Hi, I’m Jay!

By the way you can access paywalled The Verge content with an Apple News+ subscription.

I still don’t get why nobody understands what a great value that is — the number of paywalled sites this lets you access is huge and constantly surprising me.

Wait I'm confused -- people are making it sound like the new OpenAI image tool has a "Ghibli mode" or a "Ghibli generator." But I think it's just that some people decided to add "Ghibli" to their prompts, and the results went viral, and now a lot of people are doing it?

This doesn't absolve OpenAI, of course, but this isn't as brazen a slap in the face as it was being made to sound, as though there were a big "Ghiblify it!" button in the UI.

Something that could be cool is a website that accepts an upload of an OPML file of RSS feeds, fetches all the posts from those feeds, and shows them to you. No account creation, no subscriptions. Just an ad-hoc, one-time-use-only feed reader.

New PT Anderson! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap-j8e9J5U0

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/03/26/metro/its-really-scary-students-residents-react-sudden-arrest-tufts-student/

> A man with a hoodie approaches her, then grabs her wrists. Ozturk screams, then asks "Can I call the police?" before being told "We're the police."

Jesus fucking christ

https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-03-26/tufts-international-graduate-student-taken-into-ice-custody

Maybe this is stupid but I'm a little surprised nobody said "Should we maybe not be talking about this on Signal?" Like when that Meta employee said "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right."

Because I ordered the new Destroyer album on CD directly from Merge Records, it just arrived in the mail, two days before it releases on digital platforms.

“I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans.

“I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.”

(Gift link)

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/?gift=M8TNkpFVI-W2f9Y_RC8uGaMMhe1moT_voekyz6HItfM&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Ell oh fucking ell, get all the way out of here with this kind of shit

This Bro meditates and bullet-journals, and then makes YouTube videos about it.

I like keyboards, but seriously eff this keyboard.

That new astronomically expensive keyboard is called "the Seneca."

There has been a new type of Bro percolating these last couple years: the "Stoicism" Bro.

New logo and graphic identity system for #CambMA https://nimblebot.com/projects/city_of_cambridge

#Boston @universalhub@mastodon.online

The #Severance opening credits are very "Hipgnosis"

What are some people's favorite delivery places in #Boston/#CambMA that do their own delivery, not through Uber Eats etc.?

(Other than pizzerias through the Slice app.)

I feel like I can only read about Trump for five minutes at a time

Feel like pure shit just want her back

"Twisters" was the first disaster movie in 15 years to take in more than $500 million at the box office.

What was the previous one?

This is seriously one of the best pieces of UI I’ve ever seen. The actions and their implications are crystal clear.

What are some "radical" or "counter-culture" books that would have been on the shelves of every Berkeley student in, say, the early- to mid-1970s?

Kabel is having a moment and I'm feeling vindicated #typography

On April 29, the lifetime plan for #Plex is more than doubling in price, increasing from $120 to $250. If you expect to use Plex for more than two years, and you can afford it, now is the time to take that leap.

Going to see Hudson Hawk for the first time, on 35mm

The #rePebble store is up and taking preorders. As an old Pebble devotee, I desperately want one to play with, but I know I wouldn't wear it instead of my Apple Watch. https://store.repebble.com

Analogue Pocket white is back in stock: https://store.analogue.co/products/analogue-pocket-white

A deep dive into Mahmoud Khalil. I don't know why of all the horrors of the past few months, this one hits me the hardest. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-university.html?unlocked_article_code=1.404.Hbcl.daMtRxdLsRP0&smid=url-share

Ok #Juxtagram really is cute and addictive as hell, and it's on sale: https://play.date/games/juxtagram/

#Playdate

I honestly have no idea what a webmention is, or how it's different from a pingback/trackback, but it sounds complicated to implement.

(I also never understood the difference between a pingback and a trackback.)

Also, thank god for the old stalwart of the blogging days, Pingbacks, through which I found this collection of observations from @mjtsai@mastodon.social: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/07/03/big-surs-narrow-alerts/

An 2020 analysis from @morrick@appdot.net: https://morrick.me/archives/9025

#macOS #Apple

Good job, Apple, A++, no notes

Trump is not secretly politically savvy, despite what even some of his detractors have said over the years.

He's just willing to do things nobody was willing to do before. His "savvy" is just being completely unscrupulous.

But that's weird, isn't it? Normal people don't care about it; people who actually make tech don't care about it (judging by the vibe on Mastodon). Who then is pushing this narrative that it's an essential feature in every product? Venture capital?

It is absolutely a tech-headed echo chamber belief that things need AI. Normal people do not think it's a defect of the iPhone 15 that it didn't "have AI in it." Nobody is using any of this stuff except talking to ChatGPT. It sucks to watch Apple sink its brand chasing this nonsense.

New Frog Eyes: https://frogeyes.bandcamp.com/album/the-open-up

#music

The world’s greatest deal-maker: Ask Putin what he wants and then give it to him.

”Nobody else could get it done except me, because they’re stupid and I’m smart.”

From @jonny@neuromatch.social, author of the incoming Mastodon “fetch all replies in thread” PR:

“As an addendum, I would say that this should be considered *expected behavior* for activitypub: the `replies` collection is a public `Collection` that is part of an actor's `outbox` and servers should expect other servers to to paginate through these, and the source servers should implement access controls accordingly.”

Cosmic horror from Flying Lotus?? https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/ash-movie-review-flying-lotus-eiza-gonzalez-aaron-paul-1235103042/

J.D. Vance wears eyeliner? Good for him, straight men should feel no shame in wearing makeup or doing other conventionally "un-masculine" things.

As David Bowie said when asked why he was wearing "a woman's dress": "It's a man's dress."

Sorry I just love Jon Hamm, I can't help it https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2025/03/-apple-tv-unveils-trailer-for-highly-anticipated-jon-hamm-led-drama-your-friends-neighbors-premiering-globally-april-11/

via @parkermolloy@masto.ai (dormant account) https://www.readtpa.com/p/the-media-treated-trumps-tesla-stunt

I wish there were a website or widget for people who don't really follow sports but would just like a vague idea of how their local teams are doing.

I still have no idea what Newsmast is

Twin Peaks (the first two seasons) is on iTunes for $13 right now.

I didn't think Crocs would last, I didn't think they'd become socially acceptable, and I certainly didn't think people would start decorating them with little charms.

First bike ride of the year!

Gang, it’s me. I’m the Fediverse Chick

Name this movie ❤️

Imagine reading this sentence ten years ago.

At first I didn't like playing #MarsAfterMidnight because it wasn't hard. But then I realized it's not supposed to *be* hard, and I began to enjoy it a lot more. #Playdate

Don't the Tubi commercials cause everyone to become unsynced? #Monsterdon

I didn’t know I had this in audiobook format until I went to sync my iPod.

#Severance

I just had a great idea. Closed captioning scrollback. Scroll back through recent closed captions without pausing or rewinding the video.

Haha if anybody did this on Mastodon they would be shot out of a cannon https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3ljqsf3tnr22a

Yeah they screwed up, but I'm glad Apple is erring on the side of *not* releasing something they know is half-baked.

Every newsroom's style guide should insist on formatting it as "the so-called 'Department of Government Efficiency'"

There is an 11,000-line Sass file in Mastodon's source: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/javascript/styles/mastodon/components.scss

Sandra Bernhard??

"The Academy Awards of course reflect what Academy voters like, but they also reveal what kind of story the voters want to tell about themselves."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/movies/sean-baker-oscars-speech.html?unlocked_article_code=1.104.yxmu.MUI9NfAE7zat&smid=url-share

#Ivory now has grouped notifications!! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivory-for-mastodon-by-tapbots/id6444602274

Hey a new Destroyer single #music https://destroyer.bandcamp.com/track/cataract-time

Wow the new iPads Air *still* don't have Face ID. I have a lot of mileage left in my M1, so I'm in no rush to upgrade.

