Thanks to the HTML Review (specifically, the Garry Ing essay), I have encountered Evan Roth's All HTML. It's a bizarre looking website that makes zero sense unless you've ever made a website yourself - just View Source and you'll see all the parts laid bare. Fun.

If you see someone complaining that "the web isn't fun anymore" - steer them towards The HTML Review, an online "journal of literature made to exist on the web." Take two seconds to look at Issue 03 and you'll get the appeal - a giant spinning table of contents! It's fun, it's beautiful and it's a portal to even more engaging pieces.

This Forest Void by Hannah Jenkins is a series of small poems that reveal themselves and, if you're patient, rescramble themselves. A Cragislist cacophony from Sarah Chekfa, a video game prologue from Nicholas O'Brien. A View Source essay from Garry Ing. These things require you to spend time with them - it's not a single serving stream of swipe left / swipe right / IG stories / text feeds - but they are distinctly Of The Web. It's great to see and even better to experience.

I've been listening to Lionlimb, aka Stewart Bronaugh with Joshua Jaeger, since their initial, gorgeous, release Shoo back in 2016. The newest album, Limbo was just recently announced and is set for release in late May.

There's only one song available at this very moment but the album writeup speaks of 70's Italian movie influences, funky basslines, melodramatic strings and "making music that could easily belong on Twin Peaks just as much as a Western cowboy film." I'm in.

a fusion of Postgres and Airtable. I dont know who needs to see this but maybe its you.

Castlevania ReVamped is a fan made overhaul of the 1986 NES classic into a sprawling Metroidvania type game. Loads of new power-ups, levels, etc etc. Kind of what you'd hope for from a fan remake of a game with 38 years to percolate on ideas. The trailer looks fantastic.

If you, like me, do not have a way to play a game like this, you can always turn to YouTube to passively partake.

a delightful read about creativity and getting out of your own way

It seems a little silly for me to post about an article in The Verge as I imagine anyone still reading this blog is also a fairly ardent reader of The Verge. However, there's a lot of content out there, so maybe you missed it. I did.

This piece - possibly entitled "Indie, rocked or Pitchfork Lived And Died By The Internet - is an insightful rundown on the history of Pitchfork, its influence on music and, most importantly, how the Internet was its ultimate demise.

Spoiler alert: music is much less of a valued commodity now than it was in the 80s and 90s when I was young. Turns out, having access to millions of songs makes you less invested than when you only have 12. I don't know that I see this as dire as the article makes it out to be. More music being available also means it's possible for more people to make music. A process that previously cost thousands upon thousands of dollars can be done with free software now. That's incredible.

The eulogy of Pitchfork has been spread far and wide but it's actually not quite dead yet. They're still publishing. I haven't read it regularly in over a decade so I have no idea how culturally relevant it is to anyone. I always found it intentionally obtuse or willfully antagonistic, sometimes both. From reading the article, it seems that was on purpose.

Regardless of my feelings on it, its place in Internet history and music history is undeniable. The article does a nice job of capturing that.

I am happy to report that the little we know is actually likely incorrect. There is something satisfying about that tbh.

a compelling read with a conclusion that is somewhat ironic and unfortunate

If you're not subscribed to Ben's Bites - a daily AI newsletter - you should go subscribe now. Always a morning treat.

They recently linked up this Dan Shipper piece Can a Startup Kill ChatGPT? It's a nice read with plenty of insights worth considering. However, what I really enjoyed about it was the plain and simple reminder of the definition of disruption. These three paragraphs are a nice clip but it really works well within the larger piece. Go read it.

The word “disruption” is used colloquially to mean any instance where a startup beats an incumbent, but in its original formulation, it meant something specific.

Disruption, as theorized by Clayton Christensen in the early 1990s, is a process by which a startup offers a lower-cost product that performs worse along standard dimensions of performance for a small subset of customers outside of the mainstream. The product gets adoption, though, because it performs better on a new dimension of performance that is important to its niche customer set. Over time, the disruptor improves on standard performance metrics so that it can move up-market to higher-value customers, while maintaining its other advantages.

