🎵 Today’s listen: “Old Dominion” (2019) by Old Dominion. This is a pleasant country album with great playing and production. None of the songs really grabbed me, but I enjoyed the album nonetheless. It’s the sort of music I like to have on but not really listen too closely to.

I am looking forward to the upcoming Hamilton movie. I like that it is just the filmed stage performance; I’m not really interested in an immersive, realistic adaptation. (How would that even work?) October 2021 seems so far away, though.

My third (third!) 12.0" 2017 iPad Pro is starting to exhibit backlight bleed on the bottom (left) edge of the screen. It stays on my desk most of the time and isn’t abused in any way. All the other iPad models my family has have never had screen issues. At this point, I’m considering it a failed product model. Hopefully the next iPad Pro, which I hope comes out later this year, will be much better. I’m ready to upgrade, despite the cost.

Jeremy Egner, of the New York Times, interviewed show runner Michael Schur about “The Good Place," which is ending its run on Thursday. I’m not sure how I feel about how the show’s plot is winding down—endings are hard to pull off well—but I love so much of it that its humor and its moral philosophy are always on my mind.

Today’s listen (#2): “Songbook” by Frank Turner. Disc 1 is basically a Frank Turner greatest hits collection, and it is so damn good.

🎵 Today’s listen: “WestWorld: Season 2 (Music from the HBO Series)” by Ramin Djawadi. I am getting psyched for season 3, which starts in March. Season 2 had some awesome atmospheric music as well as cool covers of “Runaway”, “Heart Shaped Box” (I like the piano one best), and “Seven Nation Army”.

John Gruber does not like the iPad multitasking interface:

The iPad at 10 is, to me, a grave disappointment. Not because it’s “bad”, because it’s not bad — it’s great even — but because great though it is in so many ways, overall it has fallen so far short of the grand potential it showed on day one. To reach that potential, Apple needs to recognize they have made profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface, mistakes that need to be scrapped and replaced, not polished and refined. I worry that iPadOS 13 suggests the opposite — that Apple is steering the iPad full speed ahead down a blind alley.

Gruber is far from the only person decrying the software on the iPad on the 10th anniversary of its reveal, but I think the strength of these opinions has more to do with punditry than with actual problems with the iPad’s usability. I would imagine that most iPad users don’t use multitasking, don’t want to use it, and don’t trigger it by accident. Moreover, multitasking can be turned off in the Settings App (look for the switch for “Allow Multiple Apps”).

I think the iPad multitasking interface is fine. What I would hate is if Apple put a freeform, windowed interface on it, to make it more like the Mac. That would introduce far more fiddliness than I have the patience to deal with on a tablet.

🎵 Today’s listen: “Manic” by Halsey. Overall, I like it. But, after one listen, I don’t have a strong opinion about it or any track on it. I’ll give it another shot later this week.

This afternoon my cable internet provider’s tech support told me there is something wrong with my cable modem. The woman sounded concerned about how messed up it is in a way that was kind of hilarious, like it was haunted or something. I hope the replacement I ordered comes in time for me to send the current one back for a full refund.

Reading this article about an article about an article about TV streaming service subscriber counts made me think about the relative lack of new content, being released regularly, that I am interested in on Disney+. The library is important, but I don’t rewatch things enough for the library to be enough.

I have been giving my ears a multi-day rest from headphone listening, because I have had terrible tinnitus lately. I’m starting to think it is related to the medicines I am taking, rather than volume level, however. I never listen to music that loud though my headphones. 🤷‍♂️

Google’s ads just look like search results now. This is yet another bad move by Google. I’m glad I don’t use Google for search anymore.

My internet connection has been on and off sporadically today. It’s day #2 with a new cable modem on a new ISP. I hope there is just some kind of bug in the ISP’s provisioning process that will sort itself out. It has been frustrating to have to reboot the modem so many times.