As someone who relies on quarters for laundry and has experienced the difficulty of getting banks to part with them, I want to "rob a bank" for an even exchange.

"ALL RIGHT, FOLKS! HERE'S A HUNDRED DOLLARS! NOW GIVE ME TEN ROLLS OF QUARTERS AND NOBODY GETS HURT"

Hey good for them, for real https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/shopping-addiction-no-buy-2025.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1U4.XSTE.yPhs0AaUKaI0&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

I have an idea for a new kind of pomodoro method, where you can do whatever you want for 25 minutes, then for five minutes you have to do nothing. Really truly nothing, just sitting quietly and unfocusing your eyes.

Conan is the only good thing we have left in this world

I am aghast -- AGHAST -- at Adrian Brody's behavior tonight

Anybody have any favorite self-hosted bookmark apps? I'm looking into #Linkding for its small footprint and active community.

I recently tried to switch from #Pinboard to #GoodLinks and I'm not super happy with it.

Does anybody else have the same sense I do that “dribs and drabs” only really became commonplace in the last 10-15 or so years? @grammargirl@zirk.us

And speaking of the #iPod Nano, this is really fun to rewatch. He refers to "the iTunes phone" here, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GRv-kv5XEg

There's an "Alien 7-Film Collection" on sale for $40 right now on iTunes

https://tv.apple.com/us/movie-bundle/alien-7-film-collection/umc.cmr.its.bun.1xhzblt676kvkyh70jads9377

Is there a book about, like, how to communicate in a remote team? How to write emails and email subjects, how to write documentation, how to effectively use group chat. I feel like we all just do these things with absolutely no guides or best practices. Something friendly, approachable, broad, and non-technical.

Do people remember that thing where Corey Feldman said he would friend you on MySpace if you sent him like $500 or something? I can't find anything about that but I swear it happened!

Sorry but there is no "Bluesky exodus" coming. Nobody cares.

I kinda hope #Slack never comes back online

Is there a Mac app that can display the width/height/dimensions of a window as I'm resizing it?

I'd love to know more about that watch, too.

Somewhat bizarrely, that single-page microsite from Last Week Tonight is running on WordPress. This could have been a single index.html with like 30 lines of CSS.

https://johnoliverwantsyourraterotica.com

I can't be the first one to want to talk about the similarities between #Severance and the game Portal, can I?

I really just mean like tonally and a bit thematically, not anything to do with the story.

Please enjoy this extremely groovy -- albeit musically gangly and awkward -- gem of a musical number hidden in "War of the Gargantuas" https://vimeo.com/1059572385

I don't remember where or when I ever shared this, and I apologize in advance for it https://vimeo.com/838757968

A god damn theremin, of course!

Is this Kier song written by Fief? #DungeonSynth #Severance

I haven't seen the movie in many years but I still get this song stuck in my head at times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=TfC2OatW4sQ

Do you ever find yourself writing some complex flex or grid code, only to realize, "Wait, I think...I think this might just be what `float` exists for." #CSS

Is there no way to get the timestamps of the events in a notification group in the new Mastodon grouped notifications? #MastoDev

For sale: Humane pin, never worn :'(

This is exactly what happens https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302906/cdc-flu-vaccine-campaign-terminated

Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat??

If you're on macOS, slightly techy, and want a very easy way to download all your Amazon #Kindle books, I can strongly recommend this tool by @treetrum@mastodon.social. Uses #BunJS, super fast, even shows progress bars for the downloads!!

https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader/

We are the goon squad and we're coming to town, beep-beep

The idea that because they are “open,” things like Mastodon and Pixelfed do not stand to benefit from addiction to their products, and are therefore not incentivized to make their products addictive, is not tenable.

Where do people buy new DVDs/Blu-rays? I wanted a copy of American Movie so I bought it at Amoeba -- any other independent places like that with a big catalog?

With great skepticism I put on "Hundreds of Beavers" to see what all the fuss was about.

At a theater I would have absolutely walked out on this before ten minutes were up.

Maybe something like this?: https://web.archive.org/web/19961128083436/http://www8.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Information_and_Documentation/Tutorials__Demos__Talks/

Anybody recall any specific "guides to the World Wide Web"-type websites that were popular in the mid-to-late-90s?

Paul Giamatti as Art Bell in new biopic?? https://deadline.com/2025/02/radio-silence-paul-giamatti-art-bell-biopic-1236284844/

Check out this new Akzidenz-like grotesque from Latinotype: https://www.myfonts.com/collections/yankee-font-latinotype #typography

In a nearby parallel universe, #RSS readers are commonplace and as natural a part of a mobile OS's default suite of apps as a browser or email client.

An "add to reader" button in a browser, and a reader app that shows you content from websites you've added in reverse chronological order.

This was so close to being a reality for non-tech people!!

It depends on your library I guess, but Kanopy has so much great stuff on it that you could probably get away with it being your only streaming service.

Are there any good cheap boxes for long-term vinyl storage someone can recommend?

When quote-posts become baked into #Mastodon and available via the API, I hope clients stop fetching quoted posts on their own.

Part of Mastodon's implementation will be the ability for people to prevent quote-posting of their content, and to "withdraw" their posts from anywhere they were quoted.

"Faking" quote-posts by merely fetching the post object from within the client will not respect these preferences and intentions of the quoted user.

A while ago, I think it was on here that I saw it, someone posted some black-and-white profile picture/avatar illustrations they were commissioning. Does anybody remember who that was? They were kind of like "Notion-style" black outline drawings on white.

Robert Eggers is doing a Labyrinth sequel??? https://deadline.com/2025/01/robert-eggers-labyrinth-sequel-sony-1236265010/

I have an idea for getting rid of the camera bump:

Make it the entire back of the phone.

Has anybody talked about the possibility that it's easier to get trapped in a cycle of checking things on your phone because the screen is so small?

On a large desktop monitor it's easier to feel like you've seen everything and it's all taken care of. Nearly everything important can be visible at once. "Yep, there's my mail, there's my social media, there's the project I've been working on. That's it!"

Let me try out this analogy on you:

A font is to a typeface as a CD is to an album.

If someone said "Oh, I love this CD!", they might then say, "Well, I guess what I mean is that I love the *album*; the CD is just how we're listening to it."

I keep seeing Content about the SNL 50th anniversary show and at this point it always makes me go "you mean it hasn't happened by now?"

What is a "safdie brother," and how do I know if that's what I found in my yard

Mastodon should allow filters to be applied to trending news, too.

Grouped notifications in Ivory TestFlight!!

(To the tune of "Owner of a Lonely Heart")

🎶 Killing of a sacred deer

Has any artist/photographer tried re-creating AI images, like, "in-camera"?

Put heavy make-up on someone, dress them in a shirt that just looks cut a little wrong, prosthetically mold a false sixth finger onto their wrist, use a tiny depth of field...

Nobody has ever felt as invincible as Trump does right now.

Multiple-choice polls on Mastodon shouldn't give results as percentages of all checkmarks, with all options adding up to 100%; it should give results as the percentage of respondents who checked each option.

So if there is a poll between A and B; half the respondents pick both; and the other half pick only B; the results should be A: 100%, B: 50%.

When I was young, the commercials were the only thing I liked about the Super Bowl. Now they may be the thing I like the least.

