I had no idea Joe Bonamassa was offered Greeny before Kirk Hammett bought it. I’d often wondered why nobody tried to sell the guitar to Joe, the man with more Les Pauls than anybody. Turns out they did.
Posts
Love this Bondi Blue iMac made out of LEGO . If 10,000 people upvote it, LEGO will consider turning it into an actual product. Go vote!
The death of the follower & the future of creativity on the web
Jack Conte, who is the founder of Patreon, gave a talk last year on the death of the follower and the future of creativity on the web. I can’t believe I didn’t see this before today, but it was a great talk and well worth your time.
In short:
- The 2000s were about the follow.
- The 2010s were about ranking systems.
- The 2020s are about algorithms, and what Conte calls the “Death of the Follower.”
What follows that are some terrific thoughts on what creators can do to mitigate TikTok-style algorithms (which are now all over YouTube and Instagram), and what the responsibilities are of creator-focused platforms.
I’ve been designing a creator-focused media platform for a client for a couple years. It’s a massive project. It launched last week. (I can’t share a link yet; I’m waiting for the go-ahead from the client. Sorry.) It was great to watch this talk and hear some of what we’ve been discussing internally reflected in Conte’s conversation.
Part of the problem is that this is a huge task:
- A lot of creators are multifaceted now, so doing just video isn’t enough. Similarly, just audio is a tall order. A lot of musicians are on YouTube. Even podcasts will be often be delivered in audio and video formats. And a lot of creators want to live stream video these days, which is, from a technical perspective, yet another format.
- On top of that, consumers want ways to stream the content and ways to download it locally (even if they merely want to archive the content, which is reasonable), and there are a lot of potential legal pitfalls to embracing either approach for a media company.
- Similarly, you have to give creators control how they communicate with their fans. This gets back to that Follower idea. (I have a lot of thoughts on this, but don’t want to divulge any strategic discussions I’ve had with my client.)
- And finally, you have to let creators sell what they want to sell, how they want to sell it.
So one could easily imagine a wide variety of features that need to exist on a creator-focused platform before that platform will capture the eyeballs of its target audience. Building all those features costs a lot of money, and if you don’t already have a platform, requires a lot of investor capital.
Patreon is in a unique position to do this. I hope my client can make a bit of a splash in that market as well.
Twelve years of Wildfire Studios
My design and front-end dev studio turns twelve today, and I’ve now been freelancing for fourteen years. I asked friends and family on social media if they had any retrospective questions I could answer in a blog post, and they were kind enough to indulge me.
It’s important that creative people like the tools they use, but I am also trying to talk myself out of buying a Pro Display XDR
tl;dr: I am trying to talk myself out of buying a Pro Display XDR, which is a 32″ computer monitor for professionals that I don’t technically need, but very much want.
Loving the tools you use makes it more likely that you will use the tools, and that makes it more likely you will finally write the novel you see in your head, or write the program you’ve been putting off developing. The tool itself does not make you more productive. Your desire to use the tool makes you more productive.
My father-in-law is not a carpenter, but he sure does love his saws and his drills, and so he finds excuses to make things out of wood.
Similarly, I am a designer, and I value high-accuracy monitors and televisions with colour gamuts and brightness curves that are close matches to reality (and the artistic intent of others). I currently use two Studio Displays. I would like to upgrade one of them to a Pro Display XDR. It’s bigger (32″ instead of 27″), brighter (real 1600 nit HDR instead of the 600 nit Studio Display), and much more colour accurate (10 bit instead of 8 bit). It is also eye-wateringly expensive, and made for people who make TV shows and movies. As an interface and graphic designer, I am not technically part of its market.
And yet, I want one anyway. Mostly because I think I’ll like staring at it even more than I like my Studio Displays.
Look, if you want to create something important — something that takes time and energy to do well, like a novel or a software application — you must love the process. A writer must love writing. A software developer must love programming.
And if you were to do that job full time, and immerse yourself in that process with no interruptions, you’ll quickly learn what Adam Mastroianni talks about when he writes about unpacking people’s jobs:
… people spend so much time doing their jobs. Hours! Every day! It’s 2pm on a Tuesday and you’re doing your job, and now it’s 3:47pm and you’re still doing it. There’s no amount of willpower that can carry you through a lifetime of Tuesday afternoons. Whatever you’re supposed to be doing in those hours, you’d better want to do it.
Of course, it’s never quite so simple. It’s easier to write if you are inherently a creative person who likes creating worlds and living in them; a good writer (particularly of fiction) is probably also a daydreamer. A great programmer is probably enthusiastic about the visual aesthetics of their work; they may not be a designer, but they would know the difference between an unusable garbage design and something intuitive. These skills — creative world building or a sense of visual taste — can be developed over time.
