Jason Tate
socials
Threads
Mastodon
Bluesky
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
Apple Music
Last.fm
Letterboxd
Trakt
Discogs
GoodReads
Jason Tate
This website is supported in part by readers. Please consider becoming a supporting member. Oh, and I have a weekly newsletter.
recommended
My Archive
Favorite Albums
Favorite Movies
Favorite TV Shows
Favorite Software
Miscellaneous Recommendations

Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Valley
Jason Tate

Anna Wiener, writing on N+1, with the best thing I read this weekend:

We get ourselves out of the office and into a bar. We have more in common than our grievances, but we kick off by speculating about our job security, complaining about the bureaucratic double-downs, casting blame for blocks and poor product decisions. We talk about our IPO like it’s the deus ex machina coming down from on high to save us — like it’s an inevitability, like our stock options will lift us out of our existential dread, away from the collective anxiety that ebbs and flows. Realistically, we know it could be years before an IPO, if there’s an IPO at all; we know in our hearts that money is a salve, not a solution. Still, we are hopeful. We reassure ourselves and one another that this is just a phase; every start-up has its growing pains. Eventually we are drunk enough to change the subject, to remember our more private selves. The people we are on weekends, the people we were for years.

Thoughts on Business Insider

Jason Tate

Shane Ferro, writing at Medium:

I used to work at Business Insider. I quit after 10 months. The first three months were great. There was seltzer on tap, and whiskey tastings on Wednesdays and lots of smart, young, enthusiastic people around me. During the second three months the pressure to get more traffic and write a higher number of posts per day ramped up.

The last four months, I remember mostly tense meetings about how I wasn’t hitting my goals — five posts per day and one million unique visitors per month. I remember riding the elevator downstairs in the afternoons, hoping that no one would see me crying until I hit the front door and made a left from Fifth Avenue onto 21st Street. I cried a lot while pacing back and forth on 21st street in the summer of 2015. My anxiety got so bad I thought about quitting with no plan. It took my mother, my boyfriend, and my therapist together to convince me to stick around until I found something new.

This is the state of publishing online right now for the large publications. It’s why you get publications rewriting content. This is why it’s a mess.

Drafts Screencast Series

Apps
Jason Tate

I’ve been a big fan of the iOS app Drafts for quite a while. Here’s the premise: open the app, get a blank screen to start typing, then after your thought is out — decide where to send it. One of my biggest uses is to type something and then append it to a file in Dropbox to keep a running list (movies to watch, gift ideas for friends and family, etc.). This video series by David Sparks is a great way to learn the ropes: highly recommended.

Helpful Safari Extension: Recent Tab List

Jason Tate

I recently decided to ditch Chrome and move full-time into Safari as my main web browser. My main reasoning was that all the bugs I kept running into with Chrome were the kind I couldn’t handle anymore (spellcheck would flat out stop working unless I relaunched, dictionary look-up stopped working right, shortcut keys would fail for no reason). It’s only been a couple of days with Safari as my main workhorse so far, but I’m liking it. I’ve finally got it set up how I want it, and it’s treating me well on our first date.

One thing I missed immediately from Chrome was if I closed a tab by accident, or too quickly, I could right click on an open tab and select “reopen last closed tab.” Sometimes I get moving too fast and still need a link or to copy something from a website after I close the tab, so I used this feature pretty frequently. With Safari, if you don’t do anything else you can quickly hit ⌘+Z to reopen a closed tab, but too often I would start typing again before realizing I needed that last website still. Enter the Recent Tab List extension. This is a great little extension that you can keep in your toolbar to show you all the recent tabs you’ve closed so you can quickly reopen one you may have closed.

Twitter Just Killed Off the Most Useful Twitter Account

Twitter
Jason Tate

Casey Newton, writing for The Verge:

MagicRecs stopped sending me notifications in February. When I asked Twitter about it at the time, the company told me MagicRecs were still active. But I never received another message, and despite having every mobile notification switched to “on,” I’ve never gotten a MagicRecs-style push notification in the app, either. (Twitter tells me this may be a bug.) It’s a shame. Twitter is as hard to follow as ever, and the one useful bot in my life is now dead.

Easily one of the most helpful things on Twitter I used to find new accounts to follow. This company makes weird decisions. Bots are clearly kind of a thing right now and Twitter’s basically walking away from the one of the best ones around. Um. Ok guys.

