Five Iron Frenzy — While Supplies Last

Look...... I just really like it when people go after conservative christians, especially from within the faith! 🤷‍♀️

Did you waste your prayers protecting snipers
While you hoarded all the Lysol and diapers?
Save some profits for your cadre of vipers
Because your God only favors survivors
If you vote to stop abortions
Damn the pregnant girls and orphans
Blame your decline on the LGBTQ
Offer platitudes not portions
Then your rancor is your fortune
And your poison is what’s poisoning you

You said “we all deserve this”
For not forcing kids to pray-
While your party loots the earth
And you tell us “Jesus saves”
You’re ignoring half the gospel
Wearing clothing made by slaves
You never “rendered unto Caesar”
Now you, now you fear the fever
Fear the bottom dropping out of your stocks-
You voted for the devil
Let that narcissist embezzle
Put the hen-house in the mouth of the fox

like.... yeah, dude. it's all bullshit, but just let 'em have it!!!!!!!

Paerish — Journey of the Prairie King

this album c r u s h e s

Okay, two things, because even though I hate Apple Music's most recent incarnations, I'm using it for specific albums today:

ONE!

It always takes me too long to figure out whether I'm searching my Library, the Apple Music catalog (which I don't subscribe to), or the iTunes Store. Why is that? Because for some reason the selector for those 3 sources is way the fuck over on the other side of the app window for some reason??????

TWO!

Apparently, in Artists view, you can't sort by Year, Descending. I want to see the most recent album by a band at the top of the list. You can't... do this?

See here, I've clicked "Year", and then I've opened the dropdown again in order to click "Descending", because Apple hates us using their software and would prefer we never click on anything, so they make it fucking annoying to do so:

Now, you may notice, that despite showing the correct options, it's not working. It's showing the earliest Five Iron Frenzy album at the top. Clicking "Ascending," just as a sanity check, shows the exact same thing.

Now, having clicked Descending, if I close the View Options and then open it again, look what it has selected:

... what??? WHAT?????? That's not what I...

THIS IS A COINCIDENCE, because "Winter Wonder Rock" is the last alphabetical entry, too! BECAUSE APPARENTLY clicking "Ascending" or "Descending" overrides all other choices, and sorts by Title and then up or down?????? are you fucking kidding me????????????????????

Can I achieve this in the Albums view? nnnnnnope! You can sort by Artist and then by Year, but there's no further option to ascend or descend. Just... can't do it! Not because a computer can't do these things; not because there's no reason anyone would ever want to do this, not because you could never do this because it used to be possible in iTunes..........

but just because, at Apple, you are no longer required to think about what the people who use your software might want to reasonably do with it!

Dear Apple,

Thanh Neville, M.D., M.S.H.S., in "I'm An ICU Doctor And I Cannot Believe The Things Unvaccinated Patients Are Telling Me":

But the relief was short-lived, the hope was fleeting, and we are amid another surge. A surge that is fueled by a highly transmissible variant and those unvaccinated. My experiences in the ICU these past weeks have left me surprised, disheartened, but most of all, angry.

I am angry that the tragic scenes of prior surges are being played out yet again, but now with ICUs primarily filled with patients who have chosen not to be vaccinated. I am angry that it takes me over an hour to explain to an anti-vaxxer full of misinformation that intubation isn’t what “kills patients” and that their wish for chest compressions without intubation in the event of a respiratory arrest makes no sense. I am angry at those who refuse to wear “muzzles” when grocery shopping for half an hour a week, as I have been so-called “muzzled” for much of the past 18 months.

I cannot understand the simultaneous decision to not get vaccinated and the demand to end the restrictions imposed by a pandemic. I cannot help but recoil as if I’ve been slapped in the face when my ICU patient tells me they didn’t get vaccinated because they “just didn’t get around to it.” Although such individuals do not consider themselves anti-vaxxers, their inaction itself is a decision — a decision to not protect themselves or their families, to fill a precious ICU bed, to let new variants flourish, and to endanger the health care workers and immunosuppressed people around them. Their inaction is a decision to let this pandemic continue to rage.

And meanwhile, immunocompromised people, for whom vaccines don’t generate much immunity, are desperately waiting for herd immunity. I have no way to comfort my rightfully outraged transplant patients who contracted COVID-19 after isolating for over a year and getting fully vaccinated as soon as they could. With angry tears, these patients tell me it’s not fair that there are people who are choosing to endanger both themselves and the vulnerable people around them. They feel betrayed by their fellow citizens and they are bitter and angry. I cannot blame them.

I am at a loss to understand how anyone can look at these past months of the pandemic — more than 600,000 lives lost in the U.S. and more than 4 million worldwide — and not believe it’s real or take it seriously. But the unhappy truth is that there are people who do not. They did not in the beginning and many are doubling down now.

Five Iron Frenzy — Zen and the Art of Xenophobia

look... sometimes being extremely on the nose is good! and I really appreciate FIF's commitment to calling out the sadistic hypocrisy of the American religious right-wing.

Let's keep them separate; melanin just can't succeed. "Give me liberty… or something." It's better if you just don't read. Crank your phasers up to "slaughter," turn your wine back into water. When you play this song, Al Qaeda wins, and Jesus was American!

