David Emery Online
Reincarnated by Kendrick Lamar
I didn’t get as hyped as everyone else over the Drake back and forth, but this is a great victory lap from Kendrick.
Also — a good reminder, as ever, not to write your end of year lists too soon.
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On Bluesky
Did I need another social app to check? No not really.
But yet, here we are. For now I like it just fine, but let’s see how it all plays out. It would be great if we could get past the “replicating Twitter but less evil” phase that the competing networks are stuck on, and get on with figuring out what might come next.
Visit ➔LCD Soundsystem x Miles Davis
I couldn’t not post this. The music! The DJ-ing using YouTube! The fact it’s been on the internet for thirteen years I’ve only just seen it!
Via Kottke.
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Writ Small: "Today" by Julie Morstad
“How was your day?” was the first story I ever asked my kid to tell me.
This line hit me as remarkably profound.
And true — you can see the cogs of storytelling slowly start to mesh together as they grow up, narrative and plot appearing out of a steam of consciousness.
Well, when they don’t just say “it was ok”, which is remarkably often.
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Collaborative Playlists in Apple Music
The latest version of iOS—17.3—just dropped*, and with it comes a great and long overdue update to Apple Music: Collaborative Playlists.
There’s delightful touches throughout, including emoji reactions per song, which strikes me as just the right amount of social in a Music app.
If you want to test it out, update to 17.3 and add something good (no pressure) to my shared playlist (link below).
* Can operating systems “drop”, or is that reserved for sneakers and hipster brewery collabs? Needs research.
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Apple Music Replay ‘23
Apple Music Replay ‘23 just launched—I say ‘launched’, but you can actually get your stats all year round, so it’s just the final year recap that’s fresh.
Either way, this just makes me wonder what a Taylor x Four Tet remix would sound like…
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Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?
The world is racing to develop ever more sophisticated large language models while a small language model unfurls itself in my home.
A beautiful mediation on a concept that has been contained to science fiction for the longest time but, now, is quickly losing the “fiction”. While it is likely that AI and large language models may well take jobs away from people, it seems that philosophers have heady days ahead of them.
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The Inter typeface family
Inter is a workhorse of a typeface carefully crafted & designed for a wide range of applications, from detailed user interfaces to marketing & signage.
A wonderful free, open source typeface, just updated to version 4 with a range of additional alternate glyphs and styles.
So wonderful, in fact, that I’ve just switched it in to replace the default-choice Helvetica on this site. Much better. I particularly like the option that let you switch in slashed zeros—amongst many other little tweaks—to give it a little more character.
(No pun intended.)
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The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport. It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?
Never have I been more interested to know why a bridge was built.
Visit ➔Radiohead x Kendrick Lamar
A NYC DJ named Dwells released this mashup of Radiohead's Everything In Its Right Place and Kendrick Lamar's N95 back in March and I love it.
— From Kottke.org
There’s two things I like about this.
Firstly, if you mash up my favourite album from 2022 with my favourite album of 2000, and you do it this well, there’s no way I’m not going to write about it.
Secondly, posting a mashup clip from YouTube, found on another blog, seems so deeply noughties that I’m getting nostalgic whiplash. Be right back, I’m just going to put this on my Facebook wall.
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