The Feed is Dying

Jason Tate

Casey Johnston, writing for NY Mag:

Unfortunately, chronological order doesn’t scale well. Once a medium or platform has had its here-comes-everyone moment, the stuff you actually want to see gets buried in an undifferentiated stream — imagine a library organized chronologically, or even the morning edition of a newspaper. People are doing too many things and they are happening all at once, and the once-coherent experience of people using a platform unravels into noise. Who among us hasn’t logged into Twitter only to find friends one-upping each other with meta-meta-meta-ironic jokes about something that happened five minutes ago, and no longer is anyone actually mentioning the thing they’re joking about? Who among us has not followed someone because of a really excellent viral photo or tweet, and then hundreds of posts later it’s like Oh my God, stop talking about your cat, or your car, or your loneliness?

Really good rundown on the idea of “feeds” and what happens when you get too big.

The Worst Part of My Job

Jason Tate

Curious what I think the worst part of my job is? The easy answer is a day when I get a bunch of personal and hateful things heaved at me anonymously. But that’s more of a byproduct of the job, not actually a part of it. The worst part of my job is when I am sitting online looking at any one of the feeds I monitor and I see something that I know is a “leak” of pertinent band information. Sometimes it’ll be Amazon or iTunes that has prematurely posted album information, sometimes it’ll be a tweet about a new song title from a small market DJ, or, worst of all in my opinion, an actual song leak. I’ve talked about these tough circumstances before; however, I think that it’s worth expanding upon my thought process.

Read More “The Worst Part of My Job”

The Voyeur’s Motel

Jason Tate

Gay Talese, writing for The New Yorker, with the most bizarre piece I’ve read in weeks:

I know a married man and father of two who bought a twenty-one-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring six by fourteen inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvred aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grilles but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades, while keeping an exhaustive written record of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught.

And the follow-up from Erik Wemple, at The Washington Post, that looks at the journalistic ethics of this:

Only in journalism would one seek to cultivate a three-decade-long relationship with a motel pervert. “The Voyeur’s Motel” reflects the anxiety of a writer doing just that. After his spying on the couple, for instance, Talese recalls saying to himself, “What was I doing up here, anyway? Had I become complicit in his strange and distasteful project?” Maybe: As Talese recounts in the story, he signed a confidentiality agreement with Foos upon his 1980 trip to the motel, before his trip to the peepholes. It was a “typed document stating that I would not identify him by name, or publicly associate his motel with whatever information he shared with me, until he had granted me a waiver,” writes Talese. “I signed the paper. I had already decided that I would not write about Gerald Foos under these restrictions. I had come to Denver merely to meet this man and to satisfy my curiosity about him.” And to watch some oral sex, too.

I am still skeeved out by this entire thing.

Helpful App: Chatology

Chatology
Jason Tate

Chatology is an app for OS X that allows you to search through your iMessage history. It’s one of those things you didn’t know you needed until you really need it.

If you use Messages, you probably know that searching messages to find important info from past chats can be frustrating. Perhaps you couldn’t find what you were looking for, or your Mac slowed down so much that you gave up.

Chatology helps you find exactly what you’re looking for without frustration.

It’s a Tesla

Tesla
Jason Tate

Ben Thompson, writing for Stratechery:

To that end, the significance of electric to Tesla that the radical rethinking of a car made possible by a new drivetrain gave Tesla the opportunity to make the best car: there was a clean slate. More than that, Tesla’s lack of car-making experience was actually an advantage: the company’s mission, internal incentives, and bottom line were all dependent on getting electric right.

Again the iPhone is a useful comparison: people contend that Microsoft lost mobile to Apple, but the reality is that smartphones required a radical rethinking of the general purpose computer: there was a clean slate. More than that, Microsoft was fundamentally handicapped by the fact Windows was so successful on PCs: the company could never align their mission, incentives, and bottom line like Apple could.

Helpful App: Thunderspace 5K

Apps
Jason Tate

The last few weeks have been just a tad stressful. Needless to say my sleep schedule has taken a massive punch in the balls. Over the past few days I’ve been using this app, Thunderspace 5K, at night as almost a white noise machine. It’s been a revelation. It might be growing up in Oregon, and having spent many a night falling asleep to the sound of rain on the wood deck outside the window of my youth, but this app has replaced podcasts when I finally find my way to bed.