I love The Claypool Lennon Delirium. With their focus on weird and wacky stories from the news (see “Amethyst Realm”, “Boriska”, and “Bubbles Burst”, among many others), I think they've even invented a new genre: tabloid rock.
My favorite song of theirs is probably “Blood and Rockets”, but “Amethyst Realm” is a close second.
“As a Facebook user, I want to have my personal information stored and utilized in very specific ways so that I can be manipulated into attempting to dismantle democracy.”
For those who don't get the joke, user stories are used in software development to describe features that should be added to applications. They describe the features concisely, but they are also supposed to be written from the point of view of someone who would want that feature (“As a… I want… so that…”). In practice, many user stories are written based on some mandate from management, even though no reasonable human being would ever want such a thing. In those cases, the user stories sound extremely awkward. Another example might be something like, “As a user, I want to pay more for the software so that the company can make it better over time.” That's the basis of the “Shit User Story” humor. It's funny because it's all to easy to imagine some product manager at Facebook actually writing this.
User stories come from Agile Software Development—a method of developing software that originally intended to empower developers, reward craftsmanship, and improve customer interaction. It saddens me that Agile has become yet another tool of bullshit corporate control, yet another half-assed, top-down process that engineers are forced to follow after the concept has been twisted and mutilated past the point of utility. That's been going on for years, though. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said a thousand times already. I suppose it could now be called the enshittification of Agile.
Apparently, Dan Nigro, who I saw twice around 2004 with As Tall as Lions at the fun but ill-fated Downtown in Farmingdale, who joked on stage about being from “Massapequa Pawk,” is now one of the world's biggest pop music songwriters. That's kind of inspiring. He probably didn't end up where he thought he would, but he still ended up doing good work he seems to love.
I think a former coworker named Brandon claimed to have signed As Tall as Lions, or at least worked on their management team in some capacity. I don't remember exactly. Small world, though.
ATAL was pretty great. I didn't like them at first, but they grew on me over time. I especially loved their self-titled album and “Goodnite, Noises Everywhere”. I also wrote about “Maybe I'm Just Tired” in an earlier blog post about playlist functionality.
“Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.”
—Jaron Lanier in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
I was pretty excited recently to speak with a customer support agent who knew the NATO phonetic alphabet. Finally, some clarity! With a last name like mine, it really helps.
If I were king for a day, I'd address many of those little annoyances we face every day by requiring that everyone…
On my second day, maybe I'd mandate Unix line endings and outlaw feedback requests. We'll see.
It saddens me that social media appears to have taught so many people that the purpose of conversation is to score points.
If we want to create a better world, good people need to persuade others to at least consider their perspectives. Dunking on them does not achieve that. In fact, dunking on outsiders has to be one of the most effective ways of pushing them even further away.
Why do we do it?
Righteous indignation powerfully affects the world. For that reason, we need to be sure we're actually right before we act on it, or for that matter, before it acts on us.