Tyler Hellard

Softwearing.

Vol. 7, No. 5

When the music industry got greedy and technology allowed, we broke it with Napster and eventually achieved an unstable balance with Spotify, a tense peace that is in the process of collapsing because they also got greedy. When the movie industry got greedy and technology allowed, we broke it with BitTorrent and eventually achieved an unstable balance with Netflix, a tense peace that is in the process of collapsing because they also got greedy.

Without looking, I’m gonna guess many, many industries have their own version of this, and right now it’s software’s turn.

I believe in hating the game and not necessarily its players, unless the players are also assholes. For example: Adobe. You don’t reverse engineer the core of Adobe’s entire software lineup and hand it out for free unless you really hate Adobe. Fortunately, everybody really hates Adobe, the gold standard in making software bloated and hostile to its own users and somehow still cranking up pricing at every opportunity. I don’t think all developers are greedy fucks, but I do know most of the software I used to use and enjoy has moved to a subscription model and while I understand the need to make your money, I am deeply in touch with the need to keep a little of my own. I miss buying a thing, owning it, and that being more or less the end of the transaction. So it goes.

Software got greedy and now technology is allowing us to break it. I mentioned Glaze somewhere in the mess of Vol. 6, but my thoughts were half-baked at the time. I’m still using it and I still really like it. It’s not using AI to help or improve code; you don’t even see the code. (Probably there is a way to look at and edit code in there? Maybe? I’ve never had cause to look.) It’s just prompt and then the app exists and you prompt and it changes. At no point do I ever even feel tempted to say I made anything. So far I’ve had it build three apps: An updated version of the markdown editor I’ve used several LLMs to build me over and over with mixed results (though very good results here); a desktop radio app that lets me mix streams, playlists and podcasts in a goofy retro interface; and a two-screen app for revealing maps during Dungeons & Dragons games.

Are these apps well built? How the fuck would I know?

Do these apps work the way I want them to? Yep. I’m writing a new novel in the markdown editor. I’m listening to the radio app while typing this. I use the D&D app on Wednesday nights. Instead of blocking off a weekend for updates and bug fixes, if I decide during a D&D game that I need a measurement tool inside my app, I can take three minutes to tell Glaze to add it right there while we’re playing. (That happened!)

I pay $12/month for credits and “Creator Hub” (not actually useful), and while I’m not in love with paying for another subscription, the D&D app alone saved me half that amount on a subscription for the app I used to use — a really great app with about a zillion features I did not need, want or use, but was paying for anyway — and I’ve identified when all my annual subs renew and have set timelines to replace most of that software with a light-weight version that does exactly what I want from Glaze. In the end, I figure the single Glaze sub will be four or five times cheaper than what I’m currently paying. Not sure how you convince me that isn’t worth it, at least not without convincing me all of this will ultimately end with our doom, and I already kinda sorta believe that anyway.

The Glaze ecosystem is funny: the best apps have triple-digit downloads if they are lucky (the highest I’ve seen is in the 900s). My three apps have a total of 10 installs, and three of those are me. (Glaze, understanding paying customers have egos, displays this in their store as “<100”.) I have downloaded other people’s apps to play with, but didn’t keep any because why would I? I’m not on Glaze for your dumb fucking app, I’m on there for my dumb fucking app (which I write release notes for because I’m an idiot). If you do see an app from someone else that you’re a little intrigued by, you don’t have to install it — you can “remix” it, telling Glaze to bend it to your will.

That feels like a very real possible future for software. At least until AI gets greedy (lol) and we break it.

Housekeeping: No more AI talk until Vol. 8. I’m sick of it. Remember when we used to talk about art and TV and stuff? That was cool. / ✌️

Et cela vaut! 100,000! et tout le monde le sait. / Hermann Paul

Confusions.

🧠 Wikipedia’s pyrrhic victory. ❝In short, the encyclopedia is being destroyed by its biggest beneficiaries, like a golden goose slaughtered for slop-pâté. It’s a cruelly ironic fate for a project that began as a failed startup’s castoff. Had anyone predicted Wikipedia’s true value during its formative phase, it would never have survived.❞ / 📺 Red Dwarf and rejecting sci-fi conventions. / 🔁 It me! (a guy who watches the same things over and over and over) / 🎰 Everything is wrestling gambling. / 🐟 I no longer have to make life decisions thanks to my infinite tins of fish. ❝An enterprising man named Nicolas Appert sealed cooked fish into glass jars and boiled them, eventually winning 12,000 francs and the kudos of Napoleon Bonaparte. Later, in Britain, the merchant Peter Durand swapped Appert’s jars for tin-plated cans. Fast-forward 200 years and now we’re all swimming happily in a $15 billion global market of shelf-stable seafoods that can last for years and years.❞

Extensions.

📐 Antique Fonts. / 🛠️ InBrowser.app, browser-based tools. / 🔠 Big Words. / 💻 Prefab is one of those minor, life-changing work apps that will save you about six years of time over the rest of your life in four-minute increments. / 📰 Wallhop, another paywall killer. / 📍 Local Wikipedia. / 🏄 Internet Cul-de-sac. / 🍿 BingeBrowse turns your streaming into an old-school video store. Considering how to make this my default TV interface. / 🎧 Sprout, a new motherboard for your old iPod. / Spider-Man background music. / RoamDial is very cool. / 🎨 Semantic Art Search. / 🚂 Railpass.

