Hi, I’m Jay!

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.

We need an #RSS reader with "Reply" and "Repost" buttons. These actions would occur on a blog you connect with #Micropub or #XMLRPC, and use #WebMentions to notify the originating site.

I needed to move a Watch Later playlist from one YouTube account to another, and the "Multiselect for YouTube" Firefox Add-on made this easier than I thought possible. I would definitely bookmark this for a rainy day.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multiselect-for-youtube/

Are people still making #Winamp themes? I bet the state of digital art has gotten so much better in the last 30 years that people could make some really beautiful ones.

So the Journal app just doesn't exist at all on iPad?

The last Twitter bird logo before it became X was really one of my favorite logos ever. Such a shame that it had to be abandoned, although I guess it's good that it doesn't share an association with what X has become.

Mastodon has had multi-column view forever, of course, but for anyone who’s also interested in #Bluesky, there is an active multi-column frontend project at https://deck.blue

I just got a notification from #Discord that said "Joe and Mary are discussing '[subject name]'". Is this some AI thing? Rather than alert me to individual new messages (since I wasn't mentioned), it was just alerting me to a current ongoing topic of conversation?

WAIT

Can I use an emulator to play Virtual Boy games on my iPhone with a "Google Cardboard" device???

Kindle Unlimited is the Tubi of books

You know your music collection is unwieldy when you start accidentally buying things you already own.

MY OTHER CAR IS
MISTER BONESTRIPPER

Ok this colored-circle-emoji “solution map” for #Strands is a cute attempt at doing what Wordle does but is pretty meaningless.

They don't make them anymore but I would kind of love a #Kobo mini.

Wow it took me way too long to realize you can make words of any length in #Quartiles.

This is how sadly little attention is paid to #GameCenter: #AppleNews+ not only adds a new puzzle in #iOS 17.5, but now integrates with Game Center for leaderboards on solving times, and I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere.

This has been in my rotation for a year or more, wanted to recommend it in case I’ve never done that here:

https://songwhip.com/various-artists/saved-and-sanctified-songs-of-the-jade-label

#music

The title of the show is styled as "Diff'rent Strokes." Were they worried people would pronounce "diff-er-ent" with three syllables?

When you scroll a message history in the Messages app, the bubbles subtly shift with a kind of fluid inertia. This is the kind of detail that makes using iOS feel so nice (most of the time.)

It reminds me of Disney’s “twelve basic principles of animation”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_basic_principles_of_animation

I just couldn't ever really get into blur. If I want droll sneering Brits I’d rather listen to Television Personalities.

When it's jacket weather and the book you're reading fits in your jacket pocket ❤️

I also initially cringed at that Apple "Crush!" ad, but I take the message not to be "Society doesn't need these anymore," but "Look how much we fit in here! (And, unrelatedly, crushing stuff looks cool.)"

Still, probably an unwise visual.

Apple lists two Mastodon apps and zero Twitter, Meta, or Bluesky apps in their "Essential Social Apps" App Store story: https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1681937659

The fifth minute of "Funeral For a Friend" could go on forever and it wouldn't be long enough.

I saw a box at Whole Foods that said “USB Salt Lamp.”

Imagine being told in 1994 that everybody in 2024 can immediately picture this.

"The thinnest Apple product ever"? Are they forgetting about the Polishing Cloth? #AppleEvent

When is the last time the word "iPod" was uttered at an #AppleEvent? "One more thing"???

Still no FaceID on the iPad Air #AppleEvent

I can barely understand how to use Drafts these days. I wish there were more labels everywhere and I could disable half the features.

"See? People use the Vision Pro, I swear!" #AppleEvent

If the new Pencil is compatible with my iPad, I'm buying it.

Here’s a new half-baked hypothesis: the reason people watch so much cable news is that it’s one of the few things on TV that’s broadcast live.

It's funny when automated phone services are like, "Representatives are busy serving other customers. Would you like to try our automated menu?"

Friend, I would sooner listen to Opus No. 1 for sixteen hours than use an automated menu.

Chris Onstad (#Achewood) wrote a novel!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/103652980

I think often when people complain about what gets printed in newspapers it’s because they don’t understand what newspapers are for.

Tired: Wired

Wired: Wireless

Don’t see Immaculate.

One thing that's great about the radio is that you can have multi-room audio with zero latency.

#A24 has become a lifestyle brand. You use their marble-colored 180g vinyl and in-joke corduroy hats or whatever to telegraph that you are that type of person.

