A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfils the brief.
I both love and hate Apple Music. Jon Hicks goes about redesigning it to make it feel more 2025.
tbqh even if they just adopted the “label Apple-created playlists with a wee Apple symbol”, I’d be much happier Apple Music user.
In an effort to de-Bezos myself, I canceled my Audible subscription and switched over to libro.fm. It doesn’t have nearly the same depth of catalogue as Audible, but they only sell DRM-free audiobooks AND you can nominate a bookshop to support, so a portion of every purchase I make goes towards a local Irish children’s bookshop. Nice!
The other night, I saw they were selling what they claimed was The Iliad translated by Emily Wilson and I bought it immediately, despite the fact there were a lot of things that really should have made me suspicious:
From the first line, it was obvious this was not the Emily Wilson translation. This was the public-domain, hundred-year-old (and fairly trash) Lang, Leaf and Myers translation. Yikes!
But I also started to suspect this was AI narration. A painfully flat affect, unnatural intonations, and two completely different pronunciations of “Atreides” (a name that, incidentally, doesn’t even appear in the Wilson translation). Every line ends in a semi-questionmark which is a trick used by stochastic parrots to gain some wiggle-room and maybe make it sound like they understand the meaning of the words they’re saying. This illusion works reasonably well in short bursts, but they were trying to do it across a 15 hour book?
I started looking into the publisher, “Paradox Audios”. Libro.fm are selling at least nine books from this publisher. And they all have a few things in common.
Take a listen to the sample of "Door in the Wall" narrated by “Samuel Grant”. Now listen to "The Canon of Sherlock Holmes" narrated by “Thomas Jenkins”. That is the exact same voice. Also, Thomas Jenkins has never narrated anything before, and the first book he’s reading is a 65 hour epic? Not a chance.
Any one of these is fishy enough, but all together, it’s obvious this “publisher” is clearly someone who is just churning out AI slop and selling it to audiobook sellers. And it’s kind of working! As of writing (2025-04-19), their versio of The Iliad is #4 in Libro.fm’s list of bestsellers in the “Poetry” category, behind Ian Mackellen reading The Odyssey but ahead of Stephen Fry’s Troy (read by Stephen Fry).
In a thoughtful blog post published in October last year, Libro addressed the issue of AI narration. They said:
We are actively taking steps to increase transparency around audiobooks that are AI-narrated by properly labeling them on our site and in our apps. As an audiobook retailer and app, we are not involved in the production AI-narrated audiobooks; so labelling them requires collaboration with our publishing partners.
Which is fair enough, I think!
And in their defence, I wrote to them to let them know my issues with the version of The Iliad I had purchased and they immediately issued a refund and said they’d shared my email with their content team and they’d be looking into the books from Paradox Audios.
But it’s not just Libro.fm. Kobo also has the Paradox Audios version of The Iliad. So does Apple Books. Do you know who doesn’t have it? Audible. (Probably because they locked down exclusive rights to the actual Wilson translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey).
What it feels like, to me, is that in order to compete with Audible, the other audiobook sellers are turning to these no-name, unscrupulous publishers to bulk out their catalogue. And it’s making their product worse.
So short-sighted. I really do want to support independent booksellers as best I can, and I would much rather Libro just say “Yeah we don’t have it”, rather serving up this dreadful slop.
Since I’m on the subject of Libro.fm, I just wanted to touch on something I mentioned earlier. Remember I talked about the other books coming up when you search for Nathan Brooks as a narrator? Rather than giving each narrator a unique ID and attaching that to the credit, Libro do a fuzzy search. So not only is the AI “Nathan Brooks” from The Iliad NOT the same as the one that read those Keto books (one is English, the other American), books like Meister der Angst also turn up in the search results. These are books with a whole cast of narrators and we’re matching partial names. In this case, “David Nathan” and “Farina Brock”. Not even close! But it makes these sketchy narrators look more legit, at least from a cursory glance.
Rob Shearer outlines some of the issues he sees with Mastodon as it currently stands and, as much as I want Mastodon to work, it’s hard to disagree with a lot of his complaints.
Plus you just have to look at the subtoots his post have generated to see how right he is about the worst of that place.
The thing about Europe is its economy is permanently stuck in the doldrums, a global cautionary tale. And no wonder. Europeans enjoy August off, retire in their prime and spend more time eating and socialising with their families than inhabitants of any other region.
