Here's a short history of onigiri, also known colloquially as a rice ball. The modern version came to be post WW2, and was hugely popularized by 7-Eleven. The post also includes this short video on how to properly open them, at which I'm quite terrible.
The Music of 2023
I listened to 1,869 tracks released in 2023. I liked 837 of those. 237 were rated best of the year. Only 47 of them made it into my Favorites list. In the last few years, fewer and fewer new tracks seem to resonate with me. I'm becoming more discerning, and I'm aging out of the music made by the young, as naturally happens. I try really hard to keep up with The Youths, yet music made by those in their early twenties continues to reflect the lives of people in their early twenties. I'm almost 43. So it goes.
In 2023, I ended up connected mostly with the records from artists who were already among my favorites. I really dug a lot of jazz and blues from the last year, but those rarely land in my Favorites list. I'm still a pop and rock guy, at heart, I guess. It's kind of bananas how many records were released this year by my favorite musicians: Gorillaz, Blur, Animal Collective, Yo La Tengo, Wilco, Margo Price, The New Pornographers, Youth Lagoon, Belle & Sebastian, Bongeziwe Mabandla, Deerhoof, Feist, The Go! Team, two from The National, four (4!) from Robert Pollard. Not all of them ended up favorites for the year, but that's still quite a list.
My listening habits have evolved in one way, I've noticed. I've been listening a little more to songwriting, specifically. That's taken me back to country music and the catalog of older songs I had once ignored. Spent more time with records from the 60s and 70s. Payed more attention to lyrics than I traditionally had before. Lots of singles from lots of artists, but plenty of The Band, Lucinda Williams, Willie Nelson, George Jones, and the Staple Singers. I can see myself growing further down this route as time passes.
2023 was also a year I listened to a lot of Robert Pollard. I finished my trek through the full 2,500 songs of his I have access to. I have been a fan of him and Guided By Voices for 25 years now, but his music has really been hitting the spot for me, lately. Straightforward rock. Unpretentious. Made with love and playfulness. Famously prolific, he put out four records this year. His music simply speaks to me, and this year I fully embraced that. He's so good.
I made a few wonderful music discoveries this year: Sparks (which I'll probably write more about at some point), Mandy Indiana, Zach Bryan, Charley Crockett. And a few rediscoveries after closer listens: Fruit Bats, The Staple Singers, The Band. Maybe it's safe to say that my music listening habits deepened this year, rather than expanded. I'm continuing to appreciate stuff in new ways. Fewer surprises as I get older. But that doesn't mean there isn't more to learn.
That's where I am as we go into 2024. I plan to focus less on new music by new artists, and instead spend more quality time with the music I know I love.
Here are my favorite albums of 2023:
- Blur - The Ballad of Darren
- Gorillaz - Cracker Island
- The National - First Two Pages of Frankenstein
- Fatoumata Diawara - London Ko
- Guided By Voices - Nowhere To Go But Up
- Zach Bryan - Zach Bryan
And the Honorable Mentions:
- New Pornographers - Continue as a Guest
- The Arcs - Electrophonic Chronic
- Youth Lagoon - Heaven Is A Junkyard
- The National - Laugh Track
- Yo La Tengo - This Stupid World
- Sparks - The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte
- Feeble Little Horse - Girl With Fish
- Fruit Bats - A River Running To Your Heart
- Lonnie Holley - Oh Me Oh My
Here are a couple playlists on Apple Music, if you're interested.
Favorite Tracks for 2023. Changed the rules for this year's playlist. It's all 47 of my faves, not just one track per artist.
The End of Pitchfork?
Pitchfork magazine is being folded into GQ. I've been a reader for over twenty years now, and so this is a bummer. I read maybe one out of every 300 reviews, but it was still a good place to catch wind of new artists, or which older artists are putting out new material.
Kornhaber does a pretty good job of capturing my attitude towards it:
The irony of Pitchfork is that although it has long been thought of as a keeper of cool, the site itself has never been particularly cool; one admits sheepishly to reading it. This is not just because of its reputation for snobbery and its sometimes exasperating prose. It's also because to absorb the logic of Pitchfork is to believe in the authority of each individual's ears and brain. Saying you're a Pitchfork person can be mistaken for saying you take its opinions as your own, when ideally it just means that you want a discerning companion for making your own discoveries and judgments.
