings and Reviews – is broken as hell, along with the rest of the Account Settings menu, notably. This is important because I insist we all complain about it on all available channels, considering it's been broken for several months, at least.
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Second, you should almost certainly use this “new” dev-facing tool when searching the App Store, considering that it actually works in a trustable way, unlike the user-facing tool in the app.
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tech writers, app reviewers, interested iOS users, I would like to formally invite you to APP STORE REVIEW DAY - a shared personal commitment to sharing commentary on apps where it actually matters most for developers. https://t.co/hfLooBwCCa
Since the standard online palette of event organization software are all so easy to use, these days, I've established event pages for this event on multiple platforms, linked in the list below, which I will update as per any suggestions/requests for equivalent pages on other services. Of course, it's certainly not a requirement that you join/engage with any of them.
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One could could certainly just add the date to their own calendar (conveniently with this .ics file,) remain entirely silent about the thing on social, and still be participating. Those interested in further engagement, however, can Chat Me Up on Extratone's Discord, the Teams event chat, Telegram, etc. I also plan to reshare most of this post as a thread on Twitter.
As we face the horrendous, utterly inexcusable state of Discovery on the App Store/Apple's general fuckery regarding the independent developers mostly responsible for making its platforms a worthwhile space, I hope I've created something of value in whipping up this “event.” If you have thoughts on how I might do so more effectively, once again, please do reach out.
Screens and software subjects big & small discussed within my most moderate 35,000 words ever.
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Believe it or not, the cyclical cold season has once again come to pass! Oh, the W̘͖̯E̟̹À̫T̯̫͓̪̮͓̼H̝E̪͇̰̘̖͍ͅŔ͍̖̱̟̪!! If the past two days on Twitter were any indication, it is indeed time for a year's-end retrospective on what has been published on this Web Site. Given the extent of the attention I've devoted to bilge.world this past year – both technically and editorially – I thought it would be nice to chuck in a bit more in the pursuit of whacking myself on the back. I understand that 2020 has been one helluva catastrophic marker of linear time for just about everyone on Earth – as I write this on its last day, the inexplicable news of MF Doom's death has just surfaced and has already hit my adjacent communities remarkably hard.
I had forgotten *a lot* more about CSS and HTML than I originally thought. glad I ended up comfortable enough to find myself with a completely original stylesheet before the end of the year, I suppose. pic.twitter.com/4QwlbEJECU
The earliest archive.org capture of this particular Writeas blog dates back only to May 1st of this year, but its stylistic contrast with the site's current version is immense. I believe I was using Max Henderson's Anxiety theme virtually stock, albeit with some color rearrangements. By the 29th, I had already arrived upon the colors you see today. “You Know I'm Blogging” was just a meta update to say howdy after such a long drought, but “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” actually proved popular (for me) among my newly-connected Fedi crowd, especially, thanks to an annotated share by Writeas on Twitter. Honestly, it was entirely worth it just for the accomplishment of exposing my platform peer Dino Bansigan to Alt+D. Writeas Community Manager CJ Eller and I began corresponding, which led to an interview regarding writing tools, managing fiddly compulsions, and the wonder of Markdown.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list.
I had wanted to write about The Langoliers – Stephen King's flop of a made-for-TV movie/extended Twilight Zone episode – for a long while. It was probably the first program I watched as a child that genuinely disturbed me and always returns to my thoughts by barren-ish experiences. I had planned to watch the whole three hours all the way through and write whatever came to mind, but I only made it halfway or so in “Craig Toomey's Coronavirus” before I ran completely out of steam. I dropped what I had without revision, to this day. Perhaps one day I shall return...
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In the right hour, the woodland springtime metamorphic processes of the neighboring Lake Geneva suburb’s in-betweens were in a paused state – the toads again hushed; the crickets tired, and the human populace, too. In the right hour, the fickle wind and the social owls were the only sound, and nothing moved but the sparse, light-footed doe in careful segments with her fawn.
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These two sentences begin the sixth chapter of my indefinitely-postponed novel, Blimp's Burden, and are almost certainly my best writing, ever. My vanity simply wouldn't allow them to go forgotten, so I published the chapter as an excerpt on The Psalms. It may seem an intimidating wall of text, but give it your attention and you'll be amused, I think.
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Summer
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The general, distinctly 21st-century wisdom regarding one's content popularity seems to be something like you never know what's going to blow up. I experienced this phenomena quite severely for the first time in my writing life after posting “Google Is Not God of The Web” on HackerNews right before going out-of-touch for some 13 straight hours amidst a local BLM protest. I did not intend to write a baity title, nor did I expect anything to come of sharing it, there – I only did so simply because the thought crossed my mind. Honestly, it is probably the least-considered content I'd ever published on The Psalms – I only put it up when I did because I knew all of my energy was about to be absorbed for an entire weekend or more. I only started the thing because I felt it important to raise a small voice in reminder that tech media had started using language when discussing code/online development which had begun to assume the existence of a single, objective standard of measure for good web design. (Fuck your bootstrap baloney, The Drywall Website was a realparadigm shit.)
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And yet... That single goddamned post would end up accruing more pageviews than all of my writing on the web, combined (I suspect.) Tens of thousands of words were written in hundreds of comments, which I did my best to parse in a for the hell of it substack email:
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Out of everything I’ve shared on Bilge recently, it’s hilarious that this particular post – on which I spent a cumulative total of perhaps 25 minutes writing and made less effort than ever to edit – became probably my most widely-shared work of all time.
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Once again, I am thankful for the readership and correspondence, I just really fucking wish it had been on literally anything else I've written about technology.
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In retrospect, it really is bonkers that I was excited about yet another vague promise to re-imagine email in the days surrounding the launch of Basecamp's HEY, but I feel it's important to nurture what paltry genuine enthusiasm remains about technology and the future, so I decided to respond to the service's homepage prompt, asking interested visitors to write in with their own thoughts on email. I spent a morning clacking out “Email and I: An Abridged History,” which I hope will one day serve as a part-foundation for a thorough, composed extension to my Why I Write About Technology series. This would be The Psalms last relevant work for a few months, while I played around with an experimental WordPress website and dove into fuckin' school for the first time in seven years.
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Fall
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I returned in late September with a partial recount of what I'd discovered: “Indulging Once More in Digital Excess.” After exploring the concept of Digital Gardens, buying my first pro-ready desktop PC in 10 years, playing with Big Boy Adobe software for the first time, and reading a delightful book documenting the history of word processing, I arrived upon the term Software Historian with which to partially describe myself. It doesn't mean all that much at the moment, but will no doubt be explored imminently on this Web Site.
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Addressing “The Social Dilemma's Dilemma” and “Software Thanksgiving” in detail would be awfully redundant, but I would at least note how they represent diametrically opposed perspectives through which to discuss this stuff. Going forward into 2021, I think it's important that I hold short on the progress I've made in moderating my voice since 2018. Digestibility is not a virtue I am at all interested in, nor is it an appropriate one in which to invest any more effort. Any non-radical argument will inevitably prove enormously unoriginal, which makes for a huge waste of all our time. For the moment, that's all the editorializing I've done.
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Three Point Oh
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Somewhere along the research process for one of my school essays, I came across the concept of academic revision tracking and peer review via Git. Having dipped my toe back in academia, any such circumvention of its penchant for the most archaic practices possible was naturally intriguing. Just wait until I show these goons how to use hyperlinks. Perhaps inevitably, I was launched into the Git-Gone Bender I'm still riding simply because I finally had ample reason to actually understand it. In just two months, I've created and forked a total of nearly 80 repositories on my new GitHub account. Though I'd created one for each of my web properties ages ago, I had absolutely no idea how to actually make use of them, so they were all quickly abandoned. In the past two weeks or so, I think I've actually begun to get the hang of the system's core intricacies, best exemplified by The Psalms' Repository as it stands.
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The “automated” Project Board I set up has so far been a very impressive replacement for the simple todo list. It tracks and categorizes Post Ideas in their various stages in my process: Mulling, Documentation (research,) Drafting, and actual Publication. Technical “Issues” regarding the CMS and/or the Repository, itself, have also fit in these categories well, so far. Just today, I discovered that one can simply tag Issues by their number to describe Commits, which form an impressive revision-tracking changelog when aggregated together. I also figured out the general idea behind Milestones and set The Psalms' first one for my 27th birthday, next month. The goal is to have figured this all out well enough by then that I'm no longer randomly stumbling upon entire featuresets multiple times in a workday. Thinking in Public – as my friend Tom Critchlow and his crowd say – is what I'm trying to do here, I think. Obviously, this really means that you are more than welcome to hop the fuck in at any time, in any manner you'd prefer. If Git is still no more than a conundrum for you – as it was for me just weeks ago – I would suggest the directory for In-Progress Drafts as a starting point.
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requesting support on how to "leverage discussions" to talk about pee pee and poo poo. #GitHubUniverse
GitHub Actions are still more or less a mystery to me, but I am unbothered – The Psalms' seems to be producing green text instead of red, now, in the midst of whatever I set it up to do. I poked around the livestreams for “GitHub Universe” a few weeks ago, when dark mode and GitHub Discussions were opened up to more users. At the moment, I cannot imagine a single application for forums in the context of my blog's repository, but I turned them on, anyway. It's very possible that all of the documentation-generating functions of Git are entirely unnecessary in this case, but – as I entrust GitHub with the eternal task of archiving such work – it is my hope that it will help me add further structure to my process.
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If you've found yourself in possession of a .edu email address and are interested in GitHub related experimentation, see this list of discounted/free dev programs/services for students, which includes a free subscription to “GitHub Pro.” (Apparently, equivalent to a $4/month service.) Adobe has similar discounts, as you’re probably already aware, which have allowed me to pursue my goal of learning InDesign. So far, I’ve created a sort of commemorative 404 page for The Drynet and a font showcase of Georgia for my mother. As much as I’d love to continue discussing the current state of Adobe apps, I’ve realized 1) I am quite distinct from a professional user, which is why I genuinely find GIMP more useful than Photoshop, for instance, and 2) given the length of my to-write list considering my current pace, I don’t know if I’d manage to get around to it in this lifetime.
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Between now and the 11th of this month, I will be migrating worthwhile posts from the experimental WordPress site (WTF) here and closing its hosting account. I haven’t been compelled to actually do anything with it in months, and the handy redirects, alone, are not worth the upcosts, however fair. Some content – including the corresponding posts for my Adobe experiments will not be imported from WTF here. I’m also going to rely on the Web Archive for publishing the rest. Notable discoveries so far include “Through an iPhone 4’s Lens,” which is a reminder of how revolutionary that particular handset was, and a few extra-Psalms pieces of content I’d like you to experience, like this Notion gallery of my single jaunt into drawing, # DavidBlueDraws. Best of all is my friend Tevin’s episode of Extratone’s defunct flagship podcast. In the years since, he’s become quite the prolific Twitch streamer. (I’ve watched enough and know Tevin well enough to say that he’s particularly entertaining in this medium.)
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Coming Soon
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For better or worse, all of these new exploratory avenues have so far led directly away from the business of actually writing, but – in my best self-estimation – I suspect I’m mostly done with fiddling, now, and ready to start thinking on the page, again. Predictably, I’ve let my upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max Review turn into quite a monstrosity over the past two months. It turns out, years of lapsed attention toward iOS development resulted in my feeling more out-of-the-loop than I expected, which I was compelled to remedy, naturally. If you’re so inclined, you can follow the minutia attached to my review process via this dedicated Snapas gallery, this shared iCloud album, my personal YouTube channel , and this Twitter collection.
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SO... I’m really starting to see the magic now. I just took this and it’s 2AM... utterly dark outside. I managed to force my car mount to couple with a tripod and set the exposure to 30 seconds. pic.twitter.com/FMLGrFzgy2
As per my newfound use of GitHub, I’ve played around with various ways of documenting this journey, specifically. First is this Wiki page (which I shall do my best to remember to keep updated) listing the entirety of my writing history on iPhone and iOS. (It’s uh... A bit underwhelming, if I’m honest.) I’ve also just begun a dedicated repository for iOS-related documentation and resources, which will soon include a full, sensically-indexed list of iCloud share links to my entire Siri Shortcuts collection (I hope.) Immediately following the review, I intend to publish here a post dedicated to functions Apple has failed to properly document, which I expect to be the most widely-useful content on this domain. To see some of the suggestions I’ve received so far and/or to add your own, see this mildly-successful thread I posted in r/iOS.
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When I have finally tired of talking about handsets once more, I hope to return my attention toward some other overwhelmingly-ambitious monstrosities like my academic paper proposing federated, open-source social networks in favor of the Big Boys, my report on the experience of returning to academia for a semester in 2020, and my evaluation of Notion as perhaps the next Big Step in the evolution of notetaking software. Perhaps before tackling projects the size of these, I intend to compile another listicle of handy tips for newcomers to Writeas. As I linked before, you can now view the entirety of The Psalms’ status in as much detail as you’d like via its Project Board on GitHub. As always, you can delight me by directly engaging on Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, and/or via email. Let’s hope 2021’s equivalent of this review doesn’t take me until February to publish!
An update on all I’ve been doing instead of what I actually intended to do.
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There will always be plenth of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. – Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think“
You have a desire for indulgence in your home and family, Co-Star has just told me in my weekly, email newsletter-delivered horoscope. “Venus conjunct to natal Moon” indicates this part of yourself will transform into something else, and goes on to say something truly stirring: *the way you relate to your past is changing*. I continue to be amazed by how influential the potential of the computing hardware present in my life at any given time can be on my habits. In the two weeks I’ve had my first moderately powerful desktop computer in over ten years, I have found myself using new image & video editing software, installing local WordPress stacks, finally experimenting with Git, somehow generating 20 draft posts on a fresh experimental WordPress site, and putting my whole back into my new Notion account, including – among others – projects like my “Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.” All the while, there has been a pull toward a more deliberate, focused sort of digital existence: reflection on Kevin McGillivray’s Word of The Year concept, digital gardening, and a few other like discoveries have culminated in a newfound, unironic use of the term “Creative Wellness” to describe a set of ideologies which I believe I should strive for in order to improve my intellectual wellbeing.
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In tandem with the fact that I have gone back to school, this has all crucially resulted in very little actual writing, which may or may not be conclusive evidence toward the classical minimalist technology argument that less capability results in more focus. On that note, remember when the Game of Thrones author appeared on Conan’s show and mentioned that he still writes exclusively using WordStar 4.0? This happening has been vaguely in the back of my mind since I encountered it during the relatively brief, basement apartment-dwelling era in Oregon when I first discovered WinWorldPC and got into running a bunch of DOS VMs, trying out every download from that blessed site which sounded even remotely interesting. Before I go on, let me just include a transcript of the entire anecdote I’m referring to here, because it’s actually much shorter than one is led to believe:
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Conan: These novels that that you write are can be over a thousand pages long. They're massive tomes and apparently you write them all on a computer, but unlike most authors, you're not worried about a computer virus. I mean an author who writes a thousand-page book their greatest fear is a virus invades and destroys a chunk of their book you don't worry about that. Why?
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Martin: No I have a secret weapon – I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the internet with and that I get my email on and I do my taxes on and that computer and then I have my writing computer which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.
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Conan: A DOS machine. How old is this program?
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Martin: A DOS machine. You remember DOS? I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system.
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Conan: Did you make this computer out of wood? Did you carve it? I'm curious why you decided to stick with this old program.
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Martin: I actually like it. I mean, it does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital – if I wanted a capital, I would've typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key. Stop fixing it!
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Conan: You yell at computers a lot. What about spellcheck?
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Martin: Oh, I hate spellcheck. Especially when you have the realm of [???], it's [???].
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That’s it! A less than sixty second exchange. I did not remember just how much coverage it received on digital news sites. Embark on a Google search for “george rr martin wordstar,” and you’ll discover a ridiculously long list of brief stories including the YouTube embed. A book I’ve just recently discovered and begun – which I am extremely excited about – is Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and its introduction begins by mentioning The George Thing, which surely indicates that it is the most significant mention of word processing software in popular culture for at least a decade:
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The clip was posted to YouTube and from there embedded in innumerable tweets, Facebook feeds, and blogs. Some commenters immediately, if indulgently, branded Martin a Luddite, while others opined it was no wonder it was taking him so long to finish the whole story (or less charitably, no wonder that it all seemed so interminable). But what was it about these seemingly obscure details that people found so compelling? Part of it was no doubt the unexpected blend of novelty and nostalgia: Many fans would be old enough to remember WordStar for themselves, and the intricacy of its interface seems somehow in keeping with Martin’s quirky persona, part paternalistic grandfather and part Doctor Who character. WordStar thus becomes an accessory to his public image, like the black fisherman’s cap he is frequently photographed wearing. But it is also clearly much more than that. Martin’s passion for the program is unmistakable...
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The book, itself, was also more widely reviewed than one would expect, where it was deemed genuinely unique. I related quite hard to the preface’s first few sentences:
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Track Changes began, as many books do, with a question: What was the first novel written with a word processor? Being an English professor interested in the history of writing as well as computers, I thought it was the sort of thing I should know, but I didn’t.
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Discovering the volume was a result of a personal determination in the last week to give in to my latent obsession with word processing/text editing software, which also led to my creating a Notion table of every word processor I’ve ever heard of. Thanks to my desktop PC acquisition, found myself virtual machining a bit again, though some of the programs I’m particularly interested in trying have inexplicitly disappeared from my personal library and been removed from WinWorldPC, probably due to (mostly absurd) copyright claims. Most versions of WordStar are still available, though, and I’ll confess I still have a desire to learn how to use its cult keyboard shortcuts, as evangelized by Robert J. Sawyer in an essayalso discussed in Track Changes, which specifically shits on WordPerfect more explicitly than I remembered. I keep returning to the idea that I should try writing the stuff I normally work on – like this post, for instance – in these software, but file transfer is a bigger and bigger obstacle the older the OS you’re running: VirutalBox’s “Guest Additions” – which allow clipboard sharing/shared folders/other interoperative network functions – are not compatible with DOS or any Windows editions before 4.0. There are workarounds, but I haven’t found any reasonably within my current abilities.
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Truthfully, though, emulating twenty-year-old software seems a bit unnecessary when contrasted with the fact that Markdown, Typora, and Writeas were supposed to be my saviors from distracted writing. A compulsion to comment on a recent note-taking app comparison published in The Information reminded me that I still haven’t written an in-depth review of Typora, which I plan to prioritize in the near future, especially since it may finally be officially releasing, according to recent activity on Twitter.
Another result of my reintroduction to academia is that I can now afford a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to student discounts. This has been life-changing in a manner which I should probably be a bit ashamed of, but once the desire to make full use of my subscription (by trying every single program it licenses) subsides, I really do intend to become proficient with InDesign – a learning experience which I will surely at least attempt to thoroughly document, here.
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Digital Gardening
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I think it was Tom Critchlow’s Digital Gardening blogchain that first exposed me to the term and his static site-generated wiki project that introduced me to the concept of personal wikis, not so long ago, though the desire to organize and/or archive personally-relevant information through the format has actually been rattling around my head for the better part of a decade. When I discovered that one could install MediaWiki – the platform Wikipedia, itself is built on – I created the shortlived Drywall Wiki, once upon a time. Since I last wrote you, I also purchased the extratone.wiki domain and played around once again with the platform. Typora even offers exports in MediaWiki’s bizarre proprietary text format! For better or worse, though, I don’t see anything becoming of the project for the moment I suppose it feels like somewhat of a risk, investing a lot of time I probably shouldn’t have into documenting all of my Twitter jokes. For the moment, I think my Notion account will have to serve as my personal wiki.
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The most inciteful argument I’ve read among the Digital Gardens discourse revolves around value as it is created within our personal online writing spaces. Two of the many infinitely-quotable essays within this space: Mike Caulfield’s “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral” and “Stock and flow” from Snarkmarket. The former references Vannevar Bush’s infamous “As We May Think” essay (which I’ve finally gotten around to finishing and its description of a “memex,” which many cite as a disturbingly-apt prediction of the World Wide Web. Caulfield, however, disagrees:
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So most people say this is the original vision of the web. And certainly it was the inspiration of those pioneers of hypertext. But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all . Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.
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Reading back from a lens including this commentary, I immediately understood. The memex concept is far more intimate than the web has become (or perhaps ever was – I wouldn’t know.) “Stock and flow” defines creative value in two disparate types of media:
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Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
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Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
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To be honest, I personally cannot imagine undertaking the task of explaining this differentiation to anyone in my own life, but if the reactionary movement within The Web back to a focus on valuable content is, indeed, underway, perhaps such conversations are bound to shortly become more and more natural. For my part, I have attempted setting up an experimental site on Github Pages using Jekyll in the past few days with partial success: as soon as I tried to specify a custom theme, I apparently broke it, at which point I realized that I had homework to do. As much as I hate to admit it, Kev Quirk’s posts regarding WordPress’ practical simplicity over SSGs earlier this monthrings somewhat true. As things currently stand, WordPress’ permeability throughout The Web is an advantage for those who just want to publish something as simply as possible. My counterargument to both Kev and myself: Writeas is a wonderful compromise in terms of substance and image among one’s super e-enabled, Mullenweg-disgusted peers. It’s very much pure Markdown, but it’s far more accessible, cross-platform, than SSGs due to its shear simplicity.
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One component which Digital Gardening would seem to offer others that I have never particularly struggled with is the freedom to write whatever I feel like writing. If anything, I have struggled in the opposite sense, existing in a state completely unhindered by consideration of the value my work may or may not offer anyone else. Perhaps the most substantial addition I’m capable of making to the Digital Gardens conversation, then, is best quoted from the first chapter of the advice book I have finally begun writing for young men, For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss:
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If there is one idea of mine you ever engage with – in this book or otherwise – it is best distilled in this single sentence: you do not *actually* want to attain a state of true apathy, trust me. It is extremely unhealthy, miserable, and alienating. I have existed for an excruciatingly long time trapped in a state of being truly unable to care about anything in the face of a great, varying effort to do so. It is very far from the immunity imbued in terms like carefree – in reality, it is manifested in extreme depression. It is less immunity than it is distance from an essential part of life.
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In terms of one’s blogging, I am glad for those who will/have/are finding a new freedom of expression, but hold this as a serious caution regarding the other extreme. Should you ever approach it, remember that considering one’s audience – as academics love to prioritize – really is important, eventually.
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Curation
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At this point, I’ve used a channel in Extratone’s Discord as my ongoing reading list for several years essentially without change. Earlier this month, though, I discovered Raindrop – a bookmarking service with public collections that (so fars) feels much more aligned with my own needs than Pocket – and pretty much immediately signed up to begin paying for it and set up a bot to crosspost from my new Reading List collection, there to the same Discord channel via the collection’s RSS feed. Raindrop’s browser extension – along with Notion’s, come to mention it – is actually usable in day-to-day browsing. As much as I love Reading.am, the prospect of its longevity worries me considering the most recent post in its development blog dates to 2016. Writing a dedicated “Little Review” of Raindrop is on my (ever-lengthening) todo list, but at the moment, I would especially emphasize my Digital Magazine Collection, which is the result of thousands of hours of web exploration and genuinely worth significant value for most anyone, I think.
With the combination of my public Notion workspaces and public Raindrop collections, I hope to make my curatorial endeavors both more accessibly beautiful and more intimately available. In terms of a dedicated discussion of Notion’s interworkings and culture, I think I have quite a bit more exploring to experience before I’m sufficiently qualified, though my notes are already quite extensive (and publicly accessible, thanks to… Notion!) In general, I continue to be astounded by the amount of tools/services/applications I have not yet heard of, despite how long I have labored to become an authority on Writing Tools.
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Workflow
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In my endeavor to more intentionally design my workspace – to actually dedicate a space for working, originally – I originally very much intended to set up dual displays for my desktop, but the desk I settled for (an old family piece from the early 1900s?) does not have enough surface area to position two displays, regardless of how thin they’ve become since I last had one. Combined with a limited budget and a concern that two displays might actually result in further distraction instead of less, I instead went for a single, 27” LED affair. I’ve also been making full use of Windows 10’s desktop switching feature and have found it surprisingly easy to make a habit, especially thanks to the Ctrl+Win+Lateral Arrow Keys keyboard shortcuts.
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On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I’ve by now worked out a personally-optimized remap (thanks to the keyboard manager tool included with PowerToys, about which I have far too much to say in some future post.) I had a conversation with a few Mastodon friends two weeks ago convincing me that my methodology of forcing myself to learn shortcuts by integrating a cheat sheet into my desktop backgrounds may actually be an original idea and useful to other users.
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In terms of writing spaces, I have actually been composing the less serious stuff I’ve been writing within WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, which is not an admission I would’ve expected to be making, just a year ago. A dedicated post about this, too, is fucking coming, but suffice it to say that with a fairly-substantial PC and a better hosting provider (DreamHost over GoDaddy, in this case,) composition has become far far smoother – improving enough to make it a viable space within which to pound away original stuff for the first time. Writing essays for academia has encouraged my return to Microsoft Word, once again, on which I’ll blame the fact that I am currently composing this very bit in The Old Bitch. A desire to once again hack together a set of personalized Word templates has led to the birth of two such files which I am proud enough to share on my Notion drive. Eventually, I would also like to take the time to completely redesign the “Ribbon” in Word – something which I’ve literally never seen anyone else do. (I spent a substantial amount of time trying to find a library for MS Office customization files, to no avail, though you can find my own customization file as it stands on the same Notion page linked just now. Let me know if you’re able to successfully import it.)
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A confession of vanity: I suspect the only reason I haven’t yet stopped composing within WordPress is that I figured out how to change the typeface to Adobe Caslon (across both the editor and the front-facing site, naturally,) thanks to my newfound access to Adobe Typekit. Yes, apparently I really am that shallow. For those Office 365 users among you, I highly suggest you look up how to enable the Classic Office sound theme. Unlike Make Use Of, I find them both adorable and genuinely useful as auditory feedback. You may also be interested in my discovery of some fairly-Woke additions to Word’s autocorrect options and the subsequent bitchy controversy their introduction spawned.
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The Read-It Website
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If you know me at all, the following admission probably seems unbelievable: I have been using Reddit. I created a new subreddit for Extratone – which I do not necessarily expect to be populated any time soon – and r/SoftwareHistory after discovering that it didn’t yet exist, which I definitely do not expect you to populate, but would be delighted if you did. As with seemingly everything else I’ve covered, I also intend to write about how Reddit’s recent feature additions and redesign may actually make it a redeemable space on The Web, which should prove interesting. Clearly, I have become more than willing to accept the moniker of Software Historian whenever/if ever my authority achieves the appropriate volume to deserve to be christened so.
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Obviously, none of the developments I’ve shared in this post indicate any improvement in my productive output, but I hope to learn soon how to settle into a fairly-consistent (and hopefully much more original) writing process.
I bought a desktop tower for the first time since 2010 and spent an embarrassingly long time struggling with Bluetooth shit.
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As with my entire history of computer purchases, my acquisition of an HP ENVY Desktop tower, today, was last-minute, ill-informed, and certainly irrational. You “PC master race” folk: please spare me the dude, you could've just built your own pc so much cheaper shit.[efn_note]Or don't. Whatever.[/efn_note] Yes, I realize the sensible course of action would've begun with a two hour trip West to the closest Microcenter, where I'm sure the staff would've made PC shopping an absolute blast and I would've come away with a more powerful, much cheaper machine. However, after I managed to break Windows on my only machine this weekend (and subsequently failed to reset it,) I was getting especially behind on schoolwork and had absolutely no desire to complete any of it on my iPhone.
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And so... I've just returned from picking up said HP Tower along with a 27” HP LED display, and am writing you after having set up the machine physically and installed most of my “essential software” list (at least all that I could remember.) As per my favorite tradition of new computer acquisition, I have named the machine after Hildur Odegard from Fortitude:
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“First Impressions”
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It's been exactly 10 years since I last bought a desktop tower – since I first set hands on the Dell XPS Studio desktop with which I would create the majority of my intellectual property – and I was immediately surprised by how much smaller[efn_note]6.12 x 11.93 x 13.28 inches.[/efn_note] and lighter[efn_note]13.12 lbs.[/efn_note] this tower was than my expectations. The display, too, is remarkably light and thin. Rationally, I should not have been surprised by this, but I'm not going to punish myself for continuing to find any sort of magic in technology.
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In the box were a Bluetooth keyboard[efn_note]Specifically, an HP model 4251a-khsap003k.[/efn_note] and mouse set – the latter of which I will hopefully never have to use, thanks to my Logitech G203 – and was perplexed by the process of how to pair the former with the tower while it was in setup mode for far too long. I was just about to give up entirely when I revisited the packaging and noticed what I'd previously assumed was an anti-theft device, but was actually the fucking dongle for the pair. I continue to despise Bluetooth peripherals, obviously, but the multimedia function keys of the product led to some important realizations: I now had reason to use Windows Desktop Switching and have a calculator application again! However, I have yet to figure out how to alter the Function key's behavior (I'm not even sure it's possible:) in order to input Alt+F4, I have to input Fn+Alt+F4, which is far too clunky to depend on. The issue did lead to a revelation which I may or may not integrate permanently: I mapped Alt+F4 to the previously-unused button on the very top of the G203. So far, it's been pretty nifty.
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The HP 4251a-khsap003k included in the box with my new HP desktop.
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That said, a component of myintention to create an intentional, static, upright-sitting desktop workspace included an allotment for a quality mechanical keyboard – my justification was that any professional in a particular craft makes a point to have the best possible tools for the job, so a high-quality keyboard has actually been very long overdue, in my case. So, I sought out a single Wirecutter recommendations list and even attempted to disseminate r/MechanicalKeyboards.[efn_note]I haven't even started self-harming yet, so my stomach is definitely strengthening![/efn_note] After a brief jaunt, I concluded that no reasonable person would be able to make heads or tails of the forum or its seemingly endless wikis without considerable indoctrination so I more or less threw a dart and landed on the Varmilo VA108M, which I ordered. All I know is that it's fairly highly-reviewed on the marketplaces I checked (though hardly mentioned on the subreddit, actually,) and that it has the Cherry Switches, which are... The good ones.
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A concern I originally had with taking over the tertiary guest room – by far the smallest allotted living space in the house – as my office was its distance from our wireless router, two floors down. The last time I used the room as a workspace (five years ago,) my old tower's integrated WiFi card often struggled to maintain a reliable connection. The adapter included in this desktop, though, actually managed to clock the fastest download speed on my SpeedTest.net records just now.
It's almost painful even to write this but... As beautiful as this $250 display is to behold, I've grown accustomed to my Surface Laptop 2's 2256 x 1504 13” display after years of hard, daily use. Apparently, those dimensions mean the little machine's display has a pixel density of 201 Pixels-Per-Inch. Filling a 27” display with just 1920 x 1080 means a pixel density of just 81.6 Pixels-Per-Inch,[efn_note]I suppose I should not have been surprised to immediately discover a dedicated online tool for calculating pixel density.[/efn_note] and the disparity was glaring to my eyes, even from the setup screen. After a few hours of regular use, I'm not sure I notice it anymore, but I suspect I will again when I've got the laptop running again. Please do indicate whether or not you think such a complaint makes me awful in the Crowdsignal poll below.
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have I become truly spoiled or is 1080p just... not high enough resolution for a 27" display.
I've also already had trouble connecting my Bose SoundLink headphones correctly via Bluetooth. On my Surface Laptop, it registered as two separate devices – “Stereo Headphones” and “Headset” – which allowed me to use them as both the primary audio output and the primary audio input. For whatever reason, I have been unable to accomplish such a simultaneous connection on this machine: I can either connect them as headphones or as a headset, but not both. This video provided some help – I know now that I have to open Sound Settings and manually connect the headphones every time I re-connect them. Hopefully, I'll figure out another solution soon.
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Returning to the webcam issue: I discovered that absolutely zero local stores keep add-on webcams in stock anymore, which makes sense. I resorted to searching Amazon for webcams and found a gargantuan list of brands I had never heard of. When I filtered by the one I did recognize – Logitech – I saw barely-facelifted versions of the camera my stepdad bought in 2008 and none were in stock. Unwilling to further investigate or research more, I set the price filter for under $40, sorted by customer ratings, and bought the first product which had even remotely legitimate-looking reviews: this 1080p thing branded with “Mersuii.”
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After returning to the order invoice hours later for this post, I got curious enough to Google search the company name and discovered a dead-end url, zero Wikipedia page, and this Trademark registration, on which I spotted some very interesting information. Entered in the second “Goods & Services” row is the following text:
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Adult sexual stimulation aids, namely, devices for massaging or vibrating external and internal portions of the body, vibrating and non-vibrating reproductions of parts of the male and female anatomies, male sex toys, masturbators, penis pumps, electrical penis cyclone pumps, rings, clamps, stimulators, vibrators, dildos, dongs, butt plugs, anal beads, rings to be worn about the penis; Adult sexual stimulation kit comprised primarily of adult sexual stimulation aids and a workbook
I've been devoting significant attention to this blog recently, and I hope it shows. Reading now contains a list of recommended email newsletters as well as an ongoing list of my all-time favorite reads on The Web. I also added Podcast for End User and a dedicated Subscribe page. I've added Open – a list of some of my favorite Open Web projects and Social – a list of my social links. About has also been updated with new branding and more current hyperlinks. Typography and colors have been unified and updated to Version 2.3, and my theme has been officially listed for those of you willing to engage in the sincerest form of flattery. Also, look at that favicon! Thank you, CJ!
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Furthermore, I took the time to import some old work:
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“Bandcamp: Streaming's Secret Savior“
-A magnum opus of a 13,000+ word essay on why Bandcamp should be the future of music streaming services.
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“Mark Fuck and the Goofy Godheads“
-An old, hilarious rant about Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk that – if I may say so – still rings awfully true today.
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“The Matchsellers' Inheritance“
-A local bluegrass band releases an album that proves they are not just what they appear to be.
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“The Case for Chuck Klosterman“
-A deep dive into whether or not the voice of one old White Portland Dad should be culturally considered.
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“Kilgore Trout on CreateSpace“
-A critique of self-publishing culture (immediately after self-publishing myself) disguised as a review of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
“Illiteracy in American Media“
-A short academic essay about how little the illiteracy issue is covered in American media.
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This blog has now surpassed Extratone in number of email subscribers, which I deeply appreciate. Though you're not paying – yet (hehe) – let me once again encourage any/all feedback you may have. Send me an email!
I was interviewed by Write.as Community Manager CJ Eller about writing software, Extratone, blogging, and self-curation.
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So I am super curious that you mentioned Markdown as something that saved you from fiddling your life away. Can you go more into that?
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I started an online magazine four years ago originally on WordPress. I thought I knew something about web development, but honestly I did not. It ended up becoming a fixation on trying to make something technically different from what I'd seen done with WordPress, which detracted heavily from my Editorial duties over the years. I'm on the OCD spectrum so I just couldn't let it go. I spent thousands of hours fiddling with different themes and formatting within those themes, and what I ended up with was a mess. I would make changes that would break old posts, so I'd go back and fix those, only to make more changes days/weeks/months later and have to go back again. I'd known vaguely about Markdown, but it wasn't until it was mentioned in the WordPress dev Slack that I really considered it seriously as a way out of what I'd been doing. I realized that its inherit limitations were actually very good for me – that I needed a limited system to constrain my workflow to keep myself on task. Finally, in late-2018, I started to convert our old content to Markdown and essentially haven't looked back since.
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Did it take a while for you to accept Markdown's limitations? Was there a turning point for you? Did you look for a Markdown plugin on WordPress to help after making the change? I imagine there's something like that out there.
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There are third-party plugins, yes, but I believe the new WordPress editor now supports “markdown blocks,” which is sortof handy for those who want to continue in that direction. The turning point was probably when we ran out of money and lost our account with our hosting provider. I was left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. I'd already started moving that direction within WordPress (largely because of the Gutenberg editor project,) but losing the site in its entirety was what I really needed to push us into a more modern, progressive CMS. Honestly, Markdown is capable of everything we actually need and nothing more. I'd like to think I was able to realize this from the beginning.
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So you're left with an old external HD full of old backups and an empty domain. Talk to me about the process then of finding that modern, progressive CMS. Did you have a vague idea of what you were looking for? I imagine getting those backups ready for whatever you were going to choose as another process entirely.
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I actually decided to ditch the backups and just move forward with a different Editorial direction (the project has since been more or less put on hiatus.) I knew Markdown had to be involved and that I never wanted to look at anything like WordPress' dashboard ever again. I played around with a local Ghost instance but just didn't feel anything for it, if that makes sense. I'd already moved my personal blog to Write.As months before and eventually realized that it was just what Extratone needed – so far, I've only imported my own contributions and the most recent work from others.
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Could you explain what you mean by feeling something for a piece of software? I noticed this in your recent post on your personal blog and what I enjoyed about it so much. There's an enthusiasm about the software you do recommend that jumps through the screen. I want to use Bear after reading your post.
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I'm glad to hear that! I suppose it dates back to my upbringing on a farm in rural Missouri, where I felt a real affection for – and attachment to – our tractors, combine, and such. When one cares about their work, I think it's inevitable for them to be emotionally invested in the tools they use to accomplish it every day. During my brief stint in IT in the beginning of 2019, I saw a lot of users struggling with outdated and ridiculously unintuitive software throughout their entire workday and it made me really appreciate the idea of “good workflow.” I'm not really a developer, but I believe software can always be better because I've seen it. As an End User of sorts with not much cash, I feel like my main contribution back to developers should be celebrating their good work. This is an idea I feel I do not encounter enough in day-to-day life.
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As someone who also had a brief stint in IT, I totally agree with the struggles people go through because of outdated & unintuitive software. But IT also made me realize how much of software is personal — someone will want a solution that's unintuitive to you but is intuitive to them. You learn a lot of empathy from that.
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I am intrigued by your last point there — why don't you think you encounter the idea of celebrating software developers enough in day-to-day life?
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I suppose specifically I mean I don't see enough celebration of good development. It's hard to challenge the personal workflow of anyone, yes, but I hope folks will continue to want to better their lives with new solutions. As I mentioned in my Tips post, Microsoft Word is a great specific example of software that simply should not be used anymore – especially in composition for The Web. Not that Word is celebrated, necessarily, but its alternatives are not. It should be noted that I have no specific authority in this matter other than years of experience with – and enjoyment of – playing around with software. I just think that End Users deserve better than they get, and awareness of new/different software is a huge part of the problem. Making average people aware of better solutions should be the primary function of special interest tech journalism, IMO.
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Great point about Microsoft Word. I don't even remember the last time I seriously used it — high school maybe? And like you said, discovery can be an issue to the adoption of these alternative tools. So are there any common patterns you've noticed as to how you've come about these software alternatives that you now use? Patterns that someone could adopt?
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It's not that I slave away, but it does take a lot of time to discover them. The simple answer is: I drink a lot of caffeine and hyperfixate on the internet. I'm not sure it's something the average user should want to adopt, but if they do, they should be on Mastodon. They should be googling “alternatives to...” regularly, and they should worship Free and Open Source Software. Accepting that you never have to settle for one piece of software is probably the beginning. For lack of a better term, I just love playing around with software. That's not something I would advocate for my old clients or other End Users – I would rather find out myself and then present a list of alternatives in an entertaining way. I hope that's an appropriate and sufficient answer hehe.
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No that's great! The acceptance of never having to settle for one piece of software is at once valuable and challenging to adopt. If you keep switching you could be a sort of software vagabond who throws their data into a rucksack to head to the next viable platform. I've always had trouble trying to find the proper balance between playing around with software & learning a tool well enough that it can be useful. How have you personally navigated that? I could imagine your foray into & out of Wordpress as an example.
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It's always a challenge when trying new things. I obsess over different ways to accomplish tasks. I've probably signed Extratone for 15 different newsletter services (including Buttondown today) though I haven't actually written a single edition of our newsletter in nearly two years. I think it's only recently that I've been able to look at these habits from a reasonable perspective. As in, I am now able to finally differentiate between playing and being productive, but it took some 15 years. Self-awareness of one's actual progress is key. Asking questions like why am I actually doing this – for profit or for play? Differentiating between these two is something someone like me will always struggle with, I think.
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The distinction between playing and being productive can be quite blurry. I sometimes find that playing around with a piece of software can lead to a productive use of it. How about you? Did you start with the idea of creating Extratone first and then tried to find the right software to fit the job? Or did you start playing around with Wordpress and then the idea of the digital publication took form soon after?
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That's an insightful supposition. I actually tried to launch an online magazine before Extratone with virtually zero editorial focus along with a standalone podcast that I'd been hosting on WordPress for years. I originally began playing around with WordPress sites in my early adolescence, so you could say it all culminated in the idea. It took maturity to realize that I actually wanted to build a platform for other voices rather than continue to invest in my own. I'd like to believe that was all enabled by the playing hehe.
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So what lead you to the conclusion of building a platform for other voices? Especially curious from the maturity angle. Because you still have a personal blog, so it doesn't feel like you've completely neglected your personal voice. But would you consider that as not the same investment of time & effort that you'd put into something like Extratone?
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I should be clear that I have not accomplished what I set out to do with Extratone. After a fairly big personal trauma in 2015, I had a bit of an existential crisis and realized that I had surrounded myself with so many talented (in a particularly relevant way) online friends who were producing all sorts of incredible content – music and videos, mostly. I realized that I was better at editing and other platform duties than I was at writing, and that perhaps the online communities I was astride could be provided a single banner to give themselves. In that sense, I haven't figured out how to do what I set out to yet. Ideally, my byline would be completely gone from Extratone, so I've more or less put it on hold until I figure out how to accomplish that. Turning it into a somewhat profitable media company is still my biggest long-term life goal.
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The curatorial characteristic you describe is underrated, even though the “everyone is a curator” idea is jammed down our throats all the time. There's something about this curation on a person-to-person level that still has lots of room for experimentation. On that subject, do you have any examples of communities, sites, or models that guide where you'd want Extratone to go?
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My citable aspirations in that regard have been somewhat superficial, I'm afraid. From a technical perspective, I really admired what Joshua Topolsky was trying to do with The Outline – which just closed this month, actually. They built their own CMS including a bespoke advertising delivery platform which really looked great but they just couldn't figure out a sustainable editorial focus. In my fantasy world, I have the connections and digital media insight of Topolsky and know how to apply them in a way that supports our community because I don't see any one brand popping up any substantial umbrellas over the electronic musicians I know. (It wasn't until “too late” that I realized Extratone's sole editorial focus should have been electronic music all along.) I read a lot about media but I'm pretty picky as far as hero worship goes when it comes to my own professional goals. I once promised that Extratone would never run ads, so I could see some sort of non-profit classification working out in our future. I believe I could be an excellent curator – I'm just not quite sure how to get there yet.
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I think you're a great curator — had to ask that question of influence because I think you have a unique curatorial presence on the web. Just saw you tweet about tractordata.com. Who else would recommend that? Love it. That's why I thought Are.na would be right up your alley.
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So you emphasized “our community” there — what do you define as your community in that broader context?
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Well thank you! That's a question I'm still struggling to define. Electronic music is about as far as I've gotten. I met most of my talented friends on Twitter over the past 10 years or so and have tried to contain them in a list before. There are innate challenges in defining such a creative community – I have done my best to label without being constricting, but it's definitely difficult trying to figure out how to provide a flag which everyone feels comfortable flying. I still think the best I've done to articulate what I'm trying to say was for Extratone's About page. Most of the folks I'm talking about are used to hustling their own brand so it's been a real challenge working on the right way to reach out.
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A flag which everyone feels comfortable flying — that's a great way to put it. What I find interesting about your internet presence is that you defy the idea of flying just a single flag. Along with Extratone you have multiplepodcasts, multipleblogs, and now you're starting a Motorsports & Tech dedicated Mastodon instance.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about how important it is to have many online buckets to put your ideas in. One just feels too limiting, especially if it's solely linked to your legal identity. How do you think about this matter of identity & expression with your own online presence?
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That's a very good question. I can't take credit for mastd.racing, actually – I'm not sure who created that server but it's administered by an account called RaceControl. You've arrived at another one of my biggest challenges. Consolidating my interests has always been a problem, especially on The Web. Age has definitely helped narrow them down a bit, but I still can't help myself sometimes. I think it's ended up alienating a lot of my followers on social because I have a hard time posting just within my niche(s). I'm not so sure how to feel about this, honestly. One could argue that I should post whatever I want, whenever, but consider your audience is also a concept I can no longer ignore. If anything, I need to learn to let myself be limited a bit more by those buckets. Once again, Extratone is a good example of this – I should've never published app reviews there, but I did. We're all learning, I suppose.
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Do you feel like you have to even learn to limit yourself on your personal blog? It seems like a personal blog can act as the release valve — a way of getting around cornering yourself into the niches that Extratone and other projects require. You can freely write about pens and Picard without feeling constrained to a single subject.
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I think I'm just now coming around to understanding personal blogging and the freedom that entails. It's been a long while since I've had the urge to write about things on which I don't consider myself at least somewhat of an authority. I think – like many people – I originally just used my personal blog as a guinea pig for messing around with themes, and I'm just now actually catching up on some of the lesser items on my “to-write” list. Since we've begun talking I've begun building my blogs bookmark folder back up and following the #100DaystoOffload challenge, which I find immensely impressive. I can't say I'm quite up to it, personally, but I definitely plan on opening up the taps a bit more. (I also don't want to flood read.write.as with too many joke posts ya know hehe.)
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That's awesome! You're reminding me of the interesting relationship between writing & tinkering when it comes to blogs. They both feed into each other in a strange way. Before, when my blog was on Wordpress, I didn't care about tinkering around — writing was my sole focus. When I moved to my new blog, however, I found myself shift towards creating apps that extend my blog and messing around with its CSS. So it's interesting that you've gone the opposite way, publishing more instead of solely tinkering.
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What has awoken the urge for you to tackle those items on your personal “to-write” list? To open up those taps a bit more? Because I can see the publication mindset, being somewhat of an authority, getting in the way.
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That is interesting. I'm wondering how many people are in each of our camps. I hate to be so topical, but the pandemic and being home constantly has definitely contributed. I've also begun to learn to let things go, which is an essential skill. Being able to actually kill work when it needs to die is the real secret. I just built up the strength to delete the rest of my 2019 list a few weeks ago.
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I wonder also! And hey, no problem bringing up the current situation. I think it's making me write more also.
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Want to drill into that practice of letting go as an essential skill for blogging. As a final question for this chat, how have you gone about the decision of keeping ideas that you've had for a long time and when to let them go? It's been something I've been struggling with for recently as ideas for blog posts start to pile up.
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Self-curation is definitely tough. Generally, it's very hard to let things go – especially when I've progressed at all significantly into research/first drafting, but I know when to kill something if I reread and am unable to immediately see where I was going. I've noticed that trying to rekindle interest or momentum in a topic is unusually not a worthwhile use of time in my case. If I can't get my rhythm back fairly early in, I am very unlikely to, ever. That said, I think it's also important to forgive yourself for investing time in something that won't work out – otherwise, you will settle for less than what you originally intended and release something you won't be happy with.
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Thank you so much for your time! I really enjoyed this!
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Forgive and forget! That's a great point about rekindling an interest being a sign of letting go of an idea. I've done that too many times. This has been a blast to chat virtually David — really enjoyed your thoughts and am looking forward to future blog posts and installments of Extratone!
It’s very pretentious to talk about pens, I agree, but I believe there’s a level of pen pretentiousness which is worth sharing with the writing masses. I continually encounter people in both personal and professional settings using – and often worshipping – very shitty pens. I'm not going to pretend spending $15 on a pen has not become a novel or ridiculous idea in contemporary culture, but if you're willing, this is one of those areas where some retrospective can lead to real pleasantnesss. Here are some of the tools I've owned. (I'll be linking heavily to The Pen Addict in this post. It's all we've got. Sorry.)
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Parker Jotter
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I believe everyone on Earth should own a Parker Jotter. It's a slim, small ballpoint designed for sketching with a clicking action that just about everyone loves. I have owned and lost many and I will continue to for the rest of my writing life. I cannot even begin to communicate how worth it $16.99 is to never write with another disposable ballpoint ever again. They're tough, light, and beautiful. Sarah Read for The Pen Addict:
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If you're primarily a fountain pen user, but you acknowledge the occasional need for a ballpoint, this really is the perfect one. It looks and feels like you're spoiling yourself, but the price is low enough that you'll still have to add a fountain pen to your cart to get free shipping.
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Pilot Metropolitan
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The Pilot Metropolitan has been the entry-level fountain pen for all of time as far as I know. Google for reviews and you'll find praises across the blog spectrum – from Little Coffee Fox to Writing For Pain and Pleasure to The Gentleman Stationer. “I'm not sure there is anything on the market that even approaches a pen of this quality for $15.00,” says the latter. Testimony from the first:
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I love how the Pilot Metropolitan feels in my hand. The brass body is cold and weighty while you write without becoming a burden to use. Despite its low cost, the look and feel of this pen will be sure to leave an impression on your friends and coworkers.
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The Pen Addict argues for the next pen on my list as The Ultimate Beginner, but I'll stick with the Metropolitan. It's a little unorthodox, actually – it doesn't feel quite as substantial as the other fountain pens I've used in my time, but it's a blast.
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Lamy Safari
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The modern alternative to the Pilot Metropolitan, the Lamy Safari is the coolest instrument on this list to own, but it is generally twice the price. Though I liked being seen with the Safari more than the Metropolitan, and its writing experience is more conventional in terms of what to expect from other composite fountain pens, I still think the Metropolitan is more fun to use. Instead of reading what I have to say, though, check out the only words about any of these pens I spied in a major publication. For The Strategist, David Notis writes:
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Fountain pens can be complicated and intimidating, but the Safari was designed to be approachable. (It was apparently originally meant to help teach proper handwriting to schoolchildren). Pen enthusiasts often recommend it as a great “starter” fountain pen, which I’ve found to be spot-on. [...]
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Not that I’m suddenly an expert, but there is something special about writing with a fountain pen. The steady flow of ink is so expressive; it somehow makes the weird, messy quirks of my handwriting feel intentional.
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To be honest, I feel like I could've done without my Safari, but I did actually write with it quite extensively. Here are two more opinions: The Gentleman Stationer and Little Coffee Fox.
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Kaweco
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Huge bias here: I adore Kaweco as a company. I first bought a Mint Skyline Sport (the featured image of this post) in 2016 and I fell in love. I love the breeziness of their colors. I love how Germanic their old logo is and how anything you read about their history is inevitably found on a website looking like this. As Susan M. Pigott points out for The Pen Addict, the plastic Sport series can be a bit lacking in refinement. “The Skyline Sport is made of plastic, and it feels rather cheap in the hand,” she says. Unfortunately, my white Classic Sport had the same problem, though I also adored it. From Shashwat Vardhana:
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If you have small to medium sized hands and like the screw cap action, you should most certainly go for this pen. While it might not be the best writer of its class, its reliability is absolute and I have never had any complaints with the pen in this aspect.
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My baby – my ultimate pen acquisition – was my Kaweco Steel Sport. I bought it in person with cash at Pen Place in Kansas City, and it was by far my favorite writing instrument of all time. As far as I'm concerned, this is as high as pens get. Find yourself in the position to buy one and you will be satisfied forever. From The Pen Addict:
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The Steel Sport features a – wait for it – stainless steel barrel. What is it about stainless steel that I love so much in pens? It tends to land in a barrel weight sweet spot that is heavier than aluminum, and lighter than copper and brass. [...]
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Stainless steel has a density and warmth that I enjoy in a pen barrel. It is also practically indestructible, which is what I want in a pocket pen.
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If you write by hand, you should treat yourself to one of these instruments. If you'd like to write more by hand, you definitely should. A good pen will have you looking for excuses to write.
When I have to pee too much to actually finish anything.
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I've updated the look of this blog with a theme adapted from “Anxiety” by Max Henderson but I've yet to update the colophon with the new colors (partially because I don't have the energy to name them yet.) Extratone's theme was listed on write.as' new themes project a while ago, of which I am quite proud. I've begun crossposting to Mastodon from Twitter again.
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Autos And Such
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I'm mostly blogging because I am fairly stuck on the Volkwagen Atlas review I promised to get done this week. (That link is to an online Word doc of my live progress, on which I'd love any comments on if you have them.) I've been playing enough Gran Turismo Sport that I've created a new blog specifically for automotive writing at dieselgoth.com. There, on Titanic day, I made a post including an “exclusive” invite link to mastd.racing, which I would compel any enthusiasts among you to oblige.
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Hanging out with myself trying to get Zoom-bombed.
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Listening
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This feature on the Bandcamp Daily regarding “Bleep” has really been my shit. Imagine my 70-year-old mother dancing to this.
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[Matt] Anniss subsequently went on a local Bristol internet station, penned a blog post, and posted a DJ set of Bleep, as a way to convince those same DJs that his thesis had some merit. He wrote an in-depth feature on the form for electronic music site Resident Advisor—which caused him to think bigger about this formative, unsung moment in UK dance music history. “I found the sound itself alien and otherworldly, but also endlessly fascinating for some reason,” he says. “It seemed so fresh and futuristic still, but also mysterious.”
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Software and Stuff
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Still waiting on my tax return/possible Corona stipend, I have lost my subscription to Google One, meaning the business Extratone Gmail (ihadtopee@gmail.com) is about to be unhooked(?)/deleted/no longer able to receive mail. As such, I've spent the past few days moving accounts to davidblue@extratone.com including the newsletters I'm most fond of (like Nextdraft.) This has given me a good opportunity to weed out those I don't particularly care about and to try using Outlook as my primary email client once again. Somehow, this has got me reverted into trying to make use of my Microsoft Office business subscription once again – I have (eeek!) not been writing in Markdown. May the Gourd have mercy on my text format-fucking soul.
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The other project I've been trying to distract myself from the Atlas review with is my list of poweruser/especially handy Windows/iOS/MacOS applications/tricks that I believe just about everyone should be using. From “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” (working title):
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I want you to come away from this list feeling as liberated and powerful as I do now when I’m On My Computer without any condescension or tedium. Unfortunately, there’s probably going to be some of both, so please stick with me and don’t take it personally. I do a lot of online reading, writing, and fiddling. I’ve been compelled to do these things in one form or another since very early childhood, and what follows could be described as a list of my favorite tools to accomplish things. Almost all of them are entirely free to use and the vast majority of them are easily and beautifully functional as well. They are what I suggest for my own mother to use, for what that’s worth, and I would argue sincerely for their extreme importance. Don’t waste your life on bad software.
Why spend so much time worrying about what Medium is? Maybe because we wanted to know whether it was a friend or an enemy. The answer is that it’s neither. It’s a reflection of what the media industry has worried about, and hoped for, and not received. But Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like. That’s not much fun for people who got burned along the way, but Medium was never exactly ours to begin with.
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Other Stuff
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I wrote Extratone's sparse submissions page today after signing us up for Submit.as. I'd encourage you to check out the prompts and to send me any suggestions you might have.
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Extratone.com's favicon has been updated thanks to the beautiful geniuses at write.as. (They literally just take requests for this via email.)
Yes, I am still managing to waste my time digging up and re-arranging some very old content, but I just couldn't resist. Somehow, it didn't occur to me until yesterday evening that I could sort through the original video files of my old vines fairly easily in fucking Google Photos and blast them through iMovie for iOS into a full montage relatively easily.
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Some of these are very cringey...
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Yes, I'd love to finally get around to my ultimate romantic editorialization on that most dearly departed social network, but things are way too jumbled right now, obviously.
Setting out upon a desperate personal journey to rediscover enchantment with computers.
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This evening, a package is scheduled to arrive upon my doorstep containing a Compaq Portable Plus luggable computer from 1983 which I have fantasized about buying for far too many years. Despite living in the midst of perhaps the worst possible financial situation to spend $139.99 outright on a relic of computing, I finally just bought one anyway last Thursday because I’m absolutely fed up with life without the magic I remember feeling from computers. Yes, I am having a mid-life crises and The Machine is just a physical manifestation of one of my favorite stories, but I expect it will provide something irreplaceable for me and at least one piece of entertainment for just about anybody: I’m going to start a photoseries of myself using the 26-lb., suitcase-like, and utterly time-displaced Portable Plus in different coffee shops throughout Portland.
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There’s also potential opportunity (or necessity) for me to make use of my limited knowledge of hardware electronics. I’ve never been very comfortable with openly using the term “hobby,” but I fully intend to savor, document, and preserve every possible detail of my experience, so we’re going to behave as if the tales of computer history are precious to a dedicated audience besides myself, and that I am thereby and hereafter binding myself to an important duty of discovery, curation, and presentation expressed through multimedia of the highest possible caliber.
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In other words, I’m pretty sure I’ve just begun a vintage computing blog. Before we go any further, then, let’s dispense with the obligatory arrangements.
Put simply, Compaq was punk as fuck. Three dorky Texan technodads premeditated their leave of fair, secure jobs in the industry in order to bet everything on the promise of a single undeniably pro-user ideal to disrupt its dominant monopolistic supervillian. Unlike any of the countless other stories from the information age with the very same introduction, theirs was immediately propelled into stratospheric, record-breaking success — from coffee table sketches in the wastelands of suburban Houston nights to one billion dollarsin less than five years, proving that it was possible to win huge in tech by committing sincerely to liberating the consumer and manifesting the ultimate performance of the underdog complex American business has ever witnessed.
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Those of us who’ve maintained some curious orbit of technology have recently entered a reconcillatory process as the world has become all at once intimately familiar with our collective pursuits’ true consequences. Never has it been more appropriate to reflect on the wholesome bravado of the only American computer company to build a billion-dollar business atop the sole mantra of user liberation. At a glance one might assume that AMC’s attempt to reproduce Mad Men’s formula with a story set in Compaq’s origin in a series that’s supposedly attracted a fair number of Netflixers called Halt and Catch Fire in conjunction with the 2016 documentary Silicon Cowboys have sufficiently reminded America of to whom it really owes its privileged tech industry. However, a Twitter search for “Compaq” turns up virtually nothing of consequence, and — on the other cultural spectrum — I’ve yet to see a single well-documented collection of Compaq hardware, and I’m unsatisfied.
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Like it not, you’re coming with me on a safari back through two full nostalgic cycles to rediscover our wonder and excitement about technology because I miss it desperately and I know you do too. We’re going to find something marvelous.
Reporting from deep within the iOS cult on essential apps/methods for real-life music people.
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Listen to this article read (with some bugs) by Siri Voice 3 below...
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As you may or may not be aware, I’ve spent all of my 2021 so far diving real deep into iOS, considering all that has changed since “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.” I’ve tuned in to the output of explicitly Apple-adjacent publications both old (MacRumors, Apple Insider, 9to5 Mac, etc,) and new (Apple Scoop, MacStories,) which have all metamorphosed in huge, mostly-redeemable ways just as their primary subject has. I have my own pubescent stories of Mac occultism, but I do not consider my relationship with the brand to be an essential part of my identity, as so many do and have. Apple, Inc’s story is spectacular and infinitely-relevant so long as they remain “the most valuable company in the history of the world,” as I so love to describe them. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am often compelled to bring up the humongous contrasts in the historical context of the company – to scream infinitely many variations of the observation that Apple was basically the fucking indie, premium-tier consumer tech manufacturer owned by the Creative Class for the first half+ of their existence, and have somehow maintained that Think Different™ brand narrative as they have definitively become the Big Blue of their time.
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From my perspective, the responsibility for the wellbeing of this utterly-delusional, occasionally very dangerous sentiment actually lies fairly squarely on those of us who consider ourselves better than all of that because of our Debian workflows and their ancient command line utilities. (For the record, this is also 100% delusional as things stand in 2021.) One thing I think we can all acknowledge, though, is that Apple’s image has been inextricably bound with musicmaking, throughout, far more than any other even remotely comparable tech company. Naturally, the business still loves to bring this up all the time in big, glossy gestures. The topical example of note would be the only worthwhile content I’ve yet to encounter on Apple TV+: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which documents the highlights of the young, beloved musician’s prodigious ascension. For what it’s worth, I appreciate some special insights I gained thanks to the film, which I do not actually consider at odds with the truth of its super on-brandness for Apple.
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An interesting take I found from 2017 from a new favorite voice on the business end of tech reporting: “How Music Drowns Apple’s Innovation” by The Information’s Jessica Lessin portrays Apple’s relationship with music distribution and the music industry as a sort of compulsive distraction from its ambitions in serving video content, namely. Lessin points out the everpresent reminders of this obsession:
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And so it is no wonder that Apple’s first forays into original video content fall under Apple Music. It’s worth noting that the first series the company announced—“Carpool Karaoke” is literally about singing; “Planet of the Apps” features rapper Will.i.am as a judge.
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I think I can speak for the majority of my audience when I suggest that the targets of Lessin’s cynicism would be more than welcome, if they were The Whole Truth. Indeed, the most valuable company in all of history retaining an “emotional” attachment to the welfare of music creators might be described as charming or more. As is often the case on The Information, the comments from readers often offer noteworthy insight. In this case, Kevin Swint – who has apparently worked as an executive for both Apple and Samsung, according to his profile on The Information – responded with an important consideration: “…it's possible that Apple's behavior around music has more to do with the company's overall tendency to stick with its past successes a bit too long rather than music really being a core part of its DNA.”
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In terms of business, that’s all I have to contribute, and I shall do my best not to evangelize Apple Music (or more likely, disparage Spotify as one of the most destructive cultural forces of our time,) here. However, I would like to respond to a particular Jimmy Iovine quote from the original Apple Music announcement amid the 2015 WWDC Keynote:
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There needs to be a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery… and if that place could actually accommodate and support the artists who make the music, not just the top-tier artists, but the kids in their bedrooms too, provide them all with a home and a way to engage with their audiences, that would be pretty great.
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Boy, this service Iovine describes sounds an awful lot like Bandcamp, no? The suggestion that Apple should have purchased Bandcamp is a very scary one, from my perspective, but I am reassured by the likelihood that the notion did indeed occur to someone at Apple, Inc. at some point in the past, and was quickly discarded, for whatever reason. I promise not to mention Bandcamp again in this Post, aside from its own two iOS apps: for listeners and for “Artists/Labels” as creator/curator tools.
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I’m going to be focusing largely on the iPhone-bound experience, here, though I did borrow my mom’s MacBook Pro for a weekend to explore the state of music on MacOS and (accidentally) played around with Apple Music on The Television (a surprisingly beautiful experience.) On that note, I’ll hurry up and get specific…
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Apps
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Assuming you’re already an Apple Music user, it’s very possible that you’ve been deprived of the “true” experience on the service provided by the variety of actively-developed but woefully-undercovered app store entries that integrate directly with Apple Music. One of the most glaring discoveries I’ve made so far in my iOS deep dive, this year, has been the absolutely horrific state of Discovery on Apple’s App Store. If you’d thought to search the top charts under the store’s Music category, you wouldn’t find any of the gems I’m going to highlight, here. The credit for exposing me to their existence, in fact, lies with MacStories – a hard-hitting, well-established Apple-adjacent media company piloted by Federico Viticci. At this very moment, their app-centric podcast, App Stories, is in the midst of a special mini-series devoted to Music on iOS/Mac, from which this Post draws upon heavily. For better or worse, they represent the definitive authority on this subject (among many others, naturally,) though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend their various publications be added to the reading lists of any but those most invested in iOS.
There is something uniquely concrete about a purely-chronological feed which we’ve lost in the past 5-10 years in favor of algorithmic curation, generally. The next item in this particular feed, in fact, includes my attempt to explain why Twitter’s hard-chronological Lists feature has sheltered me from the anxiety of the service’s main timeline, now ordered by proprietary (and obscured) formulas. I’d been aware of that dynamic in my own Twitter consumption for years, though. I certainly did not anticipate the impact of the music release equivalent of a chronological timeline as provided by MusicHarbor – an app for iOS and MacOS that acts as a frontend for one’s music library across both Apple Music and Spotify.
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It's hard to remember how we (Apple Music) got here without embarking upon some gargantuan A Complete Visual History of Apple Music-like document, but it must be said that Tim Cook's “next chapter in music” has become a sad afterthought. As far as I understand it, the “streaming war” between Apple and Spotify has long since gone definitively to the latter in statistical terms, which I'd suggest to be an overall positive outcome for Apple Music subscribers, generally. The self-perception within the heavy music consumer crowd of “niche,” “underground,” “obscure” cultural minority should – in theory – push those who believe themselves destined to be different away from Spotify into the handy care of Apple, the absolute champion of this particular self-deception. To be honest – though I write this for all listeners, sincerely – I have found myself in a sort of utopian echo chamber of my own design in music culture terms. My days of waiting through 4+ hours of local openers before rap shows are far behind me, and I consume and engage exclusively with music I find personally redeemable.
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My Apple Music library has become quite fragmented after I lost my entire physical music collection along with the external drives containing my accumulated digital music library in 2017. Still, after more or less starting anew this past December and casually, deliberately adding digital files back into the accursed, ancient iTunes desktop application and restoring some (outdated) versions of my handful of shared curatorial playlists thanks to SongShift (which we'll glance on later,) MusicHarbor currently lists 1433 artists represented across my Apple Music and (very sparse) Spotify libraries. I know this because of a very simple Siri Shortcut I modified which returns a text list of all Artists in one's MusicHarbor library in Quick Look. (Here is my result as of this moment in GitHub Gist form.) According my App Store receipts, I first downloaded MusicHarbor on March 26 – 20 days ago – which is mentionable because of how much I've accomplished with very minimal time investment in terms of curating my own music library thanks to MusicHarbor. As you'll note in the 3rd of the 4 screenshots embedded above, I was able to delete System of a Down from my library – a single function which alone justifies the app's one-time $5.99 “Unlock Everything” fee, to my sensibility. I've also been able to begin following all the artists represented in a few of my favorite playlists with a handful of taps – a task which would literally require hours in the native Apple Music app of old (when one could actually follow artists, there.) On that note, it's time to cite the primary MacStories article you should read, entitled “How I Keep Track of New Music Releases,” regarding Apple Music's performance as a release tracker:
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The ‘New Releases’ section is tucked at the very end of the For You page and laid out as a horizontal carousel that requires a lot of swiping; you can view the ‘New Releases’ page as a grid, which has sections for different weeks, but, in my experience, it only aggregates highlights for new releases from some of my favorite artists. The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.
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Here, Federico Viticci is riffing off a newsletter issue written by music blogger Jason Tate, in which he describes the service's missing tracking functionality as “the single most frustrating part of Apple Music.” Though these points in the conversation are both almost two years old, MusicHarbor remains the ultimate means of tracking new music releases chronologically on Apple's platforms. Though I am personally just three weeks in, the confidence this app has given me in the certainty of its chronological release feed is quite profound. Its integration with one's calendar to track upcoming releases is a bit much for my own needs, but I know personally enough invested curators for whom it'd be a godsend to mark it no small addition.
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MusicHarbor’s only downside is entirely excusable/understandable, in context: it’s a bit clunky. For the sake of this work, I set up a shared Apple Music playlist so I could further demonstrate all the new music I discovered in MusicHarbor. Adding whole albums to this playlist with a single tap feels powerful because it is – I’ve no idea what sort of developer wizardry is involved in such an action, but the Wait Wheel doesn’t feel like too much to endure. Adding a release to one’s library – the other in-MusicHarbor accumulative function – is a bit quicker. It’s important to remember that this piece of software was/is created and maintained by a single human being, though I would expect nothing but improvement, going forward.
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That’s all I have to report on MusicHarbor, for the moment, but I’ll add further MacStories praise from their 2019 MacStories Selects app rewards:
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What makes MusicHarbor special – and, ultimately, the reason why we all use the app here at MacStories – is just how much developer Tanaka understands what someone who wants to know about new music releases is looking for.
On the other end of the spectrum, exploring new digital manifestations of The Music Collection, is Albums, which actually functions as an entire replacement frontend player for Apple Music. Reviewed much more recently by MacStories, it really is best-described as “opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists.” Considering that I installed the app just a week ago and have focused most of my attention on MusicHarbor in that time, I’ll leave most of the commentary to John Voorhees. All I can say, really, is that I see an extremely powerful application, here, for a fairly specific use case: someone who’s listening is largely occupied by albums they already “own” in Apple Music and treasure deeply. The ability to set an individual record’s “Immersive UI Tint” down to the hex (in “Album Settings”) is as in-depth a tool of adoration as I’ve ever seen in a digital music service. Combined with Albums’ presumptuous takeover of actual playback from the Apple Music app, I think I can rightfully say that it was built for the extremely serious music consumer.
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My favorite part so far: the app knew well enough to offer me THE ZRO BUTTON. Telling, I think.
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Others
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Since it’s already quite clear how much this Post draws from MacStories, I’ll let their review of Soor stand on its own (I couldn’t quite justify spending $6.99 just for review purposes.) In the episode embedded above, they also mention Denim – a playlist cover creator I am not personally all that impressed with. There’s also MusicHarbor’s sibling, MusicSmart, which manages the tricky but essential task of adding the metadata retrieval Apple Music should have included all along. The rest can be found in the episode’s show notes. I’m not done with them, but the rest are what I would differentiate as services…
One of the bewilderingly undercovered digital music sharing tools of our kind, Odesli has been my preferred method of sharing tracks/albums/EPs since I first discovered it in 2018. It is not specific to iOS but it isessential for competent music sharing, anywhere, these days, in its magical ability to correctly intersect any given piece of music’s links across all streaming services, known and unknown. To be honest, I thought everybody would be using it by now, but it’s continued to develop with minimal attention aside from Siri Shortcuts developers. Thanks to Odesli’s Public API, dozens of Music-centric Siri Shortcuts have emerged over the past few years, resulting in one of the most useful Siri Shortcuts integrations to be found for real, reasonable human beings. Here’s where Apple-adjacent media and I part ways…
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While current common conversation might point you to Federico Viticci’s MusicBot hyper-Shortcut and/or @gianflo6’s 600 action-strong Song.Link Shortcut, I (perhaps expectedly) would point you to my own, 17-action Shortcut which spares you any selections and simply opens the Song.Link URL of the track currently playing in Apple Music (while also copying said URL to the clipboard.) It’s not that MusicBot isn’t massively impressive and still useful, but it represents a class of super/hyper-Shortcuts which (from my perspective) far-overreach beyond the intended use case for Siri Shortcuts and end up immediately bewildering/alienating potential new users. Truthfully – as Federico singularly acknowledges – they are full applications built atop a less-than-ideal platform designed for relatively simple, repeatable automations. I’ll spare you further opining on this idea until another, potential Post, and instead demonstrate my personal solution.
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In the clip above, you can see I was working on this very draft when LoneMoon’s “kawAii @F” started playing. Naturally, I was compelled to share it on Twitter, so – without leaving Drafts (my writing app) – I called the type-to-Siri prompt by holding the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and simply typed “sl” (I renamed my Shortcut for this use,) running the Shortcut, which opened the track’s Song.Link page in Safari – very much an optional step, mostly just to make sure the match is correct – and copied its URL to my clipboard, from which I could share it anywhere. Since the advent of widgets in iOS’ Today View, I’ve also kept a button for this Shortcut in one of four precious slots in a box at the very top. For those willing to play around a bit, it should be fairly straightforward to configure the end bits to your liking, but it should work out of the box for even those least interested in Siri Shortcuts/automation in general.
As I confessed before, it is only thanks to SongShift that I was able to recover anything of my original, prized, deeply-considered Apple Music playlists. The standalone MacStories article on this one is a bit dated, but I don’t see much change in function in that time. For most people, SongShift’s free service is simply the best way to transfer a playlist between music streaming services. If you find yourself genuinely sold by the features offered by SongShift Pro, I suspect you know more about playlist manipulation than I could ever learn you by diving in any deeper.
Yup… Believe it or not, Last.fm is still fucking scrobbling after 19 fucking years (almost to the day,) and its iOS app still fucking works. What’s most bizarre about this truth is that I did not encounter mention of Last.fm for years until I started noticing it as an integration option in the settings menus of these premium iOS apps. Is this some sort of conspiracy? I’m not sure, but I suppose I might as well insist you follow my ancient account, if you’re still using it.
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alright folks fucking ADD ME ironically or not. this profile is older than all of the cells in my body. https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK
I should also note that not only is the Last.fm iOS app still working, it’s working well, from all appearances, anyway. Though the service no longer includes hosting, itself, it’s apparently still a prime player in the world of playback tracking.
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Music Creation
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DAWs
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What if you actually want to “make” music with your iPhone? We’ve seen iPhone television ads for years featuring amalgamations of musician-looking types playing instruments with cables attached to their handsets, but is the iPhone now a reasonable platform for any sort of serious sound capture? The short answer is no. Who am I to proclaim such an absolute? None other than the motherfucker who’s been messing around with mobile DAWs for 10 whole years. I even “released” an “album” on Bandcamp made exclusively with Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS and inspired by the dangerous life of the contemporary raw milk smuggler. I wouldn’t call it “music,” per se, or an example of what a real electronic producer could pull off in the app, but it does represent its capabilities in the hands of the average user, using mostly default loops.
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While Apple does publish an Apple Book entitled “Everyone Can Create Music” about GarageBand on iOS, it is specifically directed at iPad-bound use. Any serious DAW user uses keyboard shortcuts, which I admit I only discovered recently in GarageBand for iOS. The official documentation is – once again – for iPad, specifically, but most of them still work on iPhone.
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FL Studio Mobile – the original third-party iOS-bound DAW – is still going, apparently. While I did, indeed purchase the original version on my iPhone 4, I remember absolutely nothing about it, suggesting I was over my head, even then. There’s also Auxy, as covered recently in this App Store Story and Reason Compact. I’ve played around with these more recently – since they’re both available in their most primitive forms as a free download – with little to report.
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Capture
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Disappointingly, Apple’s own Music Memos – as demonstrated by Chris Welch from The Verge in the embed, above – is currently in the process of being officially sunsetted and is now no longer available for download on the App Store. As that article notes, users are instead directed toward GarageBand or ye olde native Voice Memos to record high quality audio. However, if you want to take advantage of the stereo audio recording capabilities included in iPhones after the 11 Pro, you must either use the native Camera app to capture video (and extract the audio later,) or Dolby On – Dolby’s own iOS app for recording which – if I’m completely honest – will do nothing but utterly frustrate anyone trying to capture the truest digital audio possible.
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As part of my iPhone 12 Pro Max Review, I’ve accumulated quite a few audio files in various formats testing its capture abilities and stashed them in this folder on The Psalms’ GitHub Repository. Probably the most relevant of these, though, is embedded just above. If you’ll forgive my pajamas, ridiculous piano faces, and general rustiness with the instrument, it demonstrates the “Audio Zoom” feature found in the iPhone 11 Pro and up, which I’ve found to be unfortunately underdocumented by Apple, itself. I added my own inquiry to this post on the official Developer forums asking about it, but don’t really expect anything back. According to “What is Audio Zoom for smartphones?” published on the site DxOMark:
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The main technology behind audio zoom is called beamforming, or spatial filtering. It allows changing an audio recording’s directivity (that is, the sensitivity according to the direction of the sound source) and shape it in any way necessary. In this case, the optimal directivity is a hypercardioid pattern (see illustration below), which enhances sounds coming from the front direction — that is, from the direction in which your camera is pointed — while attenuating sounds from all other directions (your background noise).
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My testing has suggested that the best means of recording unfiltered-as-possible stereo audio with an iPhone is to record video at 1x zoom with the native Camera app and extract the audio from the video file. In the Bandcamp track embedded below, I “mounted” my 12 Pro Max right above my old upright’s soundboard and extracted audio directly from the video file with Audacity. It was then amplified slightly, saved to a FLAC file and uploaded directly to Bandcamp. Of course, it’s worth qualifying that – while I have extensive experience with audio – I have neither professional training, nor any professional monitoring equipment.
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That said, the biggest objection I’ve heard from audiophiles regarding audio capture and manipulation on handsets, generally, has to do with their hardware’s extremely limited capabilities when compared to any sort of professional desktop soundcard. Given the greater argument I've come to regarding the state of consumer tech as best exemplified by smartphone design – that we've come to expect far too much of single devices, and the resulting jack-of-all-tradeness summing their real-life capabilities has become a severe detriment instead of a feature – I must echo, again, that adding “studio” audio capture, manipulation, and production capabilities to our goddamned cellular phones doesn't help anyone. To any user truly hoping to accomplish these things, I say just go home and boot up your damned desktop.
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Other Considerations
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The final episode in AppStories' three-part miniseries on music was just published today, though I suspect – for my audience, anyway – that its coverage is mostly out-of-scope on this topic, largely for financial reasons. Apple's first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow at noon, my time, and is entitled “Spring Loaded,” which – combined with its 4/20 joke date – suggests to me that we'll finally see the release of the APPLE GUN™ alongside iWeed™, but little to nothing in the way of music.
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In the midst of my brief research into The Greater History of Apple Music, I discovered the existence of iTunes Ping – which I somehow missed entirely, along with my Twitter friend Jon Male. I also discovered articles from the company's decision to kill its successor “Connect” from Apple Music, which was reportedly “rarely used.” Notably, this removal also took away what little power Artists had over the narrative surrounding their music on the service. I can see the business justification for all of this (barely) except for removing the ability for users to follow artists.
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The latest Apple Music feature – a “channel” for music videos – also makes zero sense to me, but the launch of Apple Music on the webabsolutely does, especially for Windows and Linux users, who are now officially freed from iTunes (the software) and allowed to use a much more modern Apple Music experience. I prepended “officially,” there, because third-party Apple Music web players have existed as long as the service has allowed the required integration. First, there was Naveed Golafshani's – which is no longer live – but Brychan Bennett-Odlum's Musish is still live and working, as you can see from the screenshot embedded above. Other than the ability to select between two stream bitrates, I can't seen any remaining advantages to using the latter over Apple's own web player, unless you harbor spite toward their handling of the whole thing, which would be entirely understandable, from my perspective.
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MKBHD’s first tech purchase with his own money was an iPod Touch. mine was the original flash drive iPod Shuffle… this is what I mean when I say “I feel old.” it’s not that I’m actually elderly - it’s just strange finding out so often I am older than people I look up to. pic.twitter.com/rbCupcU0R5
As someone who grew up in the mp3 era with a first-generation iPod Shuffle and iTunes, living and dying between iTunes Store gift cards, Apple Music still seems like one hell of a magical deal. In effect, it allows access to all of iTunes for a flat monthly fee. Or at least it would had I never become acquainted with professional independent musicians who've published, there, and have to contend with tedious realities like the process by which one can add those beautiful lyrics to Apple Music tracks, and who's only real means of control/engagement on the service has been removed with virtually zero prospects of a replacement. If, indeed, Jessica Lessin was correct about Apple's obsession with music, it has resulted in very little for any class of music makers, and left even its listeners to seek out and find third-party solutions like MusicHarbor to perform even the most basic personalization one expects from a modern music streaming service without even bothering to amend their App Store's discovery process to illuminate them, or even write a fucking App Story. Despite this, one-to-three-person app teams continue to work on new solutions, to these and other problems...
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
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Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
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For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
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Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking” – a function once relegated to magazines – has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” – applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now – can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
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In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
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On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
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She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
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According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
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“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
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The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
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In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
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Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and – most controversially – the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns – if not its proposed solutions – should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
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Responsible Curation
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For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
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Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
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Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
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Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook – the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world – as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy – vague, at best.
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In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
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In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”[^1]
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You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
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In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
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Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
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In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
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Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
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The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
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Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
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I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”[^2]
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As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections – which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page – and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
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Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
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The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
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[1] While Bandcamp set out from the beginning to make it easier for artists to publish music, getting music on Spotify has always been a grueling process.
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[2] I fully intended to quote Kaitlyn Tiffany on how organizations only get tech media attention if a significant amount of capital is involved in some form, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ll certainly come back and add it if/when I do.
My friend Sierra has used SoundCloud almost exclusively for her music discovery, consumption, and recommendations, but has remained resolute in her unwillingness to financially invest in the service. As such, her listening is regularly interrupted by ads and limited to bitrates as low as 64kbps. Since I was last employed, I have maintained a vow to her that I would pay for a subscription to SoundCloud Go+ – the premium listener tier of the service – with my own money, once I was once again in place at a steady job. This move would remove all advertising from her listening and up its bitrate to 256kbps, among other benefits.
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Two nights ago, we were refueling her car in preparation for another one of our recreational drives into rural Missouri when I made the decision on a whim to simply signup for a trial of Go+ on my own account using Apple Pay, mostly because I knew we’d be going out of effective cell network range and one of Go+’s most emphasized features is its ability to download music locally. (Since my Apple Music subscription expired earlier this year, I only have a single album actually downloaded on my phone.)
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***
-The above is what I wrote several weeks ago, just as I was beginning my trial period. Now, having experienced a significant amount of time as a SoundCloud Go user, I am a bit sad that my trial is over. To be honest, I fully intended to become a paying subscriber, but my PayPal account was $0.70 short of the $12.99 monthly fee when the first billing cycle came, two weeks ago. This is not a conclusion I expected to come to, as SoundCloud’s fundamental arrangement could not possibly differ any more from the music streaming service I long claimed as my ideal own: Apple Music.
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One major worry I would imagine potential subscribers may have when approaching SoundCloud as a replacement for their single music subscription service would revolve around the extent of SoundCloud’s establishment music industry library. There’s no way your Dad’s Sunday barbecue playlist is going to be on SoundCloud, right? Strangely enough, I was unable to find a single track that was not in the library. From my own favorite Keith Jarrett’s archives to the new Dixie Chicks album, every bit of big time record label-distributed music I could conceieve of could be found aside the Go+ badge (though notably, neither of these showed significant playcounts.) As far as the app experience goes, I swear it got smoother as soon as I signed up for Go+. This is probably bullshit, but regardless, with the seemingly ever-widening disparity in the experiences of free vs. premium users, SoundCloud appears to be moving actively away from the former.
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I have long said (somewhat in jest) that Chance The Rapper is the only reason SoundCloud still exists.
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From a future historian’s perspective, the battle for the definitive name in independent digital music distribution has already won, largely thanks to its relationship with Chance The Rapper, who’s quickly become a “cultural influencer, thought leader, global star,” and one of my generation’s upmost celebrity champions. Obviously, there is little sense trying to determine whether SoundCloud earned his partnership or landed their popular association with his name as long as the artist maintains it publicly, while continuing to give new meaning to the phrase “serially likable.”
--“Bandcamp: Streaming’s Secret Savior” | July, 2018
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If CNET_ was asking the question a year before that Bandcamp essay, I think I can feel properly varified. What I’d really like to know, now: does Chance still feel the same way about the streaming service after the launch of SoundCloud Go+? Considering that I am far from a real music journalist, I do not have any more contact resources than you have. That said, I left [a comment on his Facebook Page](https://www.facebook.com/chancetherapper/posts/3299672310124810?commentid=3319045628187478). I guess we’ll see.
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Some more technical bits: SoundCloud is now castable on Chromecast, but not supported by Apple CarPlay, for whatever that’s worth. Notably apart from Bandcamp and Apple Music and aligned with Spotify, SoundCloud is explicitly investing in algorithmic music discovery, which means its users are doing the curatorial work. I am doing/have done the curatorial work. That means the DnB crowd is going to receieve Toto recommendations, given what I sought out for this post. You’re welcome, and sorry…
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While I was surprisingly unable to find any Tweets or Evernotes further evangelizing Apple Music (I suspect I’m thinking of an old, untranscribed Drycast episode,) I found real magic in the service as I perceieved it: $9.99 a month for all of iTunes. 13 year-old me would considerthat one helluva deal.
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Naturally, if you know of one, please do comment and/or drop me a line.
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In fact, it is the only streaming app I found that _does not _have CarPlay support. Even Bandcamp and MixCloud for iOS do!
The duo's new album manages to be wonderfully explorative without sacrificing any sacred traditions.
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For years, I took the voices and culture of working Americans for granted and sought to generally distance myself from my origin’s heritage as much as possible, but I’ve since realized that I couldn’t have done so without absolute certainty that country, bluegrass, and folk music were stubborn as State highway ditch-rooted fescue blades: omnipresent forces of Midwestern nature that’d secured their invincibility with the simple superiority of their belonging. While this conclusion is true enough for the time being, it’s quite independently so of their worth or necessity. In such conditional blindness, I’ve simply proven my sensibilities to be (predictably in the case of my seniors) not exempt. This truth is noteworthy only because of its potential to spare others the embarrassment of blatant ignorance to their own privilege. That said, I would suggest that you engage this music sincerely for a moment for your own sake, regardless of your own convictions regarding country music, Indiana, plaid, pickup trucks, the end of the world, or the proper noun for “cantaloupe.”
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As young adults, even those folks who’ve remained resolutely country-minded found themselves trivializing the name of the titanic Dallas-born trio The Dixie Chicks not out of half-assed iconoclasm, but because their brand was so cleverly immune to irony. You thought you were proving yourself of a higher caliber of discernment, but mocking goddesses only paraded your ignorance. In my teen rebellion against the culture of my rural origin, I scoffed at their mention for a while, somehow oblivious to my blatant hypocrisy. Thanks to my older sisters and their automobiles, I spent before and after elementary school days absorbing thousands of hours’ worth of late-90s/early-oughts Pop Country radio. Two summers ago, I returned to this library at length for the first time in 10 years and found my heart completely vulnerable to its related memories and my mind consistently flabbergasted by the oomph of the composition that defines the genre’s last mainstream hurrah.
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The original three Chicks – Natalie Maines, Emily Robison, and Marty Maguire – are still very much alive, kicking, and radio-playing. They even “returned from exile” with a real international tour in 2016. (I regret little more in my adult life than missing the opportunity to see them.) According to a fascinating November 2015 analysis in The Guardian, their 2003 denouncement of President George W. Bush cost them serious cred among their audience, but Johnny Cash likely harbored similar sentiments, Stephen Morrissey is… not straight, the most worthwhile current country sounds from my teenage home are composed and performed by a trans woman, and the staple tunes from the genre’s most chaste personalities are often just about sex. No reasonable individual would still cite this incident in an argument opposing the essential legacy of these three miraculously talented women.
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From a pop perspective at least, The Dixie Chicks are almost certainly the penultimate expression of country music as a technical and emotional exercise. Their extraordinary musicianship and prodigally antecedent mastery of suave sincerity represented the absolute peak of pop country’s untenable relationship with the American working class in one hell of a 21st-century-breaching last hurrah that still brings tears of pride to many an eye. However, the hysterical backlash of the greater working people personified in part by Donald Trump’s presidency is a last sure indication of the mainstream’s final estrangement from all distillations of rural culture. In the coming years, I fear the toiling masses will be left only with less and less authentic, more and more suburban bastardizations of their music as the last superficial delusions of condescending affection from the middle class fade, and the enterprise dies. What does survive will “graduate” (retire) to Folk (for white performers,) and further strengthen the Blues resurrection (for everyone else.) That said, it’s hard to find anyone who’s comfortable mourning the loss openly after acceptance has progressively set in – there’s simply nowhere else to go, and its aging icons have been in desperate need of retirement throughout the Information Age.
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The Top 10 Vegan Alternatives to Working-Class America
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Even if I’d had the moderate exposure from my current perch in the midst of the notoriously grass-roots nature of Portland’s Folk/Blues scene, 2000 miles west, I would have still been totally blindsided by my incidental introduction to The Matchsellers, two years ago. One needn’t harbor any presumptions about the relationship between Kansas City violinist/fiddler Julie Bates and Hoosier blues guitarist, Andrew Morris – they’re just about the cutest pair you’ll ever see, couple’s act or not (it’s less relevant than you’d think, and none of our business.) They’re also extremely talented and genuinely authoritative world-class musicians with plenty of authentic country mileage who exude a proud air of warm, confident serenity occupying the bluegrass sphere. After happening upon their set at Columbia’s faux-speakeasy in Summer 2016, I was at once charmed and impressed by the pervasive magnitude of the ethereal aura that followed them, especially after our brief post-performance conversation. I’m ninety percent sure they came without a mobile phone between them carrying a wicker basket full of CDs and matchbooks, and shucks… I do believe we’ve been doing this whole thing wrong, all along.
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I bought a copy of Kosciusko County then and there and played the shit out of it the next summer, wandering aimlessly around Missouri with my best friend, revisiting (and occasionally disrupting) the resolute peace of the tiny communities I grew up orbiting. On our way to the Hannibal – Huckleberry’s Fictional home/the great Mississippi’s tired tourism machine – we just left it on repeat. As a soundtrack to such sentimental pursuits, a central trio of back-to-back tracks proved especially potent, beginning with “Mentone (The 3,000 lb Egg)” – the work’s nostalgic, tear-jerking sole instrumental. Production isn’t low-fidelity, but appropriately honest – no amount of expensive mastering would be capable of compressing the essence of a surprise late-night live performance from The Matchsellers’ work into a digital audio file, anyway.
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Bates’ fiddling is an impossibly rare pleasure – the real type of sawing that mystically manages to erase one’s inhibitions and sense of civic responsibility when tearing about the borders of quiet row-crop plots, leaving long-lived lesions of billowing limestone high above numbered county roads at ninety miles-per-hour. Succeeding the distant, eye-misting cruise of the 1.5-ton Egg, “Driving Escort” is a masterpiece (naturally) of this raucous realm.
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Driving down the road with a yellow light on top of my truck / Going down to Vincennes earning my sixty bucks.
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Add the accompaniment of Morris’ obviously-fathomless relationship with the guitar, and the result nails a select truth without any hint of prudishness. At sufficient volume, “Muskmelon Breakdown” becomes a beautifully-harmonious catalyst of fast, loose, maniacal, hilarious energy that’s sure to land you in a ditch, but you’ll still be laughing your ass off by the time you’re pulling clay clumps and waist-high fescue blades from your steaming radiator. Kosciusko County isn’t an innovative record by any critical instrumentation, but I’d do best to keep my sun-faded, skip-worn copy readily at hand for the next time I find myself on a fresh gravel road, whenever that may be.
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For the last five years, all we said was goodbye
-I said it again, it was the fifth time
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I took your word and did what I thought was best
-I took your word and went 600 miles west
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That’s it, then – we’ve got The Matchsellers pretty well figured for either wannabe(?) or reformed(?) yahoos of their own design; charming, dusty novelties who chose a folly destiny of toiling their craft for none but a seasonal dozen acres of white, sweating State Fair flesh. Obviously, they’re meant for us sophisticated, globetrotting Winners to collect like thrift store antiques on our way down the interstate. Their time is ours to book for nothing on our mediocre “speakeasy’s” waxy new stage; to post on an Instagram story, to Tweet in an easy compartmentalization of their quaint displacement from our time, deep in the dusty recesses of our collections for no good bargain, where they’ll fall comfortably in line as our predictable and willing country servants should an opportunity happen upon us to show a stranger how interesting, dynamic, and worldly we are.
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As a displaced (and formerly ex-communicated) yokel, I’ve often been astonished by how easy it is to discard American folk music for huge swaths of time unless it expresses some unignorable sort of spectacular torment. My own failure to recognize the value in this one until I became separated and homesick was an overtly foolhardy cliché (though quite predictable of like privilege,) but I can’t help but wonder: is it unavoidable? Of course, the process is necessary for ‘class justice’ – one might even call it a natural law of sorts – and in the case of The Matchsellers, there’s hardly a struggle to communicate emotionally. For a real music scholar, though, it’s surely worth asking of those voices who know: do the oppressed, destitute, and hope-impoverished people of this country still rely on bluegrass, or has it been replaced for them?
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The abstraction of the phrase “good surprise” had plummeted from our collective vocabulary at a record-demolishing velocity in the interim, but this past spring’s release of Bluegrastronauts hit me squarely upside the skull again, stirring a solid half hour of hysterical, shrieking psychosis. I assumed the worst… Dear God, what has the internet forced upon that sweet, rootsy duo?! – and was immediately compelled to drop everything and listen.
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Hoosiers, we have a problem. What the fuck is this album, exactly? A nonchalant, apparently oblivious challenge to every assumption you could possibly arrive with. It’s safe to suppose “Bluegrastronauts” refers to its departure from the rest of their discography – from smack dab in Indiana’s center to the goddamned Beta Quadrant, the two managed to stupefyingly ace a theme most comfortable residents of their bluegrass sphere would take care to avoid leaving up on the kitchen whiteboard – even tackling apocalypse with regal serenity. At first glance, I was sure that copious soft glow had to either be the false product of my own insanity, or a deliberate attempt to alienate the sum of their audience in a single crises of identity. In fact, The Matchsellers had pulled off yet another especially-sparse artistic miracle and harnessed their creative restlessness to propel their departure from the elderly genre’s pretensions without spilling a single drip of their secret sauce. It’s not a concept album (thank God,) but doesn’t wander in any disparaging sense, either.