But first, a writer must want to write, and a programmer must want to program.
This is all true and extremely important. What we don’t talk about in the same fashion is that people who do those jobs for a living ought to like the sound their keyboards make.
Of course, the keyboard doesn’t matter, but it also does. That’s why people like Jon Gruber write with a 1990 Apple Extended Keyboard II, and have multiple spares ready to go for when their favourite discontinued keyboard bites the dust. It’s why George RR Martin still writes in DOS. It’s why so many designers on YouTube own a Pro Display XDR, which is not a screen they technically need, since they are not working in a film or television studio. (Remember my tl;dr. I also do not need this display.)
For Jon Gruber, any keyboard would work, but only one will do.
For me, any monitor will work, but only extremely nice ones with excellent colour accuracy and little to no eyestrain will do.
The tools don’t matter, but you have to like love the tools you use. Nobody wants to use a wooden shovel for snow removal if the shovel gives them splinters. If you’re using these tools all day, every day, you’re not looking for a tool that will magically make you more productive. You’re looking for a tool that makes you want to do the work.
Because it’s 3:47 on a Tuesday afternoon, or 10:30 on a Friday night, and you’re still working on that passion project.
Just a quick aside: I am aware that the Pro Display XDR uses outdated display tech, but show me another 32″ 6K monitor with support for real HDR and the same colour accuracy. It might be outdated, but only on a tech spec, and not in objective reality.
One more thought: writing this hasn’t assuaged me of my gear lust.
Noah Berlatsky writes for Public Notice about how competitive authoritarianism has been “a prevalent form of government throughout American history.” A sobering read, and a good reminder to stand up for the marginalized.
MAID in Canada
Elaina Plott Calabro wrote an incredible article about nine years of Canada’s euthanasia laws (called MAID) in The Atlantic. In the past nine years, MAID has expanded from an option for patients with “reasonably foreseeable” deaths into Track 2, which allows for people who don’t have reasonably foreseeable deaths to request it anyway.
Over 5% of deaths in my country are now clinically assisted. It took Canada just a few years to reach that number; it took Belgium over twenty to do the same. And the number continues to climb. In Quebec, 7% of deaths are assisted.
The laws surrounding MAID are unclear and mostly assign responsibility to medical practitioners to determine if patients qualify, which means the entire thing is basically one giant loophole allowing legally assisted death.
One of the things it means to be Canadian is to honour the rights and wishes of other people. That’s part of what makes it a wonderful place to live: most people genuinely believe in equality and respect for others, including people who don’t look like them.
I think it’s good to respect the wishes of other people and honour their requests. But I also think it’s far too easy for political leadership in Canada to lean on the pretence of respecting a person’s right to die how they want. This country has major accessibility problems in its free health care systems. Some of these problems are provincial. Some are federal. It is irresponsible for the federal government to lean on assisted death, instead of providing more universal access to healthcare. In fact, the provision of MAID without adequate universal health care causes predictable, knowable problems.
Calabro writes:
For these critics, the “reasonably foreseeable” death requirement had been the solitary consolation in an otherwise lost constitutional battle. The elimination of that protection with the creation of Track 2 [note: an option for MAID despite no reasonably foreseeable death in the patient’s future] reinforced their conviction that MAID would result in Canada’s most marginalized citizens being subtly coerced into premature death. Canadian officials acknowledged these concerns — “We know that in some places in our country, it’s easier to access MAID than it is to get a wheelchair,” Carla Qualtrough, the disability-inclusion minister, admitted in 2020 — but reiterated that socioeconomic suffering was not a legal basis for MAID.
And later:
Nearly half of all Canadians who have died by MAID viewed themselves as a burden on family and friends. For some disabled citizens, the availability of assisted death has sowed doubt about how the medical establishment itself sees them — about whether their lives are in fact considered worthy of saving.
Finally:
MAID advocates dispute the charge that disabled Canadians are being quietly or overtly pressured to consider assisted death… Even so, this past March, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities formally called for the repeal of Track 2 MAID in Canada — arguing that the federal government had “fundamentally changed” the premise of assisted dying on the basis of “negative, ableist perceptions of the quality and value” of disabled lives, without addressing the systemic inequalities that amplify their perceived suffering.
It is regrettable to me that so much of the pushback on MAID is from religious, conservative voices. Almost every left-leaning person I know would agree that it is the responsibility of our government to make healthcare easily accessible and available for all. But the instant Christian conservative voices get involved and start arguing about moral values, people bristle and suddenly there’s a polarized divide.
