Good article from The New Statesman on some of the race- and gender-related cultural shifts that have been happening this year: What to do when you’re not the hero any more.

This week, when the internet learned that a black woman had been cast in a new play billed as the ‘next instalment’ in the Harry Potter series, author J K Rowling reacted perfectly, reminding fans: "Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione".

Was Rowling imagining a black girl when she sat down to write that book in the mid-1990s? Probably not. But she knows, like the best storytellers, that books are hands held out to lonely children of every age, and not all those lonely children are white boys, and those stories change lives in ways even their authors cannot guess. So it matters. It matters that the “brightest witch of her generation”, the bookish heroine of a generation’s definitive fairytale, doesn’t have to be white every time.

And:

Like a screaming toddler denied a sweet, [the angry backlash] becomes more righteous the more it reminds itself that after all, it’s only a story.

Only a story. Only the things we tell to keep out the darkness. Only the myths and fables that save us from despair, to establish power and destroy it, to teach each other how to be good, to describe the limits of desire, to keep us breathing and fighting and yearning and striving when it’d be so much easier to give in. Only the constitutive ingredients of every human society since the Stone age.

Only a story. Only the most important thing in the whole world.

Read the whole thing.

From the New York Times: E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread).

Still, if we rely solely on e-mail at work, the absence of a channel for the brain’s emotional circuitry carries risks. In an article to be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin Byron, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.

One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients than by senders.

We fail to realize this largely because of egocentricity, according to a 2005 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Sitting alone in a cubicle or basement writing e-mail, the sender internally “hears” emotional overtones, though none of these cues will be sensed by the recipient.

In case you didn’t notice the publication date, that article is from eight long years ago. Eight. The year the first iPhone came out, just to give you a benchmark for how far back in the mists of time we’re talking about here.

So, surely we rely on written electronic communication even more now than we did then: IMs, text messages, Slack, Twitter, Github issues, website comment threads, etc. Increased use of emoticons and emojis can help make our intended message and tone more clear – that’s why I don’t hesitate to use them, despite some people feeling that such things are somehow for teenagers – but working against better clarity is the tendency toward shorter, more abbreviated messages and responses.

The harsh truth of that article (you should read the whole thing) is at least as true today as it was in 2007: there is always – always – something lost in these written communications, and we would do well to remember that, whether we’re the writer, or the reader.

I read my Eyes out, and cant read half enough neither. The more one reads the more one sees We have to read.

— John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, 28 December 1794

We’re done with Apple Music. The whole experience has been a frustrating, bewildering fight against our own devices and music, for virtually no added benefit.

I’ve wasted hours wrestling with weird problems and various amounts of data loss. As I write this, I’m in the middle of another full phone restore, trying to get things back to square one, back to how they were before Apple Music gleefully stomped through and wrecked everything.

Here’s a summary of the most frustrating problems we ran into.

On vacation I spent more than a day trying to get newly bought MP3s to sync from my computer to my phone (you know: the absolutely most basic and simple task of any music player ever made). In this case, it was a prerelease copy that I bought directly from the artist, but it was also listed in Apple Music as a coming-soon release, and maybe that was part of the problem, but I was never quite sure. I’d say “make available offline”, the app would say, “sure thing boss!”, then I’d hop in the car to rock down the road and find: nope. Not there.

Trying to help my wife keep her Jazzercise-instructor playlists in sync with her computer was a constant uphill struggle. And if hers are screwed up, it’s a bigger deal than me being disappointed that I can’t listen to my new music. For her, it means her carefully planned and choreographed class is ruined. Sometimes playlists stayed in sync, sometimes they didn’t. Less than 100% confidence is a deal-breaker, so although I’m just now rage-quitting this aggravating debacle, she’s been off it for a while already.

Having lots of my carefully-tended album art get totally trashed during the Great Upload to the Cloud was really annoying. (This has been complained about by others, as have other iCloud/Match-related woes.)