Holy shit somebody did it -- they made a Flying Toasters screensaver clone that works on modern #macOS: https://github.com/robertventurini/FlyingToasters

Can we have an acronym for "that was an autocorrect but it was funny so I'm deciding to keep it"?

The only alternative to dying is living forever, which honestly sounds way way WAY worse.

This is a great overview of everything that's been going on the last week or so. At some point every sentence is more terrifying than the last. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us/politics/musk-federal-government.html?unlocked_article_code=1.u04.xhE4.ck6UnxiB2l4_&smid=url-share

Nobody ever made a CD player that scrobbles over WiFi, did they? I think WiFi was becoming ubiquitous just as CD players were being universally discarded.

Would be so cool, though! I'd almost be less surprised to find a *turntable* that scrobbles, these days.

"has Oliver Platt in it" is a genre

It's always a little goofy when a science fiction show/movie tries to have a punk band railing in earnest against some fictional sci-fi villain.

I know I heard this last year but somehow forgot to keep listening to it. This is great stuff. https://sarahmarychadwick.bandcamp.com/album/messages-to-god

“While you frame this as a conflict about ambition, I hear you wrestling with a profound question: What defines a life well lived?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/well/mind/ask-the-therapist-gottlieb-hard-work.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tU4.EkDA.eIercIQvrsA6&smid=url-share

As much as I've read about BotW and TotK, I've never really seen anybody talk much about the style of their art. They eschew the polygons-and-textures look for these painterly, comic-like swaths of color. And while I don't play a lot of video games, I haven't even really seen it imitated.

I need to read an article whose title is "An art expert talks about the paintings in 'Severance'"

You're allowed to complain about something that defies credulity in a sci-fi story if the question you're asking isn't "How did they do that?", but "Why did they do that?"

I bought a CD on eBay. It just arrived in an Amazon box, with a gift receipt, along with six metal rings -- evidently for horse bridles -- also with gift receipts.

The only possible explanation is that the eBay seller didn't even possess the CD. They sent it as a gift to me from Amazon, and added the 75¢ rings to hit the free shipping minimum.

And I paid way more on eBay than I would have on Amazon.

HTML and CSS mostly use American spellings (`color` vs `colour` for instance), which is partly why `aria-labelledby` -- whose double "l" is "rest of the English-speaking world"-ian -- always confuses me. I'm always writing `aria-labeledby`.

Sometimes Meg Baird comes on unexpectedly and I remember how much I absolutely adore her https://megbaird.bandcamp.com/album/cross-bay

Almost went to the theater to see The Substance again on a big screen tonight, having already seen it in September, it's that good.

[normal person, posting to Mastodon] "I just discovered XYZ, it's so great!”

[all of Mastodon, in a single resounding chorus] “Oh, you shouldn't be using XYZ.”

ABBA are so fucking good

Is there any Mastodon-like ActivityPub software that auto-fetches replies from unfollowed accounts? I'd love to just host my own instance, but I hate that it means you don't see so much content. Does #GoToSocial do this?

Drop Amazon, drop Meta (gift link): https://wapo.st/3PMU1xT

New Mogwai day: https://mogwai.bandcamp.com/album/the-bad-fire

Another huge recommend, maybe I'm out of touch for not knowing about this already https://soundcloud.com/mothercain/perverts?in=mothercain/sets/perverts-2

You can rely on my meaning it when I say: Check this shit out! https://importantrecords.com/products/agartha-personal-meditation-music

"eBay" is such a great name because it's like a bay, but electronic

I might buy a Steam Deck JUST so I can play Portal again. Unless anybody knows how to get it running on a Mac.

I had no idea the "Goonies™ 'R' Good Enough" music video was a whole-ass movie -- with a part 2! https://ww.youtube.com/watch?v=VhPujiA9BRY

OMG #switch2 #nintendo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itpcsQQvgAQ

For sale: baby shoes, feet included

There appears to be a viral copypasta going around Discord saying that Discord's email has been compromised and that phishing emails are being sent from their real email servers, signed with DKIM and SPF etc.

I'm really skeptical that this is true; I don't see any news stories about this. Anybody know anything about this?

There are few thrills like finding an un-Shazamable song

Just want to re-recommend this amazing Mac app, Music MiniPlayer, which recreates the old brushed-metal iTunes floating miniplayer. Such a delight, it's free but I'm gonna "Buy him a coffee" now because I just opened it and smiled. https://marioaguzman.github.io/musicminiplayer/

#RSS feeds often have categories and tags in their XML. Are there any feed readers that use this info? Why not let me browse all my downloaded content by tags?

I did not expect to watch all 45 minutes of this, but I did and I loved it. It takes you on a journey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLMZPlIufA0

"Vespertine" still just puts me in a headspace that no other album does

I like to be an early adopter, because often an opt-in feature is where things are headed anyway and it's fun to toy around with new ideas.

But the "group by sender" feature in iOS Mail categories needs a lot of work.

In the film adaptation of "Cats," instead of using CGI that will look dated in two weeks, couldn't they have just used...I don't know... COSTUMES??

just absolutely blasting some bill callahan over here

Anybody have a mnemonic for remembering how to spell "hors d'oeurves"? That "oeu" gets me every time.

I've played BotW and TotK for over 400 combined hours now.

I still think possibly my favorite thing about it is the deconstructed Legend of Zelda theme reprise when riding your horse. When the violin comes in with that nearly 30-year-old melody at half the tempo it just blows my mind.

"Image Playground" is truly one of the dopiest things Apple has released in recent years.

The color grading on "Carol" is just bonkers

There's a Miller commercial where a guy is playing "Deck the Halls" by striking a series of beer bottles that emit specific pitches.

The note from the last bottle is flat, so he drinks from it, and the pitch *rises*.

This is not difficult to get right!!

There's a lot wrong with the Cybertruck, but one thing I never hear people asking about it is, what the hell is "cyber" about it??

The Hyrule of BotW and TotK is roughly 31 square miles, about the size of Miami.

Pulled my copy of "Here Come the Warm Jets" off the shelf and the CD case is empty, I hate it when that happens

#RowbotRally is just about a perfect #Playdate game -- true pixel art; a novel, clever, and meaningful use of the crank; pick-up-and-playable; in-game leaderboards. It's masterful. It's not cheap as Playdate games go, but I really recommend it: https://play.date/games/rowbot-rally/

"The Gremlins Duology"

Few people make me wish I *were* them as much as Cate Blanchett does

Because the Switch 2 will play Switch 1 games, will that mean the quality will be improved on those games? The waving banners in TotK flutter at like 2fps.

Anybody have any recent favorite point-and-click games?

This is a free, 4.9-star, editor's choice game that has no in-app purchases and doesn't collect any personal data. What?? #WereCleaner https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-werecleaner/id6478448519

"Time Enough at Last" always makes it into these #TwilightZone marathons, but I don't really care for it that much, I think it's in the B pile for sure.

People who are old enough will remember that if you texted or called people at midnight on New Year's Eve in the early 2000s, *you might not get through* because the cell networks were so overloaded. Sometimes you'd get an SMS hours after it was sent.

Crazy to me that you can't send "Happy birthday" or "Congratulations" or "Happy new year" in iMessage without an "effect" being added. This is automatic and there is no way to disable it.

You could turn off iMessage and send these as SMS/RCS messages, I suppose, but that's a pain in the ass.

The freaky rise of AI horrorcore https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/65760/1/freaky-rise-of-ai-horrorcore-will-smith-root-people-dongcrawlers

Whoa there is a recipe-sharing webapp using #ATProto: https://bsky.app/profile/recipe.exchange/post/3ldmgaozkhk2m

I'm having major Baader-Meinhof with the Fugu fish

Fill in the blank: "______ is like CocoMelon for adults."