Explorations.

🎥 Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald. / 🍿 Ready Or Not: Here I Come. / 🍿 “The Cornetto Trilogy.” Finally introduced my youngest to the only film trilogy I care about. / 📚 See You Around by Lex Paleaux.

The Miseducation of Mister Mary Marmalade.

Vol. 7, No. 4

Featuring: Butthole Surfers, Fatboy Slim, Trampled by Turtles, Spacemoth, Mhaol, SLOT, PISS, MOULD, shishi, Yard Act, Fionna Apple, 7ebra, Pan Amsterdam, Bloc Party, Spike Fuck, Caley Watts, and Baby Nova.

Cassette via TapeDeck.org.

Ode, snap.

Vol. 7, No. 3

I’m not a very good photographer. I tried to change that a few times in my life (as recently as last year, in fact) — I spent too much on a camera and got really into Flickr and hung out with (i.e., tweeted at) creative types who owned nice lenses and had at least a dilettantish interest in taking good pictures — but it didn’t matter, I don’t have a knack for it and I lack the patience and inclination to learn and improve. (More like F-Oh-Just-Stop-Already, amirite?)

Last summer, I handed my phone to a stranger and had them take a photo of me with family and friends. When I looked at the photo later, there was a woman passing behind us looking at the camera, as though she were with us, but not, like, with us. It was just odd, so for the first time in my life I tried out that thingy where you use your phone and your finger to erase a person. It took four seconds and worked great and felt… weird.

It’s not like photography doesn’t have a rich tradition of dishonesty, but I am concerned we are now spending too much effort creating moments when all we really wanted to do is capture them.

So now I’m a “snapshot” guy. There’s an app called Lapse, and it more or less operates like the iPhone version of a disposable camera — features that do more to mimic the spirit of those cameras than force fit analogue features for shits, kicks and giggles. It’s the good kind of nostalgia. (Lapse also seems to have a bit of a history going from simple app, to social photo app, to failed social photo app that burned though tens of millions of dollars, and then, incredibly, instead of just shutting down, they reverted back to the original concept. All of that happened before I found it.)

Opens immediately to take photos, stores them behind a button for me to review later (I like that feature a lot, and this button push is a much better implementation of it than Gudak’s wait for three fucking days while we pretend develop your fake film), and does a little voodoo to actually look like proper photograph.

Now you’re thinking, “the fuck does ‘proper’ even mean there?” Well, let me tell you: I am 48 years old, which means my sticky years were like 1992 through 1998 or so, so a proper photo looks like it was taken by a Kodak FunSaver — it’s grainy, there might be red eye, and everyone looks a little spooked but also like they are having the best day of their life. Also the date should be stamped on there in an unnecessarily digital-ass font.

(Also, I bought my kids each one of these and they are pretty great if you’re in good light.)

Housekeeping: Been a few weeks. Just assume I’m very busy working on the new book. / ✌️

Matthew / Kenneth Josephson / 1965

Confusions.

🏴‍☠️ Pirating the pirates. ❝Legally, this is piracy. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, merely breaking a Blu-ray’s digital lock to rip the video files is a federal violation, regardless of intent. The law makes no distinction between mass-distributing a movie for profit and preserving the historical record. To take part in these preservation projects is to take on significant legal risk, with admonishments from rights holders and cease-and-desist letters being common.❞ / 📖 Choose Your Own Adventure books for adults. / Not unrelated: how romance novels filled sex-ed gaps. / 📦 Don’t let anyone take away your big box of cables. / 🤬 Reddit is turning off RSS. / 🧠 Bad Brains are releasing their original demo tape. ❝The riff for ‘Pay To Cum’ started as a stream of punk rock vibes fueled by The Ramones, The Damned, and Return To Forever. The title actually meant nothing to us; it was just a fun-loving play on words.❞ / 🎲 Very jealous of these friends who are trying to play through all of The Campaign for North Africa, the most tedious war game ever made.

Extensions.

🗄️ Museum Of Endangered Sounds. / Museum of Time Based Art. / 🗂️ The Ikea Complexity Index. / 📐 Bastardica, a foundry for bastard web fonts. / 🎸 Tuner, for tuning. / Air Theremin. / 🛠️ Bento/Suite, presentation in a single browser file. / Normal Tools. / Bye Bye Paywall. / Blockr, see what your computer is talking to. / Butter Box, file sharing without internet. / Keeby, keyboard sounds. / 👾 Spaceships, you are not the ship. / 📍 The David Rumsey Map Collection.

Explorations.

📺 Hornblower, all of it. I do this every five years or so. / 🍿 Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). I think I prefer the older one. / 🍿 Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Not terrible. / 🍿 The Wrong Girls is the stoner comedy we needed. / 🍿 Coyote vs. Acme. / 🍿 Zoolander. / 📺 Ted Lasso, because I’m a completist.

📸 September snapshots.

(Or: Yes, we got a new cat.)