Yeah basically how I feel after today. Whew. What a crazy, crazy afternoon. Fun. But crazy! (And the song is so good.)
The Worst Part of My Job
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.
Cool Etsy Shop: Skyworld Project
Skyworld Project on Etsy has some pretty awesome prints available of cityscapes mixed in with nerdy things like the Bat-signal or Spider-Man.
The Voyeur’s Motel
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 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.
A New Chapter for the Serial
Even Puschak’s new video “A New Chapter for the Serial” talks about the rise of the serialization genre. I found this really interesting.
It’s a Tesla
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
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.
Top 50 Albums From Past 15 Years
On this week’s episode of Encore we looked at the top ten albums from the past fifteen years. The goal was to pick our favorite ten albums that came out between 2001 and 2015. This was way harder than I expected it to be and I ended up cutting out albums I love, being surprised at what albums I knew had to make the cut, and you can hear my entire (strange) thought process on the episode. If you hit read more you can read the last 50 that made the cut.