I’m cancelling FIOS over the phone now. Where I live, I have two ISPs to choose from, and (have) had to switch providers every two years or so because each one hikes the bill quite a bit after a certain period. I’m glad I have the option, but it is an annoying to have to do it.

📺 Cool! “Star Trek: Picard” is getting some good reviews, like this one.

This morning amounted to a last-minute doctor appointment and a trip to the pharmacy. Winter colds are not fun.

Per Matt Golderberg at Collider:

Now, the final Rotten Tomatoes tally has come in, and it looks like The Rise of Skywalker is the worst-reviewed Star Wars movie ever, sitting at 52%, one percent lower than Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

I actually enjoyed Rise of Skywalker. The Last Jedi was the film that ruined the Star Wars franchise for me—it wasn’t really bad, like The Phantom Menace, but it both added and threw out so much of the Star Wars canon that it made the phone thing seem silly and unimportant.

Now that I have seen all all three “sequel trilogy” movies, the whole “Star Wars” franchise seems silly and unimportant. Creatively, the sequel trilogy was completely bankrupt, amounting mostly to remakes of the prior (good) films, and repeats and amplifications of prior plot points. I don’t hate it now, though. I think of it as enjoyable cinematic fluff: entertaining diversions, like really high-budget B-movies. It just isn’t important and it clearly doesn’t make any sense. Accepting that, I can enjoy them when I want to escape to “a time long ago, in a galaxy far away,” and otherwise not think about them at all.

🎵 Today’s listen: “Kiwanuka” by Michael Kiwanuka. With its mix of soul, Afrobeat, and psychedelia, it sounds timeless, or, maybe, somehow plucked out of time and brought forward about forty years to now.

I was thinking of “Russian Doll” and put on “Gotta Get Up” by Harry Nillson. Curious about the song, I looked it up on Wikipedia.

From Wikipedia:

In 2019, “Gotta Get Up” was prominently featured as the “reset” song in the Netflix series Russian Doll. The song plays each time the series’ protagonist Nadia (co-creator Natasha Lyonne) dies and returns to the same location – a bathroom at her 36th birthday party. Its use is similar to that of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” from the 1993 film Groundhog Day. Lyonne explained that in choosing the song she was struck by the “buoyant doomsday quality” of Nilsson’s life. The cost of using the song so many times took up a significant portion of the music budget. His estate also limited how many times the song could be used.

Reading this got me thinking about what nonsense music rights are for TV and movies. Why are song rights so expensive? Moreover, why should Nillson’s estate be able to limit “how many times the songs could be used? (Harry Nilsson died in 1994.) That sounds so frustrating to deal with. I don’t understand why more TV producers don’t just hire musicians to record cover versions and cut out, at the very least, the performance royalties. (I know this sometimes happens. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more.)

I was sick all weekend and, consequently, watched way more TV than usual. I watched most of the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show”. From what I had heard about it online and in various podcasts, I had anticipated a disappointing, underwhelming drama that grasped for, but never reached, Aaron Sorkin-esque heights.

I was pleasantly surprised, however. I liked it quite a bit. If this is mediocre TV, then much of what I have been watching the past couple years must be truly bad.

I am giving up on Marvin 3 (an iOS ePub reader) once again. The app cannot remember my place in the book I’m reading, and that is infuriating. I am back to using Hyphen.

🎵 Today’s listen: “Free Yourself Up” by Lake Street Dive, which is a fun, Boston-based, blue-eyed-soul group. My favorite track on this album is “Good Kisser”, which is what I mainly choose listen to when building a playlist, but the whole record is worth a listen.

I’m all for dropping “Fox” from 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight studios, now that Disney owns them. Good riddance.

🎵 Today’s listen: “69 Love Songs” by The Magnetic Fields. This is an amazing triple album full of diverse, smart, and interesting songs-not just love songs, but songs about love, and even about love songs. There really are 69 songs, 23 per album, which make it almost a box set in and of itself.

Maybe this version of Xcode (11.3.1) will be good. 😅