Sponsor: My Thanks to MailButler

Sponsored Post

My thanks to MailButler for sponsoring the website this week. MailButler is a plugin for Apple Mail that adds a whole bunch of functionality to the app to make it even better. You can do things like schedule your emails, snooze emails so they come back later to deal with, and create signature and message templates. It’s quite powerful and if you’re using Apple Mail for your email, it’s definitely worth a look.

Check out the official MailButler website to find out more.

Read More “My Thanks to MailButler”

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.