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Jason Tate
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Jason Tate
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Hobbies, Work, and Everything Between (Encore Episode 141)

Encore 141
Jason Tate

On this week’s episode of Encore I am joined by special guest Jacob Tender. This week we discuss AbsolutePunk.net, SpinMedia, UnderTheGun and a lot of behind the scenes chaos that plagued the music web community over the past few years. Then we move into a discussion about creating things and the balance between hobbies, work, and everything between. We look at what it’s like to create things, when to know if they’ve failed, and why it is we both feel a need to create and put things out into the world. There’s also talk about the new MacBooks with Touchbar, some thoughts on AirPods, as well as collecting media and how we track what we listen to, read, and watch.

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How Jon Stewart Took Over the Daily Show and Revolutionized Late-Night TV: An Oral History

Jason Tate

Vanity Fair has an excerpt from a recently released book with the oral history of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

My wildest dream for The Daily Show when I started was “This will be fun. Hopefully we’ll do it well.” Success for me would’ve been feeling like I figured it out. That I got to express the things I wanted to. It was never “I want this to be a cultural touchstone … but only for a very small portion of America.” And I was hoping to stay on TV longer than nine months this time.

What a great read. I’ve already added the full book to my Amazon wishlist.

World War Three, by Mistake

Jason Tate

New Yorker:

President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asleep in Washington, D.C., when the phone rang. His military aide, General William Odom, was calling to inform him that two hundred and twenty missiles launched from Soviet submarines were heading toward the United States. Brzezinski told Odom to get confirmation of the attack. A retaliatory strike would have to be ordered quickly; Washington might be destroyed within minutes. Odom called back and offered a correction: twenty-two hundred Soviet missiles had been launched.

Brzezinski decided not to wake up his wife, preferring that she die in her sleep. As he prepared to call Carter and recommend an American counterattack, the phone rang for a third time. Odom apologized—it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications device at NORAD headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents.

A terrifying read.

Jason’s Favorites From 2016 Playlist

Jason Tate

This week we revealed the Chorus.fm staff and contributor top albums of 2016 feature. Along with that a bunch of us put together our own individual lists and I decided to take some of my favorite songs from my list and put them into a playlist. You can find that on Spotify and Apple Music.

I figured this would be a good way to quickly check out any of the artists you may not have heard yet before diving into the full albums. Also I want any excuse to share “Drive It Like You Stole It” with more people. If anyone else has playlists they made of songs from their favorite albums this year, I’d love to check them out — feel free to send over a link.

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Review: The Menzingers – After the Party

The Menzingers
Jason Tate

This first impression was originally posted as a live blog for supporters in our forums on January 9th, 2017. First impressions are meant to be quick, fun, initial impressions on an album or release as I listen to it for the first time. It’s a running commentary written while listening to an album — not a review. More like a diary of thoughts. This post has been lightly edited for structure and flow.

Finally!

I’m been embargoed on this sucker for what feels like forever and been aching to talk about it. And, with the last few weeks being a big move to get Chorus set up to work better with a version system (cleaning up my Git workflow and deployment) and working on a new Supporter Page (streamlining and creating a much better page for those that don’t wanna be a forum member to sign up), I’ve been itching to talk about music again. Always a needed distraction from some of the horrors going on basically everywhere else these days.

So, things are crossed off the ‘ol todolist and I’m ready to dive into what is sure to be a favorite of 2017.

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Jason Tate’s Top Albums of 2016

The Best of 2016
Jason Tate

I’ll remember 2016 as the year I migrated from AbsolutePunk to Chorus and the year where The 1975 pretty much dominated my music listening from start to finish. My goal this year was to try and spend more time with the music I loved instead of trying to listen to everything. In the end, I felt like devoting more time to each album let me discover more about each one without worrying about needing to move onto the next thing until I was ready. I’m glad I did it.

I included a bunch of movies, TV shows, books, and apps I enjoyed over the year as well.

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Most Anticipated of 2017 (Encore Episode 140)

Encore 140
Jason Tate

On this week’s episode of Encore I am joined by special guest Deanna Chapman. The main topic this week is all about our most anticipated albums of 2017. What made the list and what did we decide to leave off? Do we really have to mention Brand New … again? We also talk about movies we are looking forward to, discuss music on TV shows, and nerd out about comic books a little bit.

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OmniFocus Adds Global Search

Apps
Jason Tate

OmniGroup have released OmniFocus 2.8 for Mac:

Happy New Year! After a quiet couple of weeks, we are back in the office today and releasing OmniFocus 2.8 for Mac, which includes one of our most requested features: Global Search.

Great new addition to the most important app I use.

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