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Earl Scruggs in a spaceship on his way to Mars
-Pickin' away on the banjo at 100,000 miles an hour
-Bill Monroe in a rocket, see the look on his face
-it's mighty dark to travel when you're in outer space
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Name-dropping four bluegrass legends within the number 1 album-titled introductory track is the pair’s single self-conscious acknowledgment of visiting folk fanatics: this CD looks crazy, but we know what we’re doing – and Kansas City’s mention accredits the locale of the following entirely Missouri-made production. Indeed, in the WhoDoneIts, you’ll see The HillBenders’ Chad Graves layed em’ down in Springfield, and Johnny Kenepaske’s Dead Horse Sound Company spread em’ around in the Heart of America, itself. Missourian musicians especially should take note of these names: the offerings may have diversified since my day, but sound talent like this is difficult to come across, even within explosive college towns. Cutting two live acoustic tracks per performer – four in total – while expecting to retain any subsequent control over the behavior of either unwanted or subject sound is as difficult as any other circumstance you’ll encounter in studio production at this level. I know this much (but little more in that direction): real sound control is simply too tedious to bear for monomiking rascals with GarageBand. Now, having lost or been estranged from any remotely-professional sound reproduction equipment, Bluegrastronauts sounds as balanced and polished as my wired Apple earbuds could ever convey.
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In shared verses, Julie and Andrew’s charmed harmonies are separated beautifully about the listener without inducing a sense of lateral imbalance when one of them sings alone. (Admittedly, I don’t exactly know how it’s accomplished.) No single personality in the record’s toolset – guitar, fiddle, banjo, bass, or dobro steps over any other.
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I have no idea who’s listening, but I’m positive their numbers should be multiplying by a hundredfold very quickly, filling especially with all of ye who feel abandoned by all authentic American representation. They shouldn’t ever fill up stadiums or establishment radiowaves, nor should their art invite extensive pretentious dissection, but they will be adored.
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It’s a quintessential manner of Country Boy pride to whip the middle class’s condescension right back around with a classic demonstration: Oh, you thought I didn’t know about that? You thought I couldn’t do that? Well, of course I can! I’m just not particularly interested. The Matchsellers, though, have attained a much higher tier of comfort and confidence in their own skin.
I have to just fucking do it — I’m going to start writing about music in this space. There’s virtually zero chance that I’ll shout over other voices of music criticism as long as Bilge remains so poorly optimized for SEO, and Portland, Oregon has been far too confusing to deprive myself the opportunity to work out any understanding of its youth culture. It’s not a lack of talented musicians in the area — the opposite is true — but a severe drought of the kind of tragedy and trauma which ultimately give acoustic American musical expression its whole shit. What I caught of the weekend’s invasion with Santa Cruz musicians were all praiseworthy, tight and confident performers who’d obviously invested heavily in their equipment and their presence here. Joe Kaplow arrived with a sort of bespoke magazine rack containing 20 neatly-arranged effect pedals, leading me to wonder for a moment if I was about to witness banjo powerviolence for the first time, but he explained that he simply preferred their availability, and wouldn’t use “more than a few at once,” and seemed almost genuinely perturbed by my attempt to explain the specific industrially-influenced involvement of audio hardware in hardcore punk and grind performance which I was referring to with the term. (“Powerviolence” has apparently become an ambiguous one around these parts, and I’m sure he was actually just utterly uninterested.)
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No more than two dozen guests made up their peak crowd of witnesses, yet Joe and his band certainly made good on shear effort expended in laying down a hearty, back-to-back recital for us at an unusually protracted rate, though apparently either they, the Getaway Dogs, or The Curfews had insisted that a “cover charge” be collected at the door of the house show. It’s not my business to to dwell on or attempt to investigate an unsubstantiatable rumor, but I understand this could have been a breach of house show etiquette. What I do know is that one of the visiting musicians stole 4 flat AA batteries out of my COOLPIX and apparently attempted to jack its ancient Compact Flash card, which is only hilarious because they didn’t succeed. Regardless, it should be said that Joe Kaplow’s songwriting is more flattered by Indie mags than my own ears, though one still wishes for a more substantive topic than “I thought it’d be cool make a corn cob pipe, so I did.” Then again, much of what you’ll find at this URL reads a lot like “I thought it’d be interesting to make a WordPress blog, so I did.” White people have truly run out of shit to say, haven’t we?
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The inspiration that sparked ‘I Said’ moved me like a puppet. So much so that I had to pull over at the top of Altamont Pass, by the huge windmills, and write the song in the back of my van.
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Joe Kaplow for Glide Magazine
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Reflection upon just about anything can have personal meaning, but no amount of musicianship can mask a stark lack of context. I do wonder if Indie Folk should just return to the megachurch, where songwriters like Joe and musicians of his crew’s sort are literally handed a gigantic audience of trained experts at finding profound meaning where it probably isn’t, along with great salaries, from what I hear. Otherwise, all that taxing preparation and expenditure will only lead to more forgettable performances. Or perhaps I am simply misguided in my assumption that artists work exclusively to communicate something lasting to someone. Every conversation I’ve had with Portlanders about Portland music has been predominantly about what artists and their audiences wear and how they behave instead of what they’re trying to say. There’s nothing inherently wrong with leaving things petty, lyrically and choosing to remain content with established sounds, musically, as long as your work is advertised as entertainment, not performance.
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Before I came Northwest, my fiancé had been exposing me to a variety of its music, which I mostly tolerated politely. Dozens of albums and EPs were played through once and forgotten forever, but when I arrived at a demo tape recorded by her long time friend’s band, The Cigarette Burns, I finally heard something familiar, yet vitally compelling: pissed off punks having fun. That said, I should admit that I only attended Saturday’s show because he was on the ticket, and I’m still glad I did.
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After what felt like hours of drowsy corn cob pipes, Christmas sweaters, and old sweethearts at fifty beats per minute (there were literally two young men sleeping within 15 feet of the bands for the duration,) Ricky sat himself on a stool in the midst of Kaplow’s sprawling gear load at 2:30AM with only his guitar and his voice. Unfortunately, I’d squandered the Nikon’s batteries on Californians (the lighting was not ideal anyway,) so I thought I’d share his set on Periscope. Though Ricky had been patiently present and attentive for the entire night (unlike myself,) those who were left of the entertainers bolted to the porch for a lively discussion about unicycles and quinoa while Ricky told us about hate, jealousy, and feeling like shit in a somber elegy. Any further adjectives may edge dangerously close to a half-assed “concert review,” which I am not yet qualified for, but I will say that Ricky’s sincerity made him most engaging part of the night, and his frustrated, conclusive nod to The Cigarette Burns was the first real punk sounds I’ve yet heard in Portland.
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I realize sharing this small experience does little to grow the conversation, but this isn’t a magazine, and I am desperate for answers about the bizarre reality in which I find myself. When Ricky dedicated a song to Courtney Love, one of the male musicians(?) yelled “Courtney Love fuckin’ killed Kurt Cobain!” which was such an unbelievably cliché happening/decision that I’ll surely spend the rest of my days in this city unsuccessfully attempting to work it out, aloud. I can’t quite recall who it was last Fall that responded to my frustration by challenging “what if there’s nothing to understand?” While this may be a reasonable conclusion, I suspect it’s not one I could accept as long as I remain here without losing my mind. If Portland is truly the dimensionless bastion of apathy and intellectual stagnancy for young Americans, I must blog my way out it as soon as possible (for Pete’s sake, just give these kids some antidepressants,) but I’d still like to believe the idea too oxymoronic to actually exist.
As the industry endeavors once again to reconcile the cultural and financial incentives of streaming digital music, one independent platform has wavered little from its 10-year-long mission to bring the business to the unsigned artist with elegance and integrity.
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If you’ve ever thought to yourself wow, Bandcamp has looked basically the same forever, you were entirely correct – now for a tenth of the century, at least – and you’ll be hard-pressed to find another Silicon Valley technology company toting a venture-funded origin story with such casual, yet robust long-standing user relationships underneath an unwavering, bullshit-free commitment to their product. Even under the most ludicrous scrutiny, the company’s rudder is flawless and its course true. What at first glance you’d swear to be an unsolicited conclusion to an obscure examination could very reasonably be described as cheesy, stubborn, dweebish, pious, or just generally boring, indeed, yet the respective accuracy of each of these adjectives are no more than the byproducts of the very same operational ethics which we’ve suggested, requested, demanded, and begged the rest of the world’s computing capitol to re-adopt, enforce, or at least ponder for a beat. The volume of the masses’ exponentially-increasing attendance of late is only overcome by its hysterical shouting match, so let us pipe down for a while, now so that we may be precise as we dig deeper into the methodology which has finally led to a profitable, drama-free outlying technology organization without the need for a single drop of analogous sweat over its brand upkeep. By arranging the company in its infancy to so precisely and elementally align with the needs of its customers, the original troupe of Bandcamp Bums ensured profound and lasting simplicity in the single overarching priority for those in every single role behind the quiet perpetuation of Bandcamp dot com: selling goodmusic.
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The platform indiscriminately provides both individual artists and labels with a clean, cozy, charming, smartly-designed and technically competent storefront with a wide-open storage allocation, optimal search engine optimization and a widely-trusted point of sale experience in exchange for 15% of any sales that should come in – significantly less than other channels; half what Apple Music will take. In examining Bandcamp’s history, its impact on independent music, and its viability as an alternative streaming service, we shall excavate the truth behind the derisive cynicism directed its way by the titans of the tech and music press. Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
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To catch our starting gun, we must first travel to Face The Music 2016 in Melbourne – as far as one can possibly get from The Valley – alongside Bandcamp’s super-worldly Chief Curator, Andrew Jervis to observe his interview for a live audience.
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Bandcamp has always grown extremely organically. There’s never actually been any advertising that we’ve done; there’s never any advertising on the site, and there never will be. We haven’t really tooted our horn very hard.
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In fact, just about everything from the shrewd idealism of those who beget its conception to the on-the-nose care in their person-to-person customer service is so adamantly inverse of the tech industry archetype which the global End User community at large are presently discovering at twice the speed of sound there should at least be some conspiratorializing going around. Where I come from, launching a desolate business to little mainstream success with persistence and dignified determination is (or should be) regarded as a telltale sign that one is running a front (according to the television, anyway,) but exploration of this plausibility yielded nothing in Bandcamp’s case, even after I took the risk of incrimination and begged a certain Boston-based future funk producer to accept my ginormous bribe and include any sort of pharmacological substance with his summer beat tape. He wouldn’t even send antihistamines.
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As uncomfortably as it lands on the soul, no moniker describes Bandcamp more comprehensively than “an online record store.” As far as Ethans go, Bandcamp’s CEO and founders’ public attaché Ethan Diamond is as good as they come: it’s quite telling that he is the only Silicon Valley CEO who’s remained intellectually grounded enough with the rest of us in order to retain any skills in nuanced forms of verbal communication like… humor. The closest the company has ever come to promotion? His awkward, sub-20-minute presentation at the XOXO Festival 2014 offered an impressively succinct introduction to their greater mission considering the unmistakable agony in his body language.
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“We worked out of the public library for the first four years of the company's existence,” he admits. Impressively, Bandcamp was operated entirely as a “virtual company” until 2015.
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Either Bandcamp just happens to be the single Silicon Valley company where the executives are unanimously so fucking fulfilled by their work without exception that they aren’t compelled to leave it long enough to stumble upon the inevitable coastal colleague with a connection to something like The Internet History Podcast, or technology journalism has definitively lost all reverence for actual innovation in favor of the emotionally-charged Innovation Myth, now relinquished almost entirely to the narrative control of its own protagonists. Perhaps it was inevitable that Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos would become immortalized as “those who make things happen,” but our ability to quantify value as consumers tends to scurry rapidly away behind our backs when they’re turned by the constant distraction of these mostly inert figureheads. As their personalities have stolen the story, the people in industry with their hands on real product have all but completely disappeared from the frame, and all of the work remaining at the End User’s eye level was abandoned by aspiration long ago and replaced with the unfulfilling mechanism of A Quick Buck. Though now we are proceeding into a similar frame – only because our subject cares more about their mission than claiming recognition for it and might just be the first such company run by a cast who become sincerely defensive at the suggestion of a cash-out.
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“Bandcamp’s philosophy has always been very different [from] a lot of the companies we’re surrounded by,” reflects Jervis. “We are not a ‘let’s-raise-money-and-burn-through-it’ type of company.”
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I know that your mind has been trained by years of engagement with the digital media of a rapidly-globalizing, venture capital-obsessed society to block the passage of this sort of language across your conscious threshold at risk of life-threatening overexposure to the Medium Dialect and its churnalising neoliberal cyberchode scholars of the Personal Brand; I know you’ve read the exact same quote from how many entrepreneurs in how many worthless, masturbatory business magazine profiles, but I swear on my one-of-a-kind Estonian Hilary Duff pullout that Jervis speaks without irony or deception. how many fucking churnicles have abandoned you, but this time, it’s actually sincere.
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On The Web
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Though Bandcamp was technically the first comprehensive library-modeled music streaming service in existence, the topical conversations between both technology and music journalists and industry executives flooding both podcast and news feeds at the moment orbiting the “Cord-Cutting” phenomena as it’s washed over television, cinema, and music are rooted in the same building blocks as the core technology behind the delivery of all of these conversations as well as their subjects, funny enough. As long as my subgeneration has known it, The Web has been a source of sound in some manifestation, but the example with the most perplexing history was also the first. Today, one of five tabs in the main menu of my iPhone’s native music app contains the text “Radio” beneath an “antenna with waves” graphic which opens a service once called iTunes Radio that was absorbed into – and restricted to subscribers of – Apple Music as of 2016, confusingly. However, both “iTunes Radio” and “Apple Music Radio(?)” – along with any and all audio streaming services (mentioned and not) – are fundamentally nothing more than different UX design interpretations of the “simple” practice of streaming an audio file, which made its debut at the turn of the century in the form of “Internet Radio.” Astonishingly, the protocol – still referred to by at least one person on Earth as “Webcasting,” no doubt – has survived nearly 20 years, and even the youngest of us have likely encountered it in unusual situations.
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Ironically, the majority of Internet Radio broadcasts remaining on the air are nothing more than live duplicates of the traditional radio wave-bound products from the physical stations your car’s head unit receives. Even the current desktop version of iTunes maintains support for streaming “audio files over the internet,” though a glance at Apple’s dated support page for the process suggests it hasn’t crossed anybody’s mind for at least half of that history. In 1994, the publicly-funded radio network Voice of America became the “First [radio] on the Internet” when it began – after an introduction by Al Gore, no less – “offering digitized audio versions of selected newscasts and other program segments in 15 languages on its public internet server on Monday, Aug. 15,” according to former engineer Chris Kern. However – since we’re already this deep into internet history – a distinction must be established between streaming static files and streaming live audio. The first relies on pre-recorded audio files uploaded to a publicly-accessible server – in Kern’s original case, “via anonymous FTP and the Internet Gopher protocol,” which continues to be the elemental process behind every audio file streamed across the Web (including those on Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) more or less because it ain’t broke.
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Semantically, “live” digital audio streaming in its aforementioned “purest” form is more or less exclusive to Internet Radio. Obscured aside from the traditional station simulcast, Web-only Internet Radio stations have their own of “the Internet’s quiet success stories,” filled with quaint experiences and an endless cycle of death proclamations which continue to be disproven, anywise.
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On June 27th, 1999, The Seattle Times ran an especially worthwhile introduction to the concept that likely represents the only major newspaper’s mention of SHOUTcast (the first and likely last name in DIY Web DJing) in the history of the printed word within a work of truly phenomenal tech reporting on Mark Mataassa’s part. From the past, one will find his chillingly spot-on foresight and well-considered observations are bestrewed with mind-boggling hilarity when they look.
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Dialing in to the Net through a 56 kilobit-per-second modem, as I am, this seems like a ridiculous waste – or at least misallocation – of resources.
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I'm using a $3,000 machine, tying up a phone line and seriously compromising my computing power for an experience that in sound quality, simplicity and dependability can't compare, truthfully, with the $9 Emerson clock radio an arm's length away.
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And yet Web radio is one of the hottest ideas going in the ever-hot world of Internet startups and acquisitions: In the past few months, America Online and Yahoo! each have purchased fast-growing Web music sites, rock-music trendsetters like Rolling Stone and MTV have gotten into the business, and technological improvements – from Microsoft's newest browser and Real Networks' newest player to the latest MP3 enhancements – are closing the quality and accessibility gaps.
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The combination of developments is not only changing how computers (and radios) are used, but offering a glimpse of a future when audience demographics are sliced ultra-thin – to the person – and everybody has the potential to be a radio broadcaster as well as listener.
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I only have a few experiences with Internet Radio of my own, but they’re all rampantly more memorable than one would expect. The now in-stasis NWIRE project was by the most relevantly intriguing and savvily-curated home for a diverse host of electronic musicians I’ve ever come across – it was my second default browser tab for most of 2017, when I’d even listen to the odd-hour broadcasts overseen by just the automated library-perusing bot for hours. On episode 16 of Drycast, I recounted the absurd tale of my surprise morning encounter with a Norwegian station’s live broadcast from some European breakcore club, which was likely responsible for the most fun I’ve ever had working in retail.
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Extratone’s former Tech Editor is partial to a station called Radio Swiss Jazz, which appears to be thriving in comparison with most visible broadcasters, and unapologetically emits a bizarre amalgamation of tunes both chart-topping and Seriously Obscure across every conceivable genre (including Marching Music,) and continent of origin. Between every few charts, the brief commentary and station identification has provided our own private mystery: Was that one pre-recorded? This guy was on yesterday, but has since shed his accent? However, these tiny temporary mysteries are Internet Radio’s only remaining value for us, and I suspect the same is true for all but the most laggard laggards. For as long as I’ve been coherent enough to disseminate between much of anything, very few of its visible offerings have offered anything groundbreaking or fresh, perhaps out of negligence (one can very easily arrange leave a machine running SHOUTcast to shuffle through a given library of music and/or podcasts indefinitely,) frustration, or economic necessity.
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Crucially, the truly most critical consequences and contributions provided by the pioneers of Internet Radio to our current digital streaming experience were centered within intellectual property legislation and advertising-supported business. Unfortunately, this juncture marks our complete departure from my wheelhouse, but thankfully, a few sacred accounts of one of technology’s foremost confusing clashes with the ill-equipped, technoilliterate monoliths of the American justice system do indeed remain. As early as 2002, the ineffable Doc Searls reported on a document authored by the Library of Congress’ Copyright Royalty Board called “Determination of Royalty Rates and Terms for Ephemeral Recording and Webcasting Digital Performance of Sound Recordings” for Linux Journal in an encyclopedic breakdown of its implications ironically entitled “Why Are So Many Internet Radio Stations Still on the Air?” I would hope my comprehension is sufficient to declare that this was no Cambridge Analytica: only a few years subsequent the technology’s inception, operators within the Internet Radio business faced serious and immediate fines for their pre-enforcement distribution of copyrighted material stretching four years back – the severity of which the Doc suggested would “surely bankrupt many of the individual broadcasters that have been pioneering this marketplace for the longest time.”
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Unlike the commercial radio stations we hear on the old-fashioned airwaves, Internet radio stations' primary market relationship isn't with advertisers; it's with listeners. In many cases, the listeners are the primary source of revenue. This business model is similar to that of noncommercial (public) radio, only the market relationship is much more direct and efficient. Internet radio stations don't need to stop programming to hold marathon whine-fests begging listeners to call phone volunteers and pledge money to qualify for a mug or a t-shirt. Listeners simply click on a PayPal or an Amazon link, and after a few more clicks they've made a payment.
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By March, 2010, just 374 stations were aggregated in Google’s Internet Radio Directory, and my own quick sample from its list unfortunately indicated that most are now silent, but SHOUTcast has yet to be abandoned after all this time and we can safely suppose the core architecture of the internet will remain recognizable enough to support it until after we’re all dead, rendering the necessary tools indefinitely ready and accessible should new projects in NWIRE’s vein come along (I know of no better fate I could wish upon the protocol.) From Internet Radio’s pioneer days, we must skip over a whole era to close in on Bandcamp’s origin in the very brightest peak of Web 2.0.
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Again, we find ourselves in 2008 and nobody knows what an iPhone is, but the same classic rock-worshiping, upper-middle class, white collar Early Majority who first loved Internet Radio are now rapidly and delightedly distributing links to something called “Pandora dot com” between AOL and Hotmail inboxes. True luxury music reproduction comes in the form of Beats headphones motivated by a 320GB iPod Classic. Budding audiophiles and backpacker dweebs illegally torrent lossless .FLACs to play over their Christmas-gifted studio monitors with WinAmp, which they’ve set up to impeccably “scrobble” their history with every played track to their Last.fm profiles. Everybody else is still buying music from iTunes. (Those who cannot afford to buy the music they intend to add to their libraries transition to the music nerd classification as soon as they’ve sought out a way to obtain it free.) “Streaming” comes from subscription services like Rhapsody (now Napster,) which are too buried in Digital Rights Management controversy to feel sustainable. MySpace Music has just begun to fade away – next year, in “the Twitter era,” SoundCloud will definitively replace it as the go-to creator network – and Pandora’s immediate future is bright – they’ll make a big move on brand-new mobile streaming experience when they launch their iPhone OS app in July, but the limited performance of the handset’s EDGE network will render it a poor alternative to onsite .mp3s for years to come.
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In January, to minimal acclaim, Oddpost’s Ethan Diamond launched Bandcamp, the startup with programmer friends Joe Holt, Shawn Grunberger, and Neal Tucker to be “a sortof WordPress for musicians” – an easily-created, well-designed landing page to showcase one’s digital music files. As Holt laments in an interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for your music had long been “a pain in the ass.”
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“You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.”
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As an address to all of their shared complaints about the experience of online music distribution up to that point, early Bandcamp was an astounding piece of engineering. The quaint, unsurprisingly crate-digger-looking Ethan Diamond – who’s more or less remained the singular public face of the company since the very beginning – began a brand tradition of transparently music-nerdy correspondence with his first post on the Bandcamp blog, explaining the solutions the team had come up with in greater detail.
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We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
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The launch garnered very little attention from tech or music publications of the time, but Andy Baio’s interview with Diamond provides a substantial, technically in-depth picture of just how revolutionary and necessary it was. Most of what has continued to make Bandcamp such an essential tool was present at the very beginning: server-side stats and metadata (a unique architectural undertaking, no doubt,) track and album-oriented pagination, and a robust, easily-embedded Flash player.
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Study Diamond’s first “screencast” alongside a video tour of SoundCloud from the period and you’ll notice just how much more functional, future-proofed and dignified Bandcamp appeared in comparison. As apprehensive as I am to be caught arguing for minimalism over good design, it’s made perfect sense in the use case of this one platform, which knew exactly what it was from birth, along with what it would always be, apparently, which is such a bizarre reversal of the archetypes and the relentless common narrative we know from The Valley’s legends. Ethan first shows the consumer’s experience – none of which has changed after a whole decade aside from quality-specific track purchases – before delving into the artist-side UI, beginning with the statistics tool, which included playback and search insights to a depth that was (and still is) unheard of from a free service. Then, he demonstrates the publishing process from upload to playback: adding album art, setting a release date, and pricing its purchase. Aside from their removal of the old waveform visualizer (I couldn’t find any record of an announcement of this decision, official or otherwise,) Bandcamp has changed absolutely nothing of what’s shown in Diamond’s tutorial. In the next few months, they would add custom page design, email address capture, and support for custom domains. By October 2008, they’d made enough waves to be picked up by CNET, for whatever that was worth. Apparently, Facebook Music was a legitimate property as well, but I do not remember anything about it at all—pondering an alternate reality in which The Social Network became the dominant online music streaming platform leads to a bizarre comparison of Neil Diamond and Mark Zuckerberg which I can’t imagine being altogether productive. Suffice it to say, the two founders’ visions differ greatly.
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Musicblogocide
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Contextually, it’s also important that we dwell for a moment on the legal and financial hullabaloo surrounding music sales during Bandcamp’s first formative years, and the federal government’s losing battle to interpret, enforce, or replace intellectual property law for the information age. As the Web had grown exponentially more capable and accessible as a means of audio file distribution, it had become absolutely saturated with blatantly DRM-circumventing .mp3s and .wavs. For years, the quickest way to follow up on a check it out sort of music recommendation was simply to search Google for its track name followed by “.mp3.” If the first go didn’t yield success, even the most rudimentary application of cryptography – like substituting some variation of “nsilmtic.rar” to find a download for Nas’ Illmatic, for instance – was a sure bet for one’s second try, which would often return several copies just laying around Google-indexed WordPress media libraries, though results hosted on Mediafire were a preferable alternative. This was the establishment into which my first adolescent digital music discoveries were borned, and I’m still convinced that 99% of us participants were completely without malice. I’d argue heartily that music’s brief escape from the tireless grip of the record industry as its only medium stumbled into digital form would be clearly shown to have a net gain for the whole of American recording artists if you could measure and plot it, including the past, present, and future use of peer-to-peer sharing.
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2010 would prove to be The Year of Reckoning for the fraction of DRM-violating traffic on the visible Web, at least. Though it’d be virtually impossible to quantify, is it only reasonable to assume that many siteowners made some real money from the ad impressions that directly resulted from their unauthorized hosting and Mediafire-embedding, but let’s consider how minuscule even the most outrageously liberal overestimate would be, side-by-side with the billions in additional revenue YouTube has raked in from the same music since assuming their place as the de facto platform for quickly summoning just about any work of audio that’s ever taken digital form. It was in February of that year that Blogger (another Google property) deleted six music blogs from its platform in response to complaints about allegedly DMCA-violating .mp3s. The Registryinsisted the collective finger be pointed at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, itself.
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“It would seem the music bloggers aren't versed in the ways of DMCA claims and counterclaims. But you can't blame Google for that,” they concluded, after one of the blog’s founders expressed some of the most personally-dramatic words mine empathy has yet faced as quoted in The Guardian.
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“It's just sad because we were documenting young people's music from all around the globe. For a lot of people, it was music they wouldn't have been able to discover elsewhere.”
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In hindsight, “blame” is an even more useless avenue of one’s attention than usual, especially when one party (Google) was 100% exempt from any consequences all along. The alarming takeaway is not the DMCA’s deftness, but that Google had the freedom to wait for a parallel business incentive before deciding the law applied to them.
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Frankly, we should all have realized long ago just how fucking futile it is to attempt to control any file traffic. Every desktop-class browser ships with the capability to capture any streamable media on the Web with a handful of keystrokes – it’d take a maximum of 20 minutes to bestow upon even the most casual user the knowledge they’d need to keep every single track, YouTube video, and Twitch stream they’d ever watch, 100% legally without a single third-party service/extension interaction, but the crucial question remains to what end, exactly? It’s easy, but it’s not exactly a fun way to spend an afternoon. The only two rationales that’d justify capturing streamed Web files at scale are 1) the totally bonkers inclination that any given property/ies is likely to disappear from the entire World Wide Web, ever or 2) the increasingly rarefying expectation of prolonged time away from internet access.
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As Bandcamp has stood so obdurately still, the mainstream music streaming sphere has expanded titanically around it as if enveloping the Indie platform in a surrealist timelapse within the eye of a ruinous tech industry cyclone, which would explosively expand the market into a ghoulish, filthy monstrosity beyond anything we’d recognize from the rule of the WinAmp Hipster, long ago. Today, the coolest and most rabid daily music listeners I know all have Spotify memberships, joining 70 million others globally as of January. For most, it’s how they prefer to swaddle their lives in a constant soundtrack – at work, in the car, at school, then at home on the television. For many, it’s how they “explore” new music outside of peer and social recommendations... or, that’s how the narrative was supposed to go, anyway. Those folks I know who actually create music, however, are rarely seen using Spotify—even after they’ve endured untold horrors in order to publish their own music there—because the real story of its track record as a place to “Discover” new artists, genres, or sounds is completely abysmal. When 2017’s streaming data began coming in this past January, a popular feature by Galaxie 500’s Damon Krukowski was run by the definitively terminal music magazine of broad notoriety—Pitchfork—entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which he began by citing some very alarming statistics.
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“More than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks [on Spotify.] Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.”
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Why? A brazen disregard for necessary meta information, for one.
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“Look now at how badly their applications already serve entire genres of less popular music. Spotify lists recordings by song title, album title, or featured artist name. But that information is so limited it leaves out even the other performers on a recording, a crucial aspect to classical and jazz.”
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Alarming for those of us who intend to create or consume any music separate the Top 40, anyway, which one should feel justified expecting from most people, most of the time. Last month, The Carters released an album on which even Beyoncé identified the problematic service by name. “Patiently waiting for my demise ‘cause my success can’t be quantified,” she rapped, “if I gave two fucks about streaming numbers woulda put Lemonade up on Spotify.” The unfortunate issue with this single denouncement of the industry’s current direction is that its source is adamantly guaranteed a place for her work within Spotify’s top 10 percent for the rest of her career’s lifetime (and probably far beyond.)
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[I could now take the time to complain that she’s also entirely abandoned the city she owes for her career’s creation in its darkest hour, but let’s just plan on coming back to the subject at a later date, when we’ll be sure to touch on how terribly Drake also treats Houston (and women.)]
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Unsurprisingly, the apathy is far from mutual. From the Swedish company’s perspective, the digits themselves should’ve been dearly and universally beloved from the beginning, and their exponentially ballooning hubris became so inflated by 2014 that they launched a WordPress blog dedicated entirely to promoting and discussing their data called Spotify Insights, proclaiming themselves—naturally—to be “the world’s favorite streaming service,” championing the growing diversity in their demographics. Though Beyoncé is mentioned only twice upon a search of its archive as it stands today, it’s with fanfare: “10 Female Artists Women Listen To The Most on Spotify” declared her the third most popular female artist among women, globally, and “Single Ladies” the number one female-streamed track in the world (assuming I’m interpreting its language correctly.)
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We’ve established that Spotify has comfortably planted itself at the polar opposite end of the business spectrum from Bandcamp, yet for the sake of an oblivious adjudicating layman’s understanding, you’d have your work cut out for you explaining the difference between them: both are online marketplaces with gigantic libraries of digital music which a listener can browse, download locally, or stream from using Web browser or the mobile applications offered by each, respectively—and they can do from just about anywhere, for as much or as little as they wish. And—as the music industry and its satellites shall always remain for the rest of humanity’s reign—both are overwhelmingly associated with young people. There, the crucial divide should probably ring a bell—it’s been a constant between cultural generations for as long as culture, itself has existed.
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There are those among us who’s adolescent adoration of music is still completely valid as a very powerful component of hormonal development, yet doomed to quickly sizzle into casual listening or worse by the time our post-secondary Senior year rolls around. And then, there are those on whom the curiosity clings devotedly on: the cool high school punk band-forming types our culture loves to romanticize, who’ll inevitably end up bald and bespeckled with a pre-dawn community radio block. These Musicians, Crate-Diggers, and capital-A Audiophiles have historically overlapped in synonymous functions across a love triangle of dweebish intolerability, though it’s become especially easy as of late to forget that DIY recording is by no means a recent development—its financial and technical barrier-to-entry has simply plummeted thanks to the developmental progression of Digital Audio Workstations and a growing industry of consumer-oriented audio equipment. For succinct insight into this dynamic, let’s refer to the pre-dialogue context in Chuck Klosterman’s GQ interview with “the second- or the third-best rock guitarist of all time”—Zinc Blimp legend Jumbo Page.
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The only thing Page really wants to talk about [is] the sound of the music, and how that sound was achieved. He can talk about microphone placement for a very, very long time. Are you interested in having a detailed conversation about how the glue used with magnetic audiotape was altered in the late 1970s, subsequently leading to the disintegration of countless master tapes? If so, locate Jimmy Page. If a different musician obsessed over technological details with this level of exacting specificity, he would likely be classified as a “nerd,” as that has become a strange kind of compliment in the Internet age. People actually want to be seen as nerds. But that designation does not apply here. Jimmy Page does not seem remotely nerdy.
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Bandcamp’s core architecture was handbuilt from the beginning to handle the “hard part” for creators “so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy,” which it, alone pioneered on the Web, becoming the best metadata management utility for all time, but also committing to a traditional interpretation of music mediums that can feel old fashioned in 2018. Despite having been around for a directly comparable length of time, SoundCloud has maintained its relevance among friends in my network as the more socially-focused platform for keeping up with work from their peers thanks in large part to its exclusive, timestamp-oriented comment function, which allows for ultra-specific shortform feedback between fellow creators and fans. This is how the company has chosen to grow its community, which has lent especially to its strength in the most “nerdy” independent scenes: hip-hop and electronic music. The experience is busy by design and the divide between listener and creator is next to non-existent—by now, the difference is universally irrelevant. External sharing has also become a major strength since the inception of SoundCloud’s Web audio player, which was unlike any other embeddable we’d ever seen at the time. Over the years, it’s become the most universally-supported means of embedding a track or playlist elsewhere, though the space has quite recently began blooming with a few much slimmer Open Web offshoots like Vocaroo, Clyp, and Instaudio.
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While I can casually throw these names around for you in the same sized font, the gulfs between the properties they denote are completely inexpressible in words. Because Spotify went public in Q1 of this year, they released their first earnings report in April: 170 million active monthly users, $1.33 billion in total quarterly revenue, and $5.7-$6.2 billion in expected total revenue for 2018. I’ll spare you the entire Forbes piece it would require to comprehensively demonstrate just how cavernous of a disparity canyon the industry represents. Early projects like Pandora were docile, ad-free, and sincerely curious about the curatorial potential of music streaming services – *let’s use this cool new tech to play music for anybody with a Web browser if only because it’ll be a blast* – yet in that sense, they’ve all failed entirely. All except Bandcamp, anyway.
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“We started as a service to help artists sell their music and merchandise directly to their fans, but then as the site grew—it’s now at about 12 million tracks and 1.5 million albums [as of 2014]—we evolved into also being a destination for music Discovery,” he explains, partially anticipating the foot-to-the-floor transition to streaming which has indeed shook the industry the hell up over the years since. The company's solution is minimal, elemental, yet uniquely alternative as only theirs could be: an idealized digital interpretation of a music collection, which had actually launched a year before XOXO as part of “Bandcamp for Fans.” That release notably introduced the ability to “follow” both artist and fan accounts, the now-iconic “supported-by” section on release pages showing customers’ avatars and optional comments, and public wishlists. “I think it’s great to use a streaming service for music Discovery—they can be really really good for that,” Diamond concedes, before reiterating one of the several variations of Bandcamp’s founding premise that composes his core argument: “if you actually care about music, and you care about the people who make it, and you want them to keep making it, the best way to do that is to buy directly from them, or to use services that allow you to directly support them.”
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Instead of the “firehose”-like experience of a contemporary activity feed, “you’ve got a collection of albums and tracks that people were passionate enough to spend money on.” For my personal use, Ethan lit up a long-dormant incandescent bulb in my skull. My use of Bandcamp had long been to purchase and download music files, only—never to stream it—and there’s been good reason for this. While Bandcamp has formally supported playback on iPhone and iPad in-browser since July 2010, actually using it for any substantial amount of playback has always been a souring endeavor. Considering that it’s persisted to this day, we must concede that it is part of an intentional design rather than just an irritating flaw: multitasking between apps or even browser tabs will prevent continuous playback of an album, as will locking the device. In order to move from track to track fluidly, one must keep the page with the in-use Bandcamp player front and center. For three years, this was the only way to stream Bandcamp on mobile, but such capability was far from reliably expected by even the earliest adopters, then—3G data networks were worse than you remember, anyway—and then in 2013, the Bandcamp app was launched on iOS and Android, providing a sufficient fix in my book at the time. (I’d rather any externally-embedded players I may engage with in an album review or artist profile be limited to a single track, anyway.) However, the app itself remained quite mediocre for years, which was a tangible disappointment given how revolutionary their desktop experience had been when the company launched,but not necessarily a substantial deterrent to the sort of user they were attracting.
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I made a point to spend a lot of time engaging with Bandcamp’s service as much as possible – naturally, this included a trip back through my neglected, digitally dusty Collection, which proved a way more emotionally provocative experience than I anticipated. Ethan’s simple truth didn’t really sink in until I realized that this list is made up exclusively of my real favorites, and there’s not a single track that is not inextricably and intoxicatingly tied to a specific era(s) of my life (yes, even that one Blank Banshee album... I was 18, okay?) It’s absurdly powerful—not something I could engage with for any extended time without becoming saturated with nostalgic gut stuff. (Listen for my upcoming special celebratory episode of Extratone Radio to hear the best music I’ve found through Bandcamp.) It hadn’t occurred to me that I would retain ownership and streaming rights to all music I’ve purchased—including for a $0.00 sum, as I did for at least half of the works you see—even after an artist chose to delete or hide it on their own page. (Though they are not retained in my public collection, of course.)
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The Discovery Debacle
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Pursuing an objective definition of “music Discovery” might appear foolish – an individual’s music taste is perhaps the most broadly angst-steeped realms of overwhelming subjectivity in modern American culture, after all – but its the pungent poignancy of our fundamental human relationship with sound, itself which makes the history of Discovery’s digitization so important (and fascinating.) If I were to ask you what you believe should be the single most important function that must be reliably performed by any “music Discovery” device – whether it be an application, Web service, magazine or even a crate-digging habit – the single factor which would render whole vague concept inert, irrelevant, and/or completely destroyed, how would you answer? How would you interpret the question?
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It’s important we do well to take a considerable moment to cultivate a special wariness of the eggshells beneath our feet in this arena. Debatably at least a minim more than one’s taste in film, Americans from Generation X on forward until the end of time (I suspect) will hold “their” music as perhaps the most integral support upon which their identities are built throughout every stage of their lives. The intense sensation of ownership that propels this phenomenon within our culture leaves an especially sensitive passage ahead of us.
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As a wide-eyed teenager and infantile audio producer, I explored the idea of anti-music in my own entirely Bandcamp-supported project while I searched – aided tremendously by my expert best friend – for the edgiest, least sensical sounds and scenes on which to publicly attach on my identity in an opposing of “Discovery’s” extremes with fandom: an obsessive, entirely-detached last-ditch skirmish between the cultural reality and my delusional pubescent need to be unique. This process appears to be a universal requisite in modern youth in one form or another, but it’s important now that I emphasize this confession: I was an especially ostentatious little backpacker fuck, but I’ve continued to find my shame well worth achieving a specific balance for music’s purpose in my life, and I’d anecdotally endorse its potential to relieve cognitive dissonance at great scale. There’s only so much fun to be had blasting breakcore cassettes at deafening, distorted volumes solely to bewilder rural overnight convenience store clerks on their smoke breaks in the wee hours or the bruteforce seizure of the speakers’ Bluetooth connection at a frat party just to play harsh noise or anime-sampling Hardstyle while demonically shrieking – eyes rolled back – and lighting various parts of oneself ablaze before one realizes that 1) it’s they who end up looking like the idiots for aggressively breaching a group’s fun with inappropriate tunes (yes, no matter how interesting, rare, or underrated they may be, Chadley;) 2) by ferally manifesting, you’ve deligitimized yourself, which 3) can seriously damage any future attempts to accomplish the fundamental drive to share the gospel of music’s variety out of your own rubish frustration with the differences between you.
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The real, sweetest truth is that 100% of all music has value potential because of the medium’s broad influence on the human psyche. Pop music is amazing right now; the signature trap sound we devalued with Datpiff jokes made us all look like fools when it unconsciously transcended our “irony” and burrowed its own huge partition in our sincere hearts. After my pitiful attempt to reject and distance myself from my own rural roots by scoffing at country music for years, I’ve made a beautiful peace with the childhood memories and the historic excellence of Shania Twain and The Dixie Chicks in their mastery of both wholesome joy and crippling nostalgia (I’ve even cried to Taylor Swift.) Yes, it’s been entirely reasonable all along to enjoy the straightforwardly slothen pleasure in belching “Sweet Home Alabama” pounding cheap pissbeer on a foul pontoon boat on the Lake of the Ozarks, leaving my penultimate irony to confess that I’ve only found true and serene identity through music after learning how to stop insisting so violently upon the worldly, one-of-a-kind superiority of my “taste.”
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That said, it’s still bewildering how content we are to abruptly abandon the substance music had to our teenage selves out of misconstrued justifications for our classic fainéance – actively choosing to subject our public ambiance to thousands of replays of “the best” records in favor of dipping even the most cowardly toe into unfamiliar waters, even when the opportunity cost is inherently halved – only to then have the audacity to evangelize our dilapidated conceptions of “good music” to our children as we demonize the music of their generation, depriving them of a very essential rite of their cognitive development. I can think of little more reductive, repugnant, reckless, or racist crusades as a model figure than indoctrinating your child with an inherent distaste for their own culture, and nothing more deeply alarming to hear from the mouth of someone born in the 21st century than shit like “Queen was better than any rapper will ever be,” or “real musicianship will die forever with Eric Clapton.” It’s unfair and unnatural: imagine if your high school classmates had consistently turned up their scrunched nose at the living whole of rock & roll, declaring Scott Joplin to be the last musician they could stand.
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Consider if the industry-wide customer experience standard for the musical ambiance in 1970s American eating and drinking establishments was entirely comprised of works by John Phillip Souza, and the most prevalent cultural revolution manifested itself something like the following: In countless popular films set in the time (and the stories told today by your parents of their youths that informs them,) a group of popular high school boys – generally three longtime childhood friends and a single addition from the previous summer with an Army Dad and a moderate bad boy aura that’s made him one of the school’s notoriously attractive students and the somewhat-abusive leader in the pack. After spending some time trying to convince the other three (the crucial moment for his case being the bad kid’s rare moment of sincerity trope) of its guaranteed social, sexual and financial ROI, they seal their agreement to start a band with a four-way saliva slap. Imagine if in the progression of this exhausted old tale, it remained entirely classic (and boring) when it faded to a “THREE MONTHS LATER...” ceiling shot of the four the in full, gleaming, performance-spec get-up of the presidential marching band in their garage, and it was revealed that they’d they practiced “The Star Spangled Banner” every night just to make the girls swoon in the film’s resolution with an encore of “America the Beautiful” at an unsanctioned (and very patriotic!) house party.
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Suffice it to say that it’s absolutely fucking bonkers how often I encounter “Sweet Home Alabama” (and other tunes I’ve already heard hundreds of times throughout the first third of my existence, conservatively) dripping down from the overhead speakers in all manner of big retail stores, where it’s inappropriate and unwelcome. Even from the generous assumption that every single one of them is an objective masterwork of composition, the amount of affection the American music listening audience has for the same 500 singles is on par with our rampant gun violence in terms of our unanimous tolerance for ridiculously illogical habits. I’ve been sitting in a cute, moderately trendy coffee shop on the corner of the major avenue of access to my cute, moderately trendy Portland neighborhood for an hour now, and I’ve recognized every single one of the tracks played just a bit too loudly on the stereo. I’ve been sick of them all since Middle School. That one Bow Bow Chicka Chicka thing… How very charming.
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“The 70s, the 80s… the one-hit wonder channel!”
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Contrary to the popular hipster narrative we’ve just defeated, it’s not the popularity of the lineup that makes these experiences so distasteful, but their regularity. It doesn’t take a doctor of psychology to observe that tireless exposure to any given work of art inevitably erodes its value, yet we continue to expend resources saturating most mundane spaces in our society with an unyielding regurgitation of the same brackish pop culture symbols as if we’re trying to either induce a canonical vomit, intentionally obliterate the Yelp! reviews for a distant future museum’s “North America Enters the 21st Century” exhibit, or both. After failing my best attempts to elaborate with historical analogy citing a past event, I’m afraid we must pivot to a science fiction-esque nanonarrative containing obnoxiously speculative hypotheticals, instead.
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Imagine: It’s 2036 – four years after we found out we are not alone in the universe when a significantly more advanced civilization makes formal first contact with humanity by sending a party of diplomats, anthropologists, and explorers (who were actually getting ready to go in 2016 before getting word of the Trump presidency and deciding we weren’t quite ready just yet) who land their space egg right in front of the United Nations’ New York City headquarters and expressing something to the tune of hey so um… we noticed you guys moved in and we just wanted to stop by and say hi, entirely altering humanity’s self-perception and future trajectory (see: works by Gene Roddenberry) yadda yadda. The visitors expressed a wish to begin a cultural exchange project with us, and it’s just now coming to fruition… I have only moments ago made history in the eyes of the entire world when I walked through the front door of a Target store in suburban New Jersey leading a hovering hyper-intelligent silicon-based sphere of agender mist (roughly comparative to a basketball in size,) who’s already both impressing and shaming me tremendously as we move by the in-store Starbucks. From above us, Semisonic’s “Closing Time” is belched upon my life’s proudest moment and my guest requests we pause to discuss it, to my profound horror.
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“The sound from the reproduction devices embedded above us...” the android translator trails off for a moment. “It is the same noise that was distantly reproduced 51 hours ago in ‘Miami’ as I conversed with Ambassador Phillip Defranco about ‘the setting sun’ on the ‘beach,’ coming from a small open air structure which he defined as ‘a surf shop,’ which was occupied by a young male who appeared to be moderately agitated, moving about in jagged strides as he wildly smacked the foundational surface with ‘a broom.’ The Ambassador explained the youth was likely nearing the end of his allotted period of daily occupational labor.”
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Blood is flooding my cheeks as I listen with a building dread to the robot’s interpretation, awash with all manner of embarrassment for my species.
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“Is the purpose of this noise reproduction of a logistical nature, or is it perhaps a common ritual within business and/or working class culture?”
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Now, it’s your turn to be the human representative in this pico science fiction: you’re now obligated to confirm the alien anthropologist’s hypothesis and explain that “Closing Time” is but one piece of recorded music among billions of diverse expressive works across millennia. You must reverently describe how the “universal language” of math within melodious composition has long been a hefty buzzword in the pop culture conversations about interstellar communication and our longtime search for extraterrestrial intelligence from the future-thrilled 90s—S.E.T.I.’s glory days – when we felt pretty damned good about space. The historic launch of the United Nations’ “greetings on behalf of the people of our planet” etched into The Golden Record aboard Voyager I and Jodie Foster’s novel portrayal of a S.E.T.I. scientist in the iconic Carl Sagan-sourced 1997 science fiction drama Contact are among the globally-celebrated Best Hits of humanism (not to mention the organization listed on your paystubs,) and they weigh a billion tons on you, now—in the most significant moment of your entire life, bar none – as you explain on behalf of your species to real extraterrestrial intelligence the reality of how negligent it is actually is of the culture the Record claimed to treasure. The worst part, though? The entire experience is accompanied by a nasal-as-hell Semisonic soundtrack.
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Aren’t you frustrated? You should be, but it’s not over yet: inevitably, your round fictional companion of note is going to follow up their query with some seriously burning meat.
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“Just a half-generation ago, your utopian dream of a globally-connected world – in which everyone would be empowered to saturate and culture themselves with new ideas and forms of expression – was the defining aspiration of your society, and yet you’ve definitively achieved Total Connectivity, now, and caused the overwhelmingly opposite result: you’re all intolerable shitheads who every passing solar orbit become less and less capable of anything but regurgitation of the same foul bullshit. Y’all fucking wack. I’m out. ”
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And there, that filthy little ball would have us all. Friends, colleagues, human siblings of mine, it’s long-past time we expect better from ourselves as music citizens of the world. Even the longest living of us are endowed with very little opportunity to absorb anything more than an infinitesimal fraction of all there is to experience, and we’ve all been carelessly and embarrassingly chucking it to the weeds. If it this all seems excessive, there’s no need to feel attacked, but for Pete’s sake… please stop claiming you “like music” because it’s misleadingly inaccurate and I’ll promise never to use the phrase “music citizens of the world” again, in exchange.
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Distribution & Curation
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You, your friends, and I are missing out on way too much cool shit and we’re going to continue addressing possible causes and solutions to this ongoing catastrophe without asking for a single moved finger on your part because we are fucking saints. Let’s come back to ground and consider a casual real-world use case for a streaming service which I’ve observed.
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It’s just after 1PM on an especially beautiful Summer day in 2018, and you’ve decided with your two best friends that an impromptu hot dog barbecue in your little apartment’s parking lot would be a great way to spend the afternoon. You get on Facebook Messenger – no time to bother with the formality of creating an event – and begin to bother your group of art school friends. In a few hours, you’ve set up chairs in a circle around the borrowed fire pit, gathered meat tubes, marshmallows, and beer, and your guests have begun to arrive. The next step: retrieve your cordless Bluetooth speaker from inside to place it atop a log nearest the scene, re-pair it with your smartphone, and ___?
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Let’s acknowledge that music has incredibly diverse purposes of value in human life—of course I realize this—and ultimately, nobody can dictate those fulfilled for another individual by any given track, album, artist, or genre across time and setting. Even splittercore-obsessed serial killers and body modding cybergrind disciples are doomed: inevitably, they will one day let their guard down and find themselves singing along with “Goodbye Earl” on the radio way off key, smiling like a doofus. Even if one hates humanity, they will eventually be forced to acknowledge that The Dixie Chicks came very close to its penultimate manifestation.
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I understand that it’s not always time for something new for everyone, but you’re missing out on music’s most worthwhile function by far if you never seek anything fresh, and—if you still find yourself unwilling to bother, even—carrying around even the slightest bit of anecdotal knowledge about what’s going on in music with you can be invaluably culturing to your image when socializing with youths and alien intelligences, alike. There is a spectrum of enthusiasm (or pretentiousness, depending on one’s own subjectives) for music that is far more culturally consequential than the practice of partaking and/or patroning any other artform. Settle comfortably on any point – extreme or not – and you’re at serious risk of being uncool. Nobody wants Anthony Fantano showing up to their party, but if you live too long confusing the Beach Boys with the Beatles – as I have – folks start to behave as if there’s something wrong with you. If it helps, let’s suppose this to be the real reason behind my need to discuss Bandcamp – perhaps its relative lack of aged or worshiped-at-scale work justifies it all.
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By this nature, its effort is designed to bracket the enthusiast as wholly as possible, but the value most in need of its experience has become its comparatively extravagant hospitality for the dabbler. The “Discoverinator” (I would’ve voted for calling it “Genre-Fucker”) is simply the most ingenious tool available anywhere to filter music by genre, subgenre, location, and medium. Or at least... It’s too gorgeous not to be. Thanks to its recent visual redesign, I don’t even care if it’s useful—it’s just a beautiful thing to play with on both the Web and the iOS app (though I’d bet they were each crafted separately.)
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Front and center on the homepage is the Bandcamp Daily – a showcase of features, lists, albums of the day, and artist interviews from various staff and guest contributors which I’d most certainly judge befit of a standalone publication – and the Bandcamp Weekly – an extraordinarily-produced podcast like no other with special mixes, guest appearances, and commentary which the company’s Chief Curator Andrew Jervis has been honing since 2013 over 289 episodes as of this morning. Its player functions both in-browser and on the iOS app unlike any I’ve ever seen, with a list of embedded tracks that pop out when they’re actually spinning on the show so that you can engage further with them, if you wish. It’s difficult to describe, but it feels visually like you’re listening to a playlist in Bandcamp’s normal player, except tracks are intermixed and faded between one another beneath the host’s commentary, so the audio itself must be pre-rendered. Regardless, it’s nearly as extraordinary an achievement in Web design as the program itself is in curatorial music broadcasting. I’m no addict to the genre, but I have yet to Discover another similar product which I can binge episode after episode for hours without becoming bored or irritated as I can the Bandcamp Weekly’s.
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To fill in the parking lot party blank with a single streaming solution for the sake of our young, art school-attending, likely more musically-literate than average summer barbecue guests—how viable is Bandcamp? Truthfully, it’s only slightly more suited now than it was in its earliest infancy for obediently filling a space with ambiance. We could ponder whether or not its design discourages absentminded playback only consequently, or perhaps condescendingly from the high, white tower of hipster elitism on which you’ll occasionally hear it accused of perching, but UX design is the most ridiculous sphere within which to intenspeculate in lieu of verification (gazing at you with the timeless grace of a thousand moons, Medium,) so lets hold off to seek out an interview with a Bandcamp representative.
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SoundCloud would be a bit closer to the mark—it can be configured to simply keep going after you’ve finished a track, regardless of where you may be within the interface (excluding the embedded player, of course)—but it’d be much safer to spend the smidgen of extra time required to find a manmade playlist. Letting it loose will quickly land you on some seriously dubious (and probably embarrassing) nerd shit. As I understand it, YouTube has long been the go-to houseparty music player because of its universality, Chromecast support, and (obviously) visual component for accompanying music videos, so its new, ad-free YouTube Music service has a lot of potential, in theory, but we’re outside in this scenario and our smartphone is our only playback device.
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Startlingly, the Web’s given best answer to this situation is still Spotify in all of its culture-diluting gluttony. Internet radio? Yikes. You can still find a gem of a stream every once in a while, but they’re usually unreliable and probably abandoned, so the catalog won’t last you more than a few hours before you’ll start to hear repeats. You could search out the internet stream of your favorite radio station—a student radio station, even—but those offering the most entertaining programming are unlikely to have a suitable playlist on a summer afternoon. So—forgetting its overwhelming financial funneling toward its top 10% and everything else for a moment—why not just give up the pretense and use Spotify? Again, for most of my friends, it works just fine to play Cat Stevens, Run DMC, Gorillaz or The Rolling Stones, but I have yet to figure out a combination of keywords to keep it on target within even the most rudimentary parameters. Such ill-restraint becomes especially dire—necessary, really—when I queue up “Cannibal Ox Radio” for the office and R Kelly ends up playing, 20 minutes in. Using personally-targeted artist bans is probably too subjective to ask of such a service in the spotlight, but how about an option to filter out white rappers? (I hope you didn’t blink because that’s by far my best contribution in tech writing yet.)
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The truth is, I’d probably end up calling upon Apple Music as I’ve been an on-and-off subscriber since its release, but have yet to meet a single fellow user. The girth of its catalog is reportedly still nearly 25% larger, its UI is significantly more cohesively integrated with iOS (which hasn’t always been a given from Apple with its music software, mind you,) yet it costs me precisely the same $9.99 a month as Spotify Premium would. If I did know somebody else who used it, they’d be able to see my public profile including my playlists and activity, just as my followers on Spotify can, and I can create “Stations” for artists that function similarly to Spotify’s endless adaptive playlists, but—crucially, for myself—after the app’s redesign for iOS 10, the integration of Apple Music music with my own iTunes library is completely seamless. With unlimited data, I’ve selected the option to refrain from storing music locally, which further diminishes the distinction between “my” music and the music I’ve paid for the rights to stream. Fundamentally, the end result is that I pay ten bucks a month for “ownership” of all the music on iTunes proper.
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While I might personally play Bandcamp Weekly episodes in such a context and gladly accept whatever results I’d get, I’d only do so acknowledging the subsequently increased risk of some vest-wearing fuck I’ve never met springing out of the bushes to accost me about Weird Allan. However, I am neither cool nor musically literate, which makes me particularly vulnerable to misusing algorithmic Discovery—the practice in which artificial intelligence has become most widely-deployed which continues to prove itself to better deserve the term “automated wallowing,” or “robotized ear rot.”
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Ironically, Damon Krukowski’s aforementioned “responsibility” essay on Pitchfork openly cites Liz Pelly’s burning-hot and 100% essential analysis of algorithmically-generated playlists for The Baffler notes the publication’s own substantial relationship with Spotify, including a Webby Award-winning advertorial series called Inside Discovery, which the two collaborate to produce that’s “meant to boost awareness of the ‘Discover Weekly’ feature.”
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The series shows Pitchfork editors (and favored musicians) gushing about their love of streaming—the immediacy! The deep back catalogs! One editor says it helps him keep track of his listening habits, while another rejoices at not having to dig through crates at record shops anymore. Yet another likens Spotify to walking around a music festival, discovering something new at every turn. What does it mean for “the most trusted voice in music” to celebrate an algorithm as preferable to its own crate digging? What does it mean when the tastemaking humans endorse data-driven machines? What does it mean when the algorithms become cool? Virtually every music publication now relies on Spotify media players to embed songs within online articles, and Websites like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone regularly celebrate their playlists with listicles: “Ten Albums To Stream Now.” “The Five Playlists You Need to Hear This Summer.”
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We love bespoke Open Web projects, so exploring Inside Discovery’s (surely bespoke) experience induced the same pathetic sort of I wish business just incentived building nice things disappointment which has become my default, bitchy mood, and blaming as a further let down to immediately land on Mitski’s playlist, to whom I’d just been reintroduced (by Pitchfork, admittedly) after happening upon her performance at Pitchfork 2017 (which is organized, admittedly, by Pitchfork.)
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Upon a brief review of these once-petty desires and the new, apocalyptic solutions which we are burning barns full of cash to develop, it would appear that the overwhelmingly defining feature of those which are at all viable remains to be the interference of a human being, and why wouldn’t it be, still, when manual music aggregation remains so desperately cheap? I’d wager heavily that there’s at least a single editor within Apple Music who’s spent serious time embedded in the Berlin techno scene considering how regularly the prime “Techno” playlist is updated with new work of a moderately-industrial bias.
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“The downside to automated music Discovery is that we’re encouraged to develop a taste profile and stick to it,” opines somebody on Pigeons & Planes, complimenting Pelly in their profile of former BBC Radio 1 host, Zane Lowe, and his new job curating an Apple Music playlist?
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The truth is, the stories that come to us that smell the strongest of philanthropy on the surface are often actually about some dusty, Y2K-lookin’-ass nerd with powerfully tedious grievances and too much time on their hands. The whole world knows the details by now of how Mark Zuckerberg’s horny social ineptitude led to Facebook’s conception, but we must both keep in check the bad habit we share – the whole present-day reading world and I, that is – of dwelling entirely too much on the most “negative,” soul-agitating tales in what we perceive to be the pursuit of necessary ingredients for concocting a better solution. Bandcamp’s story is predominantly comprised of smart decisions, sincere transparency, and savvy ideas which are best examined in contrast, I’m afraid, with all that’s being done wrong everywhere else.
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Are my favorite punk bands now Bandcamp bands? Are they suddenly wanting to conform to a kind of Bandcamp aesthetic? I don’t think so. Not yet. But if that does happen, something might be lost — a sense of these bands defining themselves as they want to, which is sort of the Bandcamp promise in the first place. People can use help navigating the riches of Bandcamp. But its estimable editorial project opens an interesting question: When does help turn into tastemaking?
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The Creators
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You missed it, didn’t you—the ten-year anniversary of Bandcamp’s launch? Ashamed, I realized last month that I did, too. Ashamed, because I owe a lot to to the platform’s unwavering commitment to the distribution and curation of work made by just about all of my favorite artists—within and outside of my social network. Throughout 2015, I hosted a number of conversations with exceptional, future-looking creators on Drycast which I am especially proud of. On one early episode with an exceptional total of seven music makers, I observed in a beat that “all of us have Bandcamp accounts,” before the week’s guest, Samantha Carter, suggested that she’d found her page especially financially rewarding, and originated the concept of the “Bandcamp Sugar Daddy” (which I personally ship 100%.)
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“It's something I take for granted,” said my friend yzome – a truly one-of-a-kind electronic producer who’s far-traveling composition is probably the closest Digital Audio Workstation equivalent of Extreme Use Testing—when automotive manufacturers effectively torture new prototypes with the most inhospitable conditions on Earth until they break. However, it’s not a PR stunt in yzome’s case—he’s just very good at doing what he does after doing it for nearly 10 years—and his end product requires a hell of a lot more than any one genre would ever presume, but it more than delivers back on the investment with significant interest.
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When he appeared on Drycast in January 2015, we failed to achieve any descriptors more sophisticated than “alien sounds,” but perhaps that’s all they need: the inner worlds into which yzome invites us are of manic, unpredictable arrhythmia which poses an unapologetic, yet magically lighthearted challenge to any cohesive theory. It’s very rare that his proudly-ungenreable exploration of the fringes does not demand the listener’s full attention, yet it always manages to be inoffensively aggressive like nothing else, which suggesting promise for the possible upheaval of a long-upheld natural law among electronic dance music: yzome doesn’t need to be a shithead to challenge the listener intellectually.
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Play YVETTE for any boomer you know with that classically impenetrable disgust for all electronic music, and you’ll witness firsthand how special yzome’s particular innovation truly is. No, they’re not going to be sexually liberated, or anything—it’s still going to be alarming—but you’ll notice that the swift and overwhelming fury which sample and break-heavy dance music has always awoken within them has been miraculously circumvented. Instead of immediately storming off, they’ll be paralyzed in an existential fugue state from which they may never quite fully emerge. I’ve seen it firsthand. It’s witchcraft.
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There is no other across the (especially-wide) electronic spectrum who can so loudly go so far, so fast without any insincerity, whatsoever. His arrangement seems mischievous and all over the place, but really listen and you’ll hear rips of recognizable patterns playing peekaboo in willy-nilly bursts that reveal his dynamic mastery of the dance music space through Breakcore, Juke, Footwork, and Techno sampling. All of this is to say, really, that yzome’s music represents a level of boundary-pushing which only a niche audience tends to truly appreciate, yet is undoubtedly worthy of an elegantly-presented host like Bandcamp.
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“Like thank god I don't have to look for a label to release this. It's seen as a legitimate platform (by people who might actually care about what I’m doing, at least,) which I think is less offputting than uploading things to Mediafire or whatever else. It’s populist and boutique at the same time.”
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Populist, yet boutique. Can we really be expected to exceed this summation? Well, nobody’s said much at all in the mainstream press, but what has been said is 1) unusually misplaced in the spaces of those least likely to find it relevant and 2) way more insightful than you’d expect.
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“Bandcamp has an independent-artist identity because of practicalities: Independent artists from Web-centered subcultures need it most,” observed an especially savvy online aside from by Ben Ratliff—jazz and pop critic for The New York Times—asking “Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?” So why aren’t we talking about it? The other important takeaway: founder Ethan Diamond told Ratliff that “the company has never spent money on promotion.” This is largely why I’ve invested so much time and affection into this piece—gratitude is not often sellable incentive for mainstream coverage.
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The truth is, the continued obscurity of Bandcamp’s story despite all it’s done comes down not to any malpractice by the company (in fact, it would likely be more visible had it fucked up more,) or even to its prevalence in the careers of big industry names (whom I will address in detail shortly,) but because it simply operates too magnanimously for its customers to be taken seriously as a newsworthy business, which is problematic and personally infuriating. In November, 2015, Bandcamp made mention in The New Yorker via the openly diminutive context of Car Seat Headrest’sorigin story, describing it as “a charming alternative,” and “a casual, low-risk approach.” Granted, it’s worth noting that the platform did not address its lack of “editorial guidance” until a year later, with the launch of the excellent Bandcamp Daily blog, but I think you’ll agree it’s in poor taste to argue against the legitimacy of a music distribution platform because it’s too democratic. Perhaps it’s still just beyond reasonable expectations to get a top-of-the-foodchain music writer’s head wrapped around the idea that such products on The Internet can easily—even optimally—service both hobbyists and professionals.
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Last year, Bandcamp was responsible for $270 million in payments to artists like Jlin,the genius commonly associated with Footwork (certainly Chicago’s most underreported and popularly underrepresented movement,) for pushing its expressive boundaries both in theory and geography further than any other, and who’s so far produced two of the most “aggressively beautiful” records you’ll find anywhere in the process.[i] Type her name into any search engine and her Bandcamp page is always the first result, yet Cntrl-Fing for “Bandcamp” will yield 0 results from her interviews with The Fader, FACT Magazine, Pitchfork, The Seventh Hex, Passion of the Weiss, PopMatters, Crack Magazine, DUMMY, The Guardian, The Quietus, BOMB Magazine, Ableton Blog, The Creative Independent, Rolling Stone, SPIN, No Fear of Pop, self-titled magazine, Circulation Magazine, The New Yorker, Cyclic Defrost, Mixmag, or melting bot, and only one in Interview Magazine. To be clear: I am not arguing that Jlin—a black female music artist—should be profusely thanking Bandcamp—a service founded largely by white male programmers—for hosting her most visible page but rather that the more independent of these publications, especially, should mention its role in her story or—at the very least—be hyperlinking to her Bandcamp page first, for both her’s and their readers’ sake—Bandcamp’s cut of album purchases is half of iTunes. From the user experience perspective, it’s absurd that those of these pages including embedded music players chose to use SoundCloud’s—which is more resource heavy (yet of noticeably lesser streaming playback quality) and visually disruptive—instead of Bandcamp’s.
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The two services were launched the same year—that fateful 2008—but comparing them is complicated. They are clear opposites in at least one principal: how they’ve defined their mission. Bandcamp has changed less throughout its history than any other Web service that comes to mind (see below,) but SoundCloud has struggled with identity issues, to their vastly-superior success (in terms of user statistics, anyway.) The New York Timesreported in June, 2011 that they’d reached 5 million users, citing their decision to expand focus beyond “popular music” to explain the milestone. “We’re building a sound platform that’s not just about music,” said Alex Ljung – a SoundCloud co-founder and the company’s chief executive at the time – and its present landscape certainly reflects a diverse offering of uses, but ultimately, any . Today, both SoundCloud and Bandcamp have premium subscription plans for artists which are at least perceived to be competitive with one another—SoundCloud Pro and Bandcamp Pro, respectively—along with free base experiences, which we’ll compare first.
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Free Bandcamp Account
- Uploads: quantity unlimited, size of each file limited to 291mb.
- Distribution: unlimited streaming, up to 200 free downloads per month.
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Free SoundCloud Account
- Uploads: total of 3 hours uploaded at any given time.
- Distribution: unlimited streaming, unlimited downloads.
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Both offer access “basic” statistics for their tracks at this tier which most of the creators I know consider more than enough—the usefulness of any playback/download stats is negligible when you’re publishing within tight niches—and each has had about 5 years to fine-tune their free offerings so that they feel as complete as possible. If you’re planning on publishing a podcast on SoundCloud, you’re obviously going to have to upgrade your upload limit even beyond Pro ($8/month, 6-hour upload limit) to Pro Unlimited ($16/month, unlimited uploads,) though I would suggest a plethora of alternative methods before you got that far. Unfortunately, they would not include a free Bandcamp account. While there arepodcasts on Bandcamp, they’re completely separate the platform’s aspirations and without support for the basic requirements of podcast distribution (namely, RSS feeds.)
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Bandcamp’s Pro option is $10 a month and includes a custom domain, batch file uploading, private streaming (for press and/or fans) plus the ability to disable free streaming (requiring listeners to actually buy the music to enable any playback,) ad-free video hosting (which nobody uses, to my knowledge,) extended fan interaction tools, and a broader statistics suite that includes Google Analytics support. SoundCloud’s Pro and Pro Unlimited options are complimentary, but a full-time independent artist could justify maintaining Pro accounts on both services or neither—one does not necessarily replace the other, but the contrast in their chosen presentations has led to a divide in the cultures of the two communities so stark it could be a punchline and/or simplified to say that SoundCloud is for rap and Bandcamp is not.
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It’s not entirely shocking, then, that SoundCloud’s story has been more present in the greater conversation than Bandcamp’s. Frankly, its largest issues are directly related: compared to SoundCloud, Bandcamp’s community is White As Fuck (a claim I can only make on behalf of my own observations and those which a select few creators have seen fit to express to me over the years, considering that the company has yet to release any demographic information about its creators) which is a glaringly fundamental obstruction to the project’s broader mission to help music culture “thrive.”
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From a future historian’s perspective, the battle for the definitive name in independent digital music distribution has already won, largely thanks to its relationship with Chance The Rapper, who’s quickly become a “cultural influencer, thought leader, global star,” and one of my generation’s upmost celebrity champions. Obviously, there is little sense trying to determine whether SoundCloud earned his partnership or landed their popular association with his name as long as the artist maintains it publicly, while continuing to give new meaning to the phrase “serially likable.” Thus far, his mythical power to exude purity has felt virtually 100% airtight Last year, his second album Coloring Book made history when it won the first streaming-only Grammy for Best Album. In my personal favorite moment in recent popular culture memory, the fashionable-as-hell young man accepted the accolade by looking the whole industry establishment in the face and proclaiming “this is for every indie artist—everybody who’s been doin’ this mixtape shhhh...tuff for a long ass time... shouts out to every independent artist out there; shouts out to SoundCloud for holding me down.” Obviously, such significant, sentimental, and sincere sentiments are never expressed about tech companies by beloved darlings of the art world like Chance—especially not for Earth-encompassing awards show audiences.
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After last year’s massive layoff, it was Chance’s assurances that “SoundCloud is here to stay” which the public took to heart. Even if the company is destined to fail within the next year (it appears to be as yet missing much of a verdict,) and it’s all still destined to fold at any moment, at least it’ll have the distinct pride of doing so having maintained his publicly-expressed respect and confidence, which is a damned fine legacy in my book. Meanwhile, Bandcamp has only made a few small tweaks to its basic infrastructure, and added new features very deliberately, which haven’t resulted in a single memorable controversy. Aside from Amanda Palmer, perhaps, there has never been a single band or artist who’ve been known as “from Bandcamp,” leaving our only pitch to be something like Independent Online Music Platform on Track to Complete 10th Year Serving Small-Time Artists, Continues to Look Pretty Good.
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Considering the significance of these contributions, it’s of a special wonder that they were made not by a non-profit organization, academic movement, or government endowment, but by a for-profit, California-based tech company that’s continued to thrive and innovate great content, entirely apart from mainstream coverage.
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The Future
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It might seem a bit much on the surface, but in many ways, Bandcamp has spent the past 10 years showing us what a for-profit, Web-based, culturally-edging independent platform Can be, even in the Valley.
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Though Bandcamp has embarked upon unusually sparse explanation of its editorial directive in the Daily blog and Weekly podcast, but regularly consume either for any length of time, and you’ll notice a particular savvy for Discovering technically-progressive Afrocentric projects: “Black Experimental Music.”
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On last week’s episode of the excellent New York Times podcast Still Processing, co-host Jena Wortham “I’m thinking a lot about ways in which new culture, new cultural products, new cultural creators come to light in ways that sidestep these traditional means and don’t have to go through the traditionally very white, very male, very cis, very hetero hoops to prove worthiness.”
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So, our greatest hope for the decentralization of the music industry in the 1990s ended up transforming before us to become the most effectively divisive Discovery barrier ever known to man because of its psychological influence sub-threshold at unprecedented scale over time, in parallel with so many other like horrific monstrosities we’ve discovered in anguish to be mutants of those final salvations from our atrocious history which we’d been so relieved to believe in. Surely, the turn of the millennia was destined to be our final turning point – the moment we’d finally use our new technology to discover a truth (or maybe just a really good clue,) that’d immediately unite our species in a deafening, worldwide aha moment when it would reveal a general abstract of whatever the fuck our deal was that was preventing our silent, dutiful, and 100% harmonious collective effort toward a utopia like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s, in which anyone is absolutely free of obligation or desperation from birth to pursue… whatever with their time.
Reporting from deep within the iOS cult on essential apps/methods for real-life music people.
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Listen to this article read (with some bugs) by Siri Voice 3 below...
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As you may or may not be aware, I’ve spent all of my 2021 so far diving real deep into iOS, considering all that has changed since “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.” I’ve tuned in to the output of explicitly Apple-adjacent publications both old (MacRumors, Apple Insider, 9to5 Mac, etc,) and new (Apple Scoop, MacStories,) which have all metamorphosed in huge, mostly-redeemable ways just as their primary subject has. I have my own pubescent stories of Mac occultism, but I do not consider my relationship with the brand to be an essential part of my identity, as so many do and have. Apple, Inc’s story is spectacular and infinitely-relevant so long as they remain “the most valuable company in the history of the world,” as I so love to describe them. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am often compelled to bring up the humongous contrasts in the historical context of the company – to scream infinitely many variations of the observation that Apple was basically the fucking indie, premium-tier consumer tech manufacturer owned by the Creative Class for the first half+ of their existence, and have somehow maintained that Think Different™ brand narrative as they have definitively become the Big Blue of their time.
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From my perspective, the responsibility for the wellbeing of this utterly-delusional, occasionally very dangerous sentiment actually lies fairly squarely on those of us who consider ourselves better than all of that because of our Debian workflows and their ancient command line utilities. (For the record, this is also 100% delusional as things stand in 2021.) One thing I think we can all acknowledge, though, is that Apple’s image has been inextricably bound with musicmaking, throughout, far more than any other even remotely comparable tech company. Naturally, the business still loves to bring this up all the time in big, glossy gestures. The topical example of note would be the only worthwhile content I’ve yet to encounter on Apple TV+: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which documents the highlights of the young, beloved musician’s prodigious ascension. For what it’s worth, I appreciate some special insights I gained thanks to the film, which I do not actually consider at odds with the truth of its super on-brandness for Apple.
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An interesting take I found from 2017 from a new favorite voice on the business end of tech reporting: “How Music Drowns Apple’s Innovation” by The Information’s Jessica Lessin portrays Apple’s relationship with music distribution and the music industry as a sort of compulsive distraction from its ambitions in serving video content, namely. Lessin points out the everpresent reminders of this obsession:
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And so it is no wonder that Apple’s first forays into original video content fall under Apple Music. It’s worth noting that the first series the company announced—“Carpool Karaoke” is literally about singing; “Planet of the Apps” features rapper Will.i.am as a judge.
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I think I can speak for the majority of my audience when I suggest that the targets of Lessin’s cynicism would be more than welcome, if they were The Whole Truth. Indeed, the most valuable company in all of history retaining an “emotional” attachment to the welfare of music creators might be described as charming or more. As is often the case on The Information, the comments from readers often offer noteworthy insight. In this case, Kevin Swint – who has apparently worked as an executive for both Apple and Samsung, according to his profile on The Information – responded with an important consideration: “…it's possible that Apple's behavior around music has more to do with the company's overall tendency to stick with its past successes a bit too long rather than music really being a core part of its DNA.”
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In terms of business, that’s all I have to contribute, and I shall do my best not to evangelize Apple Music (or more likely, disparage Spotify as one of the most destructive cultural forces of our time,) here. However, I would like to respond to a particular Jimmy Iovine quote from the original Apple Music announcement amid the 2015 WWDC Keynote:
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There needs to be a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery… and if that place could actually accommodate and support the artists who make the music, not just the top-tier artists, but the kids in their bedrooms too, provide them all with a home and a way to engage with their audiences, that would be pretty great.
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Boy, this service Iovine describes sounds an awful lot like Bandcamp, no? The suggestion that Apple should have purchased Bandcamp is a very scary one, from my perspective, but I am reassured by the likelihood that the notion did indeed occur to someone at Apple, Inc. at some point in the past, and was quickly discarded, for whatever reason. I promise not to mention Bandcamp again in this Post, aside from its own two iOS apps: for listeners and for “Artists/Labels” as creator/curator tools.
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I’m going to be focusing largely on the iPhone-bound experience, here, though I did borrow my mom’s MacBook Pro for a weekend to explore the state of music on MacOS and (accidentally) played around with Apple Music on The Television (a surprisingly beautiful experience.) On that note, I’ll hurry up and get specific…
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Apps
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Assuming you’re already an Apple Music user, it’s very possible that you’ve been deprived of the “true” experience on the service provided by the variety of actively-developed but woefully-undercovered app store entries that integrate directly with Apple Music. One of the most glaring discoveries I’ve made so far in my iOS deep dive, this year, has been the absolutely horrific state of Discovery on Apple’s App Store. If you’d thought to search the top charts under the store’s Music category, you wouldn’t find any of the gems I’m going to highlight, here. The credit for exposing me to their existence, in fact, lies with MacStories – a hard-hitting, well-established Apple-adjacent media company piloted by Federico Viticci. At this very moment, their app-centric podcast, App Stories, is in the midst of a special mini-series devoted to Music on iOS/Mac, from which this Post draws upon heavily. For better or worse, they represent the definitive authority on this subject (among many others, naturally,) though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend their various publications be added to the reading lists of any but those most invested in iOS.
There is something uniquely concrete about a purely-chronological feed which we’ve lost in the past 5-10 years in favor of algorithmic curation, generally. The next item in this particular feed, in fact, includes my attempt to explain why Twitter’s hard-chronological Lists feature has sheltered me from the anxiety of the service’s main timeline, now ordered by proprietary (and obscured) formulas. I’d been aware of that dynamic in my own Twitter consumption for years, though. I certainly did not anticipate the impact of the music release equivalent of a chronological timeline as provided by MusicHarbor – an app for iOS and MacOS that acts as a frontend for one’s music library across both Apple Music and Spotify.
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It's hard to remember how we (Apple Music) got here without embarking upon some gargantuan A Complete Visual History of Apple Music-like document, but it must be said that Tim Cook's “next chapter in music” has become a sad afterthought. As far as I understand it, the “streaming war” between Apple and Spotify has long since gone definitively to the latter in statistical terms, which I'd suggest to be an overall positive outcome for Apple Music subscribers, generally. The self-perception within the heavy music consumer crowd of “niche,” “underground,” “obscure” cultural minority should – in theory – push those who believe themselves destined to be different away from Spotify into the handy care of Apple, the absolute champion of this particular self-deception. To be honest – though I write this for all listeners, sincerely – I have found myself in a sort of utopian echo chamber of my own design in music culture terms. My days of waiting through 4+ hours of local openers before rap shows are far behind me, and I consume and engage exclusively with music I find personally redeemable.
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My Apple Music library has become quite fragmented after I lost my entire physical music collection along with the external drives containing my accumulated digital music library in 2017. Still, after more or less starting anew this past December and casually, deliberately adding digital files back into the accursed, ancient iTunes desktop application and restoring some (outdated) versions of my handful of shared curatorial playlists thanks to SongShift (which we'll glance on later,) MusicHarbor currently lists 1433 artists represented across my Apple Music and (very sparse) Spotify libraries. I know this because of a very simple Siri Shortcut I modified which returns a text list of all Artists in one's MusicHarbor library in Quick Look. (Here is my result as of this moment in GitHub Gist form.) According my App Store receipts, I first downloaded MusicHarbor on March 26 – 20 days ago – which is mentionable because of how much I've accomplished with very minimal time investment in terms of curating my own music library thanks to MusicHarbor. As you'll note in the 3rd of the 4 screenshots embedded above, I was able to delete System of a Down from my library – a single function which alone justifies the app's one-time $5.99 “Unlock Everything” fee, to my sensibility. I've also been able to begin following all the artists represented in a few of my favorite playlists with a handful of taps – a task which would literally require hours in the native Apple Music app of old (when one could actually follow artists, there.) On that note, it's time to cite the primary MacStories article you should read, entitled “How I Keep Track of New Music Releases,” regarding Apple Music's performance as a release tracker:
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The ‘New Releases’ section is tucked at the very end of the For You page and laid out as a horizontal carousel that requires a lot of swiping; you can view the ‘New Releases’ page as a grid, which has sections for different weeks, but, in my experience, it only aggregates highlights for new releases from some of my favorite artists. The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.
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Here, Federico Viticci is riffing off a newsletter issue written by music blogger Jason Tate, in which he describes the service's missing tracking functionality as “the single most frustrating part of Apple Music.” Though these points in the conversation are both almost two years old, MusicHarbor remains the ultimate means of tracking new music releases chronologically on Apple's platforms. Though I am personally just three weeks in, the confidence this app has given me in the certainty of its chronological release feed is quite profound. Its integration with one's calendar to track upcoming releases is a bit much for my own needs, but I know personally enough invested curators for whom it'd be a godsend to mark it no small addition.
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MusicHarbor’s only downside is entirely excusable/understandable, in context: it’s a bit clunky. For the sake of this work, I set up a shared Apple Music playlist so I could further demonstrate all the new music I discovered in MusicHarbor. Adding whole albums to this playlist with a single tap feels powerful because it is – I’ve no idea what sort of developer wizardry is involved in such an action, but the Wait Wheel doesn’t feel like too much to endure. Adding a release to one’s library – the other in-MusicHarbor accumulative function – is a bit quicker. It’s important to remember that this piece of software was/is created and maintained by a single human being, though I would expect nothing but improvement, going forward.
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That’s all I have to report on MusicHarbor, for the moment, but I’ll add further MacStories praise from their 2019 MacStories Selects app rewards:
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What makes MusicHarbor special – and, ultimately, the reason why we all use the app here at MacStories – is just how much developer Tanaka understands what someone who wants to know about new music releases is looking for.
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July 2021 Update: The MacStories gentlemen have just published an interview episode of AppStories speaking at length with MusicHabor creator Marcos Tanaka.
On the other end of the spectrum, exploring new digital manifestations of The Music Collection, is Albums, which actually functions as an entire replacement frontend player for Apple Music. Reviewed much more recently by MacStories, it really is best-described as “opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists.” Considering that I installed the app just a week ago and have focused most of my attention on MusicHarbor in that time, I’ll leave most of the commentary to John Voorhees. All I can say, really, is that I see an extremely powerful application, here, for a fairly specific use case: someone who’s listening is largely occupied by albums they already “own” in Apple Music and treasure deeply. The ability to set an individual record’s “Immersive UI Tint” down to the hex (in “Album Settings”) is as in-depth a tool of adoration as I’ve ever seen in a digital music service. Combined with Albums’ presumptuous takeover of actual playback from the Apple Music app, I think I can rightfully say that it was built for the extremely serious music consumer.
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My favorite part so far: the app knew well enough to offer me THE ZRO BUTTON. Telling, I think.
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Others
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Since it’s already quite clear how much this Post draws from MacStories, I’ll let their review of Soor stand on its own (I couldn’t quite justify spending $6.99 just for review purposes.) In the episode embedded above, they also mention Denim – a playlist cover creator I am not personally all that impressed with. There’s also MusicHarbor’s sibling, MusicSmart, which manages the tricky but essential task of adding the metadata retrieval Apple Music should have included all along. The rest can be found in the episode’s show notes. I’m not done with them, but the rest are what I would differentiate as services…
One of the bewilderingly undercovered digital music sharing tools of our kind, Odesli has been my preferred method of sharing tracks/albums/EPs since I first discovered it in 2018. It is not specific to iOS but it isessential for competent music sharing, anywhere, these days, in its magical ability to correctly intersect any given piece of music’s links across all streaming services, known and unknown. To be honest, I thought everybody would be using it by now, but it’s continued to develop with minimal attention aside from Siri Shortcuts developers. Thanks to Odesli’s Public API, dozens of Music-centric Siri Shortcuts have emerged over the past few years, resulting in one of the most useful Siri Shortcuts integrations to be found for real, reasonable human beings. Here’s where Apple-adjacent media and I part ways…
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While current common conversation might point you to Federico Viticci’s MusicBot hyper-Shortcut and/or @gianflo6’s 600 action-strong Song.Link Shortcut, I (perhaps expectedly) would point you to my own, 17-action Shortcut which spares you any selections and simply opens the Song.Link URL of the track currently playing in Apple Music (while also copying said URL to the clipboard.) It’s not that MusicBot isn’t massively impressive and still useful, but it represents a class of super/hyper-Shortcuts which (from my perspective) far-overreach beyond the intended use case for Siri Shortcuts and end up immediately bewildering/alienating potential new users. Truthfully – as Federico singularly acknowledges – they are full applications built atop a less-than-ideal platform designed for relatively simple, repeatable automations. I’ll spare you further opining on this idea until another, potential Post, and instead demonstrate my personal solution.
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In the clip above, you can see I was working on this very draft when LoneMoon’s “kawAii @F” started playing. Naturally, I was compelled to share it on Twitter, so – without leaving Drafts (my writing app) – I called the type-to-Siri prompt by holding the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and simply typed “sl” (I renamed my Shortcut for this use,) running the Shortcut, which opened the track’s Song.Link page in Safari – very much an optional step, mostly just to make sure the match is correct – and copied its URL to my clipboard, from which I could share it anywhere. Since the advent of widgets in iOS’ Today View, I’ve also kept a button for this Shortcut in one of four precious slots in a box at the very top. For those willing to play around a bit, it should be fairly straightforward to configure the end bits to your liking, but it should work out of the box for even those least interested in Siri Shortcuts/automation in general.
As I confessed before, it is only thanks to SongShift that I was able to recover anything of my original, prized, deeply-considered Apple Music playlists. The standalone MacStories article on this one is a bit dated, but I don’t see much change in function in that time. For most people, SongShift’s free service is simply the best way to transfer a playlist between music streaming services. If you find yourself genuinely sold by the features offered by SongShift Pro, I suspect you know more about playlist manipulation than I could ever learn you by diving in any deeper.
Yup… Believe it or not, Last.fm is still fucking scrobbling after 19 fucking years (almost to the day,) and its iOS app still fucking works. What’s most bizarre about this truth is that I did not encounter mention of Last.fm for years until I started noticing it as an integration option in the settings menus of these premium iOS apps. Is this some sort of conspiracy? I’m not sure, but I suppose I might as well insist you follow my ancient account, if you’re still using it.
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alright folks fucking ADD ME ironically or not. this profile is older than all of the cells in my body. https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK
I should also note that not only is the Last.fm iOS app still working, it’s working well, from all appearances, anyway. Though the service no longer includes hosting, itself, it’s apparently still a prime player in the world of playback tracking.
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Music Creation
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DAWs
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What if you actually want to “make” music with your iPhone? We’ve seen iPhone television ads for years featuring amalgamations of musician-looking types playing instruments with cables attached to their handsets, but is the iPhone now a reasonable platform for any sort of serious sound capture? The short answer is no. Who am I to proclaim such an absolute? None other than the motherfucker who’s been messing around with mobile DAWs for 10 whole years. I even “released” an “album” on Bandcamp made exclusively with Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS and inspired by the dangerous life of the contemporary raw milk smuggler. I wouldn’t call it “music,” per se, or an example of what a real electronic producer could pull off in the app, but it does represent its capabilities in the hands of the average user, using mostly default loops.
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While Apple does publish an Apple Book entitled “Everyone Can Create Music” about GarageBand on iOS, it is specifically directed at iPad-bound use. Any serious DAW user uses keyboard shortcuts, which I admit I only discovered recently in GarageBand for iOS. The official documentation is – once again – for iPad, specifically, but most of them still work on iPhone.
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FL Studio Mobile – the original third-party iOS-bound DAW – is still going, apparently. While I did, indeed purchase the original version on my iPhone 4, I remember absolutely nothing about it, suggesting I was over my head, even then. There’s also Auxy, as covered recently in this App Store Story and Reason Compact. I’ve played around with these more recently – since they’re both available in their most primitive forms as a free download – with little to report.
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Capture
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Disappointingly, Apple’s own Music Memos – as demonstrated by Chris Welch from The Verge in the embed, above – is currently in the process of being officially sunsetted and is now no longer available for download on the App Store. As that article notes, users are instead directed toward GarageBand or ye olde native Voice Memos to record high quality audio. However, if you want to take advantage of the stereo audio recording capabilities included in iPhones after the 11 Pro, you must either use the native Camera app to capture video (and extract the audio later,) or Dolby On – Dolby’s own iOS app for recording which – if I’m completely honest – will do nothing but utterly frustrate anyone trying to capture the truest digital audio possible.
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As part of my iPhone 12 Pro Max Review, I’ve accumulated quite a few audio files in various formats testing its capture abilities and stashed them in this folder on The Psalms’ GitHub Repository. Probably the most relevant of these, though, is embedded just above. If you’ll forgive my pajamas, ridiculous piano faces, and general rustiness with the instrument, it demonstrates the “Audio Zoom” feature found in the iPhone 11 Pro and up, which I’ve found to be unfortunately underdocumented by Apple, itself. I added my own inquiry to this post on the official Developer forums asking about it, but don’t really expect anything back. According to “What is Audio Zoom for smartphones?” published on the site DxOMark:
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The main technology behind audio zoom is called beamforming, or spatial filtering. It allows changing an audio recording’s directivity (that is, the sensitivity according to the direction of the sound source) and shape it in any way necessary. In this case, the optimal directivity is a hypercardioid pattern (see illustration below), which enhances sounds coming from the front direction — that is, from the direction in which your camera is pointed — while attenuating sounds from all other directions (your background noise).
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My testing has suggested that the best means of recording unfiltered-as-possible stereo audio with an iPhone is to record video at 1x zoom with the native Camera app and extract the audio from the video file. In the Bandcamp track embedded below, I “mounted” my 12 Pro Max right above my old upright’s soundboard and extracted audio directly from the video file with Audacity. It was then amplified slightly, saved to a FLAC file and uploaded directly to Bandcamp. Of course, it’s worth qualifying that – while I have extensive experience with audio – I have neither professional training, nor any professional monitoring equipment.
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That said, the biggest objection I’ve heard from audiophiles regarding audio capture and manipulation on handsets, generally, has to do with their hardware’s extremely limited capabilities when compared to any sort of professional desktop soundcard. Given the greater argument I've come to regarding the state of consumer tech as best exemplified by smartphone design – that we've come to expect far too much of single devices, and the resulting jack-of-all-tradeness summing their real-life capabilities has become a severe detriment instead of a feature – I must echo, again, that adding “studio” audio capture, manipulation, and production capabilities to our goddamned cellular phones doesn't help anyone. To any user truly hoping to accomplish these things, I say just go home and boot up your damned desktop.
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Other Considerations
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The final episode in AppStories' three-part miniseries on music was just published today, though I suspect – for my audience, anyway – that its coverage is mostly out-of-scope on this topic, largely for financial reasons. Apple's first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow at noon, my time, and is entitled “Spring Loaded,” which – combined with its 4/20 joke date – suggests to me that we'll finally see the release of the APPLE GUN™ alongside iWeed™, but little to nothing in the way of music.
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In the midst of my brief research into The Greater History of Apple Music, I discovered the existence of iTunes Ping – which I somehow missed entirely, along with my Twitter friend Jon Male. I also discovered articles from the company's decision to kill its successor “Connect” from Apple Music, which was reportedly “rarely used.” Notably, this removal also took away what little power Artists had over the narrative surrounding their music on the service. I can see the business justification for all of this (barely) except for removing the ability for users to follow artists.
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The latest Apple Music feature – a “channel” for music videos – also makes zero sense to me, but the launch of Apple Music on the webabsolutely does, especially for Windows and Linux users, who are now officially freed from iTunes (the software) and allowed to use a much more modern Apple Music experience. I prepended “officially,” there, because third-party Apple Music web players have existed as long as the service has allowed the required integration. First, there was Naveed Golafshani's – which is no longer live – but Brychan Bennett-Odlum's Musish is still live and working, as you can see from the screenshot embedded above. Other than the ability to select between two stream bitrates, I can't seen any remaining advantages to using the latter over Apple's own web player, unless you harbor spite toward their handling of the whole thing, which would be entirely understandable, from my perspective.
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MKBHD’s first tech purchase with his own money was an iPod Touch. mine was the original flash drive iPod Shuffle… this is what I mean when I say “I feel old.” it’s not that I’m actually elderly - it’s just strange finding out so often I am older than people I look up to. pic.twitter.com/rbCupcU0R5
As someone who grew up in the mp3 era with a first-generation iPod Shuffle and iTunes, living and dying between iTunes Store gift cards, Apple Music still seems like one hell of a magical deal. In effect, it allows access to all of iTunes for a flat monthly fee. Or at least it would had I never become acquainted with professional independent musicians who've published, there, and have to contend with tedious realities like the process by which one can add those beautiful lyrics to Apple Music tracks, and who's only real means of control/engagement on the service has been removed with virtually zero prospects of a replacement. If, indeed, Jessica Lessin was correct about Apple's obsession with music, it has resulted in very little for any class of music makers, and left even its listeners to seek out and find third-party solutions like MusicHarbor to perform even the most basic personalization one expects from a modern music streaming service without even bothering to amend their App Store's discovery process to illuminate them, or even write a fucking App Story. Despite this, one-to-three-person app teams continue to work on new solutions, to these and other problems...
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
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Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
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For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
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Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking” – a function once relegated to magazines – has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” – applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now – can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
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In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
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On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
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She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
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According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
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“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
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The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
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In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
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Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and – most controversially – the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns – if not its proposed solutions – should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
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Responsible Curation
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For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
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Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
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Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
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Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook – the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world – as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy – vague, at best.
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In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
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In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”[^1]
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You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
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In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
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Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
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In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
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Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
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The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
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Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
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I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”[^2]
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As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections – which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page – and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
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Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
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The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
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[1] While Bandcamp set out from the beginning to make it easier for artists to publish music, getting music on Spotify has always been a grueling process.
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[2] I fully intended to quote Kaitlyn Tiffany on how organizations only get tech media attention if a significant amount of capital is involved in some form, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ll certainly come back and add it if/when I do.
My friend Sierra has used SoundCloud almost exclusively for her music discovery, consumption, and recommendations, but has remained resolute in her unwillingness to financially invest in the service. As such, her listening is regularly interrupted by ads and limited to bitrates as low as 64kbps. Since I was last employed, I have maintained a vow to her that I would pay for a subscription to SoundCloud Go+ – the premium listener tier of the service – with my own money, once I was once again in place at a steady job. This move would remove all advertising from her listening and up its bitrate to 256kbps, among other benefits.
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Two nights ago, we were refueling her car in preparation for another one of our recreational drives into rural Missouri when I made the decision on a whim to simply signup for a trial of Go+ on my own account using Apple Pay, mostly because I knew we’d be going out of effective cell network range and one of Go+’s most emphasized features is its ability to download music locally. (Since my Apple Music subscription expired earlier this year, I only have a single album actually downloaded on my phone.)
