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Japandroids Have Been Missed

Japandroids
Jason Tate

Steven Hyden, writing for Uproxx, on missing the Japandroids and how to follow up Celebration Rock:

Japandroids make music that should, theoretically, be relatively easy to produce more than once or twice per decade. And yet, when you make a record as good at being simple as Celebration Rock is, it doesn’t leave you with a lot of options moving forward. If you repeat the formula, you have to compete directly with your most beloved record (and your audience’s distorted memory of that record). If you change up the formula (assuming you’re even capable of doing that), you run the risk of losing what people liked about you in the first place.

On the End of Yellowcard

Yellowcard
Jason Tate

Evan Lucy has a nice interview and feature on the end of Yellowcard over at Alternative Press:

The sense of finality led Key to approach writing Yellowcard from a different angle lyrically, as well. The singer felt especially galvanized by the ability to have the album’s lyrics serve as his farewell to friends, fans and family, and he challenged himself to use each song to express a different sentiment of saying goodbye. Some, like the affecting wistfulness of “Empty Street” (“Boxing up the fireworks/cancel my parade/the street is empty tonight”) and album closer “Fields & Fences,” complete with a goosebump-inducing orchestral outro, find him staring down his rapidly approaching future as Yellowcard’s ex-frontman, while the fiery “Savior’s Robes”—with its biting chorus, “Play us a song I know/Make it an older one”—seems aimed at those who’d prefer the band’s Ocean Avenue selves be fossilized forever.

Trying to read the article and having an Ice Nine Kills video pop up in my face sure was fun.

Gawker.com to Shut Down

Jason Tate

Gawker is shutting down:

After nearly fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week. The decision to close Gawker comes days after Univision successfully bid $135 million for Gawker Media’s six other websites, and four months after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal campaign against the company.

Blog: ‘Sausage Party’ Animators Allege Studio Used Unpaid Overtime

Jason Tate

Variety:

Instead of basking in the success, the makers of “Sausage Party” are finding themselves embroiled in a controversy that’s being fueled by anonymous comments on a series of blogs and news outlets. The formula used to deliver the film on time and on budget is now drawing unwanted attention, as animators who worked on the film in Canada are complaining they did not get overtime pay or the screen credits they deserved.

Ugh.

Uber to Begin Testing Self-Driving Cars in Pittsburgh

Uber
Jason Tate

Max Chafkin, reporting for Bloomberg, on Uber’s announcement that they will begin testing “self-driving” cars in Pittsburgh:

Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot, essentially a souped-up cruise control that drives the car on the highway. Earlier this week, Ford announced plans for an autonomous ride-sharing service. But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.

There will be two “safety drivers” that sit in the car and can take over at any time, but this is a step toward our driverless future. A future generation will look back on the days where we all manually drove cars around as barbaric.

Twitter Rolls Out Abuse Filters

Twitter
Jason Tate

Twitter has finally rolled out some content filters to help curb abusive behavior on the service.

When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with – and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.

NPR Gets Rid of Comments Section

Jason Tate

NPR are removing comments from their website:

In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, [managing editor Scott] Montgomery said. That’s 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016. […] When viewed purely from the perspective of whether the comments were fostering constructive conversations, the change should come as no surprise. The number of complaints to NPR about the current comment system has been growing — complaints that comments were censored by the outside moderators, and that commenters were behaving inappropriately and harassing other commenters.

Good for them. Moving all comments to our forums was the best decision I ever made.

Geoff Rickly on Surviving Martin Shkreli

Thursday
Jason Tate

Gary Suarez, writing at Pitchfork, speaks with Geoff Rickly of Thursday on “surviving” Martin Shkreli. This is the first time I’ve seen Geoff publicly mention that Collect Records was originally going to put out that The Hotelier album:

We would talk about bands. He brought me the Hotelier. I didn’t know them, they were sort of a buzzy band already. But he was super into them. He was always like you’re not signing enough bands. For me, the situation was so good that I didn’t want to lose it. I probably should have pressured him to put more money into each band.

And:

I met with the Hotelier about their record, which is so good. I thought, “This is the record that could save our label, it’s so good. There’s this one song on it that’s so much better than the rest of the record that we finally have a single—a real single.” And they were like, “We can’t do it.” That meeting, I felt like somebody punched me in the stomach. And I didn’t feel like they were betraying me. I just felt like I was understanding there’s no saving it. This is it. This is done.

