Billboard is reporting that PWR BTTM have begun working with a new manager and will be re-releasing their debut album:
But the band’s lawyer says the group has so far been unable to reach an agreement with Polyvinyl, the indie label that released — then withdrew — PWR BTTM’s well-reviewed second album, Pageant, to make it available again.
Travis Barker of Blink-182 wrote in Runners World about how important exercise is to him:
I’ve been sober since the accident, but I’ve replaced all of my bad addictions with good ones. Now, I get high off running.
I just love running. It makes me feel like I can conquer anything that comes at me. I’m never tapped out. I’m never tired around my two kids. I owe a lot of that to running.
Federico Viticci, writing for MacStories, about the new 10.5” iPad Pro:
The first time I swiped on the 10.5” iPad Pro’s 120Hz display last week, I thought it looked fake – like a CGI software sequence. It was incredibly, utterly crisp and fast. It didn’t look like iOS belonged on the screen: after years of iPad usage, my brain was telling me that something didn’t seem normal about the way iOS was animating. Except it’s all real, and it simply takes a couple of days to get used to the new display and the work Apple has put into ProMotion for smoother scrolling and fluid animations throughout the system.
The International Olympic Committee announced that both men’s and women’s 3-on-3 basketball will be contested at the 2020 Tokyo Games in addition to the traditional 5-on-5 game.
OK, I’m sold. This sounds like fun.
Gerard Way talked to Billboard about his upcoming work with comics, and mentioned in passing a little about My Chemical Romance:
“I wouldn’t count (a reunion) out, but at the same time everybody’s doing stuff in their lives now that they’re really enjoying,” Way says. “In some ways I don’t really miss it; It had gotten so big it was very unwieldy. It took a toll on my mental life and personal life. The thing I’m happiest about right now is everybody’s relationships with each other are really strong. That’s more important than anything else to me.”
And a second solo album:
Way is also starting to eyeball a second solo album, with “a bunch of stuff I’ve written over the past couple of years” already in motion. “I’m just about to seriously figure out my schedule in terms of how many weeks I’m writing comics and how many weeks I’m writing music,” Way explains. “There’s a plan to put something out; I don’t know when that’ll come, but the process is starting.”
George Slefo, writing for Ad Age:
Google’s Chrome browser will soon come with preinstalled technology that will block the most annoying ads currently marring the web experience, the company confirmed on Thursday.
Publishers will be able to understand how they will be affected through a tool Google is dubbing “The Ad Experience Report.” It will basically score a publisher’s site and inform them which of their ads are “annoying experiences.”
At the same time, Chrome will give publishers the option to force a choice on people running their own ad blocking software: whitelist the site so its non-annoying ads can display or pay a small fee to access the content ad-free.
I’m assuming Google’s annoyingly shitty ads will display just fine? I think I’m fine with the move to build this into the browser, but I think Google’s own ads, specifically their tracking capabilities, are just as big a problem as the ones that dance all over my screen on Alternative Press’ homepage.
Chris DeVille, writing at Stereogum, talks about how since Arcade Fire released great music in the past, they have become too big to fail:
The mighty would have fallen by now, but their reputation is propping them up. That’s how it goes when your rock band becomes too big to fail. You grab enough people by the heart when they’re young and impressionable, you get to be a big deal forever, whether your moment of excellence lasted well over a decade (like U2 or the Rolling Stones) or just for an album or two (like Weezer and the Strokes). Call it brand loyalty, wishful thinking, whatever. It’s a fact of the music business. Creative death can’t kill the world’s biggest rock bands — only actual death, and sometimes not even that.
I’ve only heard a couple songs on the new Arcade Fire album, so I can’t comment on that directly, but I do think this is an interesting phenomenon in general. When an artist’s prior work creates an unstoppable gravitational force of fandom.