I never really cared what Pitchfork said about anyone. I'm able to have my own studied opinions. But if they cared to write about someone, I figured they were worth the attention, for good or bad.
This is probably the end of the site, but the real Pitchfork killer would be the sunsetting of its RSS feed. If I can't follow the music news without also getting posts about what watches movie stars wore on red carpets, then I'm out out.
Time to start looking for more places for independent music news.
A Small Design Success
Yesterday was one of those good days as a designer where a solution to a tricky problem falls into place, everyone is very happy with the results, and it looks good. It can be surprisingly hard to hit all three. Especially in a large organization with dozens of competing agendas.
This was for a small, repetitive piece of UI — a stack of 250px x 100px cards — each already dense with images, text, and other info. The requirement was to also include three to five new affordances; buttons for performing different actions. One of those actions would account for around 95% of the clicks, so preferably that one would be larger. After a couple dozen iterations, it all fell into place. Voilà. C'est fini.
Most of my work lately has been systems-level stuff. Cross-tooling design patterns and functionality. Or complicated workflows with numerous newsroom roles working in coordination. Or intra-department work where Editorial Tools and Consumer site design are partnering. These are all satisfying problems to solve. But there's nothing quite like the feeling when a piece of UI clicks into place right before my eyes. That's what pleases the soul of the art school student in me. Balance, weight, color, space, and purpose.
Modern Life Is Rubbish
New art for the hallway wall. If you know, you know.
Snow Day
Good morning from snowy Brooklyn. I was going to go into the office today, but I’ll take any chance like this to work from home. I’m assuming everyone else is doing the same. The return of the ol' wintery mix.
Jason Frank at Vulture found the royalty free music track used by Wigg and Ferrel at this year's Golden Globes. I loved this dumb little tune (by Kevin McLeod), and that bit was the best moment of the night.
I do not expect to ever be the victim of one of those new AI voice scams where someone uses your voice to convince a loved one you're in extreme trouble and need money fast. But Imani Gandy shared a good idea: have a password between you and those who might get one of these calls.
BrianFeeney.us v11.2
Welcome to a slightly updated brianfeeney.us. This morning, I transferred my domain from one server to another, moving from my old website to this one. Minor updates on the front-end, but it's a fully updated Craft instance on the back-end. Apologies to anyone following via RSS; you might have just been flooded with a bunch of old posts and new.
Only a few things have changed between v11.1 and v11.2. Here's a short list:
- I've added a Notes post type for short comments not necessitating a title.
- There's a new homepage featuring writing and photos.
- My portfolio & CV is no longer on this site, but on a new domain: http://brianfeeney.design
- An about page! I plan to update this with something better ASAP.
That's about it for now. I'm currently playing with designs for a big v12 update. I don't feel pressured to get that up anytime soon, as I still really like the general design of v11. Maybe summer 2024?
If you're a reader, I welcome you to reach out! I run this site as if there are literally zero real people visiting. I don't believe for a moment that the 4.6k unique visitors registered by Cloudflare is really real. But surely a few those are friends and future friends out there.
AirPlay is Broken
At some point in the last few months, Apple degraded the user experience with AirPlay and the HomePods. I used to be able to play music on my speakers via an "iPhone -> Living Room" option. Now, I can only handoff to the Living Room option, which is a combo HomePods/AppleTV thing. I can control the music playing out of the speakers, but it's not really my Apple Music library. It's a facsimile of it. And that's the real problem. It doesn't retain "favorites", gives me an "Add to Library" option for songs supposedly playing from my library, does not allow for rating tracks, and play counts do not increase inside my iTunes smart playlists. When viewing on the iPhone, it doesn't even let you look back through the history so you can update Favorites or ratings from there. It's all very frustrating because it used to work exactly as I expected it to.
I've troublshooted by turning on/off every single setting I can find on my phone, HomePods, Apple TV, and Apple Music apps. No luck. The problem is such that no amount of specificity in my Google search terms can filter to it. I suspect that once you set a pair of HomePods to be the default audio for an AppleTV, those HomePods are no longer findable on their own to AirPlay to. They disappear as their own thing which can AirPlay.
My hope is that my personal use case has fallen into the cracks between one update and the next within something in the Apple ecosystem, and that an upcoming update will realign it all. That AirPlaying music will once again be possible.