Star Wars: Episode VIII will be titled The Last Jedi.
Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
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Logic Pro X and GarageBand Get Updates
Logic Pro X for macOS and GarageBand for iOS have both been updated today. MacStories has a good rundown of the new features:
Logic Pro X 10.3 adds Touch Bar support to the app for the first time, implementing it in a number of ways. The Touch Bar can serve as an instrument, allowing users to tap out a drum beat or play a piano keyboard. Power users will appreciate the ability to keep some of their favorite controls on the Touch Bar, as it can be configured with different keyboard shortcuts to suit each person’s needs. There is also the option to navigate audio waveforms using the Touch Bar.
An Interview With Zane Lowe, Bozoma Saint John, and Larry Jackson
Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Bozoma Saint John, and Larry Jackson sat down for an interview with Complex:
Zane Lowe: Larry was the first person who ever called me and asked if I wanted to be involved in Apple Music. For the most part, it remains how he and I talked about it in that first conversation, which was a place for music to live, and for artists to call home, and for an audience to feel like this is where the conversation is happening. I want it to go deeper than just availability.
Chelsea Manning to Be Released Early as Obama Commutes Sentence
President Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning’s prison sentence.
President Obama on Tuesday commuted all but four months of the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst convicted of a 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted Mr. Obama’s administration and brought global prominence to WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures.
Blog: World War Three, by Mistake
President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asleep in Washington, D.C., when the phone rang. His military aide, General William Odom, was calling to inform him that two hundred and twenty missiles launched from Soviet submarines were heading toward the United States. Brzezinski told Odom to get confirmation of the attack. A retaliatory strike would have to be ordered quickly; Washington might be destroyed within minutes. Odom called back and offered a correction: twenty-two hundred Soviet missiles had been launched.
Brzezinski decided not to wake up his wife, preferring that she die in her sleep. As he prepared to call Carter and recommend an American counterattack, the phone rang for a third time. Odom apologized—it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications device at NORAD headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents.
A terrifying read.
The Rise and Fall of McDonald’s Happy Meals
Nina Corcoran, writing for Consequence of Sound, about the history of McDonald’s Happy Meal:
Kids wanted a clear distinction between their food and their parents’ food. Bernstein decided to give them that. Shortly after being assigned the task of bringing the “Menu Ronald” to American audiences, Bernstein took note of his son’s habits at breakfast. Instead of staring at his cereal while eating it, he scanned the cereal box’s illustrations over and over, drawing a line through its mazes and reading the jokes characters told. Bernstein instructed his creative team to set to work on paperboard boxes modeled in the style of lunch pails. The restaurant’s iconic Golden Arches, he told them, had to be handles. The company asked nationally known children’s illustrators to design content for the sides of the boxes, eight items total, that incorporated jokes, games, comics, stories, or anything else that might capture a child’s imagination.
I remember as a kid when getting to go to McDonalds was treated like an event, a special occasion.
Chrome 56 Adds Native FLAC Support
The next version of Chrome will bring support for the FLAC audio codec directly in the browser.
Chrome 56 is currently in the beta channel and should hit stable in about a week. When released, it will bring support for the FLAC audio codec directly in the browser. This will provide a quick way to play those files, with the Mac being the biggest platform to benefit due to a lack of native support.
‘Portlandia’ to End in 2018
Portlandia’s final season will air in 2018.
IFC president Jennifer Caserta announced Saturday that the comedy starring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein has been renewed for an eighth and final season in 2018. Season seven returned this month.
Nintendo Switch Now Available for Pre-Order
Nintendo’s new console, Switch, is now available for pre-order.
Pandora Lays Off 7% of US Workforce
Pandora will be laying off seven percent of its US workforce:
Westergren went on to say that the company is “prioritizing the highest value opportunities and deprioritizing others” without elaborating further about the areas affected by the cuts. A spokesperson declined to share more details on the subject. Ticketfly, the company’s online ticketing service, will not be affected by the layoffs.
The Inside Story of BitTorrent’s Bizarre Collapse
Jessi Hempel, writing for Backchannel:
But from the start, BitTorrent had a branding problem — pirates used it to share movies illegally, making it the Napster of entertainment. Because the protocol was open-source, BitTorrent (the company) couldn’t stop the pirates. For 12 years, BitTorrent’s investors, executives and founders attempted to figure out many money-making strategies, including both enterprise software and entertainment businesses, while convincing us all that, sure, people might use the BitTorrent protocol to conduct illegal activity, but BitTorrent was just a tool — a really great tool you can use for really great things!
Queens of the Stone Age to Release New Album This Year
Mastodon’s Troy Sanders let it slip to Rolling Stone that Queens of the Stone Age will be releasing a new album this year:
Otherwise, we wouldn’t dedicate the first week of 2017 to working on this band. For example, Queens of the Stone Age, Mastodon and At the Drive-In have all been recording, and we all have new records coming out this year. We’ve all been extremely busy writing and recording, and we’re about to get super busy touring the world. So I believe we’re all fulfilled to a certain degree with all we have going on.
Cool Kickstarter: Indie Microblogging
Manton Reece has started a new Kickstarter for a book and service dedicated to a new platform for microblogs:
Do you remember how the web used to work? How the web was supposed to work?
In the earlier days of the web, we always published to our own web site. If you weren’t happy with your web host, or they went out of business, you could move your files and your domain name, and nothing would break.
Today, most writing instead goes into a small number of centralized social networking sites, where you can’t move your content, advertisements and fake news are everywhere, and if one of these sites fails, your content disappears from the internet. Too many sites have gone away and taken our posts and photos with them.
Amen. This is something I’ve thought about a lot, and it’s one of the reasons I continue to run Chorus (and our forums) on domains I own powered mostly by software I can easy move to other servers if I need to.
The Weeknd Again Tops the Charts
The Weeknd has returned to the top of the Billboard charts:
The Moana film soundtrack rises from No. 6 to No. 2 with 64,000 units (up 21 percent) and 44,000 in traditional album sales (up 37 percent — it is the best selling album of the week). It’s the only title in the top 10 to post a gain in either total units or sales, so, for the most part, albums with a small decline in units will rise up the list. That is typical for the first tracking week after the holiday shopping season and Christmas — when the chart adjusts to normal non-holiday business.
Nielsen Has Released Their 2016 Music Year-End Report
Music consumption is at an all-time high. Overall volume is up 3% over 2016, fueled by a 76% increase in on-demand audio streams, enough to offset declines in sales and return a positive year for the business. Nearly 650 solo artists, groups and collaborators appeared on the Top 200 Song Consumption chart in 2016, representing over 1,200 different songs.
You have to use the blue download button to read the full thing, but a brief recap can be found on their press release page:
The biggest song of the year in terms of total activity (sales + audio streaming equivalents) was Drake’s “One Dance,” followed by “Closer” by Chainsmokers (feat. Halsey) and “Work” by Rihanna (feat. Drake). Topping the Digital Songs Sales charts this year were “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” by Justin Timberlake, “Closer” by The Chainsmokers (feat. Halsey) and “My House” by Flo Rida.