I said to a friend the other day that the hipster was not one thing: there were (very roughly) "cocaine hipsters" (Parliament Lights and LCD Soundsystem) and "pot hipsters" (American Spirits and Devendra Banhart) -- and others, I'm sure, that differ from and overlap with these.

But I was always uneasy about the "cocaine hipsters," myself.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/26/2010s-indie-sleeze-music-culture

What gall to name a song "THE CHRISTMAS SONG."

I love the bustle of the holidays, and I love seeing my loved ones all month, but I am so glad to be in my own cozy apartment with no long-distance travel in the near future.

Bruce Hornbies and A Range

18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/10/22/marginalian-18/

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist a book by Liz Pelly https://bookshop.org/p/books/mood-machine-the-rise-of-spotify-and-the-costs-of-the-perfect-playlist-liz-pelly/21580625?ean=9781668083505)

Apple, bring Cover Flow back to iOS, cowards

I can't overstate how much of an impact it has had on my mental wellbeing to keep a reusable travel packing list on my phone. I check off everything I either don't need or have packed, and I can know I didn't forget anything. I'm not running through a mental checklist on the way to the airport.

"Run Rudolph Run" is one of the most well-known songs to contain a lyric about urination

I've got to get home

Say, what's in this comb

Me: "I forgot to mention one little thing: a ring."

Santa: "Oh you mean like on the phone?? ;P"

Spotify is stuffing their playlists with cheap factory-farm music to avoid paying artists.

Soon people will be listening to AI music without even knowing or caring.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

Wow I had totally forgotten about the whole #DaShareZ0ne debacle. What ever came of that? Did we ever learn exactly what happened?

Back in the 1960s, You Bought Your Christmas Music at the Tire Store https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42257785/goodyear-firestone-tire-christmas-record/

If you're looking for a wildly different Christmas record this year: Dick Hyman and the Organ Orchestra - That Happy Christmas Feeling (1959)

https://open.spotify.com/album/77XZ5RZpbDvfQq6ayuw67M

#music

Wow people made quick work of knocking me out of the top spot on Short Circuit on #RowbotRally #Playdate https://play.date/games/rowbot-rally/

I can't believe I'm saying this

But I might rewatch Gilmore Girls

I challenge you to do a "three-finger swipe undo" in Mail without also selecting a message.

Even four-finger swipe app switching on iPadOS seems to register taps for me.

Wow The Soft Bulletin just turned 25.

I'm delighted that The Substance has five Golden Globe nominations, including best picture: https://goldenglobes.com/film/the-substance/

There's a #WordPress plugin for changing all YouTube embeds to "youtube-nocookie" embeds: https://github.com/wpexplorer/wp-youtube-nocookie/blob/main/wp-youtube-nocookie.php

Civilization VI is on sale on Steam for $2.99 right now.

Why is there so much teal and orange in AI imagery?

Christmas will always make me miss Brian O’Donovan now #Boston #GBH @gbhnews@mastodon.social

Wow Portishead's "Dummy" turned 30 this August.

What's the difference between Ghost Box and Belbury Music?

Anywhere here's a new thing from them: https://belburymusic.greedbag.com/buy/prismatics/

#music

Corporate training modules are like:

You find a USB drive on the floor by the elevator. What should you do?

A. Mount it to your work laptop to see if there is any Bitcoin on it.
B. Throw it away. It probably isn't important anyway.
C. Give it to someone in IT and explain where you found it.
D. Promptly swallow it while nobody is looking.

"Only Murders in the Building" just makes me so happy that Steve Martin and Martin Short got to do one last relevant thing that people like in the last quarter of their lives.

I wish there were still someplace that did a "Cool Site of the Day" like Yahoo used to

Has anyone confirmed that this "AI poopoo peepee podcast" actually was created with AI? The voices sound so natural, with all the inhales and inflections, and the dialog is so perfect.

The only giveaway for me is that they mispronounce (?) "dadaism" as "daydayism."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfr4BP4V1R8?

"Fedified" was always so vicariously embarrassing to me. Like it's the ultimate desperation for a check mark to just get someone else to put the link on their meaningless domain.

If you loved Espers or Josephine Foster & the Supposed, you absolutely need to hear this record: https://nighttimes.bandcamp.com/album/keeper-is-the-heart

#music

In Regis Philbin's 2005 rendition of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," he starts losing it and introduces Rudolph to Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees.

(Also a certain vile president-elect makes an appearance, so listen with caution.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8YivKZrOno?

When GitHub is down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8wbL88f4gI

Haven't listened to this in an eternity, god damn. Just think about this record. https://fatcatrecords.bandcamp.com/album/finally-we-are-no-one

Am I crazy? A Topre keyboard for ~$150? I thought you had to spend at least $200 to get these switches. I've been dying to try Topres forever. https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/products/topre-realforce-r3s-tkl-wired

This is incredible work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grBNYalWEZU

I'm an insufferable purist but I have to admit I enjoy this cover. It modernizes the song while retaining its spirit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM-n3s6SD2U?

Hallmark rom-coms reuse so many of the same actors, is there an online shipping community that thinks up as-yet unrealized pairings and argues about them?

Who's that comic who plays a coach in those new Geico commercials

The most unbelievable thing about Home Alone is that Kevin kept dressing himself up in cute little sweater ensembles.

> And don’t tell me about enshittification, that is a thought-terminating cliche that does not actually perform useful or interesting analysis and is little more than the new “just use linux” of annoying Fediverse reply guys.

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2024-11-05/modernity

@phire@phire.place via @kissane@mas.to

Can iOS apps choose to lower the iPhone display's refresh rate? Could Libby for instance run at 1Hz when not turning pages?

Don't forget there are a lot of great magazine subscription deals on Black Friday, too.

What's the easiest way to play Q*bert in 2024?

Red Line Now Slow Zone-Free for the First Time in At Least 20 Years #Boston #CambridgeMA #MBTA https://www.mbta.com/news/2024-11-25/red-line-now-slow-zone-free-the-first-time-least-20-years

I can't believe those NFL coaches let the football boys play with their iPads so much. It's a beautiful day! They should be on the field playing with their friends.

I'm thinking I might want to hear sounds from my Raspberry Pi occasionally -- just like beeps or something, not music -- and I'm wondering what is the absolute dirt-cheapest dinky 3.5mm speaker I can get?

They're playing Cocteau Twins at this Shake Shack

If I were a woman I would go on at least one blind date with a green ribbon tied around my neck

Bluesky is fine but one thing it lacks is Algorithmic Fanfares

Don't sleep on this https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/album/rain-on-the-road

One of my favorite lines in any movie is when Marge Gunderson says, "There's more to life than a little money, y'know." And after a long pause, she says: "Don't you know that?"

Still the absolute GOAT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5nkpkg_sL8?

The first new Fief in five years #music #DungeonSynth https://fief.bandcamp.com/album/vi

lol holy shit the Spatial Audio version of Magnolia Electric Co. sounds like shit

Whoa, listen to this https://geologist.bandcamp.com/album/a-shaw-deal

#WBUR appears to have a new logo but I can't find any articles about it. Anybody know anything about this? #Boston #BostonUniversity

I love this so much: https://ben-mini.github.io/2024/img-0416

TIL this is the mouse John Gruber uses: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/accessories-and-software/keyboards-and-mice/mice/4y50x88822

It's very cute how all these new people on Bluesky think they're not just going right back to Twitter as soon as they stop feeling mad

Oh my god it's a god damn Shaggs for the 21st century https://numerogroup.com/products/summer-2000-y2k-25th-anniversary-edition

I made a UserScripts stylesheet that will blur and grayscale photos of Trump (false positives and negatives likely): https://gist.github.com/jsit/a47aae03d7f4781d3c464b6db25a0faa

I spent a bunch of time this afternoon writing a theme / style for the macOS #IRC app #Textual: https://github.com/jsit/California #TextualIRC

Guild Builds: Games for you to play while we are on strike https://nytimesguild.org/tech/guild-builds/

Gosh, which newspaper was it that was constantly uncovering Trump's misdeeds during his first term? I wonder if now would be a good time to consider financially supporting that work. Just can't remember who it was...