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***
-The above is what I wrote several weeks ago, just as I was beginning my trial period. Now, having experienced a significant amount of time as a SoundCloud Go user, I am a bit sad that my trial is over. To be honest, I fully intended to become a paying subscriber, but my PayPal account was $0.70 short of the $12.99 monthly fee when the first billing cycle came, two weeks ago. This is not a conclusion I expected to come to, as SoundCloud’s fundamental arrangement could not possibly differ any more from the music streaming service I long claimed as my ideal own: Apple Music.
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One major worry I would imagine potential subscribers may have when approaching SoundCloud as a replacement for their single music subscription service would revolve around the extent of SoundCloud’s establishment music industry library. There’s no way your Dad’s Sunday barbecue playlist is going to be on SoundCloud, right? Strangely enough, I was unable to find a single track that was not in the library. From my own favorite Keith Jarrett’s archives to the new Dixie Chicks album, every bit of big time record label-distributed music I could conceieve of could be found aside the Go+ badge (though notably, neither of these showed significant playcounts.) As far as the app experience goes, I swear it got smoother as soon as I signed up for Go+. This is probably bullshit, but regardless, with the seemingly ever-widening disparity in the experiences of free vs. premium users, SoundCloud appears to be moving actively away from the former.
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I have long said (somewhat in jest) that Chance The Rapper is the only reason SoundCloud still exists.
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From a future historian’s perspective, the battle for the definitive name in independent digital music distribution has already won, largely thanks to its relationship with Chance The Rapper, who’s quickly become a “cultural influencer, thought leader, global star,” and one of my generation’s upmost celebrity champions. Obviously, there is little sense trying to determine whether SoundCloud earned his partnership or landed their popular association with his name as long as the artist maintains it publicly, while continuing to give new meaning to the phrase “serially likable.”
--“Bandcamp: Streaming’s Secret Savior” | July, 2018
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If CNET_ was asking the question a year before that Bandcamp essay, I think I can feel properly varified. What I’d really like to know, now: does Chance still feel the same way about the streaming service after the launch of SoundCloud Go+? Considering that I am far from a real music journalist, I do not have any more contact resources than you have. That said, I left [a comment on his Facebook Page](https://www.facebook.com/chancetherapper/posts/3299672310124810?commentid=3319045628187478). I guess we’ll see.
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Some more technical bits: SoundCloud is now castable on Chromecast, but not supported by Apple CarPlay, for whatever that’s worth. Notably apart from Bandcamp and Apple Music and aligned with Spotify, SoundCloud is explicitly investing in algorithmic music discovery, which means its users are doing the curatorial work. I am doing/have done the curatorial work. That means the DnB crowd is going to receieve Toto recommendations, given what I sought out for this post. You’re welcome, and sorry…
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While I was surprisingly unable to find any Tweets or Evernotes further evangelizing Apple Music (I suspect I’m thinking of an old, untranscribed Drycast episode,) I found real magic in the service as I perceieved it: $9.99 a month for all of iTunes. 13 year-old me would considerthat one helluva deal.
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Naturally, if you know of one, please do comment and/or drop me a line.
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In fact, it is the only streaming app I found that _does not _have CarPlay support. Even Bandcamp and MixCloud for iOS do!
The duo's new album manages to be wonderfully explorative without sacrificing any sacred traditions.
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For years, I took the voices and culture of working Americans for granted and sought to generally distance myself from my origin’s heritage as much as possible, but I’ve since realized that I couldn’t have done so without absolute certainty that country, bluegrass, and folk music were stubborn as State highway ditch-rooted fescue blades: omnipresent forces of Midwestern nature that’d secured their invincibility with the simple superiority of their belonging. While this conclusion is true enough for the time being, it’s quite independently so of their worth or necessity. In such conditional blindness, I’ve simply proven my sensibilities to be (predictably in the case of my seniors) not exempt. This truth is noteworthy only because of its potential to spare others the embarrassment of blatant ignorance to their own privilege. That said, I would suggest that you engage this music sincerely for a moment for your own sake, regardless of your own convictions regarding country music, Indiana, plaid, pickup trucks, the end of the world, or the proper noun for “cantaloupe.”
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As young adults, even those folks who’ve remained resolutely country-minded found themselves trivializing the name of the titanic Dallas-born trio The Dixie Chicks not out of half-assed iconoclasm, but because their brand was so cleverly immune to irony. You thought you were proving yourself of a higher caliber of discernment, but mocking goddesses only paraded your ignorance. In my teen rebellion against the culture of my rural origin, I scoffed at their mention for a while, somehow oblivious to my blatant hypocrisy. Thanks to my older sisters and their automobiles, I spent before and after elementary school days absorbing thousands of hours’ worth of late-90s/early-oughts Pop Country radio. Two summers ago, I returned to this library at length for the first time in 10 years and found my heart completely vulnerable to its related memories and my mind consistently flabbergasted by the oomph of the composition that defines the genre’s last mainstream hurrah.
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The original three Chicks – Natalie Maines, Emily Robison, and Marty Maguire – are still very much alive, kicking, and radio-playing. They even “returned from exile” with a real international tour in 2016. (I regret little more in my adult life than missing the opportunity to see them.) According to a fascinating November 2015 analysis in The Guardian, their 2003 denouncement of President George W. Bush cost them serious cred among their audience, but Johnny Cash likely harbored similar sentiments, Stephen Morrissey is… not straight, the most worthwhile current country sounds from my teenage home are composed and performed by a trans woman, and the staple tunes from the genre’s most chaste personalities are often just about sex. No reasonable individual would still cite this incident in an argument opposing the essential legacy of these three miraculously talented women.
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From a pop perspective at least, The Dixie Chicks are almost certainly the penultimate expression of country music as a technical and emotional exercise. Their extraordinary musicianship and prodigally antecedent mastery of suave sincerity represented the absolute peak of pop country’s untenable relationship with the American working class in one hell of a 21st-century-breaching last hurrah that still brings tears of pride to many an eye. However, the hysterical backlash of the greater working people personified in part by Donald Trump’s presidency is a last sure indication of the mainstream’s final estrangement from all distillations of rural culture. In the coming years, I fear the toiling masses will be left only with less and less authentic, more and more suburban bastardizations of their music as the last superficial delusions of condescending affection from the middle class fade, and the enterprise dies. What does survive will “graduate” (retire) to Folk (for white performers,) and further strengthen the Blues resurrection (for everyone else.) That said, it’s hard to find anyone who’s comfortable mourning the loss openly after acceptance has progressively set in – there’s simply nowhere else to go, and its aging icons have been in desperate need of retirement throughout the Information Age.
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The Top 10 Vegan Alternatives to Working-Class America
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Even if I’d had the moderate exposure from my current perch in the midst of the notoriously grass-roots nature of Portland’s Folk/Blues scene, 2000 miles west, I would have still been totally blindsided by my incidental introduction to The Matchsellers, two years ago. One needn’t harbor any presumptions about the relationship between Kansas City violinist/fiddler Julie Bates and Hoosier blues guitarist, Andrew Morris – they’re just about the cutest pair you’ll ever see, couple’s act or not (it’s less relevant than you’d think, and none of our business.) They’re also extremely talented and genuinely authoritative world-class musicians with plenty of authentic country mileage who exude a proud air of warm, confident serenity occupying the bluegrass sphere. After happening upon their set at Columbia’s faux-speakeasy in Summer 2016, I was at once charmed and impressed by the pervasive magnitude of the ethereal aura that followed them, especially after our brief post-performance conversation. I’m ninety percent sure they came without a mobile phone between them carrying a wicker basket full of CDs and matchbooks, and shucks… I do believe we’ve been doing this whole thing wrong, all along.
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I bought a copy of Kosciusko County then and there and played the shit out of it the next summer, wandering aimlessly around Missouri with my best friend, revisiting (and occasionally disrupting) the resolute peace of the tiny communities I grew up orbiting. On our way to the Hannibal – Huckleberry’s Fictional home/the great Mississippi’s tired tourism machine – we just left it on repeat. As a soundtrack to such sentimental pursuits, a central trio of back-to-back tracks proved especially potent, beginning with “Mentone (The 3,000 lb Egg)” – the work’s nostalgic, tear-jerking sole instrumental. Production isn’t low-fidelity, but appropriately honest – no amount of expensive mastering would be capable of compressing the essence of a surprise late-night live performance from The Matchsellers’ work into a digital audio file, anyway.
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Bates’ fiddling is an impossibly rare pleasure – the real type of sawing that mystically manages to erase one’s inhibitions and sense of civic responsibility when tearing about the borders of quiet row-crop plots, leaving long-lived lesions of billowing limestone high above numbered county roads at ninety miles-per-hour. Succeeding the distant, eye-misting cruise of the 1.5-ton Egg, “Driving Escort” is a masterpiece (naturally) of this raucous realm.
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Driving down the road with a yellow light on top of my truck / Going down to Vincennes earning my sixty bucks.
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Add the accompaniment of Morris’ obviously-fathomless relationship with the guitar, and the result nails a select truth without any hint of prudishness. At sufficient volume, “Muskmelon Breakdown” becomes a beautifully-harmonious catalyst of fast, loose, maniacal, hilarious energy that’s sure to land you in a ditch, but you’ll still be laughing your ass off by the time you’re pulling clay clumps and waist-high fescue blades from your steaming radiator. Kosciusko County isn’t an innovative record by any critical instrumentation, but I’d do best to keep my sun-faded, skip-worn copy readily at hand for the next time I find myself on a fresh gravel road, whenever that may be.
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For the last five years, all we said was goodbye
-I said it again, it was the fifth time
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I took your word and did what I thought was best
-I took your word and went 600 miles west
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That’s it, then – we’ve got The Matchsellers pretty well figured for either wannabe(?) or reformed(?) yahoos of their own design; charming, dusty novelties who chose a folly destiny of toiling their craft for none but a seasonal dozen acres of white, sweating State Fair flesh. Obviously, they’re meant for us sophisticated, globetrotting Winners to collect like thrift store antiques on our way down the interstate. Their time is ours to book for nothing on our mediocre “speakeasy’s” waxy new stage; to post on an Instagram story, to Tweet in an easy compartmentalization of their quaint displacement from our time, deep in the dusty recesses of our collections for no good bargain, where they’ll fall comfortably in line as our predictable and willing country servants should an opportunity happen upon us to show a stranger how interesting, dynamic, and worldly we are.
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As a displaced (and formerly ex-communicated) yokel, I’ve often been astonished by how easy it is to discard American folk music for huge swaths of time unless it expresses some unignorable sort of spectacular torment. My own failure to recognize the value in this one until I became separated and homesick was an overtly foolhardy cliché (though quite predictable of like privilege,) but I can’t help but wonder: is it unavoidable? Of course, the process is necessary for ‘class justice’ – one might even call it a natural law of sorts – and in the case of The Matchsellers, there’s hardly a struggle to communicate emotionally. For a real music scholar, though, it’s surely worth asking of those voices who know: do the oppressed, destitute, and hope-impoverished people of this country still rely on bluegrass, or has it been replaced for them?
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The abstraction of the phrase “good surprise” had plummeted from our collective vocabulary at a record-demolishing velocity in the interim, but this past spring’s release of Bluegrastronauts hit me squarely upside the skull again, stirring a solid half hour of hysterical, shrieking psychosis. I assumed the worst… Dear God, what has the internet forced upon that sweet, rootsy duo?! – and was immediately compelled to drop everything and listen.
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Hoosiers, we have a problem. What the fuck is this album, exactly? A nonchalant, apparently oblivious challenge to every assumption you could possibly arrive with. It’s safe to suppose “Bluegrastronauts” refers to its departure from the rest of their discography – from smack dab in Indiana’s center to the goddamned Beta Quadrant, the two managed to stupefyingly ace a theme most comfortable residents of their bluegrass sphere would take care to avoid leaving up on the kitchen whiteboard – even tackling apocalypse with regal serenity. At first glance, I was sure that copious soft glow had to either be the false product of my own insanity, or a deliberate attempt to alienate the sum of their audience in a single crises of identity. In fact, The Matchsellers had pulled off yet another especially-sparse artistic miracle and harnessed their creative restlessness to propel their departure from the elderly genre’s pretensions without spilling a single drip of their secret sauce. It’s not a concept album (thank God,) but doesn’t wander in any disparaging sense, either.
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Earl Scruggs in a spaceship on his way to Mars
-Pickin' away on the banjo at 100,000 miles an hour
-Bill Monroe in a rocket, see the look on his face
-it's mighty dark to travel when you're in outer space
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Name-dropping four bluegrass legends within the number 1 album-titled introductory track is the pair’s single self-conscious acknowledgment of visiting folk fanatics: this CD looks crazy, but we know what we’re doing – and Kansas City’s mention accredits the locale of the following entirely Missouri-made production. Indeed, in the WhoDoneIts, you’ll see The HillBenders’ Chad Graves layed em’ down in Springfield, and Johnny Kenepaske’s Dead Horse Sound Company spread em’ around in the Heart of America, itself. Missourian musicians especially should take note of these names: the offerings may have diversified since my day, but sound talent like this is difficult to come across, even within explosive college towns. Cutting two live acoustic tracks per performer – four in total – while expecting to retain any subsequent control over the behavior of either unwanted or subject sound is as difficult as any other circumstance you’ll encounter in studio production at this level. I know this much (but little more in that direction): real sound control is simply too tedious to bear for monomiking rascals with GarageBand. Now, having lost or been estranged from any remotely-professional sound reproduction equipment, Bluegrastronauts sounds as balanced and polished as my wired Apple earbuds could ever convey.
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In shared verses, Julie and Andrew’s charmed harmonies are separated beautifully about the listener without inducing a sense of lateral imbalance when one of them sings alone. (Admittedly, I don’t exactly know how it’s accomplished.) No single personality in the record’s toolset – guitar, fiddle, banjo, bass, or dobro steps over any other.
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I have no idea who’s listening, but I’m positive their numbers should be multiplying by a hundredfold very quickly, filling especially with all of ye who feel abandoned by all authentic American representation. They shouldn’t ever fill up stadiums or establishment radiowaves, nor should their art invite extensive pretentious dissection, but they will be adored.
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It’s a quintessential manner of Country Boy pride to whip the middle class’s condescension right back around with a classic demonstration: Oh, you thought I didn’t know about that? You thought I couldn’t do that? Well, of course I can! I’m just not particularly interested. The Matchsellers, though, have attained a much higher tier of comfort and confidence in their own skin.
I have to just fucking do it — I’m going to start writing about music in this space. There’s virtually zero chance that I’ll shout over other voices of music criticism as long as Bilge remains so poorly optimized for SEO, and Portland, Oregon has been far too confusing to deprive myself the opportunity to work out any understanding of its youth culture. It’s not a lack of talented musicians in the area — the opposite is true — but a severe drought of the kind of tragedy and trauma which ultimately give acoustic American musical expression its whole shit. What I caught of the weekend’s invasion with Santa Cruz musicians were all praiseworthy, tight and confident performers who’d obviously invested heavily in their equipment and their presence here. Joe Kaplow arrived with a sort of bespoke magazine rack containing 20 neatly-arranged effect pedals, leading me to wonder for a moment if I was about to witness banjo powerviolence for the first time, but he explained that he simply preferred their availability, and wouldn’t use “more than a few at once,” and seemed almost genuinely perturbed by my attempt to explain the specific industrially-influenced involvement of audio hardware in hardcore punk and grind performance which I was referring to with the term. (“Powerviolence” has apparently become an ambiguous one around these parts, and I’m sure he was actually just utterly uninterested.)
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No more than two dozen guests made up their peak crowd of witnesses, yet Joe and his band certainly made good on shear effort expended in laying down a hearty, back-to-back recital for us at an unusually protracted rate, though apparently either they, the Getaway Dogs, or The Curfews had insisted that a “cover charge” be collected at the door of the house show. It’s not my business to to dwell on or attempt to investigate an unsubstantiatable rumor, but I understand this could have been a breach of house show etiquette. What I do know is that one of the visiting musicians stole 4 flat AA batteries out of my COOLPIX and apparently attempted to jack its ancient Compact Flash card, which is only hilarious because they didn’t succeed. Regardless, it should be said that Joe Kaplow’s songwriting is more flattered by Indie mags than my own ears, though one still wishes for a more substantive topic than “I thought it’d be cool make a corn cob pipe, so I did.” Then again, much of what you’ll find at this URL reads a lot like “I thought it’d be interesting to make a WordPress blog, so I did.” White people have truly run out of shit to say, haven’t we?
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The inspiration that sparked ‘I Said’ moved me like a puppet. So much so that I had to pull over at the top of Altamont Pass, by the huge windmills, and write the song in the back of my van.
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Joe Kaplow for Glide Magazine
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Reflection upon just about anything can have personal meaning, but no amount of musicianship can mask a stark lack of context. I do wonder if Indie Folk should just return to the megachurch, where songwriters like Joe and musicians of his crew’s sort are literally handed a gigantic audience of trained experts at finding profound meaning where it probably isn’t, along with great salaries, from what I hear. Otherwise, all that taxing preparation and expenditure will only lead to more forgettable performances. Or perhaps I am simply misguided in my assumption that artists work exclusively to communicate something lasting to someone. Every conversation I’ve had with Portlanders about Portland music has been predominantly about what artists and their audiences wear and how they behave instead of what they’re trying to say. There’s nothing inherently wrong with leaving things petty, lyrically and choosing to remain content with established sounds, musically, as long as your work is advertised as entertainment, not performance.
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Before I came Northwest, my fiancé had been exposing me to a variety of its music, which I mostly tolerated politely. Dozens of albums and EPs were played through once and forgotten forever, but when I arrived at a demo tape recorded by her long time friend’s band, The Cigarette Burns, I finally heard something familiar, yet vitally compelling: pissed off punks having fun. That said, I should admit that I only attended Saturday’s show because he was on the ticket, and I’m still glad I did.
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After what felt like hours of drowsy corn cob pipes, Christmas sweaters, and old sweethearts at fifty beats per minute (there were literally two young men sleeping within 15 feet of the bands for the duration,) Ricky sat himself on a stool in the midst of Kaplow’s sprawling gear load at 2:30AM with only his guitar and his voice. Unfortunately, I’d squandered the Nikon’s batteries on Californians (the lighting was not ideal anyway,) so I thought I’d share his set on Periscope. Though Ricky had been patiently present and attentive for the entire night (unlike myself,) those who were left of the entertainers bolted to the porch for a lively discussion about unicycles and quinoa while Ricky told us about hate, jealousy, and feeling like shit in a somber elegy. Any further adjectives may edge dangerously close to a half-assed “concert review,” which I am not yet qualified for, but I will say that Ricky’s sincerity made him most engaging part of the night, and his frustrated, conclusive nod to The Cigarette Burns was the first real punk sounds I’ve yet heard in Portland.
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I realize sharing this small experience does little to grow the conversation, but this isn’t a magazine, and I am desperate for answers about the bizarre reality in which I find myself. When Ricky dedicated a song to Courtney Love, one of the male musicians(?) yelled “Courtney Love fuckin’ killed Kurt Cobain!” which was such an unbelievably cliché happening/decision that I’ll surely spend the rest of my days in this city unsuccessfully attempting to work it out, aloud. I can’t quite recall who it was last Fall that responded to my frustration by challenging “what if there’s nothing to understand?” While this may be a reasonable conclusion, I suspect it’s not one I could accept as long as I remain here without losing my mind. If Portland is truly the dimensionless bastion of apathy and intellectual stagnancy for young Americans, I must blog my way out it as soon as possible (for Pete’s sake, just give these kids some antidepressants,) but I’d still like to believe the idea too oxymoronic to actually exist.
As the industry endeavors once again to reconcile the cultural and financial incentives of streaming digital music, one independent platform has wavered little from its 10-year-long mission to bring the business to the unsigned artist with elegance and integrity.
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If you’ve ever thought to yourself wow, Bandcamp has looked basically the same forever, you were entirely correct – now for a tenth of the century, at least – and you’ll be hard-pressed to find another Silicon Valley technology company toting a venture-funded origin story with such casual, yet robust long-standing user relationships underneath an unwavering, bullshit-free commitment to their product. Even under the most ludicrous scrutiny, the company’s rudder is flawless and its course true. What at first glance you’d swear to be an unsolicited conclusion to an obscure examination could very reasonably be described as cheesy, stubborn, dweebish, pious, or just generally boring, indeed, yet the respective accuracy of each of these adjectives are no more than the byproducts of the very same operational ethics which we’ve suggested, requested, demanded, and begged the rest of the world’s computing capitol to re-adopt, enforce, or at least ponder for a beat. The volume of the masses’ exponentially-increasing attendance of late is only overcome by its hysterical shouting match, so let us pipe down for a while, now so that we may be precise as we dig deeper into the methodology which has finally led to a profitable, drama-free outlying technology organization without the need for a single drop of analogous sweat over its brand upkeep. By arranging the company in its infancy to so precisely and elementally align with the needs of its customers, the original troupe of Bandcamp Bums ensured profound and lasting simplicity in the single overarching priority for those in every single role behind the quiet perpetuation of Bandcamp dot com: selling goodmusic.
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The platform indiscriminately provides both individual artists and labels with a clean, cozy, charming, smartly-designed and technically competent storefront with a wide-open storage allocation, optimal search engine optimization and a widely-trusted point of sale experience in exchange for 15% of any sales that should come in – significantly less than other channels; half what Apple Music will take. In examining Bandcamp’s history, its impact on independent music, and its viability as an alternative streaming service, we shall excavate the truth behind the derisive cynicism directed its way by the titans of the tech and music press. Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
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To catch our starting gun, we must first travel to Face The Music 2016 in Melbourne – as far as one can possibly get from The Valley – alongside Bandcamp’s super-worldly Chief Curator, Andrew Jervis to observe his interview for a live audience.
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Bandcamp has always grown extremely organically. There’s never actually been any advertising that we’ve done; there’s never any advertising on the site, and there never will be. We haven’t really tooted our horn very hard.
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In fact, just about everything from the shrewd idealism of those who beget its conception to the on-the-nose care in their person-to-person customer service is so adamantly inverse of the tech industry archetype which the global End User community at large are presently discovering at twice the speed of sound there should at least be some conspiratorializing going around. Where I come from, launching a desolate business to little mainstream success with persistence and dignified determination is (or should be) regarded as a telltale sign that one is running a front (according to the television, anyway,) but exploration of this plausibility yielded nothing in Bandcamp’s case, even after I took the risk of incrimination and begged a certain Boston-based future funk producer to accept my ginormous bribe and include any sort of pharmacological substance with his summer beat tape. He wouldn’t even send antihistamines.
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As uncomfortably as it lands on the soul, no moniker describes Bandcamp more comprehensively than “an online record store.” As far as Ethans go, Bandcamp’s CEO and founders’ public attaché Ethan Diamond is as good as they come: it’s quite telling that he is the only Silicon Valley CEO who’s remained intellectually grounded enough with the rest of us in order to retain any skills in nuanced forms of verbal communication like… humor. The closest the company has ever come to promotion? His awkward, sub-20-minute presentation at the XOXO Festival 2014 offered an impressively succinct introduction to their greater mission considering the unmistakable agony in his body language.
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“We worked out of the public library for the first four years of the company's existence,” he admits. Impressively, Bandcamp was operated entirely as a “virtual company” until 2015.
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Either Bandcamp just happens to be the single Silicon Valley company where the executives are unanimously so fucking fulfilled by their work without exception that they aren’t compelled to leave it long enough to stumble upon the inevitable coastal colleague with a connection to something like The Internet History Podcast, or technology journalism has definitively lost all reverence for actual innovation in favor of the emotionally-charged Innovation Myth, now relinquished almost entirely to the narrative control of its own protagonists. Perhaps it was inevitable that Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos would become immortalized as “those who make things happen,” but our ability to quantify value as consumers tends to scurry rapidly away behind our backs when they’re turned by the constant distraction of these mostly inert figureheads. As their personalities have stolen the story, the people in industry with their hands on real product have all but completely disappeared from the frame, and all of the work remaining at the End User’s eye level was abandoned by aspiration long ago and replaced with the unfulfilling mechanism of A Quick Buck. Though now we are proceeding into a similar frame – only because our subject cares more about their mission than claiming recognition for it and might just be the first such company run by a cast who become sincerely defensive at the suggestion of a cash-out.
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“Bandcamp’s philosophy has always been very different [from] a lot of the companies we’re surrounded by,” reflects Jervis. “We are not a ‘let’s-raise-money-and-burn-through-it’ type of company.”
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I know that your mind has been trained by years of engagement with the digital media of a rapidly-globalizing, venture capital-obsessed society to block the passage of this sort of language across your conscious threshold at risk of life-threatening overexposure to the Medium Dialect and its churnalising neoliberal cyberchode scholars of the Personal Brand; I know you’ve read the exact same quote from how many entrepreneurs in how many worthless, masturbatory business magazine profiles, but I swear on my one-of-a-kind Estonian Hilary Duff pullout that Jervis speaks without irony or deception. how many fucking churnicles have abandoned you, but this time, it’s actually sincere.
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On The Web
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Though Bandcamp was technically the first comprehensive library-modeled music streaming service in existence, the topical conversations between both technology and music journalists and industry executives flooding both podcast and news feeds at the moment orbiting the “Cord-Cutting” phenomena as it’s washed over television, cinema, and music are rooted in the same building blocks as the core technology behind the delivery of all of these conversations as well as their subjects, funny enough. As long as my subgeneration has known it, The Web has been a source of sound in some manifestation, but the example with the most perplexing history was also the first. Today, one of five tabs in the main menu of my iPhone’s native music app contains the text “Radio” beneath an “antenna with waves” graphic which opens a service once called iTunes Radio that was absorbed into – and restricted to subscribers of – Apple Music as of 2016, confusingly. However, both “iTunes Radio” and “Apple Music Radio(?)” – along with any and all audio streaming services (mentioned and not) – are fundamentally nothing more than different UX design interpretations of the “simple” practice of streaming an audio file, which made its debut at the turn of the century in the form of “Internet Radio.” Astonishingly, the protocol – still referred to by at least one person on Earth as “Webcasting,” no doubt – has survived nearly 20 years, and even the youngest of us have likely encountered it in unusual situations.
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Ironically, the majority of Internet Radio broadcasts remaining on the air are nothing more than live duplicates of the traditional radio wave-bound products from the physical stations your car’s head unit receives. Even the current desktop version of iTunes maintains support for streaming “audio files over the internet,” though a glance at Apple’s dated support page for the process suggests it hasn’t crossed anybody’s mind for at least half of that history. In 1994, the publicly-funded radio network Voice of America became the “First [radio] on the Internet” when it began – after an introduction by Al Gore, no less – “offering digitized audio versions of selected newscasts and other program segments in 15 languages on its public internet server on Monday, Aug. 15,” according to former engineer Chris Kern. However – since we’re already this deep into internet history – a distinction must be established between streaming static files and streaming live audio. The first relies on pre-recorded audio files uploaded to a publicly-accessible server – in Kern’s original case, “via anonymous FTP and the Internet Gopher protocol,” which continues to be the elemental process behind every audio file streamed across the Web (including those on Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) more or less because it ain’t broke.
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Semantically, “live” digital audio streaming in its aforementioned “purest” form is more or less exclusive to Internet Radio. Obscured aside from the traditional station simulcast, Web-only Internet Radio stations have their own of “the Internet’s quiet success stories,” filled with quaint experiences and an endless cycle of death proclamations which continue to be disproven, anywise.
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On June 27th, 1999, The Seattle Times ran an especially worthwhile introduction to the concept that likely represents the only major newspaper’s mention of SHOUTcast (the first and likely last name in DIY Web DJing) in the history of the printed word within a work of truly phenomenal tech reporting on Mark Mataassa’s part. From the past, one will find his chillingly spot-on foresight and well-considered observations are bestrewed with mind-boggling hilarity when they look.
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Dialing in to the Net through a 56 kilobit-per-second modem, as I am, this seems like a ridiculous waste – or at least misallocation – of resources.
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I'm using a $3,000 machine, tying up a phone line and seriously compromising my computing power for an experience that in sound quality, simplicity and dependability can't compare, truthfully, with the $9 Emerson clock radio an arm's length away.
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And yet Web radio is one of the hottest ideas going in the ever-hot world of Internet startups and acquisitions: In the past few months, America Online and Yahoo! each have purchased fast-growing Web music sites, rock-music trendsetters like Rolling Stone and MTV have gotten into the business, and technological improvements – from Microsoft's newest browser and Real Networks' newest player to the latest MP3 enhancements – are closing the quality and accessibility gaps.
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The combination of developments is not only changing how computers (and radios) are used, but offering a glimpse of a future when audience demographics are sliced ultra-thin – to the person – and everybody has the potential to be a radio broadcaster as well as listener.
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I only have a few experiences with Internet Radio of my own, but they’re all rampantly more memorable than one would expect. The now in-stasis NWIRE project was by the most relevantly intriguing and savvily-curated home for a diverse host of electronic musicians I’ve ever come across – it was my second default browser tab for most of 2017, when I’d even listen to the odd-hour broadcasts overseen by just the automated library-perusing bot for hours. On episode 16 of Drycast, I recounted the absurd tale of my surprise morning encounter with a Norwegian station’s live broadcast from some European breakcore club, which was likely responsible for the most fun I’ve ever had working in retail.
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Extratone’s former Tech Editor is partial to a station called Radio Swiss Jazz, which appears to be thriving in comparison with most visible broadcasters, and unapologetically emits a bizarre amalgamation of tunes both chart-topping and Seriously Obscure across every conceivable genre (including Marching Music,) and continent of origin. Between every few charts, the brief commentary and station identification has provided our own private mystery: Was that one pre-recorded? This guy was on yesterday, but has since shed his accent? However, these tiny temporary mysteries are Internet Radio’s only remaining value for us, and I suspect the same is true for all but the most laggard laggards. For as long as I’ve been coherent enough to disseminate between much of anything, very few of its visible offerings have offered anything groundbreaking or fresh, perhaps out of negligence (one can very easily arrange leave a machine running SHOUTcast to shuffle through a given library of music and/or podcasts indefinitely,) frustration, or economic necessity.
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Crucially, the truly most critical consequences and contributions provided by the pioneers of Internet Radio to our current digital streaming experience were centered within intellectual property legislation and advertising-supported business. Unfortunately, this juncture marks our complete departure from my wheelhouse, but thankfully, a few sacred accounts of one of technology’s foremost confusing clashes with the ill-equipped, technoilliterate monoliths of the American justice system do indeed remain. As early as 2002, the ineffable Doc Searls reported on a document authored by the Library of Congress’ Copyright Royalty Board called “Determination of Royalty Rates and Terms for Ephemeral Recording and Webcasting Digital Performance of Sound Recordings” for Linux Journal in an encyclopedic breakdown of its implications ironically entitled “Why Are So Many Internet Radio Stations Still on the Air?” I would hope my comprehension is sufficient to declare that this was no Cambridge Analytica: only a few years subsequent the technology’s inception, operators within the Internet Radio business faced serious and immediate fines for their pre-enforcement distribution of copyrighted material stretching four years back – the severity of which the Doc suggested would “surely bankrupt many of the individual broadcasters that have been pioneering this marketplace for the longest time.”
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Unlike the commercial radio stations we hear on the old-fashioned airwaves, Internet radio stations' primary market relationship isn't with advertisers; it's with listeners. In many cases, the listeners are the primary source of revenue. This business model is similar to that of noncommercial (public) radio, only the market relationship is much more direct and efficient. Internet radio stations don't need to stop programming to hold marathon whine-fests begging listeners to call phone volunteers and pledge money to qualify for a mug or a t-shirt. Listeners simply click on a PayPal or an Amazon link, and after a few more clicks they've made a payment.
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By March, 2010, just 374 stations were aggregated in Google’s Internet Radio Directory, and my own quick sample from its list unfortunately indicated that most are now silent, but SHOUTcast has yet to be abandoned after all this time and we can safely suppose the core architecture of the internet will remain recognizable enough to support it until after we’re all dead, rendering the necessary tools indefinitely ready and accessible should new projects in NWIRE’s vein come along (I know of no better fate I could wish upon the protocol.) From Internet Radio’s pioneer days, we must skip over a whole era to close in on Bandcamp’s origin in the very brightest peak of Web 2.0.
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Again, we find ourselves in 2008 and nobody knows what an iPhone is, but the same classic rock-worshiping, upper-middle class, white collar Early Majority who first loved Internet Radio are now rapidly and delightedly distributing links to something called “Pandora dot com” between AOL and Hotmail inboxes. True luxury music reproduction comes in the form of Beats headphones motivated by a 320GB iPod Classic. Budding audiophiles and backpacker dweebs illegally torrent lossless .FLACs to play over their Christmas-gifted studio monitors with WinAmp, which they’ve set up to impeccably “scrobble” their history with every played track to their Last.fm profiles. Everybody else is still buying music from iTunes. (Those who cannot afford to buy the music they intend to add to their libraries transition to the music nerd classification as soon as they’ve sought out a way to obtain it free.) “Streaming” comes from subscription services like Rhapsody (now Napster,) which are too buried in Digital Rights Management controversy to feel sustainable. MySpace Music has just begun to fade away – next year, in “the Twitter era,” SoundCloud will definitively replace it as the go-to creator network – and Pandora’s immediate future is bright – they’ll make a big move on brand-new mobile streaming experience when they launch their iPhone OS app in July, but the limited performance of the handset’s EDGE network will render it a poor alternative to onsite .mp3s for years to come.
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In January, to minimal acclaim, Oddpost’s Ethan Diamond launched Bandcamp, the startup with programmer friends Joe Holt, Shawn Grunberger, and Neal Tucker to be “a sortof WordPress for musicians” – an easily-created, well-designed landing page to showcase one’s digital music files. As Holt laments in an interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for your music had long been “a pain in the ass.”
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“You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.”
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As an address to all of their shared complaints about the experience of online music distribution up to that point, early Bandcamp was an astounding piece of engineering. The quaint, unsurprisingly crate-digger-looking Ethan Diamond – who’s more or less remained the singular public face of the company since the very beginning – began a brand tradition of transparently music-nerdy correspondence with his first post on the Bandcamp blog, explaining the solutions the team had come up with in greater detail.
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We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
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The launch garnered very little attention from tech or music publications of the time, but Andy Baio’s interview with Diamond provides a substantial, technically in-depth picture of just how revolutionary and necessary it was. Most of what has continued to make Bandcamp such an essential tool was present at the very beginning: server-side stats and metadata (a unique architectural undertaking, no doubt,) track and album-oriented pagination, and a robust, easily-embedded Flash player.
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Study Diamond’s first “screencast” alongside a video tour of SoundCloud from the period and you’ll notice just how much more functional, future-proofed and dignified Bandcamp appeared in comparison. As apprehensive as I am to be caught arguing for minimalism over good design, it’s made perfect sense in the use case of this one platform, which knew exactly what it was from birth, along with what it would always be, apparently, which is such a bizarre reversal of the archetypes and the relentless common narrative we know from The Valley’s legends. Ethan first shows the consumer’s experience – none of which has changed after a whole decade aside from quality-specific track purchases – before delving into the artist-side UI, beginning with the statistics tool, which included playback and search insights to a depth that was (and still is) unheard of from a free service. Then, he demonstrates the publishing process from upload to playback: adding album art, setting a release date, and pricing its purchase. Aside from their removal of the old waveform visualizer (I couldn’t find any record of an announcement of this decision, official or otherwise,) Bandcamp has changed absolutely nothing of what’s shown in Diamond’s tutorial. In the next few months, they would add custom page design, email address capture, and support for custom domains. By October 2008, they’d made enough waves to be picked up by CNET, for whatever that was worth. Apparently, Facebook Music was a legitimate property as well, but I do not remember anything about it at all—pondering an alternate reality in which The Social Network became the dominant online music streaming platform leads to a bizarre comparison of Neil Diamond and Mark Zuckerberg which I can’t imagine being altogether productive. Suffice it to say, the two founders’ visions differ greatly.
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Musicblogocide
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Contextually, it’s also important that we dwell for a moment on the legal and financial hullabaloo surrounding music sales during Bandcamp’s first formative years, and the federal government’s losing battle to interpret, enforce, or replace intellectual property law for the information age. As the Web had grown exponentially more capable and accessible as a means of audio file distribution, it had become absolutely saturated with blatantly DRM-circumventing .mp3s and .wavs. For years, the quickest way to follow up on a check it out sort of music recommendation was simply to search Google for its track name followed by “.mp3.” If the first go didn’t yield success, even the most rudimentary application of cryptography – like substituting some variation of “nsilmtic.rar” to find a download for Nas’ Illmatic, for instance – was a sure bet for one’s second try, which would often return several copies just laying around Google-indexed WordPress media libraries, though results hosted on Mediafire were a preferable alternative. This was the establishment into which my first adolescent digital music discoveries were borned, and I’m still convinced that 99% of us participants were completely without malice. I’d argue heartily that music’s brief escape from the tireless grip of the record industry as its only medium stumbled into digital form would be clearly shown to have a net gain for the whole of American recording artists if you could measure and plot it, including the past, present, and future use of peer-to-peer sharing.
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2010 would prove to be The Year of Reckoning for the fraction of DRM-violating traffic on the visible Web, at least. Though it’d be virtually impossible to quantify, is it only reasonable to assume that many siteowners made some real money from the ad impressions that directly resulted from their unauthorized hosting and Mediafire-embedding, but let’s consider how minuscule even the most outrageously liberal overestimate would be, side-by-side with the billions in additional revenue YouTube has raked in from the same music since assuming their place as the de facto platform for quickly summoning just about any work of audio that’s ever taken digital form. It was in February of that year that Blogger (another Google property) deleted six music blogs from its platform in response to complaints about allegedly DMCA-violating .mp3s. The Registryinsisted the collective finger be pointed at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, itself.
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“It would seem the music bloggers aren't versed in the ways of DMCA claims and counterclaims. But you can't blame Google for that,” they concluded, after one of the blog’s founders expressed some of the most personally-dramatic words mine empathy has yet faced as quoted in The Guardian.
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“It's just sad because we were documenting young people's music from all around the globe. For a lot of people, it was music they wouldn't have been able to discover elsewhere.”
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In hindsight, “blame” is an even more useless avenue of one’s attention than usual, especially when one party (Google) was 100% exempt from any consequences all along. The alarming takeaway is not the DMCA’s deftness, but that Google had the freedom to wait for a parallel business incentive before deciding the law applied to them.
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Frankly, we should all have realized long ago just how fucking futile it is to attempt to control any file traffic. Every desktop-class browser ships with the capability to capture any streamable media on the Web with a handful of keystrokes – it’d take a maximum of 20 minutes to bestow upon even the most casual user the knowledge they’d need to keep every single track, YouTube video, and Twitch stream they’d ever watch, 100% legally without a single third-party service/extension interaction, but the crucial question remains to what end, exactly? It’s easy, but it’s not exactly a fun way to spend an afternoon. The only two rationales that’d justify capturing streamed Web files at scale are 1) the totally bonkers inclination that any given property/ies is likely to disappear from the entire World Wide Web, ever or 2) the increasingly rarefying expectation of prolonged time away from internet access.
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As Bandcamp has stood so obdurately still, the mainstream music streaming sphere has expanded titanically around it as if enveloping the Indie platform in a surrealist timelapse within the eye of a ruinous tech industry cyclone, which would explosively expand the market into a ghoulish, filthy monstrosity beyond anything we’d recognize from the rule of the WinAmp Hipster, long ago. Today, the coolest and most rabid daily music listeners I know all have Spotify memberships, joining 70 million others globally as of January. For most, it’s how they prefer to swaddle their lives in a constant soundtrack – at work, in the car, at school, then at home on the television. For many, it’s how they “explore” new music outside of peer and social recommendations... or, that’s how the narrative was supposed to go, anyway. Those folks I know who actually create music, however, are rarely seen using Spotify—even after they’ve endured untold horrors in order to publish their own music there—because the real story of its track record as a place to “Discover” new artists, genres, or sounds is completely abysmal. When 2017’s streaming data began coming in this past January, a popular feature by Galaxie 500’s Damon Krukowski was run by the definitively terminal music magazine of broad notoriety—Pitchfork—entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which he began by citing some very alarming statistics.
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“More than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks [on Spotify.] Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.”
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Why? A brazen disregard for necessary meta information, for one.
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“Look now at how badly their applications already serve entire genres of less popular music. Spotify lists recordings by song title, album title, or featured artist name. But that information is so limited it leaves out even the other performers on a recording, a crucial aspect to classical and jazz.”
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Alarming for those of us who intend to create or consume any music separate the Top 40, anyway, which one should feel justified expecting from most people, most of the time. Last month, The Carters released an album on which even Beyoncé identified the problematic service by name. “Patiently waiting for my demise ‘cause my success can’t be quantified,” she rapped, “if I gave two fucks about streaming numbers woulda put Lemonade up on Spotify.” The unfortunate issue with this single denouncement of the industry’s current direction is that its source is adamantly guaranteed a place for her work within Spotify’s top 10 percent for the rest of her career’s lifetime (and probably far beyond.)
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[I could now take the time to complain that she’s also entirely abandoned the city she owes for her career’s creation in its darkest hour, but let’s just plan on coming back to the subject at a later date, when we’ll be sure to touch on how terribly Drake also treats Houston (and women.)]
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Unsurprisingly, the apathy is far from mutual. From the Swedish company’s perspective, the digits themselves should’ve been dearly and universally beloved from the beginning, and their exponentially ballooning hubris became so inflated by 2014 that they launched a WordPress blog dedicated entirely to promoting and discussing their data called Spotify Insights, proclaiming themselves—naturally—to be “the world’s favorite streaming service,” championing the growing diversity in their demographics. Though Beyoncé is mentioned only twice upon a search of its archive as it stands today, it’s with fanfare: “10 Female Artists Women Listen To The Most on Spotify” declared her the third most popular female artist among women, globally, and “Single Ladies” the number one female-streamed track in the world (assuming I’m interpreting its language correctly.)
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We’ve established that Spotify has comfortably planted itself at the polar opposite end of the business spectrum from Bandcamp, yet for the sake of an oblivious adjudicating layman’s understanding, you’d have your work cut out for you explaining the difference between them: both are online marketplaces with gigantic libraries of digital music which a listener can browse, download locally, or stream from using Web browser or the mobile applications offered by each, respectively—and they can do from just about anywhere, for as much or as little as they wish. And—as the music industry and its satellites shall always remain for the rest of humanity’s reign—both are overwhelmingly associated with young people. There, the crucial divide should probably ring a bell—it’s been a constant between cultural generations for as long as culture, itself has existed.
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There are those among us who’s adolescent adoration of music is still completely valid as a very powerful component of hormonal development, yet doomed to quickly sizzle into casual listening or worse by the time our post-secondary Senior year rolls around. And then, there are those on whom the curiosity clings devotedly on: the cool high school punk band-forming types our culture loves to romanticize, who’ll inevitably end up bald and bespeckled with a pre-dawn community radio block. These Musicians, Crate-Diggers, and capital-A Audiophiles have historically overlapped in synonymous functions across a love triangle of dweebish intolerability, though it’s become especially easy as of late to forget that DIY recording is by no means a recent development—its financial and technical barrier-to-entry has simply plummeted thanks to the developmental progression of Digital Audio Workstations and a growing industry of consumer-oriented audio equipment. For succinct insight into this dynamic, let’s refer to the pre-dialogue context in Chuck Klosterman’s GQ interview with “the second- or the third-best rock guitarist of all time”—Zinc Blimp legend Jumbo Page.
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The only thing Page really wants to talk about [is] the sound of the music, and how that sound was achieved. He can talk about microphone placement for a very, very long time. Are you interested in having a detailed conversation about how the glue used with magnetic audiotape was altered in the late 1970s, subsequently leading to the disintegration of countless master tapes? If so, locate Jimmy Page. If a different musician obsessed over technological details with this level of exacting specificity, he would likely be classified as a “nerd,” as that has become a strange kind of compliment in the Internet age. People actually want to be seen as nerds. But that designation does not apply here. Jimmy Page does not seem remotely nerdy.
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Bandcamp’s core architecture was handbuilt from the beginning to handle the “hard part” for creators “so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy,” which it, alone pioneered on the Web, becoming the best metadata management utility for all time, but also committing to a traditional interpretation of music mediums that can feel old fashioned in 2018. Despite having been around for a directly comparable length of time, SoundCloud has maintained its relevance among friends in my network as the more socially-focused platform for keeping up with work from their peers thanks in large part to its exclusive, timestamp-oriented comment function, which allows for ultra-specific shortform feedback between fellow creators and fans. This is how the company has chosen to grow its community, which has lent especially to its strength in the most “nerdy” independent scenes: hip-hop and electronic music. The experience is busy by design and the divide between listener and creator is next to non-existent—by now, the difference is universally irrelevant. External sharing has also become a major strength since the inception of SoundCloud’s Web audio player, which was unlike any other embeddable we’d ever seen at the time. Over the years, it’s become the most universally-supported means of embedding a track or playlist elsewhere, though the space has quite recently began blooming with a few much slimmer Open Web offshoots like Vocaroo, Clyp, and Instaudio.
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While I can casually throw these names around for you in the same sized font, the gulfs between the properties they denote are completely inexpressible in words. Because Spotify went public in Q1 of this year, they released their first earnings report in April: 170 million active monthly users, $1.33 billion in total quarterly revenue, and $5.7-$6.2 billion in expected total revenue for 2018. I’ll spare you the entire Forbes piece it would require to comprehensively demonstrate just how cavernous of a disparity canyon the industry represents. Early projects like Pandora were docile, ad-free, and sincerely curious about the curatorial potential of music streaming services – *let’s use this cool new tech to play music for anybody with a Web browser if only because it’ll be a blast* – yet in that sense, they’ve all failed entirely. All except Bandcamp, anyway.
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“We started as a service to help artists sell their music and merchandise directly to their fans, but then as the site grew—it’s now at about 12 million tracks and 1.5 million albums [as of 2014]—we evolved into also being a destination for music Discovery,” he explains, partially anticipating the foot-to-the-floor transition to streaming which has indeed shook the industry the hell up over the years since. The company's solution is minimal, elemental, yet uniquely alternative as only theirs could be: an idealized digital interpretation of a music collection, which had actually launched a year before XOXO as part of “Bandcamp for Fans.” That release notably introduced the ability to “follow” both artist and fan accounts, the now-iconic “supported-by” section on release pages showing customers’ avatars and optional comments, and public wishlists. “I think it’s great to use a streaming service for music Discovery—they can be really really good for that,” Diamond concedes, before reiterating one of the several variations of Bandcamp’s founding premise that composes his core argument: “if you actually care about music, and you care about the people who make it, and you want them to keep making it, the best way to do that is to buy directly from them, or to use services that allow you to directly support them.”
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Instead of the “firehose”-like experience of a contemporary activity feed, “you’ve got a collection of albums and tracks that people were passionate enough to spend money on.” For my personal use, Ethan lit up a long-dormant incandescent bulb in my skull. My use of Bandcamp had long been to purchase and download music files, only—never to stream it—and there’s been good reason for this. While Bandcamp has formally supported playback on iPhone and iPad in-browser since July 2010, actually using it for any substantial amount of playback has always been a souring endeavor. Considering that it’s persisted to this day, we must concede that it is part of an intentional design rather than just an irritating flaw: multitasking between apps or even browser tabs will prevent continuous playback of an album, as will locking the device. In order to move from track to track fluidly, one must keep the page with the in-use Bandcamp player front and center. For three years, this was the only way to stream Bandcamp on mobile, but such capability was far from reliably expected by even the earliest adopters, then—3G data networks were worse than you remember, anyway—and then in 2013, the Bandcamp app was launched on iOS and Android, providing a sufficient fix in my book at the time. (I’d rather any externally-embedded players I may engage with in an album review or artist profile be limited to a single track, anyway.) However, the app itself remained quite mediocre for years, which was a tangible disappointment given how revolutionary their desktop experience had been when the company launched,but not necessarily a substantial deterrent to the sort of user they were attracting.
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I made a point to spend a lot of time engaging with Bandcamp’s service as much as possible – naturally, this included a trip back through my neglected, digitally dusty Collection, which proved a way more emotionally provocative experience than I anticipated. Ethan’s simple truth didn’t really sink in until I realized that this list is made up exclusively of my real favorites, and there’s not a single track that is not inextricably and intoxicatingly tied to a specific era(s) of my life (yes, even that one Blank Banshee album... I was 18, okay?) It’s absurdly powerful—not something I could engage with for any extended time without becoming saturated with nostalgic gut stuff. (Listen for my upcoming special celebratory episode of Extratone Radio to hear the best music I’ve found through Bandcamp.) It hadn’t occurred to me that I would retain ownership and streaming rights to all music I’ve purchased—including for a $0.00 sum, as I did for at least half of the works you see—even after an artist chose to delete or hide it on their own page. (Though they are not retained in my public collection, of course.)
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The Discovery Debacle
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Pursuing an objective definition of “music Discovery” might appear foolish – an individual’s music taste is perhaps the most broadly angst-steeped realms of overwhelming subjectivity in modern American culture, after all – but its the pungent poignancy of our fundamental human relationship with sound, itself which makes the history of Discovery’s digitization so important (and fascinating.) If I were to ask you what you believe should be the single most important function that must be reliably performed by any “music Discovery” device – whether it be an application, Web service, magazine or even a crate-digging habit – the single factor which would render whole vague concept inert, irrelevant, and/or completely destroyed, how would you answer? How would you interpret the question?
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It’s important we do well to take a considerable moment to cultivate a special wariness of the eggshells beneath our feet in this arena. Debatably at least a minim more than one’s taste in film, Americans from Generation X on forward until the end of time (I suspect) will hold “their” music as perhaps the most integral support upon which their identities are built throughout every stage of their lives. The intense sensation of ownership that propels this phenomenon within our culture leaves an especially sensitive passage ahead of us.
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As a wide-eyed teenager and infantile audio producer, I explored the idea of anti-music in my own entirely Bandcamp-supported project while I searched – aided tremendously by my expert best friend – for the edgiest, least sensical sounds and scenes on which to publicly attach on my identity in an opposing of “Discovery’s” extremes with fandom: an obsessive, entirely-detached last-ditch skirmish between the cultural reality and my delusional pubescent need to be unique. This process appears to be a universal requisite in modern youth in one form or another, but it’s important now that I emphasize this confession: I was an especially ostentatious little backpacker fuck, but I’ve continued to find my shame well worth achieving a specific balance for music’s purpose in my life, and I’d anecdotally endorse its potential to relieve cognitive dissonance at great scale. There’s only so much fun to be had blasting breakcore cassettes at deafening, distorted volumes solely to bewilder rural overnight convenience store clerks on their smoke breaks in the wee hours or the bruteforce seizure of the speakers’ Bluetooth connection at a frat party just to play harsh noise or anime-sampling Hardstyle while demonically shrieking – eyes rolled back – and lighting various parts of oneself ablaze before one realizes that 1) it’s they who end up looking like the idiots for aggressively breaching a group’s fun with inappropriate tunes (yes, no matter how interesting, rare, or underrated they may be, Chadley;) 2) by ferally manifesting, you’ve deligitimized yourself, which 3) can seriously damage any future attempts to accomplish the fundamental drive to share the gospel of music’s variety out of your own rubish frustration with the differences between you.
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The real, sweetest truth is that 100% of all music has value potential because of the medium’s broad influence on the human psyche. Pop music is amazing right now; the signature trap sound we devalued with Datpiff jokes made us all look like fools when it unconsciously transcended our “irony” and burrowed its own huge partition in our sincere hearts. After my pitiful attempt to reject and distance myself from my own rural roots by scoffing at country music for years, I’ve made a beautiful peace with the childhood memories and the historic excellence of Shania Twain and The Dixie Chicks in their mastery of both wholesome joy and crippling nostalgia (I’ve even cried to Taylor Swift.) Yes, it’s been entirely reasonable all along to enjoy the straightforwardly slothen pleasure in belching “Sweet Home Alabama” pounding cheap pissbeer on a foul pontoon boat on the Lake of the Ozarks, leaving my penultimate irony to confess that I’ve only found true and serene identity through music after learning how to stop insisting so violently upon the worldly, one-of-a-kind superiority of my “taste.”
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That said, it’s still bewildering how content we are to abruptly abandon the substance music had to our teenage selves out of misconstrued justifications for our classic fainéance – actively choosing to subject our public ambiance to thousands of replays of “the best” records in favor of dipping even the most cowardly toe into unfamiliar waters, even when the opportunity cost is inherently halved – only to then have the audacity to evangelize our dilapidated conceptions of “good music” to our children as we demonize the music of their generation, depriving them of a very essential rite of their cognitive development. I can think of little more reductive, repugnant, reckless, or racist crusades as a model figure than indoctrinating your child with an inherent distaste for their own culture, and nothing more deeply alarming to hear from the mouth of someone born in the 21st century than shit like “Queen was better than any rapper will ever be,” or “real musicianship will die forever with Eric Clapton.” It’s unfair and unnatural: imagine if your high school classmates had consistently turned up their scrunched nose at the living whole of rock & roll, declaring Scott Joplin to be the last musician they could stand.
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Consider if the industry-wide customer experience standard for the musical ambiance in 1970s American eating and drinking establishments was entirely comprised of works by John Phillip Souza, and the most prevalent cultural revolution manifested itself something like the following: In countless popular films set in the time (and the stories told today by your parents of their youths that informs them,) a group of popular high school boys – generally three longtime childhood friends and a single addition from the previous summer with an Army Dad and a moderate bad boy aura that’s made him one of the school’s notoriously attractive students and the somewhat-abusive leader in the pack. After spending some time trying to convince the other three (the crucial moment for his case being the bad kid’s rare moment of sincerity trope) of its guaranteed social, sexual and financial ROI, they seal their agreement to start a band with a four-way saliva slap. Imagine if in the progression of this exhausted old tale, it remained entirely classic (and boring) when it faded to a “THREE MONTHS LATER...” ceiling shot of the four the in full, gleaming, performance-spec get-up of the presidential marching band in their garage, and it was revealed that they’d they practiced “The Star Spangled Banner” every night just to make the girls swoon in the film’s resolution with an encore of “America the Beautiful” at an unsanctioned (and very patriotic!) house party.
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Suffice it to say that it’s absolutely fucking bonkers how often I encounter “Sweet Home Alabama” (and other tunes I’ve already heard hundreds of times throughout the first third of my existence, conservatively) dripping down from the overhead speakers in all manner of big retail stores, where it’s inappropriate and unwelcome. Even from the generous assumption that every single one of them is an objective masterwork of composition, the amount of affection the American music listening audience has for the same 500 singles is on par with our rampant gun violence in terms of our unanimous tolerance for ridiculously illogical habits. I’ve been sitting in a cute, moderately trendy coffee shop on the corner of the major avenue of access to my cute, moderately trendy Portland neighborhood for an hour now, and I’ve recognized every single one of the tracks played just a bit too loudly on the stereo. I’ve been sick of them all since Middle School. That one Bow Bow Chicka Chicka thing… How very charming.
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“The 70s, the 80s… the one-hit wonder channel!”
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Contrary to the popular hipster narrative we’ve just defeated, it’s not the popularity of the lineup that makes these experiences so distasteful, but their regularity. It doesn’t take a doctor of psychology to observe that tireless exposure to any given work of art inevitably erodes its value, yet we continue to expend resources saturating most mundane spaces in our society with an unyielding regurgitation of the same brackish pop culture symbols as if we’re trying to either induce a canonical vomit, intentionally obliterate the Yelp! reviews for a distant future museum’s “North America Enters the 21st Century” exhibit, or both. After failing my best attempts to elaborate with historical analogy citing a past event, I’m afraid we must pivot to a science fiction-esque nanonarrative containing obnoxiously speculative hypotheticals, instead.
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Imagine: It’s 2036 – four years after we found out we are not alone in the universe when a significantly more advanced civilization makes formal first contact with humanity by sending a party of diplomats, anthropologists, and explorers (who were actually getting ready to go in 2016 before getting word of the Trump presidency and deciding we weren’t quite ready just yet) who land their space egg right in front of the United Nations’ New York City headquarters and expressing something to the tune of hey so um… we noticed you guys moved in and we just wanted to stop by and say hi, entirely altering humanity’s self-perception and future trajectory (see: works by Gene Roddenberry) yadda yadda. The visitors expressed a wish to begin a cultural exchange project with us, and it’s just now coming to fruition… I have only moments ago made history in the eyes of the entire world when I walked through the front door of a Target store in suburban New Jersey leading a hovering hyper-intelligent silicon-based sphere of agender mist (roughly comparative to a basketball in size,) who’s already both impressing and shaming me tremendously as we move by the in-store Starbucks. From above us, Semisonic’s “Closing Time” is belched upon my life’s proudest moment and my guest requests we pause to discuss it, to my profound horror.
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“The sound from the reproduction devices embedded above us...” the android translator trails off for a moment. “It is the same noise that was distantly reproduced 51 hours ago in ‘Miami’ as I conversed with Ambassador Phillip Defranco about ‘the setting sun’ on the ‘beach,’ coming from a small open air structure which he defined as ‘a surf shop,’ which was occupied by a young male who appeared to be moderately agitated, moving about in jagged strides as he wildly smacked the foundational surface with ‘a broom.’ The Ambassador explained the youth was likely nearing the end of his allotted period of daily occupational labor.”
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Blood is flooding my cheeks as I listen with a building dread to the robot’s interpretation, awash with all manner of embarrassment for my species.
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“Is the purpose of this noise reproduction of a logistical nature, or is it perhaps a common ritual within business and/or working class culture?”
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Now, it’s your turn to be the human representative in this pico science fiction: you’re now obligated to confirm the alien anthropologist’s hypothesis and explain that “Closing Time” is but one piece of recorded music among billions of diverse expressive works across millennia. You must reverently describe how the “universal language” of math within melodious composition has long been a hefty buzzword in the pop culture conversations about interstellar communication and our longtime search for extraterrestrial intelligence from the future-thrilled 90s—S.E.T.I.’s glory days – when we felt pretty damned good about space. The historic launch of the United Nations’ “greetings on behalf of the people of our planet” etched into The Golden Record aboard Voyager I and Jodie Foster’s novel portrayal of a S.E.T.I. scientist in the iconic Carl Sagan-sourced 1997 science fiction drama Contact are among the globally-celebrated Best Hits of humanism (not to mention the organization listed on your paystubs,) and they weigh a billion tons on you, now—in the most significant moment of your entire life, bar none – as you explain on behalf of your species to real extraterrestrial intelligence the reality of how negligent it is actually is of the culture the Record claimed to treasure. The worst part, though? The entire experience is accompanied by a nasal-as-hell Semisonic soundtrack.
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Aren’t you frustrated? You should be, but it’s not over yet: inevitably, your round fictional companion of note is going to follow up their query with some seriously burning meat.
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“Just a half-generation ago, your utopian dream of a globally-connected world – in which everyone would be empowered to saturate and culture themselves with new ideas and forms of expression – was the defining aspiration of your society, and yet you’ve definitively achieved Total Connectivity, now, and caused the overwhelmingly opposite result: you’re all intolerable shitheads who every passing solar orbit become less and less capable of anything but regurgitation of the same foul bullshit. Y’all fucking wack. I’m out. ”
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And there, that filthy little ball would have us all. Friends, colleagues, human siblings of mine, it’s long-past time we expect better from ourselves as music citizens of the world. Even the longest living of us are endowed with very little opportunity to absorb anything more than an infinitesimal fraction of all there is to experience, and we’ve all been carelessly and embarrassingly chucking it to the weeds. If it this all seems excessive, there’s no need to feel attacked, but for Pete’s sake… please stop claiming you “like music” because it’s misleadingly inaccurate and I’ll promise never to use the phrase “music citizens of the world” again, in exchange.
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Distribution & Curation
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You, your friends, and I are missing out on way too much cool shit and we’re going to continue addressing possible causes and solutions to this ongoing catastrophe without asking for a single moved finger on your part because we are fucking saints. Let’s come back to ground and consider a casual real-world use case for a streaming service which I’ve observed.
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It’s just after 1PM on an especially beautiful Summer day in 2018, and you’ve decided with your two best friends that an impromptu hot dog barbecue in your little apartment’s parking lot would be a great way to spend the afternoon. You get on Facebook Messenger – no time to bother with the formality of creating an event – and begin to bother your group of art school friends. In a few hours, you’ve set up chairs in a circle around the borrowed fire pit, gathered meat tubes, marshmallows, and beer, and your guests have begun to arrive. The next step: retrieve your cordless Bluetooth speaker from inside to place it atop a log nearest the scene, re-pair it with your smartphone, and ___?
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Let’s acknowledge that music has incredibly diverse purposes of value in human life—of course I realize this—and ultimately, nobody can dictate those fulfilled for another individual by any given track, album, artist, or genre across time and setting. Even splittercore-obsessed serial killers and body modding cybergrind disciples are doomed: inevitably, they will one day let their guard down and find themselves singing along with “Goodbye Earl” on the radio way off key, smiling like a doofus. Even if one hates humanity, they will eventually be forced to acknowledge that The Dixie Chicks came very close to its penultimate manifestation.
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I understand that it’s not always time for something new for everyone, but you’re missing out on music’s most worthwhile function by far if you never seek anything fresh, and—if you still find yourself unwilling to bother, even—carrying around even the slightest bit of anecdotal knowledge about what’s going on in music with you can be invaluably culturing to your image when socializing with youths and alien intelligences, alike. There is a spectrum of enthusiasm (or pretentiousness, depending on one’s own subjectives) for music that is far more culturally consequential than the practice of partaking and/or patroning any other artform. Settle comfortably on any point – extreme or not – and you’re at serious risk of being uncool. Nobody wants Anthony Fantano showing up to their party, but if you live too long confusing the Beach Boys with the Beatles – as I have – folks start to behave as if there’s something wrong with you. If it helps, let’s suppose this to be the real reason behind my need to discuss Bandcamp – perhaps its relative lack of aged or worshiped-at-scale work justifies it all.
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By this nature, its effort is designed to bracket the enthusiast as wholly as possible, but the value most in need of its experience has become its comparatively extravagant hospitality for the dabbler. The “Discoverinator” (I would’ve voted for calling it “Genre-Fucker”) is simply the most ingenious tool available anywhere to filter music by genre, subgenre, location, and medium. Or at least... It’s too gorgeous not to be. Thanks to its recent visual redesign, I don’t even care if it’s useful—it’s just a beautiful thing to play with on both the Web and the iOS app (though I’d bet they were each crafted separately.)
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Front and center on the homepage is the Bandcamp Daily – a showcase of features, lists, albums of the day, and artist interviews from various staff and guest contributors which I’d most certainly judge befit of a standalone publication – and the Bandcamp Weekly – an extraordinarily-produced podcast like no other with special mixes, guest appearances, and commentary which the company’s Chief Curator Andrew Jervis has been honing since 2013 over 289 episodes as of this morning. Its player functions both in-browser and on the iOS app unlike any I’ve ever seen, with a list of embedded tracks that pop out when they’re actually spinning on the show so that you can engage further with them, if you wish. It’s difficult to describe, but it feels visually like you’re listening to a playlist in Bandcamp’s normal player, except tracks are intermixed and faded between one another beneath the host’s commentary, so the audio itself must be pre-rendered. Regardless, it’s nearly as extraordinary an achievement in Web design as the program itself is in curatorial music broadcasting. I’m no addict to the genre, but I have yet to Discover another similar product which I can binge episode after episode for hours without becoming bored or irritated as I can the Bandcamp Weekly’s.
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To fill in the parking lot party blank with a single streaming solution for the sake of our young, art school-attending, likely more musically-literate than average summer barbecue guests—how viable is Bandcamp? Truthfully, it’s only slightly more suited now than it was in its earliest infancy for obediently filling a space with ambiance. We could ponder whether or not its design discourages absentminded playback only consequently, or perhaps condescendingly from the high, white tower of hipster elitism on which you’ll occasionally hear it accused of perching, but UX design is the most ridiculous sphere within which to intenspeculate in lieu of verification (gazing at you with the timeless grace of a thousand moons, Medium,) so lets hold off to seek out an interview with a Bandcamp representative.
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SoundCloud would be a bit closer to the mark—it can be configured to simply keep going after you’ve finished a track, regardless of where you may be within the interface (excluding the embedded player, of course)—but it’d be much safer to spend the smidgen of extra time required to find a manmade playlist. Letting it loose will quickly land you on some seriously dubious (and probably embarrassing) nerd shit. As I understand it, YouTube has long been the go-to houseparty music player because of its universality, Chromecast support, and (obviously) visual component for accompanying music videos, so its new, ad-free YouTube Music service has a lot of potential, in theory, but we’re outside in this scenario and our smartphone is our only playback device.
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Startlingly, the Web’s given best answer to this situation is still Spotify in all of its culture-diluting gluttony. Internet radio? Yikes. You can still find a gem of a stream every once in a while, but they’re usually unreliable and probably abandoned, so the catalog won’t last you more than a few hours before you’ll start to hear repeats. You could search out the internet stream of your favorite radio station—a student radio station, even—but those offering the most entertaining programming are unlikely to have a suitable playlist on a summer afternoon. So—forgetting its overwhelming financial funneling toward its top 10% and everything else for a moment—why not just give up the pretense and use Spotify? Again, for most of my friends, it works just fine to play Cat Stevens, Run DMC, Gorillaz or The Rolling Stones, but I have yet to figure out a combination of keywords to keep it on target within even the most rudimentary parameters. Such ill-restraint becomes especially dire—necessary, really—when I queue up “Cannibal Ox Radio” for the office and R Kelly ends up playing, 20 minutes in. Using personally-targeted artist bans is probably too subjective to ask of such a service in the spotlight, but how about an option to filter out white rappers? (I hope you didn’t blink because that’s by far my best contribution in tech writing yet.)
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The truth is, I’d probably end up calling upon Apple Music as I’ve been an on-and-off subscriber since its release, but have yet to meet a single fellow user. The girth of its catalog is reportedly still nearly 25% larger, its UI is significantly more cohesively integrated with iOS (which hasn’t always been a given from Apple with its music software, mind you,) yet it costs me precisely the same $9.99 a month as Spotify Premium would. If I did know somebody else who used it, they’d be able to see my public profile including my playlists and activity, just as my followers on Spotify can, and I can create “Stations” for artists that function similarly to Spotify’s endless adaptive playlists, but—crucially, for myself—after the app’s redesign for iOS 10, the integration of Apple Music music with my own iTunes library is completely seamless. With unlimited data, I’ve selected the option to refrain from storing music locally, which further diminishes the distinction between “my” music and the music I’ve paid for the rights to stream. Fundamentally, the end result is that I pay ten bucks a month for “ownership” of all the music on iTunes proper.
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While I might personally play Bandcamp Weekly episodes in such a context and gladly accept whatever results I’d get, I’d only do so acknowledging the subsequently increased risk of some vest-wearing fuck I’ve never met springing out of the bushes to accost me about Weird Allan. However, I am neither cool nor musically literate, which makes me particularly vulnerable to misusing algorithmic Discovery—the practice in which artificial intelligence has become most widely-deployed which continues to prove itself to better deserve the term “automated wallowing,” or “robotized ear rot.”
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Ironically, Damon Krukowski’s aforementioned “responsibility” essay on Pitchfork openly cites Liz Pelly’s burning-hot and 100% essential analysis of algorithmically-generated playlists for The Baffler notes the publication’s own substantial relationship with Spotify, including a Webby Award-winning advertorial series called Inside Discovery, which the two collaborate to produce that’s “meant to boost awareness of the ‘Discover Weekly’ feature.”
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The series shows Pitchfork editors (and favored musicians) gushing about their love of streaming—the immediacy! The deep back catalogs! One editor says it helps him keep track of his listening habits, while another rejoices at not having to dig through crates at record shops anymore. Yet another likens Spotify to walking around a music festival, discovering something new at every turn. What does it mean for “the most trusted voice in music” to celebrate an algorithm as preferable to its own crate digging? What does it mean when the tastemaking humans endorse data-driven machines? What does it mean when the algorithms become cool? Virtually every music publication now relies on Spotify media players to embed songs within online articles, and Websites like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone regularly celebrate their playlists with listicles: “Ten Albums To Stream Now.” “The Five Playlists You Need to Hear This Summer.”
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We love bespoke Open Web projects, so exploring Inside Discovery’s (surely bespoke) experience induced the same pathetic sort of I wish business just incentived building nice things disappointment which has become my default, bitchy mood, and blaming as a further let down to immediately land on Mitski’s playlist, to whom I’d just been reintroduced (by Pitchfork, admittedly) after happening upon her performance at Pitchfork 2017 (which is organized, admittedly, by Pitchfork.)
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Upon a brief review of these once-petty desires and the new, apocalyptic solutions which we are burning barns full of cash to develop, it would appear that the overwhelmingly defining feature of those which are at all viable remains to be the interference of a human being, and why wouldn’t it be, still, when manual music aggregation remains so desperately cheap? I’d wager heavily that there’s at least a single editor within Apple Music who’s spent serious time embedded in the Berlin techno scene considering how regularly the prime “Techno” playlist is updated with new work of a moderately-industrial bias.
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“The downside to automated music Discovery is that we’re encouraged to develop a taste profile and stick to it,” opines somebody on Pigeons & Planes, complimenting Pelly in their profile of former BBC Radio 1 host, Zane Lowe, and his new job curating an Apple Music playlist?
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The truth is, the stories that come to us that smell the strongest of philanthropy on the surface are often actually about some dusty, Y2K-lookin’-ass nerd with powerfully tedious grievances and too much time on their hands. The whole world knows the details by now of how Mark Zuckerberg’s horny social ineptitude led to Facebook’s conception, but we must both keep in check the bad habit we share – the whole present-day reading world and I, that is – of dwelling entirely too much on the most “negative,” soul-agitating tales in what we perceive to be the pursuit of necessary ingredients for concocting a better solution. Bandcamp’s story is predominantly comprised of smart decisions, sincere transparency, and savvy ideas which are best examined in contrast, I’m afraid, with all that’s being done wrong everywhere else.
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Are my favorite punk bands now Bandcamp bands? Are they suddenly wanting to conform to a kind of Bandcamp aesthetic? I don’t think so. Not yet. But if that does happen, something might be lost — a sense of these bands defining themselves as they want to, which is sort of the Bandcamp promise in the first place. People can use help navigating the riches of Bandcamp. But its estimable editorial project opens an interesting question: When does help turn into tastemaking?
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The Creators
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You missed it, didn’t you—the ten-year anniversary of Bandcamp’s launch? Ashamed, I realized last month that I did, too. Ashamed, because I owe a lot to to the platform’s unwavering commitment to the distribution and curation of work made by just about all of my favorite artists—within and outside of my social network. Throughout 2015, I hosted a number of conversations with exceptional, future-looking creators on Drycast which I am especially proud of. On one early episode with an exceptional total of seven music makers, I observed in a beat that “all of us have Bandcamp accounts,” before the week’s guest, Samantha Carter, suggested that she’d found her page especially financially rewarding, and originated the concept of the “Bandcamp Sugar Daddy” (which I personally ship 100%.)
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“It's something I take for granted,” said my friend yzome – a truly one-of-a-kind electronic producer who’s far-traveling composition is probably the closest Digital Audio Workstation equivalent of Extreme Use Testing—when automotive manufacturers effectively torture new prototypes with the most inhospitable conditions on Earth until they break. However, it’s not a PR stunt in yzome’s case—he’s just very good at doing what he does after doing it for nearly 10 years—and his end product requires a hell of a lot more than any one genre would ever presume, but it more than delivers back on the investment with significant interest.
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When he appeared on Drycast in January 2015, we failed to achieve any descriptors more sophisticated than “alien sounds,” but perhaps that’s all they need: the inner worlds into which yzome invites us are of manic, unpredictable arrhythmia which poses an unapologetic, yet magically lighthearted challenge to any cohesive theory. It’s very rare that his proudly-ungenreable exploration of the fringes does not demand the listener’s full attention, yet it always manages to be inoffensively aggressive like nothing else, which suggesting promise for the possible upheaval of a long-upheld natural law among electronic dance music: yzome doesn’t need to be a shithead to challenge the listener intellectually.
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Play YVETTE for any boomer you know with that classically impenetrable disgust for all electronic music, and you’ll witness firsthand how special yzome’s particular innovation truly is. No, they’re not going to be sexually liberated, or anything—it’s still going to be alarming—but you’ll notice that the swift and overwhelming fury which sample and break-heavy dance music has always awoken within them has been miraculously circumvented. Instead of immediately storming off, they’ll be paralyzed in an existential fugue state from which they may never quite fully emerge. I’ve seen it firsthand. It’s witchcraft.
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There is no other across the (especially-wide) electronic spectrum who can so loudly go so far, so fast without any insincerity, whatsoever. His arrangement seems mischievous and all over the place, but really listen and you’ll hear rips of recognizable patterns playing peekaboo in willy-nilly bursts that reveal his dynamic mastery of the dance music space through Breakcore, Juke, Footwork, and Techno sampling. All of this is to say, really, that yzome’s music represents a level of boundary-pushing which only a niche audience tends to truly appreciate, yet is undoubtedly worthy of an elegantly-presented host like Bandcamp.
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“Like thank god I don't have to look for a label to release this. It's seen as a legitimate platform (by people who might actually care about what I’m doing, at least,) which I think is less offputting than uploading things to Mediafire or whatever else. It’s populist and boutique at the same time.”
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Populist, yet boutique. Can we really be expected to exceed this summation? Well, nobody’s said much at all in the mainstream press, but what has been said is 1) unusually misplaced in the spaces of those least likely to find it relevant and 2) way more insightful than you’d expect.
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“Bandcamp has an independent-artist identity because of practicalities: Independent artists from Web-centered subcultures need it most,” observed an especially savvy online aside from by Ben Ratliff—jazz and pop critic for The New York Times—asking “Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?” So why aren’t we talking about it? The other important takeaway: founder Ethan Diamond told Ratliff that “the company has never spent money on promotion.” This is largely why I’ve invested so much time and affection into this piece—gratitude is not often sellable incentive for mainstream coverage.
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The truth is, the continued obscurity of Bandcamp’s story despite all it’s done comes down not to any malpractice by the company (in fact, it would likely be more visible had it fucked up more,) or even to its prevalence in the careers of big industry names (whom I will address in detail shortly,) but because it simply operates too magnanimously for its customers to be taken seriously as a newsworthy business, which is problematic and personally infuriating. In November, 2015, Bandcamp made mention in The New Yorker via the openly diminutive context of Car Seat Headrest’sorigin story, describing it as “a charming alternative,” and “a casual, low-risk approach.” Granted, it’s worth noting that the platform did not address its lack of “editorial guidance” until a year later, with the launch of the excellent Bandcamp Daily blog, but I think you’ll agree it’s in poor taste to argue against the legitimacy of a music distribution platform because it’s too democratic. Perhaps it’s still just beyond reasonable expectations to get a top-of-the-foodchain music writer’s head wrapped around the idea that such products on The Internet can easily—even optimally—service both hobbyists and professionals.
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Last year, Bandcamp was responsible for $270 million in payments to artists like Jlin,the genius commonly associated with Footwork (certainly Chicago’s most underreported and popularly underrepresented movement,) for pushing its expressive boundaries both in theory and geography further than any other, and who’s so far produced two of the most “aggressively beautiful” records you’ll find anywhere in the process.[i] Type her name into any search engine and her Bandcamp page is always the first result, yet Cntrl-Fing for “Bandcamp” will yield 0 results from her interviews with The Fader, FACT Magazine, Pitchfork, The Seventh Hex, Passion of the Weiss, PopMatters, Crack Magazine, DUMMY, The Guardian, The Quietus, BOMB Magazine, Ableton Blog, The Creative Independent, Rolling Stone, SPIN, No Fear of Pop, self-titled magazine, Circulation Magazine, The New Yorker, Cyclic Defrost, Mixmag, or melting bot, and only one in Interview Magazine. To be clear: I am not arguing that Jlin—a black female music artist—should be profusely thanking Bandcamp—a service founded largely by white male programmers—for hosting her most visible page but rather that the more independent of these publications, especially, should mention its role in her story or—at the very least—be hyperlinking to her Bandcamp page first, for both her’s and their readers’ sake—Bandcamp’s cut of album purchases is half of iTunes. From the user experience perspective, it’s absurd that those of these pages including embedded music players chose to use SoundCloud’s—which is more resource heavy (yet of noticeably lesser streaming playback quality) and visually disruptive—instead of Bandcamp’s.
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The two services were launched the same year—that fateful 2008—but comparing them is complicated. They are clear opposites in at least one principal: how they’ve defined their mission. Bandcamp has changed less throughout its history than any other Web service that comes to mind (see below,) but SoundCloud has struggled with identity issues, to their vastly-superior success (in terms of user statistics, anyway.) The New York Timesreported in June, 2011 that they’d reached 5 million users, citing their decision to expand focus beyond “popular music” to explain the milestone. “We’re building a sound platform that’s not just about music,” said Alex Ljung – a SoundCloud co-founder and the company’s chief executive at the time – and its present landscape certainly reflects a diverse offering of uses, but ultimately, any . Today, both SoundCloud and Bandcamp have premium subscription plans for artists which are at least perceived to be competitive with one another—SoundCloud Pro and Bandcamp Pro, respectively—along with free base experiences, which we’ll compare first.
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Free Bandcamp Account
- Uploads: quantity unlimited, size of each file limited to 291mb.
- Distribution: unlimited streaming, up to 200 free downloads per month.
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Free SoundCloud Account
- Uploads: total of 3 hours uploaded at any given time.
- Distribution: unlimited streaming, unlimited downloads.
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Both offer access “basic” statistics for their tracks at this tier which most of the creators I know consider more than enough—the usefulness of any playback/download stats is negligible when you’re publishing within tight niches—and each has had about 5 years to fine-tune their free offerings so that they feel as complete as possible. If you’re planning on publishing a podcast on SoundCloud, you’re obviously going to have to upgrade your upload limit even beyond Pro ($8/month, 6-hour upload limit) to Pro Unlimited ($16/month, unlimited uploads,) though I would suggest a plethora of alternative methods before you got that far. Unfortunately, they would not include a free Bandcamp account. While there arepodcasts on Bandcamp, they’re completely separate the platform’s aspirations and without support for the basic requirements of podcast distribution (namely, RSS feeds.)
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Bandcamp’s Pro option is $10 a month and includes a custom domain, batch file uploading, private streaming (for press and/or fans) plus the ability to disable free streaming (requiring listeners to actually buy the music to enable any playback,) ad-free video hosting (which nobody uses, to my knowledge,) extended fan interaction tools, and a broader statistics suite that includes Google Analytics support. SoundCloud’s Pro and Pro Unlimited options are complimentary, but a full-time independent artist could justify maintaining Pro accounts on both services or neither—one does not necessarily replace the other, but the contrast in their chosen presentations has led to a divide in the cultures of the two communities so stark it could be a punchline and/or simplified to say that SoundCloud is for rap and Bandcamp is not.
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It’s not entirely shocking, then, that SoundCloud’s story has been more present in the greater conversation than Bandcamp’s. Frankly, its largest issues are directly related: compared to SoundCloud, Bandcamp’s community is White As Fuck (a claim I can only make on behalf of my own observations and those which a select few creators have seen fit to express to me over the years, considering that the company has yet to release any demographic information about its creators) which is a glaringly fundamental obstruction to the project’s broader mission to help music culture “thrive.”
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From a future historian’s perspective, the battle for the definitive name in independent digital music distribution has already won, largely thanks to its relationship with Chance The Rapper, who’s quickly become a “cultural influencer, thought leader, global star,” and one of my generation’s upmost celebrity champions. Obviously, there is little sense trying to determine whether SoundCloud earned his partnership or landed their popular association with his name as long as the artist maintains it publicly, while continuing to give new meaning to the phrase “serially likable.” Thus far, his mythical power to exude purity has felt virtually 100% airtight Last year, his second album Coloring Book made history when it won the first streaming-only Grammy for Best Album. In my personal favorite moment in recent popular culture memory, the fashionable-as-hell young man accepted the accolade by looking the whole industry establishment in the face and proclaiming “this is for every indie artist—everybody who’s been doin’ this mixtape shhhh...tuff for a long ass time... shouts out to every independent artist out there; shouts out to SoundCloud for holding me down.” Obviously, such significant, sentimental, and sincere sentiments are never expressed about tech companies by beloved darlings of the art world like Chance—especially not for Earth-encompassing awards show audiences.
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After last year’s massive layoff, it was Chance’s assurances that “SoundCloud is here to stay” which the public took to heart. Even if the company is destined to fail within the next year (it appears to be as yet missing much of a verdict,) and it’s all still destined to fold at any moment, at least it’ll have the distinct pride of doing so having maintained his publicly-expressed respect and confidence, which is a damned fine legacy in my book. Meanwhile, Bandcamp has only made a few small tweaks to its basic infrastructure, and added new features very deliberately, which haven’t resulted in a single memorable controversy. Aside from Amanda Palmer, perhaps, there has never been a single band or artist who’ve been known as “from Bandcamp,” leaving our only pitch to be something like Independent Online Music Platform on Track to Complete 10th Year Serving Small-Time Artists, Continues to Look Pretty Good.
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Considering the significance of these contributions, it’s of a special wonder that they were made not by a non-profit organization, academic movement, or government endowment, but by a for-profit, California-based tech company that’s continued to thrive and innovate great content, entirely apart from mainstream coverage.
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The Future
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It might seem a bit much on the surface, but in many ways, Bandcamp has spent the past 10 years showing us what a for-profit, Web-based, culturally-edging independent platform Can be, even in the Valley.
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Though Bandcamp has embarked upon unusually sparse explanation of its editorial directive in the Daily blog and Weekly podcast, but regularly consume either for any length of time, and you’ll notice a particular savvy for Discovering technically-progressive Afrocentric projects: “Black Experimental Music.”
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On last week’s episode of the excellent New York Times podcast Still Processing, co-host Jena Wortham “I’m thinking a lot about ways in which new culture, new cultural products, new cultural creators come to light in ways that sidestep these traditional means and don’t have to go through the traditionally very white, very male, very cis, very hetero hoops to prove worthiness.”
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So, our greatest hope for the decentralization of the music industry in the 1990s ended up transforming before us to become the most effectively divisive Discovery barrier ever known to man because of its psychological influence sub-threshold at unprecedented scale over time, in parallel with so many other like horrific monstrosities we’ve discovered in anguish to be mutants of those final salvations from our atrocious history which we’d been so relieved to believe in. Surely, the turn of the millennia was destined to be our final turning point – the moment we’d finally use our new technology to discover a truth (or maybe just a really good clue,) that’d immediately unite our species in a deafening, worldwide aha moment when it would reveal a general abstract of whatever the fuck our deal was that was preventing our silent, dutiful, and 100% harmonious collective effort toward a utopia like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s, in which anyone is absolutely free of obligation or desperation from birth to pursue… whatever with their time.
My girlfriend very generously offered to go for a drive with me yesterday evening, though neither of us particularly expected to end up parked at 5:40AM outside a little Diner called Ziggie’s some four hours away from home. I managed to learn a bit about driving apps and briefly flood my Jetta’s intake long enough to stall it after fording some flood water a wee bit too rapidly.
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Since I’ve begun working in Kansas City and occasionally commuting from Columbia, I’ve found incentive to revisit the crowdsourced driving directions mobile app Waze, which I recall being very excited about in early 2016. It’s smoother now, yet devoid of that pseudocountercultural sense in a design sense. Functionally, it is still the most reliable method of police detection I’ve ever encountered – in this Second Era of my Waze usage I have yet to see a single Missouri Highway Parol car sat in the center of I-70 that hadn’t been reported on Waze first – even at crazy hours on weekday mornings – which should be all the reassurance one needs regarding the immediate future of their userbase.
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I'm using Waze to drive to to Licking, MO, arriving at 2:24. Watch my drive in real-time on the Waze map! David Blue on Twitter
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Somehow, I was unaware until this morning that Waze allows you to “share” your route by generating a link to a web app of theirs that will live track your progress. Though I can’t actually imagine too many use cases for this, I still think it’s cool. Anybody who’s interested in stalking my every move should follow me on Twitter – where I’m sure I’ll be sharing more drives from now on – and/or DM me and just ask me to enable 24/7 location-sharing for ya!
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On the topic of mobile apps for those folks like me who’s only real hobby is just fucking driving around, I did actually find mention in a listicle from a real motoring enthusiast’s publication. “Seven Apps That Will Help Improve Your Driving Experience” is not exactly the sort of advisory article I remember seeing in Road & Track considering that it actually only contains one single app even vaguely related to True Driving Pleasure called Greatest Drive.
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Users contribute their favorite routes and with Yelp integration you can either pick a destination to find the most scenic way to get there or find a good spot to eat along the route you've already chosen.
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Of course, it’s nowhere to be found on the App Store, but it sounded relatively foodist anyway.
Apparently the premier mile-tracking app right now is Microsoft’s MileIQ, which I’m going to continue to try because I can’t resist automatically-generated PDF reports, ever.
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I gave my girlfriend administrator roles for my derelict joke Facebook page Boiler Explosion Memes and she’s somehow managed to get it to almost 100 likes / +25,000% impressions in just a matter of days!!!!
Seven years ago, the fourth generation of Apple’s iPhone instigated a change in our perception of digital photography. Now – thanks to Google Photos – I’d like to reflect on my favorite shots of mine.
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When iPhone 4 handsets began shipping in the Summer of 2010, I’d been carrying my first generation for three solid years – since its now history-stricken release, in fact – and its age started to become a problem. I’d drop it screen-down on a rock in the airport parking lot just before going back to school for my Junior year, splitting a crack in the screen that wouldn’t quite kill it – it was the demands of iOS 4 on its 412 MHz CPU and meager 128 MB of RAM that would ultimately cease its usability.
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The single 2 megapixel rear-facing camera would surprise one at times, but was never lauded as anything but what it was – a mobile phone-bound sensor capturing very cellular-looking* images, but Steve Jobs wasn’t three minutes in to his iPhone 4 presentation at the June 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference before he pronounced the design’s closest possible “kin” to be “an old Leica camera,” associating his device with photography in its first impression. The equivalent of the first generation’s rear-facing camera could now be found facing you, and the fourth’s primary sensor now shot at 5 megapixels (2592 x 1936) with autofocus and 5x digital zoom, setting a fundamental smartphone sensor configuration standard that’s still adhered to by the industry.
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After unleashing Google Photos upon the ~15,000 images on my home machine’s hard drive last year, I have been constantly reminded of my own photographic history – for better or worse – and regularly shown five, six, seven-year old snaps in a manner that wouldn’t have been possible (or have made any sense) before. Recently, I was astounded to find that I took many of the better shots with my iPhone 4, so I thought I’d share a few from my high-school days in loving memory of my trusty little rectangular companion.
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All taken with iPhone 4, left unedited. View more onFlickr.
My girlfriend very generously offered to go for a drive with me yesterday evening, though neither of us particularly expected to end up parked at 5:40AM outside a little Diner called Ziggie’s some four hours away from home. I managed to learn a bit about driving apps and briefly flood my Jetta’s intake long enough to stall it after fording some flood water a wee bit too rapidly.
-
-
Since I’ve begun working in Kansas City and occasionally commuting from Columbia, I’ve found incentive to revisit the crowdsourced driving directions mobile app Waze, which I recall being very excited about in early 2016. It’s smoother now, yet devoid of that pseudocountercultural sense in a design sense. Functionally, it is still the most reliable method of police detection I’ve ever encountered – in this Second Era of my Waze usage I have yet to see a single Missouri Highway Parol car sat in the center of I-70 that hadn’t been reported on Waze first – even at crazy hours on weekday mornings – which should be all the reassurance one needs regarding the immediate future of their userbase.
-
-
-
-
I'm using Waze to drive to to Licking, MO, arriving at 2:24. Watch my drive in real-time on the Waze map! David Blue on Twitter
-
-
Somehow, I was unaware until this morning that Waze allows you to “share” your route by generating a link to a web app of theirs that will live track your progress. Though I can’t actually imagine too many use cases for this, I still think it’s cool. Anybody who’s interested in stalking my every move should follow me on Twitter – where I’m sure I’ll be sharing more drives from now on – and/or DM me and just ask me to enable 24/7 location-sharing for ya!
-
-
On the topic of mobile apps for those folks like me who’s only real hobby is just fucking driving around, I did actually find mention in a listicle from a real motoring enthusiast’s publication. “Seven Apps That Will Help Improve Your Driving Experience” is not exactly the sort of advisory article I remember seeing in Road & Track considering that it actually only contains one single app even vaguely related to True Driving Pleasure called Greatest Drive.
-
-
Users contribute their favorite routes and with Yelp integration you can either pick a destination to find the most scenic way to get there or find a good spot to eat along the route you've already chosen.
-
-
Of course, it’s nowhere to be found on the App Store, but it sounded relatively foodist anyway.
Apparently the premier mile-tracking app right now is Microsoft’s MileIQ, which I’m going to continue to try because I can’t resist automatically-generated PDF reports, ever.
-
I gave my girlfriend administrator roles for my derelict joke Facebook page Boiler Explosion Memes and she’s somehow managed to get it to almost 100 likes / +25,000% impressions in just a matter of days!!!!
Seven years ago, the fourth generation of Apple’s iPhone instigated a change in our perception of digital photography. Now – thanks to Google Photos – I’d like to reflect on my favorite shots of mine.
-
-
When iPhone 4 handsets began shipping in the Summer of 2010, I’d been carrying my first generation for three solid years – since its now history-stricken release, in fact – and its age started to become a problem. I’d drop it screen-down on a rock in the airport parking lot just before going back to school for my Junior year, splitting a crack in the screen that wouldn’t quite kill it – it was the demands of iOS 4 on its 412 MHz CPU and meager 128 MB of RAM that would ultimately cease its usability.
-
-
-
-
The single 2 megapixel rear-facing camera would surprise one at times, but was never lauded as anything but what it was – a mobile phone-bound sensor capturing very cellular-looking* images, but Steve Jobs wasn’t three minutes in to his iPhone 4 presentation at the June 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference before he pronounced the design’s closest possible “kin” to be “an old Leica camera,” associating his device with photography in its first impression. The equivalent of the first generation’s rear-facing camera could now be found facing you, and the fourth’s primary sensor now shot at 5 megapixels (2592 x 1936) with autofocus and 5x digital zoom, setting a fundamental smartphone sensor configuration standard that’s still adhered to by the industry.
-
-
After unleashing Google Photos upon the ~15,000 images on my home machine’s hard drive last year, I have been constantly reminded of my own photographic history – for better or worse – and regularly shown five, six, seven-year old snaps in a manner that wouldn’t have been possible (or have made any sense) before. Recently, I was astounded to find that I took many of the better shots with my iPhone 4, so I thought I’d share a few from my high-school days in loving memory of my trusty little rectangular companion.
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All taken with iPhone 4, left unedited. View more onFlickr.
-relentless, the country keeps
-doors and walls reverberate
-all but rest in summer’s heat
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I remember the dawn and dusk – the open palette, gradiented above
-opposite a front
-overtaking me,
-on the 4030,
-tilling terraces ’round the North 180
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growing here is not a war with Earth,
-but a chronological board game,
-won by the punctual
-and patient
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I am neither of these,
-but I am fond of a good emergency
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and it all plays out for me;
-the torrent released in Missouri haste
-big drops turn to steam on the labored muffler
-too much to do;
-getting it over with,
-God cries in heaves, quickly,
-around here
eighteen dollars will buy you an hour's passage on the worn & weary Mark Twain
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the same stretch under Lover's Leap,
-an idle paddle wheel dragged cyclically, on and on
-by her diesels
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costumed so long,
-moored not far from horrid wax figures,
-similarly fated
-who bare old Sam's names with the rest of them,
-the Hannibilians assuredly assuaged by their sounds,
-so heard
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the ambiance of the little town,
-shrill with tourists' wonder,
-depression of the damned,
-envisaged waterborne toxins
-
-
despite it all,
-I departed her as a newfound touchstone,
-knowing she's just up twenty four,
-eighteen dollars away,
-no time soon to break her jaded rhythm
-as a forgotten timepiece,
-buried in a rank cellar
-
-
supposing she'd ease most crisis that could ever befall me
-she and her unsalted captain,
-who has not aged (truthfully, I do remember.)
to new meanings
-to the feeling I've only been able to find
-on one short strip
-just East of Kansas City
-that I am small in a
-dirty daunting
-
-
to coverage of
-the Be Beat
-
-
to frontiers of periphery
-and the Knowns we never see
-the wicker bowler atop the landscaper
-who's trimmed every week,
-the yard across the street
-which I've canvased in every imaginable state
-which's
-since Mrs. Tanzay's first grade,
-Remained.
clever in sharp
-through it all
-my holy communion
-my reference tradition
-now sometimes witnessed
-and lamented
-if only all these had been told
-shut out! shut up!