Reddit Won’t Turn Over IP Address of User Who May Have Leaked Twenty One Pilots’ Song

Twenty One Pilots
Jason Tate

Josh Katzowitz, writing for The Daily Dot, on Atlantic Records trying to get Reddit to release the IP address of the person that leaked a Twenty One Pilots’ song on the service:

“Upon becoming aware of the Posting, Atlantic attempted to have the illegally-distributed copies of ‘Heathens’ removed from the Internet,” the label said in the lawsuit. “Despite expending significant effort and funds in this attempt, the removal efforts were ultimately unsuccessful in curtailing further widespread distribution… As a result of the need to change the release date of ‘Heathens,’ Atlantic’s marketing efforts were substantially frustrated … Sales of the ‘Heathens’ single, which were unsupported by Atlantic’s carefully-planned marketing strategy, failed to reach predicted levels, causing substantial harm to Atlantic in the form of lost single and album sales revenue.”

Univision Buying Gawker

Money
Jason Tate

Universion is buying Gawker for $135 million dollars.

Here’s a statement from Gawker Media owner Nick Denton: “Gawker Media Group has agreed this evening to sell our business and popular brands to Univision, one of America’s largest media companies that is rapidly assembling the leading digital media group for millennial and multicultural audiences. I am pleased that our employees are protected and will continue their work under new ownership — disentangled from the legal campaign against the company. We could not have picked an acquirer more devoted to vibrant journalism.”

Goodbye, Weatherbox

Jason Tate

Dylan Andersen, writing on Medium, saying goodbye to Weatherbox:

Weatherbox is quite frankly, the most underrated rock band I have ever had the privilege of listening to and getting to see live. Period. They are so criminally underrated that it angers, frustrates, and even saddens me to see them go out this way. The sales/response to Flies in All Directions was clearly not wanted the label — Triple Crown Records — or the band wanted to see, but it was still some of the band’s best work to date.

Elliotte Friedman on the Viral Michael Phelps Race Call

Jason Tate

By now you’ve probably seen the viral video of a Canadian announcer messing up the call while Michael Phelps wins yet another gold medal. Michael Rosenberg spoke with the announcer for Sports Illustrated and it’s a master class in taking responsibility and dedication to your profession:

He only has two requests. One is that I write that if an athlete messed up like that, we would want the athlete to talk, and that’s why he is doing this. He is no hypocrite. The second request is that I put the mistake entirely on him. When I ask if a producer or production assistant was in his earpiece during the race, he bristles. It’s his fault, he says. Entirely his. Write it that way.

Blog: The Election Won’t Be Rigged. But It Could Be Hacked.

Technology
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

As President Obama pointed out in a news conference last week, where he called charges of electoral rigging “ridiculous,” states and cities set up voting systems, not the federal government. That’s true, and it means the voting machine landscape is a patchwork of different systems, which makes the election hard to manipulate in a coordinated way.

But it’s still a bleak landscape.

Over the years, the team at Princeton, cooperating with other researchers, has managed to disable and tamper with many direct recording electronic systems that use touch-screen computers without a verifiable paper trail.

Twitter: “A Honeypot for Assholes”

Twitter
Jason Tate

Charlie Warzel, writing for Buzzfeed, with a massive condemnation of Twitter and their handling of trolls and abuse on their platform:

According to 10 high-level former employees, the social network’s long history with abuse has been fraught with inaction and organizational disarray. Taken together, these interviews tell the story of a company that’s been ill-equipped to handle harassment since its beginnings. Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority. On Twitter, abuse is not just a bug, but — to use the Silicon Valley term of art — a fundamental feature.

If I had to venture a guess, I think an outside company buys Twitter within the next 8 months. I see the amount of fly-by bullshit in my @replies on a weekly basis and I know for a fact it’s not anywhere near what other people are getting. I hope someone buys them and makes a better community. Twitter could be, should be, a fantastic place online. It’s not.

Inside the Mind of Steven Spielberg

Jason Tate

Jon Mooallem, writing at Wired, with a giant profile on Steven Spielberg:

That’s just how it is: all your feelings bound up together. You are scared of so many things but simultaneously drawn to them. You are infatuated with airplanes but terrified of flying. You love Disney films but later describe the shooting of Bambi’s mother as giving you PTSD. Outside of your bedroom window in New Jersey, across a long, empty field, is a tremendous tree. “I was terrified by the tree. It was a huge tree,” you’ll later remember, and at night you watch its dark silhouette morph into horrible, demonic things. “Every single night my imagination would find something else to fear.” And still, you stare at the tree every single night. You revisit the things that scare you until they don’t scare you anymore. You love that cycle of tension and resolution; it will become another trademark of your films.