Matthew Lynley, writing for TechCrunch, details Blue Apron’s plan to go public:
The company is showing a rather incredible amount of growth. Blue Apron said it generated nearly $800 million in revenue in 2016, up from $341 million in 2015. For the first quarter this year, Blue Apron said it generated $245 million in revenue, up from $172 million in the first quarter last year. Despite all this, Blue Apron said it lost $55 million in 2016, though it said it lost $52 million in the first quarter this year.
A better way to IPO.
Thom Yorke of Radiohead talked with Rolling Stone about the Israel controversy earlier this year:
I’ll be totally honest with you: this has been extremely upsetting. There’s an awful lot of people who don’t agree with the BDS movement, including us. I don’t agree with the cultural ban at all, along with J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky and a long list of others.
There are people I admire [who have been critical of the concert] like [English film director] Ken Loach, who I would never dream of telling where to work or what to do or think. The kind of dialogue that they want to engage in is one that’s black or white. I have a problem with that. It’s deeply distressing that they choose to, rather than engage with us personally, throw shit at us in public. It’s deeply disrespectful to assume that we’re either being misinformed or that we’re so retarded we can’t make these decisions ourselves. I thought it was patronizing in the extreme. It’s offensive and I just can’t understand why going to play a rock show or going to lecture at a university [is a problem to them].
The president’s decision was a victory for Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, and Scott Pruitt, his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, both of whom had argued forcefully to abandon the global agreement in favor of a clean break that would clear the way for a new environmental approach.
What an absolute disgrace.
Will Arnett spoke with Business Insider about the upcoming season of Arrested Development, and confirmed that the series will be structured more like the first three seasons:
This time around, not only is the whole cast returning (“sadly, Jason Bateman has agreed to do it,” jokes Arnett), but Arnett tells us that the show will be structured in a way that’s similar to the original seasons. That means the cast will be appearing together and sharing more scenes, he hints, as opposed to season 4, which focused on one or two characters per episode.
In the plans that exist for the death of the Queen – and there are many versions, held by Buckingham Palace, the government and the BBC – most envisage that she will die after a short illness. Her family and doctors will be there. When the Queen Mother passed away on the afternoon of Easter Saturday, in 2002, at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, she had time to telephone friends to say goodbye, and to give away some of her horses. In these last hours, the Queen’s senior doctor, a gastroenterologist named Professor Huw Thomas, will be in charge. He will look after his patient, control access to her room and consider what information should be made public. The bond between sovereign and subjects is a strange and mostly unknowable thing. A nation’s life becomes a person’s, and then the string must break.
Walt Mossberg has penned the last column of his career for Recode:
But just because you’re not seeing amazing new consumer tech products on Amazon, in the app stores, or at the Apple Store or Best Buy, that doesn’t mean the tech revolution is stuck or stopped. In fact, it’s just pausing to conquer some major new territory. And, if it succeeds, the results could be as big or bigger than the first consumer PCs were in the 1970s, or even the web in the 1990s and smartphones in the first decade of this century.
Thanks for everything Walt!
Joe Coscarelli, who has been getting all the great interviews at The New York Times, sat down with Jack Antonoff to talk about the upcoming Bleachers album:
But his aversion wasn’t to stardom, or even the burden of a megahit, which he still openly chases as a go-to producer and songwriter for those on the pop A-list, like Lorde and Taylor Swift. The problem was that Fun. was merely something Mr. Antonoff was a part of, he explained recently at his home studio in Brooklyn; he needed the music he made to be a part of him.
Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy:
The seventy-five-page document (PDF) released today by the FCC represents the clearest view yet of Ajit Pai’s point of view on what ISPs offer, how to regulate providers, and what he sees as the Commission’s role in making sure that the open web continues to thrive. And, in short, it’s a crock of shit.
I anticipate that Karl Bode and Jon Brodkin will explore this proposal — titled “Restoring Internet Freedom”, like a gigantic middle finger to anyone who truly cares about freedom on the internet — on a much deeper level than I can, but I’d like to present a few excerpts for your review.