The Death of the Middle-Class Musician | The Walrus »

This feels like a companion-piece to Los Campesinos! documenting their tour of Ireland. It sounds incredibly rough out there for mid-level musicians.

EA CEO’s pay is up, as EA worker median income drops »

The graph showing the CEO’s wages in relation to those of the average worker is eye-opening. At these numbers, things get hard to visualise but this does the best job I’ve seen.

Toward A Theory Of Kevin Roose | Defector »

Every week, I listen to Kevin Roose and Casey Newton’s podcast and I’m flabbergasted by the complete lack of incredulity these two bring to the world of technology, so it’s great to read a thorough dunking like this:

And I was thinking about Kevin Roose, serially and with apparent enthusiasm donning each next pair of gigantic clown shoes handed to him by this or that Silicon Valley titan, and dancing in them long past the point when everybody else figured out it was all on behalf of a grift.

But this paragraph also resonated with me, after a week of reading so many “Nintendo Switch 2 vs Steamdeck” arguments:

My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.

Spot on.

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the solar system »

CW: existential dread at the vastness of space as depicted through individual pixels on a screen.

How to make a BobbyBroccoli video »

TIL Jon Bois uses Google Maps to make his videos??

Things End: Punk Planet, Year 13 | dansinker.com »

I’ve enjoyed Dan Sinker’s series on each year in the making of Punk Planet and this last entry, about the end, is particularly lovely. And what a great conclusion.

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry | The Verge »

This is truly the stupidest argument.

Quite a lot of voices say, ‘You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data. I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” Clegg said.

This reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency »

I’d like to remind you that our company policy is pro–Plagiarism Machine™. We’re a tech-forward, future-oriented company that doesn’t shy away from the promise of new innovation—even if that innovation is a Giant Plagiarism Machine™ that copy-pastes existing innovation into fake sentient sentences.

Christ, this is a little on the nose.

Type Help by William Rous »

I spent a good part of the weekend playing Type Help, an incredible Twine game by William Rous. Each chapter of the story is told in files with the format <timecode>-<two-letter room code>-[list of code for the people in the room at the time], e.g. one of the first you are given is 02-EN-1-6-7-10. It’s been compared to Return of the Obra Dinn and that’s a fair enough comparison – in both games, you progress by analysing the story – but I feel like Type Help is probably the game that will stick with me longer because of the metatextual element. I’m also SO impressed with the mechanics of this. I’ve been working with hypertext for 30 years now and this was pretty new to me (other people have done the “guess the address of the page” before, but never to tell a story like this).

Anyway, this gets my highest recommendation.

My perfect Music app doesn’t exist - Hicks.design »

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.