I don't think I use any of the social, automation, or integration features of #Pinboard anymore, and the site and app ecosystem has languished for so long. Is it time to switch to #GoodLinks?

I just heard the term "rightsizing" for the first time and I am white-hot with rage

I'm an earnest Bluey fan via my nephews and just subscribed to Disney+ to check out this new episode everyone is talking about

As far as I can tell, the best Kindle you can buy today is still using EInk technology that is over ten years old. I don't care about color, but when can we expect some more improvements to contrast?

It sounds like the Humane AI Pin is worse than Siri, which is no small feat.

The impulse to actually turn the premise of “Civil War” into a movie seems so juvenile to me. It's like an idea you'd have stoned in a college dorm room. "It's gonna make people think, man!!"

The title is terrible and lazy, too.

Anybody have any ideas on how to import Mastodon posts into #WordPress?

(To be clear I'm not talking about enabling ActivityPub on WordPress.)

I've never related to Trump as much as I do about his falling asleep in court. I remember sitting quietly in lecture halls in college, and no matter how interesting the subject, nothing could put me to sleep faster than that. I would have been out in seven minutes.

I’d love to try playing the SegaCD Bram Stoker’s Dracula game again

It could be cool if there were a "CSS Zen Garden" that worked strictly with custom props.

Q: Why do people watch golf on TV?

A: Because listening on the radio would *really* be boring

I would love a weekly half-hour movie critic TV show like Siskel & Ebert again, does anything like this exist on YouTube or podcasts?

I want a “couch to 5k” but for hot sauce.

The issue isn’t that people get their news from social media, it’s that people get their news from MEMES on social media.

When I see posts about Gemini, the Google LLM, I initially think they’re about Gemini, the protocol. Fans of the protocol must be bummed out by this naming.

What's so weird about Musk's obsession with turning "X" into "the WeChat of the West" is that it's such a boring idea.

However involved he may or may not be in the development of rockets and brain motor implants and electric cars, and however truly "self-driving" those cars may be -- those are exciting things!

But being passionate about building an app that lets you, like...post videos and buy stuff and send money or whatever? Who is excited by this?

Does #DuckDuckGo’s pro plan remove ads from search results? If so I might switch from Kagi.

The DDG ads are a big part of the reason I use Kagi (even if DDG ads don’t track me).

If the glove's the wrong size, you must metastasize

It's crazy to think about the ripple effects the OJ trial had -- Norm Macdonald's career, "the dancing Itos," the Kardashians, Seinfeld.

I finally left Bank of America and moved my checking to a local mutual bank, feels good.

Wait, *Steve Coogan* is in the new Joker? I guess I am going to see it after all

Who else remembers the breathless hype that ensued after that Clap Your Hands record came out in 2005

An eclipse seems like a great time to commit some break-ins

Can’t wait till this #eclipse is over so I can look at the sun again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF-_Sh9u30Y

I'd love a Tweetdeck-like frontend for Mastodon that lets you save a "set" of columns you've set up for easy retrieval/switching.

Say I'm really into the NFL and every week I want columns for my home team's tags and some sports writers, but not on non-game days.

Is there a simple ActivityPub bot you can set up that boosts a specified list of accounts?

This would be like “following” a list on the bad site.

Meteorologists are always getting it wrong, I bet we don’t even get an eclipse today

More bars should have couches

This is fascinating stuff. Check out the full proposal linked from this FEP.
https://tech.lgbt/@laxla/112229524748141528

It would be like learning that people in Idaho get a bill for tens of thousands of dollars after the fire department extinguishes their house.

I remember a Brit on a forum telling me about the first time he learned as a kid that Americans had to pay for healthcare and it blowing his mind, I think maybe he was seeing a movie where someone had to steal money to pay for an operation.

I had never imagined what that experience must be like and how insane it must sound if you’re just hearing about it.

New Jessica Pratt

https://jessicapratt.bandcamp.com/album/here-in-the-pitch

Anybody else notice that trailers have their own trailers now?

They all start with a rapid super-cut of the trailer and then the words "Trailer starts now."

I know it starts now! I just hit play!!

mas.to, the sixth-largest Mastodon instance, is considering un-suspending (but still limiting) Threads.
https://mas.to/@trumpet/112212160964939807

The "listen to this entire thing without grimacing” challenge

When this first came out I didn't get beyond the first 30 seconds or so.

