bandcamp.com – David Bazan has consistently produced music that scratches my itch. Careful lyrical slices of a life rife with internal struggles, his Pedro the Lion records are embedded into my amygdala. In my opinion, Winners Never Quit and Control are quintessential albums that sit in my teenage requiem. Bandcamp interviews Bazan on some of his influences, past and future, and of course, his bandcamp picks. Highly recommend reading, and happy listening.
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David Bazan Picks His Bandcamp Favorites
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1 min read
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The Graphic Art of Incredibles 2 — Josh Holtsclaw
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1 min read
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joshholtsclaw.com – An incredible blog post from Josh Holtsclaw, an Art Director at Pixar. I love coming across these. This post in particular documents a lot of the process, design thinking and iteration that goes into the art direction for the film Incredibles 2
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I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
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1 min read
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And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper’s robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet’s engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn’t worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business – not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
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The Best Daily Note iOS Shortcuts
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2 min read
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I am not interested in shelling out money to use productivity apps. This is for two reasons:
- Most productivity software has moved to a subscription model. No thanks.
- Apple provides these out-of-the-box on iOS and macOS. Seems good!
If those two items resonate with you, you’ve come to the right place. There’s of course problems with staying with the Apple ecosystem. For example features and bugfixes typically only ship once a year. Sometimes, you get no features at all in a given release cycle! A small trade-off for inexpensive productivity apps.
I love Obsidian. Especially because you get a lot for free. But, I keep coming back to the Notes App. It is simply too easy to use and frankly more available when I just need a place to jot something down. It also seems that Apple is making incremental steps to improve Notes, especially in the context of Apple Intelligence making its way to iOS users very soon:
That being said, the true power of the Notes app lies hidden within another another app altogether… Shortcuts! iOS Shortcuts are the key to unlocking more effective productivity across the Apple ecosystem.
I’m shamelessly re-posting Volkov’s iOS Shortcuts from his piece titled, The Digital Minimalist’s Complete Guide to Information Management in Apple Ecosystem:
Basic with No Tasks:https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/9f26253a78a7462b87eb29a374e88fe4
Daily Plan based on Reminders:https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d980745a1468406cbc11f63df7cbb271
Daily Plan based on Things 3 (latest version):https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b28b3936596d44fea7311cc92e59e6d9
Daily Plan for TickTick (a bit different logic):https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/47d10b291c9747c2b744059289c6ed33I recommend taking Volkov’s Shortcuts and editing them to your liking! For example, I like the ‘Basic’ shortcut as a base template. I edited the shortcut to always save a note in a
Daily Notesfolder and to always default to ISO 8601 date format (e.g.2024-06-29).Probably anecdotal at this point, but I keep my Shortcut on my homescreen over the actual Notes app, so I can always tap right into my Daily Note:
If you want my fork of Volkov’s daily note shortcut, you’re welcome to have it: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d23d9cc51c1b433f9d2299db5bf676c4
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Kinky Friedman has died
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1 min read
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A Texas legend. A prolific satirist. A poignant and irreverent political superstar in a state full of bullshitters and snake-oil salesmen, Kinky was a breath of fresh air.
Friedman gained a reputation as a provocateur. In the early 1970s, he formed the satirical country band Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys — which penned songs like “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.” Later, he published novels that often featured a fictionalized version of himself, including “Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola” and “Armadillos and Old Lace.”
In politics, Friedman staked out unusual positions at the time for someone seeking statewide office in Texas, like legalization of marijuana and casino gambling. He supported same-sex marriage in 2006, long before the Supreme Court legalized it nationally, quipping, “I support gay marriage because I believe they have right to be just as miserable as the rest of us.”
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The last time I saw Crawford’s work at the MoMA it was maybe around 2021. It left me filled with anguish and a lot of contempt for industrial progression. Which, frankly I needed the perspective. Immensely thankful I live in a city where I can go visit the MoMA to experience Anatomy of an AI System in person.
Calculating Empires is a little different in some respects, but also very much a similar research visualization. From the about page of calculatingempires.net:
Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today.
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Kwon is best known for capturing the burgeoning New York hip-hop scene from the late 1980s to the late 2000s, featuring iconic figures such as Notorious B.I.G., Method Man, and De La Soul.
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Paul Nicholson, designer and creator of the Aphex Twin Logo shares his creative design process
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1 min read
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Back in 2017, Resident Advisor visited Paul Nicholson. He shares his creative design process for Aphex Twin’s (Richard D. James) Selected Ambient Works Volume II (sometimes abbreviated as SAW II) album artwork. Novel and fun to hear him talk about some of the design choices he made. You can tell he’s giddy to expand on some of the deliberate artwork choices (like the chart symbols corresponding to different tracks on SAW II).