My cup of iced tea

Ladytron's new album Paradises is really good. Helen Marnie on the 25-year anniversary of their debut album 604:

"I think the way that we perceive time now — because everything is simultaneous — chronology has kind of gone out of the window, especially with music. Everything is simultaneous, right? So I feel like we're naturally selective when we think about that 25 years. It actually feels, to me, quite compressed when you only think about the times we were actually working. I mean, we took like a six or seven-year break. I think doing all these interviews at the moment, and being asked questions about the early days, it's started to feel closer in a way. It's funny how our minds play these tricks."

Alan Tudyk had a bad feeling about Firefly

"This was a terrible sign right from the start: Fox made us pay for our lunches. We'd have to go to the commissary to buy it and that wasn't worked into the schedule, so we had to make it over there and eat in costume sometimes."

Tamigotcha

"What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?"

Page architecture and hostility

"Publishers aren't evil but they are desperate. Caught in this programmatic ad-tech death spiral, they are trading long-term reader retention for short-term CPM pennies. The modern ad industry is slowly de-coupling the creator from the advertiser. They weaponize the UI because they think they have to.

"Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you're trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.

"The reader is not respected enough by the software. The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns."

-- Shubham Bose, Thatshubham.com 

Eyes without a face

"The biggest rookie mistake is to have a little work done too soon before an event. We've all seen the effects of what we can only assume to be poor planning, with difficult-to-unsee appearances by Madonna at the 2023 Grammys and Tom Cruise at a Lakers game in 2020 (both with inflated cheeks) and Renée Zellweger at the Elle Women in Hollywood Awards in 2014, with upper eyelids dramatically altered. Their faces certainly wouldn't have looked so startling if given the chance to settle in."

Celebrated air

Elite Gymnastics' Ruin 1, 2 and 3 are a precious throwaway sad/fast soundtrack to a GITS / Neuromancer remake that never happened. Founder Jaime Brooks talks about what the band weren't about:

Back when you first heard about Elite Gymnastics, I don't think we thought about ourselves as people who were getting on a professional track. I think that's why it was easier for us to blow it up when we stopped getting along. We wanted to be good. Neither one of us was super interested in the version of it that tried to adapt to the market to survive as a commercial concern. We didn't want to do that, and I still don't want to do that.

The full interview is here c/o Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night.

Shake it

Nile Rodgers on collaborating with David Bowie:

We talk about all of those Let’s Dance songs now, but 40 years ago, David was dropped from his record label because the ugly truth is, people don’t like to hear that rock and roll is a business and David wasn’t selling any records in America. We now act like it was all hip and fantastic, but it wasn’t. He wasn’t killing it.