Listening to it now, and knowing it was written by a person, it's extremely embarrassing to hear someone try to write new George Carlin material.

Hahahahaha wow I completely missed that the "AI George Carlin special" was written by humans:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

Apple ought to remove App Store ads for Apple One subscribers.

“But everyone said it didn’t matter which instance I joined.”

The messaging on Mastodon needs to be a lot clearer.

“You cannot view this profile because your Mastodon server, example dot com, has suspended the example dot net domain.”

And people say Mastodon isn’t confusing 🙄

If you search Mastodon for “threads.net” you’ll see a bunch of people wondering why they can’t see President Biden’s account, unaware that they are on an instance that did a full suspend on the threads.net domain.

A tip for fellow old people, if you don’t recognize a celebrity name, they were probably in Euphoria

It feels like older news than it should at this point, but it’s wild that I can follow users of a Facebook-owned social network from a small cooperative Mastodon server through the indie app Ivory.

I watched some “The Mads Are Back” last night and it’s way funnier than RiffTrax in my opinion. I love Trace and Frank so much.

One of the small but brilliant things about the Mac for the last 40 years is the way a menu item blinks after you click it, to reinforce which item received the click. Windows didn’t have this. You probably don’t think about it.

It’s an affordance like this that demonstrates the care that went into the UI.

It’s the kind of thing people would be too lazy or thoughtless to do today, and it’s the kind of thing I could see Apple killing because they forgot how important stuff like this is.

Just because I’m a man doesn’t mean I’m into slickly produced pablum!

I haven’t heard anybody mention how weirdly sexist it is that #Pitchfork is being folded into “Gentleman’s Quarterly.”

lol, not gonna fool me with this one!! discord is known for perfect ux and wouldn't clutter up their app with stuff like this

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/discord-starts-down-the-dangerous-road-of-ads-this-week

I know this will upset a lot of people, but the truth shouldn't need a content warning:

Spring might be better than fall.

I have a suggestion that I’m not entirely pleased with but I’m waiting to see if anyone else says it first.

If they made Back to the Future today (heaven forbid), what car model would the time machine be?

“New” Gastr del Sol!!

https://gastrdelsol.bandcamp.com/album/we-have-dozens-of-titles

New Chastity Belt!

https://chastity-belt.bandcamp.com/album/live-laugh-love

This whole song was generated from the prompt: “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.”

https://soundcloud.com/rs-539916550/soul-of-the-machine

So many “hazy IPAs” kind of taste like someone took their regular IPA and added a few pumps of “hazy-flavored” syrup to it.

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/112138024510274956

Just learned from Drag City that Joanna Newsom's "The Milk-Eyed Mender” has just turned 20. Easily one of the greatest records of the last quarter century.

Wait Saltburn stars that kid from Killing of a Sacred Deer??

Elon is rattling off ideas for Twitter like it’s Calvinball

Every thought Elon has is an r/showerthought that he thinks is a TED Talk

Elon has the misplaced arrogance of a “gifted” 7th grader who thinks big problems aren’t hard to solve at all, actually, and would have been solved long ago if only people were as bright as him

Monoculture https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/taylor-swift-all-hot-100-top-10-anti-hero-1235163664/

One simple thing Elon could do to immediately make Twitter better is to turn RSS back on

If the nascent metaverse is analogous to the nascent internet, does Mark Zuckerberg think Meta is AOL or Netscape?

I’m worried about putting all our eggs in Bandcamp’s basket. I love what it’s done for music, but in ten years a LOT of embedded audio players just won’t work anymore.

an art heist movie where a team pulls off a 51% attack

One of the great comforting things about a Bose Wave CD player is that the words on the glowing display are in Gill Sans

A good trick if you're logging into multiple similar WordPress environments (dev/staging/prod): Change the Admin Color Scheme for each one so you can easily tell which one you're in.

the mac touchbar could be offering to refill my coffee and i wouldn't know it because i never look at the keyboard

Whenever possible, show up with a box of donuts

We don’t talk enough about this Randy Newman impression that always felt bizarre in the middle of a teen comedy

https://youtu.be/qWzZOPqM8QM

all movies should be exactly an hour and forty five minutes

If you still subscribe to @DVDNetflix, nothing ever “leaves Netflix”

matrix resurrections is seriously taking advantage of my weakness for "white rabbit"

I knew it was only a matter of time before Twitter changed their timeline design so that "open for a surprise" tweets wouldn't make sense anymore

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1390035323862896643

I want a supercut of every time a small mammal jumped and latched onto somebody’s face in a 1995-2005 comedy, it would be like an hour long

If Trump just called into Tucker Carlson for five minutes every Monday night urging people that getting vaccinated is the patriotic thing to do, COVID in the U.S. would be over.