I can comfortably say this because I am a God-fearing Christian. I have my own personal qualms with MAID and am unsure I would ever request it, even if my death were “reasonably foreseeable.” However, I don’t accept my morals to be deterministic of national law, and I do not think that anything in our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would suggest otherwise, particularly in the twenty-first century.
But I am deeply uncomfortable with the fact that people who view themselves as a burden to the system, or people who view the system as unavailable to them, pursue MAID as a viable option. The queasiness is underlined by Calabro’s reporting, which includes this gem of a sentence:
Although cost savings have never been mentioned as an explicit rationale for expansion, the parliamentary budget office anticipated annual savings in health-care costs of nearly $150 million as a result of the expanded MAID régime.
In Canada, our annual health spending was expected reach $372 billion in 2024, so $150 million is 0.04% of our spending. I do not suspect it to be a primary motivator or rationale behind MAID. However, what would happen if we spent another $1 billion, or even $5 billion, on improving health care access for the sorts of people who feel abandoned by the system? That would be an increase of spending in 1.3%. (If our leaders are feeling particularly spineless, they could increase healthcare spending by 0.04%. Call it a re-investment of the savings back into the system.)
According to Calabro’s reporting, 60,300 Canadians received medical assistance in dying as of 2023. I would suggest that a better way to honour the rights of our fellow citizens would be to increase spending by a fractional amount, increase access to healthcare, and possibly save the lives of people who otherwise feel the system pressures them to choose assisted death, rather than be a burden.
Medicare is called a “universal health care system” for a reason. In any situation where it is not universal — and there are many — efforts should be made to make it so. Those efforts should not be “reasonable.” I should not look at their efforts and deem that they merely tried. Politicians should make unreasonable efforts to better the lives of the people. That is their job. To do any job well is to pursue it to a level that outsiders would deem unreasonable.
Unreasonable efforts must be made to improve our healthcare system, because if a growing number people rely on MAID as a solution, it suggests that the system is otherwise insufficient.
Regardless of your stance on this issue, Calabro’s reporting is excellent, and well worth an hour of your time.
I spent a bit of time last week comparing how SVGs render differently in Safari and Chrome when using CSS’s vector-effect
, and shared my findings in my portfolio.
Doing the hard thing, even if it’s working out in the morning before your first cup of coffee, and you would rather die
I’ve been playing with a new routine for the month of August. Nearly a year and a half ago, I bought a good rowing machine. I use it a lot. I’ve tried rowing during the morning, which is hard; rowing over lunch, which is difficult to consistently schedule; and rowing after work, which requires a level of fastidiousness towards a shut-down routine that I do not possess.
The habit I quit the fastest is rowing in the morning. It’s hard to get out of bed and work out. Your body is cold, so it’s slower. You never get your best times in the morning. You’re groggy and grumpy. You get the benefits of an improved mood after a workout, sure, but those benefits are less observable because your comparison point pre-workout is “asleep.”
Despite that, my habit for the month of August is to attempt to work out every morning before I work. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I have various rowing routines. Tuesday is strength training. Thursday is core day, with optional strength or rowing sessions on top of it. If I really need a break, I can walk on Thursdays instead.
I’m starting my second week of this. I hate it. To be blunt, I love working out, but I don’t love anything enough to want it before I have coffee.
But it also works. Or at least, it’s working now. If I remember, I’ll write again about how it’s going in a month.
There’s something about starting with the hard thing. I don’t mean eating the frog. I mean just doing something hard. It’s the same dopamine hit you get from a hard Dark Souls boss. Maybe it’s because I’m chronically depressed, but doing one hard thing before my brain can talk me out of it is the only way I know to do two hard things. A part of your brain says: “I can do this. I am not a failure. I’ve done this hard thing. I can do anything.”
Doing the hard thing gives you the strength to ask the most important question: “What’s next?”
Spotify is an ad platform, not a music service
I was today years old when I found out that Spotify’s entire existence started with selling ads. From Nick Heer’s review of Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine:
While Spotify’s founders tend to describe a noble birth, Perry points to a 2015 interview with co-founder Martin Lorentzon in which he describes the idea to build a targeted advertising platform first. How it would acquire users was an open question — “[s]hould it be product search? Should it be movies, [or ‘Godfather’], or audiobooks? And then we ended up with music”. That is not necessarily a bad thing. What is bad, though, is that Spotify reportedly began with an unlicensed library and made money on the back of it. That combination does not sound to me like the result of a love of music.
This explains a lot about why it feels like Spotify’s interests don’t align with my own. Most of their decisions don’t line up with the decisions people who love music would make.
