David Emery Online

Vicennial

Two decades ago today, I walked into an unassuming converted collection of terrace houses, somewhere in Wandsworth, South London, and began working in the music industry. It was purely by chance that I ended up there, really. Growing up, I had always wanted to work in music, but I never really knew how, or even where to start. I had no connections, no understanding of the industry beyond a vague notion of what a record label was, and certainly no resources to work as an unpaid intern — the “traditional” route in.

I did, though, have a knack for computers — a genetic trait, seemingly, as I ended up doing roughly the same computer science degree as both my parents and brother. That degree took me to working as a graduate at a Mac software developer — an ideal job, perfectly suited to my at-the-time quite specific skill set, in a field that wasn’t exactly awash with roles.

I got made redundant after six months.

In hindsight, it was the most fortunate thing that could have happened, but it sure didn’t feel like it at the time. It led me to bouncing around doing various freelance things, which turned out wasn’t all that...

Frame of preference

This would be a wonderful trip down memory lane just by itself — and I say this as someone who remembers well everything from about 1991 onwards, which is far too long a go to consider.

But! You realise after a moment that the computer screens throughout aren’t static images, they’re fully working emulators of the damn Macs. The whole thing, Finder, ancient versions of iTunes, Control Strip — history in a bottle, through the narrative of system settings.

Sometimes I struggle a little with everything that the internet has become, but then every once in a while something like this comes along, a piece of art that could only be born on the web, like a pearl in a river of sludge. It’s not all bad.

Twenty

This blog turned twenty years old last week, and I have a couple of things to say about that. I had planned to post on the day, but instead I took my children to an aeroplane museum on the west coast of France — we were already in France, just to be clear, we didn’t hop on an EasyJet just to scamper round a hanger of French military paraphernalia. Anyway, there are several things that 22-year-old me would have found surprising about that excuse.

Twenty years is a long time. The second post on this blog was that Adobe was buying Macromedia, which was a big deal at the time and now a distant footnote. The fourth was about the launch of Google Maps in the UK. This blog predates YouTube by about a week. A couple of months after I started blogging, I inadvertently live blogged the 7/7 London terror attacks.

When I started this blog, I was a freelance web designer mostly writing about tech and music. This blog helped me get a job at a record label, which, well, has led to a lot. A lot of those early posts were about Apple, and now that’s...

The hardest working font in Manhattan

A beautiful deep dive into a font you have definitely seen, but likely never noticed.

The sheer craft that has gone into this article is remarkable. A reminder of the best that the web can be, and a timely palate cleanser in amongst everything else that is going on right now.

Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?

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.

The Inter typeface family

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.)

In Memory Of Tweetbot

For a while I’ve been hearing people say how “bad” their Twitter experience has been recently. How many controversy-baiting tweets they’re being pushed, or how often they get content they just don’t want to see. This had always confused me, as it didn’t match at all with what I was seeing—I thought to myself that maybe they should just unfollow whoever was retweeting that content into their timelines.

Well, now I get it.

I’ve not used the official Twitter client in—checks notes—over a decade and, well, it turns out it’s not… great. Spot checking it just now, and out of my latest 15 posts, 7 of them are negative, click-batey noise that the algorithm is prioritising as the most “engaging” content. I’m also getting notifications about random accounts that I don’t follow having posted. Hugh Laurie’s dog has died. Thanks for letting me know, Twitter.

Tweetbot has been one of my top used apps for years, but also my refuge. Always focused on the user experience above all else, it is such a loss to see it come to an end in such an abrupt and unceremonious way.

The only silver lining to this dark cloud is that Ivory—Tapbot’s new Mastodon client—is brilliant. It already feels like home.

A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.

I could have quoted all of this, it’s well worth a read.

It feels like we’re going through a few substantial shifts in technological thinking, all at once. For a long time it felt like we were coalescing around a few large, American, ad-supported social platforms. With the rise of TikTok and—to a much smaller extent—Mastodon, and the fall in Facebook and Twitter, that seems to be undoing.

At the same time, half of my social feed is screengabs of ChatGPT. A year ago it was all terrible mass produced art of bored monkeys, so I guess that’s progress. ChatGPT—or at least, its productionised successor—as a virtual barman for a social community? That’s an interesting thing to think about…

Transitions

When I started my career in music I worked in what was then known as the New Media department. “This new internet malarkey” we collectively thought “is probably something we should pay attention to. Let’s separate out the people that seem to understand what it is hope they don’t cause too much fuss.”

This was a while ago now. The iTunes Store was but a year old in the UK. YouTube didn’t exist yet. If you wanted to watch a music video your best bet was to wait for it to come on MTV. Your other option was to watch a postage-stamp-sized, sub-VHS quality Windows Media or Real Player streaming link.

All of the talk then – at least in the New Media Department – was of the digital transition. At this point this referred to the transition to legal digital downloads from CDs and Napster. It was a format shift. Vinyl to cassettes to CDs to downloads. The concept was the same as it ever had been – buying music. And the overriding thought was that if the industry can make digital download sales work, and litigate like crazy, then the Napster problem would go away.

In hindsight, it’s pretty...

Music Stories

Last week a new band came in to play us their freshly delivered debut album. There is protocol in these situations. Everyone must sit in rapturous contemplation and laser focused attention. Heads must bob. Feet must tap. After every track you must make some gesture that indicates that, yes, that track was good; a smile, a nod, maybe even a quick, muttered “Great”.

Mid way through the second track, one of them gets up, stretches over to the stereo and turns the volume up.

“So, what did you think?”

The one universal constant shared by all the artists I have come across is the wash of nervousness that descends upon them in the split second of silence that follows that question.

Fortunately the room agrees that it is a great piece of work, and even more fortunately they’re not just saying it to avoid an awkward situation (and potential job loss). In the conversation that follows the band go into the ideas behind the record, the context, and also how much time they spent getting the track listing just so. You can hear it, as well; listening from start to finish the album ebbs and flows, building up tension and weight, only to release...