-just listen
-
-
my companion met me two nights in a row in front of the Heidelberg and said twice
-she loves me
-and of course it's like me to begin to read in but
-when nobody else does, she loves me
-I don't quite note his particular personification
-
-
more impressively trained, definitively
-with a stack of charts – some his – on his noggin
-but when he'd finally play, I'd pity
-because he must ask first
-and his fingers are well-read
-but they must ask first
-and every little passerby
-draws away his eye
-so delicate,
-his attention for she that loves him
-relentless, the country keeps
-doors and walls reverberate
-all but rest in summer’s heat
-
-
I remember the dawn and dusk – the open palette, gradiented above
-opposite a front
-overtaking me,
-on the 4030,
-tilling terraces ’round the North 180
-
-
growing here is not a war with Earth,
-but a chronological board game,
-won by the punctual
-and patient
-
-
I am neither of these,
-but I am fond of a good emergency
-
-
and it all plays out for me;
-the torrent released in Missouri haste
-big drops turn to steam on the labored muffler
-too much to do;
-getting it over with,
-God cries in heaves, quickly,
-around here
eighteen dollars will buy you an hour's passage on the worn & weary Mark Twain
-
-
the same stretch under Lover's Leap,
-an idle paddle wheel dragged cyclically, on and on
-by her diesels
-
-
costumed so long,
-moored not far from horrid wax figures,
-similarly fated
-who bare old Sam's names with the rest of them,
-the Hannibilians assuredly assuaged by their sounds,
-so heard
-
-
the ambiance of the little town,
-shrill with tourists' wonder,
-depression of the damned,
-envisaged waterborne toxins
-
-
despite it all,
-I departed her as a newfound touchstone,
-knowing she's just up twenty four,
-eighteen dollars away,
-no time soon to break her jaded rhythm
-as a forgotten timepiece,
-buried in a rank cellar
-
-
supposing she'd ease most crisis that could ever befall me
-she and her unsalted captain,
-who has not aged (truthfully, I do remember.)
to new meanings
-to the feeling I've only been able to find
-on one short strip
-just East of Kansas City
-that I am small in a
-dirty daunting
-
-
to coverage of
-the Be Beat
-
-
to frontiers of periphery
-and the Knowns we never see
-the wicker bowler atop the landscaper
-who's trimmed every week,
-the yard across the street
-which I've canvased in every imaginable state
-which's
-since Mrs. Tanzay's first grade,
-Remained.
clever in sharp
-through it all
-my holy communion
-my reference tradition
-now sometimes witnessed
-and lamented
-if only all these had been told
-shut out! shut up!
-just listen
-
-
my companion met me two nights in a row in front of the Heidelberg and said twice
-she loves me
-and of course it's like me to begin to read in but
-when nobody else does, she loves me
-I don't quite note his particular personification
-
-
more impressively trained, definitively
-with a stack of charts – some his – on his noggin
-but when he'd finally play, I'd pity
-because he must ask first
-and his fingers are well-read
-but they must ask first
-and every little passerby
-draws away his eye
-so delicate,
-his attention for she that loves him
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so illequipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so illequipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.
I don’t want you to think this is just another listicle to mark as spam or ignore completely – though it technically is, I suppose. I know how it looks… because I’ve run into many of them and have been just as irritated as you. In fact, I would be so bold as to presume I’ve run into many many more than you have simply because a primary hobby of mine has always been Just Trying to Do Things On The Computer without any academic authority or hands-on training. This is a way of life for my generation and those proceeding it, yes, but I promise you that I have gone far, far deeper than the vast majority of anyone you know. What I’m ultimately trying to do here is to spare you the hundreds – perhaps thousands – of hours I have had to spend mulling through shitty workflows throughout my childhood and adulthood before I stumbled upon Good Practices (i.e. Better Ways to Do Things.)
-
-
-
-
I want you to come away from this list feeling as liberated and powerful as I do now when I’m On My Computer without any condescension or tedium. Unfortunately, there’s probably going to be some of both, so please stick with me and don’t take it personally. I do a lot of online reading, writing, and fiddling. I’ve been compelled to do these things in one form or another since very early childhood, and what follows could be described as a list of my favorite tools to accomplish things. Almost all of them are entirely free to use and the vast majority of them are easily and beautifully functional as well. They are what I suggest for my own mother to use, for what that’s worth, and I would argue sincerely for their extreme importance. Don’t waste your life on bad software.
-
-
-
-
You Need a Password Manager
-
-
In 2020, password managers are no longer optional for digital life. They are mandatory. If you only ever heed a single piece of my advice, ever, please make it this one. Most password managers available are secure, cross-platform, optionally cloud-synced tools that help you generate, store, and organize digital credentials. More likely than not, you’re already using one in your favorite browser. On MacOS and iOS, Safari is linked to a service called Keychain, which is – functionally – a robust password manager. On signup for a given website or service, Safari should prompt you to automatically generate secure, complex passwords to store in Keychain. Generally, it’s pretty smart about knowing when it’s time to retrieve the credentials with Touch-ID, but for when it isn’t, you should know how to manually retrieve passwords from Keychain. If you’re deeply enough embedded into the Mac ecosystem, you can feel free to continue to rely on this process as long as you know how to help yourself when it fails. I’m not going to tell you who to trust, but I do almost actually believe in Apple’s commitment to securing user data, if only because of the way their incentives are aligned (in contrast with those in front of data-funded organizations like Google.)
-
-
If you’re using a Windows Home Machine and/or an Android smartphone, I believe it’s more urgent that you find a standalone password management solution immediately. I use a gorgeous app called Enpass to store all of my passwords as well as my bank credentials, credit cards, driver’s license information, and anything else I might need to keep handy, securely. I can use virtually any cloud or file-sharing service to keep my “vaults” synced between all of my devices: Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, Box, etc, and I also regularly create encrypted local backups just in case. I can even share end-to-end encrypted credentials with another device or Enpass installation. I migrated to Enpass two years ago after using 1Password for nearly 10. It was intuitive and virtually seamless, as such things in software tend to be these days, and as a result, I haven’t had to memorize a single password since my adolescence. Enpass allows me to create custom login templates for quick differentiation when creating new entries as well as picturized categories and tags. With one click, even the icon can be pulled from a given URL’s favicon to help keep my vault looking visually itemized. It also includes presets for a hundred services or so – from Google to Wix to Yahoo! Japan.
-
-
-
-
Total Recall with a Clipboard Manager
-
-
Imagine if everything you had ever copied (as in Ctrl-C) were listed in linear order, easily and instantly searchable via a single global keyboard shortcut (Alt-`) and navigable with the arrow keys. Imagine if you could then export an archive of your clipboard so nothing could ever be lost. Imagine clipboard tabs that are easily switchable. CopyQ – an “advanced clipboard manager” – is one of my favorite software discoveries of all time. Some workdays, I use it literally hundreds of instances in my workflow. It is difficult to describe how much more useful it makes the clipboard feature – something we’ve all been using for decades, now. For someone like me who copies a ridiculous amount of links every day, CopyQ’s functionality has truly become life-changing.
-
-
-
-
Alt-D and Other Keyboard Shortcuts
-
-
Somehow, I did not discover Alt-D until 2018, which means that I had spent the entirety of my 24 years since triple-clicking to select every single URL I’d ever copied. I built a media company this way, and I can’t believe nobody told me about this shortcut. Open any given web browser, use Alt-D, and your selection will move to the URL in the address bar on top of the page. It’s very possible this will be of little use to you, but anyone who regularly shares or copies links will save themselves so much time. I felt the same way when I discovered text navigation with Alt, Shift, Ctrl + the arrow keys. Most of these are cross-platform, but I am specifically focusing on Windows shortcuts for this piece because that’s what I’m currently using.
-
-
Arrow key-related shortcuts
-
-
· Shift in conjunction with the arrow keys selects text in a document surrounding the cursor.
-
-
· Alt in conjunction with the arrow keys allows one to go forward or backward in a browser.
-
-
· Ctrl in conjunction with the arrow keys allows one to navigate text by word.
-
-
Virtually all of the “Windows logo key” shortcuts are usable in day-to-day workflows. I use Win-D to immediately minimize all windows and show the desktop on the regular. Microsoft is currently testing a feature like MacOS’ spotlight which is triggered with this key.
-
-
Designed to replace the existing Win + R shortcut, the new launcher will include options to quickly search apps and files across Windows and support for plugins like calculators, dictionaries, and search engines.
-
-
We can only hope this feature will be as useful as spotlight (which is triggered with ⌘-Spacebar for you Mac users,) and will be implemented as standard as soon as possible. If you’re not already using basic shortcuts for functions like closing tabs/windows and cut/copy/pasting text, I’d advise you to begin as soon as possible. It can be hard to commit, but I promise it’ll make your life better. Try printing out a list of shortcuts for your particular operating system to keep by your workspace and/or find or create an image of the list to set as your desktop background for a while.
-
-
Learn Markdown Immediately
-
-
While we’re on the subject of text – and hopefully without finding ourselves exploring the entire history of word processing – I’d like to evangelize what very well might be the Ultimate Formatting Language for digital text. It’s called Markdown, and it’s something you’ve likely already used in one form or another. Technically, Markdown is “a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers,” but – more importantly – it’s a method of stylizing text which is as simple as possible, easy to universalize, and already quite popular. While Vice argues that Markdown is a “power-user tool,” I’d suggest that it’s one everybody should make use of. Though I am currently writing this in Word (for the first time in a good while,) I’m going to pay for it later.
-
-
A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology.
I once had to convert a Word document to a web page.
-
-
Once.
-
-
After spending hours deleting mso-style blocks and cleaning up thousands of lines of crap, I swore (and swore, and swore) that I’d never do that again.
-
-
So I moved to Markdown. For a writer who publishes mostly to the web, it’s perfect.
-
-
Before I committed to writing in Markdown and moved Extratone to Write.As – a wonderfully simple, open-source web CMS entirely based on Markdown – I really struggled with text formatting on our old WordPress-based site, spending hours cleaning up text from Word, Apple Notes, Dropbox Paper, and Google Docs. Now, WordPress natively supports Markdown along with Ghost, Slack, Discord, Tumblr, and more.
-
OKAY, YOU GUYS WERE RIGHT ABOUT BEAR...
the whole world was right about Bear...
I'm not sure if I've ever seen a more beautiful text editor and I've seen A LOT. pic.twitter.com/8SzGiBgoYt
-Mashable published a formidable list of Markdown editors in 2013, but many are since significantly out of date. Instead, I’d refer you to @awwsmm’s “State of Markdown Editors 2019,” which suggests Joplin as the winning pick. Joplin is open-source and syncs across devices using your preferred cloud service, but it requires that all notes be written in a monospace typeface, which I do not prefer. If you have a MacOS-running machine and/or an iOS-running smartphone, you must download and try an application called Bear. It is quite simply the most beautiful piece of software – aesthetically and functionally – that I have ever seen, and therefore the most beautiful possible execution of a Markdown Editor. From The Verge’s Dieter Bohn:
-
-
Bear uses a simple three-paned design. The largest column is devoted to your current note. A smaller column to the left contains your notes in reverse-chronological order, topped by a search bar. The left-most column contains notes that you’ve pinned, as well as any tags you’ve created to organize your notes — #recipes, for example. I spent years trying to sort my notes into notebooks in Evernote, only to learn that what I really needed was a faster search box.
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-
-
-
As much as I despise the term “seamless,” everything about Bear is its definition. For someone like me, it, alone, almost warrants a reversion to MacOS. If you have the correct platforms, I require you to try it. Unfortunately, there can be no true Windows or Linux equivalent without the work Shiny Frog has done to streamline Bear’s near-instantaneous iCloud integration, but there is one application that can literally simulate its functionality in every other way. Typora is an infinitely-customizable alternative that spans all three platforms with a well-populated themes gallery (including an actual copy of my favorite Bear theme.) My installation is not nearly as smooth as Bear, but it’s technically more powerful – bad news for users like me who can’t resist fiddling. I’ve downloaded (and attempted to author/modify) a billion themes for Typora. Bear, by contrast, allows just enough stylistic modification (color theme, a choice list of 7 beautiful typefaces, and sliders for font size, line height, paragraph spacing,) without any access to its internal workings. In this way, it provides the perfect blend of customizability and minimalism. If you tend toward the latter, try an ultra-slim solution like WordPress’ Simplenote.
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-
-
-
Telegram
-
-
I ran a poll on both Twitter and Mastodon yesterday asking “do you still email things to yourself?” Overwhelmingly, my “audience” responded “yes,” which is awfully surprising considering their demographic – young, techish early adopters. Though email is not yet “obsolete” – as envisioned by Inc’s John Brandon in 2015 – it has indeed been replaced by other software in many of its functions, especially the old Mail-to-Self practice. I cannot remember the last time I emailed myself anything – even to transfer photos from my cellular to my computer, as I used to do often. Instead, I use a private Telegram channel to send myself photos, videos, links, text, and any other file up to 1.5GB! There’ve always been plenty of reasons to use the messaging app for general communication – especially since Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014. Though press coverage of the application has all but dried up, I would argue there are now more reasons than ever to make use of Telegram in your day-to-day life.
-
-
As of 2016, Telegram had 100 million active users, but it’s certainly experienced its fair share of controversies. I see no reason to be worried about encryption or privacy at all, for that matter, for the vast majority of Mail-to-Self cases. If the files you’re sending yourself are sensitive enough to worry about, you shouldn’t be emailing them, anyway.
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Other Stuff
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-
If you’re the sort of person who regularly types out 500+ word text messages (or have to do homework/any real writing) on your smartphone, I have a secret to reveal to you: most smartphones still have Bluetooth keyboard support. It may look strange, but yes, you can use a full qwerty keyboard with your phone. Those of us who’ve livestreamed or used screenrecording software know that OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is an absolute gift from Gourd, but these days, it’s also easy enough for most computer users to make use of. I’d encourage everybody who can think of a reason to record their screen – to show somebody how to do something, for instance – to download and install it. Finally, I think every Windows user should look into compacting their operating system into just the essentials. “Compact OS” is really just a Windows 10 install without bloatware: the shit you almost certainly don’t need. If you do find yourself in need of default Microsoft apps, you’ll be able to redownload them instantly from the Windows Store.
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-
I’d been meaning to write something like this for a very long time, so I hope you or someone you know has found it useful. I’m not an authority in the technical sense, but I’ve used every one of these suggestions in my own computing life for years, now, to great benefit. If you have any comments/suggestions/feedback/petty insults, please do contact me via email, Twitter, Mastodon, or Discord.
I don’t want you to think this is just another listicle to mark as spam or ignore completely – though it technically is, I suppose. I know how it looks… because I’ve run into many of them and have been just as irritated as you. In fact, I would be so bold as to presume I’ve run into many many more than you have simply because a primary hobby of mine has always been Just Trying to Do Things On The Computer without any academic authority or hands-on training. This is a way of life for my generation and those proceeding it, yes, but I promise you that I have gone far, far deeper than the vast majority of anyone you know. What I’m ultimately trying to do here is to spare you the hundreds – perhaps thousands – of hours I have had to spend mulling through shitty workflows throughout my childhood and adulthood before I stumbled upon Good Practices (i.e. Better Ways to Do Things.)
-
-
-
-
I want you to come away from this list feeling as liberated and powerful as I do now when I’m On My Computer without any condescension or tedium. Unfortunately, there’s probably going to be some of both, so please stick with me and don’t take it personally. I do a lot of online reading, writing, and fiddling. I’ve been compelled to do these things in one form or another since very early childhood, and what follows could be described as a list of my favorite tools to accomplish things. Almost all of them are entirely free to use and the vast majority of them are easily and beautifully functional as well. They are what I suggest for my own mother to use, for what that’s worth, and I would argue sincerely for their extreme importance. Don’t waste your life on bad software.
-
-
-
-
You Need a Password Manager
-
-
In 2020, password managers are no longer optional for digital life. They are mandatory. If you only ever heed a single piece of my advice, ever, please make it this one. Most password managers available are secure, cross-platform, optionally cloud-synced tools that help you generate, store, and organize digital credentials. More likely than not, you’re already using one in your favorite browser. On MacOS and iOS, Safari is linked to a service called Keychain, which is – functionally – a robust password manager. On signup for a given website or service, Safari should prompt you to automatically generate secure, complex passwords to store in Keychain. Generally, it’s pretty smart about knowing when it’s time to retrieve the credentials with Touch-ID, but for when it isn’t, you should know how to manually retrieve passwords from Keychain. If you’re deeply enough embedded into the Mac ecosystem, you can feel free to continue to rely on this process as long as you know how to help yourself when it fails. I’m not going to tell you who to trust, but I do almost actually believe in Apple’s commitment to securing user data, if only because of the way their incentives are aligned (in contrast with those in front of data-funded organizations like Google.)
-
-
If you’re using a Windows Home Machine and/or an Android smartphone, I believe it’s more urgent that you find a standalone password management solution immediately. I use a gorgeous app called Enpass to store all of my passwords as well as my bank credentials, credit cards, driver’s license information, and anything else I might need to keep handy, securely. I can use virtually any cloud or file-sharing service to keep my “vaults” synced between all of my devices: Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, Box, etc, and I also regularly create encrypted local backups just in case. I can even share end-to-end encrypted credentials with another device or Enpass installation. I migrated to Enpass two years ago after using 1Password for nearly 10. It was intuitive and virtually seamless, as such things in software tend to be these days, and as a result, I haven’t had to memorize a single password since my adolescence. Enpass allows me to create custom login templates for quick differentiation when creating new entries as well as picturized categories and tags. With one click, even the icon can be pulled from a given URL’s favicon to help keep my vault looking visually itemized. It also includes presets for a hundred services or so – from Google to Wix to Yahoo! Japan.
-
-
-
-
Total Recall with a Clipboard Manager
-
-
Imagine if everything you had ever copied (as in Ctrl-C) were listed in linear order, easily and instantly searchable via a single global keyboard shortcut (Alt-`) and navigable with the arrow keys. Imagine if you could then export an archive of your clipboard so nothing could ever be lost. Imagine clipboard tabs that are easily switchable. CopyQ – an “advanced clipboard manager” – is one of my favorite software discoveries of all time. Some workdays, I use it literally hundreds of instances in my workflow. It is difficult to describe how much more useful it makes the clipboard feature – something we’ve all been using for decades, now. For someone like me who copies a ridiculous amount of links every day, CopyQ’s functionality has truly become life-changing.
-
-
-
-
Alt-D and Other Keyboard Shortcuts
-
-
Somehow, I did not discover Alt-D until 2018, which means that I had spent the entirety of my 24 years since triple-clicking to select every single URL I’d ever copied. I built a media company this way, and I can’t believe nobody told me about this shortcut. Open any given web browser, use Alt-D, and your selection will move to the URL in the address bar on top of the page. It’s very possible this will be of little use to you, but anyone who regularly shares or copies links will save themselves so much time. I felt the same way when I discovered text navigation with Alt, Shift, Ctrl + the arrow keys. Most of these are cross-platform, but I am specifically focusing on Windows shortcuts for this piece because that’s what I’m currently using.
-
-
Arrow key-related shortcuts
-
-
· Shift in conjunction with the arrow keys selects text in a document surrounding the cursor.
-
-
· Alt in conjunction with the arrow keys allows one to go forward or backward in a browser.
-
-
· Ctrl in conjunction with the arrow keys allows one to navigate text by word.
-
-
Virtually all of the “Windows logo key” shortcuts are usable in day-to-day workflows. I use Win-D to immediately minimize all windows and show the desktop on the regular. Microsoft is currently testing a feature like MacOS’ spotlight which is triggered with this key.
-
-
Designed to replace the existing Win + R shortcut, the new launcher will include options to quickly search apps and files across Windows and support for plugins like calculators, dictionaries, and search engines.
-
-
We can only hope this feature will be as useful as spotlight (which is triggered with ⌘-Spacebar for you Mac users,) and will be implemented as standard as soon as possible. If you’re not already using basic shortcuts for functions like closing tabs/windows and cut/copy/pasting text, I’d advise you to begin as soon as possible. It can be hard to commit, but I promise it’ll make your life better. Try printing out a list of shortcuts for your particular operating system to keep by your workspace and/or find or create an image of the list to set as your desktop background for a while.
-
-
Learn Markdown Immediately
-
-
While we’re on the subject of text – and hopefully without finding ourselves exploring the entire history of word processing – I’d like to evangelize what very well might be the Ultimate Formatting Language for digital text. It’s called Markdown, and it’s something you’ve likely already used in one form or another. Technically, Markdown is “a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers,” but – more importantly – it’s a method of stylizing text which is as simple as possible, easy to universalize, and already quite popular. While Vice argues that Markdown is a “power-user tool,” I’d suggest that it’s one everybody should make use of. Though I am currently writing this in Word (for the first time in a good while,) I’m going to pay for it later.
-
-
A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology.
I once had to convert a Word document to a web page.
-
-
Once.
-
-
After spending hours deleting mso-style blocks and cleaning up thousands of lines of crap, I swore (and swore, and swore) that I’d never do that again.
-
-
So I moved to Markdown. For a writer who publishes mostly to the web, it’s perfect.
-
-
Before I committed to writing in Markdown and moved Extratone to Write.As – a wonderfully simple, open-source web CMS entirely based on Markdown – I really struggled with text formatting on our old WordPress-based site, spending hours cleaning up text from Word, Apple Notes, Dropbox Paper, and Google Docs. Now, WordPress natively supports Markdown along with Ghost, Slack, Discord, Tumblr, and more.
-
-
OKAY, YOU GUYS WERE RIGHT ABOUT BEAR...
the whole world was right about Bear...
I'm not sure if I've ever seen a more beautiful text editor and I've seen A LOT. pic.twitter.com/8SzGiBgoYt
Mashable published a formidable list of Markdown editors in 2013, but many are since significantly out of date. Instead, I’d refer you to @awwsmm’s “State of Markdown Editors 2019,” which suggests Joplin as the winning pick. Joplin is open-source and syncs across devices using your preferred cloud service, but it requires that all notes be written in a monospace typeface, which I do not prefer. If you have a MacOS-running machine and/or an iOS-running smartphone, you must download and try an application called Bear. It is quite simply the most beautiful piece of software – aesthetically and functionally – that I have ever seen, and therefore the most beautiful possible execution of a Markdown Editor. From The Verge’s Dieter Bohn:
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Bear uses a simple three-paned design. The largest column is devoted to your current note. A smaller column to the left contains your notes in reverse-chronological order, topped by a search bar. The left-most column contains notes that you’ve pinned, as well as any tags you’ve created to organize your notes — #recipes, for example. I spent years trying to sort my notes into notebooks in Evernote, only to learn that what I really needed was a faster search box.
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As much as I despise the term “seamless,” everything about Bear is its definition. For someone like me, it, alone, almost warrants a reversion to MacOS. If you have the correct platforms, I require you to try it. Unfortunately, there can be no true Windows or Linux equivalent without the work Shiny Frog has done to streamline Bear’s near-instantaneous iCloud integration, but there is one application that can literally simulate its functionality in every other way. Typora is an infinitely-customizable alternative that spans all three platforms with a well-populated themes gallery (including an actual copy of my favorite Bear theme.) My installation is not nearly as smooth as Bear, but it’s technically more powerful – bad news for users like me who can’t resist fiddling. I’ve downloaded (and attempted to author/modify) a billion themes for Typora. Bear, by contrast, allows just enough stylistic modification (color theme, a choice list of 7 beautiful typefaces, and sliders for font size, line height, paragraph spacing,) without any access to its internal workings. In this way, it provides the perfect blend of customizability and minimalism. If you tend toward the latter, try an ultra-slim solution like WordPress’ Simplenote.
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Telegram
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I ran a poll on both Twitter and Mastodon yesterday asking “do you still email things to yourself?” Overwhelmingly, my “audience” responded “yes,” which is awfully surprising considering their demographic – young, techish early adopters. Though email is not yet “obsolete” – as envisioned by Inc’s John Brandon in 2015 – it has indeed been replaced by other software in many of its functions, especially the old Mail-to-Self practice. I cannot remember the last time I emailed myself anything – even to transfer photos from my cellular to my computer, as I used to do often. Instead, I use a private Telegram channel to send myself photos, videos, links, text, and any other file up to 1.5GB! There’ve always been plenty of reasons to use the messaging app for general communication – especially since Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014. Though press coverage of the application has all but dried up, I would argue there are now more reasons than ever to make use of Telegram in your day-to-day life.
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As of 2016, Telegram had 100 million active users, but it’s certainly experienced its fair share of controversies. I see no reason to be worried about encryption or privacy at all, for that matter, for the vast majority of Mail-to-Self cases. If the files you’re sending yourself are sensitive enough to worry about, you shouldn’t be emailing them, anyway.
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Other Stuff
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If you’re the sort of person who regularly types out 500+ word text messages (or have to do homework/any real writing) on your smartphone, I have a secret to reveal to you: most smartphones still have Bluetooth keyboard support. It may look strange, but yes, you can use a full qwerty keyboard with your phone. Those of us who’ve livestreamed or used screenrecording software know that OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is an absolute gift from Gourd, but these days, it’s also easy enough for most computer users to make use of. I’d encourage everybody who can think of a reason to record their screen – to show somebody how to do something, for instance – to download and install it. Finally, I think every Windows user should look into compacting their operating system into just the essentials. “Compact OS” is really just a Windows 10 install without bloatware: the shit you almost certainly don’t need. If you do find yourself in need of default Microsoft apps, you’ll be able to redownload them instantly from the Windows Store.
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I’d been meaning to write something like this for a very long time, so I hope you or someone you know has found it useful. I’m not an authority in the technical sense, but I’ve used every one of these suggestions in my own computing life for years, now, to great benefit. If you have any comments/suggestions/feedback/petty insults, please do contact me via email, Twitter, Mastodon, or Discord.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
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Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
-
-
Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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-
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-
God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
Reporting from deep within the iOS cult on essential apps/methods for real-life music people.
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Listen to this article read (with some bugs) by Siri Voice 3 below...
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As you may or may not be aware, I’ve spent all of my 2021 so far diving real deep into iOS, considering all that has changed since “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.” I’ve tuned in to the output of explicitly Apple-adjacent publications both old (MacRumors, Apple Insider, 9to5 Mac, etc,) and new (Apple Scoop, MacStories,) which have all metamorphosed in huge, mostly-redeemable ways just as their primary subject has. I have my own pubescent stories of Mac occultism, but I do not consider my relationship with the brand to be an essential part of my identity, as so many do and have. Apple, Inc’s story is spectacular and infinitely-relevant so long as they remain “the most valuable company in the history of the world,” as I so love to describe them. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am often compelled to bring up the humongous contrasts in the historical context of the company – to scream infinitely many variations of the observation that Apple was basically the fucking indie, premium-tier consumer tech manufacturer owned by the Creative Class for the first half+ of their existence, and have somehow maintained that Think Different™ brand narrative as they have definitively become the Big Blue of their time.
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From my perspective, the responsibility for the wellbeing of this utterly-delusional, occasionally very dangerous sentiment actually lies fairly squarely on those of us who consider ourselves better than all of that because of our Debian workflows and their ancient command line utilities. (For the record, this is also 100% delusional as things stand in 2021.) One thing I think we can all acknowledge, though, is that Apple’s image has been inextricably bound with musicmaking, throughout, far more than any other even remotely comparable tech company. Naturally, the business still loves to bring this up all the time in big, glossy gestures. The topical example of note would be the only worthwhile content I’ve yet to encounter on Apple TV+: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which documents the highlights of the young, beloved musician’s prodigious ascension. For what it’s worth, I appreciate some special insights I gained thanks to the film, which I do not actually consider at odds with the truth of its super on-brandness for Apple.
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An interesting take I found from 2017 from a new favorite voice on the business end of tech reporting: “How Music Drowns Apple’s Innovation” by The Information’s Jessica Lessin portrays Apple’s relationship with music distribution and the music industry as a sort of compulsive distraction from its ambitions in serving video content, namely. Lessin points out the everpresent reminders of this obsession:
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And so it is no wonder that Apple’s first forays into original video content fall under Apple Music. It’s worth noting that the first series the company announced—“Carpool Karaoke” is literally about singing; “Planet of the Apps” features rapper Will.i.am as a judge.
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I think I can speak for the majority of my audience when I suggest that the targets of Lessin’s cynicism would be more than welcome, if they were The Whole Truth. Indeed, the most valuable company in all of history retaining an “emotional” attachment to the welfare of music creators might be described as charming or more. As is often the case on The Information, the comments from readers often offer noteworthy insight. In this case, Kevin Swint – who has apparently worked as an executive for both Apple and Samsung, according to his profile on The Information – responded with an important consideration: “…it's possible that Apple's behavior around music has more to do with the company's overall tendency to stick with its past successes a bit too long rather than music really being a core part of its DNA.”
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In terms of business, that’s all I have to contribute, and I shall do my best not to evangelize Apple Music (or more likely, disparage Spotify as one of the most destructive cultural forces of our time,) here. However, I would like to respond to a particular Jimmy Iovine quote from the original Apple Music announcement amid the 2015 WWDC Keynote:
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There needs to be a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery… and if that place could actually accommodate and support the artists who make the music, not just the top-tier artists, but the kids in their bedrooms too, provide them all with a home and a way to engage with their audiences, that would be pretty great.
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Boy, this service Iovine describes sounds an awful lot like Bandcamp, no? The suggestion that Apple should have purchased Bandcamp is a very scary one, from my perspective, but I am reassured by the likelihood that the notion did indeed occur to someone at Apple, Inc. at some point in the past, and was quickly discarded, for whatever reason. I promise not to mention Bandcamp again in this Post, aside from its own two iOS apps: for listeners and for “Artists/Labels” as creator/curator tools.
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I’m going to be focusing largely on the iPhone-bound experience, here, though I did borrow my mom’s MacBook Pro for a weekend to explore the state of music on MacOS and (accidentally) played around with Apple Music on The Television (a surprisingly beautiful experience.) On that note, I’ll hurry up and get specific…
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Apps
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Assuming you’re already an Apple Music user, it’s very possible that you’ve been deprived of the “true” experience on the service provided by the variety of actively-developed but woefully-undercovered app store entries that integrate directly with Apple Music. One of the most glaring discoveries I’ve made so far in my iOS deep dive, this year, has been the absolutely horrific state of Discovery on Apple’s App Store. If you’d thought to search the top charts under the store’s Music category, you wouldn’t find any of the gems I’m going to highlight, here. The credit for exposing me to their existence, in fact, lies with MacStories – a hard-hitting, well-established Apple-adjacent media company piloted by Federico Viticci. At this very moment, their app-centric podcast, App Stories, is in the midst of a special mini-series devoted to Music on iOS/Mac, from which this Post draws upon heavily. For better or worse, they represent the definitive authority on this subject (among many others, naturally,) though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend their various publications be added to the reading lists of any but those most invested in iOS.
There is something uniquely concrete about a purely-chronological feed which we’ve lost in the past 5-10 years in favor of algorithmic curation, generally. The next item in this particular feed, in fact, includes my attempt to explain why Twitter’s hard-chronological Lists feature has sheltered me from the anxiety of the service’s main timeline, now ordered by proprietary (and obscured) formulas. I’d been aware of that dynamic in my own Twitter consumption for years, though. I certainly did not anticipate the impact of the music release equivalent of a chronological timeline as provided by MusicHarbor – an app for iOS and MacOS that acts as a frontend for one’s music library across both Apple Music and Spotify.
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It's hard to remember how we (Apple Music) got here without embarking upon some gargantuan A Complete Visual History of Apple Music-like document, but it must be said that Tim Cook's “next chapter in music” has become a sad afterthought. As far as I understand it, the “streaming war” between Apple and Spotify has long since gone definitively to the latter in statistical terms, which I'd suggest to be an overall positive outcome for Apple Music subscribers, generally. The self-perception within the heavy music consumer crowd of “niche,” “underground,” “obscure” cultural minority should – in theory – push those who believe themselves destined to be different away from Spotify into the handy care of Apple, the absolute champion of this particular self-deception. To be honest – though I write this for all listeners, sincerely – I have found myself in a sort of utopian echo chamber of my own design in music culture terms. My days of waiting through 4+ hours of local openers before rap shows are far behind me, and I consume and engage exclusively with music I find personally redeemable.
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My Apple Music library has become quite fragmented after I lost my entire physical music collection along with the external drives containing my accumulated digital music library in 2017. Still, after more or less starting anew this past December and casually, deliberately adding digital files back into the accursed, ancient iTunes desktop application and restoring some (outdated) versions of my handful of shared curatorial playlists thanks to SongShift (which we'll glance on later,) MusicHarbor currently lists 1433 artists represented across my Apple Music and (very sparse) Spotify libraries. I know this because of a very simple Siri Shortcut I modified which returns a text list of all Artists in one's MusicHarbor library in Quick Look. (Here is my result as of this moment in GitHub Gist form.) According my App Store receipts, I first downloaded MusicHarbor on March 26 – 20 days ago – which is mentionable because of how much I've accomplished with very minimal time investment in terms of curating my own music library thanks to MusicHarbor. As you'll note in the 3rd of the 4 screenshots embedded above, I was able to delete System of a Down from my library – a single function which alone justifies the app's one-time $5.99 “Unlock Everything” fee, to my sensibility. I've also been able to begin following all the artists represented in a few of my favorite playlists with a handful of taps – a task which would literally require hours in the native Apple Music app of old (when one could actually follow artists, there.) On that note, it's time to cite the primary MacStories article you should read, entitled “How I Keep Track of New Music Releases,” regarding Apple Music's performance as a release tracker:
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The ‘New Releases’ section is tucked at the very end of the For You page and laid out as a horizontal carousel that requires a lot of swiping; you can view the ‘New Releases’ page as a grid, which has sections for different weeks, but, in my experience, it only aggregates highlights for new releases from some of my favorite artists. The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.
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Here, Federico Viticci is riffing off a newsletter issue written by music blogger Jason Tate, in which he describes the service's missing tracking functionality as “the single most frustrating part of Apple Music.” Though these points in the conversation are both almost two years old, MusicHarbor remains the ultimate means of tracking new music releases chronologically on Apple's platforms. Though I am personally just three weeks in, the confidence this app has given me in the certainty of its chronological release feed is quite profound. Its integration with one's calendar to track upcoming releases is a bit much for my own needs, but I know personally enough invested curators for whom it'd be a godsend to mark it no small addition.
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MusicHarbor’s only downside is entirely excusable/understandable, in context: it’s a bit clunky. For the sake of this work, I set up a shared Apple Music playlist so I could further demonstrate all the new music I discovered in MusicHarbor. Adding whole albums to this playlist with a single tap feels powerful because it is – I’ve no idea what sort of developer wizardry is involved in such an action, but the Wait Wheel doesn’t feel like too much to endure. Adding a release to one’s library – the other in-MusicHarbor accumulative function – is a bit quicker. It’s important to remember that this piece of software was/is created and maintained by a single human being, though I would expect nothing but improvement, going forward.
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That’s all I have to report on MusicHarbor, for the moment, but I’ll add further MacStories praise from their 2019 MacStories Selects app rewards:
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What makes MusicHarbor special – and, ultimately, the reason why we all use the app here at MacStories – is just how much developer Tanaka understands what someone who wants to know about new music releases is looking for.
On the other end of the spectrum, exploring new digital manifestations of The Music Collection, is Albums, which actually functions as an entire replacement frontend player for Apple Music. Reviewed much more recently by MacStories, it really is best-described as “opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists.” Considering that I installed the app just a week ago and have focused most of my attention on MusicHarbor in that time, I’ll leave most of the commentary to John Voorhees. All I can say, really, is that I see an extremely powerful application, here, for a fairly specific use case: someone who’s listening is largely occupied by albums they already “own” in Apple Music and treasure deeply. The ability to set an individual record’s “Immersive UI Tint” down to the hex (in “Album Settings”) is as in-depth a tool of adoration as I’ve ever seen in a digital music service. Combined with Albums’ presumptuous takeover of actual playback from the Apple Music app, I think I can rightfully say that it was built for the extremely serious music consumer.
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My favorite part so far: the app knew well enough to offer me THE ZRO BUTTON. Telling, I think.
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Others
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Since it’s already quite clear how much this Post draws from MacStories, I’ll let their review of Soor stand on its own (I couldn’t quite justify spending $6.99 just for review purposes.) In the episode embedded above, they also mention Denim – a playlist cover creator I am not personally all that impressed with. There’s also MusicHarbor’s sibling, MusicSmart, which manages the tricky but essential task of adding the metadata retrieval Apple Music should have included all along. The rest can be found in the episode’s show notes. I’m not done with them, but the rest are what I would differentiate as services…
One of the bewilderingly undercovered digital music sharing tools of our kind, Odesli has been my preferred method of sharing tracks/albums/EPs since I first discovered it in 2018. It is not specific to iOS but it isessential for competent music sharing, anywhere, these days, in its magical ability to correctly intersect any given piece of music’s links across all streaming services, known and unknown. To be honest, I thought everybody would be using it by now, but it’s continued to develop with minimal attention aside from Siri Shortcuts developers. Thanks to Odesli’s Public API, dozens of Music-centric Siri Shortcuts have emerged over the past few years, resulting in one of the most useful Siri Shortcuts integrations to be found for real, reasonable human beings. Here’s where Apple-adjacent media and I part ways…
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While current common conversation might point you to Federico Viticci’s MusicBot hyper-Shortcut and/or @gianflo6’s 600 action-strong Song.Link Shortcut, I (perhaps expectedly) would point you to my own, 17-action Shortcut which spares you any selections and simply opens the Song.Link URL of the track currently playing in Apple Music (while also copying said URL to the clipboard.) It’s not that MusicBot isn’t massively impressive and still useful, but it represents a class of super/hyper-Shortcuts which (from my perspective) far-overreach beyond the intended use case for Siri Shortcuts and end up immediately bewildering/alienating potential new users. Truthfully – as Federico singularly acknowledges – they are full applications built atop a less-than-ideal platform designed for relatively simple, repeatable automations. I’ll spare you further opining on this idea until another, potential Post, and instead demonstrate my personal solution.
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In the clip above, you can see I was working on this very draft when LoneMoon’s “kawAii @F” started playing. Naturally, I was compelled to share it on Twitter, so – without leaving Drafts (my writing app) – I called the type-to-Siri prompt by holding the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and simply typed “sl” (I renamed my Shortcut for this use,) running the Shortcut, which opened the track’s Song.Link page in Safari – very much an optional step, mostly just to make sure the match is correct – and copied its URL to my clipboard, from which I could share it anywhere. Since the advent of widgets in iOS’ Today View, I’ve also kept a button for this Shortcut in one of four precious slots in a box at the very top. For those willing to play around a bit, it should be fairly straightforward to configure the end bits to your liking, but it should work out of the box for even those least interested in Siri Shortcuts/automation in general.
As I confessed before, it is only thanks to SongShift that I was able to recover anything of my original, prized, deeply-considered Apple Music playlists. The standalone MacStories article on this one is a bit dated, but I don’t see much change in function in that time. For most people, SongShift’s free service is simply the best way to transfer a playlist between music streaming services. If you find yourself genuinely sold by the features offered by SongShift Pro, I suspect you know more about playlist manipulation than I could ever learn you by diving in any deeper.
Yup… Believe it or not, Last.fm is still fucking scrobbling after 19 fucking years (almost to the day,) and its iOS app still fucking works. What’s most bizarre about this truth is that I did not encounter mention of Last.fm for years until I started noticing it as an integration option in the settings menus of these premium iOS apps. Is this some sort of conspiracy? I’m not sure, but I suppose I might as well insist you follow my ancient account, if you’re still using it.
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alright folks fucking ADD ME ironically or not. this profile is older than all of the cells in my body. https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK
I should also note that not only is the Last.fm iOS app still working, it’s working well, from all appearances, anyway. Though the service no longer includes hosting, itself, it’s apparently still a prime player in the world of playback tracking.
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Music Creation
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DAWs
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What if you actually want to “make” music with your iPhone? We’ve seen iPhone television ads for years featuring amalgamations of musician-looking types playing instruments with cables attached to their handsets, but is the iPhone now a reasonable platform for any sort of serious sound capture? The short answer is no. Who am I to proclaim such an absolute? None other than the motherfucker who’s been messing around with mobile DAWs for 10 whole years. I even “released” an “album” on Bandcamp made exclusively with Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS and inspired by the dangerous life of the contemporary raw milk smuggler. I wouldn’t call it “music,” per se, or an example of what a real electronic producer could pull off in the app, but it does represent its capabilities in the hands of the average user, using mostly default loops.
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While Apple does publish an Apple Book entitled “Everyone Can Create Music” about GarageBand on iOS, it is specifically directed at iPad-bound use. Any serious DAW user uses keyboard shortcuts, which I admit I only discovered recently in GarageBand for iOS. The official documentation is – once again – for iPad, specifically, but most of them still work on iPhone.
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FL Studio Mobile – the original third-party iOS-bound DAW – is still going, apparently. While I did, indeed purchase the original version on my iPhone 4, I remember absolutely nothing about it, suggesting I was over my head, even then. There’s also Auxy, as covered recently in this App Store Story and Reason Compact. I’ve played around with these more recently – since they’re both available in their most primitive forms as a free download – with little to report.
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Capture
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Disappointingly, Apple’s own Music Memos – as demonstrated by Chris Welch from The Verge in the embed, above – is currently in the process of being officially sunsetted and is now no longer available for download on the App Store. As that article notes, users are instead directed toward GarageBand or ye olde native Voice Memos to record high quality audio. However, if you want to take advantage of the stereo audio recording capabilities included in iPhones after the 11 Pro, you must either use the native Camera app to capture video (and extract the audio later,) or Dolby On – Dolby’s own iOS app for recording which – if I’m completely honest – will do nothing but utterly frustrate anyone trying to capture the truest digital audio possible.
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As part of my iPhone 12 Pro Max Review, I’ve accumulated quite a few audio files in various formats testing its capture abilities and stashed them in this folder on The Psalms’ GitHub Repository. Probably the most relevant of these, though, is embedded just above. If you’ll forgive my pajamas, ridiculous piano faces, and general rustiness with the instrument, it demonstrates the “Audio Zoom” feature found in the iPhone 11 Pro and up, which I’ve found to be unfortunately underdocumented by Apple, itself. I added my own inquiry to this post on the official Developer forums asking about it, but don’t really expect anything back. According to “What is Audio Zoom for smartphones?” published on the site DxOMark:
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The main technology behind audio zoom is called beamforming, or spatial filtering. It allows changing an audio recording’s directivity (that is, the sensitivity according to the direction of the sound source) and shape it in any way necessary. In this case, the optimal directivity is a hypercardioid pattern (see illustration below), which enhances sounds coming from the front direction — that is, from the direction in which your camera is pointed — while attenuating sounds from all other directions (your background noise).
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My testing has suggested that the best means of recording unfiltered-as-possible stereo audio with an iPhone is to record video at 1x zoom with the native Camera app and extract the audio from the video file. In the Bandcamp track embedded below, I “mounted” my 12 Pro Max right above my old upright’s soundboard and extracted audio directly from the video file with Audacity. It was then amplified slightly, saved to a FLAC file and uploaded directly to Bandcamp. Of course, it’s worth qualifying that – while I have extensive experience with audio – I have neither professional training, nor any professional monitoring equipment.
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That said, the biggest objection I’ve heard from audiophiles regarding audio capture and manipulation on handsets, generally, has to do with their hardware’s extremely limited capabilities when compared to any sort of professional desktop soundcard. Given the greater argument I've come to regarding the state of consumer tech as best exemplified by smartphone design – that we've come to expect far too much of single devices, and the resulting jack-of-all-tradeness summing their real-life capabilities has become a severe detriment instead of a feature – I must echo, again, that adding “studio” audio capture, manipulation, and production capabilities to our goddamned cellular phones doesn't help anyone. To any user truly hoping to accomplish these things, I say just go home and boot up your damned desktop.
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Other Considerations
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The final episode in AppStories' three-part miniseries on music was just published today, though I suspect – for my audience, anyway – that its coverage is mostly out-of-scope on this topic, largely for financial reasons. Apple's first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow at noon, my time, and is entitled “Spring Loaded,” which – combined with its 4/20 joke date – suggests to me that we'll finally see the release of the APPLE GUN™ alongside iWeed™, but little to nothing in the way of music.
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In the midst of my brief research into The Greater History of Apple Music, I discovered the existence of iTunes Ping – which I somehow missed entirely, along with my Twitter friend Jon Male. I also discovered articles from the company's decision to kill its successor “Connect” from Apple Music, which was reportedly “rarely used.” Notably, this removal also took away what little power Artists had over the narrative surrounding their music on the service. I can see the business justification for all of this (barely) except for removing the ability for users to follow artists.
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The latest Apple Music feature – a “channel” for music videos – also makes zero sense to me, but the launch of Apple Music on the webabsolutely does, especially for Windows and Linux users, who are now officially freed from iTunes (the software) and allowed to use a much more modern Apple Music experience. I prepended “officially,” there, because third-party Apple Music web players have existed as long as the service has allowed the required integration. First, there was Naveed Golafshani's – which is no longer live – but Brychan Bennett-Odlum's Musish is still live and working, as you can see from the screenshot embedded above. Other than the ability to select between two stream bitrates, I can't seen any remaining advantages to using the latter over Apple's own web player, unless you harbor spite toward their handling of the whole thing, which would be entirely understandable, from my perspective.
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MKBHD’s first tech purchase with his own money was an iPod Touch. mine was the original flash drive iPod Shuffle… this is what I mean when I say “I feel old.” it’s not that I’m actually elderly - it’s just strange finding out so often I am older than people I look up to. pic.twitter.com/rbCupcU0R5
As someone who grew up in the mp3 era with a first-generation iPod Shuffle and iTunes, living and dying between iTunes Store gift cards, Apple Music still seems like one hell of a magical deal. In effect, it allows access to all of iTunes for a flat monthly fee. Or at least it would had I never become acquainted with professional independent musicians who've published, there, and have to contend with tedious realities like the process by which one can add those beautiful lyrics to Apple Music tracks, and who's only real means of control/engagement on the service has been removed with virtually zero prospects of a replacement. If, indeed, Jessica Lessin was correct about Apple's obsession with music, it has resulted in very little for any class of music makers, and left even its listeners to seek out and find third-party solutions like MusicHarbor to perform even the most basic personalization one expects from a modern music streaming service without even bothering to amend their App Store's discovery process to illuminate them, or even write a fucking App Story. Despite this, one-to-three-person app teams continue to work on new solutions, to these and other problems...
In the bleak face of Twitter’s centralization, Tapbots refuses to give up on its mobile client.
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Listen to this article read by Siri below...
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Were it just I who came to you with only my voice on this cold night, proclaiming the imminent release of a whole numerical version of a third-party mobile Twitter client in 2021, you really would have no choice but to send for the laws, for you’d be left no consideration other than my comprehensive descent into absolute insanity. 825 days ago, I told you lots about the history surrounding the development of Tweetbot 5, which I confidently described as “likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS.” After spending the past few months diving deep into iOS in preparation to review and reflect upon Apple’s current flagship handset, my eyes have been opened to the exponentially-increasing pace of the whole environment’s metamorphosis during the course of my lapsed attention. In the name of progress, I’ve done my best to make a point of looking back, too, yet something astonishingly personally relevant managed to slip past me until just last week: there is a sixth version of the Tweetbot app. At this moment, it is listed on the App Store as an “Early Release” version, though its predecessor can still be downloaded by those who’ve already purchased it in the past, like me. This is an unusual practice – usually, pre-release versions of iOS apps can only be distributed through Apple’s developer beta testing infrastructure, though Testflight. Notably, Tweetbot developer company Tapbots was apparently required to take down Tweetbot 5’s store listing 30 days before releasing Tweetbot 6.
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I can’t remember exactly why – though I suspect I was just fucking around on my phone before bed, bleary-eyed – but the implications of this next numeral passed me by the first time I saw and downloaded Tweetbot 6, two weeks ago. Perhaps it’s because the app didn’t appear to have any new features – in fact, it’s technically got less than 5, though those that have been removed – user-specified URL shortening, image hosting, and video hosting services – haven’t worked in a good while anyway. As my old fav, The Verge noted in their coverage of 6, blame for these omissions rests solely on Twitter, Inc., itself, who’s continued to hold its API development inordinately close-to-chest. I didn’t bother to find out about this, though, because my first assumptions upon poking around the new app – especially after encountering its new subscription requirement in order to use any of its substantive features – was that its developers had ceased any actual time investment into the app long ago, and that 6 was a new version in number and rudimentary visual updates, only, shoved out in hopes of peaking old, loyal users like myself enough to get us to download it, at least. In the disappointment I’d already expected, I closed and immediately deleted the app.
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I’ve paused everything else to write you on this, though, because the story is actually much bigger. Had I investigated any further that first time, I would have discovered an odd amount of buzz coming from even the most mainstream of tech media in a simple search. (Yes, I am ashamed about it.) You’re still reading, but perhaps – as I was, originally – you are doing so from an appropriately-jaded, well-read perspective on software, generally, in 2021. Perhaps you’re looking at the search results, yourself, and wondering if you’re dreaming. Dedicated coverage of a fucking third-party Twitter client iteration??? At this point in history? What in fuck? I’m fairly certainly neither of us are, though: fucking Tweetbot made headlines on Engadget, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacStories, iMore, MacRumors, and others. No, it’s not 2010 again. In fact, The Verge, at least, has never given up on Tweetbot. If my long term memory had been functioning, I would have remembered noticing its spot in “12 great apps for your new iPhone in 2020:”
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Twitter is a vaguely terrible way to spend your time these days, but if you (like me) can’t tear yourself away from the social media service / entryway into hell, you’ll want Tweetbot, which actually makes using Twitter far less painful. Tweetbot shows you the tweets of the people you follow, in the order that they tweeted them. There are no ads or promoted tweets, powerful mute filters to block out unwanted noise, and (thanks to Twitter’s unfriendly API changes) no notifications to constantly ping you to come back to the app.
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Here’s to Chaim for exposing me to a perspective I never would have otherwise considered: Tweetbot’s lack of push notifications as a positive. If you’re wondering, no, this new app does not ~yet~ include any additional notification integration, and it’s not clear whether or not it’s on Tapbots future roadmap for the app, or where. As for the reality of integrating Tweetbot 6 into your current Twitter use, I stand by my argument that deleting the native Twitter app isn’t really an option if you plan to ever view your notifications on your phone. The popular assumption (I assume) if you’re still reading is that you are a “poweruser,” meaning details about my own configuration are probably irrelevant. If by chance you’ve just downloaded Tweetbot for the first time, you should take the time to disable notifications for Tweetbot entirely, but leave them on for the native Twitter app, even if you decide to banish it to your App Library. Before I began any work on this review, I made sure to swap in Tweetbot 6 where the native app had been in my dock for several years, now. I originally pushed the native app all the way to page 6, but immediately found this extreme. Instead, I put it in the bottom-right corner in my second screen, as you can see in the screenshot below (which also serves as proof, if you needed it.)
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I should also note how much my own engagement on Twitter has diminished in the past 3-5 years. Not to manifest tiny violins – in turn, my engagement on (and investment in) Mastodon has increased exponentially, and it’s of a much higher quality. I bring it up for context’s sake: I can afford to prioritize Tweetbot in my Twitter use because of how few daily notifications I get – a number which is unusual for someone who uses Twitter as much as I do. Inevitably, my own use is once again going to factor heavily in this work, as is the significance of my relationship with Twitter, generally, in my life. If you didn’t already know, I’ve met basically all of my friends since high school through Twitter. As of this moment, my private “Friends” Twitter List includes 149 accounts, and I’ve spent more than 10 years, now, reading almost every single one of their Tweets. I have been as critical of the service as anyone, but – whether or not either of us are willing to acknowledge it, wholly – I believe the intimacy of this arrangement to exceed that of any in-person relationship I have ever had. Reading the random thoughts of these people seconds or minutes after they’ve popped into their heads for all this time has been an experience unique to the format Twitter pioneered, if not to the service, itself. I have no choice but to acknowledge that I am deeply invested in not just Twitter, but Twitter’s less-than-visible Lists feature, emotionally and intellectually. When I hit my follow limit, several years ago, Lists also became my single means of acquiring new connections on the network. If it were to be removed, I would lose this ability, entirely, as well as any reasonable means of communicating with any of my friends.
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Perhaps you understand, now, why I have written and Tweeted so extensively about Lists. You should also understand just how miraculous the possibility of Tweetbot’s new future now seems, personally, unless you’re new to all of these ideas and don’t feel like reading that big olé Tweetbot 5 review of mine (which is fine.) Before I go into the history of Tweetbot, let me first share the single most telling feature in Tweetbot of Tapbots’ belief in using Lists and share some evidence of others’ present day belief in Tweetbot. Shamefully, I’ve spent several years – tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours – using Lists in Tweetbot, oblivious to its upmost Lists integration: “Use Lists as Timeline.” Had I actually bothered to look at the support docs at any point, I would have discovered this long ago, which would have almost certainly made my given year. If you use Tweetbot and Lists, for the love of Gourd, please take a look. Here’s what those docs currently say, in full:
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One long time Tweetbot feature is the ability to use any of your lists as your main timeline. To do this, all you have to do is hold down on the “Timeline” label in the navigation bar (in the timeline tab) and a menu populated with your lists will appear. Select one and that will become your current timeline. You can switch to another list or back to your main timeline any time by performing the same action.
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Even after reading this multiple times, it still was not obvious to me what it was talking about, and I was unable to find precisely zero visuals on The World Wide Web of this action taking place, so I recorded and uploaded the video embedded above. Good God, how I wish I’d been a more detail-oriented young man! I’ll be privatizing my self-punishment from here on out, though, so bear with me.
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The discourse surrounding Tapbots’ recent announcement has already reached a higher decibel count than I would have ever expected, so it’s obvious there are plenty of users who still love Tweetbot, and you already know from the beforelinked stories that The Verge has also stood firmly by it as the preferred Twitter experience. It takes a wee bit of digging, though, to discover the subtle bets on both Tweetbots and Lists from no less than Apple, Inc., itself. In the official Apple Shortcuts Gallery, a curated list entitled “Twitter Better” includes “Open Twitter Lists” at number 1. In 5th position is “Open in Tweetbot,” and “Open in Twitter App” (3rd,) is configured by default to first ask you to choose between Tweetbot and Twitter’s native app, despite its title.
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As for App Store rankings, the fact that Tweetbot 5 was forcibly removed from public listings makes it impossible to meaningfully judge recent popularity of Tweetbot on iPhone/iPad. Its MacOS-based sibling, though (called Tweetbot 3,) was the second most popular paid app on the Mac App Store as of February 6th, 2020. That’s the day I borrowed my Mom’s MacBook Pro for a short while to check up on MacOS Big Sur, when I downloaded the current version (3.5.2, if you wanted to know) of Tapbots’ desktop Twitter client and messed around with it enough to tell you that it’s as wonderful as ever. (Had I not switched back to Windows as my primary desktop OS a decade ago, I would use it every single day.)
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I suspect most active Twitter users in 2021 would be even more surprised to discover Tweetbot’s remaining, discreet hold on today’s Twitter experience than I was, assuming most of them joined more recently than myself and those I regularly interact with. For the sake of this Post, I reached out to Tapbots with an interview request about “Tweetbot’s roadmap, Apple’s requirement that [they] remove 5 from the App Store 30 days beforehand, and why [they’ve] decided to take this (risky, imo) bet on making our lives better,” though I don’t expect a reply, which is fine. They did respond to my support request regarding hardware keyboard shortcut support very quickly, saying they’ll look into it. (Without being verbose, I’ll just tell you that if a near future update to the app fixes the F and ⌘ + R shortcuts, I will shit out my whole ass.)
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The Business at Hand
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Before I dig into the controversy and hypotheticals surrounding what Tweetbot 6 might become, let’s take a moment to qualify it vs all of one’s options to interact with Twitter on iOS currently (as in, Feb 11, 2021 at 19:24.) It’s almost certainly premature to do so, but skeptical readers would note, I’m sure, that its listing on the App Store is “early release” in name only, that I have just spent money on this specific version, which should therefore render inert the normal exceptions a review would make for beta or pre-release software. If you’ve somehow come across this Post before reading anything else about Tweetbot 6 and simply want to know what is new for this version compared with 5.5.3 (its predecessor’s most recent release,) the frank answer as it stands is not much. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, here, but the YouTube videos and tech media articles I could find dealing with the subject of additions, specifically, were all either misleading, entirely wrong, or both.
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While 6 lists one more option (for a total of 9) under Themes in the Display section of the app’s Settings menu, none are substantive variations of the same themes you’re familiar with from 5. “Future Light” is just a more turquoise variant of the “Default” blue UI theme in 5. In fact, the singular change in the Display menu is the addition of “San Francisco Rounded” under the Fonts selection. Below, you can see side-by-side screenshots of the Tweet Detail view in Tweetbot 5 vs. Tweetbot 6, with the regular SFUI font on the left and rounded variant on the right (text size slider set to max on both apps.)
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To be honest, I can’t really tell the difference between the typefaces in this view, but have used the new app enough to know I prefer the latter. More topically exemplified in that image is Tweetbot 6’s new support for social cards, which the Tapbots boys have executed in a startlingly beautiful way that puts Twitter to shame and makes one feel like you’ve taken them for granted these past few years. Also in that vein and more than worthy of the same accolades is Tweetbot 6’s support for Twitter polls. They’ve never looked so good.
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Somewhat on-trend, the app also includes two new icons, but – if we’re being 100% frank – they’re a paltry, dated-looking afterthought and Tweetbot deserves (needs, even) better branding. If I were allowed a singular compulsion to impress upon its developers, I’d make them put out a public call for new art. I’m all but dying to see what the community would come up with.
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So, if you were wondering what the fuck Tapbots have been doing these past 3+ years, you should now have the basal bullet points of your answer. The Greater Truth about this gosh darned Twitter app (and why its long-respected developers are now asking you for a whole dollar a month,) though, requires a broader look.
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Slow & Steady
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For as long as I can remember, both the MacOS and iOS versions of Tweetbot have always possessed a more-or-less undefinable (perhaps Apple Development- specific) quality that’s noticeably set them apart from their direct competitors. I didn’t fully understand why they “feel” so much more “right” until I started making my way through this list of all the interviews/podcast appearances by Tapbots’ iOS code wizard, Paul Haddad, who comments in variations the same argument for a very deliberate developmental pace. The first time, with a MacWorld journalist on some steps outside WWDC 2013, I assumed he was just tossing some self-deprecation around to casualize the interview:
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Frankly, we’re slow at doing stuff.
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Yes, you are, Tapbot… From a returning user’s perspective, it’s hard to understand what in Gourd’s name they’ve been doing. I listened and read through every Tapbots interview I could find – all but one with Paul, who has through the years continued to come across as a sensitive, well-read, even wise professional developer with a healthy, professional outlook on the work of his little (relatively) weathered company and its place within the warp speed nightmare that is the mobile software industry. I suppose I was expecting to find an explanation for what I saw initially as a minimal regard for Tweetbot’s history, in contrast to 6’s announcement. I wouldn’t find it, though, because in truth, I was sure I already knew it: Twitter made it clear over a decade ago – just after they’d purchased Tweetie and slapped their own name on it – that they had no intention of competing in the client space, so third-party developers were no longer welcome.
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Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
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As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.
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I’ve spent enough time in The App Space (read: Phone Dude Hell) to expect a lot of melodrama, largely without judgement, considering how generally awful the big vendors have made the whole situation. The business legality of the story was spiked into the mainstream conversation last year by controversy encouraged by Basecamp following some pretty toxic, retaliatory correspondence from Apple regarding their plan to subsidize their new email service, HEY. Frankly, I’ve found such stories – about clashes between big software companies over mediocre, uninspiring, and sometimes just downright bad software – ridiculously exhausting and less and less interesting, lately, as I’ve realized that the most innovative, quality work I have experienced has basically all come from the tiniest teams. The most groundbreaking projects and products I’ve bothered to show and tell, here – Unichar, Zalgo Generator, Bear, Toot!, Mastonaut, Mast, etc. – were all built by individual developers except for Shiny Frog’s Bear. (Their team currently numbers 16, by my count.) Each one of those hyperlinks eventually leads to a form of my same rant: why the fuck won’t tech media talk about genuine innovation anymore.
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As I read and listened through Tweetbot’s history for this work, it occurred to me that I might be neglecting to acknowledge an age old divide in development philosophy across platforms. In the singular instance both Tweetbot devs appeared together in a podcast interview – a Founder’s Talk episode from 10 whole years ago – Paul Haddad addressed the when is it gonna be done question in a comprehensive and particularly illuminating way:
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I personally hate that question because, you know… it just will get done when it gets done… We’re definitely slow. We go over every screen, every detail over and over again until we get it right. That takes time, which is why we don’t talk about upcoming projects.
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Every screen, every detail, over and over again. This sort of deliberateness (which I have personally been working on appreciating, as of late) is actually – as I have come to realize – Tweetbot’s defining feature, especially going forward. Out of all the third-party Twitter clients to come and go, Tweetbot has been overwhelmingly singled out as the favorite because of how aligned it is with the traditional priorities of the Apple space: thoughtful, deeply-considered robustness. Pardon the cliché, but it is the only one that has always felt native – as if it could have been published by Apple, itself.
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Everything Happens So Much
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The iOS Poweruser Community has been “allowed” to drift away from these principles since iOS 12, especially, and its Pandora’s box-like integration of Siri Shortcuts (Workflow, by another name.) You may or may not be aware of the jailbreaking community’s continued efforts – I was certainly surprised to discover that the r/Jailbreak subreddit has nearly 600,000 subscribers, which outnumbers all but the eldest subreddits in the Apple sphere, including r/iOS, r/iOSBeta, and r/Shortcuts (one of the primary hubs for the Siri Shortcut tinkering community) by a huge margin. Since iOS 14’s addition of sanctioned custom widgets, Twitter and Reddit have been host to a fairly-steady stream of personalized iOS “themes” representing varying degrees of tedium/obsession/madness. One “fringe”-ish avenue I’ve explored quite thoroughly is the adjacent community of public beta tests via Testflight, which allows willing App Scrubs like myself to download beta/pre-release versions of iOS apps. As of this moment, no less than 25 of the 227 apps installed on my iPhone 12 Pro Max are Testflight beta versions (both numbers far higher than normal because of my in-progress review.)
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Essentially, it’s now easier than ever to run incredibly janky software on your iPhone or iPad, remaining well clear of a warranty violation, yet the apps that stick out most boldly in the mind (at least for myself) are unfailingly apart from any sort of experimentation. Bear, for instance – the writing app I evangelize to every iOS user and have continued to describe as “the most beautiful piece of software I have ever seen” – just allowed registered beta testers access to its in-progress “Editor 2.0” on iOS, which Shiny Frog describes as still in its “alpha” stage, yet even I have as yet been unable to trip it up whatsoever. This is the league Tweetbot pioneered, in many ways. For the record, both Tweetbot 6 and Tweetbot 5 have been demonstrably more reliable for me in the past few months than Twitter’s native app, which has been crashing multiple times per day on my devices for quite a while during regular use. I’m accustomed to crashes, so I can’t say with 100% confidence that Tweetbot has never crashed, but it certainly hasn’t since I first downloaded 6 and began this review, despite my deliberate attempts to probe its every possible function.
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Not only is Tweetbot 6 reliable as hell – it’s also stupid frugal. Currently, its App Store installation weighs in at 10.9 MB, while Twitter’s app is more than ten times heavier, at 116 MB. I realize Sizes On Disk are further from your mind than they’ve ever been in this age of outright computing gluttony and you probably couldn’t care less about my personal encounter with bandwidth famine in late 2018. In fact, I find it particularly telling that Tapbots has continued to prioritize such efficiency in their development despite operating under less financial, technical, and social pressure than ever to do so.
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Future of The Bot
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Let’s say you’ve somehow made it this far without either satisfactorily resolving your confusion about Tapbots’ decision to implement subscriptions, why they’ve decided to continue investing their time in third-party Twitter clients, whatsoever, and/or some other App Quandary, and you’re still expecting David Blue of all people to articulate some pivotal element of this story that’ll put your intellect at ease. Perhaps you’re still looking for a comprehensive picture of what using Tweetbot as one’s main Twitter client looks like in 2021. Let’s change it up a bit, toss in some fucking bullet points, and list a few fundamental truths:
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If you intend to view your Twitter notifications on iOS at any point, completely deleting the native Twitter app is not an option. (Notably, it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon, if ever.)
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“Shopping around” for a third-party Twitter client leads the at all attentive user back to Tweetbot, exclusively. With the potential exception of Fenix, all other Twitter apps on the App Store are fucking bunk and will cost you as much or more as Tweetbot 6’s new subscription.
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If you use Twitter Lists regularly, you’d be an idiot not to start your Tweetbot subscription right this fucking minute.
In the ~month since the Tweetbot 6 story first broke (a nice birthday present!,) no less than three newish Twitter features have made the news. Last week, it (apparently) committed to the worst possible user-side content monetization model concept out of the dozens that have dipped in and out of rumor for virtually the service’s entire history: “Super Follows” are slated to shade our collective experience with putrid freemium concerns. “Communities” sound in concept like a worthwhile and genuinely value-adding feature addition for actual Twitter users, but any substantial expectations of the company feel far too risky to invest in. All the while, Twitter Spaces – the audio-only Clubhouse-ish mutilation of Periscope’s corpse – has been silently bestowed upon a secret set of @s at an achingly slow pace. I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t even fully digested fucking Fleets, yet.
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What does Tweetbot 6 really offer you, Twitter user, in 2021?Freedom from all of that bullshit.
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It’s just occurred to me how much more anxious the movements of Twitter, Inc. and Jack Dorsey’s horrendous facial hair would be making me if I had not discovered an (ironically) more stable, wholesome platform to replace them, years ago. No, I will not discuss Mastodon beyond this remark, but readers invested enough to get to this point who haven’t heard of the federated, open source social network by that name would do well to consult this handy hyperlink. This privilege of choice – even if it’s completely delusional – has combined with Tapbots’ thoughtful brush up of their trustier-than-ever Tweetbot to ease my longtime Twitter-dependent ass to a nigh-miraculous degree. However, stepping back from it all, I realized Tweetbot’s new life bets even heavier on that single, defining feature which the company hardly mentions, and could conceivably restrict – maliciously or not – or remove entirely without real consequences to their business or public standing via tech media outcry. What if Twitter killed Lists? We’d all be fucked.
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Upon this realization, I shot out of bed very late in a recent evening and went straight to fucking Trello, of all places, to sift through Twitter’s public development roadmap for any official word on their fate. I really did panic for a beat upon first reading the words “Replacement for Lists functionality” before realizing the actual intention of the card’s expression in the context’s syntax, which is probably about as positive as it could possibly be: a public suggestion that Lists will continue to be supported through 2.0, at least. The card sits in the “Nesting” column (which I assume to be the lowest priority group, chronologically,) right between identical cards for Bookmarks and Direct Messages.
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The Grandma's House Method
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Writing about Tweetbot 6 has been an illuminating personal experience, if you haven’t yet caught on. The timing of its release has proved awfully convenient, just predating the aforementioned catastrophe of disjointed features that has descended harder than ever before on Twitter’s own app, leaving it an absolute mess. When I initiated the symbolic swap maneuver documented at the very beginning of this review, I assumed I was going to find Tweetbot awkward to use as my primary in the present day, but have found the opposite to be true. The social network Tweetbot draws from is barely recognizable as the same property it drew upon originally, when its Lists-loving configuration was simply one of a dozen different interpretations of how one should interact with Twitter (by far the sharpest, I think we’d agree.) Tweetbots, in contrast, is virtually identical in principle, though the unwavering bearing of its development has resulted in the true definition of refinement. The result is the most beautiful way to use Twitter in 2021, no competition, and is also crucially the singular means of interacting with it on one’s “own terms” – as long as yours align with The Lists Method, that is – in an environment that feels predictable and fundamentally at your control.
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As much as I have praised the Mastodon app Toot! as the most innovative social app available – and will continue to do so until I encounter something more original and ingenious – it’s perhaps the singular remaining cleverly playful Tweetbots feature which first opened my perspective to appreciate little Easter egg-like tricks. Indeed – even after all we’ve been through together these past ten years – you can still cycle through all of Tweetbot’s visual themes by two-finger swiping vertically in 6. Quick Account Switching is the other less-than-obvious swipe function of note, which I’ll rely on an embed stolen from Tapbots themselves to demonstrate:
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I don’t think it should ever feel natural to speak sentimentally about mobile apps, but Tweetbot is a worthy exception. If you glance over the respective comments sections of the articles and YouTube videos I’ve hyperlinked, you’ll pick up on this phenomena of legacy Twitter users chucking back some tragically nostalgic sentiments in response to the reminder surfaced by the Tweetbot 6 news of just how long we’ve been doing this. From my perspective, the other majority sentiment found there catalyzes the bizarre chronobending at play even further. I can’t believe how many folks continue to be flabbergasted by the idea of paying for software in 2021, but I’ve been literally begging Twitter to charge me a monthly fee in exchange for some greater curative capabilities for as long as I can remember. The whole of my gospel, again, is that Tweetbot 6 has personally made using Twitter a little bit better than bearable, so I have no other reasonable choice available: I’m paying the fuck up.
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See this post's corresponding GitHub Issue for related media, aggregated links, and other minutia.
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
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Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
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For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
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Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking” – a function once relegated to magazines – has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” – applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now – can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
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In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
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On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
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She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
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According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
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“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
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The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
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In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
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Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and – most controversially – the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns – if not its proposed solutions – should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
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Responsible Curation
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For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
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Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
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Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
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Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook – the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world – as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy – vague, at best.
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In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
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In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”[^1]
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You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
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In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
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Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
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In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
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Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
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The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
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Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
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I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”[^2]
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As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections – which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page – and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
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Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
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The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
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[1] While Bandcamp set out from the beginning to make it easier for artists to publish music, getting music on Spotify has always been a grueling process.
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[2] I fully intended to quote Kaitlyn Tiffany on how organizations only get tech media attention if a significant amount of capital is involved in some form, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ll certainly come back and add it if/when I do.
Purposing a disciplined effort to reflect on those tech products which have remained too fair and/or too good to catch the attention of the alarmists in us, recently.
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I've never been a big fan of holidays, nor do I think Thanksgiving should be a federal one, given its shitty, undebatably imperialist origins, but these opinions are entirely inconsequential. Regardless of how I feel, Thanksgiving will remain as pervasive as ever in the spaces around me, so I thought I'd change things up this year and actually participate in a substantial way. I did my best to travel back to a vastly less complicated self, letting all of the crud that's accumulated atop my love of computers in the past twenty years: wokeness, adtech, Obama wearing VR glasses, etc... When I thought the Native Americans were glad to see white people because they gave them guns and horses and assumed people made things because good ideas were the apex of currency. When I was able to respond to new software discoveries by screwing around aimlessly without wondering if they'd been stolen entirely from a handful of talented developers lacking in the resources and know how required to protect their ideas in the face of Microsoft's ruthless Embrace, Extend, Extinguish crusade.
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Forgive yourself for a moment and return there with me. Or perhaps somewhere else, if you need – wherever and whenever you last remember feeling genuinely enthralled with The Future of Computers. (Perhaps it was yesterday! If so, Gourd bless you. Never change.) Let's take ourselves back to kindergarten, before we knew anything about the rapid cyclical consolidation and monopolization within the technology industry that had already established itself as a trend, by then, when all we knew of the software we interacted with was contained within our most visceral reactions: I like Ask Jeeves because I like red and I like Jeeves. I vaguely remember when Google (the search engine) first broached the general awareness of my elementary school's computer lab. I'm fairly sure I even remember the sort of feelings that were elicited the first time I actually set eyes on the Google.com homepage: it looked so modern, then, compared to the rest of the web. (After two decades, it currently looks like shit.) Upon the first first query, it was immediately clear that Google was superior to any of the other search engines we'd been using.
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This sort of encounter – with a service that significantly alters one's perception of a given set of tasks – is precious in our lives as users.
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A few examples from my own using life which come to mind:
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The first time I witnessed a Skype call.
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Downloading and using the beta Evernote client on the school machines in Junior High.
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The first album I uploaded on Bandcamp.
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Discord's first public release.
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The “moment” I first put a name to Markdown. (I'd been using bits of the syntax for years before I actually read the word.)
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And most recently, exploring Notion as personal catch-all documentation software.
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The atmosphere of elation about the future on which I so often lament has been replaced by wariness for most of us – from Californian software developers to tractor-hacking farmers. Now, the conversation is saturated with CEO appearances before legal committees, corporate memo leaks, and somber interviews. Of course, I have unquestionably contributed more than my share. In fact, I wish I could be twice as critical in twice the written volume, and I believe the tech media industry to be far too culturally-embedded within Silicon Valley to be nearly critical enough. For this holiday, though, I think a respite from the negative is worthwhile and essential. I know it is for my personal sanity, at least.
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A week ago, I shared this Google Form and asked you to reflect with me on the “really great” software/services you have encountered in your using life built by “technology companies who's business ethics align toward the benefit of us users and who's products are well-priced (or free!)” As of the time of this writing, nearly 80 responses have been recorded on the form, itself, and several more via comments on Hacker News. I deeply appreciate your participation! They're far from predictable, too – I've ended up learning a lot. The very first submission was for Logos Bible Software, which has quite a fascinating history. I feel like those less-secular of us go unexposed to theological software without participants such as the human who submitted this one (thank you, human!,) and end up missing out on an entire segment of software development. Having studied The Good Book in a very much analog fashion through Lutheran school, I wonder in retrospect how software solutions could've changed the experience.
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I have never received this volume of feedback in my prompts before, nor have I ever really seen a reason to close any of them to responses, so I'm going to take a blind shot at the dartboard and plan to close the form on New Year's Day, 2021. Until then, please feel free to respond in any way you'd like and/or view all the live answers in this very bad spreadsheet full of these very good responses. (My apologies – I have absolutely no idea how to use Google Sheets.)
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ⓣⓗⓐⓝⓚⓢ
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I originally intended to go into relatively extensive detail for each of the entities on my own Most Thankful For list, but I do have to actually stop somewhere, so the commentary on these isn't remarkably insightful or educational. It is genuine, though, which is worth something, I hope.
Yes, I have tirelessly promoted my essay about Bandcamp's holiness for years now, but I have done so with good reason: here is a for-profit technology company which is building a one-of-a-kind product that invests directly in independent artists. I spent a whole summer scouring The Web looking for a single misstep or controversy and found absolutely none.
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Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
Before OBS (Open Broadcaster Software,) streaming video was an absolute mess that usually involved paying for or pirating some proprietary software. Remember Ustream? Good God...
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OBS is the streaming video equivalent of Audacity and GIMP: an extremely powerful, infinitely-malleable set of tools that allow one to take full advantage of their hardware to capture and/or stream video and audio.
Typora is an infinitely-customizable markdown editor spanning all platforms that's managed to become my primary word processor (and I'm someone who demands a lot from word processors.) It's immensely powerful in all the important ways – my use over the past two years has stress tested it with both enormous (100,000+ words) and extremely complicated (100+ images and embeds) documents. It's able to export even these chunkos to any format you can imagine instantaneously and never crashes.
Typora is a Markdown editor with left sidebar file sorting, very much like Bear (several available themes can make it look actually identical, in fact,) but without its native iCloud-based file syncing. It is cross-platform, open-source, and definitely more powerful, though.
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The Typora theming community has been especially on-point, as of late. In the screenshot embedded above, it's wearing the Slate variation of H16nning's Gitbook theme, which is by far the most beautiful configuration I've yet to see the editor in.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program – which just celebrated its 25th anniversary last week – is one of the most powerful tools in its space and perhaps the number one exemplary example of open source software to cite when explaining the concept for the first time. I have used it my entire creative life for all manner of tasks and evangelized it plenty, but it wasn't until I returned to college this Fall and took advantage of Adobe's student discounts that I had an opportunity to thoroughly explore its proprietary nemesis, Photoshop.
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What I found was indeed a very powerful piece of software, albeit as arrogant as ever in its stubborn commitment to the original keyboard shortcuts set by default and other legacy artifacts, though not one I would compare to GIMP, necessarily. This shouldn't be breaking news: as far as I know, there are billions of posts comparing the two going back to the beginning of the written word. My personal conclusion: I can accomplish much more, much faster with GIMP in every single one of my own use cases.
I was browsing some FOSS-related article aggregation page a few weeks ago when a post caught my eye: “Audacity exceeds 100 million downloads.” In reflection, I realized in that moment that perhaps no other single piece of software has been so thoroughly present in my “workflows” across all sorts of projects through the years, largely because of its God-sent Truncate Silence feature, which I have used to remove silence from audio files for as long as I've been working within the medium, basically. Every podcast episode I have ever published has passed through Audacity for this reason and others, as have voiceovers, high school punk band demo tapes, personal voice notes, and more.
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the world would actually be perfect if audacity's truncate silence feature could be autotied to video timecodes.
Until OBS came along, Audacity was where all recorded audio started for myself and my creative friends. It was Audacity that captured (and caused, technically) the death of my friend's soundcard in audio form during the recording process for Hamura, the first Drywall album, back in October of 2011.
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Fucking around in Audacity through the years has led to some halfway creative results on my part, including “SLOWED 'N' THROWED” Hilary Duff tracks and legacy Windows sounds remixes. I still use it for every episode of End User and have recently created a macro for remastering Drycast episodes. (A big feat for me and reflective of Audacity's ingenuity.) As far as I know, there are zero competitors, proprietary or not, which can replicate Audacity's particular usefulness as an audio utility.
Shortly after I discovered NeoCities last Spring, I signed up to be a Supporter for $5/month, not necessarily for the additional storage or bandwidth, but because the project immediately sounded like one I was personally obligated to uplift. Parimal Satyal's essay “Rediscovering the Small Web,” along with the design of the website which delivered it, inspired me to make another attempt at building an HTML site by hand. So far, davidblue.xyz obviously borrows heavily from his CSS, but looking at the code itself was vastly more pleasant than one would expect. Recently, during the course of writing an academic research essay, I found myself listening to interviews with its founder, Kyle Drake and reading articles from its debut in 2013, which prompted me to take even further advantage of my account.
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Last week, I moved my inactive automotive blog (dieselgoth.com) from a Writeas blog to a purely-HTML NeoCities website with disturbingly little friction. (I challenge you to spot any differences.) After discovering a backup of the original Drywall Website deep within my old files, NeoCities was the only reasonable host on which to archive it. After I'd finished uploading, I fell down what the youth call a “rabbit hole” of discovery, mesmerized by what I found on page after page of NeoCities' site browser. I did my best to save the best finds by following them within the sites dashboard and have since set up a Best of NeoCities GitHub repository with my absolute favorites among them archived thanks to wget.
Trust me when I tell you that some of the best web design, ever can be found on NeoCities. What's even better: after my deep dive, I was pleasantly surprised by strangers commenting on what I'd found! Replying in a timely, substantial, and genuine manner seems to be a hallmark of the community: my (rather verbose) question regarding the well-manneredness of publishing such an archive without permission in the community Discord I discovered just this morning was almost immediately met with encouraging replies.
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A Post you should probably expect soon: “NeoCities is 2020's Best Social Network.” Going forward, I'd like to digitize my poetry collection on NeoCities in the near future while continuing to otherwise brush back up on HTML and CSS – both of which I am also very thankful for, come to think of it.
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Thank you again for your correspondence! May your Imperialism Day be a positive experience!
The pop culture discussion of tech's greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways.
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For those of us who've written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/“ethical” conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it's particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn't know what the movie was about. I'm not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could've done better, in that regard.
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First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell's casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man's screen, the film's depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as “ridiculous,” as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
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The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
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The Verge's official review of the film – written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey – is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge's audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media – grandmothers, retirees, etc. – who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about “privacy” – a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of “my data,” regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which – while possible – is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
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you don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses – you need only to want a better and/or different experience.
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by – and directly promotes on several occasions – one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain... hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for “solutions” to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who've been building against the adtech-funded web for ages – some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization's website nor the film's webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
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The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I'm here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you've followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn't still be reading,) you know I've advocated exhaustively for Mastodon – the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who's business model benefits both platform and artist. I'm still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn't immediately off-putting to “the average person.”
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Poke around the film's official website a bit and you'll discover a variety of heavily-branded “resources” for “taking action,” all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the “Take Action” vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall's tips for reducing your screen time, the “Data Detox Kit,” which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a “Join Now” button, and – most ironic of all – a link to download the “Ad Observer plugin,” in order to “share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable.” In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the “Online Political Transparency Project” instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
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No, it's not a scam. Using The Markup's shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here's the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves... incompetence? I'm afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world – regardless of what they believe now, or then – that these folks should not be our first call when we're searching for “solutions.” You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
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Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can't imagine you'd be correct... Under the heading “CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA,” step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
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At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both – or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
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This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
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You wouldn't announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
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Now, I've always considered the ability to change a computer's name an immense privilege. My first “real” computer's name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus' name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that's completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone's common name to that of “your favorite television character” (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so...) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it's just that it's ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down “change device name” as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
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-A notification I received while literally typing this out.
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I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an “Alternative Apps Centre” within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the “detox” seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it's hilarious that I can freely refer to “privacy” as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one' social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the “Supported by Mozilla Firefox” badges all over the website and asks me “well, what did you expect?” My answer: something “more” than promotion, I suppose.
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I suspect this is another case of don't go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to “innovate” than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I'd somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who's notifications I'd probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
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Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I'd wager.) I suspect it's long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as “Email Addiction” goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR's greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email's footer. If you're really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform's archives feature – or don't – but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you'll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
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If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it's okay to announce on Facebook that you're taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823-4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I've discovered with you.
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My own advice on “privacy:” don't worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the “privacy tools” you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you're an iOS user, you've already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step – if we're really honest with ourselves – is figuring out how you're going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
An update on all I’ve been doing instead of what I actually intended to do.
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There will always be plenth of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. – Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think“
You have a desire for indulgence in your home and family, Co-Star has just told me in my weekly, email newsletter-delivered horoscope. “Venus conjunct to natal Moon” indicates this part of yourself will transform into something else, and goes on to say something truly stirring: *the way you relate to your past is changing*. I continue to be amazed by how influential the potential of the computing hardware present in my life at any given time can be on my habits. In the two weeks I’ve had my first moderately powerful desktop computer in over ten years, I have found myself using new image & video editing software, installing local WordPress stacks, finally experimenting with Git, somehow generating 20 draft posts on a fresh experimental WordPress site, and putting my whole back into my new Notion account, including – among others – projects like my “Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.” All the while, there has been a pull toward a more deliberate, focused sort of digital existence: reflection on Kevin McGillivray’s Word of The Year concept, digital gardening, and a few other like discoveries have culminated in a newfound, unironic use of the term “Creative Wellness” to describe a set of ideologies which I believe I should strive for in order to improve my intellectual wellbeing.
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In tandem with the fact that I have gone back to school, this has all crucially resulted in very little actual writing, which may or may not be conclusive evidence toward the classical minimalist technology argument that less capability results in more focus. On that note, remember when the Game of Thrones author appeared on Conan’s show and mentioned that he still writes exclusively using WordStar 4.0? This happening has been vaguely in the back of my mind since I encountered it during the relatively brief, basement apartment-dwelling era in Oregon when I first discovered WinWorldPC and got into running a bunch of DOS VMs, trying out every download from that blessed site which sounded even remotely interesting. Before I go on, let me just include a transcript of the entire anecdote I’m referring to here, because it’s actually much shorter than one is led to believe:
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Conan: These novels that that you write are can be over a thousand pages long. They're massive tomes and apparently you write them all on a computer, but unlike most authors, you're not worried about a computer virus. I mean an author who writes a thousand-page book their greatest fear is a virus invades and destroys a chunk of their book you don't worry about that. Why?
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Martin: No I have a secret weapon – I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the internet with and that I get my email on and I do my taxes on and that computer and then I have my writing computer which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.
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Conan: A DOS machine. How old is this program?
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Martin: A DOS machine. You remember DOS? I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system.
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Conan: Did you make this computer out of wood? Did you carve it? I'm curious why you decided to stick with this old program.
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Martin: I actually like it. I mean, it does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital – if I wanted a capital, I would've typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key. Stop fixing it!
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Conan: You yell at computers a lot. What about spellcheck?
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Martin: Oh, I hate spellcheck. Especially when you have the realm of [???], it's [???].
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That’s it! A less than sixty second exchange. I did not remember just how much coverage it received on digital news sites. Embark on a Google search for “george rr martin wordstar,” and you’ll discover a ridiculously long list of brief stories including the YouTube embed. A book I’ve just recently discovered and begun – which I am extremely excited about – is Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and its introduction begins by mentioning The George Thing, which surely indicates that it is the most significant mention of word processing software in popular culture for at least a decade:
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The clip was posted to YouTube and from there embedded in innumerable tweets, Facebook feeds, and blogs. Some commenters immediately, if indulgently, branded Martin a Luddite, while others opined it was no wonder it was taking him so long to finish the whole story (or less charitably, no wonder that it all seemed so interminable). But what was it about these seemingly obscure details that people found so compelling? Part of it was no doubt the unexpected blend of novelty and nostalgia: Many fans would be old enough to remember WordStar for themselves, and the intricacy of its interface seems somehow in keeping with Martin’s quirky persona, part paternalistic grandfather and part Doctor Who character. WordStar thus becomes an accessory to his public image, like the black fisherman’s cap he is frequently photographed wearing. But it is also clearly much more than that. Martin’s passion for the program is unmistakable...
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The book, itself, was also more widely reviewed than one would expect, where it was deemed genuinely unique. I related quite hard to the preface’s first few sentences:
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Track Changes began, as many books do, with a question: What was the first novel written with a word processor? Being an English professor interested in the history of writing as well as computers, I thought it was the sort of thing I should know, but I didn’t.
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Discovering the volume was a result of a personal determination in the last week to give in to my latent obsession with word processing/text editing software, which also led to my creating a Notion table of every word processor I’ve ever heard of. Thanks to my desktop PC acquisition, found myself virtual machining a bit again, though some of the programs I’m particularly interested in trying have inexplicitly disappeared from my personal library and been removed from WinWorldPC, probably due to (mostly absurd) copyright claims. Most versions of WordStar are still available, though, and I’ll confess I still have a desire to learn how to use its cult keyboard shortcuts, as evangelized by Robert J. Sawyer in an essayalso discussed in Track Changes, which specifically shits on WordPerfect more explicitly than I remembered. I keep returning to the idea that I should try writing the stuff I normally work on – like this post, for instance – in these software, but file transfer is a bigger and bigger obstacle the older the OS you’re running: VirutalBox’s “Guest Additions” – which allow clipboard sharing/shared folders/other interoperative network functions – are not compatible with DOS or any Windows editions before 4.0. There are workarounds, but I haven’t found any reasonably within my current abilities.
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Truthfully, though, emulating twenty-year-old software seems a bit unnecessary when contrasted with the fact that Markdown, Typora, and Writeas were supposed to be my saviors from distracted writing. A compulsion to comment on a recent note-taking app comparison published in The Information reminded me that I still haven’t written an in-depth review of Typora, which I plan to prioritize in the near future, especially since it may finally be officially releasing, according to recent activity on Twitter.
Another result of my reintroduction to academia is that I can now afford a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to student discounts. This has been life-changing in a manner which I should probably be a bit ashamed of, but once the desire to make full use of my subscription (by trying every single program it licenses) subsides, I really do intend to become proficient with InDesign – a learning experience which I will surely at least attempt to thoroughly document, here.
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Digital Gardening
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I think it was Tom Critchlow’s Digital Gardening blogchain that first exposed me to the term and his static site-generated wiki project that introduced me to the concept of personal wikis, not so long ago, though the desire to organize and/or archive personally-relevant information through the format has actually been rattling around my head for the better part of a decade. When I discovered that one could install MediaWiki – the platform Wikipedia, itself is built on – I created the shortlived Drywall Wiki, once upon a time. Since I last wrote you, I also purchased the extratone.wiki domain and played around once again with the platform. Typora even offers exports in MediaWiki’s bizarre proprietary text format! For better or worse, though, I don’t see anything becoming of the project for the moment I suppose it feels like somewhat of a risk, investing a lot of time I probably shouldn’t have into documenting all of my Twitter jokes. For the moment, I think my Notion account will have to serve as my personal wiki.
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The most inciteful argument I’ve read among the Digital Gardens discourse revolves around value as it is created within our personal online writing spaces. Two of the many infinitely-quotable essays within this space: Mike Caulfield’s “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral” and “Stock and flow” from Snarkmarket. The former references Vannevar Bush’s infamous “As We May Think” essay (which I’ve finally gotten around to finishing and its description of a “memex,” which many cite as a disturbingly-apt prediction of the World Wide Web. Caulfield, however, disagrees:
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So most people say this is the original vision of the web. And certainly it was the inspiration of those pioneers of hypertext. But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all . Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.
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Reading back from a lens including this commentary, I immediately understood. The memex concept is far more intimate than the web has become (or perhaps ever was – I wouldn’t know.) “Stock and flow” defines creative value in two disparate types of media:
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Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
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Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
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To be honest, I personally cannot imagine undertaking the task of explaining this differentiation to anyone in my own life, but if the reactionary movement within The Web back to a focus on valuable content is, indeed, underway, perhaps such conversations are bound to shortly become more and more natural. For my part, I have attempted setting up an experimental site on Github Pages using Jekyll in the past few days with partial success: as soon as I tried to specify a custom theme, I apparently broke it, at which point I realized that I had homework to do. As much as I hate to admit it, Kev Quirk’s posts regarding WordPress’ practical simplicity over SSGs earlier this monthrings somewhat true. As things currently stand, WordPress’ permeability throughout The Web is an advantage for those who just want to publish something as simply as possible. My counterargument to both Kev and myself: Writeas is a wonderful compromise in terms of substance and image among one’s super e-enabled, Mullenweg-disgusted peers. It’s very much pure Markdown, but it’s far more accessible, cross-platform, than SSGs due to its shear simplicity.
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One component which Digital Gardening would seem to offer others that I have never particularly struggled with is the freedom to write whatever I feel like writing. If anything, I have struggled in the opposite sense, existing in a state completely unhindered by consideration of the value my work may or may not offer anyone else. Perhaps the most substantial addition I’m capable of making to the Digital Gardens conversation, then, is best quoted from the first chapter of the advice book I have finally begun writing for young men, For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss:
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If there is one idea of mine you ever engage with – in this book or otherwise – it is best distilled in this single sentence: you do not *actually* want to attain a state of true apathy, trust me. It is extremely unhealthy, miserable, and alienating. I have existed for an excruciatingly long time trapped in a state of being truly unable to care about anything in the face of a great, varying effort to do so. It is very far from the immunity imbued in terms like carefree – in reality, it is manifested in extreme depression. It is less immunity than it is distance from an essential part of life.
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In terms of one’s blogging, I am glad for those who will/have/are finding a new freedom of expression, but hold this as a serious caution regarding the other extreme. Should you ever approach it, remember that considering one’s audience – as academics love to prioritize – really is important, eventually.
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Curation
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At this point, I’ve used a channel in Extratone’s Discord as my ongoing reading list for several years essentially without change. Earlier this month, though, I discovered Raindrop – a bookmarking service with public collections that (so fars) feels much more aligned with my own needs than Pocket – and pretty much immediately signed up to begin paying for it and set up a bot to crosspost from my new Reading List collection, there to the same Discord channel via the collection’s RSS feed. Raindrop’s browser extension – along with Notion’s, come to mention it – is actually usable in day-to-day browsing. As much as I love Reading.am, the prospect of its longevity worries me considering the most recent post in its development blog dates to 2016. Writing a dedicated “Little Review” of Raindrop is on my (ever-lengthening) todo list, but at the moment, I would especially emphasize my Digital Magazine Collection, which is the result of thousands of hours of web exploration and genuinely worth significant value for most anyone, I think.
With the combination of my public Notion workspaces and public Raindrop collections, I hope to make my curatorial endeavors both more accessibly beautiful and more intimately available. In terms of a dedicated discussion of Notion’s interworkings and culture, I think I have quite a bit more exploring to experience before I’m sufficiently qualified, though my notes are already quite extensive (and publicly accessible, thanks to… Notion!) In general, I continue to be astounded by the amount of tools/services/applications I have not yet heard of, despite how long I have labored to become an authority on Writing Tools.
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Workflow
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In my endeavor to more intentionally design my workspace – to actually dedicate a space for working, originally – I originally very much intended to set up dual displays for my desktop, but the desk I settled for (an old family piece from the early 1900s?) does not have enough surface area to position two displays, regardless of how thin they’ve become since I last had one. Combined with a limited budget and a concern that two displays might actually result in further distraction instead of less, I instead went for a single, 27” LED affair. I’ve also been making full use of Windows 10’s desktop switching feature and have found it surprisingly easy to make a habit, especially thanks to the Ctrl+Win+Lateral Arrow Keys keyboard shortcuts.
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On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I’ve by now worked out a personally-optimized remap (thanks to the keyboard manager tool included with PowerToys, about which I have far too much to say in some future post.) I had a conversation with a few Mastodon friends two weeks ago convincing me that my methodology of forcing myself to learn shortcuts by integrating a cheat sheet into my desktop backgrounds may actually be an original idea and useful to other users.