For example, when attempting to fight spammy AI-generated music:
In an attempt to disincentivize these behaviours and reduce Spotify’s costs, the company announced in November 2023 it would stop paying royalties for tracks with fewer than one thousand annual streams. … How much it actually hurts low-effort spammers is a good question, but it impacts legitimate indie artists — what [Universal Music Group CEO] Grainge calls “garbage” — for whom Spotify now presents no advantage over piracy.
I can understand how this decision was made, but its ramifications — and the lack of consideration for them — are damning.
All this to say that Nick Heer’s essay is excellent, and I highly recommend it.
James Clear’s Newsletter
James Clear has been on a roll recently. This week’s newsletter is no exception:
“You can attract luck simply by telling people what you are working on.”
And:
“Working on a problem reduces the fear of it. It’s hard to fear a problem when you are making progress on it — even if progress is imperfect and slow. Action relieves anxiety.”
One of the highest-value newsletters I’ve ever subscribed to.
CRO’s latest case study was one of their most interesting in a while.
Public Betas for iPadOS 26, iOS 26, and macOS 26
Apple released the public betas for this year’s major operating systems today. Six Colors has coverage of iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26. I have not used these yet, and I don’t intend to for the time being. Despite all the whizz-bang of Liquid Glass, I am unexcited about these betas. It is easy to judge something one hasn’t used, but I have had to design around it already for clients (I hope I’ll have more to share about that soon), and its increasingly transparent UI does not inspire confidence in its usability.
I am looking forward to the new windowing experience in iPadOS, but I wish it came without the rest of the new design.
Frame of Preference
Marcin Wichary made an incredible website that lets you experience the Mac’s various different preference panels over the decades. This is a mine of incredibly good and incredibly bad design, and a frankly unbelievable way to play with it all.
I really like the panels in the original from 1984, but I think the 1987 control panel works well too. The 1987 panel reminds me of where we are today, but it was obviously designed with a lot more love and care.
The PRS SE NF 53
I found out only tonight that PRS recently announced the SE NF 53, which is their lower-priced, foreign-made version of their high-end NF 53. The NF 53 (which I’ve written about before) is their take on a 50s Telecaster, which is one of Fender’s most beloved instruments.
I have owned multiple Telecasters in my time, across varying price ranges. Right now, I have one in my collection — their cheapest “Made in Mexico” variant. It’s the best Telecaster I’ve ever played. (I just spent some time playing it today and had a blast.)
A Telecaster doesn’t need to be expensive to be great. That’s what makes it such a beloved instrument. So I’m excited about this much more affordable version of the NF53.
Years ago, after PRS unveiled the Silver Sky (John Mayer’s signature guitar and their take on a Strat-style instrument), I emailed PRS and asked when we could expect their take on a Tele. Needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to both the NF 53 and the SE version for some time. (PRS told me they don’t comment on future products, but that was enough to suggest to me that their take on a Tele might be a “future product,” so it felt like a sure thing it was coming.)
First, PRS’s video demo of this instrument is excellent. Bryan Ewald is an incredible player, and I am certain he gets better every year. He makes everything sound great, and this is no exception.
Second, I love that the SE version of this instrument has the same bridge as the American-made version. That’s a great sign. Every Tele player will tell you the bridge is what makes or breaks a Telecaster. And the bridge on the NF 53 line, along with its saddles, is a genuinely innovative design and a testament to American guitar manufacturing. It solves a lot of intonation problems common to this style of guitar, so the guitar is more likely to be in tune all the way along the neck. That helps a lot with recording.
Thirdly, I am not sure I like the pickups. The NF 53 comes with noiseless “Deep Dish” pickups that look to my eyes like an unconventional size, but I really like normal Telecaster pickups, even with their vintage single coil sound. I think that’s a huge part of their charm and a massive part of their tone, which can go from round-bottomed and thick to bright, thin, and twangy with the twist of one knob. I did some googling, and I’m unsure if one could easily replace the Deep Dish pickups with something more conventional. Just something to keep an eye on, if you’re into that kind of things.
Finally, the price. First, I thought it was outrageous. $1400 CAD seemed really high to me when I checked my local retailer. But it turns out that’s only a few bucks more than Fender’s new Player II Telecaster (their Made in Mexico line). That’s just about $600 more than I paid for my Player Telecaster only a year ago. I don’t know if this is Fender bumping up their prices, or just what things cost now thanks to American tariffs. Either way, $1400 isn’t chicken scratch, but it’s in line with the competition, so fair is fair. (And unlike every Fender I’ve ever owned, I’ve never had a PRS with a wonky neck or wony frets.)