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Jason Tate
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The (Not So) Annual State of Chorus.fm
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Now Playing: My Raspberry Pi Weekend Project
The New Home Office
Blink-182 – One More Time…

Jason Tate’s Top Albums of 2023

Best of 2023
Jason Tate

Well, it’s that time of the year again. I’ve been putting together a list of my favorite albums of the year since at least 2005, and 2023 was one of the most jam-packed I can remember. Not only did I listen to more music than ever before, but I found the quality of new releases week-to-week to be engaging and exciting. Discovering new gems and being more than impressed with the output from old favorites.

You can subscribe to my newsletter if you’re interested in a weekly rundown of the music and other entertainment I consume, and the staff compiled best of 2023 list can be found here.

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Blink-182 Live at Coachella Bootleg

Blink-182 Bootlegs
Jason Tate

Blink-182 performed two nights at Coachella as their first two shows back after reuniting with Tom DeLonge. I wrote about what the first performance meant to me in my newsletter:

Last night, Blink-182 returned to the stage to perform with Tom DeLonge for the first time in almost eight years. And the return at Coachella was live-streamed on YouTube. While I feel awful for the fans that had their shows postponed due to Travis’s injury, this being the return, to a massive hometown crowd and the entire thing being streamed so that fans across the globe could experience it together … was such a perfect treat. I texted a few friends to let them know it was happening, sat down on the couch, and experienced a new Blink-182 memory that I’ll carry with me for years to come with a whole bunch of fans in the Blink-182 thread on Chorus. It was an incredible evening. The band sounded as good as I think I’ve ever heard them with Tom. Mark sounded incredible. Tom sounded like he wanted to be there. Travis was an animal behind the kit. Seeing the smiles on the band’s faces, seeing how happy Mark was, and hearing the banter back and forth again was everything I could have hoped for. I sat there with a stupid grin on my face. Just an hour of being happy. An hour of hearing some of my favorite songs being played by one of my favorite bands and getting to nerd out with a bunch of like-minded fans just losing our shit like it was 2001. There’s a magic this band has always had that just hits different. A mixture of fun times with band members that we’ve grown up emulating and songs that we’ve spent countless hours listening to. And for those of us they’ve infected, it’s been an almost lifelong obsession now. Last night was a beautiful entry into the pantheon of Blink memories. With all the band drama, the health scares, and the years adding up on all of us, to see the band at this level deliver on that stage, with all of us experiencing it together, was truly special. Maybe it’s because I turned 40 a few weeks back. Perhaps it’s a combination of the collective trauma of the past few years. Or maybe it’s just an elder emo being over dramatic on a Friday evening, but I couldn’t help but be a little choked up seeing this all play out. The adoration for the songs that have meant so much to me over my life, the happiness radiating from the stage, and the shared experience with other Blink fans, was one more addition to the scrapbook of memories I’ve had with Blink-182. And they absolutely crushed it. Blink-182 for life.

Being able to experience this show, with other fans, really captured how much being a Blink-182 fan means to me and how the fanbase really is a wonderful community. I’m not usually a big bootleg, or even live album, listener. However, these two shows were so much fun to experience, and were two of the best performances I’ve heard from the band in ages, that I felt like they should live for posterity for all fans to experience over and over again.

I used the highest quality rip of the performance I could find, a direct from source download. Then I cut the files up into individual tracks, using The Mark, Tom, and Travis model of where to put the dialog and splice the songs. And then I used my, admittedly very novice, audio engineering skills to “master” the files in Logic Pro. I tried to clean up the audio the best I could, removing extra artifacts, trying to reduce the audible “hiss” that permeated weekend two’s vocals, and giving the entire thing a more clean and punchy EQ. It’s edited to my personal taste in what my ears find pleasing. Then I raised the volume to better match what I expect an album to sound like, and avoid any clipping, and exported all the tracks as 320 kbps MP3s.

I added the awesome artwork done by Danyel Saldanha Evangelista and am now sharing the entire thing with other Blink fans. Please feel free to share these as I believe everything deserves more Blink in their life. And, I’m crossing my fingers no one gets too mad at me for sharing live bootleg audio only files.

Y’all can keep the videos for your YouTube channel, let us share and experience the audio!

UPDATE • Apr 28, 2023

Welp, Coachella’s lawyers are a bunch of party poopers:

God forbid people want to enjoy something and actually have a positive feeling about your festival. 🙄

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Jason Tate’s Top Albums of 2022

Best of 2022
Jason Tate

I’ve been putting together a list of my favorite albums since at least 2005. And here we are at the end of another year, so I suppose it’s time to once again figure out what albums I should decide are those that best defined my last twelve months. I listened to more music in 2022 than any year I can remember (let alone that I’ve tracked), and trying to distill it all down is harder than ever. But, we might as well try.

You can subscribe to my newsletter if you’re interested in a weekly rundown of the music and other entertainment I consume, and the staff compiled best of 2022 list can be found here.

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Jason Tate’s Top Albums of 2021

Best of 2021
Jason Tate

I once again find myself writing a best of the year list. Just like I have done so many times before. But this year is interesting because 2021 signaled a music renaissance of sorts in my life. I’ve always listened to a lot of music, but about mid-way through the year, I found a fire lit inside of me that re-sparked the passion. I started seeking out new music like I hadn’t in years; I started returning to old favorites and keeping them on repeat; I revisited albums and bands that never clicked for me to see if I had missed something. And now I am faced with the impossible task of trying to put all of that in a tidy little list. I’ve done my best and, like usual, included my entertainment rankings as well.