There really could not have been a better time for this new Mount Eerie record #Music https://www.pwelverumandsun.com/products/night-palace-by-mount-eerie-2xlp

Let’s not forget to be glad that there hasn’t been any violence

Spilled Mushrooms is a beautifully designed #Playdate game. Took me a while to wrap my head around, as I don’t usually play “deck building” games, but it’s so pretty to look at and listen to that I had to teach myself.

Everybody drink water and go to bed early tonight

I decided I wanted a familiar, escapist movie tonight — was gonna go with Vertigo but that led me to To Catch a Thief instead.

Remember that scene in "Ghost World" when Enid says, "Oh my god -- he just ordered a giant glass of milk!!"

That's what people sound like when they say Trump fellated a mic stand.

Whoa the #MBTA is getting an official iOS app! Currently available in TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/R2ZghSuQ

#Boston #CambridgeMA

If you're looking to take your mind off things this weekend and you have an iPad, Calvin and Hobbes books are just $10 on Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/book-series/calvin-and-hobbes/id1120871492

Lack of compute power / ray tracing is not the reason the Apple TV isn't a viable gaming console. It's the damn games. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-11-03/apple-finally-finds-its-game-console-rival-with-the-new-m4-and-m4-pro-mac-minis-m31na57p

Harris will be the first female president but less remarked upon is that Walz will be the first golden retriever vice president

I had my first real-life encounter with gen z slang on Halloween when a trick-or-treater said to me -- and I am not making this up -- "skibidi toilet to your brother"

I'm willing myself into the mindset that Harris will win decisively.

If she loses, Tuesday will suck anyway, so I might as well be happy till then.

Friday the 13th Part III is the rare sequel that takes place *the day after* the previous movie ended.

#Playdate Season 2!!!

If you could recommend just *one* domain for someone to block, for reducing surveillance -- what would it be? doubleclick? fbcdn?

I'm on the Substack mobile website and I have no idea how to see what I subscribe to.

Which Mastodon apps use the new grouped notifications API?

Not an app that rolls its own grouped notifications, but one that uses the actual Mastodon 4.3 API.

In some ways I'm more afraid of a narrow Harris victory than a decisive Trump victory.

It's truly a miracle that Obsidian hasn't sold out

can someone with #genmoji access please make a "thinking jack-o-lantern" face for me, thanks

"The clipboard" is one of the oddest computing metaphors. "You store a copy of a piece of data to be used elsewhere -- you know, like the way you use a clipboard!"

I'm 5 days away from surpassing my best Wordle streak of 186 days.

I think maybe if I ever hit 365 days I'll stop playing daily.

Holy crap I haven't thought of this song in 25 years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgfZyzukKh8

There's no cauldron emoji?

Anybody know if there's an API for third-party apps to use #SmartScript on #iPadOS18?

#iPad #iOS18

I think I must be the only one who remembers "Right Network," the extremely short-lived far right streaming network promoted by Kelsey Grammer, and its standup comedy show "Right 2 Laugh": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehMl-CztpnA

Recently, #Threads made it so that you can see replies "from the Fediverse" on a Threads post.

But I think "unlisted"/"quiet public" replies might not show up there?

I'm not cool enough to have one of those massive, noisy group texts going, but I have to imagine the summaries in Messages is going to be so great for people who do.

The new iMacs still can't be used as an external display?

crazy that our descent into authoritarianism didn't start with ideology, but with vanity

Going to a midnight showing of Frankenhooker tonight, my first time seeing it!

Still the best #Halloween song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH-Q59geylw #music

I really need to start listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees

I think you have to start out as a weirdo to want billions of dollars (at the expense of other things that make a fulfilling life), but I also suspect that having billions of dollars makes you way, way more weird.

Can't believe there's only one more Halloween before the election

Maybe I'm naive, but I take the Washington Post at their word in their reasons for not endorsing. I don't think they are doing this to get Trump elected or to evade the ire of his supporters. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New Soccer Mommy *and* new Anna McClellan today #music

Why can't Google make these "Google Doodle" games into progressive web apps?

This is not really my style of music but I am fascinated by the phenomenon of "Lofi Girl". Anyhway they are doing a Halloween stream these days: https://www.youtube.com/live/z_d13tqggP4

I just realized I wish I had a Siri shortcut for "turn JavaScript off for five minutes." That's not possible, is it?

Should I seriously start using passkeys? They kinda freak me out.

The Apple TV watchlist maxes out at 100 items? I've definitely lost a lot of stuff.

Re: Trump's "exhaustion" -- I wonder if he's just got COVID. When he got it as president he couldn't really hide that fact, but now as a private citizen he could very easily just be walking around with it.

Software and websites are just getting too complex and brittle. Everything is cracking at the seams, you can feel it.

Ok it’s time for Train to Busan tonight, I’m tired of being disappointed

A movie immediately drops in my estimation if a ghost smiles and cocks its head

'Cause I'm the Tears of Kingdom Linking

It's really kind of disappointing that, the way the digital media renting/ownership balance worked out, you can't currently just buy a bundle of Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes on iTunes.

You'd have to figure out which streaming service it's currently on, then manually scroll through entire seasons of episodes till you find them.

This seems like a step backwards from what we had two decades ago.

I think I'm gonna watch Oculus tonight. I don't know why, but I've always gotten this feeling that I'll just be lukewarm on it.

I know there's no shortage of "watch this person play a video game theme on an instrument" videos, but this remains one of my favorite things on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IkpUYlOx8

Think I'm gonna watch Tenebrae for the first time tonight

One of my favorite radio shows, celebrating 40 years on #WMBR https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/10/18/for-your-pleasure-rene-marchando-wmbr

Think I might watch this tonight https://letterboxd.com/film/the-outwaters/

Can I get a "why is my phone hot" app

This is so minor, but something I haven't heard pointed out is how weird it is the way Trump thinks of theses "levels" of psychiatric hospitals:

"Many are coming in from jails and prisons and mental institutions, insane asylums. That’s like, you know, step above, right? Insane asylum."

He commonly does this; he'll make a point of saying that people are coming from *both* "mental institutions" *and* "insane asylums," and *then he will add* that the latter is "worse."

It's so bizarre!

Does a link become trending on #Mastodon if only *one* account posts it, but hundreds of others boost it?

Mastodon 4.3 has changed the mobile search/explore icon from a hash mark/octothorpe to a compass. Still awful.

Stop trying to cram search and "explore" into the same thing. Search should be represented by a magnifying glass, I don't make the rules.

Baffling to me that the #plushtodon is pale yellow instead of indigo

Drama aside, “Secure Custom Fields” is a terrible name. It implies the native custom fields aren’t secure and that this plugin’s main purpose is making them secure. #WordPress

A movie I don't hear people talk about enough is Deerskin https://letterboxd.com/film/deerskin/

"Body horror" is when the body *itself* is frightening, not what is being done to it

Is there an app that lets me browse my Apple Music library by record label?

(Not interested in non-Apple Music-based solutions.)

Me, owning both fake plants and real plants: "He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us."