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In terms of writing spaces, I have actually been composing the less serious stuff I’ve been writing within WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, which is not an admission I would’ve expected to be making, just a year ago. A dedicated post about this, too, is fucking coming, but suffice it to say that with a fairly-substantial PC and a better hosting provider (DreamHost over GoDaddy, in this case,) composition has become far far smoother – improving enough to make it a viable space within which to pound away original stuff for the first time. Writing essays for academia has encouraged my return to Microsoft Word, once again, on which I’ll blame the fact that I am currently composing this very bit in The Old Bitch. A desire to once again hack together a set of personalized Word templates has led to the birth of two such files which I am proud enough to share on my Notion drive. Eventually, I would also like to take the time to completely redesign the “Ribbon” in Word – something which I’ve literally never seen anyone else do. (I spent a substantial amount of time trying to find a library for MS Office customization files, to no avail, though you can find my own customization file as it stands on the same Notion page linked just now. Let me know if you’re able to successfully import it.)
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A confession of vanity: I suspect the only reason I haven’t yet stopped composing within WordPress is that I figured out how to change the typeface to Adobe Caslon (across both the editor and the front-facing site, naturally,) thanks to my newfound access to Adobe Typekit. Yes, apparently I really am that shallow. For those Office 365 users among you, I highly suggest you look up how to enable the Classic Office sound theme. Unlike Make Use Of, I find them both adorable and genuinely useful as auditory feedback. You may also be interested in my discovery of some fairly-Woke additions to Word’s autocorrect options and the subsequent bitchy controversy their introduction spawned.
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The Read-It Website
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If you know me at all, the following admission probably seems unbelievable: I have been using Reddit. I created a new subreddit for Extratone – which I do not necessarily expect to be populated any time soon – and r/SoftwareHistory after discovering that it didn’t yet exist, which I definitely do not expect you to populate, but would be delighted if you did. As with seemingly everything else I’ve covered, I also intend to write about how Reddit’s recent feature additions and redesign may actually make it a redeemable space on The Web, which should prove interesting. Clearly, I have become more than willing to accept the moniker of Software Historian whenever/if ever my authority achieves the appropriate volume to deserve to be christened so.
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Obviously, none of the developments I’ve shared in this post indicate any improvement in my productive output, but I hope to learn soon how to settle into a fairly-consistent (and hopefully much more original) writing process.
It is my privilege and my curse to write about every new major iteration to Apple’s mobile operating system, though I skipped iOS 13 last year, which was largely dominated by Dark Mode, the iPad OS fork, and Memoji – which I could care less about, honestly – and didn’t warrant my investment in a Full Post, I felt. The Photos app improvements were very welcome, but I’d departed from iCloud as my primary storage service, so I didn’t have anything relevant to say. iOS 14 is also mostly irrelevant to my own personal use, but represents a more abstract shift in design philosophy that I thought was worth commenting on. For myself, everything about it adds anxiety, beginning with the launch, itself, at Apple’s WWDC 2020, which I watched, live, and Tweeted extensively about.
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I do not want to live on the Memoji planet.
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My technology writing over the years has largely centered around my awe and confusion regarding what I've perceived as a divergent path from the future I once imagined. My closest guess as to this divergence's origin is the announcement of iOS7, with Apple's abandonment of skeuomorphic design in favor of an entirely new, “flatter” UX visual language, which I actually found quite jarring. In retrospect, though, of course I'm glad they did so. I thought this was an importat preface to any thoughts I have about today's WWDC Keynote – they will probably seem idiotic in a year or so (they might to you already.)
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Thanks to The Big Beer Virus, this was Apple's first pre-recorded WWDC presentation (though the word “live” continued to be used on several occasions,) which made it especially surreal. During the wait for the Keynote to “go live,” the stream was occupied by an animated Earth from orbit. As the clock rolled over the hour's top, AURORA's “Daydreamer” faded in and we began to grow closer to this Earth, gradually revealing that it was covered with millions of floating memoji in various states behind their animated MacBooks. Like much of the event to follow, this scene became more and more anxiety-inducing as we grew closer to the mob (keep in mind that I've never really found memoji cute, unlike plenty of folks.) Eventually, we changed pitch dramatically and plunged through a hole in the clouds straight toward the incenter of the spaceship at Apple Park, through the door, down the staircase, and into a completely empty – but fully lit – Steve Jobs theatre, where Tim Cook emerged on stage and almost immediately began to address racism.
This disorganization of Craig Federighi's Homescreen shown in the presentation exemplifies the entire aura of this update: it’s complicated. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn receives this new complication positively in an excellent essay dedicated to the topic, divided into Widgets on The Home Screen, Jiggle Mode and Editing Pages, the App Library, and App Clips. (Yes, in many ways, linking to the essay makes this post redundant.)
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That's what I wrote about WWDC. iOS 14 officially released five days ago, now, and folks are already showcasing some crazy homescreen modifications on Twitter in #ios14homescreen. I would go into detail, but I'm honestly not all that curious about the process, which is unusual. I hope more than anything that I am not loosing my curiosity or playfulness regarding iOS which not so long ago propelled an exuberant exploration of Shortcuts' capabilities during their early days as an integrated Apple property with the release of iOS 12.
Basically, I'm not going to do the full bit, this year, but I'd like to address some of the notes I did take throughout the past few months of the developer beta. Notably, there is simply far less to iOS 14 that's relevant to my life, personally, than any other release I remember, but that's okay. It's just a wee bit more difficult to motivate myself to talk about it. If there's one definite statement to be made about this release, it's that it is additive rather than transformative. As Dieter Bohn so elequently put it for The Verge:
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For the iPhone, the overarching theme is that they're finally letting it get complicated. The home screen starts simple, but it can be complex if you want it to and Apple's also finally putting different elements on top of other elements so you can see Siri on top of your current screen instead of taking over the whole screen.
Yes, I do find the title of that article quite ironic considering what I just articulated to you.
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The title of his penultimate review, additionally, includes the summation “Apple is finally lettting the iPhone homescreen get complicated.” Yes... Complexity. I'll be honest: I've actually had the opportunity to play around quite a bit with Android 11 thanks to Android Studio on my PCs, and I found it tremendously underwhelming as an alternative. On a virtual Pixel 3, the experience was functionally no more than a fucking material design-tasting, slightly varied execution of a smartphone operating system in comparison. I should disclaim, though, that these weeks with early iOS widget implementation – which represents quite a hefty chunk of this release's significance, I think we can all agree – have led me to the conclusion that I personally do not believe in widgets. Or at least – I do not have the usership vocabulary to even begin integrating them into my own handset-using life.[efn_note]I'd elaborate but honestly, who cares, really?[/efn_note]
App Clips: Oh boy... I'm so physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted. Just gonna say no to that one.
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Add widgets to the home screen: I'm going to assume it's Android users who've stigmatised dynamic home screen widgets as a desirable outlet of development resources. I simply cannot fathom any bit of data which would be truly be constructively consumed there, as opposed to unlocking the device and navigating to whatever application it originated from. Perhaps I'm just old and slow.
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Send apps to the App Library: Directly related, actually. Still considering how I assume most folks actually navigate to applications that have been in folders or in secondary+ homescreens to date – that is, dragging down and typing a handful of characters into Spotlight search – I'm not sure an alphabetized listing of all apps is really that useful. I know I'm not alone on this one: iJustine expressed an identical assumption on an episode of her podcast, Same Brain.
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Hide some of your home screens: (I repeat the exact same argument.)
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Watch videos with picture-in-picture mode: Once again, I could definitely be showing my age, but what really constitues watching when you're talking about a fractional segment of a ~6 inch display? You may as well just be listening to the audio, right?
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Pin conversations in Messages: I'm afraid the text conversation pinning feature doesn't really apply to someone like myself, who literally never messages anyone but my girlfriend and my mom. All pinning the conversations accomplishes for me is the obfuscation of the handy in-line timestamp found in the normal list view.
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Mention your contacts in Messages: Jesus... And we're still using fucking SMS?
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Add more variety to your memojis: I still have not figured out how to actually use memojies, practically, so...
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Get suggested smart home automations: I'm sorry... What did you say? I'm not familiar with those words.
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Get to bed on time: Clarification: “iOS 14 works with watchOS 7 (or on its own) to help you get to sleep at the right time each night, with reminders and Do Not Disturb options.” If you were truly at all interested in not being disturbed or getting lots of sleep, you wouldn't have spent $300 on a machine to strap to your wrist who's primary function is to disturb you!
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Translate websites in Safari: Christ... Really? How have I not encountered an issue with this before?
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Search inside apps: There we go! The first item on this list that suggests anyone at Apple actually uses iOS!
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Get more detailed weather forecasts: Dark Sky acquision... All this one does is remind me that Apple's self-restraint could breach at any time and essentially the only competent mobile weather app ever devised could die or be molested into irrelevance.
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Use your iPhone as a translator: Well... Yeah... Anything that convenienctly allows me to reduce dependence on Google, I guess!
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Get more facts from Siri: ...lol
-“Apple says Siri knows more facts than ever before, though it hasn’t offered up any specific examples of something it knows in iOS 14 that it didn’t know in iOS 13—you’ll have to try and test it out yourself. According to Apple, Siri now knows 20 times the number of facts that it did three years ago, and we haven’t been able to catch it out with anything so far.”
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Get cycling directions in Apple Maps: No! Cut that out!
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Plan a journey in an electric vehicle: I'm not joking when I suggest that this fits perfectly into iOS 14's Anxiety Mode Enchancement theme: all this really means is We've added the new Apple Range Anxiety app!
Yes, there are examples of genuine progress. The Guides feature in Maps (seen above) probably could/should have been added a long time ago, but at least Apple executed it quite elegantly. I'm could've sworn sharing your ETA has been possible from within Maps since like... iOS 7 or something, but perhaps I was thinking of Waze. Wallpapers for CarPlay are one of those features that didn’t occur to me to want, but I did/do. Also – though my personal experience with CarPlay has been limited – I can definitely imagine more layout options (“Horizontal status bar”) will be useful in fringe use cases.
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And that's it! All of my notes have now been crossed off! Now I can finally forget I ever spent time thinking about iOS this year... Gourd Bless.
An attempt to fix a Windows Insider Build issue led to soft-bricking my Surface Laptop 2.
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I finally did it, ladies and gentlemen... I managed to break the Windows installation on my Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 to such an extent that it has been unrecoverable. I am currently borrowing my mother's MacBook Pro and waiting on a Windows 10 installation .ISO file to download so that I can hope to mount it correctly on the last, shitty USB thumb drive I still have lying around.
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YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT BITCH.
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I now suspect I began down this path a few months ago when I discovered Windows Insider Channels and rejoiced... As I've discovered that one can relatively easily find a beta version of virtually any piece of software, it's become a bit of a habit for me. More or less unconsciously, I’ve ended up with an application library full of Developer Beta and NightlyBuild-type shit. I don't think there was/is a single web browser installed on that machine that is not the given entity's “Developer Edition” which – considering most of the regular installs allow you to opt into dev tools, anyway – seem like they might be redundant. I don't particularly care, anymore – I mostly just love their icons. Firefox Developer Edition's logo is a blue Firefox(!,) Edge Chromium Dev's is... more interesting than the regular version. Google Chrome Canary's icon is a surprisingly-tasteful variation of the company's usually-horrendous color palette.
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What I'm trying to say is... I have continued upon this habit of opting for unstable versions of software in a sort of defiance against the common sense notion that relying upon them is generally a bad idea.[^1] I suppose I was just waiting to experience any consequences from such a decision, and well... Here they are!
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It all began when my Surface's integrated webcam became invisible to all applications that used a video input – including Microsoft's own Camera app and OBS. It showed up in Device Manger, where I did the generally-recommended troubleshooting task of uninstalling it completely (including its drivers) and rebooting to force Windows to reinstall it. It did so successfully every time, to no effect on the original issue. I also went into the Surface's BIOS menu, where its hardware devices are explicitly listed, and disabled/re-enabled the camera, to no effect. Normally, the absence of a webcam function would be more or less irrelevant to my day-to-day workflow, but now that I'm partaking in “virtual” college courses, at least one of my professors has pressured me to appear on cam as soon as possible.
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On Sunday night, I decided to revisit the problem with greater commitment, diving into a variety of deeper troubleshooting steps which I do not recall. The crucial one, though, was my decision to use the System File Checker tool (sfc /scannow) with the added instruction to fix whatever errors it found.[^2] This drove my dearest little laptop into a cycle of self-diagnoses which results in an option screen including “Reset PC.” After trying virtually every other option, I decided to try resetting, only to be met with connectivity error messages after pursuing the “Install via Network” option, leaving the use of a bootable Windows 10 recovery USB as my only choice, in theory.
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Another problem now arose: my mother's MacBook Pro is the only other machine I have any sort of access to at the moment, and MacOS no longer supports the creation of such a bootable USB for Windows via the Boot Camp Utility any longer. Nevertheless, I tried to make one by downloading the correct OS ISO and mounting it via UNetbootin, which didn't work. I then called Columbia Computer Center, who very generously agreed to make one for me and only charge me for the drive itself ($10!)
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Unfortunately, that one hasn't worked either, so I'm afraid I'm just going to have to take the thing to them... Stay tuned for the Final Verdict.
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[1] This is why I’ve always downloaded the developer iOS beta releases on my actual, daily driver handset.
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[2] I’m pretty sure it was “-f” but I’m not going to do the research to verify that… Sorry!
My friend Sierra has used SoundCloud almost exclusively for her music discovery, consumption, and recommendations, but has remained resolute in her unwillingness to financially invest in the service. As such, her listening is regularly interrupted by ads and limited to bitrates as low as 64kbps. Since I was last employed, I have maintained a vow to her that I would pay for a subscription to SoundCloud Go+ – the premium listener tier of the service – with my own money, once I was once again in place at a steady job. This move would remove all advertising from her listening and up its bitrate to 256kbps, among other benefits.
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Two nights ago, we were refueling her car in preparation for another one of our recreational drives into rural Missouri when I made the decision on a whim to simply signup for a trial of Go+ on my own account using Apple Pay, mostly because I knew we’d be going out of effective cell network range and one of Go+’s most emphasized features is its ability to download music locally. (Since my Apple Music subscription expired earlier this year, I only have a single album actually downloaded on my phone.)
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***
-The above is what I wrote several weeks ago, just as I was beginning my trial period. Now, having experienced a significant amount of time as a SoundCloud Go user, I am a bit sad that my trial is over. To be honest, I fully intended to become a paying subscriber, but my PayPal account was $0.70 short of the $12.99 monthly fee when the first billing cycle came, two weeks ago. This is not a conclusion I expected to come to, as SoundCloud’s fundamental arrangement could not possibly differ any more from the music streaming service I long claimed as my ideal own: Apple Music.
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One major worry I would imagine potential subscribers may have when approaching SoundCloud as a replacement for their single music subscription service would revolve around the extent of SoundCloud’s establishment music industry library. There’s no way your Dad’s Sunday barbecue playlist is going to be on SoundCloud, right? Strangely enough, I was unable to find a single track that was not in the library. From my own favorite Keith Jarrett’s archives to the new Dixie Chicks album, every bit of big time record label-distributed music I could conceieve of could be found aside the Go+ badge (though notably, neither of these showed significant playcounts.) As far as the app experience goes, I swear it got smoother as soon as I signed up for Go+. This is probably bullshit, but regardless, with the seemingly ever-widening disparity in the experiences of free vs. premium users, SoundCloud appears to be moving actively away from the former.
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I have long said (somewhat in jest) that Chance The Rapper is the only reason SoundCloud still exists.
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From a future historian’s perspective, the battle for the definitive name in independent digital music distribution has already won, largely thanks to its relationship with Chance The Rapper, who’s quickly become a “cultural influencer, thought leader, global star,” and one of my generation’s upmost celebrity champions. Obviously, there is little sense trying to determine whether SoundCloud earned his partnership or landed their popular association with his name as long as the artist maintains it publicly, while continuing to give new meaning to the phrase “serially likable.”
--“Bandcamp: Streaming’s Secret Savior” | July, 2018
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If CNET_ was asking the question a year before that Bandcamp essay, I think I can feel properly varified. What I’d really like to know, now: does Chance still feel the same way about the streaming service after the launch of SoundCloud Go+? Considering that I am far from a real music journalist, I do not have any more contact resources than you have. That said, I left [a comment on his Facebook Page](https://www.facebook.com/chancetherapper/posts/3299672310124810?commentid=3319045628187478). I guess we’ll see.
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Some more technical bits: SoundCloud is now castable on Chromecast, but not supported by Apple CarPlay, for whatever that’s worth. Notably apart from Bandcamp and Apple Music and aligned with Spotify, SoundCloud is explicitly investing in algorithmic music discovery, which means its users are doing the curatorial work. I am doing/have done the curatorial work. That means the DnB crowd is going to receieve Toto recommendations, given what I sought out for this post. You’re welcome, and sorry…
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While I was surprisingly unable to find any Tweets or Evernotes further evangelizing Apple Music (I suspect I’m thinking of an old, untranscribed Drycast episode,) I found real magic in the service as I perceieved it: $9.99 a month for all of iTunes. 13 year-old me would considerthat one helluva deal.
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Naturally, if you know of one, please do comment and/or drop me a line.
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In fact, it is the only streaming app I found that _does not _have CarPlay support. Even Bandcamp and MixCloud for iOS do!
Basecamp's HEY matters, and not just because it took on Apple's App Store policies.
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Something always worth celebrating: a considered, no-nonsense new effort to reimagine email. I've lived through many notable milestones in this regard: Apple Mail on the original iPhone, Gmail, Readdle's Spark, and (yes, really,) the revitalization of Microsoft's Outlook. Exciting innovations have abounded throughout email's history, but it's highly debatable whether or not any of them have really changed the way we use it in a profound way, yet I am unfailingly intrigued whenever somebody new comes along, so when I saw Casey Newton's story on The Verge's frontpage discussing Basecamp's HEY before I got out of bed on the morning of June 15th, I was delighted to see an organization still had the courage to invest their confidence and resources into their Ideas About Email. Originally, HEY's homepage included a prompt: “To get on the list, email iwant@hey.com and tell us how you feel about email. Could be a love story, or a hate story. Could be long, could be short. It’s your story, so it’s up to you.” Though I knew it'd likely never be read, I decided to write them a letter about my personal history with email, which turned into an entertaining enough anecdote to publish here.
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The real reason HEY continued to be so widely covered by tech media, though, was its challenge to Apple's App Store policies after one of its updates was rejected by the marketplace just a day after Casey's story was published. Much drama ensued – I have done my best to aggregate links to all the news stories on the subject in a thread on the Extratone subreddit I recently started. I think the public resistance by Basecamp's CTO David Heinemeier Hansson was probably a PR move, which is fine, but all I wanted to contribute was a review of the actual function of HEY, itself. After reading posts by some of my favorite bloggers, however, I think it would be redundant. Kev Quirk argued “Email Is Not Broken,” to which Mike Stone responded “Email Is Broken.” Additionally, Business Insider's Lisa Eadicicco published an in-depth review at the beginning of the month.
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My singular commentary: I'm worried that subscription services that exclusively accept large yearly sums like HEY inevitably become the “country club for the most self-important emailers in business” which Casey spoke of. I guess we'll see.
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The following is an excerpt from my letter to HEY asking for a early-access invite.
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Email and I: An Abridged History
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I am 26 years old, so I suppose I'm of the first generation that's never experienced life without email. I grew up on a farm in rural central Missouri and my dad was very much an early adopter. (You'd be surprised how e-enabled farmers were becoming in the early 2000s.) I cannot remember life before the humongous satellite dish was anchored in our front yard. Long before I had any reason to be online (or really understood what that meant,) he began and ended every day sitting at in front of a CRT on a corner desk, clacking away on a cigarette smoke-yellowed plastic keyboard for hours. I did not understand why, then, but in retrospect I realize that he was corresponding with a huge network of neighbors, politicians, family, and college friends via email lists/chains and that he depended on it both professionally and personally in a big way. As a single man living at least an hour's drive from a city of any size, I suppose my dad was predisposed to have a rich online life long before his suburban peers, which normalized it precociously for me.
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The summer before my first grade year, my elementary school became the first in the district to have a computer lab (also the first air-conditioned room in the building,) so my high school graduating class was literally the very first to have had any digital curriculum – and an email address(!) – for the entirety of our public school experience. Because of this, I think most of us were trained to think of email as a tool for school work – it was eluded to by our computer teachers that our school email addresses were being monitored to make sure they remained so (obviously, they weren't.) As we grew into 6th-7th grade, however, we all seemed to end up with personal email addresses. I consider myself lucky to have experienced a very brief window – before instant messaging/early social networks became mainstream and SMS became even remotely pleasant to use – when my middle school friends and I corresponded exclusively by email when we weren't on the phone.
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It still sounds a bit silly to say, but I've spent the past few years coming to believe more and more strongly that my first-generation iPhone changed my life forever in a profound way – especially my relationship with email. After watching Steve Job's introduction at MacWorld 2007 live, I promised to skip a year of Christmas gifts if my mom would agreed to buy me one, and she did. Obviously, it was like nothing else I'd ever experienced, and it completely changed how I responded to and thought about technology. Before smartphones, there was no checking email outside of time in the computer lab, which was intended to be quite strictly-regulated. I had a real advantage when I started bringing my iPhone to school – absolutely no one knew what it was (a bizarre thought in contrast,) including teachers. Suddenly able to browse and read my inbox in class, at lunch, and on the bus, my use and consideration of email was propelled far ahead of my peers'.
When I started an online magazine in 2016, I don't think I could've conceived of the extent to which running a modern media company – even one targeted toward tech-savvy, early-adopting youth – still involves email. I assumed that my audience rarely actually read from their inboxes and relied almost exclusively on social networks for content discovery, so I originally forwent any implementation of a newsletter. As I grew more and more interested in and engaged with the media beat, I was exposed to the email renaissance of the past 2-3 years thanks to services like Revue and Substack, saw that it was good, and decided to give it a try for myself. I launched our semi-regular newsletter in April, 2017 on the subjects of “Division, Art, and Media” and published a little over 30 issues over the course of 18 months. To be honest, I'm not sure I've ever had so much fun writing.
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Very shortly after it began, I observed our general engagement quadruple, and – quite selfishly – found the process of aggregation to be soothing and very mentally restorative. It exposed some pretty horrendous media consumption habits of mine, but it also offered a painless solution to them. As soon as everything I read became a potential item in the newsletter, I wasn't just reading for myself anymore (or at least, that's the mentality it gave me,) so I could no longer afford to dismiss particular subjects as easily or to skim so recklessly. I nurtured a much less chaotic media diet and found myself absorbing a lot more of what I wanted to without wasting so much time burning through links. I ended up feeling more focused in other, unrelated areas of my life, too. Obviously, I love email for that, and I miss writing that darn newsletter so much that I continuously look for excuses to do something similar.
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My former Tech Editor loved email perhaps as much, but she's definitely the only person I've ever met who finds the medium as entertaining as I do. (If you're really committed, I just made a Twitter Moment full of all the best stuff I've ever posted about email – mostly jokes like “patron saint of email marketing,” but there are one or two profound posts in there, too.) We realized one day that – aside from The Webbys – there are very few notable awards celebrating excellence in the email medium, so we decided our magazine would host the 2017 First Annual Email Awards. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone else had any idea what the heck we were trying to do, so we never received enough submissions. However, I noticed a great opening paragraph in the original announcement post which I thought made a worthy conclusion:
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Man has used electronic mail to intercommunicate, woo, build communities, topple businesses & civilizations, embezzle money, spread worms, distribute cluttered, broken links to discontinued Orscheln products, feed infants, set climate control, confirm identities, check bank account statuses, and lie to exhausted, slightly-conceited, and newly self-published professors. That's right – These Trillions of simple digijewels have purveyed every single possible category of human communication, and it's still growing strong.
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I'm excited to give Hey a try – I hope you'll consider inviting me early. I'll even send my feedback if you so desire it! If not, I'll probably end up trying a paid subscription, anyway hehe. Either way, let me wish the best of luck to your team. Win or lose, I'm glad you're taking action on your complaints, unlike the rest of us.
A safari through the enchanting space of third-party Mastodon clients on iOS.
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Apple's second virtual World Wide Developer Conference came and went as I wrote this guide – you can metaphorically picture me looking up from my machine having overheard the news of the 2021 Apple Design Award Winners announcement. Perusing through them, I saw two I would have voted for, myself: CARROT Weather – the beautifully vulgar, grumpy bitch frontend for your preferred weather information service, and Craft – perhaps the most innovative take on word processing of the past two or three years – listed under “Finalists.” (Read: losers.) The most positive personal discovery of (all?) WWDCs: an app called Be My Eyes, which “connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call,” along with an exceptionally crafted, cross-device accessible-as-fuck TTS solution called Voice Dream Reader. However, a double take in games from Genshin Impact and the fucking League of Legends game certainly sours the mouth and suggests yet further just how much Apple, Inc. has sold out.
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The continued prioritization of Growth for Growth's sake over any and all other considerations (namely, users,) is not unexpected from even the most valuable company in the history of the world, I suppose, but there is an actor at this point in the story who is catastrophically and demonstrably failing to fulfill their role: all I really know is that technology media has fallen into a trough of total uselessness when it comes to qualitative, authoritative analysis of consumer-targeted software. The necessity of this guide – and the bizarrely silent ignorance of even the “fringes” on its subject – is unimaginably severe. Before me has been (for years, now,) the “answer” to a Jolly Big Load of what tech and marketing types lament in more and more existential language, yet hardly any of the humans with the most to lose from their negligence – regular, casual social media users – have been delivered to these experiences. The story is not being articulated. The journalism is not being done.
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I know you almost certainly did not arrive here to hear one motherfucker's complaints about WWDC, but – as with everything Apple, Inc. does – every morsel of curatorial expression/discrimination/favoritism from The Great Money God within this platform must be scrutinized and criticized. Quite frankly, I found myself completely at a loss as to how not to dwell on the Discovery Disparity, here.
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Despite how deeply I've gone into iOS this year, I do not believe myself to be a qualified judge of software design, but I no longer believe Apple to be, either. Regardless of the revenue-related controversies of late, Apple have simply become terrible stewards of the App Store in every imaginable sense. Scams and blatant intellectual property theft abound, while the majority of the most innovative entries I've ever seen remain entirely obfuscated and uncelebrated by all of Apple. Inc.'s mechanisms. If you required an explanation for the amount of time I've invested into App Guides – a space to which I never would have imagined intentionally bringing The Psalms – I hope you can understand.
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I must confess: I have been meaning to write this app guide since even before I interviewed Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko on the morning of his Big Press Day, just over 4 years ago. I’ve exhaustively explored different means of convincing my own longtime Twitter friends to move, over that time, with very little success. Eugen, himself, published an official blog post at the beginning of February detailing his plans to open up onboarding by way of “an official Mastodon app that is free to download and that is specialized in helping new users get started on the platform.” As a Patreon supporter of The Mastodon Project (full disclosure,) I've been testing this app (see preview shots at the very end,) and am quite smitten with it. That said, I thought it might be worth going over the third-party options iOS users currently have available to them, largely because the offerings are each innovative and mature applications in their own right. (Also, it’s become quite apparent that the normal tech media sources you’d go to for such a guide aren’t going to give Mastodon the attention it deserves.)
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Obligatory(?) Context
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I originally intended to be as clinical as possible in this Post, having realized its potential as the singular comparison of its kind to appear in search results for new and potential users of Mastodon. From my perspective, Mastodon has long since surpassed regard as a novel social media experiment who's function is to prompt academic conversations about decentralization, open source, ad tech, and federated social's solutions to all of the Big Web's Big Boy (proprietary) Problems (though I have been compelled to invest significantly in that very conversation.) In the less intellectual hours of my day-to-day life (read: most of the time,) Mastodon is nothing more or less than my favorite place on the internet. It is a relentless delight which I only lament because I want to share so much of it with my friends, but have continued to fail in my efforts to articulate that Mastodon is not a compromise; it is a better social space.
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If you didn't know, this seems to have become my general shit, for lack of a better term: the ethical considerations of open source/“alternative” software are very important, yes! ... but they are far from the whole, and they are not a requisite for new users. The second of this World Wide Web Blog's fundamental considerations, in fact:
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The Open Source/Open Web community continues to struggle with their brand image (if you will) in both old and new ways that needlessly alienate (and sometimes obfuscate) some of their most important contributions from the average user. Technology media has failed in their responsibility to address this issue.
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The blog on which you're reading this, in fact, is federated on ActivityPub. If you so chose, you could be reading it in any client capable of displaying large bodies of text. The crucial point, though, is that you didn't need to know that – you could very well go on reading it on the web in total ignorance/apathy regarding Federation.
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Oh boy, here we go... No. I did not want to say anything ideological – I wanted this Post to function as little more than a pretty screenshot showcase and simple associative list responding to all of the Reddit posts I've seen to the tune of “is there an iPhone app?” As I explored them, however, I was reminded of the sheer creativity the “alternative” software community is capable of. Even the roughest of these considered apps seem unable to be faceless – sorting through the obscene amount of (unlabeled) screenshots accumulated over the past weeks of testing in my Recents folder has been so much easier than I thought it would be because of their relentless originality. If you've actually used any iOS applications and/or browsed the singular App Store from which they can be acquired in the past 3-4 years, you're undoubtedly skeptical: what we might have called “feature overlap” at one time has become all but the platform's core ethos. If you're the sort who enjoys screwing around with apps, generally, as I have for the whole of iPhone history, you have grown accustomed to disappointment.
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so! I found a way to actually find the apps you’re looking for on the App Store! the search function in this dev-facing tool *ACTUALLY WORKS*!!! https://t.co/XrsStvXq57
Regardless of who is to blame, we can all agree that the App Store is currently oversaturated nigh beyond usability with mediocre entries built from the beginning with zero apparent ambition toward original function. This, alone, wouldn't be so problematic if Discovery were not so completely and totally Fucked (except when dev-facing,) but I needn't comment further on that subject at the moment – I'm just trying emphasize how absolutely unheard of it is for a single protocol/service's third-party client representation on iOS to be so thoroughly special. It was astonishing to find all but one or two of these apps in a functional state, actually. In all my equivalent experiences downloading the entirety of a given service's API-supported palette (e.g. IRC apps, topically,) an all-too-significant purpose of whatever ends up getting published is simply documenting the ~20% of available titles that actually work at the given moment. (I'd have mentioned the “best [service/task] iPhone apps for [year]” listicles found in online publications like Digital Trends were it not for the percentage of them in which it's clear the author did not actually download some/most of the apps listed‽‽‽) Perhaps due to iOS 14.5's implementation of ATT, all of the Mastodon apps I could find and test (not counting non-English language-supporting apps, in fairness' interest) are currently functioning.
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So, if there's virtually zero chance a new Mastodon user might download one of the apps we're about to consider and find it broken, what practical function remains for this guide? Hopefully, to establish a SEO catch-all for such users from a non-automated source less associated with the project than the official apps list. Those for whom Mastodon is still an unfamiliar subject should find the collected imagery intriguing, hopefully.
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The Big 6
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My first step in writing this guide was to post a thread on r/Mastodon soliciting thoughts on third-party Mastodon apps from other users, who expressed a lot of love for Toot! and Metatext:
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Toot is just a joy to use. It has a little too much sometimes (it actually contains little mini games...which really aren't needed), but the experience of using it has some really clever UI twists. -u/mikepictor
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Pragmatic Code's Linky was also mentioned by multiple respondents. It's not a client, but a bridging tool for smoother URL sharing that integrates with iOS' share sheet. I did not have time to try it, myself, but from all accounts, it is an obligatory mention. So too is the GitHub Repository/List I created in order to “formally” offer a list with much greater brevity and zero editorialization.
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First, let’s begin with The Big 6 – those apps The Mastodon Project, itself, has seen fit to list on joinmastodon.org.
Dag Ågren‘s Toot! is not only my personal app of choice – I would (and have) go so far as to say it’s the single most innovative mobile social app I’ve ever encountered, largely because of its jacknife-esque instance selection. It’s held a place in my phone’s dock since the day I first downloaded it, for this and many other reasons. While one might find bugs/loose ends (understandably) exploring the functions of other indie social clients, within Toot!, they will only find little delights, like its wholly unique Share Sheet interface.
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Toot! is extremely beautiful (despite its unfortunate name,) and I am quite superficial in my taste. It’s Obsidian theme (which may or may not be related to the topical notetaking system of the same name) is especially gorgeous.
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In my cacophonous attempt to compare the notifications of all available Mastodon apps simultaneously, it's worth noting that Toot!'s always came first. Its charming custom audio alerts also make them my favorite by far.
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They're not just cute: in reflection informed by a newly-considered function of these apps – serving as representing the network as a whole – it occurred to me that Toot! audio alerts playing from my iPhone have prompted more first-time conversations about Mastodon in the wild than I can count. (Seriously: they should be considered an onboarding mechanism.)
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In my experience, it’s also the most robust of the lot – as in, it is very much the exception rather than the norm to encounter any sort of error or other obstruction in normal, day-to-day use. My own real reservation applies to the entire selection discussed today: I wish Toot! supported Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts.
I originally had high hopes for Shihab Mehboob‘s Mast – which used to look very different from the way it does, today. That’s almost certainly to do with its ownership changing hands at some point (no, I do not have any further details on that story, unfortunately.) That’s not to say the current app isn’t a worthwhile offering, it’s just far less visually ambitious than the original I remember. However, it’s also significantly more reliable.
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They were there last time I checked, but Mast isn’t owned and maintained by me anymore so not sure.
The Original… Genesis… If Amaroq was not the first Mastodon app on the App Store, it’s certainly the oldest to survive. Its GitHub Repository’s first commit dates back to April 17th, 2017. While you’re there, you might note that it’s the only one of these entries coded entirely in Objective-C – the near-40-year-old language originally underpinning iOS before Swift’s birth in 2014. Amaroq was the first Mastodon app I used and remains the strongest free option for iOS users. It’s been nearly a year since its last update, so its missing a few narrower functions like Bookmarking and Polls, but the core features it does include are rock solid. The only wild card: what the fuck is Awoo Mode???
For better or worse, @rinsuki’s iMast will require either a basic grasp of the Japanese language, or the patience to translate its menus and work backwards. (OCR came to mind, but I’m not quite dedicated enough to try it for this guide.) Assuming Google’s translation of its GitHub Pages site is correct, iMast is also Open Source “under the Apache License 2.” Unlike Amaroq, it appears to have been built in Swift from the ground up. Unfortunately, that's about all I can comment on, though I would very much love to hear from any iMast users/Japanese speakers and will update this Post accordingly.
Daniel Nitsikopoulos' Mercury represents yet another entirely original direction in Social clients. It's fresh and “opinionated” in its explicit lack of support for instances that “promote abuse and harassment.” From all appearances, this appears to be the singular source of negative reviews on its iOS App Store page. It's also the other option to offer widgets integration (in a single form, currently,) and custom audio notifications, though I couldn't capture a sample. Its Trello Roadmap and Feedback Repo are public but mostly inactive. As you can see in the grid embedded above, I absolutely adore its Scoops theme and find my $0.99 Tip 100% worth its custom icons.
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Unfortunately, the state of Mercury's App Store reviews prompt yet another essential economic/editorial consideration. The one in the very center of the image embedded, above – from “FeralDandelion” – is the singular one I will allow myself to address. It is true that Mercury straight up refuses to authenticate or federate with a substantial amount of specific Mastodon servers, but it is exhaustively explicit about this from very get-go. Its single-page Help document includes a detailed, up-to-date table of every single blocked instance and the specific justification for each respective instance's presence on it:
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Mercury takes a zero tolerance stance on abuse and harassment and as such does not support many instances that promote abuse and harassment.
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Let me be clear: the practical manifestation of this position is exclusively positive. The Mastodon project has long outgrown the sort of fixation on ideology for ideology's sake that even Lucky Linus himself has no patience for. Instead, thank Gourd Mercury's developers took the time to better your social experience! In response to statements like the pullquote above, I expect *only* thumbs in the air from this point, forward.
Metatext is perhaps the buzziest of all these apps – well-praised in every space I could find conversation on the subject. It's developed under Justin Mazzocchi's software studio, Metabolist and is as Open Source as it gets! (As per my hardware keyboard shortcuts crusade, I added my own issue requesting support.) u/GummyKibble noted that “it looks like a native app on both iOS and iPadOS.” This term – native – seems inextricably linked with Metatext. I vaguely understand what it means, and I do agree, but it's worth noting that I speak with some privilege, having compared all of these apps on the top performing handset Apple currently has to offer. In many ways, it is the most frugal of the new offerings, especially, yet it strikes a keen balance between function and delight. I think “native” can be translated as generally of a stout, sturdy disposition, thanks to the care put into honing said balance.
I'm not entirely positive which Mastodon app was actually the first on my iPhone, back in 2017, but I know for sure it was either Amaroq or the dearest, infinitely-colorful Tootle. Its App Store Page Version History suggests it has not been updated in 14 months, yet the app – which was apparently “Designed for iPad” – appears to be working just fine. There are some overlapping UI elements, but they're barely noticeable. Were it not for the new dev-facing store search tool mentioned above, I would have assumed this app long gone, to be honest, but using it again has somehow managed to genuinely twinge my nostalgia nerve.
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In my search for any extra-App Store representation other than Tootle's Mastodon Account (which last posted the day after my birthday, last year,) I discovered Tootle... for Linux. Since I am a dedicated and thorough person, these days, I spent several hours messing around with Linux Virtual Machining until Lubuntu finally functioned just so I could show you what it looks like. Below is a screen capture of Tootle bordered by the most Macish LXQ desktop bars included in Lubuntu and even wearing the new official Apple System Font, SF Pro. Still, I think you'll agree... Tootle for Linux is not related to Tootle.
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Personally, I find this a profound shame – I think more apps should be as colorful – and as color configurable – as this little, mysterious Mastodon app. I created the theme you see represented in the frames embedded above using The Psalms colors, naturally, and the whole process took less than five minutes. Play around with it as I remember doing, all those years ago, and you'd be surprised how hard it is to create an unusable color theme. What I find most shame in, though, is that Tootle appears to be completely invisible in regular app store searches, now. (And by “most shame,” you know I really mean entirely fucking unacceptable.)
I found my way to the only currently in-development entry on this list thanks to my Mastodon friend wakest. iOS developer Shadowfacts (who also maintains shadowfacts.net) is working on their considerate, distinct app, Tusker in this self-hosted Repository. In #tusker on Mastodon, you'll find a few poignant praises from Pixelfed founder and principal developer Dan Sup, which – from my perspective – are especially high, indeed.
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Tusker's color customization options are technically... well.. not infinite, like other apps here, but the end result of their (obviously, very considered) selection will be a net win for 100% of users over that alternative, I believe. It is definitely of a similar philosophy to Metatext, but unquestionably more ambitious. Out of the lot, testing Tusker was the singular instance in which I found myself considering a “replacement” for Toot! You, yourself can use Tusker right this very minute via Apple's beta distribution system, Testflight, via this invite link.
Installing Roma for the first time led to a puzzling quest with a particularly pleasant end. I noticed fairly quickly that the iOS app was a re-branded release of what used to be Mast. My first instinct upon this discovery was to DM Mast's original developer, Shihab Meboob, on Twitter, but frankly, I've already bothered him enough there over the years, so it's understandable that I didn't hear back. When I downloaded the desktop app I found on Roma's web page and noticed its similarity to Whalebird, I decided to use the site's contact form to inquire about what exactly was going on as gingerly as I could. Happily, I received a reply just minutes later from Leo Radvinsky, head of Leo.com, “a Florida-based boutique venture capital fund that invests in technology companies:”
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Hi David,
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In both cases we funded the original developers of both Mast and Whalebird to create a branded whitelabel app specially made for Pleroma. The idea was to make Roma a cross platform brand/app. It didn't really work out so now we're working on a new app from scratch called Fedi for iOS and Android and releasing that as open source.
I think Roma has been removed from the app stores as it's no longer supported.
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Let me know if you have any other questions
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Though my hopes for the original Mast to live on in Roma form were more or less dashed by this message, the suggestion that someone is investing actual capital into federated social is certainly worth celebrating. If Roma is still available on the App Store as you're reading this, I insist you download it immediately. It represents an incredible and original attention to detail which should not simply be forgotten.
Naturally, the app inheriting the work/resources established by Mast and Roma – known by Fedi – should be next up for discussion. Hopefully, my relative lack of experience with Pleroma – another ActivityPub-based, federated social network – won't let you down, here. After a brief shock from the uniqueness of Fedi's UI passes, one immediately notices how beautifully it is animated, wholly disregarding my recently-acquired preference for as little animation as possible. Perhaps more than any other app discussed here, Fedi feels uncannily bespoke in a way which iOS apps almost never do. It is undoubtedly the result of a very specific vision – to disregard the whole modern template for social apps and completely reimagine the archetype. Personally, I'm not sure if it would be easy to get used to, but my tastes/habits in this regard are very much the result of the past decade of proprietary social apps' blandness. Going forward with substantial financial backing and the talents of whoever it was that got it this far, no doubt we should all have very high hopes for Fedi.
DUDU (or “嘟嘟,” which translates to “Toot,” appropriately,) definitely wins for Cutest Iconography. It's a non-English-native application with exceptional English support, which I personally appreciate very much. Compared the entries immediately above, DUDU represents a much more modest interpretation of what a Mastodon client can offer. It’s robust, free of over-animation, and – most distinctly – very wide, which might have something to do with the “designed for iPad” subtitle on its App Store Page.
Yet another “Designed for iPad” entry, Naoki Kuwata's Tootoise is defined by its custom incoming post rate accommodations and its gorgeous Solarized theme. Its “Max number of new arrival posts” setting ranges from 0-400, allowing one to freeze their timeline entirely from any accidental (or habitual) Pulls to Refresh (set at 0,) load 400 Toots from such a gesture, or anything in between (at 40-Toot increments, anyway.) The advantages of this specification become immediately apparent when one actually begins to explore it, especially for those who have come to Mastodon after feeling overwhelmed by Big Social.
Yet another entirely one-of-a-kind experience, the slightly-mysterious Stella is listed as a “Mastodon, Twitter & News Client,” and is notably one of the two apps on this list which do indeed support Twitter! More than that, it is the first app I've seen in a very long time that allows one to simultaneously post to two separate social services (Twitter and Mastodon, in this case.) Without documentation, it's a bit clunky, but its customizable timelines feature also allows one to combine multiple “sources” (social accounts) into a single timeline.
B4X is yet another quite perplexing entry. The “Developer Website” link on its App Store Page leads to b4x.com – a web page entitled “Anywhere Software.” The GitHub icon in its footer led me to discover a repository which is labeled as such to lead one to believe it is, indeed, the development space for the iOS app we're discussing, but does not contain a single .swift or .pbxproj file – universally essential for iOS apps, as I understand it. Regardless, B4X appears to be built atop Anywhere Software's “rapid application development tools.” I like its elemental simplicity and nice 'n' wide post display.
Isao Takeyasu's Oyakodon feels a bit like it originally began as a school project, and I mean that in the best possible sense. While it’s probably the least polished of the lot – and therefore likely the least viable candidate for the role of your primary, daily-driven Mastodon client – is is far from a throwaway application. Some evil component of Takeyasu’s mind was clearly let loose if only for a moment, for Oyakodon’s Facebook-style theme is reminiscent enough of Big Blue to alarm. The volume of its design definitely peaks in its Cute theme, which is so violently loud I could not help but extract its color palette to illustrate just how furious its creator must have been.
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Truly diabolical design, there. For better or worse, Oyakodon doesn’t really work very well in its current state, but it does work.
I very vaguely remember happening upon StarPterano in my very first moments on Mastodon, so finding it still published on the App Store – buried as it was – brought me a particular sort of joy. If I’m not mistaken, it holds a special personal accolade as the only iOS app which has caused me to involuntarily shriek. This might sound like an insult, but it is actually the peak of my praise. I believe my knowledge of iOS development safely allows me to suppose that StarPterano was built with complete disregard for any established UI element libraries. That is, the familiar toggles and buttons developers rely on to standardize the iOS experience were cast aside entirely in favor of handbuilt, translucent buttons of a sort of neon quality which call menus and text entry fields no less alien to the platform. The most astonishing bit, though, is that it works. On my 12 Pro Max, it’s exceptionally smooth, in fact.
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I would imagine those real iOS developers among you should find StarPterano’s GitHub Repository particularly interesting, considering. In the interest of preservation, I have forked it as well, and fully intend to dive in to its code, one of these days. The audio player embedded above cites a three-second .mp3 file in the repository which perhaps once accounted for the “Sounds” toggle still found in the Settings menu of StarPterano’s current build. I couldn’t get the app to reproduce it, which is actually what set me on the hunt that led to the repo.
Ore2 is another (apparently) non-English-native Mastodon client focused on consolidating Mastodon and Twitter within a single space. Alongside Stella, it's the second of the first two apps I've come across in a very long time which allows one to post to both services simultaneously. Considerable work was obviously done on making its timeline-based tabs switchable with touch. Personally, I very much prefer my current crossposting configuration via this (generously-public) web tool, but I am all but certain those users exist who will find Ore2’s setup preferable.
Inadvertently, I have saved the best story of the lot for last. Developer and researcher Zhiyuan Zheng documents both the narrative context leading up to the creation of his first app, tooot, as well as the philosophy behind its design in “Building my first app – toot.” His reference to the downfall of a prominent social app in mainland China called Douban – and the “Douban Refugees” which resulted – are alarmingly missing from all English news organizations save for a single Quartz article from October 2019. He eludes to a “boom” of Mastodon adoption in the past few years and cites a lack of “user friendly mobile clients” which I can only assume to be a conundrum specific to China.
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“With the aim of contributing to the community and to this movement, I decided to take my quarantine time to build an enjoyable mobile client for Douban Refugees,” he explains. He notes that decentralized platforms have universally rejected algorithmic recommendation if for any other reason than “without centralized computing power, such [a] recommendation service is also not that feasible.” “Adapting” back to a linear timeline in a manner which still encourages exploration was clearly a major design consideration for tooot.
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The core consists of 3 needs: 1) what I can read; 2) what I can write; 3) what I have done.
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Obviously, I very much appreciate Zhiyuan writing publicly about his thoughts on decentralized social and sharing specific considerations in his app’s design and look forward to continued updates.
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Get Bent, Big Social
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A few universal truths among these apps stand out as obligatory mentions. First – in comparison with their Proprietary, Big Social counterparts – they are all ridiculouslyfrugal. Not a one weighs over 40mb, while minor (unexplained) updates to the official Twitter app often exceed 100mb. They are all astonishingly robust – I did not experience a single crash in the course of normal testing these “alt” social apps- even from the beta builds – while I distinctly remember the official Twitter app crashing several times over this period, even after I deleted and reinstalled it (an accepted maintenance requirement for anyone using it heavily for its entire history.) Also, on the topic of the platform, itself, they are also made absurdly interoperable by the ActivityPub standard. My PixelFed posts show up seamlessly on their timelines among content from Diaspora, Pleroma, and Mastodon, itself.
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yup… it’s me again, bringing up inexplicably huge updates to the Twitter app.
. . and pointing out… again… that speculation wouldn’t be necessary if Twitter just published actual release notes. pic.twitter.com/IZFDYPLAvS
The overwhelming impression I was left with after testing these apps was one of unwavering competence, cleverness, and true innovation. How many different ways can I possibly conjure forth in order to communicate this? I, David Blue – the vain fucker with a precollection for the most superficial variables of software design so healthy that I have on multiple occasions designed whole, years-long workflows around specific applications entirely because of their available color palettes... It is I who requires you to take a good fucking look, because this list of decentralized, largely open source, federated social software is a goddamned fashion show.
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Continuing to Explore Social Ownership
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This couldn't be “just” an app guide – I think I have thoroughly accepted this, by now, just in time for some conclusionary remarks. Somehow, the subject I originally tackled specifically because I thought it would be quick, rudimentary, and straightforward has become yet another personal journey. It'd feel a bit preposterous to declare any one of these apps to be life-changing, but – in every sense of the term, in contemporary, inevitably social media-informed life, they do indeed constitute a form of radical, ideological wellness. Each of them managed to remind me of a different minute delight found within a developer-user dynamic made up of thoughtful and effective minds working to contribute original and valuable experiences, first. Most noteworthy of these little freedoms: the realization that the upcoming “official” Mastodon app along with any future new options are exclusively a positive thing for the user... None of these apps were conceived to gobble up market share because the market is fundamentally, inevitably, uncompromisingly infinitely shared. I don't know anything about business, but I do know that relief from the burden of considering proprietary multivectored development intentions has been personally breathtaking. I can only hope the reciprocal compensation is happening at even a fraction of what it “should” be.
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From another essential direction, I hope I have communicated that they're far from curious, “niche” or vanity side projects, now. When I used the term “mature” in introducing this little arena, I very much meant it – these “alt” social clients developed almost exclusively within single-person-led projects now make the Twitter for iOS app look ugly and fucking broken. “Giving social networking back to you” has never been more resonant. Yes, it really is Toot!'s “take a break” blue screen, Amaroq's mysterious Awoo mode toggle, iMast's music app integration, Mercury's configurable timelines, Metatext's native solidity, Tootle's custom colors, Tusker's Digital Wellness controls, DUDU's elemental readability, Roma's quiet resurrection of Mast's UI bravado, Stella's utterly bizarre visual departures, Fedi's odd animated UI behaviors, Tootoise's consideration of pace, B4X's unfathomable elements, Ore2's parallel timelines, tooot's development story, and Oyakodon's adorable rough edges that have made my online life measurably... immensely better, these past weeks. At the forefront of this perception is undoubtedly the comparatively extensive control over my social experience as a user offered by the diversity of mobile experiences these applications offer.
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Those of you who haven't yet signed up for Mastodon: ==you are missing the fuck out==. I am being actually pampered, now, in World Wide Web terms. You are so welcome whenever you're ready – the water is nice and warm, as they say.
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...Party One
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Yes, you are looking at the currently in-development “Official” Mastodon app on iOS, coming very soon to the Awful App Store. You can join me in testing the app right this very moment by contributing to the Mastodon Project's Patreon. Though I do plan to publish a dedicated review on its release date, what I'll say for now is that it's very cute, includes the most gorgeous media player I've ever seen on an iOS app, and is as distinctly clever as any of the third-party family we've just visited, all whilst maintaining an expert's aim at its evangelist purpose.
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The surprise that threw me over the edge to a genuinely pitiful extent: the official Mastodon app already includes full Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts integration on iPhone!
A commitment to share my thoughts where developers actually want them, and an invitation for other reviewers/users to join me.
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I have written more than my fair share of words about software, as I have loved, despised, and been utterly perplexed by it. This year, my return to the iOS community has perhaps inevitably turned apps into an addiction of sorts. This particular platform is so utterly chock full/stocked up of creativity at a scale immeasurably greater and more accessible than the whole of those throughout computing history, combined. For someone like myself, it is all too easy to allow oneself to wander down a virtually endless path of intriguing, very self-indulgent play, especially now that third-party sites like Departures.to have managed to add discoverability to TestFlight beta distributions, allowing those non-millionaires among us opportunities to use test releases of applications we would’ve otherwise had to pay for. This has been exclusively to my benefit – I can only imagine what 15 year-old me would have done with such power.
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In my recent endeavor to focus on making my work more useful to others, I've reflected on something I've heard from nigh every developer of the apps I've reviewed: Ah yes, your blog looks really cool but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE REVIEW MY FUCKING APP on the FUCKING STORE. Read: your commentary is appreciated, but your five stars would almost certainly more economically beneficial.
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As you can see from the image embedded above, I have personally fallen very behind in doing my part for those apps I've celebrated, here. A vague intention to get around to it eventually clearly is not working, so I've decided to give myself a deadline: August 15th, 2021 – precisely one month from today. By this date, I will have sifted through my commentary on apps in this setting and adapted the most useful of it (per app, obviously) into a manner appropriate to appear on an App Store Page, and I would like to formally-ish invite other tech writers/app reviewers to join me.
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so! I found a way to actually find the apps you’re looking for on the App Store! the search function in this dev-facing tool *ACTUALLY WORKS*!!! https://t.co/XrsStvXq57
I'm terrible at community organization, which certainly does not exclude events, so I very much welcome any feedback you might have, as well as any collaborative contributions you'd be interested in making. As I see it, I have a few essential considerations to offer.
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First, the page in the screen capture above – which can be found in the App Store App ⇨ Account (your profile picture in the top-right corner) ⇨ Account Settings (the tapable element at the very top with your profile picture and information) ⇨ Ratings and Reviews – is broken as hell, along with the rest of the Account Settings menu, notably. This is important because I insist we all complain about it on all available channels, considering it's been broken for several months, at least.
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Second, you should almost certainly use this “new” dev-facing tool when searching the App Store, considering that it actually works in a trustable way, unlike the user-facing tool in the app.
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tech writers, app reviewers, interested iOS users, I would like to formally invite you to APP STORE REVIEW DAY - a shared personal commitment to sharing commentary on apps where it actually matters most for developers. https://t.co/hfLooBwCCa
Since the standard online palette of event organization software are all so easy to use, these days, I've established event pages for this event on multiple platforms, linked in the list below, which I will update as per any suggestions/requests for equivalent pages on other services. Of course, it's certainly not a requirement that you join/engage with any of them.
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One could could certainly just add the date to their own calendar (conveniently with this .ics file,) remain entirely silent about the thing on social, and still be participating. Those interested in further engagement, however, can Chat Me Up on Extratone's Discord, the Teams event chat, Telegram, etc. I also plan to reshare most of this post as a thread on Twitter.
As we face the horrendous, utterly inexcusable state of Discovery on the App Store/Apple's general fuckery regarding the independent developers mostly responsible for making its platforms a worthwhile space, I hope I've created something of value in whipping up this “event.” If you have thoughts on how I might do so more effectively, once again, please do reach out.
The first release version of my only original contribution to the iOS community is now ready to assist when you can't find your phone.
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One of the handful of Siri's most useful features has been the “Hey Siri! Where are you?” command, to which Siri will respond “I'm here” or “here I am!” Were it possible to view how many times one has triggered a particular Siri command on iOS, my personal reliance on it would almost certainly be embarrassing. Often, my handset isn't even obscured from view – it's just faster to have Siri speak up than it is to scan the room. Occasionally, however, my device has managed to become embedded beneath and/or within some genuinely-perplexing series of couch cushions/blankets/briefcase pockets/etc. which require a more constant homing sort of audio reproduction. Asking friends/family to call one's phone is the general goto, yes, but honestly the actual length of time cellular telephones will ring before sending a caller to voicemail in 2021 is ridiculously short, especially when rummaging through Gourd-knows-what. For that matter, most of my peers keep their phones on silent mode, 24/7. What then?
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Since the very first time I set eyes upon Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12 Beta, I have wanted to create one to address this issue in a creative, entertaining, and (hopefully) genuinely-useful way. On that day almost three years ago, I even knew it would be called Marco!, believe it or not. In the past few months, I've returned to the project on and off and ended up with several different versions of varying complexity. One day, I'd like to figure out how to integrate the full extent of my ideas for Marco! into a Shortcut which can be reliably triggered when one's device is locked, but for this first release version, I have included only what I and a few other (much appreciated) volunteers were able to trigger in every situation we could conceive of.
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Marco! Version 1.0 can be downloaded on RoutineHub (which I would highly recommend,) or directly via this iCloud share link. I know it's a bit excessive, but I even created a GitHub Repository just for this Shortcut, seeing as it is undoubtedly the most original I will ever contribute, and the singular one with potential for continued development.
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Download Marco! as is and (as long as you don't rename it) use “Hey Siri!... Marco!” This should immediately run the Shortcut, which includes my voice saying “Polo! Bitch!” followed by five repeats of the flashlight/noise cycle as described in detail below.
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As documented by the Jellycuts file above, Version 1.0 of Marco!'s actions are as follows:
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Turn Low Power Mode OFF
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Turn Airplane Mode OFF
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Turn Wi-Fi On
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Turn Bluetooth On
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Set brightness to 100%
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Turn Do Not Disturb OFF
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Turn appearance Light
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Set playback destination to iPhone
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Set volume to 89%
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Vibrate device (Not currently working.)
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Play my voice saying “Polo!” + a few other items
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Toggle (flash) the flashlight 5 times (odd number leaving your flashlight on constantly unless it was on before the Shortcut was triggered)
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Simultaneously (in the same repeat action) plays three separate classic Mac sounds 5 times.
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The most clever bit about this particular Shortcut is its use of Base64 text to include audio playback. I just fixed a bug on my own Base64 audio encoder Shortcut if you'd like to try it out. Since this version includes my own voice (subject to taste, I realize,) as well as some minor profanity, I do intend to publish a clean variation at some point in the future. If this is an obstacle for you, and/or if you'd like a custom version made with audio of your own choosing, please do send me an email! I would be more than happy to make one for you.
Reporting from deep within the iOS cult on essential apps/methods for real-life music people.
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Listen to this article read (with some bugs) by Siri Voice 3 below...
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As you may or may not be aware, I’ve spent all of my 2021 so far diving real deep into iOS, considering all that has changed since “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.” I’ve tuned in to the output of explicitly Apple-adjacent publications both old (MacRumors, Apple Insider, 9to5 Mac, etc,) and new (Apple Scoop, MacStories,) which have all metamorphosed in huge, mostly-redeemable ways just as their primary subject has. I have my own pubescent stories of Mac occultism, but I do not consider my relationship with the brand to be an essential part of my identity, as so many do and have. Apple, Inc’s story is spectacular and infinitely-relevant so long as they remain “the most valuable company in the history of the world,” as I so love to describe them. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am often compelled to bring up the humongous contrasts in the historical context of the company – to scream infinitely many variations of the observation that Apple was basically the fucking indie, premium-tier consumer tech manufacturer owned by the Creative Class for the first half+ of their existence, and have somehow maintained that Think Different™ brand narrative as they have definitively become the Big Blue of their time.
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From my perspective, the responsibility for the wellbeing of this utterly-delusional, occasionally very dangerous sentiment actually lies fairly squarely on those of us who consider ourselves better than all of that because of our Debian workflows and their ancient command line utilities. (For the record, this is also 100% delusional as things stand in 2021.) One thing I think we can all acknowledge, though, is that Apple’s image has been inextricably bound with musicmaking, throughout, far more than any other even remotely comparable tech company. Naturally, the business still loves to bring this up all the time in big, glossy gestures. The topical example of note would be the only worthwhile content I’ve yet to encounter on Apple TV+: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which documents the highlights of the young, beloved musician’s prodigious ascension. For what it’s worth, I appreciate some special insights I gained thanks to the film, which I do not actually consider at odds with the truth of its super on-brandness for Apple.
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An interesting take I found from 2017 from a new favorite voice on the business end of tech reporting: “How Music Drowns Apple’s Innovation” by The Information’s Jessica Lessin portrays Apple’s relationship with music distribution and the music industry as a sort of compulsive distraction from its ambitions in serving video content, namely. Lessin points out the everpresent reminders of this obsession:
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And so it is no wonder that Apple’s first forays into original video content fall under Apple Music. It’s worth noting that the first series the company announced—“Carpool Karaoke” is literally about singing; “Planet of the Apps” features rapper Will.i.am as a judge.
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I think I can speak for the majority of my audience when I suggest that the targets of Lessin’s cynicism would be more than welcome, if they were The Whole Truth. Indeed, the most valuable company in all of history retaining an “emotional” attachment to the welfare of music creators might be described as charming or more. As is often the case on The Information, the comments from readers often offer noteworthy insight. In this case, Kevin Swint – who has apparently worked as an executive for both Apple and Samsung, according to his profile on The Information – responded with an important consideration: “…it's possible that Apple's behavior around music has more to do with the company's overall tendency to stick with its past successes a bit too long rather than music really being a core part of its DNA.”
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In terms of business, that’s all I have to contribute, and I shall do my best not to evangelize Apple Music (or more likely, disparage Spotify as one of the most destructive cultural forces of our time,) here. However, I would like to respond to a particular Jimmy Iovine quote from the original Apple Music announcement amid the 2015 WWDC Keynote:
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There needs to be a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery… and if that place could actually accommodate and support the artists who make the music, not just the top-tier artists, but the kids in their bedrooms too, provide them all with a home and a way to engage with their audiences, that would be pretty great.
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Boy, this service Iovine describes sounds an awful lot like Bandcamp, no? The suggestion that Apple should have purchased Bandcamp is a very scary one, from my perspective, but I am reassured by the likelihood that the notion did indeed occur to someone at Apple, Inc. at some point in the past, and was quickly discarded, for whatever reason. I promise not to mention Bandcamp again in this Post, aside from its own two iOS apps: for listeners and for “Artists/Labels” as creator/curator tools.
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I’m going to be focusing largely on the iPhone-bound experience, here, though I did borrow my mom’s MacBook Pro for a weekend to explore the state of music on MacOS and (accidentally) played around with Apple Music on The Television (a surprisingly beautiful experience.) On that note, I’ll hurry up and get specific…
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Apps
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Assuming you’re already an Apple Music user, it’s very possible that you’ve been deprived of the “true” experience on the service provided by the variety of actively-developed but woefully-undercovered app store entries that integrate directly with Apple Music. One of the most glaring discoveries I’ve made so far in my iOS deep dive, this year, has been the absolutely horrific state of Discovery on Apple’s App Store. If you’d thought to search the top charts under the store’s Music category, you wouldn’t find any of the gems I’m going to highlight, here. The credit for exposing me to their existence, in fact, lies with MacStories – a hard-hitting, well-established Apple-adjacent media company piloted by Federico Viticci. At this very moment, their app-centric podcast, App Stories, is in the midst of a special mini-series devoted to Music on iOS/Mac, from which this Post draws upon heavily. For better or worse, they represent the definitive authority on this subject (among many others, naturally,) though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend their various publications be added to the reading lists of any but those most invested in iOS.
There is something uniquely concrete about a purely-chronological feed which we’ve lost in the past 5-10 years in favor of algorithmic curation, generally. The next item in this particular feed, in fact, includes my attempt to explain why Twitter’s hard-chronological Lists feature has sheltered me from the anxiety of the service’s main timeline, now ordered by proprietary (and obscured) formulas. I’d been aware of that dynamic in my own Twitter consumption for years, though. I certainly did not anticipate the impact of the music release equivalent of a chronological timeline as provided by MusicHarbor – an app for iOS and MacOS that acts as a frontend for one’s music library across both Apple Music and Spotify.
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It's hard to remember how we (Apple Music) got here without embarking upon some gargantuan A Complete Visual History of Apple Music-like document, but it must be said that Tim Cook's “next chapter in music” has become a sad afterthought. As far as I understand it, the “streaming war” between Apple and Spotify has long since gone definitively to the latter in statistical terms, which I'd suggest to be an overall positive outcome for Apple Music subscribers, generally. The self-perception within the heavy music consumer crowd of “niche,” “underground,” “obscure” cultural minority should – in theory – push those who believe themselves destined to be different away from Spotify into the handy care of Apple, the absolute champion of this particular self-deception. To be honest – though I write this for all listeners, sincerely – I have found myself in a sort of utopian echo chamber of my own design in music culture terms. My days of waiting through 4+ hours of local openers before rap shows are far behind me, and I consume and engage exclusively with music I find personally redeemable.
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My Apple Music library has become quite fragmented after I lost my entire physical music collection along with the external drives containing my accumulated digital music library in 2017. Still, after more or less starting anew this past December and casually, deliberately adding digital files back into the accursed, ancient iTunes desktop application and restoring some (outdated) versions of my handful of shared curatorial playlists thanks to SongShift (which we'll glance on later,) MusicHarbor currently lists 1433 artists represented across my Apple Music and (very sparse) Spotify libraries. I know this because of a very simple Siri Shortcut I modified which returns a text list of all Artists in one's MusicHarbor library in Quick Look. (Here is my result as of this moment in GitHub Gist form.) According my App Store receipts, I first downloaded MusicHarbor on March 26 – 20 days ago – which is mentionable because of how much I've accomplished with very minimal time investment in terms of curating my own music library thanks to MusicHarbor. As you'll note in the 3rd of the 4 screenshots embedded above, I was able to delete System of a Down from my library – a single function which alone justifies the app's one-time $5.99 “Unlock Everything” fee, to my sensibility. I've also been able to begin following all the artists represented in a few of my favorite playlists with a handful of taps – a task which would literally require hours in the native Apple Music app of old (when one could actually follow artists, there.) On that note, it's time to cite the primary MacStories article you should read, entitled “How I Keep Track of New Music Releases,” regarding Apple Music's performance as a release tracker:
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The ‘New Releases’ section is tucked at the very end of the For You page and laid out as a horizontal carousel that requires a lot of swiping; you can view the ‘New Releases’ page as a grid, which has sections for different weeks, but, in my experience, it only aggregates highlights for new releases from some of my favorite artists. The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.
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Here, Federico Viticci is riffing off a newsletter issue written by music blogger Jason Tate, in which he describes the service's missing tracking functionality as “the single most frustrating part of Apple Music.” Though these points in the conversation are both almost two years old, MusicHarbor remains the ultimate means of tracking new music releases chronologically on Apple's platforms. Though I am personally just three weeks in, the confidence this app has given me in the certainty of its chronological release feed is quite profound. Its integration with one's calendar to track upcoming releases is a bit much for my own needs, but I know personally enough invested curators for whom it'd be a godsend to mark it no small addition.
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MusicHarbor’s only downside is entirely excusable/understandable, in context: it’s a bit clunky. For the sake of this work, I set up a shared Apple Music playlist so I could further demonstrate all the new music I discovered in MusicHarbor. Adding whole albums to this playlist with a single tap feels powerful because it is – I’ve no idea what sort of developer wizardry is involved in such an action, but the Wait Wheel doesn’t feel like too much to endure. Adding a release to one’s library – the other in-MusicHarbor accumulative function – is a bit quicker. It’s important to remember that this piece of software was/is created and maintained by a single human being, though I would expect nothing but improvement, going forward.
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That’s all I have to report on MusicHarbor, for the moment, but I’ll add further MacStories praise from their 2019 MacStories Selects app rewards:
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What makes MusicHarbor special – and, ultimately, the reason why we all use the app here at MacStories – is just how much developer Tanaka understands what someone who wants to know about new music releases is looking for.
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July 2021 Update: The MacStories gentlemen have just published an interview episode of AppStories speaking at length with MusicHabor creator Marcos Tanaka.
On the other end of the spectrum, exploring new digital manifestations of The Music Collection, is Albums, which actually functions as an entire replacement frontend player for Apple Music. Reviewed much more recently by MacStories, it really is best-described as “opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists.” Considering that I installed the app just a week ago and have focused most of my attention on MusicHarbor in that time, I’ll leave most of the commentary to John Voorhees. All I can say, really, is that I see an extremely powerful application, here, for a fairly specific use case: someone who’s listening is largely occupied by albums they already “own” in Apple Music and treasure deeply. The ability to set an individual record’s “Immersive UI Tint” down to the hex (in “Album Settings”) is as in-depth a tool of adoration as I’ve ever seen in a digital music service. Combined with Albums’ presumptuous takeover of actual playback from the Apple Music app, I think I can rightfully say that it was built for the extremely serious music consumer.
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My favorite part so far: the app knew well enough to offer me THE ZRO BUTTON. Telling, I think.
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Others
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Since it’s already quite clear how much this Post draws from MacStories, I’ll let their review of Soor stand on its own (I couldn’t quite justify spending $6.99 just for review purposes.) In the episode embedded above, they also mention Denim – a playlist cover creator I am not personally all that impressed with. There’s also MusicHarbor’s sibling, MusicSmart, which manages the tricky but essential task of adding the metadata retrieval Apple Music should have included all along. The rest can be found in the episode’s show notes. I’m not done with them, but the rest are what I would differentiate as services…
One of the bewilderingly undercovered digital music sharing tools of our kind, Odesli has been my preferred method of sharing tracks/albums/EPs since I first discovered it in 2018. It is not specific to iOS but it isessential for competent music sharing, anywhere, these days, in its magical ability to correctly intersect any given piece of music’s links across all streaming services, known and unknown. To be honest, I thought everybody would be using it by now, but it’s continued to develop with minimal attention aside from Siri Shortcuts developers. Thanks to Odesli’s Public API, dozens of Music-centric Siri Shortcuts have emerged over the past few years, resulting in one of the most useful Siri Shortcuts integrations to be found for real, reasonable human beings. Here’s where Apple-adjacent media and I part ways…
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While current common conversation might point you to Federico Viticci’s MusicBot hyper-Shortcut and/or @gianflo6’s 600 action-strong Song.Link Shortcut, I (perhaps expectedly) would point you to my own, 17-action Shortcut which spares you any selections and simply opens the Song.Link URL of the track currently playing in Apple Music (while also copying said URL to the clipboard.) It’s not that MusicBot isn’t massively impressive and still useful, but it represents a class of super/hyper-Shortcuts which (from my perspective) far-overreach beyond the intended use case for Siri Shortcuts and end up immediately bewildering/alienating potential new users. Truthfully – as Federico singularly acknowledges – they are full applications built atop a less-than-ideal platform designed for relatively simple, repeatable automations. I’ll spare you further opining on this idea until another, potential Post, and instead demonstrate my personal solution.
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In the clip above, you can see I was working on this very draft when LoneMoon’s “kawAii @F” started playing. Naturally, I was compelled to share it on Twitter, so – without leaving Drafts (my writing app) – I called the type-to-Siri prompt by holding the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and simply typed “sl” (I renamed my Shortcut for this use,) running the Shortcut, which opened the track’s Song.Link page in Safari – very much an optional step, mostly just to make sure the match is correct – and copied its URL to my clipboard, from which I could share it anywhere. Since the advent of widgets in iOS’ Today View, I’ve also kept a button for this Shortcut in one of four precious slots in a box at the very top. For those willing to play around a bit, it should be fairly straightforward to configure the end bits to your liking, but it should work out of the box for even those least interested in Siri Shortcuts/automation in general.
As I confessed before, it is only thanks to SongShift that I was able to recover anything of my original, prized, deeply-considered Apple Music playlists. The standalone MacStories article on this one is a bit dated, but I don’t see much change in function in that time. For most people, SongShift’s free service is simply the best way to transfer a playlist between music streaming services. If you find yourself genuinely sold by the features offered by SongShift Pro, I suspect you know more about playlist manipulation than I could ever learn you by diving in any deeper.
Yup… Believe it or not, Last.fm is still fucking scrobbling after 19 fucking years (almost to the day,) and its iOS app still fucking works. What’s most bizarre about this truth is that I did not encounter mention of Last.fm for years until I started noticing it as an integration option in the settings menus of these premium iOS apps. Is this some sort of conspiracy? I’m not sure, but I suppose I might as well insist you follow my ancient account, if you’re still using it.
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alright folks fucking ADD ME ironically or not. this profile is older than all of the cells in my body. https://t.co/cQLeb0dGEK
I should also note that not only is the Last.fm iOS app still working, it’s working well, from all appearances, anyway. Though the service no longer includes hosting, itself, it’s apparently still a prime player in the world of playback tracking.
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Music Creation
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DAWs
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What if you actually want to “make” music with your iPhone? We’ve seen iPhone television ads for years featuring amalgamations of musician-looking types playing instruments with cables attached to their handsets, but is the iPhone now a reasonable platform for any sort of serious sound capture? The short answer is no. Who am I to proclaim such an absolute? None other than the motherfucker who’s been messing around with mobile DAWs for 10 whole years. I even “released” an “album” on Bandcamp made exclusively with Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS and inspired by the dangerous life of the contemporary raw milk smuggler. I wouldn’t call it “music,” per se, or an example of what a real electronic producer could pull off in the app, but it does represent its capabilities in the hands of the average user, using mostly default loops.
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While Apple does publish an Apple Book entitled “Everyone Can Create Music” about GarageBand on iOS, it is specifically directed at iPad-bound use. Any serious DAW user uses keyboard shortcuts, which I admit I only discovered recently in GarageBand for iOS. The official documentation is – once again – for iPad, specifically, but most of them still work on iPhone.
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FL Studio Mobile – the original third-party iOS-bound DAW – is still going, apparently. While I did, indeed purchase the original version on my iPhone 4, I remember absolutely nothing about it, suggesting I was over my head, even then. There’s also Auxy, as covered recently in this App Store Story and Reason Compact. I’ve played around with these more recently – since they’re both available in their most primitive forms as a free download – with little to report.
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Capture
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Disappointingly, Apple’s own Music Memos – as demonstrated by Chris Welch from The Verge in the embed, above – is currently in the process of being officially sunsetted and is now no longer available for download on the App Store. As that article notes, users are instead directed toward GarageBand or ye olde native Voice Memos to record high quality audio. However, if you want to take advantage of the stereo audio recording capabilities included in iPhones after the 11 Pro, you must either use the native Camera app to capture video (and extract the audio later,) or Dolby On – Dolby’s own iOS app for recording which – if I’m completely honest – will do nothing but utterly frustrate anyone trying to capture the truest digital audio possible.
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As part of my iPhone 12 Pro Max Review, I’ve accumulated quite a few audio files in various formats testing its capture abilities and stashed them in this folder on The Psalms’ GitHub Repository. Probably the most relevant of these, though, is embedded just above. If you’ll forgive my pajamas, ridiculous piano faces, and general rustiness with the instrument, it demonstrates the “Audio Zoom” feature found in the iPhone 11 Pro and up, which I’ve found to be unfortunately underdocumented by Apple, itself. I added my own inquiry to this post on the official Developer forums asking about it, but don’t really expect anything back. According to “What is Audio Zoom for smartphones?” published on the site DxOMark:
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The main technology behind audio zoom is called beamforming, or spatial filtering. It allows changing an audio recording’s directivity (that is, the sensitivity according to the direction of the sound source) and shape it in any way necessary. In this case, the optimal directivity is a hypercardioid pattern (see illustration below), which enhances sounds coming from the front direction — that is, from the direction in which your camera is pointed — while attenuating sounds from all other directions (your background noise).
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My testing has suggested that the best means of recording unfiltered-as-possible stereo audio with an iPhone is to record video at 1x zoom with the native Camera app and extract the audio from the video file. In the Bandcamp track embedded below, I “mounted” my 12 Pro Max right above my old upright’s soundboard and extracted audio directly from the video file with Audacity. It was then amplified slightly, saved to a FLAC file and uploaded directly to Bandcamp. Of course, it’s worth qualifying that – while I have extensive experience with audio – I have neither professional training, nor any professional monitoring equipment.
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That said, the biggest objection I’ve heard from audiophiles regarding audio capture and manipulation on handsets, generally, has to do with their hardware’s extremely limited capabilities when compared to any sort of professional desktop soundcard. Given the greater argument I've come to regarding the state of consumer tech as best exemplified by smartphone design – that we've come to expect far too much of single devices, and the resulting jack-of-all-tradeness summing their real-life capabilities has become a severe detriment instead of a feature – I must echo, again, that adding “studio” audio capture, manipulation, and production capabilities to our goddamned cellular phones doesn't help anyone. To any user truly hoping to accomplish these things, I say just go home and boot up your damned desktop.
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Other Considerations
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The final episode in AppStories' three-part miniseries on music was just published today, though I suspect – for my audience, anyway – that its coverage is mostly out-of-scope on this topic, largely for financial reasons. Apple's first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow at noon, my time, and is entitled “Spring Loaded,” which – combined with its 4/20 joke date – suggests to me that we'll finally see the release of the APPLE GUN™ alongside iWeed™, but little to nothing in the way of music.
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In the midst of my brief research into The Greater History of Apple Music, I discovered the existence of iTunes Ping – which I somehow missed entirely, along with my Twitter friend Jon Male. I also discovered articles from the company's decision to kill its successor “Connect” from Apple Music, which was reportedly “rarely used.” Notably, this removal also took away what little power Artists had over the narrative surrounding their music on the service. I can see the business justification for all of this (barely) except for removing the ability for users to follow artists.
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The latest Apple Music feature – a “channel” for music videos – also makes zero sense to me, but the launch of Apple Music on the webabsolutely does, especially for Windows and Linux users, who are now officially freed from iTunes (the software) and allowed to use a much more modern Apple Music experience. I prepended “officially,” there, because third-party Apple Music web players have existed as long as the service has allowed the required integration. First, there was Naveed Golafshani's – which is no longer live – but Brychan Bennett-Odlum's Musish is still live and working, as you can see from the screenshot embedded above. Other than the ability to select between two stream bitrates, I can't seen any remaining advantages to using the latter over Apple's own web player, unless you harbor spite toward their handling of the whole thing, which would be entirely understandable, from my perspective.
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MKBHD’s first tech purchase with his own money was an iPod Touch. mine was the original flash drive iPod Shuffle… this is what I mean when I say “I feel old.” it’s not that I’m actually elderly - it’s just strange finding out so often I am older than people I look up to. pic.twitter.com/rbCupcU0R5
As someone who grew up in the mp3 era with a first-generation iPod Shuffle and iTunes, living and dying between iTunes Store gift cards, Apple Music still seems like one hell of a magical deal. In effect, it allows access to all of iTunes for a flat monthly fee. Or at least it would had I never become acquainted with professional independent musicians who've published, there, and have to contend with tedious realities like the process by which one can add those beautiful lyrics to Apple Music tracks, and who's only real means of control/engagement on the service has been removed with virtually zero prospects of a replacement. If, indeed, Jessica Lessin was correct about Apple's obsession with music, it has resulted in very little for any class of music makers, and left even its listeners to seek out and find third-party solutions like MusicHarbor to perform even the most basic personalization one expects from a modern music streaming service without even bothering to amend their App Store's discovery process to illuminate them, or even write a fucking App Story. Despite this, one-to-three-person app teams continue to work on new solutions, to these and other problems...
In the bleak face of Twitter’s centralization, Tapbots refuses to give up on its mobile client.
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Listen to this article read by Siri below...
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Were it just I who came to you with only my voice on this cold night, proclaiming the imminent release of a whole numerical version of a third-party mobile Twitter client in 2021, you really would have no choice but to send for the laws, for you’d be left no consideration other than my comprehensive descent into absolute insanity. 825 days ago, I told you lots about the history surrounding the development of Tweetbot 5, which I confidently described as “likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS.” After spending the past few months diving deep into iOS in preparation to review and reflect upon Apple’s current flagship handset, my eyes have been opened to the exponentially-increasing pace of the whole environment’s metamorphosis during the course of my lapsed attention. In the name of progress, I’ve done my best to make a point of looking back, too, yet something astonishingly personally relevant managed to slip past me until just last week: there is a sixth version of the Tweetbot app. At this moment, it is listed on the App Store as an “Early Release” version, though its predecessor can still be downloaded by those who’ve already purchased it in the past, like me. This is an unusual practice – usually, pre-release versions of iOS apps can only be distributed through Apple’s developer beta testing infrastructure, though Testflight. Notably, Tweetbot developer company Tapbots was apparently required to take down Tweetbot 5’s store listing 30 days before releasing Tweetbot 6.
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I can’t remember exactly why – though I suspect I was just fucking around on my phone before bed, bleary-eyed – but the implications of this next numeral passed me by the first time I saw and downloaded Tweetbot 6, two weeks ago. Perhaps it’s because the app didn’t appear to have any new features – in fact, it’s technically got less than 5, though those that have been removed – user-specified URL shortening, image hosting, and video hosting services – haven’t worked in a good while anyway. As my old fav, The Verge noted in their coverage of 6, blame for these omissions rests solely on Twitter, Inc., itself, who’s continued to hold its API development inordinately close-to-chest. I didn’t bother to find out about this, though, because my first assumptions upon poking around the new app – especially after encountering its new subscription requirement in order to use any of its substantive features – was that its developers had ceased any actual time investment into the app long ago, and that 6 was a new version in number and rudimentary visual updates, only, shoved out in hopes of peaking old, loyal users like myself enough to get us to download it, at least. In the disappointment I’d already expected, I closed and immediately deleted the app.
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I’ve paused everything else to write you on this, though, because the story is actually much bigger. Had I investigated any further that first time, I would have discovered an odd amount of buzz coming from even the most mainstream of tech media in a simple search. (Yes, I am ashamed about it.) You’re still reading, but perhaps – as I was, originally – you are doing so from an appropriately-jaded, well-read perspective on software, generally, in 2021. Perhaps you’re looking at the search results, yourself, and wondering if you’re dreaming. Dedicated coverage of a fucking third-party Twitter client iteration??? At this point in history? What in fuck? I’m fairly certainly neither of us are, though: fucking Tweetbot made headlines on Engadget, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacStories, iMore, MacRumors, and others. No, it’s not 2010 again. In fact, The Verge, at least, has never given up on Tweetbot. If my long term memory had been functioning, I would have remembered noticing its spot in “12 great apps for your new iPhone in 2020:”
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Twitter is a vaguely terrible way to spend your time these days, but if you (like me) can’t tear yourself away from the social media service / entryway into hell, you’ll want Tweetbot, which actually makes using Twitter far less painful. Tweetbot shows you the tweets of the people you follow, in the order that they tweeted them. There are no ads or promoted tweets, powerful mute filters to block out unwanted noise, and (thanks to Twitter’s unfriendly API changes) no notifications to constantly ping you to come back to the app.
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Here’s to Chaim for exposing me to a perspective I never would have otherwise considered: Tweetbot’s lack of push notifications as a positive. If you’re wondering, no, this new app does not ~yet~ include any additional notification integration, and it’s not clear whether or not it’s on Tapbots future roadmap for the app, or where. As for the reality of integrating Tweetbot 6 into your current Twitter use, I stand by my argument that deleting the native Twitter app isn’t really an option if you plan to ever view your notifications on your phone. The popular assumption (I assume) if you’re still reading is that you are a “poweruser,” meaning details about my own configuration are probably irrelevant. If by chance you’ve just downloaded Tweetbot for the first time, you should take the time to disable notifications for Tweetbot entirely, but leave them on for the native Twitter app, even if you decide to banish it to your App Library. Before I began any work on this review, I made sure to swap in Tweetbot 6 where the native app had been in my dock for several years, now. I originally pushed the native app all the way to page 6, but immediately found this extreme. Instead, I put it in the bottom-right corner in my second screen, as you can see in the screenshot below (which also serves as proof, if you needed it.)
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I should also note how much my own engagement on Twitter has diminished in the past 3-5 years. Not to manifest tiny violins – in turn, my engagement on (and investment in) Mastodon has increased exponentially, and it’s of a much higher quality. I bring it up for context’s sake: I can afford to prioritize Tweetbot in my Twitter use because of how few daily notifications I get – a number which is unusual for someone who uses Twitter as much as I do. Inevitably, my own use is once again going to factor heavily in this work, as is the significance of my relationship with Twitter, generally, in my life. If you didn’t already know, I’ve met basically all of my friends since high school through Twitter. As of this moment, my private “Friends” Twitter List includes 149 accounts, and I’ve spent more than 10 years, now, reading almost every single one of their Tweets. I have been as critical of the service as anyone, but – whether or not either of us are willing to acknowledge it, wholly – I believe the intimacy of this arrangement to exceed that of any in-person relationship I have ever had. Reading the random thoughts of these people seconds or minutes after they’ve popped into their heads for all this time has been an experience unique to the format Twitter pioneered, if not to the service, itself. I have no choice but to acknowledge that I am deeply invested in not just Twitter, but Twitter’s less-than-visible Lists feature, emotionally and intellectually. When I hit my follow limit, several years ago, Lists also became my single means of acquiring new connections on the network. If it were to be removed, I would lose this ability, entirely, as well as any reasonable means of communicating with any of my friends.
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Perhaps you understand, now, why I have written and Tweeted so extensively about Lists. You should also understand just how miraculous the possibility of Tweetbot’s new future now seems, personally, unless you’re new to all of these ideas and don’t feel like reading that big olé Tweetbot 5 review of mine (which is fine.) Before I go into the history of Tweetbot, let me first share the single most telling feature in Tweetbot of Tapbots’ belief in using Lists and share some evidence of others’ present day belief in Tweetbot. Shamefully, I’ve spent several years – tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours – using Lists in Tweetbot, oblivious to its upmost Lists integration: “Use Lists as Timeline.” Had I actually bothered to look at the support docs at any point, I would have discovered this long ago, which would have almost certainly made my given year. If you use Tweetbot and Lists, for the love of Gourd, please take a look. Here’s what those docs currently say, in full:
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One long time Tweetbot feature is the ability to use any of your lists as your main timeline. To do this, all you have to do is hold down on the “Timeline” label in the navigation bar (in the timeline tab) and a menu populated with your lists will appear. Select one and that will become your current timeline. You can switch to another list or back to your main timeline any time by performing the same action.
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Even after reading this multiple times, it still was not obvious to me what it was talking about, and I was unable to find precisely zero visuals on The World Wide Web of this action taking place, so I recorded and uploaded the video embedded above. Good God, how I wish I’d been a more detail-oriented young man! I’ll be privatizing my self-punishment from here on out, though, so bear with me.
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The discourse surrounding Tapbots’ recent announcement has already reached a higher decibel count than I would have ever expected, so it’s obvious there are plenty of users who still love Tweetbot, and you already know from the beforelinked stories that The Verge has also stood firmly by it as the preferred Twitter experience. It takes a wee bit of digging, though, to discover the subtle bets on both Tweetbots and Lists from no less than Apple, Inc., itself. In the official Apple Shortcuts Gallery, a curated list entitled “Twitter Better” includes “Open Twitter Lists” at number 1. In 5th position is “Open in Tweetbot,” and “Open in Twitter App” (3rd,) is configured by default to first ask you to choose between Tweetbot and Twitter’s native app, despite its title.
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As for App Store rankings, the fact that Tweetbot 5 was forcibly removed from public listings makes it impossible to meaningfully judge recent popularity of Tweetbot on iPhone/iPad. Its MacOS-based sibling, though (called Tweetbot 3,) was the second most popular paid app on the Mac App Store as of February 6th, 2020. That’s the day I borrowed my Mom’s MacBook Pro for a short while to check up on MacOS Big Sur, when I downloaded the current version (3.5.2, if you wanted to know) of Tapbots’ desktop Twitter client and messed around with it enough to tell you that it’s as wonderful as ever. (Had I not switched back to Windows as my primary desktop OS a decade ago, I would use it every single day.)
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I suspect most active Twitter users in 2021 would be even more surprised to discover Tweetbot’s remaining, discreet hold on today’s Twitter experience than I was, assuming most of them joined more recently than myself and those I regularly interact with. For the sake of this Post, I reached out to Tapbots with an interview request about “Tweetbot’s roadmap, Apple’s requirement that [they] remove 5 from the App Store 30 days beforehand, and why [they’ve] decided to take this (risky, imo) bet on making our lives better,” though I don’t expect a reply, which is fine. They did respond to my support request regarding hardware keyboard shortcut support very quickly, saying they’ll look into it. (Without being verbose, I’ll just tell you that if a near future update to the app fixes the F and ⌘ + R shortcuts, I will shit out my whole ass.)
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The Business at Hand
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Before I dig into the controversy and hypotheticals surrounding what Tweetbot 6 might become, let’s take a moment to qualify it vs all of one’s options to interact with Twitter on iOS currently (as in, Feb 11, 2021 at 19:24.) It’s almost certainly premature to do so, but skeptical readers would note, I’m sure, that its listing on the App Store is “early release” in name only, that I have just spent money on this specific version, which should therefore render inert the normal exceptions a review would make for beta or pre-release software. If you’ve somehow come across this Post before reading anything else about Tweetbot 6 and simply want to know what is new for this version compared with 5.5.3 (its predecessor’s most recent release,) the frank answer as it stands is not much. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, here, but the YouTube videos and tech media articles I could find dealing with the subject of additions, specifically, were all either misleading, entirely wrong, or both.
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While 6 lists one more option (for a total of 9) under Themes in the Display section of the app’s Settings menu, none are substantive variations of the same themes you’re familiar with from 5. “Future Light” is just a more turquoise variant of the “Default” blue UI theme in 5. In fact, the singular change in the Display menu is the addition of “San Francisco Rounded” under the Fonts selection. Below, you can see side-by-side screenshots of the Tweet Detail view in Tweetbot 5 vs. Tweetbot 6, with the regular SFUI font on the left and rounded variant on the right (text size slider set to max on both apps.)
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To be honest, I can’t really tell the difference between the typefaces in this view, but have used the new app enough to know I prefer the latter. More topically exemplified in that image is Tweetbot 6’s new support for social cards, which the Tapbots boys have executed in a startlingly beautiful way that puts Twitter to shame and makes one feel like you’ve taken them for granted these past few years. Also in that vein and more than worthy of the same accolades is Tweetbot 6’s support for Twitter polls. They’ve never looked so good.
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Somewhat on-trend, the app also includes two new icons, but – if we’re being 100% frank – they’re a paltry, dated-looking afterthought and Tweetbot deserves (needs, even) better branding. If I were allowed a singular compulsion to impress upon its developers, I’d make them put out a public call for new art. I’m all but dying to see what the community would come up with.
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So, if you were wondering what the fuck Tapbots have been doing these past 3+ years, you should now have the basal bullet points of your answer. The Greater Truth about this gosh darned Twitter app (and why its long-respected developers are now asking you for a whole dollar a month,) though, requires a broader look.
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Slow & Steady
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For as long as I can remember, both the MacOS and iOS versions of Tweetbot have always possessed a more-or-less undefinable (perhaps Apple Development- specific) quality that’s noticeably set them apart from their direct competitors. I didn’t fully understand why they “feel” so much more “right” until I started making my way through this list of all the interviews/podcast appearances by Tapbots’ iOS code wizard, Paul Haddad, who comments in variations the same argument for a very deliberate developmental pace. The first time, with a MacWorld journalist on some steps outside WWDC 2013, I assumed he was just tossing some self-deprecation around to casualize the interview:
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Frankly, we’re slow at doing stuff.
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Yes, you are, Tapbot… From a returning user’s perspective, it’s hard to understand what in Gourd’s name they’ve been doing. I listened and read through every Tapbots interview I could find – all but one with Paul, who has through the years continued to come across as a sensitive, well-read, even wise professional developer with a healthy, professional outlook on the work of his little (relatively) weathered company and its place within the warp speed nightmare that is the mobile software industry. I suppose I was expecting to find an explanation for what I saw initially as a minimal regard for Tweetbot’s history, in contrast to 6’s announcement. I wouldn’t find it, though, because in truth, I was sure I already knew it: Twitter made it clear over a decade ago – just after they’d purchased Tweetie and slapped their own name on it – that they had no intention of competing in the client space, so third-party developers were no longer welcome.
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Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
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As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.
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I’ve spent enough time in The App Space (read: Phone Dude Hell) to expect a lot of melodrama, largely without judgement, considering how generally awful the big vendors have made the whole situation. The business legality of the story was spiked into the mainstream conversation last year by controversy encouraged by Basecamp following some pretty toxic, retaliatory correspondence from Apple regarding their plan to subsidize their new email service, HEY. Frankly, I’ve found such stories – about clashes between big software companies over mediocre, uninspiring, and sometimes just downright bad software – ridiculously exhausting and less and less interesting, lately, as I’ve realized that the most innovative, quality work I have experienced has basically all come from the tiniest teams. The most groundbreaking projects and products I’ve bothered to show and tell, here – Unichar, Zalgo Generator, Bear, Toot!, Mastonaut, Mast, etc. – were all built by individual developers except for Shiny Frog’s Bear. (Their team currently numbers 16, by my count.) Each one of those hyperlinks eventually leads to a form of my same rant: why the fuck won’t tech media talk about genuine innovation anymore.
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As I read and listened through Tweetbot’s history for this work, it occurred to me that I might be neglecting to acknowledge an age old divide in development philosophy across platforms. In the singular instance both Tweetbot devs appeared together in a podcast interview – a Founder’s Talk episode from 10 whole years ago – Paul Haddad addressed the when is it gonna be done question in a comprehensive and particularly illuminating way:
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I personally hate that question because, you know… it just will get done when it gets done… We’re definitely slow. We go over every screen, every detail over and over again until we get it right. That takes time, which is why we don’t talk about upcoming projects.
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Every screen, every detail, over and over again. This sort of deliberateness (which I have personally been working on appreciating, as of late) is actually – as I have come to realize – Tweetbot’s defining feature, especially going forward. Out of all the third-party Twitter clients to come and go, Tweetbot has been overwhelmingly singled out as the favorite because of how aligned it is with the traditional priorities of the Apple space: thoughtful, deeply-considered robustness. Pardon the cliché, but it is the only one that has always felt native – as if it could have been published by Apple, itself.