You can subscribe to my newsletter if you’re interested in a weekly rundown of the music and other entertainment I consume, and the staff compiled best of 2021 list can be found here.

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Jason Tate’s Top Albums of 2020

Best of 2020
Jason Tate

I don’t know how historians will write about 2020, but there’s a good chance future generations just flat out don’t believe the truth. I just lived through it and can barely believe everything that happened over the last twelve months. I know one day in the future, I’ll be scrolling through my phone and will come upon photos of my wife and I in masks and be like, “Oh, yeah, remember that whole thing?” It’s virtually impossible for me to wrap my head around this past year and everything that’s happened. So, deep breath, let’s put the head down and keep powering through.

The staff compiled best of 2020 list can be found here.

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My iOS 14 Home Screen

Jason's iPhone 11
Jason Tate

I like keeping screenshots and documenting my iOS home screens over the years so I can look back on how I had everything set up and remembering what it was like. The release of iOS 14 brings even more customizable options with the new widgets and stacks. I decided to describe my current layout, my custom iOS 14 icons, and add a little commentary about the apps.

UPDATE • Oct 2, 2021

The Launch Center Pro way of making icons has been removed by Apple as of iOS 14.5. If you had made the profile/icons before, they still work, but now the best solution for custom icons is to use the Shortcut method.

UPDATE • Oct 23, 2020

I’ve made some changes, notably changing up how all my custom icons look. All the screen shots have been updated.

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GoodReads Sucks

amazon
Jason Tate

Sarah Manavis, writing at New Statesman:

With the vast amount of books and user data that Goodreads holds, it has the potential to create an algorithm so exact that it would be unstoppable, and it is hard to imagine anyone objecting to their data being used for such a purpose. Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books – Goodreads is almost 40 times the size of the next biggest community, LibraryThing, which is also 40 per cent owned by Amazon – and it appears to be doing very little with it.

GoodReads is a really bad website and an even worse app. It could be awesome. It should be awesome. The difference between using it, and say Letterboxd for movies, is night and day. It just makes me sad.

The Oral History of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

Mad Max
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

Even Oscar-winning auteurs have been awed by George Miller’s operatically staged spectacle. “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho said last year that the scale of the movie brought him to tears, while Steven Soderbergh put it more bluntly: “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film,” he said in a 2017 interview, “and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

So how did Miller and his cast pull it off and survive to tell the tale?

Five years after “Fury Road” was released, I asked 20 of its key players what making it was like. Though its post-apocalyptic plot is deceptively simple — road warrior Max (Tom Hardy) and the fierce driver Furiosa (Charlize Theron) must race across the desert to escape the vengeful Immortan Joe and his fleet of kamikaze War Boys — filming the movie was anything but easy.

I had never read this before, but it’s fascinating.

The Science and Politics of Masks in the Covid-19 Pandemic

Science
Jason Tate

Robert Wachter, writing on Medium:

Why is masking so difficult to maintain among the public? In Asia, face masks are now seen as a normal accessory. In the U.S., they’re still seen as awkward and stigmatizing. Historically, they have been a sign of illness or danger. This aversion, plus the fact that the benefit of masks mostly accrues to others, is why we need to make mask-wearing mandatory as long as SARS-CoV-2 is active in our communities, at least in closed spaces (as San Francisco has done).

One of the most common questions is whether it is necessary to wear a mask when walking or exercising outside. Empiric and simulation studies have shown that there is practically zero risk of viral spread when one is outdoors and keeping a distance of greater than six feet from others. I personally don’t wear a mask when walking the dog (but I do keep one with me just in case I encounter someone at close range). But I always wear a mask inside, or if an encounter within six feet is likely.

What You See Are People Pushed to the Edge

Jason Tate

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, writing at the LA Times:

Yes, protests often are used as an excuse for some to take advantage, just as when fans celebrating a hometown sports team championship burn cars and destroy storefronts. I don’t want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.

The Militarization of the Police

The Atlantic
Jason Tate

Nick Baumann on the militarization of the American police:

“You create this world where you’re not just militarizing the police — you equip the police like soldiers, you train the police like soldiers. Why are you surprised when they act like soldiers?” Rizer, a former police officer and soldier, said. “The mission of the police is to protect and serve. But the premise of the soldier is to engage the enemy in close combat and destroy them. When you blur those lines together with statements like that … It’s an absolute breakdown of civil society.”

American police officers generally believe that carrying military equipment and wearing military gear makes them feel like they can do more, and that it makes them scarier, Rizer’s research has found. Officers even acknowledge that acting and dressing like soldiers could change how the public feels about them. But “they don’t care,” he said.

Research on How to Stop Police Violence

Math
Jason Tate

From Samuel Sinyangwe, a thread about solutions to stop police violence:

More restrictive state and local policies governing police use of force are associated with significantly lower rates of police shootings/killings by police. This is backed by 30+ years of research.

Demilitarization. Police depts that get more military weapons from the federal govt kill more people. You can stop that from happening through local and state policy. Montana (Red state) has gone the furthest on this.

Police Union Contracts. Every 4-6 years your police dept’s accountability system is re-negotiated. Purging misconduct records, reinstating fired officers, dept funding- it’s in the contract. Cities with worse contracts have higher police violence rates.

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