Talking Music Communities with It’s All Dead

Yours truly was on a recent episode of the It’s All Dead podcast. We talked about the transition from AbsolutePunk.net to Chorus.fm, building online communities (and the difficulties around them), and some of the great music that’s come out this year. I think it was a great conversation.

Side note: This was recorded before the news about Jesse Lacey broke.

SuperDuper 3.0

SuperDuper 3.0 has been released:

With that last bit of explanation, I’m happy to say that we’ve reached the end of this particular voyage. SuperDuper! 3.0 (release 100!) is done, and you’ll find the download in the normal places, as well as in the built-in updater, for both Beta and Regular users.

SuperDuper! 3.0 has, literally, many hundreds of changes under the hood to support APFS, High Sierra and all version of macOS from 10.9 to the the present.

SuperDuper! 3.0 is the first bootable backup application to support snapshot copying on APFS, which provides an incredible extra level of safety, security and accuracy when backing up. It’s super cool, entirely supported (after all, it’s what Time Machine uses… and it was first overall), and totally transparent to the user.

Fantastic app that I highly recommend. I have a reoccurring task scheduled to make SuperDuper clones of my entire hard drive as part of my back-up strategy.

Amazon Announces ‘Lord of the Rings’ TV Series

amazon

Amazon has announced they’ll be producing a new Lord of the Rings TV series. The Hollywood Reporter has more:

The retail giant and streaming outlet announced Monday that it has acquired global television rights to the Lord of the Rings franchise, based on the best-selling novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. Amazon has handed out a multiple-season commitment. The Amazon LOTR series will be produced in-house at Amazon Studios alongside the Tolkien Estate and Trust, publisher HarperCollins and Warner Bros. Entertainment’s New Line Cinema.

Taylor Swift’s ‘Reputation’ Sold 700,000 on First Day in U.S.

Taylor Swift

Billboard:

Taylor Swift’s Reputation is off to a red-hot start. The album sold around 700,000 copies in the U.S. on its first day of release, according to initial sales reports to Nielsen Music.

The set was released at 12 a.m. ET on Nov. 10, through Big Machine Records. Its first day sales figure could grow larger, after all of Nielsen’s retail reporters have submitted their sales for the day.

Hmm, that seems good.

How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art

Picasso

Cody Delistraty, writing for The Paris Review:

Sixteen years ago, Marina Picasso, one of Pablo Picasso’s granddaughters, became the first family member to go public about how much her family had suffered under the artist’s narcissism. “No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius,” she wrote in her memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather. “He needed blood to sign each of his paintings: my father’s blood, my brother’s, my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and mine. He needed the blood of those who loved him.”

After Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife, barred much of the family from the artist’s funeral, the family fell fully to pieces: Pablito, Picasso’s grandson, drank a bottle of bleach and died; Paulo, Picasso’s son, died of deadly alcoholism born of depression. Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s young lover between his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and his next mistress, Dora Maar, later hanged herself; even Roque eventually fatally shot herself.“Women are machines for suffering,” Picasso told Françoise Gilot, his mistress after Maar. After they embarked on their affair when he was sixty-one and she was twenty-one, he warned Gilot of his feelings once more: “For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.” Marina saw her grandfather’s treatment of women as an even darker phenomenon, a vital part of his creative process: “He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.”

I read this piece this morning and it’s full of things I definitely didn’t learn in art history courses. Then I saw Jason Kottke’s comments on it:

[M]assive chunks of our culture [have] been created by specific men who abuse women but also that so-called “Western culture” in its entirety has been marked and in many ways defined by systemic and institutionalized misogyny that has chewed up women for art and discarded them en masse. Never mind your fave is problematic…the whole damn culture is problematic. This aspect of the creation of culture has been largely written out of history, but going forward, it’s going to be important to write it back in.

Yep. That’s a perfect way to sum up how I feel.