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Everything Happens So Much
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The iOS Poweruser Community has been “allowed” to drift away from these principles since iOS 12, especially, and its Pandora’s box-like integration of Siri Shortcuts (Workflow, by another name.) You may or may not be aware of the jailbreaking community’s continued efforts – I was certainly surprised to discover that the r/Jailbreak subreddit has nearly 600,000 subscribers, which outnumbers all but the eldest subreddits in the Apple sphere, including r/iOS, r/iOSBeta, and r/Shortcuts (one of the primary hubs for the Siri Shortcut tinkering community) by a huge margin. Since iOS 14’s addition of sanctioned custom widgets, Twitter and Reddit have been host to a fairly-steady stream of personalized iOS “themes” representing varying degrees of tedium/obsession/madness. One “fringe”-ish avenue I’ve explored quite thoroughly is the adjacent community of public beta tests via Testflight, which allows willing App Scrubs like myself to download beta/pre-release versions of iOS apps. As of this moment, no less than 25 of the 227 apps installed on my iPhone 12 Pro Max are Testflight beta versions (both numbers far higher than normal because of my in-progress review.)
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Essentially, it’s now easier than ever to run incredibly janky software on your iPhone or iPad, remaining well clear of a warranty violation, yet the apps that stick out most boldly in the mind (at least for myself) are unfailingly apart from any sort of experimentation. Bear, for instance – the writing app I evangelize to every iOS user and have continued to describe as “the most beautiful piece of software I have ever seen” – just allowed registered beta testers access to its in-progress “Editor 2.0” on iOS, which Shiny Frog describes as still in its “alpha” stage, yet even I have as yet been unable to trip it up whatsoever. This is the league Tweetbot pioneered, in many ways. For the record, both Tweetbot 6 and Tweetbot 5 have been demonstrably more reliable for me in the past few months than Twitter’s native app, which has been crashing multiple times per day on my devices for quite a while during regular use. I’m accustomed to crashes, so I can’t say with 100% confidence that Tweetbot has never crashed, but it certainly hasn’t since I first downloaded 6 and began this review, despite my deliberate attempts to probe its every possible function.
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Not only is Tweetbot 6 reliable as hell – it’s also stupid frugal. Currently, its App Store installation weighs in at 10.9 MB, while Twitter’s app is more than ten times heavier, at 116 MB. I realize Sizes On Disk are further from your mind than they’ve ever been in this age of outright computing gluttony and you probably couldn’t care less about my personal encounter with bandwidth famine in late 2018. In fact, I find it particularly telling that Tapbots has continued to prioritize such efficiency in their development despite operating under less financial, technical, and social pressure than ever to do so.
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Future of The Bot
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Let’s say you’ve somehow made it this far without either satisfactorily resolving your confusion about Tapbots’ decision to implement subscriptions, why they’ve decided to continue investing their time in third-party Twitter clients, whatsoever, and/or some other App Quandary, and you’re still expecting David Blue of all people to articulate some pivotal element of this story that’ll put your intellect at ease. Perhaps you’re still looking for a comprehensive picture of what using Tweetbot as one’s main Twitter client looks like in 2021. Let’s change it up a bit, toss in some fucking bullet points, and list a few fundamental truths:
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If you intend to view your Twitter notifications on iOS at any point, completely deleting the native Twitter app is not an option. (Notably, it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon, if ever.)
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“Shopping around” for a third-party Twitter client leads the at all attentive user back to Tweetbot, exclusively. With the potential exception of Fenix, all other Twitter apps on the App Store are fucking bunk and will cost you as much or more as Tweetbot 6’s new subscription.
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If you use Twitter Lists regularly, you’d be an idiot not to start your Tweetbot subscription right this fucking minute.
In the ~month since the Tweetbot 6 story first broke (a nice birthday present!,) no less than three newish Twitter features have made the news. Last week, it (apparently) committed to the worst possible user-side content monetization model concept out of the dozens that have dipped in and out of rumor for virtually the service’s entire history: “Super Follows” are slated to shade our collective experience with putrid freemium concerns. “Communities” sound in concept like a worthwhile and genuinely value-adding feature addition for actual Twitter users, but any substantial expectations of the company feel far too risky to invest in. All the while, Twitter Spaces – the audio-only Clubhouse-ish mutilation of Periscope’s corpse – has been silently bestowed upon a secret set of @s at an achingly slow pace. I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t even fully digested fucking Fleets, yet.
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What does Tweetbot 6 really offer you, Twitter user, in 2021?Freedom from all of that bullshit.
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It’s just occurred to me how much more anxious the movements of Twitter, Inc. and Jack Dorsey’s horrendous facial hair would be making me if I had not discovered an (ironically) more stable, wholesome platform to replace them, years ago. No, I will not discuss Mastodon beyond this remark, but readers invested enough to get to this point who haven’t heard of the federated, open source social network by that name would do well to consult this handy hyperlink. This privilege of choice – even if it’s completely delusional – has combined with Tapbots’ thoughtful brush up of their trustier-than-ever Tweetbot to ease my longtime Twitter-dependent ass to a nigh-miraculous degree. However, stepping back from it all, I realized Tweetbot’s new life bets even heavier on that single, defining feature which the company hardly mentions, and could conceivably restrict – maliciously or not – or remove entirely without real consequences to their business or public standing via tech media outcry. What if Twitter killed Lists? We’d all be fucked.
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Upon this realization, I shot out of bed very late in a recent evening and went straight to fucking Trello, of all places, to sift through Twitter’s public development roadmap for any official word on their fate. I really did panic for a beat upon first reading the words “Replacement for Lists functionality” before realizing the actual intention of the card’s expression in the context’s syntax, which is probably about as positive as it could possibly be: a public suggestion that Lists will continue to be supported through 2.0, at least. The card sits in the “Nesting” column (which I assume to be the lowest priority group, chronologically,) right between identical cards for Bookmarks and Direct Messages.
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The Grandma's House Method
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Writing about Tweetbot 6 has been an illuminating personal experience, if you haven’t yet caught on. The timing of its release has proved awfully convenient, just predating the aforementioned catastrophe of disjointed features that has descended harder than ever before on Twitter’s own app, leaving it an absolute mess. When I initiated the symbolic swap maneuver documented at the very beginning of this review, I assumed I was going to find Tweetbot awkward to use as my primary in the present day, but have found the opposite to be true. The social network Tweetbot draws from is barely recognizable as the same property it drew upon originally, when its Lists-loving configuration was simply one of a dozen different interpretations of how one should interact with Twitter (by far the sharpest, I think we’d agree.) Tweetbots, in contrast, is virtually identical in principle, though the unwavering bearing of its development has resulted in the true definition of refinement. The result is the most beautiful way to use Twitter in 2021, no competition, and is also crucially the singular means of interacting with it on one’s “own terms” – as long as yours align with The Lists Method, that is – in an environment that feels predictable and fundamentally at your control.
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As much as I have praised the Mastodon app Toot! as the most innovative social app available – and will continue to do so until I encounter something more original and ingenious – it’s perhaps the singular remaining cleverly playful Tweetbots feature which first opened my perspective to appreciate little Easter egg-like tricks. Indeed – even after all we’ve been through together these past ten years – you can still cycle through all of Tweetbot’s visual themes by two-finger swiping vertically in 6. Quick Account Switching is the other less-than-obvious swipe function of note, which I’ll rely on an embed stolen from Tapbots themselves to demonstrate:
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I don’t think it should ever feel natural to speak sentimentally about mobile apps, but Tweetbot is a worthy exception. If you glance over the respective comments sections of the articles and YouTube videos I’ve hyperlinked, you’ll pick up on this phenomena of legacy Twitter users chucking back some tragically nostalgic sentiments in response to the reminder surfaced by the Tweetbot 6 news of just how long we’ve been doing this. From my perspective, the other majority sentiment found there catalyzes the bizarre chronobending at play even further. I can’t believe how many folks continue to be flabbergasted by the idea of paying for software in 2021, but I’ve been literally begging Twitter to charge me a monthly fee in exchange for some greater curative capabilities for as long as I can remember. The whole of my gospel, again, is that Tweetbot 6 has personally made using Twitter a little bit better than bearable, so I have no other reasonable choice available: I’m paying the fuck up.
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See this post's corresponding GitHub Issue for related media, aggregated links, and other minutia.
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
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Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
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For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
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Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking” – a function once relegated to magazines – has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” – applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now – can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
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In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
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On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
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She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
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According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
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“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
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The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
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In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
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Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and – most controversially – the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns – if not its proposed solutions – should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
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Responsible Curation
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For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
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Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
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Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
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Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook – the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world – as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy – vague, at best.
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In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
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In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”[^1]
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You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
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In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
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Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
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In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
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Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
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The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
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Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
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I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”[^2]
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As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections – which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page – and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
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Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
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The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
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[1] While Bandcamp set out from the beginning to make it easier for artists to publish music, getting music on Spotify has always been a grueling process.
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[2] I fully intended to quote Kaitlyn Tiffany on how organizations only get tech media attention if a significant amount of capital is involved in some form, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ll certainly come back and add it if/when I do.
Purposing a disciplined effort to reflect on those tech products which have remained too fair and/or too good to catch the attention of the alarmists in us, recently.
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I've never been a big fan of holidays, nor do I think Thanksgiving should be a federal one, given its shitty, undebatably imperialist origins, but these opinions are entirely inconsequential. Regardless of how I feel, Thanksgiving will remain as pervasive as ever in the spaces around me, so I thought I'd change things up this year and actually participate in a substantial way. I did my best to travel back to a vastly less complicated self, letting all of the crud that's accumulated atop my love of computers in the past twenty years: wokeness, adtech, Obama wearing VR glasses, etc... When I thought the Native Americans were glad to see white people because they gave them guns and horses and assumed people made things because good ideas were the apex of currency. When I was able to respond to new software discoveries by screwing around aimlessly without wondering if they'd been stolen entirely from a handful of talented developers lacking in the resources and know how required to protect their ideas in the face of Microsoft's ruthless Embrace, Extend, Extinguish crusade.
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Forgive yourself for a moment and return there with me. Or perhaps somewhere else, if you need – wherever and whenever you last remember feeling genuinely enthralled with The Future of Computers. (Perhaps it was yesterday! If so, Gourd bless you. Never change.) Let's take ourselves back to kindergarten, before we knew anything about the rapid cyclical consolidation and monopolization within the technology industry that had already established itself as a trend, by then, when all we knew of the software we interacted with was contained within our most visceral reactions: I like Ask Jeeves because I like red and I like Jeeves. I vaguely remember when Google (the search engine) first broached the general awareness of my elementary school's computer lab. I'm fairly sure I even remember the sort of feelings that were elicited the first time I actually set eyes on the Google.com homepage: it looked so modern, then, compared to the rest of the web. (After two decades, it currently looks like shit.) Upon the first first query, it was immediately clear that Google was superior to any of the other search engines we'd been using.
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This sort of encounter – with a service that significantly alters one's perception of a given set of tasks – is precious in our lives as users.
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A few examples from my own using life which come to mind:
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The first time I witnessed a Skype call.
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Downloading and using the beta Evernote client on the school machines in Junior High.
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The first album I uploaded on Bandcamp.
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Discord's first public release.
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The “moment” I first put a name to Markdown. (I'd been using bits of the syntax for years before I actually read the word.)
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And most recently, exploring Notion as personal catch-all documentation software.
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The atmosphere of elation about the future on which I so often lament has been replaced by wariness for most of us – from Californian software developers to tractor-hacking farmers. Now, the conversation is saturated with CEO appearances before legal committees, corporate memo leaks, and somber interviews. Of course, I have unquestionably contributed more than my share. In fact, I wish I could be twice as critical in twice the written volume, and I believe the tech media industry to be far too culturally-embedded within Silicon Valley to be nearly critical enough. For this holiday, though, I think a respite from the negative is worthwhile and essential. I know it is for my personal sanity, at least.
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A week ago, I shared this Google Form and asked you to reflect with me on the “really great” software/services you have encountered in your using life built by “technology companies who's business ethics align toward the benefit of us users and who's products are well-priced (or free!)” As of the time of this writing, nearly 80 responses have been recorded on the form, itself, and several more via comments on Hacker News. I deeply appreciate your participation! They're far from predictable, too – I've ended up learning a lot. The very first submission was for Logos Bible Software, which has quite a fascinating history. I feel like those less-secular of us go unexposed to theological software without participants such as the human who submitted this one (thank you, human!,) and end up missing out on an entire segment of software development. Having studied The Good Book in a very much analog fashion through Lutheran school, I wonder in retrospect how software solutions could've changed the experience.
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I have never received this volume of feedback in my prompts before, nor have I ever really seen a reason to close any of them to responses, so I'm going to take a blind shot at the dartboard and plan to close the form on New Year's Day, 2021. Until then, please feel free to respond in any way you'd like and/or view all the live answers in this very bad spreadsheet full of these very good responses. (My apologies – I have absolutely no idea how to use Google Sheets.)
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ⓣⓗⓐⓝⓚⓢ
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I originally intended to go into relatively extensive detail for each of the entities on my own Most Thankful For list, but I do have to actually stop somewhere, so the commentary on these isn't remarkably insightful or educational. It is genuine, though, which is worth something, I hope.
Yes, I have tirelessly promoted my essay about Bandcamp's holiness for years now, but I have done so with good reason: here is a for-profit technology company which is building a one-of-a-kind product that invests directly in independent artists. I spent a whole summer scouring The Web looking for a single misstep or controversy and found absolutely none.
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Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
Before OBS (Open Broadcaster Software,) streaming video was an absolute mess that usually involved paying for or pirating some proprietary software. Remember Ustream? Good God...
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OBS is the streaming video equivalent of Audacity and GIMP: an extremely powerful, infinitely-malleable set of tools that allow one to take full advantage of their hardware to capture and/or stream video and audio.
Typora is an infinitely-customizable markdown editor spanning all platforms that's managed to become my primary word processor (and I'm someone who demands a lot from word processors.) It's immensely powerful in all the important ways – my use over the past two years has stress tested it with both enormous (100,000+ words) and extremely complicated (100+ images and embeds) documents. It's able to export even these chunkos to any format you can imagine instantaneously and never crashes.
Typora is a Markdown editor with left sidebar file sorting, very much like Bear (several available themes can make it look actually identical, in fact,) but without its native iCloud-based file syncing. It is cross-platform, open-source, and definitely more powerful, though.
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The Typora theming community has been especially on-point, as of late. In the screenshot embedded above, it's wearing the Slate variation of H16nning's Gitbook theme, which is by far the most beautiful configuration I've yet to see the editor in.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program – which just celebrated its 25th anniversary last week – is one of the most powerful tools in its space and perhaps the number one exemplary example of open source software to cite when explaining the concept for the first time. I have used it my entire creative life for all manner of tasks and evangelized it plenty, but it wasn't until I returned to college this Fall and took advantage of Adobe's student discounts that I had an opportunity to thoroughly explore its proprietary nemesis, Photoshop.
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What I found was indeed a very powerful piece of software, albeit as arrogant as ever in its stubborn commitment to the original keyboard shortcuts set by default and other legacy artifacts, though not one I would compare to GIMP, necessarily. This shouldn't be breaking news: as far as I know, there are billions of posts comparing the two going back to the beginning of the written word. My personal conclusion: I can accomplish much more, much faster with GIMP in every single one of my own use cases.
I was browsing some FOSS-related article aggregation page a few weeks ago when a post caught my eye: “Audacity exceeds 100 million downloads.” In reflection, I realized in that moment that perhaps no other single piece of software has been so thoroughly present in my “workflows” across all sorts of projects through the years, largely because of its God-sent Truncate Silence feature, which I have used to remove silence from audio files for as long as I've been working within the medium, basically. Every podcast episode I have ever published has passed through Audacity for this reason and others, as have voiceovers, high school punk band demo tapes, personal voice notes, and more.
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the world would actually be perfect if audacity's truncate silence feature could be autotied to video timecodes.
Until OBS came along, Audacity was where all recorded audio started for myself and my creative friends. It was Audacity that captured (and caused, technically) the death of my friend's soundcard in audio form during the recording process for Hamura, the first Drywall album, back in October of 2011.
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Fucking around in Audacity through the years has led to some halfway creative results on my part, including “SLOWED 'N' THROWED” Hilary Duff tracks and legacy Windows sounds remixes. I still use it for every episode of End User and have recently created a macro for remastering Drycast episodes. (A big feat for me and reflective of Audacity's ingenuity.) As far as I know, there are zero competitors, proprietary or not, which can replicate Audacity's particular usefulness as an audio utility.
Shortly after I discovered NeoCities last Spring, I signed up to be a Supporter for $5/month, not necessarily for the additional storage or bandwidth, but because the project immediately sounded like one I was personally obligated to uplift. Parimal Satyal's essay “Rediscovering the Small Web,” along with the design of the website which delivered it, inspired me to make another attempt at building an HTML site by hand. So far, davidblue.xyz obviously borrows heavily from his CSS, but looking at the code itself was vastly more pleasant than one would expect. Recently, during the course of writing an academic research essay, I found myself listening to interviews with its founder, Kyle Drake and reading articles from its debut in 2013, which prompted me to take even further advantage of my account.
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Last week, I moved my inactive automotive blog (dieselgoth.com) from a Writeas blog to a purely-HTML NeoCities website with disturbingly little friction. (I challenge you to spot any differences.) After discovering a backup of the original Drywall Website deep within my old files, NeoCities was the only reasonable host on which to archive it. After I'd finished uploading, I fell down what the youth call a “rabbit hole” of discovery, mesmerized by what I found on page after page of NeoCities' site browser. I did my best to save the best finds by following them within the sites dashboard and have since set up a Best of NeoCities GitHub repository with my absolute favorites among them archived thanks to wget.
Trust me when I tell you that some of the best web design, ever can be found on NeoCities. What's even better: after my deep dive, I was pleasantly surprised by strangers commenting on what I'd found! Replying in a timely, substantial, and genuine manner seems to be a hallmark of the community: my (rather verbose) question regarding the well-manneredness of publishing such an archive without permission in the community Discord I discovered just this morning was almost immediately met with encouraging replies.
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A Post you should probably expect soon: “NeoCities is 2020's Best Social Network.” Going forward, I'd like to digitize my poetry collection on NeoCities in the near future while continuing to otherwise brush back up on HTML and CSS – both of which I am also very thankful for, come to think of it.
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Thank you again for your correspondence! May your Imperialism Day be a positive experience!
The pop culture discussion of tech's greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways.
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Listen to this article read by Siri Voice 2 below...
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For those of us who've written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/“ethical” conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it's particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn't know what the movie was about. I'm not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could've done better, in that regard.
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First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell's casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man's screen, the film's depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as “ridiculous,” as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
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The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
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The Verge's official review of the film – written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey – is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge's audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media – grandmothers, retirees, etc. – who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about “privacy” – a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of “my data,” regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which – while possible – is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
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you don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses – you need only to want a better and/or different experience.
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by – and directly promotes on several occasions – one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain... hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for “solutions” to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who've been building against the adtech-funded web for ages – some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization's website nor the film's webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
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The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I'm here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you've followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn't still be reading,) you know I've advocated exhaustively for Mastodon – the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who's business model benefits both platform and artist. I'm still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn't immediately off-putting to “the average person.”
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Poke around the film's official website a bit and you'll discover a variety of heavily-branded “resources” for “taking action,” all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the “Take Action” vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall's tips for reducing your screen time, the “Data Detox Kit,” which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a “Join Now” button, and – most ironic of all – a link to download the “Ad Observer plugin,” in order to “share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable.” In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the “Online Political Transparency Project” instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
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No, it's not a scam. Using The Markup's shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here's the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves... incompetence? I'm afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world – regardless of what they believe now, or then – that these folks should not be our first call when we're searching for “solutions.” You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
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Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can't imagine you'd be correct... Under the heading “CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA,” step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
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At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both – or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
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This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
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You wouldn't announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
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Now, I've always considered the ability to change a computer's name an immense privilege. My first “real” computer's name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus' name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that's completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone's common name to that of “your favorite television character” (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so...) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it's just that it's ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down “change device name” as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
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-A notification I received while literally typing this out.
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I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an “Alternative Apps Centre” within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the “detox” seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it's hilarious that I can freely refer to “privacy” as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one' social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the “Supported by Mozilla Firefox” badges all over the website and asks me “well, what did you expect?” My answer: something “more” than promotion, I suppose.
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I suspect this is another case of don't go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to “innovate” than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I'd somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who's notifications I'd probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
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Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I'd wager.) I suspect it's long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as “Email Addiction” goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR's greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email's footer. If you're really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform's archives feature – or don't – but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you'll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
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If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it's okay to announce on Facebook that you're taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823-4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I've discovered with you.
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My own advice on “privacy:” don't worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the “privacy tools” you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you're an iOS user, you've already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step – if we're really honest with ourselves – is figuring out how you're going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
An update on all I’ve been doing instead of what I actually intended to do.
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There will always be plenth of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. – Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think“
You have a desire for indulgence in your home and family, Co-Star has just told me in my weekly, email newsletter-delivered horoscope. “Venus conjunct to natal Moon” indicates this part of yourself will transform into something else, and goes on to say something truly stirring: *the way you relate to your past is changing*. I continue to be amazed by how influential the potential of the computing hardware present in my life at any given time can be on my habits. In the two weeks I’ve had my first moderately powerful desktop computer in over ten years, I have found myself using new image & video editing software, installing local WordPress stacks, finally experimenting with Git, somehow generating 20 draft posts on a fresh experimental WordPress site, and putting my whole back into my new Notion account, including – among others – projects like my “Keyboard Shortcuts Wiki.” All the while, there has been a pull toward a more deliberate, focused sort of digital existence: reflection on Kevin McGillivray’s Word of The Year concept, digital gardening, and a few other like discoveries have culminated in a newfound, unironic use of the term “Creative Wellness” to describe a set of ideologies which I believe I should strive for in order to improve my intellectual wellbeing.
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In tandem with the fact that I have gone back to school, this has all crucially resulted in very little actual writing, which may or may not be conclusive evidence toward the classical minimalist technology argument that less capability results in more focus. On that note, remember when the Game of Thrones author appeared on Conan’s show and mentioned that he still writes exclusively using WordStar 4.0? This happening has been vaguely in the back of my mind since I encountered it during the relatively brief, basement apartment-dwelling era in Oregon when I first discovered WinWorldPC and got into running a bunch of DOS VMs, trying out every download from that blessed site which sounded even remotely interesting. Before I go on, let me just include a transcript of the entire anecdote I’m referring to here, because it’s actually much shorter than one is led to believe:
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Conan: These novels that that you write are can be over a thousand pages long. They're massive tomes and apparently you write them all on a computer, but unlike most authors, you're not worried about a computer virus. I mean an author who writes a thousand-page book their greatest fear is a virus invades and destroys a chunk of their book you don't worry about that. Why?
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Martin: No I have a secret weapon – I actually have two computers: I have the computer that I browse the internet with and that I get my email on and I do my taxes on and that computer and then I have my writing computer which is a DOS machine not connected to the Internet.
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Conan: A DOS machine. How old is this program?
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Martin: A DOS machine. You remember DOS? I use WordStar 4.0 as my word processing system.
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Conan: Did you make this computer out of wood? Did you carve it? I'm curious why you decided to stick with this old program.
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Martin: I actually like it. I mean, it does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital – if I wanted a capital, I would've typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key. Stop fixing it!
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Conan: You yell at computers a lot. What about spellcheck?
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Martin: Oh, I hate spellcheck. Especially when you have the realm of [???], it's [???].
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That’s it! A less than sixty second exchange. I did not remember just how much coverage it received on digital news sites. Embark on a Google search for “george rr martin wordstar,” and you’ll discover a ridiculously long list of brief stories including the YouTube embed. A book I’ve just recently discovered and begun – which I am extremely excited about – is Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and its introduction begins by mentioning The George Thing, which surely indicates that it is the most significant mention of word processing software in popular culture for at least a decade:
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The clip was posted to YouTube and from there embedded in innumerable tweets, Facebook feeds, and blogs. Some commenters immediately, if indulgently, branded Martin a Luddite, while others opined it was no wonder it was taking him so long to finish the whole story (or less charitably, no wonder that it all seemed so interminable). But what was it about these seemingly obscure details that people found so compelling? Part of it was no doubt the unexpected blend of novelty and nostalgia: Many fans would be old enough to remember WordStar for themselves, and the intricacy of its interface seems somehow in keeping with Martin’s quirky persona, part paternalistic grandfather and part Doctor Who character. WordStar thus becomes an accessory to his public image, like the black fisherman’s cap he is frequently photographed wearing. But it is also clearly much more than that. Martin’s passion for the program is unmistakable...
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The book, itself, was also more widely reviewed than one would expect, where it was deemed genuinely unique. I related quite hard to the preface’s first few sentences:
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Track Changes began, as many books do, with a question: What was the first novel written with a word processor? Being an English professor interested in the history of writing as well as computers, I thought it was the sort of thing I should know, but I didn’t.
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Discovering the volume was a result of a personal determination in the last week to give in to my latent obsession with word processing/text editing software, which also led to my creating a Notion table of every word processor I’ve ever heard of. Thanks to my desktop PC acquisition, found myself virtual machining a bit again, though some of the programs I’m particularly interested in trying have inexplicitly disappeared from my personal library and been removed from WinWorldPC, probably due to (mostly absurd) copyright claims. Most versions of WordStar are still available, though, and I’ll confess I still have a desire to learn how to use its cult keyboard shortcuts, as evangelized by Robert J. Sawyer in an essayalso discussed in Track Changes, which specifically shits on WordPerfect more explicitly than I remembered. I keep returning to the idea that I should try writing the stuff I normally work on – like this post, for instance – in these software, but file transfer is a bigger and bigger obstacle the older the OS you’re running: VirutalBox’s “Guest Additions” – which allow clipboard sharing/shared folders/other interoperative network functions – are not compatible with DOS or any Windows editions before 4.0. There are workarounds, but I haven’t found any reasonably within my current abilities.
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Truthfully, though, emulating twenty-year-old software seems a bit unnecessary when contrasted with the fact that Markdown, Typora, and Writeas were supposed to be my saviors from distracted writing. A compulsion to comment on a recent note-taking app comparison published in The Information reminded me that I still haven’t written an in-depth review of Typora, which I plan to prioritize in the near future, especially since it may finally be officially releasing, according to recent activity on Twitter.
Another result of my reintroduction to academia is that I can now afford a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to student discounts. This has been life-changing in a manner which I should probably be a bit ashamed of, but once the desire to make full use of my subscription (by trying every single program it licenses) subsides, I really do intend to become proficient with InDesign – a learning experience which I will surely at least attempt to thoroughly document, here.
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Digital Gardening
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I think it was Tom Critchlow’s Digital Gardening blogchain that first exposed me to the term and his static site-generated wiki project that introduced me to the concept of personal wikis, not so long ago, though the desire to organize and/or archive personally-relevant information through the format has actually been rattling around my head for the better part of a decade. When I discovered that one could install MediaWiki – the platform Wikipedia, itself is built on – I created the shortlived Drywall Wiki, once upon a time. Since I last wrote you, I also purchased the extratone.wiki domain and played around once again with the platform. Typora even offers exports in MediaWiki’s bizarre proprietary text format! For better or worse, though, I don’t see anything becoming of the project for the moment I suppose it feels like somewhat of a risk, investing a lot of time I probably shouldn’t have into documenting all of my Twitter jokes. For the moment, I think my Notion account will have to serve as my personal wiki.
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The most inciteful argument I’ve read among the Digital Gardens discourse revolves around value as it is created within our personal online writing spaces. Two of the many infinitely-quotable essays within this space: Mike Caulfield’s “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral” and “Stock and flow” from Snarkmarket. The former references Vannevar Bush’s infamous “As We May Think” essay (which I’ve finally gotten around to finishing and its description of a “memex,” which many cite as a disturbingly-apt prediction of the World Wide Web. Caulfield, however, disagrees:
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So most people say this is the original vision of the web. And certainly it was the inspiration of those pioneers of hypertext. But in reality it doesn’t predict the web at all . Not at all. The web works very little like this. It’s weird, because in our minds the web still works like this, but it’s a fiction.
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Reading back from a lens including this commentary, I immediately understood. The memex concept is far more intimate than the web has become (or perhaps ever was – I wouldn’t know.) “Stock and flow” defines creative value in two disparate types of media:
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Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
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Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
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To be honest, I personally cannot imagine undertaking the task of explaining this differentiation to anyone in my own life, but if the reactionary movement within The Web back to a focus on valuable content is, indeed, underway, perhaps such conversations are bound to shortly become more and more natural. For my part, I have attempted setting up an experimental site on Github Pages using Jekyll in the past few days with partial success: as soon as I tried to specify a custom theme, I apparently broke it, at which point I realized that I had homework to do. As much as I hate to admit it, Kev Quirk’s posts regarding WordPress’ practical simplicity over SSGs earlier this monthrings somewhat true. As things currently stand, WordPress’ permeability throughout The Web is an advantage for those who just want to publish something as simply as possible. My counterargument to both Kev and myself: Writeas is a wonderful compromise in terms of substance and image among one’s super e-enabled, Mullenweg-disgusted peers. It’s very much pure Markdown, but it’s far more accessible, cross-platform, than SSGs due to its shear simplicity.
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One component which Digital Gardening would seem to offer others that I have never particularly struggled with is the freedom to write whatever I feel like writing. If anything, I have struggled in the opposite sense, existing in a state completely unhindered by consideration of the value my work may or may not offer anyone else. Perhaps the most substantial addition I’m capable of making to the Digital Gardens conversation, then, is best quoted from the first chapter of the advice book I have finally begun writing for young men, For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss:
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If there is one idea of mine you ever engage with – in this book or otherwise – it is best distilled in this single sentence: you do not *actually* want to attain a state of true apathy, trust me. It is extremely unhealthy, miserable, and alienating. I have existed for an excruciatingly long time trapped in a state of being truly unable to care about anything in the face of a great, varying effort to do so. It is very far from the immunity imbued in terms like carefree – in reality, it is manifested in extreme depression. It is less immunity than it is distance from an essential part of life.
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In terms of one’s blogging, I am glad for those who will/have/are finding a new freedom of expression, but hold this as a serious caution regarding the other extreme. Should you ever approach it, remember that considering one’s audience – as academics love to prioritize – really is important, eventually.
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Curation
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At this point, I’ve used a channel in Extratone’s Discord as my ongoing reading list for several years essentially without change. Earlier this month, though, I discovered Raindrop – a bookmarking service with public collections that (so fars) feels much more aligned with my own needs than Pocket – and pretty much immediately signed up to begin paying for it and set up a bot to crosspost from my new Reading List collection, there to the same Discord channel via the collection’s RSS feed. Raindrop’s browser extension – along with Notion’s, come to mention it – is actually usable in day-to-day browsing. As much as I love Reading.am, the prospect of its longevity worries me considering the most recent post in its development blog dates to 2016. Writing a dedicated “Little Review” of Raindrop is on my (ever-lengthening) todo list, but at the moment, I would especially emphasize my Digital Magazine Collection, which is the result of thousands of hours of web exploration and genuinely worth significant value for most anyone, I think.
With the combination of my public Notion workspaces and public Raindrop collections, I hope to make my curatorial endeavors both more accessibly beautiful and more intimately available. In terms of a dedicated discussion of Notion’s interworkings and culture, I think I have quite a bit more exploring to experience before I’m sufficiently qualified, though my notes are already quite extensive (and publicly accessible, thanks to… Notion!) In general, I continue to be astounded by the amount of tools/services/applications I have not yet heard of, despite how long I have labored to become an authority on Writing Tools.
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Workflow
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In my endeavor to more intentionally design my workspace – to actually dedicate a space for working, originally – I originally very much intended to set up dual displays for my desktop, but the desk I settled for (an old family piece from the early 1900s?) does not have enough surface area to position two displays, regardless of how thin they’ve become since I last had one. Combined with a limited budget and a concern that two displays might actually result in further distraction instead of less, I instead went for a single, 27” LED affair. I’ve also been making full use of Windows 10’s desktop switching feature and have found it surprisingly easy to make a habit, especially thanks to the Ctrl+Win+Lateral Arrow Keys keyboard shortcuts.
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On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I’ve by now worked out a personally-optimized remap (thanks to the keyboard manager tool included with PowerToys, about which I have far too much to say in some future post.) I had a conversation with a few Mastodon friends two weeks ago convincing me that my methodology of forcing myself to learn shortcuts by integrating a cheat sheet into my desktop backgrounds may actually be an original idea and useful to other users.
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In terms of writing spaces, I have actually been composing the less serious stuff I’ve been writing within WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, which is not an admission I would’ve expected to be making, just a year ago. A dedicated post about this, too, is fucking coming, but suffice it to say that with a fairly-substantial PC and a better hosting provider (DreamHost over GoDaddy, in this case,) composition has become far far smoother – improving enough to make it a viable space within which to pound away original stuff for the first time. Writing essays for academia has encouraged my return to Microsoft Word, once again, on which I’ll blame the fact that I am currently composing this very bit in The Old Bitch. A desire to once again hack together a set of personalized Word templates has led to the birth of two such files which I am proud enough to share on my Notion drive. Eventually, I would also like to take the time to completely redesign the “Ribbon” in Word – something which I’ve literally never seen anyone else do. (I spent a substantial amount of time trying to find a library for MS Office customization files, to no avail, though you can find my own customization file as it stands on the same Notion page linked just now. Let me know if you’re able to successfully import it.)
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A confession of vanity: I suspect the only reason I haven’t yet stopped composing within WordPress is that I figured out how to change the typeface to Adobe Caslon (across both the editor and the front-facing site, naturally,) thanks to my newfound access to Adobe Typekit. Yes, apparently I really am that shallow. For those Office 365 users among you, I highly suggest you look up how to enable the Classic Office sound theme. Unlike Make Use Of, I find them both adorable and genuinely useful as auditory feedback. You may also be interested in my discovery of some fairly-Woke additions to Word’s autocorrect options and the subsequent bitchy controversy their introduction spawned.
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The Read-It Website
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If you know me at all, the following admission probably seems unbelievable: I have been using Reddit. I created a new subreddit for Extratone – which I do not necessarily expect to be populated any time soon – and r/SoftwareHistory after discovering that it didn’t yet exist, which I definitely do not expect you to populate, but would be delighted if you did. As with seemingly everything else I’ve covered, I also intend to write about how Reddit’s recent feature additions and redesign may actually make it a redeemable space on The Web, which should prove interesting. Clearly, I have become more than willing to accept the moniker of Software Historian whenever/if ever my authority achieves the appropriate volume to deserve to be christened so.
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Obviously, none of the developments I’ve shared in this post indicate any improvement in my productive output, but I hope to learn soon how to settle into a fairly-consistent (and hopefully much more original) writing process.
It is my privilege and my curse to write about every new major iteration to Apple’s mobile operating system, though I skipped iOS 13 last year, which was largely dominated by Dark Mode, the iPad OS fork, and Memoji – which I could care less about, honestly – and didn’t warrant my investment in a Full Post, I felt. The Photos app improvements were very welcome, but I’d departed from iCloud as my primary storage service, so I didn’t have anything relevant to say. iOS 14 is also mostly irrelevant to my own personal use, but represents a more abstract shift in design philosophy that I thought was worth commenting on. For myself, everything about it adds anxiety, beginning with the launch, itself, at Apple’s WWDC 2020, which I watched, live, and Tweeted extensively about.
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I do not want to live on the Memoji planet.
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My technology writing over the years has largely centered around my awe and confusion regarding what I've perceived as a divergent path from the future I once imagined. My closest guess as to this divergence's origin is the announcement of iOS7, with Apple's abandonment of skeuomorphic design in favor of an entirely new, “flatter” UX visual language, which I actually found quite jarring. In retrospect, though, of course I'm glad they did so. I thought this was an importat preface to any thoughts I have about today's WWDC Keynote – they will probably seem idiotic in a year or so (they might to you already.)
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Thanks to The Big Beer Virus, this was Apple's first pre-recorded WWDC presentation (though the word “live” continued to be used on several occasions,) which made it especially surreal. During the wait for the Keynote to “go live,” the stream was occupied by an animated Earth from orbit. As the clock rolled over the hour's top, AURORA's “Daydreamer” faded in and we began to grow closer to this Earth, gradually revealing that it was covered with millions of floating memoji in various states behind their animated MacBooks. Like much of the event to follow, this scene became more and more anxiety-inducing as we grew closer to the mob (keep in mind that I've never really found memoji cute, unlike plenty of folks.) Eventually, we changed pitch dramatically and plunged through a hole in the clouds straight toward the incenter of the spaceship at Apple Park, through the door, down the staircase, and into a completely empty – but fully lit – Steve Jobs theatre, where Tim Cook emerged on stage and almost immediately began to address racism.
This disorganization of Craig Federighi's Homescreen shown in the presentation exemplifies the entire aura of this update: it’s complicated. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn receives this new complication positively in an excellent essay dedicated to the topic, divided into Widgets on The Home Screen, Jiggle Mode and Editing Pages, the App Library, and App Clips. (Yes, in many ways, linking to the essay makes this post redundant.)
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That's what I wrote about WWDC. iOS 14 officially released five days ago, now, and folks are already showcasing some crazy homescreen modifications on Twitter in #ios14homescreen. I would go into detail, but I'm honestly not all that curious about the process, which is unusual. I hope more than anything that I am not loosing my curiosity or playfulness regarding iOS which not so long ago propelled an exuberant exploration of Shortcuts' capabilities during their early days as an integrated Apple property with the release of iOS 12.
Basically, I'm not going to do the full bit, this year, but I'd like to address some of the notes I did take throughout the past few months of the developer beta. Notably, there is simply far less to iOS 14 that's relevant to my life, personally, than any other release I remember, but that's okay. It's just a wee bit more difficult to motivate myself to talk about it. If there's one definite statement to be made about this release, it's that it is additive rather than transformative. As Dieter Bohn so elequently put it for The Verge:
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For the iPhone, the overarching theme is that they're finally letting it get complicated. The home screen starts simple, but it can be complex if you want it to and Apple's also finally putting different elements on top of other elements so you can see Siri on top of your current screen instead of taking over the whole screen.
Yes, I do find the title of that article quite ironic considering what I just articulated to you.
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The title of his penultimate review, additionally, includes the summation “Apple is finally lettting the iPhone homescreen get complicated.” Yes... Complexity. I'll be honest: I've actually had the opportunity to play around quite a bit with Android 11 thanks to Android Studio on my PCs, and I found it tremendously underwhelming as an alternative. On a virtual Pixel 3, the experience was functionally no more than a fucking material design-tasting, slightly varied execution of a smartphone operating system in comparison. I should disclaim, though, that these weeks with early iOS widget implementation – which represents quite a hefty chunk of this release's significance, I think we can all agree – have led me to the conclusion that I personally do not believe in widgets. Or at least – I do not have the usership vocabulary to even begin integrating them into my own handset-using life.[efn_note]I'd elaborate but honestly, who cares, really?[/efn_note]
App Clips: Oh boy... I'm so physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted. Just gonna say no to that one.
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Add widgets to the home screen: I'm going to assume it's Android users who've stigmatised dynamic home screen widgets as a desirable outlet of development resources. I simply cannot fathom any bit of data which would be truly be constructively consumed there, as opposed to unlocking the device and navigating to whatever application it originated from. Perhaps I'm just old and slow.
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Send apps to the App Library: Directly related, actually. Still considering how I assume most folks actually navigate to applications that have been in folders or in secondary+ homescreens to date – that is, dragging down and typing a handful of characters into Spotlight search – I'm not sure an alphabetized listing of all apps is really that useful. I know I'm not alone on this one: iJustine expressed an identical assumption on an episode of her podcast, Same Brain.
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Hide some of your home screens: (I repeat the exact same argument.)
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Watch videos with picture-in-picture mode: Once again, I could definitely be showing my age, but what really constitues watching when you're talking about a fractional segment of a ~6 inch display? You may as well just be listening to the audio, right?
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Pin conversations in Messages: I'm afraid the text conversation pinning feature doesn't really apply to someone like myself, who literally never messages anyone but my girlfriend and my mom. All pinning the conversations accomplishes for me is the obfuscation of the handy in-line timestamp found in the normal list view.
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Mention your contacts in Messages: Jesus... And we're still using fucking SMS?
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Add more variety to your memojis: I still have not figured out how to actually use memojies, practically, so...
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Get suggested smart home automations: I'm sorry... What did you say? I'm not familiar with those words.
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Get to bed on time: Clarification: “iOS 14 works with watchOS 7 (or on its own) to help you get to sleep at the right time each night, with reminders and Do Not Disturb options.” If you were truly at all interested in not being disturbed or getting lots of sleep, you wouldn't have spent $300 on a machine to strap to your wrist who's primary function is to disturb you!
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Translate websites in Safari: Christ... Really? How have I not encountered an issue with this before?
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Search inside apps: There we go! The first item on this list that suggests anyone at Apple actually uses iOS!
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Get more detailed weather forecasts: Dark Sky acquision... All this one does is remind me that Apple's self-restraint could breach at any time and essentially the only competent mobile weather app ever devised could die or be molested into irrelevance.
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Use your iPhone as a translator: Well... Yeah... Anything that convenienctly allows me to reduce dependence on Google, I guess!
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Get more facts from Siri: ...lol
-“Apple says Siri knows more facts than ever before, though it hasn’t offered up any specific examples of something it knows in iOS 14 that it didn’t know in iOS 13—you’ll have to try and test it out yourself. According to Apple, Siri now knows 20 times the number of facts that it did three years ago, and we haven’t been able to catch it out with anything so far.”
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Get cycling directions in Apple Maps: No! Cut that out!
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Plan a journey in an electric vehicle: I'm not joking when I suggest that this fits perfectly into iOS 14's Anxiety Mode Enchancement theme: all this really means is We've added the new Apple Range Anxiety app!
Yes, there are examples of genuine progress. The Guides feature in Maps (seen above) probably could/should have been added a long time ago, but at least Apple executed it quite elegantly. I'm could've sworn sharing your ETA has been possible from within Maps since like... iOS 7 or something, but perhaps I was thinking of Waze. Wallpapers for CarPlay are one of those features that didn’t occur to me to want, but I did/do. Also – though my personal experience with CarPlay has been limited – I can definitely imagine more layout options (“Horizontal status bar”) will be useful in fringe use cases.
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And that's it! All of my notes have now been crossed off! Now I can finally forget I ever spent time thinking about iOS this year... Gourd Bless.
An autobiographical overview of my personal history with technology and its contributions to my current perspective.
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Incalculable odds were against my arrival in this world happening in early 1994, positioning my life within a timeline that would allow me to bridge my two species’ most significant millenniums in the first grade as a student in the first class at Fairview Elementary school to receive curriculum-mandated exposure to brand-new Windows 98 PCs in its brand-new, fluorescent-lit computer lab in the center core of its 50-year-old rectangular brick structure. The lab also meant that ours was the first Fairview class to have the available relief of air conditioning during the school day. It’s unlikely that I would be home sick and watching the last television ever allowed in my mother’s living room as the second plane hit.
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My peers and I would form a picogeneration without a name (perhaps we should be called the 9/11ers) — 91s and 92s wouldn’t have regular access to public school machines until they’d eclipsed the true prime of their development, and were just that much further along, mentally, to being able to comprehend the huge and terrifying concepts of 1) New York and 2) burning alive — while 98s like my niece were spared any such comprehension of death at all, yet now have to face the existentially future-sundering, darkly-mirrored reality of the Trump Presidency during the most critically uncertain period in the last stage of their brain’s transition to adulthood.
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If there is truth in the cross-cultural supposition that souls have some sort of choice, pre-conception, over when they’re born, my own must have either cleaned out the house, or lost horrible, though I suspect I’ll never be able to confidently wager either way. This question of how lucky or unlucky am I to be alive right now is one which I find most fascinating — not just within myself, but within others my age. I declare us a generation largely because of my experiences under the assumption that my mid-Missouri upbringing represents the ultimate average in the American experiences of the time as the area has been a reliable sample of the clearest average of the country’s cultural, political, and economic life. Technically, it was quite unlikely that I arrive here as a new human being instead of China or India, and what if that, too was my choice?
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Though less so, it was still against chance that I would be born to parents who would divorce very quickly after my birth, before my mind was able to form any tangible long-term memories, sparing me whatever pain could’ve resulted from their greater togetherness later nullified in front of me. I could’ve chosen them as well for the variety of experiences their situation would allow me as I grew up between my father’s 800-acre farm and my mother’s suburban house in Columbia, the college town an hour’s drive south. I write about my experiences now — so young — because I’ve likely already born witness to more extraordinary changes in human development than your parents, their parents, and their parents’ parents combined. At 24, my life has already spanned by far the most profound and expedited informational renaissance in human history — greater progress was made between the day I first rode a bicycle and the one on which I took my driver’s test than in thousands of years before it.
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The sum of my father’s ordeals between 1950 and 1974 — from his birth until the age I am now — would indeed include watching a man set foot on a spatial body other than Earth for the first time, but would be mostly defined by work on the family’s soybean, corn, and wheat farms in central Illinois, driving carbureted tractors pulling cultivating equipment of the same basic design and function as had been pulled by horses, mules, and oxen for hundreds of years, and other implements — like the mechanical multi-row planter — that were new technology at the beginning of the century. For neighbors, he would walk behind the path of a square hay baler next to a moving flatbed trailer, upon which he would throw the 70–100 lb. rectangles of dead compacted grass by their twine through thick cowhide gloves. All of this I would get to experience in the next century on his farm, using the exact same equipment.
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At home, he would watch NBC, ABC, and CBS on a CRT TV, as I would for several years until wireless television was legally transitioned to digital statewide in the summer of 2009. As an adolescent, he would form a business with friends cleaning out old abandoned barns in exchange for the rights of ownership to any finds inside, which led to his discovery of a hay-preserved 1929 Buick Sedan containing hand-written records of its every service. This car would change hands into his Uncle’s care as he went off to school in Champaign, married in Georgia, and eventually settled on the flat clay soil of the farm where I grew up, right on the border between Audrain and Monroe counties, Missouri. I was about 10 when we drove back to the family hub with a trailer in tow to collect the car from my Great Uncle, to my manic excitement.
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Up until my mid-teens, my life was defined by my extreme reverence for historic cars, airplanes, tractors, and watercraft, and the time I spent operating, maintaining, restoring, or simply studying the assortment of these which I was allowed — often because of extraordinary circumstances — would form the component of my psychology which seeks to experience different cultures, ideas, and eras through the medium of engineering and design and relies on these to understand them. Like my father in his youth, I would learn to clean water out of a carburetor after the Oliver 88 had sat silent for too long, and I would piss in a chamber pot to avoid waking up my Grandfather by walking down creaking attic stairs and turning the lights on. I would learn how to shoot and drive before 10-years-old, and I would have the freedom to do both as I pleased on the miles of gravel roads that ran around home.
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Though my stepfather bought me a PC of my own just as my first-grade computer class was ending, I could not conceive of a reason to occupy the dial-up line and block his incoming calls or faxes, so my use of the machine was limited to sparse writing and aggravating attempts to run Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 at approximately one frame per second on a 300MHz single-core Pentium II CPU. Though I was extremely fortunate compared to most middle-class kids my age at the time to have my own computer in my room, my relationship with it was not significant or particularly involved. I would leave it powered down for weeks at a time until my last two grades at Fairview, when homework assignments began to require it.
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Perhaps the greatest gap between my mostly-suburbanite classmates and I was an exposure to Japanese entertainment and video games. I was once disallowed from a lunch table because I’d never heard of Pokémon or Luigi, but I did have a Sony Playstation at home on which I occasionally loaded A Bug’s Life to wander around its first level, perhaps in basal awe at the idea of manipulating what I saw on a screen in realtime. In self-imposed isolation from children my age, I wouldn’t develop any need to be socially competitive with video games as many of my peers would to carry with them into adulthood. I thought my interests in mechanical engineering to be above all of them, so I spent my time alone with heavy picturebooks on 20th century cars, tractors, and airplanes.
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On the farm, my consistently agriculturally-proactive father was one of the first to have satellite internet for farm futures and weather reports on a pre-GUI machine which I don’t remember. As I was becoming computer literate in school, he would become extremely frustrated with the Windows XP-running machine he’d bought from a one-man, one-room computer shop in Centralia, and I would often solve some problem with bloatware or the goddamned printer. He would also subscribe to and install a first-generation DirectTV receiver, which had the first on-screen program guide I’d ever seen. In the evenings, I would watch hours of Modern Marvels on The History Channel, which presented the history, abstract functional theory, and implementation of a particular technology, both past and future. This single program — which has aired nearly 700 episodes since 1995 — is probably responsible for the majority of my at least rudimentary general knowledge in a variety of historic and “future” technological schools, and my curiosity about culture’s relationship with innovation.
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Though my father’s interests differed significantly from mine — he thought more about growing and raising than of the tools one used to do it — he would indulge my many questions about how engines, hydraulics, and electrical systems worked, and indulged my curiosity by exposing me to the hidden communities of the most elderly, most obscure historic machinery enthusiasts like those of the Midwest Old Threshers Reunion in Mount Pleasant, Iowa — the Concours d’Elegance for antique tractor and reciprocating engine collectors. It was a similar event closer to home where I first operated a steam tractor — great, field-going locomotive-like vehicles that supplanted a need for horsepower in the late-1800s up until the Great Depression which chug, whistle, and puff along just like rail locomotives with a huge, gritty, iron steering wheel. As I recall, I was also given the opportunity to drive an unrestored Model T truck around the grounds that day — the knowledge from which I gained I cannot imagine being of much use ever again.
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I was proud to the point of arrogance of my technical knowledge and experience in all the different things I had driven and operated, which my schoolmates were in no position to understand. I was elitist and anti-social about this as late as 8th grade, when I had just moved in to stay with my mother, who bought me a first generation iPhone which I proudly wore in a leather belt holster to Junior High. It would represent a shift in my fascination from very old technology toward the present and future.
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I started talking online with a friend I’d first met years before at Fairview, who spent most of his time fiddling with his first-generation MacBook Pro. He originally exposed me to gadget bloggers on YouTube like Mark Watson and Jon Rettinger (both of whom are still full-time tech personalities.) My mom bought me a 13-inch aluminum-bodied MacBook (which would be sold as MacBook Pro after a single year,) and my lifestyle radically shifted inside my room, my computer, and my Xbox 360. My friend and I would both obsess together over software, design, and gadget – experimenting with our own tech YouTube channels until high school, where I would be adopted by a new friend group who would finally socialize me.
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Recently, I have written about the contrasts and discrepancies of consumer technology development as its progress has disconnected from the upward linear trajectory in use, quality, and genuine innovation for the End User in a departure which has been especially visible from my perspective as an academically-untrained, but intensely demanding user in the past five years. When hardware was still the industry focus before ~2012, there was a tremendous amount of optimism among journalists and enthusiasts because each successive generation of devices had added more tangible capabilities. Publications like Gizmodo and Engadget made a fortune publishing reviews and comparison tests of hardware offerings across every segment of tech, and the discourse they generated had a noticeable influence on design. I remember this time well because it accented my last few years before adulthood, when I had plenty of spare time, energy, and curiosity to keep up.
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The general consumer technology narrative since Steve Jobs’ death has become increasingly more about the companies who design and sell hardware and software than about how and why their consumers actually use them, and the result has been a series of new product segments with little defensible place in my own linear timeline of innovation, especially where productivity is involved. Augmented and Virtual Reality are quite explicitly escapist industries, yet to fill any significant need which was before unfilled. The same could be argued about voice assistants and smartwatches — neither of which remove obstacles in most users’ day-to-day lives but instead contribute to the array of tasks and devices which already seek their attention.
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Of course, there are defensibly sound business incentives behind the industry’s new, fragmented direction, but I would also argue that there are those, too, for genuinely revisiting both what we should be doing and what we should be seeking to learn to do with technology. In a more abstract sense, I have written about whether or not we should want to be living in this particular now, and how the way we feel about the future should inform what we do in the present.
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I cannot help but observe human progress from a perspective of powerlessness, acute alienation, and amused awe, which has already lent to a significant quantity of occasionally original thoughts as I watch, having witnessed an odd diversity of American life and culture. I’ve published them to entertain and to demonstrate a few methods of reflection on what it is you really want from the times you are living.
What I have long predicted is now coming to pass: Google believes it should assume control.
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Out of all the technology companies that have made my knees knock and my voice hoarse and my Tweets manic as a technoheretic in the past several years, Jumbo Google would easily take home the winning trophy for Dystopian of the Millennium. I have been rehearsing an especially dear pet prophecy of mine, unsolicited, to family, friends, and podcast guests since 2011 in which I end up arguing quite convincingly that Google is a dead ringer for the 16th-century Vatican: an inherently self-isolating organization with an absolute monopoly yielding gargantuan levels of essentially passive income from a service which nearly everybody transacts with, but only Google understands (and is therefore assumed to be its only possible provider,) which inevitably develops such a distance from the rest of the populace and their way of life (in tandem with total notoriety and celebrity among them all) not intentionally out of malice, but from the delusion of mythically-bestowed philanthropic duty that is borned of and compounded by this economic and cultural isolation in a perpetual accumulation of power and wealth that radicalizes the monopolizers — the majority already highly predisposed to zeal as they would’ve needed to be in order to find themselves in this singular, universally powerful position over every other class — and leaves their egocentric minds to wander exempt from all criticism save for that of fellow radicalized monopolizers, who together begin to feel more and more comfortable wondering aloud about themselves in increasingly fantastic presumptions: what if all of this was bestowed upon us because we are superior to them? What if it is ourdivine responsibilityas superior beings to take charge and shepherd the common people as our sheep — for they cannot possibly know as well as we what is truly best for them?
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You see it, right? And you can feel a very specific flavor of terror that is both awed by the scale of the circumstances created by so few human minds and sincerely amused by the absoluteness of your own inability to alter them in any way. Perhaps you even recognize this taste as one perfected by Christianity’s ancient advertising business, but Google knows so much about you that it’s rumored to’ve been selling user data to the Judeochristian God for some time now at a 10% discount, and so we extrapolate and anticipate, yes?
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Of course, it’s admittedly satisfying for me to deliver you to this godfearing place in the most perverse look what I saw first that you didn’t see because you’re just not as bright but lucky for you, I’m so fucking generous with my wisdom sort of thinking around which the entire personas and livelihoods of fringe movement fanatics are built upon, but this is my one thing, okay? I’ve been waiting years for the right time to formally argue this theory in depth, and — thanks to this year’s public spotlight finally pivoting on the giants who’ve been silently swallowing their competition and relentlessly forcing their already ridiculous margins higher and higher in relative obscurity for decades, the time has come, indeed. The common people’s trust in Google had a godawful week.
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Don’t Be Evil
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On Monday, Gizmodo reported that twelve frustrated Google employees were quitting the company in protest of their work assisting the Department of Defense to “implement machine learning to classify images gathered by drones” for the detail fleeting Project Maven, despite some 4000 employee signatures on a letter addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai requesting (in full) that he “cancel this project immediately,” and “draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology,” citing the infamous “Don’t Be Evil” motto, which Google then proceeded to remove from its code of conduct for the first time in 18 years the day after the New York Times article went to press, on April 5th.
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On initial approach to the abstract of this story, from the ass to our thoughts arrives an easy narrative of a Silicon Valley mutiny comprised of twelve brave, conscientious souls who’ve been eaten up inside by their complicity in the filthy deals made by their power-obsessed CEO over scotch and cigars in a dark D.C. study — kept awake for months by the sound of his puffing cackles at satellite images of dead toddlers in a bombed-out street.
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Ah ha, we say. That man is no good, and he just wouldn’t listen! They knew they didn’t have a choice… They only did what they had to do…
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The reality of internal disagreements at Google, though, manages to be even more theatrical. The sheer volume of correspondence must surely be beyond anything capable of the enduser’s imagination, so let’s phone a friend: my favorite peek into the day-to-days of inter-Google existence is an old blog post by Benjamin Tilly on his first month at the company in which he was compelled almost immediately to describe in great detail how best to “deal with a lot of email in gmail” at peak efficiency using shortcuts and labels.
-“As you get email, you need to be aggressive about deciding what you need to see, versus what is context specific.”
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Now we have a bit better idea of the aggressive emailing that was a sure constant on a normal workday at Google in 2010, so it must’ve been deafening after 8 years of Gmail development as 4000 employees no doubt vented, debated, and decided to organize last month, though without making much headway because the leadership’s response was apparently “complicated by the fact that Google claims it is only providing open-source software to Project Maven,” this new knowledge having significant effect on our mind’s image of Sundar Pichai’s activities in Washington: he is now swapping seats with a frustrated Colin Powell in order to install OpenOffice onto his desktop from a flash drive, and we recall that Google’s Googleplex headquarters resembles nowhere in modern life more than a brand new playground built in a design language borrowing heavily from Spy Kids. And though these Twelve disciples are unnamed for the moment, a few of them could immediately land book deals by going public, and every single one would always have by default not only the badge of “I landed a job at Google,” (which is really to say I have hit Life’s maximum level cap,) but “I worked at Google for a while, but ended up quitting to do something else,” which is guaranteed to make you the most interesting, intellectually superior person present in whatever crowd for the rest of your life. The ultra-cool Sarah Cooper quit Google to become a comedian and even got to talk to Kara Swisher!
-I won’t pretend to understand big tech’s diminutive bastardization of prestige, but “more than 90 academics” jumping to publish an open letter (adjacent to a huge DONATE: Support the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots button) in which they “write in solidarity with the 3100+ Google employees” who’s terrible boss decided to help some lackeys in the Pentagon set up their email and didn’t text back for a whole hour doesn’t sound 100% sincere. Notably, I don’t know how or why the fuck 90 people would go about collaborating on a single document, but if it really was managed, they definitely used Google Docs…
-At one point, it was fun to think about the history of the friendly side-scroller-playing garage ghouls and dorm dorks who gave cooky, wacko names to their dot com startups in parody and defiance of the lame-ass surname anagrams on the buildings of their established competitors, but those who’ve stuck around have only done so by becoming expert at SUCKING UP EVERYTHING around them, and it pisses me off every day how worried I am that my species will finally be done in by a company with a name like Yahoo! and be known only to a bunch of adolescent interdimensional silicon blobs 30 million years in the future as that bipedal race who remained dignified until the last 0.01% of their reign on Earth, when in way less than a single generation, they all just wentFUCKING INSANEand blew themselves up because they suddenly hated all sense.
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“Google” is perhaps the worst of these to have to shout in fear and/or anger in your last moments as it sounds in American English like you’ve startled your subject with a ticklish pinch followed so immediately by an esophagus-busting chokehold that the two events appear simultaneous, and in real English English, it almost always sounds like a parent speaking of a character on a pre-K children’s television programme whom they find quite foul and upsetting, but will manage to refrain from expressing so otherwise because they know that Teletubbies shit is the most quickly forgotten stage of television viewership. It’s fascinating how exclusive the word “Google” is to American English because in everything else it really is complete nonsense, but lets halt all etymological discussions right now because we’ve only now just finished with Monday.
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The Soul Ledger
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On Thursday, all of my Google experiences, suppositions, and soul-detaching screenshots were usurped when a thoroughly alarming internal company video called The Selfish Ledger was leaked to The Verge, which I watched once then and do not want to watch again for the sake of this piece, but I will. Though the big V has been disappointingly timid for years about editorializing — when tech journalism desperately needs some confident, informed opinion more than ever — Vlad Savov’s accompanying article should be read in its entirety, to which I can add my own terror where he perhaps could not.
-The production style is technically identical to that of the very popular thinkpiece-esque, motion-graphics-paired-with-obligatory-sharpie illustrated videos which you find playing at max volume on your mom’s iPad from where she’s fallen asleep on the couch at 9PM, but the repeating stock string soundtrack multiplies one’s discomfort as such that we would all end up in the fetal position without remembering the transition were it not for the appearance of trusty old Dank Jenkins, who’s face I thankfully associate heavily enough with his infamous down-and-out Tweet to be a welcome respite in attention before the very scary hypothesis for which it’s been buttering me up, as best summed by Vlad:
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The system would be able to “plug gaps in its knowledge and refine its model of human behavior” — not just your particular behavior or mine, but that of the entire human species. “By thinking of user data as multigenerational,” explains Foster, “it becomes possible for emerging users to benefit from the preceding generation’s behaviors and decisions.” Foster imagines mining the database of human behavior for patterns, “sequencing” it like the human genome, and making “increasingly accurate predictions about decisions and future behaviors.”
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The next time the what if they do something scary question comes up in a casual conversation about Google, you’ll have something a lot more substantial than just speculation. Or will you? The Verge reached out for comment and got an awfully convenient response.
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This is a thought-experiment by the Design team from years ago that uses a technique known as ‘speculative design’ to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate.
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Wow! Leave it up to grand ole Googe to reveal the ultimate excuse for just about any suggestion or behavior, though it does seem almost deliberately uncomfortable, doesn’t it? No matter — whether or not this video was ever about a project or tangible product development, or simply to explore uncomfortable ideas because it is proof that the company has reached that critical Vatican stage — if you’ll remember — where they now feel comfortable exploring Very Bad, but Very easily made Real Ideas amongst themselves about what would happen if they allowed their system to nudge its users around a different, slightly less optimal route to the bar, let’s say — without their knowledge — in order for the system to collect traffic data for the sake of its own interests? Which would be, technically, in the interest of all Ledger users now and in the future, so why not?
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The ledger could be given a focus, shifting it from a system which not only tracks our behavior, but offers direction towards a desired result.”
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This, my dear privacy-obsessed friends, is the real issue with data collection — its power over huge groups by way of their behavior and it is never going to be remedied in any significant way by ad-blockers or VPNs because the EndUser shall always out number you 50 to 1, even decades from now. EndUser does not understand — or, crucially, have any desire to understand anything technical about what leads to the PewDiePie videos playing on his filthy screen. Here’s a great opportunity to escape Silicon Valley’s technolibertarianism and resign your Darwinian empathy in favor of meaningful and truly-effective action: if you want to avoid a future Google Church (or Google Government, more worryingly,) you should invest your time, effort, and knowledge into electing officials more capable of understanding and regulating Big Tech.
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Google Government
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The internet as it stands is made possible by Google as the goto resource for online advertising. In 2016, “Google held 75.8 percent of the search ad market, bringing in $24.6 billion in revenue from search ads,” according to Recode. By 2019, “that’s expected to grow to $36.62 billion in revenue, or 80.2 percent of the market.” Google’s edge in user behavior and targeted advertising combined with their extensive resources available developers to integrate independent platforms with Google’s software services at various levels makes it very difficult for any advertising-funded individual or organization to compete online without dipping in to the Google universe. YouTube — a Google property since 2006 — has actively invested in and supported a new career path entirely within their own platform that is rapidly becoming popularly aspired-to by young children, while the reality of existence as a full-time YouTuber is far less glamorous than the immediately-visible surface would indicate, and the effort already expended by my generation in its pursuit has already made us insane.
So, what would the internet look like if Google didn’t exist? We know they’ve been working with the government now on various projects, but what if some terrible exposed transgression of theirs suddenly warranted an immediate shutdown and seizure of all Google properties? Well, we know from a post on Quora by Googler Ashish Kedia that even 5 years ago, the sudden absence of Google for “2–3 mins” set the internet into a bit of a panic, reducing overall traffic by 40%. In the time since, we’ve all grown exponentially more dependent on Google properties: billions of people rely on Google Maps for directions and, thousands of companies (including the Pentagon and other government institutions) rely on Gmail and GSuites for intercommunication, file sharing, task management, etc., and more and more academic institutions rely on Chromebook devices running connection-dependent operating systems. It’s not much of a stretch to argue that Google’s sudden disappearance would constitute a Civil Emergency in the United States, which will only become a stronger and more serious incentive for regulatory bodies to look the other way.
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Though the tangible results of advertising have been quantified significantly in the past 20 years, one can’t help but wonder after watching YouTube ads for the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class on toy unboxing videos if the companies who spend big bucks on Google advertising understand where their money is going, but they know that if they don’t advertise there, their competitors will. This, of course, is a fundamental practice of a monopoly, and it’s yielded Google so much fucking money that they cannot possibly spend it fast enough, as evidenced by their investments in life extension — so that, perhaps, they will have more time on Earth to figure it out.
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When you build a collection of the world’s smartest people in a self-sufficient environment that discourages exploration of other lifestyles and ideas, and you sustain the society with a gargantuan, relatively low-maintenance revenue stream, you create a culture which is not only well-primed for isolationism, but is also extremely inefficient. In fact, with its vast collection of abandoned products and properties, Google must surely be one of the most inefficient companies in history. Thinking back on recent software releases along with its recent entries into the hardware space, Google is also one of the worst competing tech companies. Very little aside from Gmail, Google Photos, Google Maps, and Chrome have found their place or garnered significant usership. Google Play Music is unintuitive and impossible, Google Allo and Google+ are all but forgotten addendums to other services, and Google Search — its core, original function — has been out of control for years, and all of them are designed blandly and excruciatingly tiring to look at.
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Google Shun
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If this all has stirred nothing more in you than a desire to eliminate Google from your own online life as much as possible, there are alternatives in almost every one of the sphere’s they dominate. As of late, DuckDuckGo has accumulated a fair amount of buzz and coverage as a private, more relevant alternative to Google’s plain old search engine. Though it is clever enough to list us as the first result for “extratone,” I’ve found it simply insufficient as a replacement in my own life because, essentially, it rarely delivers what I’m looking for. By contrast, Dropbox Paper is such an elegant cloud notetaking and word processing software that it makes Google Docs look simply idiotic (and warrants its own review very shortly.) For getting around, know that MapQuest is not only still around — it’s now a very competitive mobile navigation app.
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I, myself, have allowed Google as complete of access to my information and behavior as possible because I believe “privacy” is a completely futile endeavor if one wishes to be a part of society, though I do often use alternatives to Google services simply because I fucking hate the way they look. If you want a more complete list of services and software that allow one to shun the Google God entirely, you’ll be forced to seek out less dignified sources like Lifehacker and Reddit and decide if the additional time you’ll spend using most of them to accomplish the same tasks is really worth your digital angst.
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If Google were to be more explicit with its users and staff about its aspirations to take over control of our lives, there will be little to do but accept the future they intend to create because they’ve long been too powerful to control. In the meantime, I’d suggest you continue to use whatever software works best for you and refrain from wasting your time fretting on conspiratorial suppositions of what the tech industry may be doing to “invade your privacy,” because there is no longer any such thing, nor will there be ever again. However, I would also urge to you worship your own Gods, whomever they may be, for Google will never be worthy. I, for one, shall only pray to our Mother Sun.
An autobiographical overview of my personal history with technology and its contributions to my current perspective.
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Incalculable odds were against my arrival in this world happening in early 1994, positioning my life within a timeline that would allow me to bridge my two species’ most significant millenniums in the first grade as a student in the first class at Fairview Elementary school to receive curriculum-mandated exposure to brand-new Windows 98 PCs in its brand-new, fluorescent-lit computer lab in the center core of its 50-year-old rectangular brick structure. The lab also meant that ours was the first Fairview class to have the available relief of air conditioning during the school day. It’s unlikely that I would be home sick and watching the last television ever allowed in my mother’s living room as the second plane hit.
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My peers and I would form a picogeneration without a name (perhaps we should be called the 9/11ers) — 91s and 92s wouldn’t have regular access to public school machines until they’d eclipsed the true prime of their development, and were just that much further along, mentally, to being able to comprehend the huge and terrifying concepts of 1) New York and 2) burning alive — while 98s like my niece were spared any such comprehension of death at all, yet now have to face the existentially future-sundering, darkly-mirrored reality of the Trump Presidency during the most critically uncertain period in the last stage of their brain’s transition to adulthood.
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If there is truth in the cross-cultural supposition that souls have some sort of choice, pre-conception, over when they’re born, my own must have either cleaned out the house, or lost horrible, though I suspect I’ll never be able to confidently wager either way. This question of how lucky or unlucky am I to be alive right now is one which I find most fascinating — not just within myself, but within others my age. I declare us a generation largely because of my experiences under the assumption that my mid-Missouri upbringing represents the ultimate average in the American experiences of the time as the area has been a reliable sample of the clearest average of the country’s cultural, political, and economic life. Technically, it was quite unlikely that I arrive here as a new human being instead of China or India, and what if that, too was my choice?
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Though less so, it was still against chance that I would be born to parents who would divorce very quickly after my birth, before my mind was able to form any tangible long-term memories, sparing me whatever pain could’ve resulted from their greater togetherness later nullified in front of me. I could’ve chosen them as well for the variety of experiences their situation would allow me as I grew up between my father’s 800-acre farm and my mother’s suburban house in Columbia, the college town an hour’s drive south. I write about my experiences now — so young — because I’ve likely already born witness to more extraordinary changes in human development than your parents, their parents, and their parents’ parents combined. At 24, my life has already spanned by far the most profound and expedited informational renaissance in human history — greater progress was made between the day I first rode a bicycle and the one on which I took my driver’s test than in thousands of years before it.
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The sum of my father’s ordeals between 1950 and 1974 — from his birth until the age I am now — would indeed include watching a man set foot on a spatial body other than Earth for the first time, but would be mostly defined by work on the family’s soybean, corn, and wheat farms in central Illinois, driving carbureted tractors pulling cultivating equipment of the same basic design and function as had been pulled by horses, mules, and oxen for hundreds of years, and other implements — like the mechanical multi-row planter — that were new technology at the beginning of the century. For neighbors, he would walk behind the path of a square hay baler next to a moving flatbed trailer, upon which he would throw the 70–100 lb. rectangles of dead compacted grass by their twine through thick cowhide gloves. All of this I would get to experience in the next century on his farm, using the exact same equipment.
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At home, he would watch NBC, ABC, and CBS on a CRT TV, as I would for several years until wireless television was legally transitioned to digital statewide in the summer of 2009. As an adolescent, he would form a business with friends cleaning out old abandoned barns in exchange for the rights of ownership to any finds inside, which led to his discovery of a hay-preserved 1929 Buick Sedan containing hand-written records of its every service. This car would change hands into his Uncle’s care as he went off to school in Champaign, married in Georgia, and eventually settled on the flat clay soil of the farm where I grew up, right on the border between Audrain and Monroe counties, Missouri. I was about 10 when we drove back to the family hub with a trailer in tow to collect the car from my Great Uncle, to my manic excitement.
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Up until my mid-teens, my life was defined by my extreme reverence for historic cars, airplanes, tractors, and watercraft, and the time I spent operating, maintaining, restoring, or simply studying the assortment of these which I was allowed — often because of extraordinary circumstances — would form the component of my psychology which seeks to experience different cultures, ideas, and eras through the medium of engineering and design and relies on these to understand them. Like my father in his youth, I would learn to clean water out of a carburetor after the Oliver 88 had sat silent for too long, and I would piss in a chamber pot to avoid waking up my Grandfather by walking down creaking attic stairs and turning the lights on. I would learn how to shoot and drive before 10-years-old, and I would have the freedom to do both as I pleased on the miles of gravel roads that ran around home.
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Though my stepfather bought me a PC of my own just as my first-grade computer class was ending, I could not conceive of a reason to occupy the dial-up line and block his incoming calls or faxes, so my use of the machine was limited to sparse writing and aggravating attempts to run Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 at approximately one frame per second on a 300MHz single-core Pentium II CPU. Though I was extremely fortunate compared to most middle-class kids my age at the time to have my own computer in my room, my relationship with it was not significant or particularly involved. I would leave it powered down for weeks at a time until my last two grades at Fairview, when homework assignments began to require it.
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Perhaps the greatest gap between my mostly-suburbanite classmates and I was an exposure to Japanese entertainment and video games. I was once disallowed from a lunch table because I’d never heard of Pokémon or Luigi, but I did have a Sony Playstation at home on which I occasionally loaded A Bug’s Life to wander around its first level, perhaps in basal awe at the idea of manipulating what I saw on a screen in realtime. In self-imposed isolation from children my age, I wouldn’t develop any need to be socially competitive with video games as many of my peers would to carry with them into adulthood. I thought my interests in mechanical engineering to be above all of them, so I spent my time alone with heavy picturebooks on 20th century cars, tractors, and airplanes.
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On the farm, my consistently agriculturally-proactive father was one of the first to have satellite internet for farm futures and weather reports on a pre-GUI machine which I don’t remember. As I was becoming computer literate in school, he would become extremely frustrated with the Windows XP-running machine he’d bought from a one-man, one-room computer shop in Centralia, and I would often solve some problem with bloatware or the goddamned printer. He would also subscribe to and install a first-generation DirectTV receiver, which had the first on-screen program guide I’d ever seen. In the evenings, I would watch hours of Modern Marvels on The History Channel, which presented the history, abstract functional theory, and implementation of a particular technology, both past and future. This single program — which has aired nearly 700 episodes since 1995 — is probably responsible for the majority of my at least rudimentary general knowledge in a variety of historic and “future” technological schools, and my curiosity about culture’s relationship with innovation.
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Though my father’s interests differed significantly from mine — he thought more about growing and raising than of the tools one used to do it — he would indulge my many questions about how engines, hydraulics, and electrical systems worked, and indulged my curiosity by exposing me to the hidden communities of the most elderly, most obscure historic machinery enthusiasts like those of the Midwest Old Threshers Reunion in Mount Pleasant, Iowa — the Concours d’Elegance for antique tractor and reciprocating engine collectors. It was a similar event closer to home where I first operated a steam tractor — great, field-going locomotive-like vehicles that supplanted a need for horsepower in the late-1800s up until the Great Depression which chug, whistle, and puff along just like rail locomotives with a huge, gritty, iron steering wheel. As I recall, I was also given the opportunity to drive an unrestored Model T truck around the grounds that day — the knowledge from which I gained I cannot imagine being of much use ever again.
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I was proud to the point of arrogance of my technical knowledge and experience in all the different things I had driven and operated, which my schoolmates were in no position to understand. I was elitist and anti-social about this as late as 8th grade, when I had just moved in to stay with my mother, who bought me a first generation iPhone which I proudly wore in a leather belt holster to Junior High. It would represent a shift in my fascination from very old technology toward the present and future.
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I started talking online with a friend I’d first met years before at Fairview, who spent most of his time fiddling with his first-generation MacBook Pro. He originally exposed me to gadget bloggers on YouTube like Mark Watson and Jon Rettinger (both of whom are still full-time tech personalities.) My mom bought me a 13-inch aluminum-bodied MacBook (which would be sold as MacBook Pro after a single year,) and my lifestyle radically shifted inside my room, my computer, and my Xbox 360. My friend and I would both obsess together over software, design, and gadget – experimenting with our own tech YouTube channels until high school, where I would be adopted by a new friend group who would finally socialize me.
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Recently, I have written about the contrasts and discrepancies of consumer technology development as its progress has disconnected from the upward linear trajectory in use, quality, and genuine innovation for the End User in a departure which has been especially visible from my perspective as an academically-untrained, but intensely demanding user in the past five years. When hardware was still the industry focus before ~2012, there was a tremendous amount of optimism among journalists and enthusiasts because each successive generation of devices had added more tangible capabilities. Publications like Gizmodo and Engadget made a fortune publishing reviews and comparison tests of hardware offerings across every segment of tech, and the discourse they generated had a noticeable influence on design. I remember this time well because it accented my last few years before adulthood, when I had plenty of spare time, energy, and curiosity to keep up.
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The general consumer technology narrative since Steve Jobs’ death has become increasingly more about the companies who design and sell hardware and software than about how and why their consumers actually use them, and the result has been a series of new product segments with little defensible place in my own linear timeline of innovation, especially where productivity is involved. Augmented and Virtual Reality are quite explicitly escapist industries, yet to fill any significant need which was before unfilled. The same could be argued about voice assistants and smartwatches — neither of which remove obstacles in most users’ day-to-day lives but instead contribute to the array of tasks and devices which already seek their attention.
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Of course, there are defensibly sound business incentives behind the industry’s new, fragmented direction, but I would also argue that there are those, too, for genuinely revisiting both what we should be doing and what we should be seeking to learn to do with technology. In a more abstract sense, I have written about whether or not we should want to be living in this particular now, and how the way we feel about the future should inform what we do in the present.
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I cannot help but observe human progress from a perspective of powerlessness, acute alienation, and amused awe, which has already lent to a significant quantity of occasionally original thoughts as I watch, having witnessed an odd diversity of American life and culture. I’ve published them to entertain and to demonstrate a few methods of reflection on what it is you really want from the times you are living.
What I have long predicted is now coming to pass: Google believes it should assume control.
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Out of all the technology companies that have made my knees knock and my voice hoarse and my Tweets manic as a technoheretic in the past several years, Jumbo Google would easily take home the winning trophy for Dystopian of the Millennium. I have been rehearsing an especially dear pet prophecy of mine, unsolicited, to family, friends, and podcast guests since 2011 in which I end up arguing quite convincingly that Google is a dead ringer for the 16th-century Vatican: an inherently self-isolating organization with an absolute monopoly yielding gargantuan levels of essentially passive income from a service which nearly everybody transacts with, but only Google understands (and is therefore assumed to be its only possible provider,) which inevitably develops such a distance from the rest of the populace and their way of life (in tandem with total notoriety and celebrity among them all) not intentionally out of malice, but from the delusion of mythically-bestowed philanthropic duty that is borned of and compounded by this economic and cultural isolation in a perpetual accumulation of power and wealth that radicalizes the monopolizers — the majority already highly predisposed to zeal as they would’ve needed to be in order to find themselves in this singular, universally powerful position over every other class — and leaves their egocentric minds to wander exempt from all criticism save for that of fellow radicalized monopolizers, who together begin to feel more and more comfortable wondering aloud about themselves in increasingly fantastic presumptions: what if all of this was bestowed upon us because we are superior to them? What if it is ourdivine responsibilityas superior beings to take charge and shepherd the common people as our sheep — for they cannot possibly know as well as we what is truly best for them?
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You see it, right? And you can feel a very specific flavor of terror that is both awed by the scale of the circumstances created by so few human minds and sincerely amused by the absoluteness of your own inability to alter them in any way. Perhaps you even recognize this taste as one perfected by Christianity’s ancient advertising business, but Google knows so much about you that it’s rumored to’ve been selling user data to the Judeochristian God for some time now at a 10% discount, and so we extrapolate and anticipate, yes?
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Of course, it’s admittedly satisfying for me to deliver you to this godfearing place in the most perverse look what I saw first that you didn’t see because you’re just not as bright but lucky for you, I’m so fucking generous with my wisdom sort of thinking around which the entire personas and livelihoods of fringe movement fanatics are built upon, but this is my one thing, okay? I’ve been waiting years for the right time to formally argue this theory in depth, and — thanks to this year’s public spotlight finally pivoting on the giants who’ve been silently swallowing their competition and relentlessly forcing their already ridiculous margins higher and higher in relative obscurity for decades, the time has come, indeed. The common people’s trust in Google had a godawful week.
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Don’t Be Evil
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On Monday, Gizmodo reported that twelve frustrated Google employees were quitting the company in protest of their work assisting the Department of Defense to “implement machine learning to classify images gathered by drones” for the detail fleeting Project Maven, despite some 4000 employee signatures on a letter addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai requesting (in full) that he “cancel this project immediately,” and “draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology,” citing the infamous “Don’t Be Evil” motto, which Google then proceeded to remove from its code of conduct for the first time in 18 years the day after the New York Times article went to press, on April 5th.
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On initial approach to the abstract of this story, from the ass to our thoughts arrives an easy narrative of a Silicon Valley mutiny comprised of twelve brave, conscientious souls who’ve been eaten up inside by their complicity in the filthy deals made by their power-obsessed CEO over scotch and cigars in a dark D.C. study — kept awake for months by the sound of his puffing cackles at satellite images of dead toddlers in a bombed-out street.
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Ah ha, we say. That man is no good, and he just wouldn’t listen! They knew they didn’t have a choice… They only did what they had to do…
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The reality of internal disagreements at Google, though, manages to be even more theatrical. The sheer volume of correspondence must surely be beyond anything capable of the enduser’s imagination, so let’s phone a friend: my favorite peek into the day-to-days of inter-Google existence is an old blog post by Benjamin Tilly on his first month at the company in which he was compelled almost immediately to describe in great detail how best to “deal with a lot of email in gmail” at peak efficiency using shortcuts and labels.
-“As you get email, you need to be aggressive about deciding what you need to see, versus what is context specific.”
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Now we have a bit better idea of the aggressive emailing that was a sure constant on a normal workday at Google in 2010, so it must’ve been deafening after 8 years of Gmail development as 4000 employees no doubt vented, debated, and decided to organize last month, though without making much headway because the leadership’s response was apparently “complicated by the fact that Google claims it is only providing open-source software to Project Maven,” this new knowledge having significant effect on our mind’s image of Sundar Pichai’s activities in Washington: he is now swapping seats with a frustrated Colin Powell in order to install OpenOffice onto his desktop from a flash drive, and we recall that Google’s Googleplex headquarters resembles nowhere in modern life more than a brand new playground built in a design language borrowing heavily from Spy Kids. And though these Twelve disciples are unnamed for the moment, a few of them could immediately land book deals by going public, and every single one would always have by default not only the badge of “I landed a job at Google,” (which is really to say I have hit Life’s maximum level cap,) but “I worked at Google for a while, but ended up quitting to do something else,” which is guaranteed to make you the most interesting, intellectually superior person present in whatever crowd for the rest of your life. The ultra-cool Sarah Cooper quit Google to become a comedian and even got to talk to Kara Swisher!
-I won’t pretend to understand big tech’s diminutive bastardization of prestige, but “more than 90 academics” jumping to publish an open letter (adjacent to a huge DONATE: Support the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots button) in which they “write in solidarity with the 3100+ Google employees” who’s terrible boss decided to help some lackeys in the Pentagon set up their email and didn’t text back for a whole hour doesn’t sound 100% sincere. Notably, I don’t know how or why the fuck 90 people would go about collaborating on a single document, but if it really was managed, they definitely used Google Docs…
-At one point, it was fun to think about the history of the friendly side-scroller-playing garage ghouls and dorm dorks who gave cooky, wacko names to their dot com startups in parody and defiance of the lame-ass surname anagrams on the buildings of their established competitors, but those who’ve stuck around have only done so by becoming expert at SUCKING UP EVERYTHING around them, and it pisses me off every day how worried I am that my species will finally be done in by a company with a name like Yahoo! and be known only to a bunch of adolescent interdimensional silicon blobs 30 million years in the future as that bipedal race who remained dignified until the last 0.01% of their reign on Earth, when in way less than a single generation, they all just wentFUCKING INSANEand blew themselves up because they suddenly hated all sense.
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“Google” is perhaps the worst of these to have to shout in fear and/or anger in your last moments as it sounds in American English like you’ve startled your subject with a ticklish pinch followed so immediately by an esophagus-busting chokehold that the two events appear simultaneous, and in real English English, it almost always sounds like a parent speaking of a character on a pre-K children’s television programme whom they find quite foul and upsetting, but will manage to refrain from expressing so otherwise because they know that Teletubbies shit is the most quickly forgotten stage of television viewership. It’s fascinating how exclusive the word “Google” is to American English because in everything else it really is complete nonsense, but lets halt all etymological discussions right now because we’ve only now just finished with Monday.
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The Soul Ledger
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On Thursday, all of my Google experiences, suppositions, and soul-detaching screenshots were usurped when a thoroughly alarming internal company video called The Selfish Ledger was leaked to The Verge, which I watched once then and do not want to watch again for the sake of this piece, but I will. Though the big V has been disappointingly timid for years about editorializing — when tech journalism desperately needs some confident, informed opinion more than ever — Vlad Savov’s accompanying article should be read in its entirety, to which I can add my own terror where he perhaps could not.
-The production style is technically identical to that of the very popular thinkpiece-esque, motion-graphics-paired-with-obligatory-sharpie illustrated videos which you find playing at max volume on your mom’s iPad from where she’s fallen asleep on the couch at 9PM, but the repeating stock string soundtrack multiplies one’s discomfort as such that we would all end up in the fetal position without remembering the transition were it not for the appearance of trusty old Dank Jenkins, who’s face I thankfully associate heavily enough with his infamous down-and-out Tweet to be a welcome respite in attention before the very scary hypothesis for which it’s been buttering me up, as best summed by Vlad:
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The system would be able to “plug gaps in its knowledge and refine its model of human behavior” — not just your particular behavior or mine, but that of the entire human species. “By thinking of user data as multigenerational,” explains Foster, “it becomes possible for emerging users to benefit from the preceding generation’s behaviors and decisions.” Foster imagines mining the database of human behavior for patterns, “sequencing” it like the human genome, and making “increasingly accurate predictions about decisions and future behaviors.”
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The next time the what if they do something scary question comes up in a casual conversation about Google, you’ll have something a lot more substantial than just speculation. Or will you? The Verge reached out for comment and got an awfully convenient response.
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This is a thought-experiment by the Design team from years ago that uses a technique known as ‘speculative design’ to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate.
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Wow! Leave it up to grand ole Googe to reveal the ultimate excuse for just about any suggestion or behavior, though it does seem almost deliberately uncomfortable, doesn’t it? No matter — whether or not this video was ever about a project or tangible product development, or simply to explore uncomfortable ideas because it is proof that the company has reached that critical Vatican stage — if you’ll remember — where they now feel comfortable exploring Very Bad, but Very easily made Real Ideas amongst themselves about what would happen if they allowed their system to nudge its users around a different, slightly less optimal route to the bar, let’s say — without their knowledge — in order for the system to collect traffic data for the sake of its own interests? Which would be, technically, in the interest of all Ledger users now and in the future, so why not?
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The ledger could be given a focus, shifting it from a system which not only tracks our behavior, but offers direction towards a desired result.”
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This, my dear privacy-obsessed friends, is the real issue with data collection — its power over huge groups by way of their behavior and it is never going to be remedied in any significant way by ad-blockers or VPNs because the EndUser shall always out number you 50 to 1, even decades from now. EndUser does not understand — or, crucially, have any desire to understand anything technical about what leads to the PewDiePie videos playing on his filthy screen. Here’s a great opportunity to escape Silicon Valley’s technolibertarianism and resign your Darwinian empathy in favor of meaningful and truly-effective action: if you want to avoid a future Google Church (or Google Government, more worryingly,) you should invest your time, effort, and knowledge into electing officials more capable of understanding and regulating Big Tech.
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Google Government
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The internet as it stands is made possible by Google as the goto resource for online advertising. In 2016, “Google held 75.8 percent of the search ad market, bringing in $24.6 billion in revenue from search ads,” according to Recode. By 2019, “that’s expected to grow to $36.62 billion in revenue, or 80.2 percent of the market.” Google’s edge in user behavior and targeted advertising combined with their extensive resources available developers to integrate independent platforms with Google’s software services at various levels makes it very difficult for any advertising-funded individual or organization to compete online without dipping in to the Google universe. YouTube — a Google property since 2006 — has actively invested in and supported a new career path entirely within their own platform that is rapidly becoming popularly aspired-to by young children, while the reality of existence as a full-time YouTuber is far less glamorous than the immediately-visible surface would indicate, and the effort already expended by my generation in its pursuit has already made us insane.
So, what would the internet look like if Google didn’t exist? We know they’ve been working with the government now on various projects, but what if some terrible exposed transgression of theirs suddenly warranted an immediate shutdown and seizure of all Google properties? Well, we know from a post on Quora by Googler Ashish Kedia that even 5 years ago, the sudden absence of Google for “2–3 mins” set the internet into a bit of a panic, reducing overall traffic by 40%. In the time since, we’ve all grown exponentially more dependent on Google properties: billions of people rely on Google Maps for directions and, thousands of companies (including the Pentagon and other government institutions) rely on Gmail and GSuites for intercommunication, file sharing, task management, etc., and more and more academic institutions rely on Chromebook devices running connection-dependent operating systems. It’s not much of a stretch to argue that Google’s sudden disappearance would constitute a Civil Emergency in the United States, which will only become a stronger and more serious incentive for regulatory bodies to look the other way.
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Though the tangible results of advertising have been quantified significantly in the past 20 years, one can’t help but wonder after watching YouTube ads for the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class on toy unboxing videos if the companies who spend big bucks on Google advertising understand where their money is going, but they know that if they don’t advertise there, their competitors will. This, of course, is a fundamental practice of a monopoly, and it’s yielded Google so much fucking money that they cannot possibly spend it fast enough, as evidenced by their investments in life extension — so that, perhaps, they will have more time on Earth to figure it out.
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When you build a collection of the world’s smartest people in a self-sufficient environment that discourages exploration of other lifestyles and ideas, and you sustain the society with a gargantuan, relatively low-maintenance revenue stream, you create a culture which is not only well-primed for isolationism, but is also extremely inefficient. In fact, with its vast collection of abandoned products and properties, Google must surely be one of the most inefficient companies in history. Thinking back on recent software releases along with its recent entries into the hardware space, Google is also one of the worst competing tech companies. Very little aside from Gmail, Google Photos, Google Maps, and Chrome have found their place or garnered significant usership. Google Play Music is unintuitive and impossible, Google Allo and Google+ are all but forgotten addendums to other services, and Google Search — its core, original function — has been out of control for years, and all of them are designed blandly and excruciatingly tiring to look at.
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Google Shun
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If this all has stirred nothing more in you than a desire to eliminate Google from your own online life as much as possible, there are alternatives in almost every one of the sphere’s they dominate. As of late, DuckDuckGo has accumulated a fair amount of buzz and coverage as a private, more relevant alternative to Google’s plain old search engine. Though it is clever enough to list us as the first result for “extratone,” I’ve found it simply insufficient as a replacement in my own life because, essentially, it rarely delivers what I’m looking for. By contrast, Dropbox Paper is such an elegant cloud notetaking and word processing software that it makes Google Docs look simply idiotic (and warrants its own review very shortly.) For getting around, know that MapQuest is not only still around — it’s now a very competitive mobile navigation app.
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I, myself, have allowed Google as complete of access to my information and behavior as possible because I believe “privacy” is a completely futile endeavor if one wishes to be a part of society, though I do often use alternatives to Google services simply because I fucking hate the way they look. If you want a more complete list of services and software that allow one to shun the Google God entirely, you’ll be forced to seek out less dignified sources like Lifehacker and Reddit and decide if the additional time you’ll spend using most of them to accomplish the same tasks is really worth your digital angst.
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If Google were to be more explicit with its users and staff about its aspirations to take over control of our lives, there will be little to do but accept the future they intend to create because they’ve long been too powerful to control. In the meantime, I’d suggest you continue to use whatever software works best for you and refrain from wasting your time fretting on conspiratorial suppositions of what the tech industry may be doing to “invade your privacy,” because there is no longer any such thing, nor will there be ever again. However, I would also urge to you worship your own Gods, whomever they may be, for Google will never be worthy. I, for one, shall only pray to our Mother Sun.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
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Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
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(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
Askeptical spectacle in the day-to-day typhoon of Faith’s modern enterprise.
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The year I was given my first generation iPhone was the last of 14 through which my mother was still comfortable enforcing my obligation to attend Sunday morning church service. She and my stepfather had migrated 18 months or so prior from [Suburban Church of Mediocore Dope Christ-Appropriated Lukewarm Dilluted Prog Rock and The Occasional Teachings of Protestant-ish Side-Glances at The New Testament] to the New York Times-appointed champion of Columbia Missouri’s 20-Year-LongQuirk the Church! Soverignty Crusade: The Crossing. Like its competitors (of which my parents’ previous church had ranked quite poorly,) the blatantly death-cult-sounding House of God includes its own artisanal, latte-equipped coffee shop (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a Starbucks affiliate at this point,) a regularly-replenished catering table full of doughnuts immediately to the side as one enters, and a sophisticated childcare operation staffed no less thoroughly than my public elementary school.
-
-
Since 2007, the church has been expanding from its first home (as a functional place of worship, anyway,) which lies within 1) line-of-sight from one of Nancy Walton’s properties, 2) a mile of the southernmost exit off US-63 – mid-Missouri’s primary North⟺South roadway – and includes a powered pump-arrogated pond, though the majority of the acreage is blackened by pragmatically-arrayed big box store-caliber multi-rowed parking. Ye, by night, it is flooded in coordinately-distributed cold white light suspended by the same uniform steel poles which guard long-term airport lots. Naturally, the entry and exit points for the asphalt spread are arranged deliberately opposed so that four figures’ worth of God’s children may be fed, digested, and evacuated through their weekly appointment with Christ as efficiently and hassle-free as possible.
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-
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God’s ~white~ children become especially sensitive to entirely-trivial delay or other perceived deviation from Their Expectations when inside an automobile thanks to a rampant misconception that simultaneously allows them a renewed sense of control over their environment. Psychoanalytic observation has suggested it is catalyzed by delusions of physical anonymity, exemption from civic responsibility, and a titanically-inflated perception of their personally misattributed contributions to the perpetuation of the universe. This vehicular component of the customer experience is a fundamental ingredient in The Crossing’s stellar member retinenance record – the single metric above all quantifying a Christian organization’s overall effectiveness in accomplishing the faith’s (mostly cross-denominational) evangelistic Prime Directive / General Order Number One as abridged by Christ himself to the Pharisees after his resurrection: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of [The Holy Trinity].” I did not take the opportunity to sample The Crossing’s baptismal services, but I’m sure sufficient combing of the church’s Yelp! page would yield as qualitative an analysis of such a “service” as you could possibly imagine. (Notably, it would appear the “lowest” review is the singular 4/5 star entry.)