Somewhere along the line, a bunch of my playlists disappeared. I didn’t even notice when this happened, as they’re static (not “smart”) playlists that I don’t use that often. But most of them are copies of old mixtapes (yes, actual real tapes). I think I’ve recovered the raw data that will let me restore these, thanks to Time Machine backups, but it will be a labor-intensive pain in the ass.

Those were all pretty maddening, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was when the Music app crashed yesterday morning. When it restarted, it was a completely blank white screen. Hmm, that’s not good. Quit the app and started again, then at least there were controls at the bottom, but when I tapped “My Music”, it was a white screen and a “Loading Library” message with a progress bar. It stayed that way during my entire commute to work (no music! See, there is still a case for CDs). I thought it was all right after that, but on my drive home that evening I got a warning about playing music away from wifi, even though I was trying to play my own music, not something streamed. With creeping dread I turned on the “only show music available offline” toggle, and sure enough, everything disappeared. Gone. All gone.

Checking out the disk usage, I found a huge amount of “Other” space. Clearly all that offline music was still taking up space, even though it was inaccessible:

A full reinstall and restore-from-backup later, and it’s fixed. Now all I have to do is re-load the music back on there (and re-enter passwords and Apple Pay credit card info and Touch ID and who knows what else), and then I’ll be back to square one!

Note that all this heartburn is despite the fact that we’re all-in on the Apple Way. We’re using iTunes on Macs, and lots of our purchased music came from the iTunes Store. That is, we’re not trying to do anything weird or bend the rules. And though I bumble around with this stuff sometimes, I am actually a professional computer guy. I shudder to think what kind of shape the music library and iPhone of a “regular person” would be in at this point.

So, we’re out. Maybe it’s for the best. I thought having a blurred-to-nonexistent line between what I own and what I stream would be great, but I never really warmed to it. I use streaming mostly to try out new music, and if I like it, I buy it. So they’re two separate tiers in how I mentally organize my music collection. Having a completely distinct service for that, like Spotify, works fine for me. It will be a little more expensive for our family, but any savings from Apple Music has already been spent a hundred times over in wasted time and frustration. There’s also the recommendations and curated lists and “radio” stations, but I’ve never been much into such services, and during this trial I never found a single new song of interest in those ways. (Which reminds me of a another failure: that “Tell us what you like” bubbles thing and the resulting “For You” recommendations were laughably wrong and completely useless for all of us.)

Update: 8/31 - Still Smoldering

After I thought I’d restored everything, I discovered this morning that my song ratings were all screwed up, too. I obsessively rate the songs in my library. Probably a little too obsessively, but I use those ratings a lot, especially in smart playlists. How the living hell this could have happened, I can’t begin to imagine, but somehow a whole bunch of tracks suddenly had ratings with light gray stars:

The best the Internets could tell me was these are “estimated” track ratings, whatever that means, but more to the point they were wrong. According to the size of my “unrated” smart playlist (told you: obsessive), there were suddenly 4,402 unrated tracks. I didn’t know the right number, but I knew that was way too high. (Once I got stuff restored, the actual number turned out to be 444.)

Thankfully there’s a special directory under the main iTunes directory called “Previous iTunes Libraries”, where Apple apparently backs up your library metadata file before major iTunes upgrades. It’s almost as if they don’t have very high confidence that everything’s going to work. But it turned out to be handy, as all I had to do was dredge up the copy from July 1, that black day I first stepped upon the dismal path of Apple Music, and voila! Except for all the music I’ve added and played and rated since then, I’m back to square one! Again!

I absolutely loved this written version of Maciej Cegłowski’s talk from last year, Web Design: The First 100 Years.

I think it's time to ask ourselves a very designy question: "What is the web actually for?"

I will argue that there are three competing visions of the web right now. The one we settle on will determine whether the idiosyncratic, fun Internet of today can survive.

Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS.

This is the correct vision.

The Web erases the barrier of distance between people, and it puts all of human knowledge at our fingertips. It also allows us to look at still images and videos of millions of cats, basically all of it for free, from our homes or a small device we carry in our pocket.