Ted Lasso follows in the grand tradition of characters invented for commercials carrying their own series, its foundation laid by Ernest P. Worrel

Testing out a quick photo thing here

I love vegan leather, so nice to know there’s no eggs or dairy in there

It’s 2021 and I just bought a TiVo

please stop naming moons

Soon all these Cooper Light/Souvenir/Recoleta/Clearface/Windsor fonts are going to go WAY out of style, and quickly, don’t get caught flat-footed on this

Why does everybody use any excuse to say “kraken” these days? When did this kraken obsession start

In general I’m a Spatial Audio optimist, but wow does Sgt Pepper sound bad in it

If you search Lycos for “lycos,” you get an error page.

If you search Lycos for “google,” it says “There were no results for your search query. Maybe you accidentally invented a new word?”

Searching Lycos for “bing” works fine.

Everybody knows “web 2.0 badges” were a thing, but now for the life of me I can’t remember where I actually saw them

Is this a podcast or is it just somebody slowly reading an article over a trip hop record

MATTY IN THE MORNING, MATTY IN THE EVENING, MATTY AT SUPPERTIME

How can @SubstackInc URLs be 459 characters long

The vocal hook from “Immigrant Song” is just the “Get Smart” theme

There’ve been a lot of short-lived sitcoms, I know, but I don’t think I’ve seen a single reference to “Double Rush” since watching it in the mid-90s. It’s like I dreamed it.

I’m a high-res/lossless skeptic; but is it possible that despite failing all ABX tests we somehow *unconsciously* experience high-res music differently?

The worst homework you ever did was the homework between The Simpsons and going to sleep

Sorry, watching Howard The Duck at 3 am is decidedly NOT “wasting your life”

The handlebar-mustache-on-a-stick industry was really hurting in 2008, till some genius created wedding photo booths

It's crazy that this deep into the 21st century there isn't a train that can take me from Boston to Philly in 2 hours, or to New York in an hour.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/amtrak-america-moment-50-years/index.html

I remember when “trigger warnings” were just called “discretion advised” and nobody thought it was the fall of Western civilization

Schiller's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by courage."

Tucker Carlson trading R Stevie Moore cassettes on Discogs

Tucker Carlson mouthing the words to “House Arrest” under a big pair of Beats headphones during commercial breaks

How the hell do you pronounce bongino anyway

I don't get why Donald Trump doesn't just run 11ty on a Linode instance

Boy I wish all these substacks were just blogs

The least credible part of Home Alone is that Kevin continues to dress himself in adorable and festive but no doubt tight and itchy clothing

There is no way Snoopy won that Neighborhood Christmas Lights and Display Contest

Shouldn’t it be “Bene Kalikimaka”

Bad books are the worst of all media. Far, far worse than bad TV.

“Sorry, we don’t have Pfizer; is Moderna ok?”

Trump: “WIDESPREAD MASSIVE RIGGED VOTER FRAUD”

Lawsuits: “Observers were 20 feet away instead of 6 feet away for 15 minutes”

Courts: “lol”

Whenever anybody’s describing terrain in a book I can’t even remotely picture it

It's wild when people claim to know with certainty what political outcomes would occur in a universe with a dozen or more variables changed; if this person had been nominated, if that person had said more of X and less of Y, if the New York Times or Breitbart or Facebook had or hadn't done Z. Nobody knows anything.

The candy nobody wants

Hoping to cram something into my brain other than this election in the next 24 hours of my downtime

I love “bootleg” stop signs

Nowhere in "Humpty Dumpty" does it say he's an egg

I miss being bored.

Two things I did not anticipate about wearing a mask are (a) Face ID doesn't work, and (b) you can't do the "slight smile" thing at strangers as you walk past them or get out of each other's way in the supermarket. "Mask face" just looks generally peeved I think.

I know there more important things going on right now, and I hope everybody is staying safe out there -- but the radio commercial Flo is different from the one on TV. Thanks

I wish there were something as reliable and popular as Zoom that weren't Zoom.

This should create a webmention at this post

“Rambo” was short for “Rambunctious”

Hair was big in the 90s?

At my funeral, I want somebody to read my favorite poem. My favorite poem is “The Iliad.”