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FEATURES, BLOGS, & REVIEWS
Happy Father’s Day. I’m pretty sure my sunglasses are virtually the same as my dad’s style in the early 80s. So I got that going for me.
It’s KD’s Fault
Craig Fehrman, writing at Slate:
The NBA has been bad for two years, and it’s Kevin Durant’s fault.
If the Warriors beat the Cavaliers on Friday night, they’ll clinch a second straight title, compiling a playoff record of 32–6 along the way. This team has erased two seasons of potentially exciting basketball as thoroughly as Ted Williams’ military service erased several years of his prime.
The Warriors aren’t the ’96 Bulls. The Warriors were the ’96 Bulls—a 70-plus-win team with a superstar and a championship-level supporting cast. Then they added the second-best player in the league. It’s as if David Robinson decided to join Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in Chicago and coast his way to some mid-’90s titles.
I love the NBA and have hated this year’s playoffs and finals. It’s not fun to watch. This article really gets to the why and how an un-competitive league is bad for basketball.
Duo Odéon – “Valses from Specter of the Rose: Maestoso” (Video)
My girlfriend (she’s the violinist) made a music video. It’s awesome, you should watch it.
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Hey, @hannahleland made a CD. (Yeah I don’t know what a CD is anymore either, but still.) So proud to see all her hard work pay off. I don’t know how to play this though. 😩
Second Life: Rethinking Myself
Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:
I used to be obsessed about not being “behind” and being one step ahead of everyone in terms of tweets and news and emails. Now I understand that’s a battle I can’t win and a fight I don’t want to participate in. It wasn’t healthy and it prevented me from enjoying everything else happening around me. I went on vacation multiple times over the past few years and all I could think about was work and todos piling up in my task manager. That’s absurd, and it’s not a job I enjoy. Perhaps it’s one of the common pitfalls of being self-employed and working from home. I want to work at my own pace; even during the busiest periods of the year, I won’t let the anxiety of being “productive” get in the way of spending time with my family and enjoying everyday life.
God damn can I relate to this.
The World Still Spins Around Male Genius
Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic:
The added tragedy of all this — kicked, climbed, son, gun, months — is the fact that Karr was not, specifically, making allegations. As Jezebel’s Whitney Kimball pointed out, “The fact that [Wallace] abused [Karr] is not a revelation; this has been documented and adopted by the literary world as one of Wallace’s character traits.” D.T. Max’s 2012 biography of Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, documented those abuses: Wallace, Max alleges, once pushed Karr from a vehicle. During another fight, he threw a coffee table at her. Karr, in her tweets, was merely repeating the story she has told many times before. A story that has been treated — stop me if this sounds familiar — largely as a complication to another story. In this case, the story of the romantically unruly genius of one David Foster Wallace.
Hannah’s Album Up for Pre-Order
My girlfriend’s new album is up for pre-order on Amazon.
A Conversation Adam Silver
Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, talked with Strategy Business:
We promote the posting of our highlights. The highlights are identified through YouTube’s software, and when ads are sold against them, we share in the revenue. We analogize our strategy to snacks versus meals. If we provide those snacks to our fans on a free basis, they’re still going to want to eat meals — which are our games. There is no substitute for the live game experience. We believe that greater fan engagement through social media helps drive television ratings.
This is a really good interview that dives into how the NBA is using data and the internet to grow their product. Very forward thinking.
In the Spotlight Playlist (2018)
Earlier this week we unveiled our “In the Spotlight” feature with a bunch of artists we think are worthy of your time. In the feature we’ve got blurbs and “recommended if you like” hints to try and convince you to listen to the bands, but sometimes just having all the recommended tracks in a playlist to churn through is the way to go.
The playlist is available on Apple Music and Spotify.
In the Spotlight: 50 Bands You Need to Hear in 2018 (Part Two)
Today we’re happy to bring you part two of our “In the Spotlight” feature. We’ve got another group of artists that we think are worthy of your time and ears. Our contributors have made their picks, put together blurbs, and pulled out recommended songs.
If you missed part one, you can find that here.
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Download Streaming Media
This question was originally answered in the Q&A Thread in the forums.
How do you rip audio from YouTube? I’ve been meaning to rip a Bellows acoustic session from YT for a while now but I want to make sure the audio quality is good, I figured you know the best way of doing this haha.
So there’s the easy way, and then the way I do it.