No one person owns it, no one person controls it, you don’t need permission to use it. And the best part is, you are encouraged to contribute right back. You can post your own cat pictures.

Why is this not enough?

We live in a world now where not millions but billions of people work in rice fields, textile factories, where children grow up in appalling poverty. Of those billions, how many are the greatest minds of our time? How many deserve better than they get? What if instead of dreaming about changing the world with tomorrow's technology, we used today's technology and let the world change us? Why do we need to obsess on artificial intelligence, when we're wasting so much natural intelligence?

When I talk about a hundred years of web design, I mean it as a challenge. There’s no law that says that things are guaranteed to keep getting better.

The web we have right now is beautiful. It shatters the tyranny of distance. It opens the libraries of the world to you. It gives you a way to bear witness to people half a world away, in your own words. It is full of cats. We built it by accident, yet already we’re taking it for granted. We should fight to keep it!

Read the whole thing, it’s excellent (and has more cat pictures than that one above).

I just finished reading Butterick’s Practical Typography, an excellent online book that I found to be just the right depth. That is, it did more than just make fun of Comic Sans and Papyrus, but stayed well short of fancy stuff like setting margins based on the golden ratio. The word “practical” in the title isn’t misleading.

This book just scratches the surface of the huge subject of typefaces, and I doubt I’ll ever be able to tell Arial apart from Helvetica. But after reading it, I do feel like I have a slightly keener eye, and certainly more interest and appreciation for what makes fonts good or bad.

One of my favorite parts is the book’s advice about which standard, widely-available “system” fonts are better than others, as well as the lists of suggested alternatives, which are short and not overwhelming. Practical, you could say. In addition to his own custom-designed fonts, he also recommends some nice free ones, such as Charter (which you’re reading right now), Firefox’s Fira Sans, and Adobe’s Source Code Pro.

As the author says right up front, there’s a lot more to typography than fonts, and with confidence and casual style, he takes you through all of it. It’s a lot of information, but it’s engaging, interesting, and best of all, kept at the practical level. The book’s conciseness and organization also make it a valuable reference.

In fact I’ve already started using it as a reference, as it prompted me to make some typographic improvements to both this blog and the Unicks Bestiary. I almost hesitate to mention these “improvements”, as both sites would probably make a professional designer weep, but I do feel like they’re less bad than they were, at least. It’s fun stuff to tinker with, anyway.

The makeover he does on a sample résumé is a good glimpse at some of the book’s principles in action. And if you go on to read the rest of the book, be sure to pay for it. I did.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and in time. Sometimes at twilight the grey vapours of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath. And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

Time again for my annual best-of music review! The process, as in years past, is to pick my ten favorite “new” albums of the year. “New” is in scare-quotes because I go by new-to-me, not by release date. If there are old albums that I get in the calendar year – as happened this year in spades with Wussy – then they’re eligible for the list, regardless of their oldness.

Here are my 2014 selections, in alphabetical order by artist (I pick the top 10, but I don’t order them further than that). The links are to Wikipedia, and a playlist of all these albums is on Spotify.

Event II, Deltron 3030 - "not a big rap fan, but: a sci-fi concept album + humor = yes please thank you" – me, when I first heard of this album. And that pretty well sums it up. The little interstitial skits are okay, though they can get a little old and they're terrible when shuffling. But overall, this wide-ranging album has a lot of good songs.

Stay Gold, First Aid Kit – With this followup to 2012's The Lion's Roar, these Swedish sisters bring their beautiful voices to another set of beautiful songs. The folksy, simple lyrics aren't afraid to have a little more edge than you might expect.

The Voyager, Jenny Lewis – This one's not unlike the First Aid Kit album in some ways: sunny, warm, 70s-reminiscent pop music, also with an occasional pleasantly surprising lyrical barb. I'd listened to her some in the past, in Rilo Kiley and her album with the Watson Twins, but was never really impressed until this album, which is fantastic. I also saw her perform at ACL Festival in October, and it was the best show of the weekend for me.

