Modern life comes with a background hum of tiny indignities. Fill out the form. Scan this QR code. Sit through the ad before your call gets answered, and rest assured, your call is very important to us. None of it is a real hardship. It’s just friction, usually delivered by someone who has no power to change, so by design there’s no one to even be mad at other than a faceless company.

I’ve built up decent defenses against most of it. This week, though, they cracked. I caught myself borderline furious at a hold-music loop, which is pretty absurd.

Then, like it usually does, perspective showed up. I realized how much I actually have, and how many people would trade problems without a second thought. That doesn’t make the hold music less annoying. It just makes me shut up about it a bit more.

My Picks

Marconi Union - Multiforms: Ambient Transmissions, Vol. 3

Marconi Union’s latest release is my frontrunner for the 2026 album of the summer. The sonic space it creates is warm, inviting, and expansive. The textures and contours evolve, taking us from one moment to the next along a journey of discovery that carried me from start to finish. I particularly like the instrumentation on this one. If you like ambient electronic music, it’s simply superb.

The American Revolution

There is so much I did not know about my country’s origin. The extent of the brutality and violence. The cruelty and privation. The struggle for freedom by indigenous Americans and slaves. I had remembered the brilliant ideas for self-determination and fractious relations among states, and knew that sacrifices were made. But I had no idea of the full extent of this war’s impact on our people and the world. It’s free to stream the entire series until July 12th.

Making Music: Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers

If you or someone you know enjoys making electronic music, Dennis DeSantis’ Making Music is a fantastic resource. It details dozens of patterns for starting, developing, and finishing music on both conceptual and practical levels without getting into specific technical details. The result is a set of universal problems and solutions that can help at any stage in the process, and at any level of expertise. The book is free as an electronic download in PDF, .mobi, and .epub versions, or you can buy your own print copy.

Scritchy Scratchy

Idle games are such a strange genre, and I’m always surprised at how much I enjoy playing them. Essentially, the game mechanics let you set up increasingly optimized automations that allow you to earn ever-greater points, which lead to better optimization, and so on. You have to earn it, though. At the beginning it’s a bit of a slog, but I think that’s just to make the payoff more sweet. In this game you’re playing scratch tickets, looking to increase your luck and winnings with every run. Try out the demo for free, and if you like it the full game is less than $10. Totally worth it in my book.

Recently Published

What do Large Language Models Owe Us?

What if we recognized the debt owed to society from AI corporations’ non-consensual scraping of the internet? We could, for example, make slightly older versions of models available at cost, with the option to power them with renewable energy. Would that be enough to dampen the backlash? I’m not so sure, but the idea itself really got me thinking.

How It’s Going

What the heck is going on with my site, posts, and newsletters? It’s time for me to step back and think about where I actually am versus where I thought I might be.

In the Groove

For decades, I’d pick an “album of the summer” each year, something that fit the vibe of the season and provided the soundtrack for these long, hot days. My earliest candidate would have to be The Cars’ debut album, released on June 6, 1978, though I was too young to think of it like that at the time. I just knew that it was everywhere, on the radio, at my friends’ houses, and it blew me away because I’d never heard anything like it. Every track holds up, and I think it’s still the perfect mix of pop, rock, and new wave. My favorite thing about these tracks is how they start. Check out the guitar and synth tom that begin Good Times Roll, or the raw chug and release of Just What I Needed. They get you instantly hooked, then drag you in for the rest of the ride. Fantastic.

Until Next Time

When things get annoying, I’d love to skip straight to the shutting up part without getting all the way to boiling first. If you’ve found a shortcut, let me know. Until then, maybe I’ll just blame the heat.