I didn’t take many photos in January. The world around me felt dark — often a little unworthy of memories. But it passed, and there were some bright moments. Hannah filled a life long dream and met the Hobbits. I filled my head with a lot of music. And now February is here. I hope for better, for all of us.
January 2026
Not an original thought, by any means, but, you know, The Beatles are good.
I’ve been (slowly, oh so slowly) trying to teach myself Swift (the programming language, not the pop star).
The main reason, besides being a distraction to the everyday hellscape news cycle, is that I’ve been working on a small Mac app for over a year that runs as a menu bar app and connects to Last.fm to scrobble songs and do a few other things. I wrote almost all of it in Python because I know Python really well. But, I want to end up converting it to be a fully native Mac/Swift app.
Problem is … I don’t know Swift very well at all.
So, I’ve been trying to get better at it. To start the year I challenged myself with a new project: make something in Swift. The first idea that came to mind was a Matrix-inspired screen saver. The goal was to make something that was written entirely in Swift, could run natively on a Mac, was as resource friendly as possible, and I could only use Chat-GPT for help in troubleshooting, debugging, or looking up functions. I wanted to try and write the code myself as much as possible since I’m trying to learn something. I got stuck a few times, but, that’s programming for you.
The result is Emotrix. A screen saver that is inspired by the Matrix digital rain effect but every so often will throw in some chunks of pop-punk song lyrics down the screen as well. It’s silly. But it makes me happy.
I wrote and tweaked it to display the characters in a way that I like the look of more than to be “movie perfect.” (The best movie version of the effect I’ve seen is this one. I did a lot of inspo-browsing over the past few weeks.) The finished and compiled version should be downloadable here. It should be installable on the latest version of macOS, but I’ve only tested it up to Sequoia (15.7.3).
I never thought I’d see this pressed to vinyl. An absolute staple of my high-school life and adding this to the collection brings immense joy.
This makes me so happy. I … really never expected I'd be listening to new The Academy Is… music again. Up there with The Format as the most shocking/exciting to me over the last year or so. Spoiler: The entire album has the same breezy vibe as this song. Feels like a mother fucking spring day set to music. "L Train" sent me into an immediate groove.
Look, I like Last.fm. It’s fun. I like seeing my stats. I’ve written about it a lot.
I include my weekly stats on all of my Top 9 posts and during the week I often like to see where I’m at. So, I wrote a simple script for Raycast to quickly calculate the stats and output them in the app:
The script’s on Github.
Why hello here, it looks like it’s time for yet another best of list.
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 2025 list can be found here.
Read More “Jason Tate’s Top Albums of 2025”
I spent a huge amount of time and emotional energy in 2025 going back through the back pages of my own music listening history. The My Life In 35 Songs series, which I launched in March and wrapped on my 35th birthday in November, provided space on this website every week for me to gush about the music that shaped who I am. It was a massive commitment, and it left little time for any other type of music writing. But it also served as a stirring reminder of how important a good song or a great album can be. For those of us on this website, music doesn’t stop being formative or emotionally resonant just because we got beyond those teenage years of self-discovery and first-time experiences. On the contrary, if you give yourself over to it, music can continue to be a true companion for your entire life.
With that thought in mind, I dove into compiling my best-of-the-year list for 2025 with as much enthusiasm and excitement as I’ve ever brought to a year-end list before. My Life In 35 Songs felt freeing and invigorating because the structure of it gave me permission to be 100 percent honest – not only about the music I’ve loved, but also about life experiences that had previously felt too raw or too private to share. I wanted to bring that energy to this list – to try to tune out any kind of popular consensus and zero in on the albums that felt vital to me. The resulting list has a bunch of albums you’ll surely recognize, but also a few I haven’t seen on a single other list so far. Just like My Life In 35 Songs, it feels true to who I am and to the life I lived this year.
That life was as confounding as ever in 2025 – a year that saw America go fascist, that saw seemingly every industry embrace the scourge of generative AI, and that saw me bristling against a growing number of indicators that I am simply not that young anymore. Along the way, though, I found a lot of records that did make me feel young again, or that gave me hope and light amidst the growing darkness. Here are a few dozen of them.
Read More “Craig Manning’s Top Albums of 2025”