I watched both Terrifier and Oddity today so if I don't have scary dreams then I don't know what to say

When is the last time any person listened to Hot Hot Heat

I think secretly every man thinks it would be cool if he were good at chess

Are you ever reading a particular book and you think "this is exactly the size and shape a book should be"

Here's a different way I'd love for someone to ask Vance this question:

Why are you afraid to say Donald Trump won the 2020 election if that's so clearly what you believe?

My recommendation for a spooky movie this season is "A Dark Song." I loved it and don't think I ever really hear anybody talking about it.

The URL path for #Playdate's spooky games selection is /boo

https://play.date/games/boo

Hey #Letterboxd now has a public API! I'd love to hook up #WordPress custom post types to log movie viewings and ratings -- someone should do the same with #11ty. https://api-docs.letterboxd.com

Does #Bandcamp Daily really not have any #RSS feeds?

It's a good sign for Mastodon that posts can go so viral that they needed to build grouped notifications into their new release.

I don't know if it's because I subscribe to too many podcasts or what, but the Podcasts app on #iOS18 is *so slow*.

(Do not talk to me about Overcast.)

You may have noticed SMS messages and a kind of "auto-sign-in" on sites that use Link and Shop(ify), even sites you haven't shopped at before.

This feels weirdly insidious to me, and I'm not entirely sure how they acquire your information in the first place, but you can delete your data from both services.

https://support.link.com/how-to-delete-your-saved-payment-information

https://help.shop.app/hc/en-us/articles/360058842072-Delete-your-Shop-account

I just heard "Mr. Jones" on the radio, and I was remembering what an inescapable monster hit that was when it came out.

I looked it up and it was on the Billboard radio chart for 47 weeks, making 1994 almost an entire year of "Mr. Jones."

"A QR code will appear onscreen for long stretches of the CBS telecast. Viewers who scan the code will be directed to the CBS News website, where a squad of about 20 CBS journalists will post fact-checks of the candidates’ remarks in real time."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/business/media/cbs-vice-presidential-debate-fact-check-qr.html

Trump: "It's raining cats and dogs out there!"

The frothing commentariat: "Our Trump lie counter has ticked up yet again after his bizarre and unhinged claim that animals are falling from the sky. FACT CHECK: Rain is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, with trace mineral content."

I'm watching "Get a Life" for the first time (available only on DVD, not streaming anywhere), and I'm enjoying it more than I expected.

I would love to see "no talking, please" screenings of The Room and Rocky Horror. Otherwise I will never see these in a theater.

This new Zelda game is already so stinking cute. And it's so refreshing not to have to worry about my sword breaking.

You can now get four free #COVID tests again from covidtests.gov

I enjoy that, unlike the Joker, #ThePenguin isn't quite so much an "antihero." He's a simpering, insecure weasel.

Omg this purple Maserati #ThePenguin

I don't like that sharing links in Messages in #iOS18 doesn't retain their URL string, because I often modify it to remove tracking strings.

There's a pizza place now occupying that corner location next to the Harvard Coop, open till THREE AM. This is a much needed addition to Harvard Square. #CambridgeMA

This "Vehicle Motion Cues" thing in #iOS18 is cool, but if motion sickness is the ONE thing that can keep me from looking at my damn phone, maybe I should embrace that.

Seriously two of the new "Text Effects" in #iOS18 should be "Serif" and "Script".

Do you think aliens probably invented all the same knots we did?

What are the chances X gets sold within the next five years, to some inexplicable legacy Silicon Valley company like Yahoo or Oracle or Amazon, gets renamed back to Twitter, and then dies a slow, ignoble death? Maybe interrupted once in 2029 by a Hail Mary rebrand/retooling à la Myspace in 2012.

New White Poppy: https://whitepoppy.bandcamp.com/album/ataraxia

#Music

Parking lots should require one tree for every twenty parking spaces.

Maybe the presidency shouldn't be so powerful that both parties think someone from the other party will be able to destroy the country with it.

I remember catching Killer Klowns while flipping through channels one afternoon at like age 10, and it scared the living hell out of me.

I wasn't familiar with "camp," so its whole weird goofy aesthetic made it absolutely chilling.

Harris is right to want the mics on at all times, because just imagine how the public would react if, in an unfiltered moment, Trump said something offensive or crazy!

Free Halloween costume idea: Beatlejuice

I'm really not fond of this two-step login form that's popular now, where the password field isn't exposed until you've submitted your email address. What is that about?

Andrew Huberman: showing that men will only accept mental health advice from someone who looks like a UFC fighter.

There are adult YouTube celebrities who are younger than YouTube, who have never known a world without YouTube.

In the truest sense of the word, #dungeonSynth is folk music

Just played the #RowbotRally demo on #Playdate -- very cute, very well-excuted. Can't wait for the full release!

https://play.date/games/rowbot-rally/

Open source stuff is just so *tacky* sometimes.

People don't think Trump himself made those Taylor Swift images, do they??

I'm just relieved we can all stop having to wonder what Steve Kerr thinks

I'm glad Shepard Fairey made an official Harris poster so we no longer have to be subjected to the Obama-like posters people have been making for fifteen years with crummy online posterize filters and Arial Black text.

I finally found a place you can watch #Raygun's full #Olympics performance, if you have a Canadian IP (or a VPN, or yt-dlp): https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6453011

It's very good and smart that the Olympic Committee aggressively DMCAs uploaded videos but also provides no other way to watch viral Olympic moments. Just a brilliant marketing strategy: "Please don't watch us."

Kamala #Harris is on...#Flickr?? Is she accidentally running for president in 2005?

It feels really weird to me to compare the number of medals each country won in the Olympics. Is this new within the last few decades, or have I just not been paying attention?

If you don't want an iPhone, don't buy an iPhone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are doing "Waiting for Godot" on Broadway???

One good use of "Apple Intelligence" would be automatically adding chapters to podcasts that don't have them by chunking their segments/subject matter together.

He’s gonna be so testy, he is in such a grumpy mood these days. This is going to be sad to watch.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/us/politics/trump-news-conference.html

Walz's eyeglass frames don't really suit him

People are making fun of Vance for wearing eyeliner, but I think we should normalize men, even or especially straight cis men, wearing makeup. This should be an ok thing to do.

The main thing we're seeing is that Trump is now on the defensive, and he's much worse on defense than he is on offense.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/05/republicans-cringe-trump-harris-attacks-00172724

I've lived here the entire time he has been performing, and I only just ran into #KeytarBear for the first time this weekend.

#Boston #CambridgeMA

The original joke about Vance fucking a couch says he used “an inside-out latex glove.”

Why inside-out? What don’t I know about latex gloves and/or penises?

I really hope terrestrial broadcast doesn't end in my lifetime. I love broadcast radio and TV so much.

Because multiple links in Wikipedia are often adjacent as part of a sentence, they really ought to be underlined so that it's clear how many links are in a given phrase.

You can add CSS to Wikipedia within its preferences at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering

This one line of CSS should do the trick:

.mw-body-content a { text-decoration: revert; }

Donald Trump will lose the popular vote three times, twice to two separate women.

Tony Hawk's Probiotic 2

Paul McCartney & The Wings

I'm beginning to wonder if the only solution to hate speech and harassment on the Fediverse might be allowlist-only instances.

TV dramas do this thing now where they have dialog that is WAY too “writerly”: a writer comes up with a new turn of phrase with a novel insertion of the word “fuck,” and the characters all end up being too “clever.”

Ianucci may have pioneered it, Aaron Sorkin is for sure guilty, but it’s everywhere now. I didn’t watch Succession but I’m told it’s plagued with it, too.

As I watch “Presumed Innocent,” I keep bracing for dialog like this, but it never happens. I applaud the writers’ restraint.

