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I Prevail Want You to Know How Hard They Worked

I Prevail
Jason Tate

I Prevail’s vocalist posted a Facebook message about how hard the band worked to get to where they are and that they didn’t pay their way to “the top”:

I love when people talk shit about I Prevail and say we “paid” our way to the top. So many assholes have no clue how much we have busted our ass to get where we are. After going to college for a semester I decided it wasn’t for me and took a leap of faith by forming my own band. I was lucky enough to come across some great fucking dudes and musicians and we decided we would spend the next year writing, recording, and putting together all the pieces it takes to form a successful band. […]

So instead of talking shit about my band, maybe you should spend some time looking in the mirror and really think about your own endeavors and how much work you’ve put into it.

Seems like someone is protesting just a tad too much.

Greg Graffin Talks New Album, Next Bad Religion Album

Bad Religion
Jason Tate

Greg Graffin of Bad Religion talked with the OC Register:

“I wanted to write a secular gospel song,” he said. “The greatest thing about religion is the music, if you ask me. People ask me ‘What’s a good religion, you’re always so dedicated to bad religion.’ I don’t know, but it’s one that has a lot of good music because that’s what seems to live on, for me at least. I thought I’d put some words to something that’s purely humanistic and puts the power for change in humanity instead of a supernatural deity. I think it’s a timely song and I hope it resonates with people, but it retains its flavor of everything that’s good about religion, which is music.”

SoundCloud Needs More Money, or It May Sell at a Fire-Sale Price

Soundcloud
Jason Tate

Peter Kafka, writing at Recode:

Sources say the streaming music service has been trying to raise more than $100 million since last summer, without success. It has also talked to potential acquirers, including Spotify, without closing a deal.

The upshot, according to people familiar with the company: SoundCloud is now at a point where it may sell for less than the $700 million investors thought it was worth a few years ago. One source thinks it will consider bids, as long as they’re above the total investment it has raised to date — about $250 million.

Turns Out™ People Like Monthly Options Best

Jason Tate

A couple weeks ago I tweaked our supporter program just a bit to put together a few new options at various tiers. It’s been incredible to see so many new people sign up and help us out at all the levels, but one of the more common things I heard was that you all love the monthly options way more than the annual ones. I think I messed up because of my own bias of liking to pay for things upfront, and so I built the program with that in mind. Welp, I think I was wrong. After seeing so many people ask about monthly tiers I’ve inverted what I highlight on our supporter page. The monthly options are now front and center and the annual options are still there but just a little less prominent.

A huge thank you to everyone that gave me feedback on this and a massive thank you to everyone that’s signed up so far. If you haven’t peeped the supporter packages yet, please take a look and/or read my little plea about becoming a member.

I’ve been working on cleaning up the website code, improving all the mobile pages, and making some other little changes to the site over the past few weeks. I’ll be rolling those out in the next few months along with some new features and perks for supporters.

Thanks again for reading!

25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going

The New York Times
Jason Tate

The New York Times’ new interactive feature covers “25 Song That Tell Us Where Music Is Going:”

A strange thing you learn about American popular music, if you look back far enough, is that for a long time it didn’t much have “genres” — it had ethnicities. Vaudeville acts, for instance, had tunes for just about every major immigrant group: the Italian number, the Yiddish number, the Irish one, the Chinese. Some were sung in a spirit of abuse; others were written or performed by members of those groups themselves. And of course there were the minstrel shows, in which people with mocking, cork-painted faces sang what they pretended were the songs of Southern former slaves. This was how we reckoned with our melting pot: crudely, obliviously, maybe with a nice tune and a beat you could dance to.

Chrissy Costanza Praises Hayley Williams

Against the Current
Jason Tate

Chrissy Costanza of Against the Current posted an open letter to Paramore’s Hayley Williams on Twitter:

I had no idea how to be a frontwoman. How to command a room. I didn’t know how to allow myself to be empowered. I wasn’t cool, I wasn’t powerful, I wasn’t a leader. Hayley changed that. She showed me that it’s ok for girls to get mad. It’s ok for girls to be powerful, to lead, to command, to conquer.”