Eight Houses, She Keeps Bees – I wish I remembered how I heard of this band. Also mellow, but darker and more electronic than the previous two, this collection of psychedelic songs is great stuff.

Major Arcana, Speedy Ortiz – A little uneven, but overall a nice little indie-rocker album. I saw them at a free Waterloo SXSW show, and they were superb. I even got my CD signed that day.

Warpaint, Warpaint – "Atmospheric, haunting, but with some edge & some texture to keep it from going down too easy" - me, when I recommended this excellent album earlier in the year. Clever, interesting music; I look forward to seeing what else they'll do.

Deep Fantasy, White Lung – This makes two years running for this kick-ass punk band to get an album in my top 10. As with last year's Sorry, it's short (23 minutes), sharp, and to the point.

Attica!, Funeral Dress, and Strawberry, Wussy – So, there's all those bands and albums above, and then there's the band that overwhelmingly dominated my 2014 music: Wussy.

I’d never heard of them before the June 27 episode of Sound Opinions, which named their new album one of the “best of 2014… so far”. I checked it out, and was instantly hooked. I went on to buy all seven of their previous albums from their Bandcamp page, and didn’t find a bad one in the bunch.

I love this band. It’s partly the Ohio-ness of them and their lyrics (Pizza King, Little Miami, the corn-maze in Teenage Wasteland), it’s partly that critics adore them (Robert Christgau said they’re “the best band in America since they released the first of their five superb albums in 2005”), but in the end the main thing is, of course, the music. It’s not flashy or amazing or mind-blowing, it’s just thoroughly and solidly good. Really, really good.

I decided to pick three of their albums for this top 10, enough to show their influence but few enough to allow some other bands onto the list. The rest of Wussy’s fine albums had to settle for song selections on the “best of the rest” playlist, below.

So those are my ten favorite “new” albums of 2014.

And then there are all the rest of the albums. To complete my annual time capsule, I also make a playlist of favorite single tracks from all of the year’s albums that didn’t make the best-album cut, ordered not alphabetically, but in the best mixtape order I can manage with an assortment like this. This “Best of the Rest” is also a playlist on Spotify (minus the 50 Foot Wave tracks).

1. Maglite (Remix) – Wussy, ...Popular Favorites
2. The Grand Destruction Game – Nina Persson, Animal Heart
3. Too True To Be Good – Dum Dum Girls, Too True
4. Antipatriarca – Ana Tijoux, Vengo ^†
5. La La La (Brazil 2014) – Shakira, 2014 Fifa World Cup: One Love, One Rhythm
6. Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair – Arctic Monkeys, Suck It And See
7. Night Mail – Public Service Broadcasting, Inform - Educate - Entertain
8. Black Out Days – Phantogram, Voices ^†
9. Renaissance Girls – Oh Land, Wishbone
10. Hard Out Here – Lily Allen, Sheezus ^†
11. Selling Rope (Swan Dive To Estuary) – Los Campesinos!, No Blues
12. West Coast – Lana Del Rey, Ultraviolence ^†
13. Jonah – Wussy, Left for Dead
14. Fool's Complaint – Suzanne Vega, Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles
15. Muscle Cars – Wussy, Wussy
16. Radiant Addict – 50 Foot Wave, With Love From The Men's Room
17. Fancy – Iggy Azalea, The New Classic ^†
18. R U Mine? – Arctic Monkeys, AM
19. Clara Bow (live) – 50 Foot Wave, You're Soaking In It
20. Rigor Mortis (Live) – Wussy, Rigor Mortis EP
21. Team – Lorde, Pure Heroine ^†
22. Young And Beautiful – Lana Del Rey, Music From The Great Gatsby ^†
23. Soak It Up – Wussy, Funeral Dress II - Acoustically

^† - saw band live this year

As in past years, there are some tracks here more for “time-capsule” value than because they’re really favorite songs: a World Cup theme song and I-G-G-Y, to name a couple.

Enjoy!

Past years' bests: 2011, 2012, 2013