Oh my god this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaQtVD0V_y4

#music

Web 2.0 was any site that had the word "folksonomy" on it.

I think the recent fetishization of “stoicism” among online men has a lot to do with these ideas being mostly by Western male thinkers who have been rendered in marble.

"Yeah, I think I've heard of The Beatles. They're old, right? Like from the 80s?"

If Harris wants to appeal to young people, she should make sure to be seen drinking Pepsi, not Coke.

It's a cool, gray day here in Cambridge and it's making me very excited about fall.

Grindstone really is a great #AppleArcade game. I encourage you to try it out if you haven't already. https://toucharcade.com/2024/07/24/grindstone-mysticverse-update-new-levels-wheelspin-puzzles-apple-arcade-download/

Sorry, the "#brat" color is not "chartreuse"; it's "pistachio green" (Werner), "strong greenish yellow" (ISCC-NBS), "inch worm" (Pantone), or "cosse green" (Ridgway).

Would love to get an “AI-free” edition of the #ProductHunt email newsletter

More than once I've deliberately moved my car for street cleaning, but parked it on the incorrect side because I just wasn't thinking.

This is a good example of one of the specific ways I can be really dumb: being smart enough to do the thing but dumb enough to do the exact opposite.

When did Tascam stop making 4-tracks???

Shoegaze is the ideal music to listen to while biking through the city.

I feel like RSS is kept alive only by a few old, dedicated people who work on CMSes. I doubt that for a major media company the presence or absence of RSS features much into their selection of a CMS. Once the people who care enough to put RSS into CMSes retire or otherwise disappear, there will be no longer be any incentive to keep publishing the feeds.

A message for my fellow cishet boys out there:

It's ok to like cute things.

Don Jr. seems to model all his body language after the villain in a teen live-action Disney Channel movie.

I just rode one of those bike share e-bikes home, and holy shit. I flew. This is how everybody should move around in a city.

A proper Chicago-style hotdog has two full raw onions and gummy worms

I’m just really scared about the future

Holy crap #JessicaPratt was on #Colbert.

#music #MexicanSummer

"Computers used to not be able to make art. Now they are able to make terrible art. Therefore, they will some day be able to make great art."

> AT&T said the stolen data “does not contain the content of calls or texts,” but does include calling and texting records that an AT&T phone number interacted with during the six-month period between May 1, 2022 and October 31, 2022.

#att #atandt

Was "Myst" one of the most widespread examples of steampunk?

“Thank you, Mr. President — Julie Smith, XYZ news. You stand before two doors; one is the door to freedom, the other the door to death. Standing in front of each door is a guard…”

It's too hot

In 1986, there were thirty-one #1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

In 1996, there were eight.

God remember the band Cursive

I have such a weakness for hosted movie shows. #DinnerAndAMovie has returned! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_and_a_Movie

CBGB toilet

Overheard from friend's kids:

"When does Link poop?"

"Link poops when he dies."

Non-rhetorical question: How did email newsletter services like #Substack make reading blogs so popular again?

What would it take for #RSS to see the same success?

I wish I had an app that would pop in with little life suggestions occasionally.

"It's cool and sunny and you've only taken 100 steps in the last two hours. Why not take a walk?"

"You have a flight on your calendar early tomorrow morning. Make sure you're packed and your alarm is set, and try to get to bed early."

"You haven't texted X in over a week; why not give them a call?"

Wait this Ladybird thing isn’t even about non-binary gender-neutral pronouns, it’s just about the idea that people other than men will be building your software: “they” as in “he or she,” not “they” as in “xe.” That is some vintage chauvinism right there.

I have a nearly 5-hour flight soon. Any tips or advice?

Does #Threads have domain blocking for fediverse replies? Are they already blocking, say, Oliphant Tier 0? If not, that could get real ugly real fast.

If hateful, abusive replies from the worst fediverse servers are what people are seeing after they turn on Threads federation, and if this is their first exposure to the fediverse, this could turn them off to it permanently.

What is "conservative" about allowing presidents to do whatever they want?

I don't like AI slop seeping into every crevice of our online (and, increasingly, offline) lives, but I also don't think blocking LLM crawlers on my personal sites will do anything to quell the deluge or reduce the value of these LLMs to a remotely measurable degree.

Even if every single person who felt inclined to block LLM crawlers did so, I don't think LLMs would be suddenly starved for data.

It seems like a silly exercise to me.

BulbHead...you've done it again...

Thank you Vulture for listing “Clue” first in this headline. Martin Mull will always be Colonel Mustard to me.

https://www.vulture.com/article/martin-mull-death-clue-arrested-development.html

At the Piercing
Piercing Pagoda

Just wait there while I get a soda

If Trump wins in 2024 I'm going to go live in the woods

New Democratic vice presidential nominee: Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Democratic presidential nominee Stormy Daniels

Alex Trebek should be on Mount Rushmore, it’s time we add someone

I hope everybody realizes bubbles will still be green with #RCS support in #iOS18? Any weird hangups or insecurities people have about that won’t go away, but it will mean you can send a video to the family chat without it getting crunched to hell.

Not NEARLY enough has been made about the fact that Trump abbreviated the ten commandments as "TTC," this is riotous to me

I'm gonna start a Billy Idol cover band called Billy Idol-ish

Which horror movie started the trend of playing an old upbeat folk song during the final credits? #mutantFam #theLastDriveIn

I’ll believe Meta is interested in the Fediverse when they let people follow my Pixelfed account from Instagram.

I’ve seen some of Donald Sutherland’s movies, but I think I mostly know him from trailers.

That viral AI takedown article is fine I guess, I'm just so allergic to that "Maddox-voice" writing style, I can't stand it.

Wirecutter got asked to recommend a non-smart TV. Their recommendations? Two smart TVs: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/ask-wirecutter-dumb-tvs/

One of the two HDMI inputs in my aging dumb TV just died. I'm dreading the day I may have to buy a smart TV because they don't make dumb ones anymore.

"Literary fiction" means nothing happens chronologically and every few pages there's a section break that forces you to figure out where the perspective has shifted to.

Does anybody have an opinions/experience with TinyPNG? https://tinypng.com/developers

I kind of like that Apple uses the iPad to experiment with new computer interaction paradigms. Does the 50-year-old Xerox PARC desktop need to be the way computers work forever? The iPad is a kind of low-stakes but high-adoption playground to question some of those assumptions.

Oops I'm serving half a megabyte of (self-hosted) fonts on my site. I really need to squash those down.

The Downeaster "Siri"

I think I might have seasonal affective disorder but in the opposite polarity

I'm disappointed in Mastodon that I didn't immediately learn that Francois Hardy died

I should probably finally give in and buy an Anbernic handheld.

Sometimes #Vim just makes me so happy. I did `:windo bd`, not knowing if it would do what I wanted -- and it did!

Fuck the #AlamoDrafthouse: https://www.vulture.com/article/sony-alamo-drafthouse-cinema.html

In #iOS18, is it possible to:

Disable Personal Cloud Compute

Disable ChatGPT

They gave the impression that a fair amount of Apple Intelligence can happen on-device; but can you set it so that it *only* does on-device processing?

I've clicked around on the #Maven website a bit and I can't even really figure out what it's trying to be

Every time I need to convert RGB to hex or something similar, I just turn to the first search result on the web. There *has* to be a nice desktop "color workflow" app, doesn't there? Show me a preview of the color, show me the values for that color in hex/LCH/RGB/etc., let me save colors in palettes, show complementary colors, etc. Where is this app?