It’s ok to break down that door and stomp on the implicit “no girls allowed” sign. It’s ok to stand for something. It’s ok to stand for being yourself when everyone wants to tell you how you should be, how a girl should be. The years changed, the hair colours changed, the music changed, but the empowering spirit never changed. She inspired me 7 years ago the day I first listened to Riot! and she has inspired me every day since.

‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Finishes Up Its 12th Season

Always Sunny
Jason Tate

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia wrapped up their 12th season last night. Glenn Howerton talked to Uproxx about the finale, the future of the show, and if Dennis will be leaving:

So… it’s a little complicated. I may seem a little bit evasive here, and I don’t mean to. It’s not entirely certain whether I am or am not. I might be. I might be, but I might not be. That really is the truth. Just to be clear, to dispel any potential weirdness, it has nothing to do with my relationship to anyone on the show or Rob or Charlie or anyone like that. It’s partially a creative and personal decision. We may be taking an extended hiatus between season 12 and season 13. So I’m certainly staying open to the possibility of doing more, but there is a possibility that I will not.

Google’s Algorithm Is Lying to You About Onions

Google
Jason Tate

Tom Scocca, writing for Gizmodo:

A little under five years ago, I got angry about a piece of fake information, and I decided to do something about it. I was reading a recipe in the New York Times, and the recipe told me, as many, many recipes had told me before, that it would take about 10 minutes of cooking to caramelize onions.

I knew from personal experience that this was a lie. Recipes always said it took 5 or 10 minutes to caramelize onions, and when you followed the recipes, you either got slightly cooked onions or you ended up 40 minutes behind schedule. So I caramelized some onions and recorded how long it really took — 28 minutes if you cooked them as hot as possible and constantly stirred them, 45 minutes if you were sane about it — and I published those results on Slate, along with a denunciation of the false five-to-10 minute standard. […]

Not only does Google, the world’s preeminent index of information, tell its users that caramelizing onions takes “about 5 minutes” — it pulls that information from an article whose entire point was to tell people exactly the opposite. A block of text from the Times that I had published as a quote, to illustrate how it was a lie, had been extracted by the algorithm as the authoritative truth on the subject.

There are quite a few examples of how Google’s massively dropping the ball with their “one true answer” feature.

International Women’s Day/Day Without a Woman Strike

Women / Strike
Jason Tate

Today is International Women’s Day and the “Day Without a Woman” strike. Here’s a few articles I’ve found that are worth giving a read:

NARAL:

Today, we’re taking a moment to draw inspiration from the many moments in history where women have spoken truth to power, pushed back against oppression and injustice, and fought to make our country and our world safer and more equitable.

New York Times:

“This is the day to emphasize the unity between work done in the so-called formal economy and the domestic sphere, the public sphere and the private sphere, and how most working women have to straddle both,” says Ms. Bhattacharya. “Labor is understood to be work only at the point of production, but as women we know that both society and policy makers invisibilize the work that women do.” The strike calls for women to withhold labor, paid or unpaid, from the United States economy to show how important their contributions are.

The Guardian:

Our roundup of this year’s celebrations, featuring global events and rallies to mark the ongoing fight for women’s equality

The Washington Post:

That’s no coincidence. From the beginning, International Women’s Day was tied tightly to activism and labor strikes. In fact, the day was named in 1909 by the Socialist Party of America to honor a 1908 garment workers’ strike in New York City.

Errata Security’s Notes on the WikiLeaks CIA Leak

Technology
Jason Tate

Robert Graham, writing for Errata Security:

I thought I’d write up some notes about the Wikileaks CIA “#vault7” leak. This post will be updated frequently over the next 24 hours.

The CIA didn’t remotely hack a TV. The docs are clear that they can update the software running on the TV using a USB drive. There’s no evidence of them doing so remotely over the Internet. If you aren’t afraid of the CIA breaking in an installing a listening device, then you should’t be afraid of the CIA installing listening software.

The CIA didn’t defeat Signal/WhatsApp encryption. The CIA has some exploits for Android/iPhone. If they can get on your phone, then of course they can record audio and screenshots. Technically, this bypasses/defeats encryption — but such phrases used by Wikileaks are highly misleading, since nothing related to Signal/WhatsApp is happening. What’s happening is the CIA is bypassing/defeating the phone. Sometimes. If they’ve got an exploit for it, or can trick you into installing their software.

This is a good post that corrects a lot of misinformation floating around.