The United State of Amnesia, make us numb, make it dumb, anesthesia. Cut the cord, close the door, we don't know 'ya. This is zen and the art of xenophobia.

Five Iron Frenzy — Huerfano

"They pushed you down on frozen ground; the bullies gathered all around. They had no right to steal your song: you belong!

But you are here, and they are gone. So sing on."

— Berserk, Chapter 5

or, “””””progress”””””

i haaaaaaate that every icon has the same silhouette now!!!! I CANNOT LOCATE APPS IN THE DOCK OR SWITCHER ANYMORE BY SHAPE-BASED INTUITION AND IT MAKES ME VERY SAD / wastes my time and disorients me constantly

I’m Grumping!!!!

remember when “iconic” meant that something was instantly recognizable?

🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

I really appreciate this piece by Riccardo Mori entitled, "Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation". He works through the arguments around how to tell whether something feels bad just because it's new, or because it's truly worse in some way. It can be a hard thing to put your finger on, especially quickly! But in light of the ongoing cascade of bad design decisions coming out of Apple right now, I really like his rubric for changes to macOS specifically.

The argument “Is this really bad UI, or is it just you who are averse to change?” will never go away, huh? A change in a user interface can be disruptive, but it’s usually easy to see if it’s disruptive-beneficial or disruptive-confusing or ‑frustrating after a while.

You can see when change brings more thoughtfully-designed UI details. Saying that “You just need some time to get used to it” is in itself indicative that the new UI is problematic. You can completely redesign an app, but if the new UI is well-designed, people will figure it out.

When change ultimately brings UI rearrangement for UI rearrangement’s sake, then you just offer something that is user-hostile. Changing habits can be healthy if it brings improvement.

If users have a poor reaction to having to relearn your non-intuitive changes just because you felt the need to ‘refresh’ your app, doesn’t mean people are lazy or change-averse. It means they’re annoyed at your lack of respect for their productivity and their time.

"Lack of respect" is precisely what I feel when looking at Apple's software over the last 5+ years!!! I also fully agree with these points:

The two major things I find especially misguided about Mac OS are:

1. The fact that Apple considers it a product that needs to look cool and be shown off, instead of a utility that runs computers.
2. The fact that Apple feels the need to release a new version of it every year.

Followed by a nice summary of the goals of OS X at its release, emphasizing its usefulness, not its marketability. Then he describes nicely the feeling of being subjected to useless or impeding changes in tools you use every day, with my emphases in bold:

This insistence around the most superficial aspects of a graphical user interface — the look — often reminds me of the constant redesign iterations of some third-party apps in an attempt to make them more alluring to customers and to increase sales. The hyperfocus on always looking new and fresh can sometimes lead to harsh breaks in an app’s ‘usability continuum’ (as I like to call it). I’m sure you’ve experienced it more than once if you have been using Mac and iOS apps for the past several years. The developer triumphantly announces the ‘significant visual overhaul’ in the app’s changelog, and after the (often inescapable) app update you are presented with something that has changed so much, its controls completely rearranged, that it becomes unrecognisable and essentially forces you to relearn how to use the app as proficiently as before.

Both for work reasons and for personal research, I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with regular, non-tech-savvy users over the years. What some geeks may be shocked to know is that most regular people don’t really care about these changes in the way an application or operating system looks. What matters to them is continuity and reliability. Again, this isn’t being change-averse. Regular users typically welcome change if it brings something interesting to the table and, most of all, if it improves functionality in meaningful ways. Like saving mouse clicks or making a multi-step workflow more intuitive and streamlined.

But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides when I need something out of the way? Maybe I like to see it all the time) — that’s not progress. It’s change for change’s sake. It’s rearranging the shelves in your supermarket in a way that seems cool and marketable to you but leaves your customers baffled and bewildered.

I love that a little further on, he refers to Windows as "mastodontic." What a great word!

Microsoft may leave entire layers of legacy code in Windows, turning Windows into a mastodontic operating system with a clean surface and decades of baggage underneath. Apple has been cleaning and rearranging the surface for a while now, and has been getting rid of so much baggage that they went to the other extreme. They’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and Mac OS’s user interface has become more brittle after all the changes and inconsistent applications of those Human Interface Guidelines that have informed good UI design in Apple software for so long.

This act of ‘reinventing the wheel over and over’ has been incredibly stifling and has, in my opinion, largely lead to operating system stagnation. Roughly since Mac OS X 10.7 Lion onward, Mac OS has gained a few cool features, but it has been losing entire apps, services, and certain facilities — like Disk Utility — have been dumbed down. Meanwhile the system hasn’t really gone anywhere.

An operating system is something that shouldn’t be treated as an ‘app’, or as something people should stop and admire for its æsthetic elegance, or a product whose updates should be marketed as if it’s the next iPhone iteration. An operating system is something that needs a separate, tailored development cycle. Something that needs time so that you can devise an evolution plan about it; so that you can keep working on its robustness by correcting bugs that have been unaddressed for years, and present features that really improve workflows and productivity while building organically on what came before. This way, user-facing UI changes will look reasonable, predictable, intuitive, easily assimilable, and not just arbitrary, cosmetic, and of questionable usefulness.

YUP!

do you think, when mario wakes up and needs to p-block in the middle of the night, he makes yoshi carry him?