I still have a Google Voice number and at this point I don’t know why.

Public service announcement: If you cut your finger in the kitchen, like I did last night, those silly-looking finger cots (or finger condoms) are awesome for protecting the wound.

Ice Cubes, the Mastodon client, has been getting better at a rapid rate. There are updates every day, it seems. Impressive.

🎵 Today’s listen: In The Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. It’s an indie rock masterpiece. That’s all I can say.

This “track changes” article by Ben Shpigel of The New York Times is wonderfully snarky:

Tom Brady’s football career traced an arc that bordered on mythical, ascending from sixth-round N.F.L. draft pick to seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback and global celebrity. And, after more than two decades of unparalleled brilliance in his sport, plus another season, it has ended.

🎵 Today’s listen, Groundhog Day The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording), composed by Tim Minchin. It is wonderful and timely.

I find the Magic Trackpad (which is connected to my Mac mini) to be very janky compared to my wired trackball (or to the built-in trackpads on MacBooks). The pointer skips around a lot. I wonder if everyone has that but no one complains.

🎵 Today’s listen: Come Get Your Wife by Elle King. Much of it is fun, “angry woman” country music. Whether you enjoy it or not probably hinges on how much you like its hit single, “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home),” which is a duet with Miranda Lambert.

A couple new, paid (or optionally paid) search engines have caught my attention recently: Kagi and Neeva. I am trying to figure out if switching to either of them, and paying for a search engine for the first time, makes sense for me.

The main problem with search engines—and Google is the prime example of this right now—is that search results are often worse in quality than they were five or ten years ago. This is because their algorithms have been gamed with SEO, so site creators can make more money, and the search engines themselves have junked up their results listings with ads and promotions for their own properties, so they can make more money.

At this point, I don’t trust Google or Bing to order search results in a way that is beneficial to me, rather than to their partners and their paying customers: advertisers. Paying a subscription for search would, theoretically, align the search engine’s interests with my own.

Kagi and Neeva promise aligned incentives and a more personalized search experience with higher-quality results. Both have iOS apps, which are web browsers that default to their own search engines. Both allow for sign-in with Apple, which allows me to hide my email address/real identity from them, if I choose to. Both have Safari extensions that hijack the address bar search (even on iOS).

I have tested out Neeva the most. I really like its AI-generated summaries of the top few results pages. Kagi is clean and much faster. I find it hard to judge which is better, per se. I think I’m finding what I want on the first page or so. I think I prefer Neeva’s AI summary to Kagi’s lack of one. The summaries are not always that impressive, though; it seems to pull one sentence out of the top three search result pages and smoosh them together into a paragraph.

One thing I have discovered is that I spend a lot less time looking at search engine results pages than I thought I did. Most of my use of the browser search bar ends with me clicking an autocomplete suggestion—one that is handled by DuckDuckGo, rather than Neeva or Kagi. (This is due to limitations in the default search engines in Safari.)

It probably makes sense for me to wait until Google, Bing, and whoever else integrate AI summaries into their offerings and re-evaluate all the search engines again. The Internet rumor mill suggests that change will come fairly soon.

🎵 Today’s listen: John Coltrane and John Hartman I just learned about this album this week. As far as I know, it is the only vocal jazz/standards album John Coltrane ever made. John Hartman has a deep, silky voice that’s so good I am surprised I never heard of him before.

📺 I’m watching The Last of Us. Love it.

🎵 Today’s listen: Heaven or Las Vegas by Cocteau Twins. This is purported to be one of the greatest albums of the 1990s, and a foundation for the dream pop and shoegaze subgenres. I never listened to it before today. I liked it but didn’t love it enough to keep it in my library. I think its genre may not be for me.

Ian Bogost’s essay comparing the TV adaptation of The Last Of Us to its video game forbear was a good read. I especially enjoyed his thoughts about what content makes sense in a video game vs. a television series.

I don’t fully buy his argument that video game storytelling is inherently inferior to other media. It works differently, which I don’t think the author fully realizes. At one point, when descriving his experience playing The Last of Us (the video game), he states:

I couldn’t shake the sense that the combat was getting in the way of the story, acting as filler, just there to give me something to do in between metered doses of narrative.

Video game narratives are compelling, even if they are shallower than television or movie narratives, because you, the player, are put into the shoes of the protagonist. You are not watching a story happen to someone else; the story is happening to you—and it is happening right now.

That’s why it doesn’t matter that all the actions you perform in a video game may fall into a video game trope, like first-person shooter-style combat or even quick-time events. That stuff is the game. Gameplay, not story, is the essential element of video games. In the best games, the gameplay, more than the narrative, is what sparks your imagination, even after you’ve stopped playing. The experience sticks with you because you did it. The story sticks with you because it happened to you.

My daughter performed in front of a couple hundred people in her elementary school talent show tonight. I am so proud of her. I was not brave enough to do such a thing at her age.

Want to read: You Are a Badass® by Jen Sincero 📚 Thanks, @greghiggins.

🎵 Today’s listen: To Venus and Back by Tori Amos. I haven’t listened to this album in many years, but I remember liking it in 1999 and 2000. I remember Tori Amos being very divisive when I was in high school (in the mid 1990s); I can’t remember why.

📺 I finished watching His Dark Materials season 3 last night. I found the last season to be a letdown in many ways, especially the last few episodes. I think an adaptation of The Amber Spyglass that I would like would be twice as long and cost a hundred times as much.

If you stop doing something, you get worse at it. Last fall, I stopped writing for myself every day. I’m tring to get back to it now. I’m finding it harder to stich together thoughts and sentences. Typing—outside the context of my day job—feels weird. My writing has lost its voice—at least for now.

One thing that has been making me happy lately is Radio Paradise, which is an Internet radio station. Several things about it make it special:

1. It is completely ad-free. It runs on the public radio model, in that it is listener-supported. A DJ breaks in between songs a couple times an hour to say hello and remind listeners that they can donate. These breaks never annoy me.

2. Its “Main Mix” is the best eclectic rock radio station I have ever listened to. The songs played on this station range from huge hits to album tracks I have never heard of. It has no pretentious or underground vibe: whatever is playing is always interesting, musical, and accessible.

3. It streams high quality audio. I listen to its AAC 320 Kbps stream, because my Apple devices support it. There is also a lossless FLAC stream, if your hardware can play it. Most Internet radio I listen has much worse audio quality, like 64 Kbps or (if you’re lucky) 128 Kbps MP3.

4. Its web player is great, it has apps for many platforms if you want them, and it can be streamed from third-party Internet radio apps as well.

I highly recommend giving it a try.

I have been playing more chess lately, and I have never played worse, I think. It is a humbling game sometimes, especially if you are not a visual thinker.

Currently reading: American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales 📚

Currently reading: Fairy Tale by Stephen King 📚

I’m happy Tapbots’s Ivory Mastodon client is out. My love for its predecessor, Tweetbot, far exceeded any feelings I had for Twitter. I installed it and am trying it out. At present, however, I’m not that interested in Mastodon, and I don’t think Ivory will change that. It was hard to kick my addiction to Twitter and I don’t think I need to replace it with something that is almost exactly the same.

I have been happy to sit out the whole Twitter implosion, though I am beyond tired of hearing about it all the time on the podcasts I listen to. I still have an account over there, mostly to be able to read tweetstorms (that really should be blog posts) that other people link to. I haven’t posted anywhere in a while. I’ve been busy reading and working and haven’t had much to say.

📺 I have been watching Obi-Wan while at the gym because it is relatively mindless. And wow is it mindless! Seeing more Darth Vader and Obi-Wan is fun, but boy does everybody suck at their jobs on that show. 😀