Seeing Arabian Larry tomorrow in 70mm. Feel like I should bring a book

I’m not specifically “worried” about the AI in Apple’s upcoming OSes… but I’m more motivated today than I was yesterday to build a tiny Linux machine on a Raspberry Pi.

People who are gobsmacked by Trump's weird shark battery tangent haven't been watching him closely enough. You need to understand that these rallies are 50% "policy," 30% storytime, and 20% stand-up comedy, and have been since they started. Sometimes he reads a poem!

He's like a traveling huckster à la Harold Hill.

I played a lot more Goonies II than I did Metroid, so to me the genre is more like "Gooniesvania."

I just saw a #Puzzmo commercial on TV??

Pretty god damn stoked about this Lee Underwood record from #DragCity

#music

https://leeunderwood.bandcamp.com/album/california-sigh

[Andy Rooney voice] Why are there like 20 kinds of Scotch Tape now

Wait, Paste owns Jezebel and AV Club??

https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/paste-magazine/paste-media-acquires-av-club

You used to be able to say to Siri, "Learn how to pronounce [contact's name]," and it would prompt you to say the name yourself, then present you with several options for pronouncing the name.

That feature is gone! You are now expected to compose a "phonetic name" in a field in this person's contact card. How are you expected to spell something phonetically?? Siri doesn't have some kind of special alphabet. The name I'm having trouble with is EXTREMELY COMMON, so the phonetic spelling is the same as the actual spelling. I don't understand what we're supposed to do here.

Very funny how people will at the same time accuse Apple of being way behind on AI while also mocking existing implementations of AI as being dangerously bad.

Apple doesn't have a magic bullet here, because nobody does. Better for Siri to say "I found these results on the web" than say "You should eat one small rock per day." Trust trumps frustration.

I've been working all spring on this garden and some guy sent by my building management just showed up and started mowing it down.

He didn't know, he was just doing his job, and I was able to stop him before he did too much damage.

But I am feeling extremely frustrated right now.

Yacht Folk

My #WWDC wishlist is a single item and has been for years: Game Center.

Setting aside feelings about certain rocket billionaires, I feel like the world can be neatly divided between people who are excited watching rockets go up and people who are deeply uninterested in it.

Like I think it’s cool that NASA wants to take us back to the moon, but I don’t care about seeing the explosion that propels us there.

New Fennesz coming this year:

#music

https://fenneszreleases.bandcamp.com/album/sognato-di-domani

We laugh when we see people using microfiche in old movies, but have *you* tried finding an old article on your local paper's website? It's almost certain not to exist digitally.

So many (male) tech podcasters are unlistenable because they’re obstinate, painfully unfunny, and most of their “jokes” are mocking their cohosts for their opinions or tiny factual slip-ups. Bros gonna bro.

As streaming prices increase, consider buying music again.

Even if you continue streaming, it’s a nice escape hatch to know you own a library if you ever feel like canceling.

Sometimes I want to reply to the topmost post in my Mastodon timeline, but I stop myself because it was posted literally 20 seconds ago and I don't want the person to think I'm a psychopath.

I think there's a good chance Apple won't use the term "AI" to refer to any of the "AI" features in iOS 18, if they use the term at all at #WWDC.

I also think they will add these features with an extremely light touch. I think they really, really, really don't want Siri telling people to eat glue or rocks, and that they won't be using ChatGPT to turn Siri into a "general knowledge" engine.

I'll always remember @gruber@mastodon.social writing in 2018, "Every computer should have a good version of Tetris." That stuck with me and I find it disheartening that six years later there is still no good macOS #Tetris app.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/03/28/tetris-mac

As much as possible, #CSS should describe the content, not boss it around.

Here's something I'd love from AI: If, while watching an episode of TV, I could ask Siri, "What are they talking about?", and Siri could summarize whatever plot point it was that I forgot.

Or if a character mentions another character I don't remember: "Who's 'Kim,' again?"

Accessibility is not a feature.

You know when you're doing a somewhat comprehensive computing task on your phone that requires data manipulation and multiple apps and windows, and you switch to doing it on a computer with a large screen and it feels so much easier?

I wonder if that's what it feels like to switch from a computer to a #VisionPro. Like "Oh finally I can get some work done."

I think Guillermo del Toro should do a #Dune movie.

Just learned about #CotEditor, this very cool open-source, Swift-based plain text editor for #macOS. Looks great! https://github.com/coteditor/CotEditor

Discord is so ubiquitous that it’s literally the UI for a popular AI image generation tool. I find that really discouraging.

Eric Trump said of his father, "He's the toughest man I've ever seen; he endures this nonsense every single day."

By no definition of the word does he "endure" it! He screams and whines and intimidates witnesses and jurors. Having a tantrum is literally the opposite of enduring something!

If this is "enduring" it, what would it look like not to endure it?

Wish I could create a Mastodon filter for posts that are just some variant of “AI sure is bad, isn’t it folks?”

(Yes I agree it is bad in many ways, but this is just a tedious thing to say without adding anything.)

What I would really really love is a Safari iOS shortcut for "reload this page with no JavaScript."

I know there are extensions that block JS on a per-site basis, but even that is too heavy, as you'd have to turn it off and on again if you wanted it back.

Just a "one-shot" "try this without JavaScript" button would be so great.

Imagine if any other genre of music had the audacity to put the word "intelligent" in front of it.

"Yeah I'm not really into disco, but I am *way* into *intelligent disco*."

Apple should separate their Apple TV editorial team -- who decides what gets featured in the app -- from their Apple TV+ production and marketing teams.

Putting Apple TV+ content in the first dozen (literally) spots on the Apple TV hero is spam.

I love my #Playdate so much. Without using it for some time you can't really picture all the little touches -- musical cues, iconography, "micro-interactions," animations, emotiveness, etc -- that just make it such a joy to play with.

And I love the support they give to developers, the sideloading, the non-exclusivity of Catalog, the enthusiasm in the community. It's just amazing that it all came together.

If you "install" #Discord as a desktop app on macOS using "Add to Dock" from Safari, you can open multiple windows at once. So frustrating that you can't do this with the macOS or iPasOS app.

Make Computers Fun Again

As a piece of tech, the #DaylightComputer looks amazing. If it were a few hundred dollars cheaper I’d have a hard time not getting it.

h/t @shaythompson@mastodon.social

https://daylightcomputer.com

I'm generally a reboot/"distant sequel" pessimist, but the sheer number of original people on board for "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" -- Tim Burton *and* Michael Keaton *and* Winona Ryder *and* Catherine O'Hara *and even* Danny Elfman -- is pretty impressive.

Whitley Strieber has a podcast??!? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dreamland/id1476330968

Man I’m just hankering to get a Raspberry Pi 400 and put Xubuntu on it these days, I don’t know why.

We need a deep dive into the new #Spotify Mix typeface from its creators. Looks like a variable font on both the width and weight axes with some interesting choices, like the vertex inside the counter of the "p"? I like it!

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2024-05-22/introducing-spotify-mix-our-new-and-exclusive-font

#typography

Been sick all week, tonight it's time for some Netflix and 'Quil

#iTerm has always had way more features than I've ever needed. Now that they're starting to add (optional) AI features, I've switched to #Alacritty and am pretty happy with it.

The #Playdate makes more sense if you think of it as "toy" rather than a "gaming console." I think this helps to explain its appeal. Toys are good, and we don't have enough of them as adults.

Honestly I think if Scarlett Johansson had *not* been the voice in “Her,” nobody would be saying the Sky OpenAI voice sounded like her.

As much shit as Garfield gives Jon, the only possible reason Garfield -- a cat with no job or responsibilities -- would hate Mondays is because it means he doesn't get to see Jon as much. Which is sweet.