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-
I do not mean to disparage The Crossing, specifically nor even organized religion, generally, but instead to emphasize the absurdities which have leapt just as readily into what I’d specifically call The Business of white protestant Christianity over just the course of my own maturation as it has into any other aspect of our lives. The difference, of course, is the universal set of exceptions – and the particular age of said exceptions – which religion maintains, societally. The perspective formed by my own experiences having grown up wholly embedded across the spectrum of white midwestern Christianity – including two years of vigorous and quite academic study of the Bible in a tiny private school headquartered in the basement of a Lutheran church – lends to a particular skepticism, amusement, horror, offense, and existential astonishment that latches my fascination into a not-entirely-voluntary hold.
-
-
(Before I go on, I suppose I should also note that it’s been at least two or three years since I last set foot inside the church building at all – my only recent experiences/engagement with The Crossing has been with their digital content from a relative distance.)
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The ludicrous parallels between Apple events and services at The Crossing, especially, come immediately to mind every single time I watch one (live or otherwise,) as they did just weeks ago when I first engaged with this summer’s WWDC keynote. Pastors Dave Cover, Keith Simon, and Shay Roush all look, dress, speak, and photograph exactly like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Scott Foristell, Jony Ive, and just about any public-facing leadership figure we’ve ever seen giving an Apple Keynote. They’re hilariously interchangeable, as are other explicit aspects of the typical Sunday morning service at The Crossing. As far as I can tell, the church as a whole only uses Mac computers and the projections in the main auditorium/worship hall – mostly sing-along hymn lyrics and referenced bible verses – are exclusively created through Apple’s office presentation software, Keynote, just as the company itself does for its “Keynotes.” This was immediately obvious to me upon first entering that space because they both use the default theme – typography, color palette, transition animations and all. Indeed, during the sermons, the three pastors would take command of the slides by fairly inconspicuously clicking what I’d imagine must be a very sweaty Apple Remote in the exact same manner in which Tim Cook and his underlings still do.
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I JUST REMEMBERED DAVE EXPLICITLY USING MENTION OF APPLE PRODUCTS IN HIS SERMONS
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Nay, the likenesses do not diverge when comparing the fundamentals of the two organizations more broadly: The Business of the faith is very much a volume business, which also describes Apple’s contemporary strategy with perfect precision. It’s been a few years since “ecosystem” ceased to be an exhaustive buzzword in tech media discourse, perhaps because the term falls very short in expressing the change in global Apple scale. My recollection of high school biology has failed to produce a scientific substitute, but I find Matt Honan’s “very lovely swamp” exceptionally said in 2014, but the fact of the swamp’s becoming generally lovelier in the interim – in a less linear fashion than would have been ideal, mind you – leaves ample room, I think, to fear and respect whatever it was that we then called The Apple Ecosystem in 2014 as a ruling deity or daemon (just as Google’s sought to be, recently.)
The church live streams every fucking keynote sermon in HD on Vimeo, not YouTube. (I had no idea Vimeo offered “professional streaming services” until this moment.) They have a fucking iOS app (apparently developed by an outfit called Subsplash, who had the audacity to include analytics meta tags following the root of their website within the in-app attribution button) which features a calendar-bound tool containing full-text preparatory reading material from scripture, on-demand audio and video recordings
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I genuinely wonder quite often if the individual who set the digital template for the sign in front of our Portland neighborhoood’s Episcopalian church paused to look at the text he was arranging: “PRAYER REQUESTS BY EMAIL.” I'm not sure any of this really means anything, but it's sure spectacular to look at.
In Stephen King's “The Langoliers,” the state of today's air travel is foreshadowed.
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I told myself I would not be topical – that I would publicly ignore the coronavirus – but I can no longer. There is simply too much to say about one of the most emotionally effective, surreal films of my childhood. The Langoliers occupied 9-11PM's slot on ABC for May 14th and 15th, 1995 (Sunday and Monday, twenty-five years ago.) It's an adaptation of a Stephen King novel of the same title and is fairly widely-regarded as the worst such adaptation of all time. You can now watch the whole three hours of The Langoliers in 360p (supposedly) at your leisure thanks to OpenTube (for now.) One commenter (on the since-taken-down YouTube video) echoes what I'm about to tell you: “My god! I thought I dreamed this movie up as a kid. I have been trying to describe this to people for years and here it is, it’s real!” In order to write this, I joined the Stephen King Wiki Discord server and was immediately welcomed with a request not to type in the text channels: “I’m working on adding some new channels so pls nobody type in them til I’m done.”
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The Langoliers begins with a pissed-off British secret agent (Mark Lindsay Chapman,) an insane businessman (Bronson Pinchot,) a psychic, vision-impaired young woman (Kate Maberly,) Sarah Jessica Parker (Patricia Wettig,) and a just-widowed pilot (David Morse) all boarding the same redeye flight to Boston – American Pride Flight 29. This group falls asleep and mysteriously wakes up alone on the aircraft except for Stephen King himself (Dean Stockwell,) a stupid incel violinist (Christopher Collet,) and a stoner (Kimber Riddle.) My favorite character, Craig Toomey, is the “twerp” business boy with daddy issues who can't stop himself from demanding to know what's going on. James Bond shuts him up with a “nose hold.”
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Whoa. No one's driving the plane!
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David Morse proceeds to try and contact air traffic control in a fairly-realistic manner, but is unable to receieve any radio signals at all, even from Strategic Air Command. Frankie Faison plays the single person of color on the flight, Don Gaffney – “a tool and die worker for Hughes Aircraft” – who dies first, of course. James Bond lecures David about inciting panic and almost immediately reveals his secret identity. Then, the Hungry Idiot (Baxter Harris) wakes up whilst Toomey begins screaming again.
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Scaring the little girl? Scaring the little girl?! Lady, we're diverting to some tin-pot airport in the middle of nowhere, and I've got better things to think about than scaring the little girl!
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After the entirety of the male cast threatens to beat him up, Toomey, sweating his balls off, begins slowly tearing strips of paper and moaning sexually like an absolute madman. Some irritiatingly irrelevant dialogue insues in which Stephen King Author Man narrates through Sherlock Holmes deduction to figure absolutely nothing out. He is wearing stripes on plaid. He suggests that the entire situation could be some sort of government experiment and I can't believe I'm wasting your time with this. “If it were just this plane, I could give you a scenario, but unfortunately, it's not just this plane. The city of Denver is probably still down there, but all its lights were off if it was.” Here you can see how excellently this script was written.
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I've been sitting here running all these old stories through my head. You know, time warps, space warps, alien raiding parties. I mean, we really don't know if there's anything left down there, do we?
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Sarah Jessica Parker reveals to Powers Girl that she's on her way to meet a guy she's been emailing with. Stoner girl asks if everything is going to be okay and Incel Violinist looks horny. She's going to rehab for stones. The captain announces to his nine passengers that they're beginning their descent into Bangor International Airport, near Stephen King's birthplace. Don asks Toomey to stop ripping up paper and the useless food addict yells “well, at least we'll be able to get some chow when we land” offscreen. Craig, sweating even more, is still ripping up magazines in the face of Don's threats. “Try it, you little jackass,” he says. I'm wondering where I can snag this American Pride livery for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Director Tom Holland manages to add drama to a more-or-less routine landing.
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This place is utterly, totally deserted... You know, there's something wrong with the air here, Brian.
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It's occuring to me that this may be the worst script I've ever actually sat through reading. “This place smells wrong. Really badly wrong.” Toomey threatens to sue the airline for $30 million for missing his 9AM meeting before seeing flashbacks to his abusive father (John Griesemer,) who mentions the Langoliers for the first time. The deserted airport scene is the reason I've written this whole thing – the dulled sounds of the characters' heels on the tarmac, the putrefied air. The clocks have stopped. The payphones are dead. The computers are lifeless. The abadonedness of it all. This is what the coronavirus has done to the world and to Craig Toomey. Even the battery-powered devices are dead. This is what confuses Stephen King Author Man to the point of head-rubbing and cigarette smoking for the first time in ten years.
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The production was actually made at Bangor International Airport as this incredible video hosted by Toomey's actor explores.
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LOVE IS NOT PART OF THE BIG PICTURE!
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It's never actually explained what The Langoliers are. Ken Tucker for Entertainment Weekly describes them as “little meatballs.” The little Beatles-haired girl can hear them approaching. “It sounds a little like rice krispies after you pour the milk.” Foodism abounds. “A really terrible, scary sound... Something making that horrible cereal noise.” She screams that the cereal is going to kill them. Somehow, Toomey finds a revolver while he's losing his mind. Kimber Riddle the Stoner went to NYU.
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Don't forget, Craiggy-weggy, the langoliers were here. And they will be back.
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Stephen King Author Man and Food Addict note that the food and soda have gone completely flat. “Tastes like old tire,” says Don. “What we're dealing with is time, not dimension,” says Stephen King. I'm wondering what in the hell sort of room they're in at the moment, and who decided those light wood countertops were ever a good idea.
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The bottom line is, I believe, that we have hopped an absurdly short distance into the past, say as little as 15 minutes, and we're discovering the unlovely truth about time travel. That one can't appear in the Texas State School Book Depository on November 22nd, 1963 and hope to stop the Kennedy assassination. One can't witness the building of the pyramids or the sack of Rome, or investigate the age of the dinosaurs firsthand. No, fellow time travellers, have a look around you. This is the past. It's empty. It's silent. It's a world with all the meaning of a discarded old paint can. Sensory input has disappeared. Electricity has already disappeared. And time itself is winding down in a kind of a spiral that's going faster and faster.
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Little Prophet notes that the sound she's been hearing is once again getting louder. Mr. Toomey's face is shoved in the floor, his nose bent.
Discovery is pushing boundaries, but for what purpose?
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Discovery may no longer be new – not even the newest Star Trek property – but it is new to me. According to the alternate timeline exemption of the J.J. movies, I've been left without “Canon” Star Trek television since 2005 (or 2155) with the last episode of Enterprise, but I've been looking forward with moderate anticipation to an opportunity to watch this new entry into “the stodgiest and squarest of all sci-fi universes.” Though I am extremely well-versed in Gene Roddenberry's baby, I come to both you and Discovery with absolutely zero desire to analyze whether or not it is “Trek” enough, “good” science-fiction, or even “good” television – I'd like only to land on your screen between all of these institutions and their proctors in some unique insight from all of them, without the clichés, cringey jokes, or unnecessary Trekism. What I will strive to do is perform my Special Duty in relation to American intellectual property mastodons for which I have my own adoration: to determine whether or not they should die. I know absolutely nothing about television writing – the same amount I know about film – so I hope I can provide something usefully unique.
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I would rather Star Treknot have to die, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s necessary. Without sounding like I have to prove myself, know that the property – in particular the history of Star Trek Online’s development – was a very important part of my adolescent life. I have watched every episode of every series several times at least, but I know better than to entrust my entire emotional existence into the promise of a continuation like Discovery. It most fascinates me how revivals of old names like this go about contextualizing their dialogue and other elements for today’s audience. “Snug as a bug in a rug” is surely not an expression we should expect to survive the next 250 years of human development, and yet this is supposed to be an aspirational series? It even made it in the recap! I should confess now: it is actually Star Trek Online which made me curious enough to seek out a CBS All Access Free Trial. The marketing worked very well.
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I tend to install the game for a few weeks or so around this time every year just to check in. This time, I was greeted by Star Trek Online: Legacy – a new expansion featuring Voyager’s Jeri Ryan and Discovery’s Sonequa Martin-Green reprising their respective characters in voiceover roles. I figured out that Michael Burnham must have been from The New Show fairly quickly, but I was disappointed to find out that the character was not in fact a trans man, but rather a female character with an unusually male name. For the most part, Burnham is simply an outlier in The Measure of Morality Parts I and II. She accompanies one’s character (along with Seven of Nine) to several different battlegrounds and stories we’d already seen before in previous episodes – when the budget’s running low, reuse sets, but there is one instance where we are brought into her (Discovery’s) world, which feels disorienting. The whole experience plays like it was forced upon STO by CBS in order to squeeze as many viewers into our free CBS All Access trials with as little developmental investment into the game as possible. Well, here I am!
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In Season 1, Episode 4 of Discovery, the writers made a very foul mistake… They placed fucking Elon Musk’s name alongside the aviation pioneering Wright Brothers and the fictional inventor of warp drive, Zefram Cochrane.
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How do you want to be remembered in history? Alongside the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, Zefram Cochrane? Or as a failed fungus expert?
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I can’t be timid about this – it straight up makes me ill. I can guarantee you that Orville and Wilbur Wright would have never watched fucking South Park and that I am actually going to be sick right here on this couch.
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I'm sorry, I don't look up to anyone who watches South Park. it's just a personal rule, okay?
I’ll spare you further ranting, but… Jesus Christ. I will not believe that I live in a world where this sort of comparison is acceptable. I’m not going to freak out because they say “shit” and “fuck” now, though I do wonder what Gene Roddenberry (though he wasn’t all that great, it turns out) would say – something like “profanity is no longer a necessary part of 23rd century language.” I thought Morgan Jeffery’s take on this for Digital Spy was an interesting one:
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There's an argument to be made that the old style of Trek might feel naive in 2017. But there's another that it'd be a refreshing antidote to the times, the Trek we really need right now as opposed to the one we deserve.
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I like to watch fellow Star Trek enthusiasts squirm and cry “continuity” and “canon” as much as any reasonable human being, but I’m not sure this sort of boundary-pushing is actually productive. Is anything being accomplished? Other than marking Discovery forever as not “family-friendly entertainment?” Linguistically, the word “fucking” in “fucking cool” was used for emphasis, which perhaps suggests there was no other way for the character to express that level of enthusiasm. In his IndieWire interview, Anthony Rapp (Paul Stamets) explains:
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“These people just put their brains to work in a really tough way and they had a breakthrough. And I imagine there’s scientists in their labs who might do that any time. We didn’t drop the F-bomb in ‘Star Trek’ by telling something to go fuck themselves. It’s like we did it by saying ‘this is fucking cool.'”
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If Discovery was “making history,” I’m not so sure what Star Trek: Picard was doing with fucking and pissant. I’m also not sure it matters at all in the grander scheme. What other freedoms should CBS feel free to explore, now that they’ve said the bad words? What else hasn’t been explored? Bathrooms? Shitting and farting? That has my vote. I really don’t remember as many colloquialisms showing up in the earlier series, but perhaps that’s just because those colloquialisms have since become part of our language. I’m not the greatest television watcher of all time, but I got lost in Discovery’s plot, and apparently I’m not the only one.
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There turned out to be too many of those twists in Discovery’s first season, and it was frustrating to watch as the writers sidled up to new, risky frontiers for exploration, only to suddenly change course right when things were starting to get interesting.
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Season 1, Episode 7 is called “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” and it’s the most classically Star Trek of what I’ve seen. One of those stuck-in-a-time-loop stories which truly makes you want to die. What’s even better and slightly meta: playback kept resetting for me at exactly 21:26 and starting from the beginning while the cat kept stepping on the delete key and destroying this paragraph. I had to keep watching the man from The Fucking Office continually kill the captain after the crew parties to 250-year-old West Coast hip hop and 300-year old Al Green all whilst writing this over again. I do not like Rainn Wilson invading my Star Trek. He gives Aquariuses a bad name and… beard. “Listen, petunia, I've been screwed over since the day I was born. I deserve this,” he says, and I wonder if in fact it is Rainn himself speaking of his invasion. He looks and sounds like a fucking incel. All of this makes me wonder if my entire problem with this show is simply that I do not particularly like its characters.
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The Vessel
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Relying on Memory Alpha – a tried-and-true Star Trek fan resource – we can examine the U.S.S. Discovery, itself. I’m not so sure about this spore drive shit. If the NCC-1701 Enterprise was indeed launched in 2245, its existence would blatantly overlap with Discovery’s, now wouldn’t it? I don’t actually care all that much, but here are a few screenshots from Star Trek Online.
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Note how much larger this Crossfield-class ship is than the Intrepid-class from some 120 years into the future. Then again, the latter was designed for “long-range exploration missions” and Discovery is the fleet’s flagship(?) Its “most advanced ship,” at least. The inclusion of technologies like the holodeck and the spore drive (perhaps the show’s most potent plot device,) though, are really stretching the canon timeline’s ability to accommodate them. The decision to include the Discovery as a playable, top-tier ship in Star Trek Online is 100% a business one, surely. I’m not here to judge, though – after all, games are about having fun, right? One of Star Trek’s ironies has always been its existence in a capitalist society as an IP within a debatably socialist future. (Everybody wants to see their own ideal socioeconomic label in this future, it would seem.) “What makes Star Trek’s economics fundamentally different, and, in many ways, fundamentally incomprehensible to us, is that scarcity is no longer a factor,” says Dale Franks. Today, though, Star Trek properties still require finite resources and labor to produce, and they always have. Atari spent over $50 million to acquire Cryptic Studios – the original developers of Star Trek Online – and Discovery supposedly cost “$6-7 million per episode.” Though the former is free-to-play, it’s filled with microtransactions and about 5 billion different currencies. When Star Trek.com says “Star Trek Online is best described as a permanent Star Trek convention,” they’re correct: it is full of shit to buy.
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There is also a lot of combat, though Discovery seems to have struck a healthy balance between warfare and other intrigues. It is definitely Trek in many ways: redshirts die without any plot consequence and all the classic character flaw tropes are represented. There is the aforementioned time loop episode with fucking Harry Mudd and even a mirror universe arc beginning with “Despite Yourself,” in which the crew actually responds to their new environment and does the research required to blend in with the Terran forces. This took an ancient Star Trek format and actually explored a new, interesting avenue within it (the time loop episode did not.) They even change the Discovery’s registry on the hull to read “ISS Discovery” instead of “USS.”
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Every moment is a test. Can you bury your heart? Can you hide your decency? Can you continue to pretend to be one of them? Even as, little by little, it kills the person you really are.
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Complaints
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There’s a reason we all hate Captain Lorca, and why he says things like “sometimes the ends justify terrible means” and “there’s no way we’re asking these neighbors for a cup of sugar.” I do not believe in Spoilers, but there’s not much reason for me to tell you why, specifically. Perhaps it is racist and/or misogynist to say so, but I found it difficult to get as attached to Discovery’s characters as I have to those of series past. Michael is great, of course, though my girlfriend Sierra surmised that her purpose in the show is to illustrate that “nobody listens to black women.” Sierra was also quite aggravated by the misunderstanding and mistreatment of the tardigrade. When Paul Stamets mentioned that his uncle Everett participated in a Beatles cover band, we both despaired, for we discovered an entry in Memory Alpha for “The Beatles.” If I were to standardize a system of measurement for my television ratings, Discovery’s cringe factor would be 9/10. The holodeck hasn’t been invented yet!
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Also, CBS All Access’ user interface is the worst I’ve ever seen from a streaming service, across iOS, desktop browser, and my Samsung television. It’s impossible to scrub, really, or to dictate a preference for high definition. One cannot navigate backward between episodes without re-searching the title and navigating through an incredibly clunky menu sequence. I was able to cast to both my Samsung TV and Sierra’s Chromecast from my iPhone, at least.
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Compliments
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Despite its failings (including Rainn Wilson,) Discovery’s acting is superb. James Frain as Sarek, especially, is the best of the three. I thought it was especially thoughtful that for the most part (at least in Season 1,) the Klingons actually spoke Klingon to each other. Given that Dr. Marc Okrand spent the time and effort to construct a fully-functional Klingon language, it seems only reasonable to include as much of it as possible. I also love Hugh Culber’s doctor’s uniform and the “cinematic” cinematography of the whole thing. It’s very much an action show, yet not quite obnoxious.
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So, should *Star Trek* die? Perhaps it shows my extreme bias, but no, I do not think it need perish quite yet. From my (white, male, cishet) perspective, Discovery does an okay job at remaining thoroughly Trek whilst acknowledging the present context’s social issues. It remains a very capitalist enterprise and wholesomely cringey generation X cultural mastodon, but I think it’s still worth our time.
Jason Isaacs is giving a very compelling performance. But the writers seem to be turning him into a fundamentally different person from who he was earlier in the season. Some might call this character development. Others might say there are more shoes to drop.
He named his dog Number One. His eyebag game disastrous. The Romulans are in a Borg Cube. They’re flirting in The Cube. It’s a Sex Cube. Its shields are very loud, now. They’re smoking weed on Weed Road. There is simply not enough runtime for a truly episodic television show anymore, is there? A Borg Romulan Scott. (Imagine Borg snot.) The shear fucking hubris. There’s the F word again. I didn’t know Romulans could be so hot. Jesus Christ. “I never really cared for science fiction – I just didn’t get it,” says Picard. Very funny, folks.
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Did he drop something or...? Paradigmatic. CBS’ closed captions are janky and I’m getting older by the second. They are in the Sex Cube again. The Star Trek OS looks like it has annoying notifications. A son? Using the term Quest. This is segregation. The Nightingale was a slave ship. This is not lost on me. Spanish speaking! Nothing about operating these ships is visceral at all. Hey! Jeri Ryan! These CBS All Access ads are absolutely bizarre. Icheb is here!? Jesus what a coincidence. Oh.
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TECHNO FUTURE. That head tilt was sudden. Romulans are freaking out in English, for some reason. Colonel Jane – Sterling’s young wife – is still a bitch. What a surprise. I still haven’t gotten tired of the introductory credits’ theme. Pissant, really? “And now the windmills have turned out to be giants.” I have no idea what that’s referencing. Admirals should not say shut the fuck up. The holograms are just different levels of Scottish according to their class. Did they do this just to make sure Scots continued to be represented in Star Trek? Why does Rios have so many pips? What rank would he be if he put all of them on? God? ALISON PILL. Dr. Pill.
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Fear is the great destroyer.
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Coordinated bonk. “We’re at a threshold” is not political at all. If I was watching this show by the week, I would be very frustrated by its pace. Very sad about the Orchid deaths. They were cute. They mentioned the Picard Maneuver correctly. Jonathan Frakes directed this. Seven of Nine just said “same,” but we will forgive Brent Spiner for aging and – I hope – for dying.
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I think we probably should’ve let ourselves let Picard die.
In Stephen King's “The Langoliers,” the state of today's air travel is foreshadowed.
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I told myself I would not be topical – that I would publicly ignore the coronavirus – but I can no longer. There is simply too much to say about one of the most emotionally effective, surreal films of my childhood. The Langoliers occupied 9-11PM's slot on ABC for May 14th and 15th, 1995 (Sunday and Monday, twenty-five years ago.) It's an adaptation of a Stephen King novel of the same title and is fairly widely-regarded as the worst such adaptation of all time. You can now watch the whole three hours of The Langoliers in 360p (supposedly) at your leisure thanks to OpenTube (for now.) One commenter (on the since-taken-down YouTube video) echoes what I'm about to tell you: “My god! I thought I dreamed this movie up as a kid. I have been trying to describe this to people for years and here it is, it’s real!” In order to write this, I joined the Stephen King Wiki Discord server and was immediately welcomed with a request not to type in the text channels: “I’m working on adding some new channels so pls nobody type in them til I’m done.”
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The Langoliers begins with a pissed-off British secret agent (Mark Lindsay Chapman,) an insane businessman (Bronson Pinchot,) a psychic, vision-impaired young woman (Kate Maberly,) Sarah Jessica Parker (Patricia Wettig,) and a just-widowed pilot (David Morse) all boarding the same redeye flight to Boston – American Pride Flight 29. This group falls asleep and mysteriously wakes up alone on the aircraft except for Stephen King himself (Dean Stockwell,) a stupid incel violinist (Christopher Collet,) and a stoner (Kimber Riddle.) My favorite character, Craig Toomey, is the “twerp” business boy with daddy issues who can't stop himself from demanding to know what's going on. James Bond shuts him up with a “nose hold.”
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Whoa. No one's driving the plane!
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David Morse proceeds to try and contact air traffic control in a fairly-realistic manner, but is unable to receieve any radio signals at all, even from Strategic Air Command. Frankie Faison plays the single person of color on the flight, Don Gaffney – “a tool and die worker for Hughes Aircraft” – who dies first, of course. James Bond lecures David about inciting panic and almost immediately reveals his secret identity. Then, the Hungry Idiot (Baxter Harris) wakes up whilst Toomey begins screaming again.
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Scaring the little girl? Scaring the little girl?! Lady, we're diverting to some tin-pot airport in the middle of nowhere, and I've got better things to think about than scaring the little girl!
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After the entirety of the male cast threatens to beat him up, Toomey, sweating his balls off, begins slowly tearing strips of paper and moaning sexually like an absolute madman. Some irritiatingly irrelevant dialogue insues in which Stephen King Author Man narrates through Sherlock Holmes deduction to figure absolutely nothing out. He is wearing stripes on plaid. He suggests that the entire situation could be some sort of government experiment and I can't believe I'm wasting your time with this. “If it were just this plane, I could give you a scenario, but unfortunately, it's not just this plane. The city of Denver is probably still down there, but all its lights were off if it was.” Here you can see how excellently this script was written.
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I've been sitting here running all these old stories through my head. You know, time warps, space warps, alien raiding parties. I mean, we really don't know if there's anything left down there, do we?
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Sarah Jessica Parker reveals to Powers Girl that she's on her way to meet a guy she's been emailing with. Stoner girl asks if everything is going to be okay and Incel Violinist looks horny. She's going to rehab for stones. The captain announces to his nine passengers that they're beginning their descent into Bangor International Airport, near Stephen King's birthplace. Don asks Toomey to stop ripping up paper and the useless food addict yells “well, at least we'll be able to get some chow when we land” offscreen. Craig, sweating even more, is still ripping up magazines in the face of Don's threats. “Try it, you little jackass,” he says. I'm wondering where I can snag this American Pride livery for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Director Tom Holland manages to add drama to a more-or-less routine landing.
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This place is utterly, totally deserted... You know, there's something wrong with the air here, Brian.
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It's occuring to me that this may be the worst script I've ever actually sat through reading. “This place smells wrong. Really badly wrong.” Toomey threatens to sue the airline for $30 million for missing his 9AM meeting before seeing flashbacks to his abusive father (John Griesemer,) who mentions the Langoliers for the first time. The deserted airport scene is the reason I've written this whole thing – the dulled sounds of the characters' heels on the tarmac, the putrefied air. The clocks have stopped. The payphones are dead. The computers are lifeless. The abadonedness of it all. This is what the coronavirus has done to the world and to Craig Toomey. Even the battery-powered devices are dead. This is what confuses Stephen King Author Man to the point of head-rubbing and cigarette smoking for the first time in ten years.
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The production was actually made at Bangor International Airport as this incredible video hosted by Toomey's actor explores.
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LOVE IS NOT PART OF THE BIG PICTURE!
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It's never actually explained what The Langoliers are. Ken Tucker for Entertainment Weekly describes them as “little meatballs.” The little Beatles-haired girl can hear them approaching. “It sounds a little like rice krispies after you pour the milk.” Foodism abounds. “A really terrible, scary sound... Something making that horrible cereal noise.” She screams that the cereal is going to kill them. Somehow, Toomey finds a revolver while he's losing his mind. Kimber Riddle the Stoner went to NYU.
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Don't forget, Craiggy-weggy, the langoliers were here. And they will be back.
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Stephen King Author Man and Food Addict note that the food and soda have gone completely flat. “Tastes like old tire,” says Don. “What we're dealing with is time, not dimension,” says Stephen King. I'm wondering what in the hell sort of room they're in at the moment, and who decided those light wood countertops were ever a good idea.
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The bottom line is, I believe, that we have hopped an absurdly short distance into the past, say as little as 15 minutes, and we're discovering the unlovely truth about time travel. That one can't appear in the Texas State School Book Depository on November 22nd, 1963 and hope to stop the Kennedy assassination. One can't witness the building of the pyramids or the sack of Rome, or investigate the age of the dinosaurs firsthand. No, fellow time travellers, have a look around you. This is the past. It's empty. It's silent. It's a world with all the meaning of a discarded old paint can. Sensory input has disappeared. Electricity has already disappeared. And time itself is winding down in a kind of a spiral that's going faster and faster.
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Little Prophet notes that the sound she's been hearing is once again getting louder. Mr. Toomey's face is shoved in the floor, his nose bent.
Discovery is pushing boundaries, but for what purpose?
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Discovery may no longer be new – not even the newest Star Trek property – but it is new to me. According to the alternate timeline exemption of the J.J. movies, I've been left without “Canon” Star Trek television since 2005 (or 2155) with the last episode of Enterprise, but I've been looking forward with moderate anticipation to an opportunity to watch this new entry into “the stodgiest and squarest of all sci-fi universes.” Though I am extremely well-versed in Gene Roddenberry's baby, I come to both you and Discovery with absolutely zero desire to analyze whether or not it is “Trek” enough, “good” science-fiction, or even “good” television – I'd like only to land on your screen between all of these institutions and their proctors in some unique insight from all of them, without the clichés, cringey jokes, or unnecessary Trekism. What I will strive to do is perform my Special Duty in relation to American intellectual property mastodons for which I have my own adoration: to determine whether or not they should die. I know absolutely nothing about television writing – the same amount I know about film – so I hope I can provide something usefully unique.
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I would rather Star Treknot have to die, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s necessary. Without sounding like I have to prove myself, know that the property – in particular the history of Star Trek Online’s development – was a very important part of my adolescent life. I have watched every episode of every series several times at least, but I know better than to entrust my entire emotional existence into the promise of a continuation like Discovery. It most fascinates me how revivals of old names like this go about contextualizing their dialogue and other elements for today’s audience. “Snug as a bug in a rug” is surely not an expression we should expect to survive the next 250 years of human development, and yet this is supposed to be an aspirational series? It even made it in the recap! I should confess now: it is actually Star Trek Online which made me curious enough to seek out a CBS All Access Free Trial. The marketing worked very well.
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I tend to install the game for a few weeks or so around this time every year just to check in. This time, I was greeted by Star Trek Online: Legacy – a new expansion featuring Voyager’s Jeri Ryan and Discovery’s Sonequa Martin-Green reprising their respective characters in voiceover roles. I figured out that Michael Burnham must have been from The New Show fairly quickly, but I was disappointed to find out that the character was not in fact a trans man, but rather a female character with an unusually male name. For the most part, Burnham is simply an outlier in The Measure of Morality Parts I and II. She accompanies one’s character (along with Seven of Nine) to several different battlegrounds and stories we’d already seen before in previous episodes – when the budget’s running low, reuse sets, but there is one instance where we are brought into her (Discovery’s) world, which feels disorienting. The whole experience plays like it was forced upon STO by CBS in order to squeeze as many viewers into our free CBS All Access trials with as little developmental investment into the game as possible. Well, here I am!
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In Season 1, Episode 4 of Discovery, the writers made a very foul mistake… They placed fucking Elon Musk’s name alongside the aviation pioneering Wright Brothers and the fictional inventor of warp drive, Zefram Cochrane.
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How do you want to be remembered in history? Alongside the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, Zefram Cochrane? Or as a failed fungus expert?
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I can’t be timid about this – it straight up makes me ill. I can guarantee you that Orville and Wilbur Wright would have never watched fucking South Park and that I am actually going to be sick right here on this couch.
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I'm sorry, I don't look up to anyone who watches South Park. it's just a personal rule, okay?
I’ll spare you further ranting, but… Jesus Christ. I will not believe that I live in a world where this sort of comparison is acceptable. I’m not going to freak out because they say “shit” and “fuck” now, though I do wonder what Gene Roddenberry (though he wasn’t all that great, it turns out) would say – something like “profanity is no longer a necessary part of 23rd century language.” I thought Morgan Jeffery’s take on this for Digital Spy was an interesting one:
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There's an argument to be made that the old style of Trek might feel naive in 2017. But there's another that it'd be a refreshing antidote to the times, the Trek we really need right now as opposed to the one we deserve.
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I like to watch fellow Star Trek enthusiasts squirm and cry “continuity” and “canon” as much as any reasonable human being, but I’m not sure this sort of boundary-pushing is actually productive. Is anything being accomplished? Other than marking Discovery forever as not “family-friendly entertainment?” Linguistically, the word “fucking” in “fucking cool” was used for emphasis, which perhaps suggests there was no other way for the character to express that level of enthusiasm. In his IndieWire interview, Anthony Rapp (Paul Stamets) explains:
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“These people just put their brains to work in a really tough way and they had a breakthrough. And I imagine there’s scientists in their labs who might do that any time. We didn’t drop the F-bomb in ‘Star Trek’ by telling something to go fuck themselves. It’s like we did it by saying ‘this is fucking cool.'”
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If Discovery was “making history,” I’m not so sure what Star Trek: Picard was doing with fucking and pissant. I’m also not sure it matters at all in the grander scheme. What other freedoms should CBS feel free to explore, now that they’ve said the bad words? What else hasn’t been explored? Bathrooms? Shitting and farting? That has my vote. I really don’t remember as many colloquialisms showing up in the earlier series, but perhaps that’s just because those colloquialisms have since become part of our language. I’m not the greatest television watcher of all time, but I got lost in Discovery’s plot, and apparently I’m not the only one.
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There turned out to be too many of those twists in Discovery’s first season, and it was frustrating to watch as the writers sidled up to new, risky frontiers for exploration, only to suddenly change course right when things were starting to get interesting.
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Season 1, Episode 7 is called “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” and it’s the most classically Star Trek of what I’ve seen. One of those stuck-in-a-time-loop stories which truly makes you want to die. What’s even better and slightly meta: playback kept resetting for me at exactly 21:26 and starting from the beginning while the cat kept stepping on the delete key and destroying this paragraph. I had to keep watching the man from The Fucking Office continually kill the captain after the crew parties to 250-year-old West Coast hip hop and 300-year old Al Green all whilst writing this over again. I do not like Rainn Wilson invading my Star Trek. He gives Aquariuses a bad name and… beard. “Listen, petunia, I've been screwed over since the day I was born. I deserve this,” he says, and I wonder if in fact it is Rainn himself speaking of his invasion. He looks and sounds like a fucking incel. All of this makes me wonder if my entire problem with this show is simply that I do not particularly like its characters.
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The Vessel
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Relying on Memory Alpha – a tried-and-true Star Trek fan resource – we can examine the U.S.S. Discovery, itself. I’m not so sure about this spore drive shit. If the NCC-1701 Enterprise was indeed launched in 2245, its existence would blatantly overlap with Discovery’s, now wouldn’t it? I don’t actually care all that much, but here are a few screenshots from Star Trek Online.
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Note how much larger this Crossfield-class ship is than the Intrepid-class from some 120 years into the future. Then again, the latter was designed for “long-range exploration missions” and Discovery is the fleet’s flagship(?) Its “most advanced ship,” at least. The inclusion of technologies like the holodeck and the spore drive (perhaps the show’s most potent plot device,) though, are really stretching the canon timeline’s ability to accommodate them. The decision to include the Discovery as a playable, top-tier ship in Star Trek Online is 100% a business one, surely. I’m not here to judge, though – after all, games are about having fun, right? One of Star Trek’s ironies has always been its existence in a capitalist society as an IP within a debatably socialist future. (Everybody wants to see their own ideal socioeconomic label in this future, it would seem.) “What makes Star Trek’s economics fundamentally different, and, in many ways, fundamentally incomprehensible to us, is that scarcity is no longer a factor,” says Dale Franks. Today, though, Star Trek properties still require finite resources and labor to produce, and they always have. Atari spent over $50 million to acquire Cryptic Studios – the original developers of Star Trek Online – and Discovery supposedly cost “$6-7 million per episode.” Though the former is free-to-play, it’s filled with microtransactions and about 5 billion different currencies. When Star Trek.com says “Star Trek Online is best described as a permanent Star Trek convention,” they’re correct: it is full of shit to buy.
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There is also a lot of combat, though Discovery seems to have struck a healthy balance between warfare and other intrigues. It is definitely Trek in many ways: redshirts die without any plot consequence and all the classic character flaw tropes are represented. There is the aforementioned time loop episode with fucking Harry Mudd and even a mirror universe arc beginning with “Despite Yourself,” in which the crew actually responds to their new environment and does the research required to blend in with the Terran forces. This took an ancient Star Trek format and actually explored a new, interesting avenue within it (the time loop episode did not.) They even change the Discovery’s registry on the hull to read “ISS Discovery” instead of “USS.”
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Every moment is a test. Can you bury your heart? Can you hide your decency? Can you continue to pretend to be one of them? Even as, little by little, it kills the person you really are.
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Complaints
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There’s a reason we all hate Captain Lorca, and why he says things like “sometimes the ends justify terrible means” and “there’s no way we’re asking these neighbors for a cup of sugar.” I do not believe in Spoilers, but there’s not much reason for me to tell you why, specifically. Perhaps it is racist and/or misogynist to say so, but I found it difficult to get as attached to Discovery’s characters as I have to those of series past. Michael is great, of course, though my girlfriend Sierra surmised that her purpose in the show is to illustrate that “nobody listens to black women.” Sierra was also quite aggravated by the misunderstanding and mistreatment of the tardigrade. When Paul Stamets mentioned that his uncle Everett participated in a Beatles cover band, we both despaired, for we discovered an entry in Memory Alpha for “The Beatles.” If I were to standardize a system of measurement for my television ratings, Discovery’s cringe factor would be 9/10. The holodeck hasn’t been invented yet!
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Also, CBS All Access’ user interface is the worst I’ve ever seen from a streaming service, across iOS, desktop browser, and my Samsung television. It’s impossible to scrub, really, or to dictate a preference for high definition. One cannot navigate backward between episodes without re-searching the title and navigating through an incredibly clunky menu sequence. I was able to cast to both my Samsung TV and Sierra’s Chromecast from my iPhone, at least.
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Compliments
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Despite its failings (including Rainn Wilson,) Discovery’s acting is superb. James Frain as Sarek, especially, is the best of the three. I thought it was especially thoughtful that for the most part (at least in Season 1,) the Klingons actually spoke Klingon to each other. Given that Dr. Marc Okrand spent the time and effort to construct a fully-functional Klingon language, it seems only reasonable to include as much of it as possible. I also love Hugh Culber’s doctor’s uniform and the “cinematic” cinematography of the whole thing. It’s very much an action show, yet not quite obnoxious.
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So, should *Star Trek* die? Perhaps it shows my extreme bias, but no, I do not think it need perish quite yet. From my (white, male, cishet) perspective, Discovery does an okay job at remaining thoroughly Trek whilst acknowledging the present context’s social issues. It remains a very capitalist enterprise and wholesomely cringey generation X cultural mastodon, but I think it’s still worth our time.
Jason Isaacs is giving a very compelling performance. But the writers seem to be turning him into a fundamentally different person from who he was earlier in the season. Some might call this character development. Others might say there are more shoes to drop.
He named his dog Number One. His eyebag game disastrous. The Romulans are in a Borg Cube. They’re flirting in The Cube. It’s a Sex Cube. Its shields are very loud, now. They’re smoking weed on Weed Road. There is simply not enough runtime for a truly episodic television show anymore, is there? A Borg Romulan Scott. (Imagine Borg snot.) The shear fucking hubris. There’s the F word again. I didn’t know Romulans could be so hot. Jesus Christ. “I never really cared for science fiction – I just didn’t get it,” says Picard. Very funny, folks.
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Did he drop something or...? Paradigmatic. CBS’ closed captions are janky and I’m getting older by the second. They are in the Sex Cube again. The Star Trek OS looks like it has annoying notifications. A son? Using the term Quest. This is segregation. The Nightingale was a slave ship. This is not lost on me. Spanish speaking! Nothing about operating these ships is visceral at all. Hey! Jeri Ryan! These CBS All Access ads are absolutely bizarre. Icheb is here!? Jesus what a coincidence. Oh.
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TECHNO FUTURE. That head tilt was sudden. Romulans are freaking out in English, for some reason. Colonel Jane – Sterling’s young wife – is still a bitch. What a surprise. I still haven’t gotten tired of the introductory credits’ theme. Pissant, really? “And now the windmills have turned out to be giants.” I have no idea what that’s referencing. Admirals should not say shut the fuck up. The holograms are just different levels of Scottish according to their class. Did they do this just to make sure Scots continued to be represented in Star Trek? Why does Rios have so many pips? What rank would he be if he put all of them on? God? ALISON PILL. Dr. Pill.
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Fear is the great destroyer.
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Coordinated bonk. “We’re at a threshold” is not political at all. If I was watching this show by the week, I would be very frustrated by its pace. Very sad about the Orchid deaths. They were cute. They mentioned the Picard Maneuver correctly. Jonathan Frakes directed this. Seven of Nine just said “same,” but we will forgive Brent Spiner for aging and – I hope – for dying.
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I think we probably should’ve let ourselves let Picard die.
A safari through the enchanting space of third-party Mastodon clients on iOS.
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Apple's second virtual World Wide Developer Conference came and went as I wrote this guide – you can metaphorically picture me looking up from my machine having overheard the news of the 2021 Apple Design Award Winners announcement. Perusing through them, I saw two I would have voted for, myself: CARROT Weather – the beautifully vulgar, grumpy bitch frontend for your preferred weather information service, and Craft – perhaps the most innovative take on word processing of the past two or three years – listed under “Finalists.” (Read: losers.) The most positive personal discovery of (all?) WWDCs: an app called Be My Eyes, which “connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call,” along with an exceptionally crafted, cross-device accessible-as-fuck TTS solution called Voice Dream Reader. However, a double take in games from Genshin Impact and the fucking League of Legends game certainly sours the mouth and suggests yet further just how much Apple, Inc. has sold out.
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The continued prioritization of Growth for Growth's sake over any and all other considerations (namely, users,) is not unexpected from even the most valuable company in the history of the world, I suppose, but there is an actor at this point in the story who is catastrophically and demonstrably failing to fulfill their role: all I really know is that technology media has fallen into a trough of total uselessness when it comes to qualitative, authoritative analysis of consumer-targeted software. The necessity of this guide – and the bizarrely silent ignorance of even the “fringes” on its subject – is unimaginably severe. Before me has been (for years, now,) the “answer” to a Jolly Big Load of what tech and marketing types lament in more and more existential language, yet hardly any of the humans with the most to lose from their negligence – regular, casual social media users – have been delivered to these experiences. The story is not being articulated. The journalism is not being done.
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I know you almost certainly did not arrive here to hear one motherfucker's complaints about WWDC, but – as with everything Apple, Inc. does – every morsel of curatorial expression/discrimination/favoritism from The Great Money God within this platform must be scrutinized and criticized. Quite frankly, I found myself completely at a loss as to how not to dwell on the Discovery Disparity, here.
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Despite how deeply I've gone into iOS this year, I do not believe myself to be a qualified judge of software design, but I no longer believe Apple to be, either. Regardless of the revenue-related controversies of late, Apple have simply become terrible stewards of the App Store in every imaginable sense. Scams and blatant intellectual property theft abound, while the majority of the most innovative entries I've ever seen remain entirely obfuscated and uncelebrated by all of Apple. Inc.'s mechanisms. If you required an explanation for the amount of time I've invested into App Guides – a space to which I never would have imagined intentionally bringing The Psalms – I hope you can understand.
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I must confess: I have been meaning to write this app guide since even before I interviewed Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko on the morning of his Big Press Day, just over 4 years ago. I’ve exhaustively explored different means of convincing my own longtime Twitter friends to move, over that time, with very little success. Eugen, himself, published an official blog post at the beginning of February detailing his plans to open up onboarding by way of “an official Mastodon app that is free to download and that is specialized in helping new users get started on the platform.” As a Patreon supporter of The Mastodon Project (full disclosure,) I've been testing this app (see preview shots at the very end,) and am quite smitten with it. That said, I thought it might be worth going over the third-party options iOS users currently have available to them, largely because the offerings are each innovative and mature applications in their own right. (Also, it’s become quite apparent that the normal tech media sources you’d go to for such a guide aren’t going to give Mastodon the attention it deserves.)
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Obligatory(?) Context
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I originally intended to be as clinical as possible in this Post, having realized its potential as the singular comparison of its kind to appear in search results for new and potential users of Mastodon. From my perspective, Mastodon has long since surpassed regard as a novel social media experiment who's function is to prompt academic conversations about decentralization, open source, ad tech, and federated social's solutions to all of the Big Web's Big Boy (proprietary) Problems (though I have been compelled to invest significantly in that very conversation.) In the less intellectual hours of my day-to-day life (read: most of the time,) Mastodon is nothing more or less than my favorite place on the internet. It is a relentless delight which I only lament because I want to share so much of it with my friends, but have continued to fail in my efforts to articulate that Mastodon is not a compromise; it is a better social space.
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If you didn't know, this seems to have become my general shit, for lack of a better term: the ethical considerations of open source/“alternative” software are very important, yes! ... but they are far from the whole, and they are not a requisite for new users. The second of this World Wide Web Blog's fundamental considerations, in fact:
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The Open Source/Open Web community continues to struggle with their brand image (if you will) in both old and new ways that needlessly alienate (and sometimes obfuscate) some of their most important contributions from the average user. Technology media has failed in their responsibility to address this issue.
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The blog on which you're reading this, in fact, is federated on ActivityPub. If you so chose, you could be reading it in any client capable of displaying large bodies of text. The crucial point, though, is that you didn't need to know that – you could very well go on reading it on the web in total ignorance/apathy regarding Federation.
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Oh boy, here we go... No. I did not want to say anything ideological – I wanted this Post to function as little more than a pretty screenshot showcase and simple associative list responding to all of the Reddit posts I've seen to the tune of “is there an iPhone app?” As I explored them, however, I was reminded of the sheer creativity the “alternative” software community is capable of. Even the roughest of these considered apps seem unable to be faceless – sorting through the obscene amount of (unlabeled) screenshots accumulated over the past weeks of testing in my Recents folder has been so much easier than I thought it would be because of their relentless originality. If you've actually used any iOS applications and/or browsed the singular App Store from which they can be acquired in the past 3-4 years, you're undoubtedly skeptical: what we might have called “feature overlap” at one time has become all but the platform's core ethos. If you're the sort who enjoys screwing around with apps, generally, as I have for the whole of iPhone history, you have grown accustomed to disappointment.
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so! I found a way to actually find the apps you’re looking for on the App Store! the search function in this dev-facing tool *ACTUALLY WORKS*!!! https://t.co/XrsStvXq57
Regardless of who is to blame, we can all agree that the App Store is currently oversaturated nigh beyond usability with mediocre entries built from the beginning with zero apparent ambition toward original function. This, alone, wouldn't be so problematic if Discovery were not so completely and totally Fucked (except when dev-facing,) but I needn't comment further on that subject at the moment – I'm just trying emphasize how absolutely unheard of it is for a single protocol/service's third-party client representation on iOS to be so thoroughly special. It was astonishing to find all but one or two of these apps in a functional state, actually. In all my equivalent experiences downloading the entirety of a given service's API-supported palette (e.g. IRC apps, topically,) an all-too-significant purpose of whatever ends up getting published is simply documenting the ~20% of available titles that actually work at the given moment. (I'd have mentioned the “best [service/task] iPhone apps for [year]” listicles found in online publications like Digital Trends were it not for the percentage of them in which it's clear the author did not actually download some/most of the apps listed‽‽‽) Perhaps due to iOS 14.5's implementation of ATT, all of the Mastodon apps I could find and test (not counting non-English language-supporting apps, in fairness' interest) are currently functioning.
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So, if there's virtually zero chance a new Mastodon user might download one of the apps we're about to consider and find it broken, what practical function remains for this guide? Hopefully, to establish a SEO catch-all for such users from a non-automated source less associated with the project than the official apps list. Those for whom Mastodon is still an unfamiliar subject should find the collected imagery intriguing, hopefully.
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The Big 6
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My first step in writing this guide was to post a thread on r/Mastodon soliciting thoughts on third-party Mastodon apps from other users, who expressed a lot of love for Toot! and Metatext:
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Toot is just a joy to use. It has a little too much sometimes (it actually contains little mini games...which really aren't needed), but the experience of using it has some really clever UI twists. -u/mikepictor
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Pragmatic Code's Linky was also mentioned by multiple respondents. It's not a client, but a bridging tool for smoother URL sharing that integrates with iOS' share sheet. I did not have time to try it, myself, but from all accounts, it is an obligatory mention. So too is the GitHub Repository/List I created in order to “formally” offer a list with much greater brevity and zero editorialization.
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First, let’s begin with The Big 6 – those apps The Mastodon Project, itself, has seen fit to list on joinmastodon.org.
Dag Ågren‘s Toot! is not only my personal app of choice – I would (and have) go so far as to say it’s the single most innovative mobile social app I’ve ever encountered, largely because of its jacknife-esque instance selection. It’s held a place in my phone’s dock since the day I first downloaded it, for this and many other reasons. While one might find bugs/loose ends (understandably) exploring the functions of other indie social clients, within Toot!, they will only find little delights, like its wholly unique Share Sheet interface.
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Toot! is extremely beautiful (despite its unfortunate name,) and I am quite superficial in my taste. It’s Obsidian theme (which may or may not be related to the topical notetaking system of the same name) is especially gorgeous.
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In my cacophonous attempt to compare the notifications of all available Mastodon apps simultaneously, it's worth noting that Toot!'s always came first. Its charming custom audio alerts also make them my favorite by far.
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They're not just cute: in reflection informed by a newly-considered function of these apps – serving as representing the network as a whole – it occurred to me that Toot! audio alerts playing from my iPhone have prompted more first-time conversations about Mastodon in the wild than I can count. (Seriously: they should be considered an onboarding mechanism.)
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In my experience, it’s also the most robust of the lot – as in, it is very much the exception rather than the norm to encounter any sort of error or other obstruction in normal, day-to-day use. My own real reservation applies to the entire selection discussed today: I wish Toot! supported Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts.
I originally had high hopes for Shihab Mehboob‘s Mast – which used to look very different from the way it does, today. That’s almost certainly to do with its ownership changing hands at some point (no, I do not have any further details on that story, unfortunately.) That’s not to say the current app isn’t a worthwhile offering, it’s just far less visually ambitious than the original I remember. However, it’s also significantly more reliable.
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They were there last time I checked, but Mast isn’t owned and maintained by me anymore so not sure.
The Original… Genesis… If Amaroq was not the first Mastodon app on the App Store, it’s certainly the oldest to survive. Its GitHub Repository’s first commit dates back to April 17th, 2017. While you’re there, you might note that it’s the only one of these entries coded entirely in Objective-C – the near-40-year-old language originally underpinning iOS before Swift’s birth in 2014. Amaroq was the first Mastodon app I used and remains the strongest free option for iOS users. It’s been nearly a year since its last update, so its missing a few narrower functions like Bookmarking and Polls, but the core features it does include are rock solid. The only wild card: what the fuck is Awoo Mode???
For better or worse, @rinsuki’s iMast will require either a basic grasp of the Japanese language, or the patience to translate its menus and work backwards. (OCR came to mind, but I’m not quite dedicated enough to try it for this guide.) Assuming Google’s translation of its GitHub Pages site is correct, iMast is also Open Source “under the Apache License 2.” Unlike Amaroq, it appears to have been built in Swift from the ground up. Unfortunately, that's about all I can comment on, though I would very much love to hear from any iMast users/Japanese speakers and will update this Post accordingly.
Daniel Nitsikopoulos' Mercury represents yet another entirely original direction in Social clients. It's fresh and “opinionated” in its explicit lack of support for instances that “promote abuse and harassment.” From all appearances, this appears to be the singular source of negative reviews on its iOS App Store page. It's also the other option to offer widgets integration (in a single form, currently,) and custom audio notifications, though I couldn't capture a sample. Its Trello Roadmap and Feedback Repo are public but mostly inactive. As you can see in the grid embedded above, I absolutely adore its Scoops theme and find my $0.99 Tip 100% worth its custom icons.
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Unfortunately, the state of Mercury's App Store reviews prompt yet another essential economic/editorial consideration. The one in the very center of the image embedded, above – from “FeralDandelion” – is the singular one I will allow myself to address. It is true that Mercury straight up refuses to authenticate or federate with a substantial amount of specific Mastodon servers, but it is exhaustively explicit about this from very get-go. Its single-page Help document includes a detailed, up-to-date table of every single blocked instance and the specific justification for each respective instance's presence on it:
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Mercury takes a zero tolerance stance on abuse and harassment and as such does not support many instances that promote abuse and harassment.
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Let me be clear: the practical manifestation of this position is exclusively positive. The Mastodon project has long outgrown the sort of fixation on ideology for ideology's sake that even Lucky Linus himself has no patience for. Instead, thank Gourd Mercury's developers took the time to better your social experience! In response to statements like the pullquote above, I expect *only* thumbs in the air from this point, forward.
Metatext is perhaps the buzziest of all these apps – well-praised in every space I could find conversation on the subject. It's developed under Justin Mazzocchi's software studio, Metabolist and is as Open Source as it gets! (As per my hardware keyboard shortcuts crusade, I added my own issue requesting support.) u/GummyKibble noted that “it looks like a native app on both iOS and iPadOS.” This term – native – seems inextricably linked with Metatext. I vaguely understand what it means, and I do agree, but it's worth noting that I speak with some privilege, having compared all of these apps on the top performing handset Apple currently has to offer. In many ways, it is the most frugal of the new offerings, especially, yet it strikes a keen balance between function and delight. I think “native” can be translated as generally of a stout, sturdy disposition, thanks to the care put into honing said balance.
I'm not entirely positive which Mastodon app was actually the first on my iPhone, back in 2017, but I know for sure it was either Amaroq or the dearest, infinitely-colorful Tootle. Its App Store Page Version History suggests it has not been updated in 14 months, yet the app – which was apparently “Designed for iPad” – appears to be working just fine. There are some overlapping UI elements, but they're barely noticeable. Were it not for the new dev-facing store search tool mentioned above, I would have assumed this app long gone, to be honest, but using it again has somehow managed to genuinely twinge my nostalgia nerve.
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In my search for any extra-App Store representation other than Tootle's Mastodon Account (which last posted the day after my birthday, last year,) I discovered Tootle... for Linux. Since I am a dedicated and thorough person, these days, I spent several hours messing around with Linux Virtual Machining until Lubuntu finally functioned just so I could show you what it looks like. Below is a screen capture of Tootle bordered by the most Macish LXQ desktop bars included in Lubuntu and even wearing the new official Apple System Font, SF Pro. Still, I think you'll agree... Tootle for Linux is not related to Tootle.
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Personally, I find this a profound shame – I think more apps should be as colorful – and as color configurable – as this little, mysterious Mastodon app. I created the theme you see represented in the frames embedded above using The Psalms colors, naturally, and the whole process took less than five minutes. Play around with it as I remember doing, all those years ago, and you'd be surprised how hard it is to create an unusable color theme. What I find most shame in, though, is that Tootle appears to be completely invisible in regular app store searches, now. (And by “most shame,” you know I really mean entirely fucking unacceptable.)
I found my way to the only currently in-development entry on this list thanks to my Mastodon friend wakest. iOS developer Shadowfacts (who also maintains shadowfacts.net) is working on their considerate, distinct app, Tusker in this self-hosted Repository. In #tusker on Mastodon, you'll find a few poignant praises from Pixelfed founder and principal developer Dan Sup, which – from my perspective – are especially high, indeed.
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Tusker's color customization options are technically... well.. not infinite, like other apps here, but the end result of their (obviously, very considered) selection will be a net win for 100% of users over that alternative, I believe. It is definitely of a similar philosophy to Metatext, but unquestionably more ambitious. Out of the lot, testing Tusker was the singular instance in which I found myself considering a “replacement” for Toot! You, yourself can use Tusker right this very minute via Apple's beta distribution system, Testflight, via this invite link.
Installing Roma for the first time led to a puzzling quest with a particularly pleasant end. I noticed fairly quickly that the iOS app was a re-branded release of what used to be Mast. My first instinct upon this discovery was to DM Mast's original developer, Shihab Meboob, on Twitter, but frankly, I've already bothered him enough there over the years, so it's understandable that I didn't hear back. When I downloaded the desktop app I found on Roma's web page and noticed its similarity to Whalebird, I decided to use the site's contact form to inquire about what exactly was going on as gingerly as I could. Happily, I received a reply just minutes later from Leo Radvinsky, head of Leo.com, “a Florida-based boutique venture capital fund that invests in technology companies:”
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Hi David,
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In both cases we funded the original developers of both Mast and Whalebird to create a branded whitelabel app specially made for Pleroma. The idea was to make Roma a cross platform brand/app. It didn't really work out so now we're working on a new app from scratch called Fedi for iOS and Android and releasing that as open source.
I think Roma has been removed from the app stores as it's no longer supported.
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Let me know if you have any other questions
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Though my hopes for the original Mast to live on in Roma form were more or less dashed by this message, the suggestion that someone is investing actual capital into federated social is certainly worth celebrating. If Roma is still available on the App Store as you're reading this, I insist you download it immediately. It represents an incredible and original attention to detail which should not simply be forgotten.
Naturally, the app inheriting the work/resources established by Mast and Roma – known by Fedi – should be next up for discussion. Hopefully, my relative lack of experience with Pleroma – another ActivityPub-based, federated social network – won't let you down, here. After a brief shock from the uniqueness of Fedi's UI passes, one immediately notices how beautifully it is animated, wholly disregarding my recently-acquired preference for as little animation as possible. Perhaps more than any other app discussed here, Fedi feels uncannily bespoke in a way which iOS apps almost never do. It is undoubtedly the result of a very specific vision – to disregard the whole modern template for social apps and completely reimagine the archetype. Personally, I'm not sure if it would be easy to get used to, but my tastes/habits in this regard are very much the result of the past decade of proprietary social apps' blandness. Going forward with substantial financial backing and the talents of whoever it was that got it this far, no doubt we should all have very high hopes for Fedi.
DUDU (or “嘟嘟,” which translates to “Toot,” appropriately,) definitely wins for Cutest Iconography. It's a non-English-native application with exceptional English support, which I personally appreciate very much. Compared the entries immediately above, DUDU represents a much more modest interpretation of what a Mastodon client can offer. It’s robust, free of over-animation, and – most distinctly – very wide, which might have something to do with the “designed for iPad” subtitle on its App Store Page.
Yet another “Designed for iPad” entry, Naoki Kuwata's Tootoise is defined by its custom incoming post rate accommodations and its gorgeous Solarized theme. Its “Max number of new arrival posts” setting ranges from 0-400, allowing one to freeze their timeline entirely from any accidental (or habitual) Pulls to Refresh (set at 0,) load 400 Toots from such a gesture, or anything in between (at 40-Toot increments, anyway.) The advantages of this specification become immediately apparent when one actually begins to explore it, especially for those who have come to Mastodon after feeling overwhelmed by Big Social.
Yet another entirely one-of-a-kind experience, the slightly-mysterious Stella is listed as a “Mastodon, Twitter & News Client,” and is notably one of the two apps on this list which do indeed support Twitter! More than that, it is the first app I've seen in a very long time that allows one to simultaneously post to two separate social services (Twitter and Mastodon, in this case.) Without documentation, it's a bit clunky, but its customizable timelines feature also allows one to combine multiple “sources” (social accounts) into a single timeline.
B4X is yet another quite perplexing entry. The “Developer Website” link on its App Store Page leads to b4x.com – a web page entitled “Anywhere Software.” The GitHub icon in its footer led me to discover a repository which is labeled as such to lead one to believe it is, indeed, the development space for the iOS app we're discussing, but does not contain a single .swift or .pbxproj file – universally essential for iOS apps, as I understand it. Regardless, B4X appears to be built atop Anywhere Software's “rapid application development tools.” I like its elemental simplicity and nice 'n' wide post display.
Isao Takeyasu's Oyakodon feels a bit like it originally began as a school project, and I mean that in the best possible sense. While it’s probably the least polished of the lot – and therefore likely the least viable candidate for the role of your primary, daily-driven Mastodon client – is is far from a throwaway application. Some evil component of Takeyasu’s mind was clearly let loose if only for a moment, for Oyakodon’s Facebook-style theme is reminiscent enough of Big Blue to alarm. The volume of its design definitely peaks in its Cute theme, which is so violently loud I could not help but extract its color palette to illustrate just how furious its creator must have been.
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Truly diabolical design, there. For better or worse, Oyakodon doesn’t really work very well in its current state, but it does work.
I very vaguely remember happening upon StarPterano in my very first moments on Mastodon, so finding it still published on the App Store – buried as it was – brought me a particular sort of joy. If I’m not mistaken, it holds a special personal accolade as the only iOS app which has caused me to involuntarily shriek. This might sound like an insult, but it is actually the peak of my praise. I believe my knowledge of iOS development safely allows me to suppose that StarPterano was built with complete disregard for any established UI element libraries. That is, the familiar toggles and buttons developers rely on to standardize the iOS experience were cast aside entirely in favor of handbuilt, translucent buttons of a sort of neon quality which call menus and text entry fields no less alien to the platform. The most astonishing bit, though, is that it works. On my 12 Pro Max, it’s exceptionally smooth, in fact.
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I would imagine those real iOS developers among you should find StarPterano’s GitHub Repository particularly interesting, considering. In the interest of preservation, I have forked it as well, and fully intend to dive in to its code, one of these days. The audio player embedded above cites a three-second .mp3 file in the repository which perhaps once accounted for the “Sounds” toggle still found in the Settings menu of StarPterano’s current build. I couldn’t get the app to reproduce it, which is actually what set me on the hunt that led to the repo.
Ore2 is another (apparently) non-English-native Mastodon client focused on consolidating Mastodon and Twitter within a single space. Alongside Stella, it's the second of the first two apps I've come across in a very long time which allows one to post to both services simultaneously. Considerable work was obviously done on making its timeline-based tabs switchable with touch. Personally, I very much prefer my current crossposting configuration via this (generously-public) web tool, but I am all but certain those users exist who will find Ore2’s setup preferable.
Inadvertently, I have saved the best story of the lot for last. Developer and researcher Zhiyuan Zheng documents both the narrative context leading up to the creation of his first app, tooot, as well as the philosophy behind its design in “Building my first app – toot.” His reference to the downfall of a prominent social app in mainland China called Douban – and the “Douban Refugees” which resulted – are alarmingly missing from all English news organizations save for a single Quartz article from October 2019. He eludes to a “boom” of Mastodon adoption in the past few years and cites a lack of “user friendly mobile clients” which I can only assume to be a conundrum specific to China.
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“With the aim of contributing to the community and to this movement, I decided to take my quarantine time to build an enjoyable mobile client for Douban Refugees,” he explains. He notes that decentralized platforms have universally rejected algorithmic recommendation if for any other reason than “without centralized computing power, such [a] recommendation service is also not that feasible.” “Adapting” back to a linear timeline in a manner which still encourages exploration was clearly a major design consideration for tooot.
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The core consists of 3 needs: 1) what I can read; 2) what I can write; 3) what I have done.
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Obviously, I very much appreciate Zhiyuan writing publicly about his thoughts on decentralized social and sharing specific considerations in his app’s design and look forward to continued updates.
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Get Bent, Big Social
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A few universal truths among these apps stand out as obligatory mentions. First – in comparison with their Proprietary, Big Social counterparts – they are all ridiculouslyfrugal. Not a one weighs over 40mb, while minor (unexplained) updates to the official Twitter app often exceed 100mb. They are all astonishingly robust – I did not experience a single crash in the course of normal testing these “alt” social apps- even from the beta builds – while I distinctly remember the official Twitter app crashing several times over this period, even after I deleted and reinstalled it (an accepted maintenance requirement for anyone using it heavily for its entire history.) Also, on the topic of the platform, itself, they are also made absurdly interoperable by the ActivityPub standard. My PixelFed posts show up seamlessly on their timelines among content from Diaspora, Pleroma, and Mastodon, itself.
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yup… it’s me again, bringing up inexplicably huge updates to the Twitter app.
. . and pointing out… again… that speculation wouldn’t be necessary if Twitter just published actual release notes. pic.twitter.com/IZFDYPLAvS
The overwhelming impression I was left with after testing these apps was one of unwavering competence, cleverness, and true innovation. How many different ways can I possibly conjure forth in order to communicate this? I, David Blue – the vain fucker with a precollection for the most superficial variables of software design so healthy that I have on multiple occasions designed whole, years-long workflows around specific applications entirely because of their available color palettes... It is I who requires you to take a good fucking look, because this list of decentralized, largely open source, federated social software is a goddamned fashion show.
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Continuing to Explore Social Ownership
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This couldn't be “just” an app guide – I think I have thoroughly accepted this, by now, just in time for some conclusionary remarks. Somehow, the subject I originally tackled specifically because I thought it would be quick, rudimentary, and straightforward has become yet another personal journey. It'd feel a bit preposterous to declare any one of these apps to be life-changing, but – in every sense of the term, in contemporary, inevitably social media-informed life, they do indeed constitute a form of radical, ideological wellness. Each of them managed to remind me of a different minute delight found within a developer-user dynamic made up of thoughtful and effective minds working to contribute original and valuable experiences, first. Most noteworthy of these little freedoms: the realization that the upcoming “official” Mastodon app along with any future new options are exclusively a positive thing for the user... None of these apps were conceived to gobble up market share because the market is fundamentally, inevitably, uncompromisingly infinitely shared. I don't know anything about business, but I do know that relief from the burden of considering proprietary multivectored development intentions has been personally breathtaking. I can only hope the reciprocal compensation is happening at even a fraction of what it “should” be.
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From another essential direction, I hope I have communicated that they're far from curious, “niche” or vanity side projects, now. When I used the term “mature” in introducing this little arena, I very much meant it – these “alt” social clients developed almost exclusively within single-person-led projects now make the Twitter for iOS app look ugly and fucking broken. “Giving social networking back to you” has never been more resonant. Yes, it really is Toot!'s “take a break” blue screen, Amaroq's mysterious Awoo mode toggle, iMast's music app integration, Mercury's configurable timelines, Metatext's native solidity, Tootle's custom colors, Tusker's Digital Wellness controls, DUDU's elemental readability, Roma's quiet resurrection of Mast's UI bravado, Stella's utterly bizarre visual departures, Fedi's odd animated UI behaviors, Tootoise's consideration of pace, B4X's unfathomable elements, Ore2's parallel timelines, tooot's development story, and Oyakodon's adorable rough edges that have made my online life measurably... immensely better, these past weeks. At the forefront of this perception is undoubtedly the comparatively extensive control over my social experience as a user offered by the diversity of mobile experiences these applications offer.
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Those of you who haven't yet signed up for Mastodon: ==you are missing the fuck out==. I am being actually pampered, now, in World Wide Web terms. You are so welcome whenever you're ready – the water is nice and warm, as they say.
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...Party One
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Yes, you are looking at the currently in-development “Official” Mastodon app on iOS, coming very soon to the Awful App Store. You can join me in testing the app right this very moment by contributing to the Mastodon Project's Patreon. Though I do plan to publish a dedicated review on its release date, what I'll say for now is that it's very cute, includes the most gorgeous media player I've ever seen on an iOS app, and is as distinctly clever as any of the third-party family we've just visited, all whilst maintaining an expert's aim at its evangelist purpose.
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The surprise that threw me over the edge to a genuinely pitiful extent: the official Mastodon app already includes full Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts integration on iPhone!
In Stephen King's “The Langoliers,” the state of today's air travel is foreshadowed.
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I told myself I would not be topical – that I would publicly ignore the coronavirus – but I can no longer. There is simply too much to say about one of the most emotionally effective, surreal films of my childhood. The Langoliers occupied 9-11PM's slot on ABC for May 14th and 15th, 1995 (Sunday and Monday, twenty-five years ago.) It's an adaptation of a Stephen King novel of the same title and is fairly widely-regarded as the worst such adaptation of all time. You can now watch the whole three hours of The Langoliers in 360p (supposedly) at your leisure thanks to OpenTube (for now.) One commenter (on the since-taken-down YouTube video) echoes what I'm about to tell you: “My god! I thought I dreamed this movie up as a kid. I have been trying to describe this to people for years and here it is, it’s real!” In order to write this, I joined the Stephen King Wiki Discord server and was immediately welcomed with a request not to type in the text channels: “I’m working on adding some new channels so pls nobody type in them til I’m done.”
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The Langoliers begins with a pissed-off British secret agent (Mark Lindsay Chapman,) an insane businessman (Bronson Pinchot,) a psychic, vision-impaired young woman (Kate Maberly,) Sarah Jessica Parker (Patricia Wettig,) and a just-widowed pilot (David Morse) all boarding the same redeye flight to Boston – American Pride Flight 29. This group falls asleep and mysteriously wakes up alone on the aircraft except for Stephen King himself (Dean Stockwell,) a stupid incel violinist (Christopher Collet,) and a stoner (Kimber Riddle.) My favorite character, Craig Toomey, is the “twerp” business boy with daddy issues who can't stop himself from demanding to know what's going on. James Bond shuts him up with a “nose hold.”
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Whoa. No one's driving the plane!
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David Morse proceeds to try and contact air traffic control in a fairly-realistic manner, but is unable to receieve any radio signals at all, even from Strategic Air Command. Frankie Faison plays the single person of color on the flight, Don Gaffney – “a tool and die worker for Hughes Aircraft” – who dies first, of course. James Bond lecures David about inciting panic and almost immediately reveals his secret identity. Then, the Hungry Idiot (Baxter Harris) wakes up whilst Toomey begins screaming again.
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Scaring the little girl? Scaring the little girl?! Lady, we're diverting to some tin-pot airport in the middle of nowhere, and I've got better things to think about than scaring the little girl!
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After the entirety of the male cast threatens to beat him up, Toomey, sweating his balls off, begins slowly tearing strips of paper and moaning sexually like an absolute madman. Some irritiatingly irrelevant dialogue insues in which Stephen King Author Man narrates through Sherlock Holmes deduction to figure absolutely nothing out. He is wearing stripes on plaid. He suggests that the entire situation could be some sort of government experiment and I can't believe I'm wasting your time with this. “If it were just this plane, I could give you a scenario, but unfortunately, it's not just this plane. The city of Denver is probably still down there, but all its lights were off if it was.” Here you can see how excellently this script was written.
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I've been sitting here running all these old stories through my head. You know, time warps, space warps, alien raiding parties. I mean, we really don't know if there's anything left down there, do we?
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Sarah Jessica Parker reveals to Powers Girl that she's on her way to meet a guy she's been emailing with. Stoner girl asks if everything is going to be okay and Incel Violinist looks horny. She's going to rehab for stones. The captain announces to his nine passengers that they're beginning their descent into Bangor International Airport, near Stephen King's birthplace. Don asks Toomey to stop ripping up paper and the useless food addict yells “well, at least we'll be able to get some chow when we land” offscreen. Craig, sweating even more, is still ripping up magazines in the face of Don's threats. “Try it, you little jackass,” he says. I'm wondering where I can snag this American Pride livery for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Director Tom Holland manages to add drama to a more-or-less routine landing.
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This place is utterly, totally deserted... You know, there's something wrong with the air here, Brian.
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It's occuring to me that this may be the worst script I've ever actually sat through reading. “This place smells wrong. Really badly wrong.” Toomey threatens to sue the airline for $30 million for missing his 9AM meeting before seeing flashbacks to his abusive father (John Griesemer,) who mentions the Langoliers for the first time. The deserted airport scene is the reason I've written this whole thing – the dulled sounds of the characters' heels on the tarmac, the putrefied air. The clocks have stopped. The payphones are dead. The computers are lifeless. The abadonedness of it all. This is what the coronavirus has done to the world and to Craig Toomey. Even the battery-powered devices are dead. This is what confuses Stephen King Author Man to the point of head-rubbing and cigarette smoking for the first time in ten years.
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The production was actually made at Bangor International Airport as this incredible video hosted by Toomey's actor explores.
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LOVE IS NOT PART OF THE BIG PICTURE!
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It's never actually explained what The Langoliers are. Ken Tucker for Entertainment Weekly describes them as “little meatballs.” The little Beatles-haired girl can hear them approaching. “It sounds a little like rice krispies after you pour the milk.” Foodism abounds. “A really terrible, scary sound... Something making that horrible cereal noise.” She screams that the cereal is going to kill them. Somehow, Toomey finds a revolver while he's losing his mind. Kimber Riddle the Stoner went to NYU.
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Don't forget, Craiggy-weggy, the langoliers were here. And they will be back.
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Stephen King Author Man and Food Addict note that the food and soda have gone completely flat. “Tastes like old tire,” says Don. “What we're dealing with is time, not dimension,” says Stephen King. I'm wondering what in the hell sort of room they're in at the moment, and who decided those light wood countertops were ever a good idea.
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The bottom line is, I believe, that we have hopped an absurdly short distance into the past, say as little as 15 minutes, and we're discovering the unlovely truth about time travel. That one can't appear in the Texas State School Book Depository on November 22nd, 1963 and hope to stop the Kennedy assassination. One can't witness the building of the pyramids or the sack of Rome, or investigate the age of the dinosaurs firsthand. No, fellow time travellers, have a look around you. This is the past. It's empty. It's silent. It's a world with all the meaning of a discarded old paint can. Sensory input has disappeared. Electricity has already disappeared. And time itself is winding down in a kind of a spiral that's going faster and faster.
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Little Prophet notes that the sound she's been hearing is once again getting louder. Mr. Toomey's face is shoved in the floor, his nose bent.
The duo's new album manages to be wonderfully explorative without sacrificing any sacred traditions.
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For years, I took the voices and culture of working Americans for granted and sought to generally distance myself from my origin’s heritage as much as possible, but I’ve since realized that I couldn’t have done so without absolute certainty that country, bluegrass, and folk music were stubborn as State highway ditch-rooted fescue blades: omnipresent forces of Midwestern nature that’d secured their invincibility with the simple superiority of their belonging. While this conclusion is true enough for the time being, it’s quite independently so of their worth or necessity. In such conditional blindness, I’ve simply proven my sensibilities to be (predictably in the case of my seniors) not exempt. This truth is noteworthy only because of its potential to spare others the embarrassment of blatant ignorance to their own privilege. That said, I would suggest that you engage this music sincerely for a moment for your own sake, regardless of your own convictions regarding country music, Indiana, plaid, pickup trucks, the end of the world, or the proper noun for “cantaloupe.”
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As young adults, even those folks who’ve remained resolutely country-minded found themselves trivializing the name of the titanic Dallas-born trio The Dixie Chicks not out of half-assed iconoclasm, but because their brand was so cleverly immune to irony. You thought you were proving yourself of a higher caliber of discernment, but mocking goddesses only paraded your ignorance. In my teen rebellion against the culture of my rural origin, I scoffed at their mention for a while, somehow oblivious to my blatant hypocrisy. Thanks to my older sisters and their automobiles, I spent before and after elementary school days absorbing thousands of hours’ worth of late-90s/early-oughts Pop Country radio. Two summers ago, I returned to this library at length for the first time in 10 years and found my heart completely vulnerable to its related memories and my mind consistently flabbergasted by the oomph of the composition that defines the genre’s last mainstream hurrah.
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The original three Chicks – Natalie Maines, Emily Robison, and Marty Maguire – are still very much alive, kicking, and radio-playing. They even “returned from exile” with a real international tour in 2016. (I regret little more in my adult life than missing the opportunity to see them.) According to a fascinating November 2015 analysis in The Guardian, their 2003 denouncement of President George W. Bush cost them serious cred among their audience, but Johnny Cash likely harbored similar sentiments, Stephen Morrissey is… not straight, the most worthwhile current country sounds from my teenage home are composed and performed by a trans woman, and the staple tunes from the genre’s most chaste personalities are often just about sex. No reasonable individual would still cite this incident in an argument opposing the essential legacy of these three miraculously talented women.
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From a pop perspective at least, The Dixie Chicks are almost certainly the penultimate expression of country music as a technical and emotional exercise. Their extraordinary musicianship and prodigally antecedent mastery of suave sincerity represented the absolute peak of pop country’s untenable relationship with the American working class in one hell of a 21st-century-breaching last hurrah that still brings tears of pride to many an eye. However, the hysterical backlash of the greater working people personified in part by Donald Trump’s presidency is a last sure indication of the mainstream’s final estrangement from all distillations of rural culture. In the coming years, I fear the toiling masses will be left only with less and less authentic, more and more suburban bastardizations of their music as the last superficial delusions of condescending affection from the middle class fade, and the enterprise dies. What does survive will “graduate” (retire) to Folk (for white performers,) and further strengthen the Blues resurrection (for everyone else.) That said, it’s hard to find anyone who’s comfortable mourning the loss openly after acceptance has progressively set in – there’s simply nowhere else to go, and its aging icons have been in desperate need of retirement throughout the Information Age.
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The Top 10 Vegan Alternatives to Working-Class America
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Even if I’d had the moderate exposure from my current perch in the midst of the notoriously grass-roots nature of Portland’s Folk/Blues scene, 2000 miles west, I would have still been totally blindsided by my incidental introduction to The Matchsellers, two years ago. One needn’t harbor any presumptions about the relationship between Kansas City violinist/fiddler Julie Bates and Hoosier blues guitarist, Andrew Morris – they’re just about the cutest pair you’ll ever see, couple’s act or not (it’s less relevant than you’d think, and none of our business.) They’re also extremely talented and genuinely authoritative world-class musicians with plenty of authentic country mileage who exude a proud air of warm, confident serenity occupying the bluegrass sphere. After happening upon their set at Columbia’s faux-speakeasy in Summer 2016, I was at once charmed and impressed by the pervasive magnitude of the ethereal aura that followed them, especially after our brief post-performance conversation. I’m ninety percent sure they came without a mobile phone between them carrying a wicker basket full of CDs and matchbooks, and shucks… I do believe we’ve been doing this whole thing wrong, all along.
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I bought a copy of Kosciusko County then and there and played the shit out of it the next summer, wandering aimlessly around Missouri with my best friend, revisiting (and occasionally disrupting) the resolute peace of the tiny communities I grew up orbiting. On our way to the Hannibal – Huckleberry’s Fictional home/the great Mississippi’s tired tourism machine – we just left it on repeat. As a soundtrack to such sentimental pursuits, a central trio of back-to-back tracks proved especially potent, beginning with “Mentone (The 3,000 lb Egg)” – the work’s nostalgic, tear-jerking sole instrumental. Production isn’t low-fidelity, but appropriately honest – no amount of expensive mastering would be capable of compressing the essence of a surprise late-night live performance from The Matchsellers’ work into a digital audio file, anyway.
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Bates’ fiddling is an impossibly rare pleasure – the real type of sawing that mystically manages to erase one’s inhibitions and sense of civic responsibility when tearing about the borders of quiet row-crop plots, leaving long-lived lesions of billowing limestone high above numbered county roads at ninety miles-per-hour. Succeeding the distant, eye-misting cruise of the 1.5-ton Egg, “Driving Escort” is a masterpiece (naturally) of this raucous realm.
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Driving down the road with a yellow light on top of my truck / Going down to Vincennes earning my sixty bucks.
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Add the accompaniment of Morris’ obviously-fathomless relationship with the guitar, and the result nails a select truth without any hint of prudishness. At sufficient volume, “Muskmelon Breakdown” becomes a beautifully-harmonious catalyst of fast, loose, maniacal, hilarious energy that’s sure to land you in a ditch, but you’ll still be laughing your ass off by the time you’re pulling clay clumps and waist-high fescue blades from your steaming radiator. Kosciusko County isn’t an innovative record by any critical instrumentation, but I’d do best to keep my sun-faded, skip-worn copy readily at hand for the next time I find myself on a fresh gravel road, whenever that may be.
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For the last five years, all we said was goodbye
-I said it again, it was the fifth time
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I took your word and did what I thought was best
-I took your word and went 600 miles west
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That’s it, then – we’ve got The Matchsellers pretty well figured for either wannabe(?) or reformed(?) yahoos of their own design; charming, dusty novelties who chose a folly destiny of toiling their craft for none but a seasonal dozen acres of white, sweating State Fair flesh. Obviously, they’re meant for us sophisticated, globetrotting Winners to collect like thrift store antiques on our way down the interstate. Their time is ours to book for nothing on our mediocre “speakeasy’s” waxy new stage; to post on an Instagram story, to Tweet in an easy compartmentalization of their quaint displacement from our time, deep in the dusty recesses of our collections for no good bargain, where they’ll fall comfortably in line as our predictable and willing country servants should an opportunity happen upon us to show a stranger how interesting, dynamic, and worldly we are.
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As a displaced (and formerly ex-communicated) yokel, I’ve often been astonished by how easy it is to discard American folk music for huge swaths of time unless it expresses some unignorable sort of spectacular torment. My own failure to recognize the value in this one until I became separated and homesick was an overtly foolhardy cliché (though quite predictable of like privilege,) but I can’t help but wonder: is it unavoidable? Of course, the process is necessary for ‘class justice’ – one might even call it a natural law of sorts – and in the case of The Matchsellers, there’s hardly a struggle to communicate emotionally. For a real music scholar, though, it’s surely worth asking of those voices who know: do the oppressed, destitute, and hope-impoverished people of this country still rely on bluegrass, or has it been replaced for them?
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The abstraction of the phrase “good surprise” had plummeted from our collective vocabulary at a record-demolishing velocity in the interim, but this past spring’s release of Bluegrastronauts hit me squarely upside the skull again, stirring a solid half hour of hysterical, shrieking psychosis. I assumed the worst… Dear God, what has the internet forced upon that sweet, rootsy duo?! – and was immediately compelled to drop everything and listen.
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Hoosiers, we have a problem. What the fuck is this album, exactly? A nonchalant, apparently oblivious challenge to every assumption you could possibly arrive with. It’s safe to suppose “Bluegrastronauts” refers to its departure from the rest of their discography – from smack dab in Indiana’s center to the goddamned Beta Quadrant, the two managed to stupefyingly ace a theme most comfortable residents of their bluegrass sphere would take care to avoid leaving up on the kitchen whiteboard – even tackling apocalypse with regal serenity. At first glance, I was sure that copious soft glow had to either be the false product of my own insanity, or a deliberate attempt to alienate the sum of their audience in a single crises of identity. In fact, The Matchsellers had pulled off yet another especially-sparse artistic miracle and harnessed their creative restlessness to propel their departure from the elderly genre’s pretensions without spilling a single drip of their secret sauce. It’s not a concept album (thank God,) but doesn’t wander in any disparaging sense, either.
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Earl Scruggs in a spaceship on his way to Mars
-Pickin' away on the banjo at 100,000 miles an hour
-Bill Monroe in a rocket, see the look on his face
-it's mighty dark to travel when you're in outer space
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Name-dropping four bluegrass legends within the number 1 album-titled introductory track is the pair’s single self-conscious acknowledgment of visiting folk fanatics: this CD looks crazy, but we know what we’re doing – and Kansas City’s mention accredits the locale of the following entirely Missouri-made production. Indeed, in the WhoDoneIts, you’ll see The HillBenders’ Chad Graves layed em’ down in Springfield, and Johnny Kenepaske’s Dead Horse Sound Company spread em’ around in the Heart of America, itself. Missourian musicians especially should take note of these names: the offerings may have diversified since my day, but sound talent like this is difficult to come across, even within explosive college towns. Cutting two live acoustic tracks per performer – four in total – while expecting to retain any subsequent control over the behavior of either unwanted or subject sound is as difficult as any other circumstance you’ll encounter in studio production at this level. I know this much (but little more in that direction): real sound control is simply too tedious to bear for monomiking rascals with GarageBand. Now, having lost or been estranged from any remotely-professional sound reproduction equipment, Bluegrastronauts sounds as balanced and polished as my wired Apple earbuds could ever convey.
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In shared verses, Julie and Andrew’s charmed harmonies are separated beautifully about the listener without inducing a sense of lateral imbalance when one of them sings alone. (Admittedly, I don’t exactly know how it’s accomplished.) No single personality in the record’s toolset – guitar, fiddle, banjo, bass, or dobro steps over any other.
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I have no idea who’s listening, but I’m positive their numbers should be multiplying by a hundredfold very quickly, filling especially with all of ye who feel abandoned by all authentic American representation. They shouldn’t ever fill up stadiums or establishment radiowaves, nor should their art invite extensive pretentious dissection, but they will be adored.
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It’s a quintessential manner of Country Boy pride to whip the middle class’s condescension right back around with a classic demonstration: Oh, you thought I didn’t know about that? You thought I couldn’t do that? Well, of course I can! I’m just not particularly interested. The Matchsellers, though, have attained a much higher tier of comfort and confidence in their own skin.
The pop culture discussion of tech's greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways.
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Listen to this article read by Siri Voice 2 below...
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For those of us who've written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/“ethical” conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it's particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn't know what the movie was about. I'm not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could've done better, in that regard.
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First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell's casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man's screen, the film's depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as “ridiculous,” as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
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The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
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The Verge's official review of the film – written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey – is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge's audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media – grandmothers, retirees, etc. – who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about “privacy” – a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of “my data,” regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which – while possible – is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
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you don't have to care about reforming privacy, intellectual property, or any of the other issues an alternative addresses – you need only to want a better and/or different experience.
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by – and directly promotes on several occasions – one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain... hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for “solutions” to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who've been building against the adtech-funded web for ages – some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization's website nor the film's webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
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The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I'm here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you've followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn't still be reading,) you know I've advocated exhaustively for Mastodon – the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who's business model benefits both platform and artist. I'm still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn't immediately off-putting to “the average person.”
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Poke around the film's official website a bit and you'll discover a variety of heavily-branded “resources” for “taking action,” all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the “Take Action” vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall's tips for reducing your screen time, the “Data Detox Kit,” which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a “Join Now” button, and – most ironic of all – a link to download the “Ad Observer plugin,” in order to “share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable.” In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the “Online Political Transparency Project” instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
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No, it's not a scam. Using The Markup's shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here's the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves... incompetence? I'm afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world – regardless of what they believe now, or then – that these folks should not be our first call when we're searching for “solutions.” You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
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Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can't imagine you'd be correct... Under the heading “CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA,” step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
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At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both – or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
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This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
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You wouldn't announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
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Now, I've always considered the ability to change a computer's name an immense privilege. My first “real” computer's name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus' name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that's completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone's common name to that of “your favorite television character” (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so...) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it's just that it's ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down “change device name” as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
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-A notification I received while literally typing this out.
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I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an “Alternative Apps Centre” within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the “detox” seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it's hilarious that I can freely refer to “privacy” as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one' social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the “Supported by Mozilla Firefox” badges all over the website and asks me “well, what did you expect?” My answer: something “more” than promotion, I suppose.
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I suspect this is another case of don't go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to “innovate” than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I'd somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who's notifications I'd probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
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Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I'd wager.) I suspect it's long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as “Email Addiction” goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR's greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email's footer. If you're really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform's archives feature – or don't – but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you'll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
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If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it's okay to announce on Facebook that you're taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823-4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I've discovered with you.
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My own advice on “privacy:” don't worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the “privacy tools” you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you're an iOS user, you've already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step – if we're really honest with ourselves – is figuring out how you're going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
Nitpicking the recklessness of last year’s highly-awarded, class-blind black comedy
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Listen to this article read by Siri Voice 2 below...
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Indeed, it may be the time to jab at the rural, working-class South, but Martin McDonagh claims to have written his Golden Orb Special “eight years ago,” long before Tump, and any critical resolution the film provides is argued haphazardly. Consequently, its eye is cast on this strange, satirical portrayal of the Midwest in a manner which is inaccurate and insensitive enough to irk this Missourian. When I saw it at Columbia’s Ragtag Cinema this week, it was introduced by a young employee who noted that 1) Ebbing, Missouri is not a real place, 2) the film was actually shot in one of the Carolinas (an audience member suggested incorrectly that it was in SC,) and 3) we should prepare ourselves to be roused a bit by a bar scene in which a character pays $8 for two beers because “that just wouldn’t happen” (the Ragtag also serves alcohol.)
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The “redemption arc” of the racist “hick” “loser” Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell) was rightfully at the center of the film’s controversy, but even if one imagines his role and fate written differently — perhaps with him irrecoverably shunned and/or visibly punished for his excessive, hateful violence — his rubishness would still be unforgivable. Living with his mother and turtle feels like an effort to humanize him — and, by extension, racist small-town cops as a whole. The Huffington Post’s Zeba Blay wrote an essential take on why Three Billboards — with its terrifyingly racist dork — was received the way it was.
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Rockwell’s character is the racist uncle whom white liberals fear and love. The ability to feel for him ― to root for him in spite of his past transgressions, because he really is a “good man at heart,” an idiot who doesn’t know any better ― offers a kind of catharsis for the white viewer who can’t or won’t deal with true nuance, who is unable to reconcile their own complicity with their desire to be “good.”
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It’s not as if the film isn’t technically well executed or refreshing — thanks in large part, yes, to Frances McDormand — or that I will not regret appealing on behalf of my home state, but it’s hard not to speak up when Hollywood shits so recklessly on my people. I don’t much like writing about movies because there are so many voices who consistently speak so much more effectively. NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, for instance, did a wonderful job dissecting the film’s depictions of racism and domestic violence. Gene Demby commented that “[McDonagh] doesn’t get these particular physics of American racism, and he’s not interested in them,” and I think it’s reasonable to suggest that Mark’s not very versed or interested in the physics of American class, either.
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If you must differentiate the state of Missouri as a cultural whole between North and South, it is currently more red than blue — we went 56% for Donald and 38% for Hillary — but ask anyone from “somewhere down in the Georgia, Florida, Alabama corner” — as McDonagh put it -where we generally fall, and they’d be unlikely to regard us, fraternally, as the same part of the country. The accents in Three Billboards are not among the wide variety of local dialects you’ll encounter anywhere in the state, but perhaps they wouldn’t be out of place in Sylva, North Carolina, where the film was actually shot.
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Regardless of all potential criticism of the film’s cultural perspective or technical excellence — and I think most of it is more valid than any take I could possibly offer — my particular issue with it comes from a culmination of tasteless decisions. If one reasonably successful Irish director were to produce a patronizing film at the expense of Missouri’s working class filled with a ton of absurd, misconstrued characters portrayed by A-list talent on location in a real Missouri town, the side-effectual economic benefits such a production delivers to a locale would make it all more forgivable. Say what you want about us… as long as you’re paying. But to photograph such a film completely separate Missouri — culturally and financially — set in a fictional(ized) town, include the state’s name in its title, before conducting oneself in interviews as if we were a random target on a “Southern” dartboard… Well, that’s awfully shitty.
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Boy, working class Americans sure are a riot!
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The writing is interesting enough for this, totally-out-of-touch“reviewer,” but I can’t imagine why it won Best Screenplay at the Globes, unless the other nominees were completely, bleakly predictable. (I wouldn’t know.) The excerpt below (SPOILER WARNING I GUESS? LOL) was the most stirring part of the experience, personally, if only because I really like films that palm strike one in the face without warning with bizarre, chaotic vulgarity (like the elevator scene in Drive.)
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I suppose it could have been the result of a rational decision to give any depth to Anne (Abbie Cornish) — who is Chief Willoughby’s (Woody Fucking Harrelson) Australian?, much-too-attractive wife — before he kills himself in the last third of the movie, making her suddenly relevant. Or, perhaps it was another attempt to emphasize the emotional repression of “Southern” folks — one of the almost-accurate positives of the film, if only thanks to McDormand’s skill. She and Sam Rockwell won Best Actress and Best Actor in a Supporting Role, respectively, which makes sense — it’s a shame they accepted such an out-of-touch work with which to demonstrate their ability to assume aloof, emotionally-dysfunctional characters.
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Growing up astride classe while traveling throughout the vast majority of Missouri for various reasons has made me defensive, and — while my right to speak for hard-working Midwesterners is certainly debatable -I’d suggest the industry at large be more diligently interested when setting is especially emphasized. It is no longer acceptable to pass up the opportunities McDonagh has for critical storytelling in Three Billboards. Racist cops, abusive spouses, unsolved murders, and mishandled grief are real, abundant issues in the country’s breadbasket, and they’re worth discussing responsibly — especially with such a powerful platform. If the purpose of film writing is to help an audience determine whether or not a work is worth spending their time and money to see it in theaters or otherwise, I can tell you — even within my bias and limited authority -that this one just… isn’t.
On Windows XP ballot day, I spent my beatnik-ass time marveling at the (seemingly) abrupt availability of some genuinely innovative social apps on the Apple App Store for the first time since iOS 7(?) Of course, I am aware that reasonable people would regard a “sneak peek,” NDA-violating, perfectly Adobe Premiered app review to be pretty fucking lame, and I won’t dispute any accusations to the tune of “just an insane white guy with a WordPress site,” but I still believe it’s important to talk about software especially because virtually everyone uses it (as opposed to quieting down just when these apps and the people who make them attain the most advantageous possible position to fuck the whole world.)
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That said, I’m going to keep this as brief and unrevisionist as I can: Tweetbot’s latest iteration may actually justify the dedicated subreddit I’ve just discovered! (Reddit’s the last place anyone wants to talk about apps, I guess.) I’ve complained at length about Twitter’s increasingly hostile (but justified, sortof) treatment of its once astonishingly diverse landscape of third-party clients and tools, yet I’d honestly grown significantly in accepting that the dynamic would never again see the power of the world’s most cash-stuffed companies delivered into the sweaty hands of small, kooky one and two-man teams, and it never would’ve occurred to me that Tweetbot was still around — much less getting ready to update its trusty old app with a release that would suddenly make it clearly more stable and better-looking than its last competitor: the Native Fuck, itself, which has also undergone significant cosmetic surgery, recently. Namely, they moved the one fucking button that’s given the app a usability premium over its mobile web-based low-rent clone.