I was not expecting to see such a pro-Europe article from The Economist of all places.
Oh, and no EU leader has ever launched their own cryptocurrency.
YET, Economist. No EU leader has launched their own cryptocurrency YET.
Figure 1: Blue Prince, my current contender for GotY
Note: I’m going to do my best not to spoil Blue Prince but it’s a hard one to talk around and everyone has a different tolerance for spoilers. If you feel like I’m giving too much away, let me know!
I spent the weekend playing Blue Prince with my kids. And they seem to be enjoying it? They’ve gotten into videogames recently but rarely stray outside of the standard kid’s fare like Minecraft and Mario Kart. I think they like the fact that Blue Prince is cozy and slightly cerebral, even if they don’t quite understand all of the things that are happening or why I might draft one room over another. But in the game, each room is a puzzle or a layer to a puzzle and I love hearing them theorise what each element of the room might be.
(Incidentally, they’ve occasionally been really helpful. There’s a picture on a wall that I just couldn’t figure out. For hours, I kept thinking “Is that Donald Trump??”. And my daughter copped it first time. I’d still be bashing my head against it if it wasn’t for her).
Playing it yesterday with my 7-year-old beside me and I reached a room with a load of things in it that I didn’t understand. “I’m not sure what these are but I’ll bet they’re important”, I said to him. So I grabbed screenshots of all the things, and asked him what he thought they were. And so we came up with a little story of what they were, and then moved onto another thing.
A couple of runs later, we were doing something else in the game and came to a whole new area I’d never visited before. As I was looking around, getting an idea of what I was looking at and I said “does this look kinda familiar?”. And at the exact same time, we both came to the realisation that these were the things we’d been looking at just an hour ago and that I’d screenshotted. The delight on his little face as he realised he’d worked it out was spectacular.
(The other take-away from this is that I have the same mental capabilities of a 7-year-old but let’s just skip over that for now.)
Anyway, Blue Prince is a really great game. But even better if you can play it as a multiplayer experience with two little buddies.
The first half is overstuffed with too many story threads that don’t go anywhere (although we can largely forgive this because “Black Leather Rock” is great). And good Christ it is molasses-slow. The second half is much more straightforward Hammer fare, albeit a fairly middling entry, with radiated children being kept under wraps by a secret government agency.
There’s an interesting streak of nihilism peeking through here that I wish they’d leaned into.
Do you like watching an entire film through a tiny pinprick of light? Then boy do I have the film for you.
The Blair Witch Project comparisons are obvious - a bunch of young people head off into the wilderness with video cameras and go slowly insane - but the second half goes off in such a weird hallucinogenic, experimental cosmic horror tangent that it suffers slightly in the comparison. People expecting a straightforward found footage horror will be disappointed.
A better point of comparison is The Evil Dead (there are a couple of shots toward the end that seem to directly reference this as an influence). And this is what unlocked the film for me. Once I realised this film was just a bunch of genre sickos armed with a microbudget, a camera and buckets of caro syrup and having lots of fun, I vibed with the film a lot more. Unfortunately the many, many (way too many) frustrating torch scenes meant I’d already semi-checked out by the time I saw what they were actually trying to do and it wasn’t enough to fully save the film for me.
It’s a testament to Noah Hathaway’s performance that multiple generations have been so deeply traumatised by something that happens to a horse that we’re introduced to barely one scene before.
Oof this is a hard one to score. On the one hand, my kids absolutely loved it and it was everything they wanted from a Minecraft movie. There’s a reunion late in the film that had my son slapping both his knees with relief and delight and he was fully invested. For kids, this film is absolutely delivering the goods.
On the other hand, “kids like it” isn’t an excuse for a film to not really try. What we’re left with is a film about creativity that demonstrates almost no creativity in itself. Jack Black’s entire direction appears to have been “just do your normal Jack Black thing pls”. The main characters have no arc and are completely forgotten for large parts of the film, completely lost in the messy action. There were a couple of nice creature effects, but most of the effects felt flat and volume-y.
On the the other other hand (we’re on our third hand now), this really could have been a lot worse.
This just didn’t work for me. The first act was a bit of grim fun but ultimately felt like Director Bong on auto-pilot. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, the film becomes something else entirely when Ruffalo and Colette appear giving career-worst performances and completely upend the film’s tone and pointedness of the satire.
Disappointing.