The startup is able to displace a larger, well-managed incumbent because the latter sees that the startup’s original product is lower cost and lower margin, and generally performs worse. So it looks like a bad business. Therefore, the incumbent fails to react until it’s too late.

The boys over at The Horror Fried Podcast recently covered the 1981 film debut of Eric Weston, Evilspeak. It's brand new to me but take 2 minutes to watch the trailer and I think you'll be as intrigued as I am... Clint Howard conjures a demon from his Tandy TRS-80 to seek revenge on his bullying classmates. If you wanna spoil a bit of it for yourself (like I did), you can watch the conjuring scene. It's like a prophetic, satanic, ChatGPT run through a terminal emulator.. and it's good.

The Wikipedia entry for it reveals that it was banned in the UK (TIL "video nasty") and praised by Anton LaVey. Amusing facts all around.

I was recently introduced to Venjent, a DJ / musician / drum-n-bass enthusiast. I suggest an Instagram deep dive but anywhere you start is a good place.

an entire operating system made with PICO-8. helluva aesthetic.

somehow I feel both incredibly impressed and entirely turned off. worth a gander tho!

Take 9 minutes and watch the Aidy Bryant Opening Monologue from the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards. It is delightfully funny.

I've nothing particularly interesting to add here, sometimes you just need a nice, amusing, break.

saw this back in 2018 and was impressed by the Moebius vibes. Here again in 2024, still impressed.

the headline is more intriguing than the results but it is a helluva big step in the right direction.

Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman recently sponsored and officially introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act, aka Artist Compensation Royalty Fund (fka H.Con.Res.102). The legalese of the resolution may be hard to parse through but accompany announcement summarizes it fairly well:

The Living Wage for Musicians Act would create a new streaming royalty, with the aim to compensate artists and musicians more fairly at a penny per stream when their music plays on streaming services. Currently, musicians make tiny fractions of a penny per stream, while streaming has grown to represent 84% of recorded music industry revenue in the U.S. Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service, pays rights-holders an average per-stream royalty of $0.003, which means it takes artists more than 800,000 monthly streams to equal a full-time $15/hour job.

A bit more discretely put, it collects money from music platforms and then has a third party service pay out those funds, bypassing labels. The intent is to ensure that streaming services are paying musicians a fair wage, which public sentiment all agrees they are not. The resolution does include a payout cap per artist per month to ensure the funds are spread out more equally and the payouts are based on actual streams played, not just having music available on a DSP.

There's lots of lively discourse on Reddit of course - which I recommend reading. For the most part, they feel the bill is misguided at best and total trash at worst. They don't propose alternatives but, hey, Reddit gonna Reddit.

Of course, if this passes and the tax is applied to DSPs, they will simply pass that cost along to consumers, increasing the cost of subscriptions. Personally, I don't think $15/mo (or more!) is too expensive for access to the wealth of music that is available but I can understand how others would disagree.

It's not a simple topic and I'm sure the resolution has its flaws. However, it's more than anyone else has done recently and I'm glad to see the conversation moving forward. You can help by signing the petition of support and then contacting your representative to tell them you support it. The UMAW site makes both extremely simple, please go for it.

Excellent read on the history of Kickstarter and, more specifically, the pivot to crypto that came with an investment from a16z. The article gives plenty of reasons to wince at their growth pains but, quite frankly, running a successful business is very hard. I've known a handful of folks that have worked there and I've always respected it as an outsider looking in, even when it was disappointing to see them not keep up with competitors.

No shade from my end being thrown towards them, it's just a fascinating read.

Riddler is a fun daily word game that tasks you with substituting a single letter in a word to answer a riddle. There are helpful clues and quick little cheats to help if you get stuck but you should have no problem. You're smart. You'll get it.

via pmo.