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“The compose button has been moved to the bottom right-hand corner and “floats” as users scroll down their timeline. That means the button is always available to quickly send a tweet when the mood strikes.”
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Yeah okay, Matt.
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We’ve got a shiny, new compose button to unveil on Twitter for iOS! Easier than ever to use, the floating icon is prominently displayed and perfect for one-handed scrolling and Tweet composing. Pro tip: Press and hold the icon to access your drafts, photos, and the GIF gallery.
--@TwitterSupport
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Twitter Support is no @Cher, yeah, but it seems strange that less than a thousand of Twitter’s more than 300 million monthly users would bother to engage with the announcement of a significant fundamental change to its infrastructure. Imagine if the federal government announced via White House press conference that every stoplight in the United States was going to have its yellow light removed to “streamline workflow” without any further explanation, yet only 1000 total Americans even bothered to tune in to the television coverage across all the news networks. It’d be strange, yeah? Well, y’all are using Twitter more than you’re driving, I’ll bet. Next time, get out andvote on my Twitter poll, you fascist!
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In my Twitter glory days — that is, when I used to spend the entirety of every one of my community college classes Tweeting from my phone — there was a healthy offering of third-party clients on both mobile and desktop that filled the english of the era’s software media with an absolutely barbaric brand-beaten pile of linguistic Twittrash. After Twinkle — one of the earliest and ugliest ways to use Twitter ever — you’d have to choose between Twitpic, Tweetdeck, Twittercounter, Twitterfeed, Twhirl, Twitturly, Twtpoll, Retweetist, Tweepler, Hellotxt, Twitdom, Tweetscan, Tweetburner, Tweetvisor, Twittervision, Twibs, Twistori, and Twitbin. These are just a few I picked up from a 10-year-oldTechCrunchreport listing the top 21 Twitter applications by traffic.
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Twibs
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Now, I have to stop myself from digging too deep here and attempting something absurd like The History of Twitter Clients, but the fucking material is there! I could spend an entire afternoon going through YouTube searches and gadget blogs because it brings me back to that time when I lived every day assuming these things were going to continue to astonish for my entire adulthood. So many incredible ideas! However, I’m going to save them for later and focus on the cream of the crop, so to speak: Twitterific and Tweetbot, which has been a longtime favorite of mine. As I said, it was in community college that I first ponied up money for Tweetbot 3 on my iPhone 4S simply because the hype over it among app and gadget nerds was so bonkers that it managed to spill over into my life, despite the fact that iOS7 and I were having serious issues in our marriage.
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If you trust Mark Watson with your life as I do, you’d better believe that Tweetbot has been “a screamer” since its very beginning, when it pioneered the Premium Poweruser segment, for which a demographic apparently still exists. It was fast, yet always noticeably smoother than the native app, just as the newest release is today. I must point out, though, that the bloggers and YouTubers who’ve insisted that Tweetbot or Twitterrific or any other premium app could replace the native Twitter app entirely on iPhone even before they were stripped of a most live/push functionality (which I’ll come back around to in just a moment,) are undoubtedly lying to themselves — as good as they got, they never overtook Twitter’s own app in immediacy terms, which is almost inevitably going to present fundamental deterrence on the part of the active Twitter user who intends to rid themselves of the default pedestrian avenue of administration. Tweetbot solved a lot of things, it really is daft when it comes to notifications. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they came a few hundred seconds late — it’s that they’re never predictably or consistently so, which severs entirely the human perception of engaged plugged-in-ness, if you will. It’s the same phenomena Chuck Klosterman explores best in the context of DVRing live sports to watch later.
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It’s difficult to project fictional scenarios that are more oblique and unexpected than the craziest moments from reality. We all understand this. And that understanding is at the core of the human attraction to liveness. We don’t crave live sporting events because we need immediacy; we crave them because they represent those (increasingly rare) circumstances in which the entire spectrum of possibility is in play.
--“Space, Time, and DVR Mechanics” by Chuck Klosterman
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Tweetbot is unquestionably a more thorough environment in which to explore Twitter than any other third party client, but it can’t do the live thing. (Please do complain to Twitter, Inc. about the API situation if you’re so inclined, though.) All I’m trying to say is, there is no fucking reason you’d delete the Twitter app — hide it away in a folder and never ever open it again if it disgusts you so, but leave its notifications settings on so that it can keep itself busy in there. Now that is a smart workflow! In fact, it was mine! And it did work for such a long time that you’d probably forget about the arrangement in no time were there not the occasional obvious discrepancies between Tweetbot’s Mention’s tab and the native app’s instant notifications. There has never been — nor will there be, I think — a client for Twitter that can replace some use of its own properties.
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I think Tweetbot 3 made me into my own ridiculous equivalent of a “poweruser.” Things are a little hazy now, but I know that I departed my main Twitter account just before the app’s release, and I didn’t come back until 2015. I was going to school in the same old mall building that housed the tool store in which I was also working in full-time, which is surely the only explanation for the shamelessness I demonstrated in bringing a wireless Apple Bluetooth keyboard to my classes and placing it behind the phone on whatever surface was in front of me so that I could lean forward and type into iOS with my nose damned near touching the screen. Strangely, I was not able to verify when Bluetooth keyboard support was added to iOS, but we’re going to conclude for the sake of convenience that it was first included in the immediate predecessor to the iPhone 4S I was using then.
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The cognoscenti have been on Twitter for years now. Stephen Fry, the web service’s patron saint — in Britain at least, joined in 2008. However, it wasn’t until early 2009, xsomewhere around the time that Fry tweeted while stuck in a lift, that the service went truly mainstream. Mentions of Twitter, usually involving celebrities, could be found in newspapers and on breakfast television.
--“Top 10 technology highlights of 2009 ” | The Telegraph
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If you’ve made it this far, you’ve already seen the demos and skimmed reviews at least. You should know by now whether or not Tweetbot 5 is worth it to you in purely functional terms, but I think we should all acknowledge that this release of Tweetbot is likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS. The mess that is Twitter, Inc. has made clear this year that it intends to prioritize its own clients over maintaining the APIs necessary for others to receive push notifications. And when I say “its own,” I’m also referring to our dearest TweetDeck, which they in fact absorbed. From a business perspective, it makes sense: only “six million App Store and Google Play users installed the top five third-party Twitter clients between January 2014 and July 2018,” according to TechCrunch. I never expected to see Tweetbot on the App Store charts again, nor would I have considered that Echophon, TweetCaster or Twitterrific would have been left available. They’re on the App Store, at least, and I can confirm that they all technically still work, but it’s safe to say they’re showing their fucking age. Tweetbot and Twitterrific, though, are not just satellite products of the platform — they literally built it. These two are the poles that have spent Twitter’s lifetime thus far demonstrating for the company and its userbase their own respective interpretations of a mobile social application. Today, they are united — along with Talon and Tweetings — in a plea for continued access to the platform they helped establish on behalf of Twitter users and developers around the world.
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Both Tweetbot and Twitterrific are in their 5th versions, and neither has actually changed much since iOS 7. (Twitterrific appears to still be in the same version number.) Facing the growing walls around the service, one struggles to imagine them surviving more than one or two iOS releases, but I’ve been wrong before. (In fact, I discovered yesterday that Lookbook is still around somehow.) By the time iOS 7 came around, the new native Twitter app still looked fucking terrible. When Tapbots released Tweetbot 3, everything about its visual experience was beyond anything we’d seen on the iPhone before and its effectiveness as a Twitter tool was immediately recognizable in contrast with even Jack’s brand-new app and mobile web experience. The animations were tasteful and smooth and the “pro user” label on Tapbot’s demographic allowed them to fully explore the functionality of iPhone’s gestures separate any bond with the hypothetically least-capable user.
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This is a dynamic which I am apparently unable to avoid across just about all of my subjects — including digital media — so you may take it as generally unreasonable or extreme, but I’m nearly as tired of being treated as an idiot user as I am an idiot reader. Readability is to Usability, etc. It’s especially aggravating when I could do so much more if developers would just assume I’m capable of any knowledge acquisition or intellectual growth whatsoever. Except for a few leftover keyboard shortcuts, the native Twitter app’s only function are the most obvious to engage with, as per the highest possible standards of use, which would make perfect sense if it was paired with competent investments in Accessibility, but Twitter always appears to detest the subject, even while quietly putting in some of the work. Thanks to Mastodon’s explicit and visible acknowledgement of accessibility by way of just one young German man and a volunteer team, we certainly know it’s not because it’s an expensive one at all. (The “if Mastodon can do it than Twitter can definitely fucking do it” argument can be expanded almost without limit.)
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Somewhere out there is a social media manager using a screen reader whose professionalism has been undermined by the belief that the update is available to everyone. We deserve equal access to the tools our peers take for granted, and the security to know that we will be able to do our jobs tomorrow regardless of updates.
--Kit Englard for The Outline
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I would like to commend myself now for making it this far without mentioning Lists — a subject which I’ve already Tweeted and written about extensively — but this time, I have the wondrous blessing of two premiere mobile software companies who recognized the potential power in list functionality to dispel or avoid most of the inherent risks assigned to the usage of a social network like Twitter and bet heavily on it. Neither can be utilized to the fullest without lists and wouldn’t it be such a shame to not get your money’s worth? Tapbots expanded their curative ability tremendously by adding customizable filters to any timeline in Tweetbot, allowing the user to infinitely manipulate incoming posts with any combination of every variable supported by the core Twitter code itself. Within a matter of seconds, you could create a filter that will exclude all Tweets except for those from unverified accounts that mention “blimps” and include a media attachment and apply this filter to any of the app’s timeline views — including Home, Mentions, Profile (your own Tweets,) your Favorites, and your Searches — everything but your Direct Messages can be sorted this way.
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TweetBot and I accomplished a lot of sorting together, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me had it not crept to #1 Paid Social App again a few weeks ago that perhaps my bias towards Twitter lists could be entirely attributed to my early use of TweetBot and Twitterrific, which allowed me to amass a Following count of over 5000 without physically perishing or mentally disintegrating to the point of undeniable insanity. However, by the time TweetBot 4 was released in 2015, it had long since swapped places with the native app within my iPhone’s homescreens and was only used when I felt particularly like Tweetstorming from a stationary situation. From my wireless Apple Keyboard, this meant Cmd (⌘)-N to compose a Tweet and ⌘-Enter to send it.
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Today — in Tweetbot 5 — this continues to be a tried-and-true method of Tweeting Tweets on Twitter, smoothly and efficiently, as always. Returning to Ye Olde Alternative in 2018 yields both familiar and newly-implemented goods: animation and audio notifications are carried over and/or updated as needed to maintain a fluid and fresh experience. The ability to switch between its intelligently-chosen color themes with a two-fingered vertical swipe, alone will be justification enough for many users like myself to hand over another $4.99 to the Tapbots developers who’ve managed against all odds to one-up Twitter’s own mobile app development one last time. Over any other alternative app, Tweetbot 5 retains the robust qualities necessary to achieve #1 Paid Social App status on the App Store despite its new API shackles.
In the bleak face of Twitter’s centralization, Tapbots refuses to give up on its mobile client.
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Listen to this article read by Siri below...
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Were it just I who came to you with only my voice on this cold night, proclaiming the imminent release of a whole numerical version of a third-party mobile Twitter client in 2021, you really would have no choice but to send for the laws, for you’d be left no consideration other than my comprehensive descent into absolute insanity. 825 days ago, I told you lots about the history surrounding the development of Tweetbot 5, which I confidently described as “likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS.” After spending the past few months diving deep into iOS in preparation to review and reflect upon Apple’s current flagship handset, my eyes have been opened to the exponentially-increasing pace of the whole environment’s metamorphosis during the course of my lapsed attention. In the name of progress, I’ve done my best to make a point of looking back, too, yet something astonishingly personally relevant managed to slip past me until just last week: there is a sixth version of the Tweetbot app. At this moment, it is listed on the App Store as an “Early Release” version, though its predecessor can still be downloaded by those who’ve already purchased it in the past, like me. This is an unusual practice – usually, pre-release versions of iOS apps can only be distributed through Apple’s developer beta testing infrastructure, though Testflight. Notably, Tweetbot developer company Tapbots was apparently required to take down Tweetbot 5’s store listing 30 days before releasing Tweetbot 6.
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I can’t remember exactly why – though I suspect I was just fucking around on my phone before bed, bleary-eyed – but the implications of this next numeral passed me by the first time I saw and downloaded Tweetbot 6, two weeks ago. Perhaps it’s because the app didn’t appear to have any new features – in fact, it’s technically got less than 5, though those that have been removed – user-specified URL shortening, image hosting, and video hosting services – haven’t worked in a good while anyway. As my old fav, The Verge noted in their coverage of 6, blame for these omissions rests solely on Twitter, Inc., itself, who’s continued to hold its API development inordinately close-to-chest. I didn’t bother to find out about this, though, because my first assumptions upon poking around the new app – especially after encountering its new subscription requirement in order to use any of its substantive features – was that its developers had ceased any actual time investment into the app long ago, and that 6 was a new version in number and rudimentary visual updates, only, shoved out in hopes of peaking old, loyal users like myself enough to get us to download it, at least. In the disappointment I’d already expected, I closed and immediately deleted the app.
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I’ve paused everything else to write you on this, though, because the story is actually much bigger. Had I investigated any further that first time, I would have discovered an odd amount of buzz coming from even the most mainstream of tech media in a simple search. (Yes, I am ashamed about it.) You’re still reading, but perhaps – as I was, originally – you are doing so from an appropriately-jaded, well-read perspective on software, generally, in 2021. Perhaps you’re looking at the search results, yourself, and wondering if you’re dreaming. Dedicated coverage of a fucking third-party Twitter client iteration??? At this point in history? What in fuck? I’m fairly certainly neither of us are, though: fucking Tweetbot made headlines on Engadget, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacStories, iMore, MacRumors, and others. No, it’s not 2010 again. In fact, The Verge, at least, has never given up on Tweetbot. If my long term memory had been functioning, I would have remembered noticing its spot in “12 great apps for your new iPhone in 2020:”
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Twitter is a vaguely terrible way to spend your time these days, but if you (like me) can’t tear yourself away from the social media service / entryway into hell, you’ll want Tweetbot, which actually makes using Twitter far less painful. Tweetbot shows you the tweets of the people you follow, in the order that they tweeted them. There are no ads or promoted tweets, powerful mute filters to block out unwanted noise, and (thanks to Twitter’s unfriendly API changes) no notifications to constantly ping you to come back to the app.
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Here’s to Chaim for exposing me to a perspective I never would have otherwise considered: Tweetbot’s lack of push notifications as a positive. If you’re wondering, no, this new app does not ~yet~ include any additional notification integration, and it’s not clear whether or not it’s on Tapbots future roadmap for the app, or where. As for the reality of integrating Tweetbot 6 into your current Twitter use, I stand by my argument that deleting the native Twitter app isn’t really an option if you plan to ever view your notifications on your phone. The popular assumption (I assume) if you’re still reading is that you are a “poweruser,” meaning details about my own configuration are probably irrelevant. If by chance you’ve just downloaded Tweetbot for the first time, you should take the time to disable notifications for Tweetbot entirely, but leave them on for the native Twitter app, even if you decide to banish it to your App Library. Before I began any work on this review, I made sure to swap in Tweetbot 6 where the native app had been in my dock for several years, now. I originally pushed the native app all the way to page 6, but immediately found this extreme. Instead, I put it in the bottom-right corner in my second screen, as you can see in the screenshot below (which also serves as proof, if you needed it.)
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I should also note how much my own engagement on Twitter has diminished in the past 3-5 years. Not to manifest tiny violins – in turn, my engagement on (and investment in) Mastodon has increased exponentially, and it’s of a much higher quality. I bring it up for context’s sake: I can afford to prioritize Tweetbot in my Twitter use because of how few daily notifications I get – a number which is unusual for someone who uses Twitter as much as I do. Inevitably, my own use is once again going to factor heavily in this work, as is the significance of my relationship with Twitter, generally, in my life. If you didn’t already know, I’ve met basically all of my friends since high school through Twitter. As of this moment, my private “Friends” Twitter List includes 149 accounts, and I’ve spent more than 10 years, now, reading almost every single one of their Tweets. I have been as critical of the service as anyone, but – whether or not either of us are willing to acknowledge it, wholly – I believe the intimacy of this arrangement to exceed that of any in-person relationship I have ever had. Reading the random thoughts of these people seconds or minutes after they’ve popped into their heads for all this time has been an experience unique to the format Twitter pioneered, if not to the service, itself. I have no choice but to acknowledge that I am deeply invested in not just Twitter, but Twitter’s less-than-visible Lists feature, emotionally and intellectually. When I hit my follow limit, several years ago, Lists also became my single means of acquiring new connections on the network. If it were to be removed, I would lose this ability, entirely, as well as any reasonable means of communicating with any of my friends.
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Perhaps you understand, now, why I have written and Tweeted so extensively about Lists. You should also understand just how miraculous the possibility of Tweetbot’s new future now seems, personally, unless you’re new to all of these ideas and don’t feel like reading that big olé Tweetbot 5 review of mine (which is fine.) Before I go into the history of Tweetbot, let me first share the single most telling feature in Tweetbot of Tapbots’ belief in using Lists and share some evidence of others’ present day belief in Tweetbot. Shamefully, I’ve spent several years – tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours – using Lists in Tweetbot, oblivious to its upmost Lists integration: “Use Lists as Timeline.” Had I actually bothered to look at the support docs at any point, I would have discovered this long ago, which would have almost certainly made my given year. If you use Tweetbot and Lists, for the love of Gourd, please take a look. Here’s what those docs currently say, in full:
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One long time Tweetbot feature is the ability to use any of your lists as your main timeline. To do this, all you have to do is hold down on the “Timeline” label in the navigation bar (in the timeline tab) and a menu populated with your lists will appear. Select one and that will become your current timeline. You can switch to another list or back to your main timeline any time by performing the same action.
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Even after reading this multiple times, it still was not obvious to me what it was talking about, and I was unable to find precisely zero visuals on The World Wide Web of this action taking place, so I recorded and uploaded the video embedded above. Good God, how I wish I’d been a more detail-oriented young man! I’ll be privatizing my self-punishment from here on out, though, so bear with me.
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The discourse surrounding Tapbots’ recent announcement has already reached a higher decibel count than I would have ever expected, so it’s obvious there are plenty of users who still love Tweetbot, and you already know from the beforelinked stories that The Verge has also stood firmly by it as the preferred Twitter experience. It takes a wee bit of digging, though, to discover the subtle bets on both Tweetbots and Lists from no less than Apple, Inc., itself. In the official Apple Shortcuts Gallery, a curated list entitled “Twitter Better” includes “Open Twitter Lists” at number 1. In 5th position is “Open in Tweetbot,” and “Open in Twitter App” (3rd,) is configured by default to first ask you to choose between Tweetbot and Twitter’s native app, despite its title.
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As for App Store rankings, the fact that Tweetbot 5 was forcibly removed from public listings makes it impossible to meaningfully judge recent popularity of Tweetbot on iPhone/iPad. Its MacOS-based sibling, though (called Tweetbot 3,) was the second most popular paid app on the Mac App Store as of February 6th, 2020. That’s the day I borrowed my Mom’s MacBook Pro for a short while to check up on MacOS Big Sur, when I downloaded the current version (3.5.2, if you wanted to know) of Tapbots’ desktop Twitter client and messed around with it enough to tell you that it’s as wonderful as ever. (Had I not switched back to Windows as my primary desktop OS a decade ago, I would use it every single day.)
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I suspect most active Twitter users in 2021 would be even more surprised to discover Tweetbot’s remaining, discreet hold on today’s Twitter experience than I was, assuming most of them joined more recently than myself and those I regularly interact with. For the sake of this Post, I reached out to Tapbots with an interview request about “Tweetbot’s roadmap, Apple’s requirement that [they] remove 5 from the App Store 30 days beforehand, and why [they’ve] decided to take this (risky, imo) bet on making our lives better,” though I don’t expect a reply, which is fine. They did respond to my support request regarding hardware keyboard shortcut support very quickly, saying they’ll look into it. (Without being verbose, I’ll just tell you that if a near future update to the app fixes the F and ⌘ + R shortcuts, I will shit out my whole ass.)
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The Business at Hand
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Before I dig into the controversy and hypotheticals surrounding what Tweetbot 6 might become, let’s take a moment to qualify it vs all of one’s options to interact with Twitter on iOS currently (as in, Feb 11, 2021 at 19:24.) It’s almost certainly premature to do so, but skeptical readers would note, I’m sure, that its listing on the App Store is “early release” in name only, that I have just spent money on this specific version, which should therefore render inert the normal exceptions a review would make for beta or pre-release software. If you’ve somehow come across this Post before reading anything else about Tweetbot 6 and simply want to know what is new for this version compared with 5.5.3 (its predecessor’s most recent release,) the frank answer as it stands is not much. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, here, but the YouTube videos and tech media articles I could find dealing with the subject of additions, specifically, were all either misleading, entirely wrong, or both.
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While 6 lists one more option (for a total of 9) under Themes in the Display section of the app’s Settings menu, none are substantive variations of the same themes you’re familiar with from 5. “Future Light” is just a more turquoise variant of the “Default” blue UI theme in 5. In fact, the singular change in the Display menu is the addition of “San Francisco Rounded” under the Fonts selection. Below, you can see side-by-side screenshots of the Tweet Detail view in Tweetbot 5 vs. Tweetbot 6, with the regular SFUI font on the left and rounded variant on the right (text size slider set to max on both apps.)
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To be honest, I can’t really tell the difference between the typefaces in this view, but have used the new app enough to know I prefer the latter. More topically exemplified in that image is Tweetbot 6’s new support for social cards, which the Tapbots boys have executed in a startlingly beautiful way that puts Twitter to shame and makes one feel like you’ve taken them for granted these past few years. Also in that vein and more than worthy of the same accolades is Tweetbot 6’s support for Twitter polls. They’ve never looked so good.
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Somewhat on-trend, the app also includes two new icons, but – if we’re being 100% frank – they’re a paltry, dated-looking afterthought and Tweetbot deserves (needs, even) better branding. If I were allowed a singular compulsion to impress upon its developers, I’d make them put out a public call for new art. I’m all but dying to see what the community would come up with.
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So, if you were wondering what the fuck Tapbots have been doing these past 3+ years, you should now have the basal bullet points of your answer. The Greater Truth about this gosh darned Twitter app (and why its long-respected developers are now asking you for a whole dollar a month,) though, requires a broader look.
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Slow & Steady
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For as long as I can remember, both the MacOS and iOS versions of Tweetbot have always possessed a more-or-less undefinable (perhaps Apple Development- specific) quality that’s noticeably set them apart from their direct competitors. I didn’t fully understand why they “feel” so much more “right” until I started making my way through this list of all the interviews/podcast appearances by Tapbots’ iOS code wizard, Paul Haddad, who comments in variations the same argument for a very deliberate developmental pace. The first time, with a MacWorld journalist on some steps outside WWDC 2013, I assumed he was just tossing some self-deprecation around to casualize the interview:
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Frankly, we’re slow at doing stuff.
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Yes, you are, Tapbot… From a returning user’s perspective, it’s hard to understand what in Gourd’s name they’ve been doing. I listened and read through every Tapbots interview I could find – all but one with Paul, who has through the years continued to come across as a sensitive, well-read, even wise professional developer with a healthy, professional outlook on the work of his little (relatively) weathered company and its place within the warp speed nightmare that is the mobile software industry. I suppose I was expecting to find an explanation for what I saw initially as a minimal regard for Tweetbot’s history, in contrast to 6’s announcement. I wouldn’t find it, though, because in truth, I was sure I already knew it: Twitter made it clear over a decade ago – just after they’d purchased Tweetie and slapped their own name on it – that they had no intention of competing in the client space, so third-party developers were no longer welcome.
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Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
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As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.
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I’ve spent enough time in The App Space (read: Phone Dude Hell) to expect a lot of melodrama, largely without judgement, considering how generally awful the big vendors have made the whole situation. The business legality of the story was spiked into the mainstream conversation last year by controversy encouraged by Basecamp following some pretty toxic, retaliatory correspondence from Apple regarding their plan to subsidize their new email service, HEY. Frankly, I’ve found such stories – about clashes between big software companies over mediocre, uninspiring, and sometimes just downright bad software – ridiculously exhausting and less and less interesting, lately, as I’ve realized that the most innovative, quality work I have experienced has basically all come from the tiniest teams. The most groundbreaking projects and products I’ve bothered to show and tell, here – Unichar, Zalgo Generator, Bear, Toot!, Mastonaut, Mast, etc. – were all built by individual developers except for Shiny Frog’s Bear. (Their team currently numbers 16, by my count.) Each one of those hyperlinks eventually leads to a form of my same rant: why the fuck won’t tech media talk about genuine innovation anymore.
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As I read and listened through Tweetbot’s history for this work, it occurred to me that I might be neglecting to acknowledge an age old divide in development philosophy across platforms. In the singular instance both Tweetbot devs appeared together in a podcast interview – a Founder’s Talk episode from 10 whole years ago – Paul Haddad addressed the when is it gonna be done question in a comprehensive and particularly illuminating way:
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I personally hate that question because, you know… it just will get done when it gets done… We’re definitely slow. We go over every screen, every detail over and over again until we get it right. That takes time, which is why we don’t talk about upcoming projects.
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Every screen, every detail, over and over again. This sort of deliberateness (which I have personally been working on appreciating, as of late) is actually – as I have come to realize – Tweetbot’s defining feature, especially going forward. Out of all the third-party Twitter clients to come and go, Tweetbot has been overwhelmingly singled out as the favorite because of how aligned it is with the traditional priorities of the Apple space: thoughtful, deeply-considered robustness. Pardon the cliché, but it is the only one that has always felt native – as if it could have been published by Apple, itself.
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Everything Happens So Much
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The iOS Poweruser Community has been “allowed” to drift away from these principles since iOS 12, especially, and its Pandora’s box-like integration of Siri Shortcuts (Workflow, by another name.) You may or may not be aware of the jailbreaking community’s continued efforts – I was certainly surprised to discover that the r/Jailbreak subreddit has nearly 600,000 subscribers, which outnumbers all but the eldest subreddits in the Apple sphere, including r/iOS, r/iOSBeta, and r/Shortcuts (one of the primary hubs for the Siri Shortcut tinkering community) by a huge margin. Since iOS 14’s addition of sanctioned custom widgets, Twitter and Reddit have been host to a fairly-steady stream of personalized iOS “themes” representing varying degrees of tedium/obsession/madness. One “fringe”-ish avenue I’ve explored quite thoroughly is the adjacent community of public beta tests via Testflight, which allows willing App Scrubs like myself to download beta/pre-release versions of iOS apps. As of this moment, no less than 25 of the 227 apps installed on my iPhone 12 Pro Max are Testflight beta versions (both numbers far higher than normal because of my in-progress review.)
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Essentially, it’s now easier than ever to run incredibly janky software on your iPhone or iPad, remaining well clear of a warranty violation, yet the apps that stick out most boldly in the mind (at least for myself) are unfailingly apart from any sort of experimentation. Bear, for instance – the writing app I evangelize to every iOS user and have continued to describe as “the most beautiful piece of software I have ever seen” – just allowed registered beta testers access to its in-progress “Editor 2.0” on iOS, which Shiny Frog describes as still in its “alpha” stage, yet even I have as yet been unable to trip it up whatsoever. This is the league Tweetbot pioneered, in many ways. For the record, both Tweetbot 6 and Tweetbot 5 have been demonstrably more reliable for me in the past few months than Twitter’s native app, which has been crashing multiple times per day on my devices for quite a while during regular use. I’m accustomed to crashes, so I can’t say with 100% confidence that Tweetbot has never crashed, but it certainly hasn’t since I first downloaded 6 and began this review, despite my deliberate attempts to probe its every possible function.
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Not only is Tweetbot 6 reliable as hell – it’s also stupid frugal. Currently, its App Store installation weighs in at 10.9 MB, while Twitter’s app is more than ten times heavier, at 116 MB. I realize Sizes On Disk are further from your mind than they’ve ever been in this age of outright computing gluttony and you probably couldn’t care less about my personal encounter with bandwidth famine in late 2018. In fact, I find it particularly telling that Tapbots has continued to prioritize such efficiency in their development despite operating under less financial, technical, and social pressure than ever to do so.
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Future of The Bot
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Let’s say you’ve somehow made it this far without either satisfactorily resolving your confusion about Tapbots’ decision to implement subscriptions, why they’ve decided to continue investing their time in third-party Twitter clients, whatsoever, and/or some other App Quandary, and you’re still expecting David Blue of all people to articulate some pivotal element of this story that’ll put your intellect at ease. Perhaps you’re still looking for a comprehensive picture of what using Tweetbot as one’s main Twitter client looks like in 2021. Let’s change it up a bit, toss in some fucking bullet points, and list a few fundamental truths:
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If you intend to view your Twitter notifications on iOS at any point, completely deleting the native Twitter app is not an option. (Notably, it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon, if ever.)
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“Shopping around” for a third-party Twitter client leads the at all attentive user back to Tweetbot, exclusively. With the potential exception of Fenix, all other Twitter apps on the App Store are fucking bunk and will cost you as much or more as Tweetbot 6’s new subscription.
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If you use Twitter Lists regularly, you’d be an idiot not to start your Tweetbot subscription right this fucking minute.
In the ~month since the Tweetbot 6 story first broke (a nice birthday present!,) no less than three newish Twitter features have made the news. Last week, it (apparently) committed to the worst possible user-side content monetization model concept out of the dozens that have dipped in and out of rumor for virtually the service’s entire history: “Super Follows” are slated to shade our collective experience with putrid freemium concerns. “Communities” sound in concept like a worthwhile and genuinely value-adding feature addition for actual Twitter users, but any substantial expectations of the company feel far too risky to invest in. All the while, Twitter Spaces – the audio-only Clubhouse-ish mutilation of Periscope’s corpse – has been silently bestowed upon a secret set of @s at an achingly slow pace. I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t even fully digested fucking Fleets, yet.
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What does Tweetbot 6 really offer you, Twitter user, in 2021?Freedom from all of that bullshit.
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It’s just occurred to me how much more anxious the movements of Twitter, Inc. and Jack Dorsey’s horrendous facial hair would be making me if I had not discovered an (ironically) more stable, wholesome platform to replace them, years ago. No, I will not discuss Mastodon beyond this remark, but readers invested enough to get to this point who haven’t heard of the federated, open source social network by that name would do well to consult this handy hyperlink. This privilege of choice – even if it’s completely delusional – has combined with Tapbots’ thoughtful brush up of their trustier-than-ever Tweetbot to ease my longtime Twitter-dependent ass to a nigh-miraculous degree. However, stepping back from it all, I realized Tweetbot’s new life bets even heavier on that single, defining feature which the company hardly mentions, and could conceivably restrict – maliciously or not – or remove entirely without real consequences to their business or public standing via tech media outcry. What if Twitter killed Lists? We’d all be fucked.
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Upon this realization, I shot out of bed very late in a recent evening and went straight to fucking Trello, of all places, to sift through Twitter’s public development roadmap for any official word on their fate. I really did panic for a beat upon first reading the words “Replacement for Lists functionality” before realizing the actual intention of the card’s expression in the context’s syntax, which is probably about as positive as it could possibly be: a public suggestion that Lists will continue to be supported through 2.0, at least. The card sits in the “Nesting” column (which I assume to be the lowest priority group, chronologically,) right between identical cards for Bookmarks and Direct Messages.
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The Grandma's House Method
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Writing about Tweetbot 6 has been an illuminating personal experience, if you haven’t yet caught on. The timing of its release has proved awfully convenient, just predating the aforementioned catastrophe of disjointed features that has descended harder than ever before on Twitter’s own app, leaving it an absolute mess. When I initiated the symbolic swap maneuver documented at the very beginning of this review, I assumed I was going to find Tweetbot awkward to use as my primary in the present day, but have found the opposite to be true. The social network Tweetbot draws from is barely recognizable as the same property it drew upon originally, when its Lists-loving configuration was simply one of a dozen different interpretations of how one should interact with Twitter (by far the sharpest, I think we’d agree.) Tweetbots, in contrast, is virtually identical in principle, though the unwavering bearing of its development has resulted in the true definition of refinement. The result is the most beautiful way to use Twitter in 2021, no competition, and is also crucially the singular means of interacting with it on one’s “own terms” – as long as yours align with The Lists Method, that is – in an environment that feels predictable and fundamentally at your control.
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As much as I have praised the Mastodon app Toot! as the most innovative social app available – and will continue to do so until I encounter something more original and ingenious – it’s perhaps the singular remaining cleverly playful Tweetbots feature which first opened my perspective to appreciate little Easter egg-like tricks. Indeed – even after all we’ve been through together these past ten years – you can still cycle through all of Tweetbot’s visual themes by two-finger swiping vertically in 6. Quick Account Switching is the other less-than-obvious swipe function of note, which I’ll rely on an embed stolen from Tapbots themselves to demonstrate:
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I don’t think it should ever feel natural to speak sentimentally about mobile apps, but Tweetbot is a worthy exception. If you glance over the respective comments sections of the articles and YouTube videos I’ve hyperlinked, you’ll pick up on this phenomena of legacy Twitter users chucking back some tragically nostalgic sentiments in response to the reminder surfaced by the Tweetbot 6 news of just how long we’ve been doing this. From my perspective, the other majority sentiment found there catalyzes the bizarre chronobending at play even further. I can’t believe how many folks continue to be flabbergasted by the idea of paying for software in 2021, but I’ve been literally begging Twitter to charge me a monthly fee in exchange for some greater curative capabilities for as long as I can remember. The whole of my gospel, again, is that Tweetbot 6 has personally made using Twitter a little bit better than bearable, so I have no other reasonable choice available: I’m paying the fuck up.
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See this post's corresponding GitHub Issue for related media, aggregated links, and other minutia.
to new meanings
-to the feeling I've only been able to find
-on one short strip
-just East of Kansas City
-that I am small in a
-dirty daunting
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to coverage of
-the Be Beat
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to frontiers of periphery
-and the Knowns we never see
-the wicker bowler atop the landscaper
-who's trimmed every week,
-the yard across the street
-which I've canvased in every imaginable state
-which's
-since Mrs. Tanzay's first grade,
-Remained.
The social network’s incongruities better its experience, if you know how.
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On a recent Tuesday, I opened a just-begun livestream on Facebook from NASA’s official page with a panel of experts discussing Europa’s plumes (or something like that) and ended up sticking around for most of its hour-long duration because of the ridiculous realtime comments from some of its ~4000 viewers. While some participants were genuinely interested in the opportunity to engage the host’s authority with relevant and invested questions (which were intermittently fielded,) the vocal majority were aggressive, ignorant, and provocative shouts. From my observation, the most noticeably manic and persistent of these came from user Shane Langman. “Nasa can telephone the moon in 1969 but can't get a phone signal in death Valley in 2018,” he noted 16 minutes in. “We cant leave the earth or we'd have left it by now.” And there was Bobby Smith, who felt compelled to express his authority on NASA’s inauthenticity: “[I’ve] been researching since 2012 no real pics of anything all cgi.”
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Assuming the additional all-caps, sans-avatar ranting I remember reading live was deleted after the fact by the culprits and/or the page’s administrator, it’s worth noting that the remaining archive is full of sincerely positive feedback: “It would be awesome to discover life in europe!!” Indeed.
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After a few minutes of gawking at the mess, I noticed that the broadcast was being simultaneously streamed on Periscope (or is it Twitter Video? or Twitter Live?) so I opened both feeds side-by-side to compare their audience’s behavior. The Periscope’s viewers averaged about 1000 strong, and their comments were noticeably more orderly and decipherable. There was still trolling and self-promotion, but it wasn’t allowed to disrupt the rest of the committed discourse, perhaps because of each post’s character limit or rationed screen time. Looking between them, the contrast in the user culture and the function of the two services during the same, simultaneous stream was at discouraging odds with their respective popularity.
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Neither are really very good ways to watch live video – Periscope, notably, was never designed for professional studio broadcasts – but the relentless malicious nonsense from the Facebook viewers pushed all attempts at real engagement away so quickly that I could see no point in making them at all. To be blunt: every conceivable corner of Facebook is an unusable cesspool (even in the shadow of NASA earnestness,) and its worth considering that something about the design of Twitter properties generally discourages such overwhelmingly stupid noise. That’s not to say that harassment, hate speech, misogyny, and radical racism have not been religiously neglected or mishandled as has been well-reported throughout the network’s history – perhaps even more than any other – but I (a cis white man, mind you,) have seen much more of these on Facebook in the wild than I have on Twitter during my longtime use of the two, despite spending exponentially more attention on the latter.
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In my sparse Facebook browsing, I have witnessed childhood friends, professional acquaintances, and family members both distant and immediate publicly shame, harass, belittle, and spitefully argue with each other for the sake of absolutely zero meaningful resolution, conclusion, or intellectual progression. In my decade of daily Twitter use, I have seen tens of pedophiles and rapists publicly outed, suicides averted, government censorship circumvented, stories broken, artists made, and marginalized voices outspoken. I have also Tweeted things in the past (mostly variations of “I want to die”) that would now get my account temporarily suspended, as per the company’s latest attempts to minimize its platform’s toxicity – an encouraging suggestion that Twitter is finally catching up and learning to avoid its cultural blunders, which have been the single greatest exception to its most valuable core identity: its mistakes.
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Two weeks ago, Twitter proudly released the first redesign of its native Windows 10 app since its debut in 2015 – leading a new generation of upcoming “lightweight” Progressive Web Apps and – true to form – immediately reclaimed the title of clumsiest, least-useful Twitter client available. PWAs represent the industry’s readiest effort to “bridge the gap between web and mobile apps,” for which expanded compatibility must surely be the best case to make. According to Google – supreme enemy of the open web and all tasteful design – PWAs are offline-first, instant-loading, and immersive – none of which are reasonable priorities in building a Twitter client for Windows, an operating system running primarily on very powerful hardware. This sort of idiocy can be reasonably expected of Twitter, but bewilderingly, the Great Minds of tech journalism seem to be unanimously pleased by this decision, which invites one to suspect that they’ve all switched secretly to the exclusive, illustrious HP Elite X3 – the only smartphone on sale running Windows 10, because Twitter’s execution of these misaligned goals is mindbogglingly foul to look at and unnecessarily frustrating to use. After doing my best to put up with it for a few days, I found myself unable to conceieve of a single advantage this new application has over literally any alternative.
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3 out of the 5 bulleted “highly-requested features” listed in their announcement are just… catching the app up with the web client as it’s been for years: the 280-character limit, Explore tab, and Bookmarks. “Adding” these web-established operations to an even-more-web-based application surely didn’t present much of a workload, but perhaps removing functionality justified the investment. The F and T keys no longer operate as shortcuts for liking and retweeting, which is such a misguided oversight that I can’t help but wonder if this app was actually intended to be utilized by anyone at all (besides HP Elite users.)
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Am I missing something? Can you hear me? Are there any flesh-and-blood Twitters users left?
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Then again, the ungainliness of Twitter’s new offspring could be attributed to the perpetual tragedy of its mother’s peril. The company’s luck has been on the down-and-out for eons in tech time: from its most recent plain text password blunder, to its constant inability to handle abuse, its endlessly tumultuous management turnovers, and its growing disinterest and disfavor among the public and potential investors alike – our cultural relationship with Twitter and its identity as a social network remains dramatically tense well past its tenth year, which is good news for its continued survival. One could certainly argue that the Tump presidency alone spared Twitter from a painful decline into irrelevance (or at least postponed it,) but I think we should acknowledge by now that turmoil is an integral component of the brand as an outlier in the connected community palette.
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For myself as a long-dependent occupant, its inconsistencies and contradictions are endearing and necessary – a competent, profitable, and sensical Twitter may as well be Facebook. If you’ve been Tweeting as long as I have, you’ll likely remember that the company’s own offerings had occupied the bottom-most position in the hierarchy of preferable available clients throughout time and across all manner of operating systems until it finally nailed its Android and iOS software and usurped longtime third-party staples like TweetBot and Twitterific just a few years ago. Gadget blogging and What’s in my Dock? videos may very well be long-dead relics of a different era in tech media, but it’s disheartening to find through research that the steadily-declining quality of our user experience has been allowed to continue without much protest. Justifiably or not, Twitter has persisted in adding stuff nobody likes as they’ve gradually neutered all the great third-party development.
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TweetDeck for Windows was perhaps the most powerful mainstream enduser social application that will ever exist. Before Twitter absorbed the tool in 2011, its diverse account integration allowed a user to send a single post across Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google+, and multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously, and they could configure the client to do so with just the Enter key! In retrospect, it was naive to assume that such potent spam capabilities would continue to be entrusted to the general population without challenge, but the modularity and customizability of TweetDeck prime as a standalone application made it useful as hell and quite the power trip. Now, it exists only as a tamed, up-to-brand-guidelines web application, yet remains the definitive way to use Twitter on a PC if one desires an ad-free, single-window experience if only because of its congruence with another, even more forgotten feature of the service: lists.
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This is how I’ve seen desktop Twitter since I lasted looked at my timeline in 2010. Since then, I’ve followed about 5000 more accounts, so I’d imagine it’s a damned mess. I have a private list of my friends, which I try to read in its entirety, and a list of nearly 500 journalists, publications, and musicians whom I’ve found particularly fresh and original. Thanks to these, Tweets are presented in order, uninterrupted by ads. (They function the same on iOS.) The network’s linear chronology is an absolute use condition for me, so I’m thankful I completely missed the beginning of their progression toward algorithmic relevance thanks to my lists, and as I’ve since happened upon distress from mutuals and non-mutuals over missed or stale Tweets, I have taken the time to relay my gospel: lists are linear. And since promoted and sponsored Tweets began overwhelming and perturbing timelines, I’ve seen the displeasure and repeated: lists are linear and ad-free!
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I realize how irritating it is when one plays the why doesn’t anyone listen to me?! card, so I’ve created a Twitter Moment to document the confusing silence I’ve gotten in response to these suggestions (though I couldn’t find any cases from the past, so I may be misremembering the extent of my charity,) and pledging to refrain from revisiting this pet advice of mine when writing about Twitter or other social networks in the future.
I’ve never understood why I never see anyone making use of the vast catalogue of nearly 140,000 standard Unicode symbols available in their social media posts, metadata, or word art. Like replacing standard bullets in our weekly newsletter with ◎ (U+25CE,) — probably my all-time favorite, or using strings of four characters for intro, ad, and station identification spots on Extratone Radio. (☉☉☉☉, for instance.) I’d like to think these uses make their experiences feel just a bit more unique to users — if only unconsciously — but I’d long wondered if I was in fact the last Unicode enthusiast alive.
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The development of Jordan Hipwell’s UniChar for iOS would suggest otherwise. Its app store page describes it as “a powerful yet beautiful Unicode symbol selection app and keyboard,” and its generic webpage appears to have testimonials including a real post on the Web Site lifehacker.
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UniChar is a third-party iOS keyboard that unlocks the wide wide world of weird Unicode characters. Service marks, copyright logos, mathematical symbols, technical signs like Apple’s “splat” icon or radioactivity indicators, and more are available in the standalone app as well as the keyboard add-on you can use wherever you need to type something.
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Wow! I can’t believe I’d pull-quote lifehacker anywhere, but here is an iOS app that actually addresses a regular issue of my own in a beautiful and intuitive way. I actually cannot remember the last time this happened — you’d have to give me a list and a comprehensive refresher of all the ways I’ve used my iPhones in the past ten years.
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Contrary to what may seem obvious, UniChar’s character selector is by far the more intuitive and efficient of these two separate ways to use it. Even in the free experience, there are simply too manycharacters in the catalog to reasonably browse in iOS’ old extended keyboard. (For the record, I’d like to note that UniChar is technically a “Reference Application,” but I understand if you can’t bring yourself to use the term.) Across both the seamlessly-interchangeable gallery and list views, the user can very quickly copy a character to the clipboard with 3D Touch, which works so well it’s as if it were meant only for this use from its beginning.
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In the off chance you’re a longtime lover and devout user of the grander Unicode collection and an iOS user, I hope you’re now experiencing the same sort of petty enthusiasm I felt myself when I discovered it. If not, I hope you’ll take away a desire to explore it. I mean… aren’t these smileys way better than any emoji? ☺☺☺☺
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Update
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Despite a handful of reports of crashing issues in App Store reviews, Unichar has continued to perform admirably for me. I ended up spending $2.99 to unlock the full Unicharacter keyboard as the tremendous value of that number for the time and effort it would save myself would be more than worth it. (Actually, it’s thanks to Redbubble for sending me the first truly usable Inter net Money I’ve had to actually spend on any apps and/or services in fucking forever, but you know.) After all this time, I’m still giddy that someone else on Earth values these hieroglyphs as much as I do, and that they knew enough to manifest the perfect software to preserve them.
Yes, I bought a mechanical keyboard. It occurred to me that folks who spend a lot of time doing things that require tools – professionals, artisans, craftsmen, etc. – usually seek out the best possible quality offerings of those tools. Even if they're just 5% better than the average alternatives and cost twice as much, when one uses them for hours every day, the last bit of refinement pays off very quickly. Considering how much typing I've done in the past 5-10 years, I find it a bit silly that I hadn't before thought to optimize the hardware I've used to do so. Now that I've put at least some thought into designing the space in which I work and gone back to school, I've also invested in bettering the thing my hands actually touch the most.
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Actually... Before I go on, here is the link to the Varmilo VA108M User Manual/Guide/Reference in English in case that's what you came looking for. (I had difficulty finding it, too.)
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I suppose I've let myself be blinded to the advantages of a mechanical keyboard by the gaemer stigma that surrounds them. This time, I believe I began by simply inputting something like “best keyboard for typing” into a search engine, which returns plenty of iffy results, naturally, but among them was a list from Wirecutter – whom I trust, more or less – of “Best Mechanical Keyboards 2020.” Also included were posts in the r/MechanicalKeyboards subreddit, which I actually fucking joined[^1] (but promise never to mention again outside of this post.) Uncovering my eyes, I found a ridiculously-extensive community message board and Wiki, which is undoubtedly the most extensive resource on the subject to be found, anywhere. Though I did place a time limit on myself for any research of 15 minutes, in retrospect, I suppose I also had some criteria, which I assume – if you're still reading – you might be interested in:
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WIRED as fuck. Bluetooth can fuck off.
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“Full” keyboard, for the same reason I'd never spend any money on a piano with any less than 88 keys.
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At least tolerably tasteful, aesthetically. (Not overwhelmingly embarrassing if someone were to actually see me using it.)
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Cute, ideally.
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No light shows.
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Not “ergonomic.”
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Not from Logitech or Microsoft.
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Immediately, it was overwhelmingly clear that my choice must also have The Cherry... The Cherries... The “Cherry MX Switches,” whatever they are. Any of even the most skimmy reading up on the subject will lead you to this conclusion. That addressed, I arrived upon three considerations: the Ducky One 2, Das Keyboard Model S Professional, and Varmilo VA87M.
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Layout of the VA108M seen from above.
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As good as the idea of something as German as the Das Keyboard sounded, I hate the way it looks, and the Ducky seemed to take itself too seriously (despite its brand name.) The VA87M seemed to be ideal if it was full-sized. I searched for the equivalent, found the VA108M, and bought one immediately. Specifically...
I've already written more than I ever wanted to, but let me just say that I love everything about the thing – the particular set of special keys, the way it feels & sounds, and that its heft prevents it from moving around – and I hope to keep it forever. As I said on the photographs I posted to social media, I promise to never bring this or any other mechanical keyboard up ever again unless asked about it.
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[1] Yes, I have actually been using the Read It website in the past 18 months or so, which anyone who’s known me at all would find unbelievable. I don’t know if I’ll write about it in the future, so I’ll just say I’ve unblocked it within my psyche largely because it’s no longer horrendous to look at.
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[2] I remain genuinely confused as to why the color of the switches matters, considering they are only visible when the keycaps have been removed.
A late geezer’s first go at the dystopian VR experience.
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Listen to this article read by Siri Voice 2 below...
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Earlier this year, Tim and I had the opportunity to try virtual reality at the True/False Film Festival in a dark, curtained side room of a commandeered Columbia art gallery, but we were both much too intoxicated and loopy those last few hours of the fest, and we bailed. Call us cowards if you must — immersion can be a scary concept to those of us who grew up reading science fiction, before the existence of the modern video game console. I’ve wanted just 30 seconds or so with a pair of goggles, just to have an idea of what the increasing number of Oculus-blinded pedestrians surrounding me are looking at. Thanks to Isiah, I was finally caught up last night with a few VR YouTube videos and Farpoint’s introduction on a PlayStation 4.
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First, Isiah brings me the headset and describes in detail how exactly to adjust it, but I forget it all and simply try to shove it directly and violently on my face. Eventually, he takes it back and simply mounts and adjusts it around my monstrous skull — like you would for a toddler — and I lay eyes on the console for the first time. For whatever reason, it never occurred to me that general GUI wouldn’t simply be displayed in 2D, but by a literal virtual display, layed out in front of me like a large, floor-mounted touch workstation. I’m astonished by my ability to turn away from it to look at the rest of Goggleworld, which is nothing but a deeply black void.
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From my previous world, I hear Isiah and Hawthorn discussing what to show me first, and YouTube is the settled-upon environment. As the application is restarted in “VR Mode,” its startup screen is what really establishes the truth — I have gone virtual. I cannot use my hands to shield my eyes from the branding’s glaring watermark and terrifying red light. At its home menu, Isiah simply selects the “VR” tab, revealing a selection of thumbnails for algorithmically-recommended VR-shot videos on the service.
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To begin, I am mounted on the tail of a superbike as it’s raced around an American desert circuit. It takes a few seconds for high resolution to buffer, leaving me briefly in a pixelized hell that would surely make anyone sick, were they exposed very long. (I was especially excited to become nauseous, to no avail.) At the getgo, I am occupied with the rider’s butt since it’s center-frame if I stand in my usual posture. Isiah points out the hovering HUD to my left containing a selection of simulated digital instruments (tachometer, 7-segment speedo, etc.) Its presence would suggest that the purpose of my virtual passengership is to witness the lap as a motorsport enthusiast, but the rear of the rider obscures most of my view forward — I cannot admire his line as one would viewing a GoPro-or-otherwise POV of the same event, so I decide to try and figure out which track I am hurried through. Though the vehicle is tossed about in the required movements of motorbike operation, I myself (the VR capture device) am impressively gyrostabilized, and the image, static, as if I’m actually hovering above the pair as they moved along. I spin left and right, spotting a small gaggle of miniature wind turbines and two wilting hilltop trees in the foreground. Behind them, small sand dunes fill the space, all the way to the horizon.
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After a few minutes, I am finally relieved early of my cutless lap for a short National Geographic documentary on a Viking revival festival in Poland. I’m introduced to its Big Boys by a series of aerial shots (presumably by drone, which is awfully un-Vikinglike) as they row their Big Boat up(?) a relatively wide, tree-lined river. In contrast with the lap, the jump cuts become a bit disorienting — I am eventually jumped in the boat for a moment, next to the sweaty, bearded lads — a few of whom are shirtless. I notice a blurry church on the distant bank. Suddenly, I float briskly across the small no man’s land between two rapidly advancing battle lines of Nordic Nerds with real, era-specific weapons and way too much free time. More lingering drone shots follow from just a few feet above the ensuing conflict. Outside, Isiah confirms Hawthorn’s suggestion that this is, indeed, the one where they use real weapons as I notice a pile of three or four men lying against each other, motionless on the ground, right-of-center in the nearest line, and mull over the sure disturbance of all this immersion the festival has allowed in welcoming the presence of the surely-buzzing drone. I guess they’re dead.
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After the conflict, I am subjected to a dreamier, narrated montage accompanied by cheesy synthesized orchestral music and featuring disproportionately a particular man with a shiny, tatted bald head and rather large feet with rather small toes, which he likes to wiggle during these particular conversations. Thanks to VR’s omniencompassing perspective, I am allowed to observe his wiggling in his every appearance. The tone of the background music and the prevalence of relaxed, conversing couples and sunsets in the scenes suggest romanticism is the montage’s theme, but for me, it is the bald man’s feet — I am too busy conversing with my two friends, across the divide, in this world, to listen to any of what is said. Considering that YouTube collects the dimensional data regarding where the user looks, and for how long, I make an effort to bend my neck up and down in extremes, and notice a patch of washed-out sky, distorting in the distance, and ponder what — if anything — we have gained in this technology.
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Does an increase in the raw amount of visual data available to the viewer actually make motion picture storytelling more effective? In the few minutes of my VR taste test, I did gain quite a bit of volition over an equivalent 2D experience, but it didn’t seem like I’d instinctively used it to gain much else. If one is specifically interested in the shrubbery around a racetrack, or the more nuanced undulations of a Viking’s foot, they can more likely than not find a standard video on the World Wide Web that would more efficiently entertain them. In specific situations, of course, a producer can undoubtedly benefit by the ability to capture in 360 degrees, but — in any sort of cinema, especially — it seems unnecessarily sacrificial to relinquish entirely the narrative directorial control of shot framing to their audience. However, I am the anti-expert on this subject, obviously. My take on the viability of VR is Virtually Redundant and — quite possibly — very wrong, but my time in its hell is not over yet.
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Isiah explains that it is time for me to game, and asks if I’d like to try “the one with the hands, or the one with the gun.” As always, I choose the firearm, as the “hands” have not been found yet and the hypothetical image immediately offered up by my imagination is of rusty iron shackles. The Infinite Blackness has returned, and I cannot see beyond it to determine what my host is up to. Then, it becomes outer space — filling with thousands of star-like white dots. The light-blue outline of a virtual PlayStation controller appears where I assume him to be, unattached and bumbling about. Soon, it jaggedly approaches, and I feel him hand it to me. We have started its calibration process, which becomes a bit frightening in my celestial surroundings, though at least I have now gained participatory power over my new existence. I’d opted out of wearing headphones, so the assistant’s malignant-sounding female British voice comes softly from the television somewhere in front of me as I point the beam of light the controller’s representation is now projecting straight forward at the navigational arrows displayed ahead and pull “the trigger” (R2.)
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I am pleased by the idea of interfacing with software exclusively by shooting it repeatedly before I am abruptly contained in a cage, now being projected by a virtualization of the system’s sensor, which is unsettling. I am now calibrating the hardware contained within the physical device that captures the position of my body in the physical world. I catch the word “confinement” in the assistant’s unending, otherwise-inaudible directions, and quicken my pace. When it’s all done, I return the controller to Isiah, who reboots the PS4, itself, before launching Farpoint. My space becomes a lighter blue and fills with little opaque bits of Sony Dust for a minute or two. Isiah continues his rummaging for another peripheral as the title’s introduction begins to play.
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Two rather poorly-animated astronauts are co-hosting a live broadcast from their craft, which is presented in a dramatization of a computer display. They’ve just met, but they’re both stacked with academia, co-massaging their knowledge, which I choose not to listen to. Out of view, Isiah unsuccessfully attempts to skip the whole thing before I’m allowed to become virtual again — this time, atop the animated body of another astronaut in a lone shuttle, approaching the mothership where it holds, next to a large, very-Star Trek “anomaly.” From Deep Space Nine, the two scientists continue to bicker over comms as I look around the cockpit. Looking backwards has already become a favorite habit of mine — I wonder where the shuttle’s bathroom is. For whatever reason, the back of my character’s neck was animated, though it can only be seen by looking rearwards and down, which distorts its shape into something truly terrifying.
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A bunch of unrelated plot follows, leading me to end up on a foreign world, exiting my crashed escape pod. By now, Isiah has connected The Gun, but something about it isn’t quite right — my character holds it in a glitched, very uncomfortable-looking manner, and it’s suspected that a fix would require a restart, and therefore — a replay of the introductory cutscene — so I retire out of lack of patience.
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If I were confidently reviewing PlayStation VR as a consumer purchase, I’d cite a quote of Isiah’s: “I couldn’t find the thing.” In addition to my first drone sighting, a few days ago in Colorado, this lost virtual virginity is not necessarily unwelcome — I feel as though I’ve acquired a platform to better ponder the dystopia to which these and their like industries add a certain comic spice. That said, I cannot imagine a reason to once again enter the digital realm — and who cares?
Though I grew up on a farm surrounded by (and loving) diesel equipment, owning a diesel-powered automobile somehow never occurred to me. This is especially puzzling given the overwhelmingly positive experience I was privileged to have with one 2014 Volkswagen Jetta TDI Sportwagen over the past year. It would find me signing up to Facebook groups, using real Fast Boy terms, revisiting long-lost roads of home, and returning to my local community in an extremely intimate ridesharing stint. Throughout it all, the Jetta made me smile much much more than I would’ve thought. I found a real love for this relatively simpleton form of transportation that I should have seen coming, but did not at all. There is something delightfully indulgent about a manual-equipped diesel wagon. Even The New York Times knows this:
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Auto writers have long tooted the horn about the benefits of diesel engines, and a bunch of them have also argued that the old-school station wagon is a far more efficient way to haul things around than a bloated high-set S.U.V.
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I knew it, too, apparently, long before I actually decided to act on a purchase. On October 24th, 2012, I Tweeted “I sat in a Jetta wagon today. I need one.” I really did intend on becoming The Jetta Man (perhaps without the fashion.) In acquiring it, my plan – and it was a good plan – was to cease an era of general insensibility in my life's decisions by entombing my wayward self within the most sensible expression of modern automotive design I suspected I could live with. The wagon component joined with diesel power and a manual transmission upon casual research. Diesel, manual, wagon – of the people's car, these I sought. Nay, demanded.
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An ex-girlfriend of mine drove an utterly decimated Mk. V Jetta Sedan which she’d acquired in some sort of dicey deal. I remember finding it surprisingly robust given its lot, and quite dynamic to drive. We traveled all over the Midwest in it – from central Missouri to Des Moines to Chicago to Kansas City and back again. I mocked, but it was everything one could hope for in cheap transportation and quite a bit more. It turns out, Volkswagen was shooting high. As Tony Quiroga recalls for Car & Driver:
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During the press launch of the outgoing Jetta back in 2005, Volkswagen touted that car as a less expensive alternative to an Acura TSX or Volvo S40. Volkswagen pointed to its growth in size, high-quality interior, new rear suspension, and refined demeanor as evidence that the Jetta had moved out of the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla class.
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In terms of premium compacts, my experience is quite limited, but it’s no wonder the company has struggled to find a place in the market for this product: in German, “Volkswagen Jetta” literally means “people’s car jet stream.” The first component is infamous, of course, because of the Nazis and their horrid Beetle, but the second seems to be almost entirely unknown. In my research, I had to specifically investigate the Jetta’s name before reading anything about it. When an American thinks of “Jetta,” they unconsciously dissociate the word from the “jet” sound and make largely unsophisticated jokes. (It’s also Regular Car Reviews’ most hated car.) Now, the name has become a marque in and of itself: in China, Volkswagen began selling several different models under the JETTA brand last year. This also was news to me, and I try to keep up with the industry.
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In 2011, the Mk. VI Jetta was released with an outdated base, 115-hp powertrain and a “hard plastic [interior] that wouldn’t look out of place in a Chrysler Sebring.” (Quiroga insults, to clarify.) Compared to the Mk. V, “Volkswagen made it clear that the targets are once again the strong-selling Civic and Corolla.” Once again, I’m at a loss for experience in the equivalent extra-Volkswagen competition, save for the Chevrolet Cruze and Kia Forte. (Surprisingly, GM actually produced a diesel version of the Cruze and AutoGuide compared it against the Jetta TDI.) It’s been too long since I last drove my ex’s Mk. V to really have much to say, but I do remember a particular solidity about the steering – perhaps because it was still hydraulic. Once again, I’ll rely on Tony:
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Less obvious cost cutting includes the loss of adjustability for the center armrest, a lack of lumbar adjustment in most models, no more power-reclining seatbacks, and a simpler stability-control program that can no longer be shut off or even reduced.
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When I began searching for my first ever truly modern car in February 2019, I surprisingly only needed to pass up a single option in the Kansas City area before I found The One: a 2014 post-Dieselgate example with ~65,000 miles on its odometer in “Deep Black Pearl” with a “Cornsilk Beige” interior which had been previously owned only by a single Michigan cyclist. I’d been without a car since dailying/living in a 1976 Lincoln Continental the year before, in Portland, and my friend had driven me around everywhere in his Wrangler for a full month (thanks, Jack!) I’d walked around and cold-idled another, high-mileage Sportwagen, but I was committed to getting something with a light-colored interior after the red velvet cake Lincoln and my dank smoking room-dark XJR.
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Three of us walked into a dealership in the middle of a frigid Kansas afternoon – Jack, my girlfriend Sierra, and I. We hovered by a smart, gleaming little Golf GTI whilst my salesman, Charles, retrieved the car I had found online. After he finished copying my driver’s license while the little diesel warmed up, the four of us set off into suburban Lawrence. Back when the Mk. VI Golf was released, I attended a Volkswagen dealership event in which Mk. V and Mk. VI GTIs were driven back-to-back – I’m assuming to reassure buyers that yes, they really had made it better (though I was quite vocal in my disagreement about this, to the dealer’s chagrin.) The car I bought immediately reminded me more of the former – perhaps I just enjoy the increased body roll of a 50,000+ mile suspension – albeit with a much longer wheelbase and significantly more torque. Rowing through the gears, I was immediately impressed and bewildered by the characteristics of the 140-horsepower, 236 lb.-ft.-developing diesel powerplant. The diesel engines I grew up around in tractors, combines, and other heavy machinery were designed to more or less remain at a constant, relatively low RPM for the majority of their use cases. It’s not a screamer, but the idea that a diesel engine can rev at all was something that took a bit to wrap my head around. However, it is almost immediately evident that carrying on to the 6000 RPM (?) redline is a futile and incorrect practice. There is nothing at all to be found up there.
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I’ve driven some quick straight-line cars in my time, but none of them have delivered their power anything like the Jetta’s long-distinguished 2.0L inline-four. It’s very odd having comparatively so little actual horsepower, yet so much torque – I’d heard Jeremy Clarkson complain about diesel power coming in “great lumps,” but I’d already started to find them extremely (and positively) amusing in my first few minutes. When asked, the oil burner will produce protracted front tire squeal and torque steer from a stop, which is odd and hilarious coming from such an otherwise docile automobile. Also hilarious: Charles likely noted that Jack, Sierra, and I were (and are) entirely unafraid of facing The End when a very near collision during our test drive did not perturb us in the least, but left him huffing and puffing from adrenaline. He was a star, though, throughout the more than four hours of deliberations required for his institution to reckon with my credit history. Eventually, I ended up spending almost exactly $12,000, which was probably too much, and named my new automobile Martin – “Marty” for short – after Martin Winterkorn, the former CEO of Volkswagen AG who bore more than his share of the blame for Dieselgate, including charges of fraud by the German government. Dirty diesel rolling coal in prison.
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Naughty Diesel
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By “post-Dieselgate,” I mean that my new car was a part of Volkwagen's $10 billion buyback program, so the Michigander sold it back to the manufacturer for its “fair replacement value” – between $12,500 and $44,000 according to Car & Driver on behalf of FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez. To be technical, the powerplant is a 2.0L EA189/CJAA turbodiesel four-cylinder. “The EA 189 was one of the most important engines in the company, destined not only for millions of Volkswagen-brand cars but also for a wide variety of other brands from the parent Volkswagen Group, like Audi, Skoda and Seat, as well as some light utility vehicles,” said The New York Times regarding the “clean diesel” “scheme.” In original spec, 236 lb.-ft. of it arrived between 1750-2800 RPM, but my (admittedly, unscientific) perception indicates that post-update, the torque was coming a bit later. If I thought you were interested, I would attempt to detail exactly what my car was then subjected to by a dealer, but suffice it to say that it was made less fuel efficient and a bit less powerful, to my displeasure. For a complete and comprehensive video on the scandal, try Regular Car Reviews. I’d also recommend the following reading from Jalopnik, The Verge, The New York Times, and The Independent.
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My own views on Dieselgate are entirely irrelevant, but I will note that buying back a buyback car for such a price felt like a favor to my dealer and that it’s pretty cool to have my own copy of VW’s Extended Emissions Warranty Notice, not to mention the fact that I actually made use of it (which I will discuss later.) From my perspective, the automotive industry is the most heavily-regulated business space in the world and I’d suggest a company like the Volkswagen Group feeling like they should cheat on emissions testing might indicate that the standards of the test could be unreasonable and/or unrealistic.
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After returning from almost two hellish, extremely confusing years in Portland taking public transport, Martin became a vehicle for a rediscovery and newfound appreciation for my Missouri home – the great Missouri River, especially. Not since owning my Miata had I driven so much in the country. Sierra and I visited Cooper’s Landing in the wet and ventured down to Springfield, Missouri (very far South,) near which we discovered Hodges Speedway – a then-abandoned dirt oval surrounded by demolition derby casualties and the large trucks used to haul them around.
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Somewhere North of Kansas City, I opened the taps all the way on a very long straight and reached 125mph, which is either the aerodynamic VMax, an electronically limited limit, or both. Surprisingly, the modern People’s Car feels quite stable at this speed – were it not my own automobile, I’m not sure I wouldn’t just travel this fast everywhere. In the past few years, Interstate 70 – which cuts Missouri just about in half from West-East, connecting St. Louis and Kansas City with my hometown in the center – has become significantly faster-paced than I remembered it before moving to Portland for two years. 80mph used to be the accepted number, 70 (the actual speed limit) was the unenforced minimum. In my old Toyota pickup, I could travel at 65 without attracting too much criticism. Now, however, one must maintain 85 to keep up with traffic, especially when traveling with commuters. 90-95 will no longer garner judgmental looks and 100mph left-laners are given a pass.
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“I’ll bet that’s great on the highway” is probably the most regular comment received from passersby and riders right after “is this a diesel!?” (Really, the fact of my Jetta’s existence as a manual-equipped diesel wagon seemed to utterly astound a great many people.) There is truth in this general supposition: the ability of the diesel powerplant to deliver hill-climbing torque at low RPM is simply unmatched by gasoline powerplants of the same displacement, which means that “highway” driving entails virtually zero downshifting – arrive in sixth gear, set the cruise control, take a nap. Everything else is taken care of. There is a definite luxury in the knowledge that one is no longer needed in the process at speed – luxury that is NOT present in a gasoline-to-manual Jetta drivetrain. From Hackaday:
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[Diesel] has a higher volumetric energy density than gasoline, and thanks to low volatility, diesel engines can run at significantly higher compression ratios without risking detonation. These benefits allow diesel engines to produce significantly more torque than similarly sized gasoline engines.
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“Diesel engines are typically poor when it comes to power to weight ratio, as their high compression ratio and torque output demands heavier materials in their construction,” notes Lewin Day, meaning steel engine block. Here we arrive on my singular dissatisfaction with the Jetta: its weight. While traveling from Kansas City back home in the East one day, I decided to satisfy a longtime bucketlist item and stop by a weigh station. As I drove up to the scale, the police-uniformed attendant looked up at me from his glass box and gave the standard white guy smile frown. It took a moment for the scale to register Martin, but it eventually displayed a whole 3440lbs. My little “compact” wagon… weighed significantly more than one and three-quarter tons – just 528 lbs. less than the full-sized, supercharged V8-powered Jaguar saloon car I call the automotive love of my life, and almost a full 200 lbs. more than its GLI sedan sibling. There was one single advantage to this weight: we were able to use Martin as a ballast to help re-spool the winch cable on Jack’s Wrangler.
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After discovering this figure, I did what I could to diminish the weight easily without tearing into the seats or removing some of the car’s fourteen airbags. Upon lifting up the base of the “car-go” area in the rear, I found a full steel spare wheel – some 30 lbs of it at least – which I immediately removed, along with some sort of flapping cargo restraint that I can only suspect was designed to keep objects (like dogs, perhaps) in the cargo area from sailing into the passenger compartment during an accident (it’s called the “luggage compartment cover” in the owner’s manual.) Ideally, I intended to one day strip out all of the interior except for the driver’s side chair, but it ‘twas not intended to be.
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After driving the Jetta for about a week, I was on the short commute back home from the office when I noticed that the cooling fans were running at what sounded like maximum capacity. Then, at a red light, I felt some rough dips in the engine’s idle. When I reached home minutes later, I turned off the ignition and removed the key only to find the fans still spooling. I was convinced I had already broken the car somehow in rough driving, but in reality, Marty was in the process of Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) Regeneration – a procedure designed to clean the little shitpot under the hood by heating it up some thousands of degrees to burn off built up diesel exhaust soot. At least, this is the way I understand it.
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Otherwise, I disagree with most reviews about the “diesel rumble” being bothersome. Perhaps it’s because this is by far the most modern car I’ve ever spent this much time with – the only car I’ve ever spent so much consecutive time with, in fact – or because I did, indeed, grow up sitting (and standing) right next to 8-liter turbodiesels at full chat for hours on end. Compared to my mother’s 1.4L gasoline-powered Mk. VII sedan at idle in her garage, there is a more pronounced clacking, but it’s nothing you’d have any trouble sleeping through. I would know! Whilst driving for Uber and Lyft through one of the warmest summers on record, I idled away many hours parked on the street with the (averagely effective) air-conditioning on. I idled when I wasn’t online, too – I would even go as far as to say that I made idling one of the trendiest activities of Summer 2019.
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What’re you up to man?
-Nothin’ much yo. Just over here idling.
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Ridesharing
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For more than six months, my primary income was from Uber and Lyft driving around Columbia, MO – a distinctly academically-dominated demographic. Frankly, I can’t think of any vehicle more suited to what ridesharing actually entails than a diesel Jetta wagon. It’s a relatively spacious and comfortable place to be for four adults – certainly when no trip lasts longer than thirty minutes – with a ridiculously stout cargo capacity. I was able to fit 9 freshman fraternity guys in for a short trip once. Their faces were all genuinely somber as one expressed “it’s really hard having 8 friends when we try to go out.” (No, you’re not supposed to accept those rides.) It was a challenge carrying some 1500 lbs. of Sad Boys, mostly for the brakes. Once, a group of young men and women began to make fun after noticing the DIESELGEEK decal I’d stuck on my side’s rear quarter window (which I’d acquired with a new shifter bushing kit.) “So are you a diesel geek?” they asked, jeering to themselves, to which I responded: “you know, it’s so weird you mention that because I know this place that sells these stickers…” They no longer seemed amused.
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All of the cars I’ve owned have been attention-grabbing in their own way – my old Toyota pickup was adored by the locals; my Miata was adored by other Miata owners. My XJR was gorgeous and my Swamp Continental seemed to be passionately coveted by absolutely everyone over 40. With the Jetta, though, I did not expect any unusual attention whatsoever, yet I must confess that more conversations were started about it than of all of the others, combined. Ridesharing will do that, yes, but it is ridiculous how many people of all races, classes, and ages were enamored by – or overly curious about – Martin.
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What is this a Jetta, dude? Is this a Jetta? Whoa! Dude, is this a stickshift!? Dude I think this is a stickshift. BRO. I can’t believe you’re driving a stick right now. He’s driving a stickshift car! Wow I think this is a manual car! Oh shit this is a diesel!? It’s a diesel too?! No way! I can’t believe you’re out here driving a diesel Jetta wagon bro. Is this a stickshift? You can drive stick!?
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No.
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Early one morning, a ride was requested from the local news station just out of town – a fascinating place. News vans parked in a converted horse stable. They farm televisions out there. A few minutes into the ride, after picking up the young woman, I noticed in the rearview mirror out of my eye’s corner that she had put down her phone to watch my right hand with total bewilderment. Eventually, she asked “what are you doing to the car?” She’d never heard of a manual transmission before. I did my best to explain, but when she asked “but why wouldn’t you just buy a regular car?” I did not have a sufficient answer. Unlike many automotive enthusiasts, I think it’s totally okay that people are allowed to exist independent of this knowledge. There are many, many other things in life to worry about. 80% of cars sold in the United States are shipped with automatics and expecting every young person who lives in an urban environment to think about automobiles as anything beyond simple transportation is asking a lot.
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While we’re on the topic of manual transmissions, it’s relevant to mention how excellent the Jetta TDI is as a vehicle to teach first timers how to operate one. With the clutch in, the engine will not rev beyond 3500 RPM thanks to an electronic limiter, which dramatically reduces the number of obligatory stalls when learning clutch control. The learner can simply hold the accelerator to the floor as they get the hang of declutching instead of having to receive shouts of “more gas!” repeatedly. Of course, being a diesel further eases those stresses with much more readily available torque. Sierra was able to grasp the basics this way in a single night, which is unprecedented in my experience. She found particular comfort in the suggested gear indicator on the instrument panel’s main information display, which is very conservative, naturally, but also apparently relief from some great anxiety regarding the question which gear should I be in right now?
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Community
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I have derided Facebook for my entire adult life for its shitty design, inaspirational effect on its users, and its massive intellectual power, but strangely, through Jetta ownership, I was able to find a community on the service that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Groups like TDI Scumbags, VW TDI Owners, VW TDI support group, and VW TDI Owners Performance and Tech Talk are full of absolutely hilarious and insightful content that I’m genuinely glad I didn’t miss.
On Instagram, I found @jp_eurogarage’s Mk. IV diesel sportwagen, which I adore. I especially love its idle. @projectownersclub posted a video in December, 2018 of a very rusty diesel Mk. III with a straight vertical stack spewing smoke all over its owner’s yard. A video was shared on one of my Facebook groups captioned “when you only drive manual” in which a very generic-looking white man with moustache finds himself gagging in a car with a traditional automatic transmission. The wholesomeness of these posts is often adorable, and not only on Facebook. VW Vortex is an active and helpful forum/blog for TDI owners that I found to be invaluable when researching modifications.
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Performance
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For the first time in my personal automotive history, I felt the desire to modify one of my own cars. Perhaps the most famous appearance of the Jetta Sportwagen in The Web Era was driving instructor Austin Cabot’s 2014 Sportwagen in one of Matt Farah’s infamous One-Takes. You can find the full list of modifications on the car’s WheelWell page. I intended to emulate Austin with a few modifications including Dieselgeek’s Sigma 6 shortshift kit and “high performance” shifter bushing kit (which I did get around to buying, but never installed.) For those interested in engine/ECU tuning, Malone Tuning has a beautiful tool to help you customize your order.
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Instead of installing the shortshift kit right away, I decided to splurge on a bespoke Raceseng Ashiko weighted shift knob, which made throws immediately better. The issue these products are combatting is the particularly disconnected gearshift which Volkswagen has been notorious for the past few decades. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like you’re just operating a lever instead of shifting a transmission, if that makes sense.
The knob itself is beautifully machined and extremely satisfying to hold. I also “deleted” (removed, in other words) the (likely) faux-leather shift boot after realizing that I’ve always hated the sound and sensation of them, but hadn’t been willing to modify my previous cars in any way. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually quite personally noteworthy that I was able to traverse the unseen boundary into mod culture. The result was a slightly more mechanical-feeling shift that would’ve certainly been vastly improved by installation of Dieselgeek’s kit.
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Another aspirational goal of mine for Martin: H&R’s Sport Springs Set paired with a set of Firestone Firehawk Indy 500s. The goal was to sure up some of that body roll and torque-induced wheelspin. I suspect the result would’ve been a very, very sticky Martin. Unfortunately, I would not get the chance before I killed him in an accident on December 22nd of last year.
According to my fuel logs, (they are public, yes, though not necessarily 100% complete,) I averaged close to 30 mpg over 78 fillups and just over 19500 miles. Considering that I was ridesharing most of that time and driving quite obnoxiously for all of it, you should be very impressed. “Diesels tend to get about 30-percent better fuel economy than their conventional counterparts,” says Consumer Reports in a comparison between diesels and hybrids dating back to 2013. From the Union of Concerned Scientists:
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Much of the reason for diesel vehicle’s high fuel economy has to do with the diesel combustion process; however, some of the increase in fuel economy is due to the simple fact that a gallon of diesel fuel contains more energy than a gallon of gasoline.
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The joy my Sportwagen brought me was not expected. My plan to make myself a more reasonable person (and driver) by buying a “boring” car was obviously foiled by the diesel’s torque, the community’s dynamism, and my own communion with mod culture. I spent more consecutive time driving the Jetta than I have in any other automobile and was able to truly enjoy it. After my experience owning a diesel-powered Volkswagen, I would very much like to try driving/owning the Golf GDI – a performance-oriented diesel version of their excellent hatch. Truthfully – given the way I killed Martin – I did not deserve his kinship, but I’m certainly grateful I had the experience.
An autobiographical overview of my personal history with technology and its contributions to my current perspective.
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Incalculable odds were against my arrival in this world happening in early 1994, positioning my life within a timeline that would allow me to bridge my two species’ most significant millenniums in the first grade as a student in the first class at Fairview Elementary school to receive curriculum-mandated exposure to brand-new Windows 98 PCs in its brand-new, fluorescent-lit computer lab in the center core of its 50-year-old rectangular brick structure. The lab also meant that ours was the first Fairview class to have the available relief of air conditioning during the school day. It’s unlikely that I would be home sick and watching the last television ever allowed in my mother’s living room as the second plane hit.
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My peers and I would form a picogeneration without a name (perhaps we should be called the 9/11ers) — 91s and 92s wouldn’t have regular access to public school machines until they’d eclipsed the true prime of their development, and were just that much further along, mentally, to being able to comprehend the huge and terrifying concepts of 1) New York and 2) burning alive — while 98s like my niece were spared any such comprehension of death at all, yet now have to face the existentially future-sundering, darkly-mirrored reality of the Trump Presidency during the most critically uncertain period in the last stage of their brain’s transition to adulthood.
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If there is truth in the cross-cultural supposition that souls have some sort of choice, pre-conception, over when they’re born, my own must have either cleaned out the house, or lost horrible, though I suspect I’ll never be able to confidently wager either way. This question of how lucky or unlucky am I to be alive right now is one which I find most fascinating — not just within myself, but within others my age. I declare us a generation largely because of my experiences under the assumption that my mid-Missouri upbringing represents the ultimate average in the American experiences of the time as the area has been a reliable sample of the clearest average of the country’s cultural, political, and economic life. Technically, it was quite unlikely that I arrive here as a new human being instead of China or India, and what if that, too was my choice?
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Though less so, it was still against chance that I would be born to parents who would divorce very quickly after my birth, before my mind was able to form any tangible long-term memories, sparing me whatever pain could’ve resulted from their greater togetherness later nullified in front of me. I could’ve chosen them as well for the variety of experiences their situation would allow me as I grew up between my father’s 800-acre farm and my mother’s suburban house in Columbia, the college town an hour’s drive south. I write about my experiences now — so young — because I’ve likely already born witness to more extraordinary changes in human development than your parents, their parents, and their parents’ parents combined. At 24, my life has already spanned by far the most profound and expedited informational renaissance in human history — greater progress was made between the day I first rode a bicycle and the one on which I took my driver’s test than in thousands of years before it.
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The sum of my father’s ordeals between 1950 and 1974 — from his birth until the age I am now — would indeed include watching a man set foot on a spatial body other than Earth for the first time, but would be mostly defined by work on the family’s soybean, corn, and wheat farms in central Illinois, driving carbureted tractors pulling cultivating equipment of the same basic design and function as had been pulled by horses, mules, and oxen for hundreds of years, and other implements — like the mechanical multi-row planter — that were new technology at the beginning of the century. For neighbors, he would walk behind the path of a square hay baler next to a moving flatbed trailer, upon which he would throw the 70–100 lb. rectangles of dead compacted grass by their twine through thick cowhide gloves. All of this I would get to experience in the next century on his farm, using the exact same equipment.
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At home, he would watch NBC, ABC, and CBS on a CRT TV, as I would for several years until wireless television was legally transitioned to digital statewide in the summer of 2009. As an adolescent, he would form a business with friends cleaning out old abandoned barns in exchange for the rights of ownership to any finds inside, which led to his discovery of a hay-preserved 1929 Buick Sedan containing hand-written records of its every service. This car would change hands into his Uncle’s care as he went off to school in Champaign, married in Georgia, and eventually settled on the flat clay soil of the farm where I grew up, right on the border between Audrain and Monroe counties, Missouri. I was about 10 when we drove back to the family hub with a trailer in tow to collect the car from my Great Uncle, to my manic excitement.
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Up until my mid-teens, my life was defined by my extreme reverence for historic cars, airplanes, tractors, and watercraft, and the time I spent operating, maintaining, restoring, or simply studying the assortment of these which I was allowed — often because of extraordinary circumstances — would form the component of my psychology which seeks to experience different cultures, ideas, and eras through the medium of engineering and design and relies on these to understand them. Like my father in his youth, I would learn to clean water out of a carburetor after the Oliver 88 had sat silent for too long, and I would piss in a chamber pot to avoid waking up my Grandfather by walking down creaking attic stairs and turning the lights on. I would learn how to shoot and drive before 10-years-old, and I would have the freedom to do both as I pleased on the miles of gravel roads that ran around home.
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Though my stepfather bought me a PC of my own just as my first-grade computer class was ending, I could not conceive of a reason to occupy the dial-up line and block his incoming calls or faxes, so my use of the machine was limited to sparse writing and aggravating attempts to run Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 at approximately one frame per second on a 300MHz single-core Pentium II CPU. Though I was extremely fortunate compared to most middle-class kids my age at the time to have my own computer in my room, my relationship with it was not significant or particularly involved. I would leave it powered down for weeks at a time until my last two grades at Fairview, when homework assignments began to require it.
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Perhaps the greatest gap between my mostly-suburbanite classmates and I was an exposure to Japanese entertainment and video games. I was once disallowed from a lunch table because I’d never heard of Pokémon or Luigi, but I did have a Sony Playstation at home on which I occasionally loaded A Bug’s Life to wander around its first level, perhaps in basal awe at the idea of manipulating what I saw on a screen in realtime. In self-imposed isolation from children my age, I wouldn’t develop any need to be socially competitive with video games as many of my peers would to carry with them into adulthood. I thought my interests in mechanical engineering to be above all of them, so I spent my time alone with heavy picturebooks on 20th century cars, tractors, and airplanes.
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On the farm, my consistently agriculturally-proactive father was one of the first to have satellite internet for farm futures and weather reports on a pre-GUI machine which I don’t remember. As I was becoming computer literate in school, he would become extremely frustrated with the Windows XP-running machine he’d bought from a one-man, one-room computer shop in Centralia, and I would often solve some problem with bloatware or the goddamned printer. He would also subscribe to and install a first-generation DirectTV receiver, which had the first on-screen program guide I’d ever seen. In the evenings, I would watch hours of Modern Marvels on The History Channel, which presented the history, abstract functional theory, and implementation of a particular technology, both past and future. This single program — which has aired nearly 700 episodes since 1995 — is probably responsible for the majority of my at least rudimentary general knowledge in a variety of historic and “future” technological schools, and my curiosity about culture’s relationship with innovation.
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Though my father’s interests differed significantly from mine — he thought more about growing and raising than of the tools one used to do it — he would indulge my many questions about how engines, hydraulics, and electrical systems worked, and indulged my curiosity by exposing me to the hidden communities of the most elderly, most obscure historic machinery enthusiasts like those of the Midwest Old Threshers Reunion in Mount Pleasant, Iowa — the Concours d’Elegance for antique tractor and reciprocating engine collectors. It was a similar event closer to home where I first operated a steam tractor — great, field-going locomotive-like vehicles that supplanted a need for horsepower in the late-1800s up until the Great Depression which chug, whistle, and puff along just like rail locomotives with a huge, gritty, iron steering wheel. As I recall, I was also given the opportunity to drive an unrestored Model T truck around the grounds that day — the knowledge from which I gained I cannot imagine being of much use ever again.
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I was proud to the point of arrogance of my technical knowledge and experience in all the different things I had driven and operated, which my schoolmates were in no position to understand. I was elitist and anti-social about this as late as 8th grade, when I had just moved in to stay with my mother, who bought me a first generation iPhone which I proudly wore in a leather belt holster to Junior High. It would represent a shift in my fascination from very old technology toward the present and future.
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I started talking online with a friend I’d first met years before at Fairview, who spent most of his time fiddling with his first-generation MacBook Pro. He originally exposed me to gadget bloggers on YouTube like Mark Watson and Jon Rettinger (both of whom are still full-time tech personalities.) My mom bought me a 13-inch aluminum-bodied MacBook (which would be sold as MacBook Pro after a single year,) and my lifestyle radically shifted inside my room, my computer, and my Xbox 360. My friend and I would both obsess together over software, design, and gadget – experimenting with our own tech YouTube channels until high school, where I would be adopted by a new friend group who would finally socialize me.
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Recently, I have written about the contrasts and discrepancies of consumer technology development as its progress has disconnected from the upward linear trajectory in use, quality, and genuine innovation for the End User in a departure which has been especially visible from my perspective as an academically-untrained, but intensely demanding user in the past five years. When hardware was still the industry focus before ~2012, there was a tremendous amount of optimism among journalists and enthusiasts because each successive generation of devices had added more tangible capabilities. Publications like Gizmodo and Engadget made a fortune publishing reviews and comparison tests of hardware offerings across every segment of tech, and the discourse they generated had a noticeable influence on design. I remember this time well because it accented my last few years before adulthood, when I had plenty of spare time, energy, and curiosity to keep up.
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The general consumer technology narrative since Steve Jobs’ death has become increasingly more about the companies who design and sell hardware and software than about how and why their consumers actually use them, and the result has been a series of new product segments with little defensible place in my own linear timeline of innovation, especially where productivity is involved. Augmented and Virtual Reality are quite explicitly escapist industries, yet to fill any significant need which was before unfilled. The same could be argued about voice assistants and smartwatches — neither of which remove obstacles in most users’ day-to-day lives but instead contribute to the array of tasks and devices which already seek their attention.
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Of course, there are defensibly sound business incentives behind the industry’s new, fragmented direction, but I would also argue that there are those, too, for genuinely revisiting both what we should be doing and what we should be seeking to learn to do with technology. In a more abstract sense, I have written about whether or not we should want to be living in this particular now, and how the way we feel about the future should inform what we do in the present.
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I cannot help but observe human progress from a perspective of powerlessness, acute alienation, and amused awe, which has already lent to a significant quantity of occasionally original thoughts as I watch, having witnessed an odd diversity of American life and culture. I’ve published them to entertain and to demonstrate a few methods of reflection on what it is you really want from the times you are living.
When I have to pee too much to actually finish anything.
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I've updated the look of this blog with a theme adapted from “Anxiety” by Max Henderson but I've yet to update the colophon with the new colors (partially because I don't have the energy to name them yet.) Extratone's theme was listed on write.as' new themes project a while ago, of which I am quite proud. I've begun crossposting to Mastodon from Twitter again.
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Autos And Such
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I'm mostly blogging because I am fairly stuck on the Volkwagen Atlas review I promised to get done this week. (That link is to an online Word doc of my live progress, on which I'd love any comments on if you have them.) I've been playing enough Gran Turismo Sport that I've created a new blog specifically for automotive writing at dieselgoth.com. There, on Titanic day, I made a post including an “exclusive” invite link to mastd.racing, which I would compel any enthusiasts among you to oblige.
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Hanging out with myself trying to get Zoom-bombed.
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Listening
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This feature on the Bandcamp Daily regarding “Bleep” has really been my shit. Imagine my 70-year-old mother dancing to this.
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[Matt] Anniss subsequently went on a local Bristol internet station, penned a blog post, and posted a DJ set of Bleep, as a way to convince those same DJs that his thesis had some merit. He wrote an in-depth feature on the form for electronic music site Resident Advisor—which caused him to think bigger about this formative, unsung moment in UK dance music history. “I found the sound itself alien and otherworldly, but also endlessly fascinating for some reason,” he says. “It seemed so fresh and futuristic still, but also mysterious.”
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Software and Stuff
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Still waiting on my tax return/possible Corona stipend, I have lost my subscription to Google One, meaning the business Extratone Gmail (ihadtopee@gmail.com) is about to be unhooked(?)/deleted/no longer able to receive mail. As such, I've spent the past few days moving accounts to davidblue@extratone.com including the newsletters I'm most fond of (like Nextdraft.) This has given me a good opportunity to weed out those I don't particularly care about and to try using Outlook as my primary email client once again. Somehow, this has got me reverted into trying to make use of my Microsoft Office business subscription once again – I have (eeek!) not been writing in Markdown. May the Gourd have mercy on my text format-fucking soul.
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The other project I've been trying to distract myself from the Atlas review with is my list of poweruser/especially handy Windows/iOS/MacOS applications/tricks that I believe just about everyone should be using. From “Dirty Dave's Poweruser Tips” (working title):
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I want you to come away from this list feeling as liberated and powerful as I do now when I’m On My Computer without any condescension or tedium. Unfortunately, there’s probably going to be some of both, so please stick with me and don’t take it personally. I do a lot of online reading, writing, and fiddling. I’ve been compelled to do these things in one form or another since very early childhood, and what follows could be described as a list of my favorite tools to accomplish things. Almost all of them are entirely free to use and the vast majority of them are easily and beautifully functional as well. They are what I suggest for my own mother to use, for what that’s worth, and I would argue sincerely for their extreme importance. Don’t waste your life on bad software.
Why spend so much time worrying about what Medium is? Maybe because we wanted to know whether it was a friend or an enemy. The answer is that it’s neither. It’s a reflection of what the media industry has worried about, and hoped for, and not received. But Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like. That’s not much fun for people who got burned along the way, but Medium was never exactly ours to begin with.
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Other Stuff
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I wrote Extratone's sparse submissions page today after signing us up for Submit.as. I'd encourage you to check out the prompts and to send me any suggestions you might have.
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Extratone.com's favicon has been updated thanks to the beautiful geniuses at write.as. (They literally just take requests for this via email.)
A powerful iOS utility for fucking digital text with ruthless efficiency.
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A warning siren sounds louder still for the current state of the Digital Divide than the profoundly ignorant spectacle of Mark Zuckerberg’s drooling, ghoulish interrogators last year from the digital hole of none other than W3School’s trusty web validator, which would surely be rated as the Most Anxious Being in History if it were to acquire sentience. The CSS file this very webpage referenced returned no fewer than 350 syntax errors at the time of this writing; Facebook dot com’s login page set off only 55. For going on a decade, now, the web has continued to expand into a grotesque, diseased mass.
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Yet another piece of software I have notably been using for 10 years: the infamous eemo.net Zalgo web text fucker. Ideally, I’d now proceed to embed some special examples of the hedonistic online text vandalism which the tool enabled me to inflict widely throughout my adolescence. However – as you can probably imagine – searching for these criminally-broken posts using standard tools provided by the services that have hosted them is virtually futile. In retrospect, I do not recall ever eliciting any acknowledgment of Zalgo’s effects, yet I’m positive that at least the majority of my victims set eyes upon the mess at some point – their silence is actually more entertaining than not, I think. Despite my extensive use of the format, I made a point to maintain my total ignorance about the origin of “Zalgo” for the past decade – only spoiling it in the name of good journalism for your sake and this review.
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On forums and image boards, scrambled text began being associated with Zalgo with phrases like “he comes” and “he waits behind the wall.” David Higgins revealed that the text is an ~abuse~ of a Unicode feature that enables the user to combine multiple superscript and subscript characters into a vertical line.
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By bizarre coincidence or some ridiculously obscure, intractable common cultural thread (which would probably take a lifetime to successfully trace,) Dave Higgins and I were already mutuals on Mastodon before I had any idea his name was at all associated with Zalgo. More bizarre still: Dave must’ve been watching his timeline at the exact moment when I posted the above quote mentioning him.
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Unfortunately, it seems his blog has moved, killing the hyperlink citation in one of the two relevant search engine results for “zalgo”: its Know Your Meme page. Searching the same term on his new WordPress blog yields absolutely nothing, so perhaps “I deny everything” was a more sincere response than one expected. A thread on Stack Overflow entitled “How does Zalgo text work?” explains the fuckery in more detail than I ever could:
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You can easily construct a character sequence, consisting of a base character and “combining above” marks, of any length, to reach any desired visual height, assuming that the rendering software conforms to the Unicode rendering model.
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There is something artistic about destroyed text like this – something that's more than just edgy chaos. I believe in “surreal memes” that can break Facebook and Twitter posts. I believe in Zalgo, and I believe you need Zalgo Generator for iOS on your phone right now.
![[2019 Volkwagen Atlas SEL w/4MOTION]](https://i.snap.as/XzLvAnV.jpg)
-and in those open spaces,
-you would fly your flag of adoration, frustration, miscommunication, and mutilation
-see what we have asked of this land:
-juicing zea jabbing through
-chapped flats
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-A notification I received while literally typing this out.
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-relentless, the country keeps
-doors and walls reverberate
-all but rest in summer’s heat
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I stumbled across this wonderful help document in 
