2025-05-09 18:49:34
I am so very in love with Man/Woman/Chainsaw — a London-based indie band that sounds like Julia Indelicate and James Smith banging out garage-y guitar rock. This year's "Adam & Steve" could have been released twenty years ago and brims with youthful urgency and foot-tapping melodies; can't argue with the plinky piano and banshee strings in the mix either.
Maya put me on to piri & tommy, a UK drum and bass duo. Crystal vocals sparkling over wub-wub bass and skippity-chick drum loops. From their froge.mp3 album, soft spot is a good introduction as it encapsulates the essence of the group in under four minutes.
I imagine there are some snobs who dismiss Moonlight Haze as a mediocre Nightwish clone. There's a lot of overlap in the "operatic female-fronted metal" genre and this Italian band aren't the most derivative I've ever heard! I really enjoyed 2020's Lunaris but never quite got into Animus. Latest single "Awakening" from yet-to-be-released album Beyond (2025) is an adequate example of the genre. The weakest of the singles, I hope the album is more like "Tame The Storm"!
Former vocalist of Bauhaus and mega Goth legend, Peter Murphy is back with a disgustingly sleazy, grandly dramatic, gothic synthpop album, Silver Shade (2025). Spattering industrial drums, squidgy synths, weird noises like horror movie sound effects, distorted guitars, and Murphy's distinctive voice all come together to make something Bauhaus meets 90's Bowie yet doesn't feel formulaic. Album opener "Swoon" sets the tone, "Soothsayer" switches up the vibe completely. Lovely stuff.
I love me some melodic death metal and Sweden's The Halo Effect are a decent example. Essentially a Scandinavian metal supergroup, The Halo Effect return with their Sophomore album March of the Unheard (2025). As you'd expect from the guitarist for Sinergy, this album shreds. Ex-Dark Tranquility vocalist, Mikael Stanne's growls are a great counterpoint to the crisp guitar work. Not surprisingly it's not a million miles away from In Flames stylistically but it's a solid album. First single, "Detonate" powers through with a beat you can nod along with and just enough melody in the chorus.
2025-05-09 18:13:04
People, including me, often use the terms "internet" and "web" interchangeably. And that's understandable — the difference is subtle and confusing. After all, there are plenty of "websites" on the internet and relatively few internetsites 🙃
The internet is a network of cables and satellites that allow data transfer from computer to computer.
The web is a network of documents interconnected by hyperlinks.
The "world wide web" is part of the internet but is not the whole of the internet.
Corporate social media attention economy advertising revenue generation sites, which typically do not allow hyperlinking external to their systems, are part of the internet but not part of the World Wide Web.
2025-05-08 20:13:31
I was sure I used to use a keyboard shortcut to "open" a file; CTRL-O and a little "finder" window pops up showing the last few opened files with a search bar.
I tried to do it today and it didn't work.
Looking through the "hotkey" settings didn't help. I couldn't find anything sensible in the Command Palette.
Some online searching led me to a Reddit post where it was confirmed that I wasn't going mad — CTRL-O is the keyboard shortcut I'm thinking of but the functionality is called "Quick Switcher" and it was toggled off in the Core Plugins menu.
I imagine it happened during one of the recent updates. Anyway, it works as expected now.
Once more for the cheap seats —
CTRL-O (the letter "o", not the number "0") to activate2025-05-08 18:49:07
I can't remember exactly who said it (so I'm paraphrasing here) but if your "design system" doesn't come with code examples, it's just a drawing of a website
1 and I completely agree.
Here's a picture of what your website will never look like!
Stephen Hay
I've been building websites professionally for over 13 years and I've seen incredible designs scribbled in notebooks during a meeting and horrific designs meticulously constructed over weeks in Figma/Sketch/Photoshop.
The tool is irrelevant. The conversation is everything.
If you're still throwing a design grenade over the wall into dev-land in 2025 you have failed. Figma will not save you.
Developers have a wealth of technical knowledge; capabilities, advancements in browser abilities, accessibility best practices, performance-enhancing tricks.
These, as much as appearance, influence a user's perception of the site, the brand, the product.
All of this knowledge, unless you have it yourself, will have to be shoe-horned in after the fact or (more likely) lost to the wind.
Undoubtedly this will alter your design to some degree — a design you've spent weeks nudging to perfection and got rubber-stamped by a client who won't be happy with any changes.
We do our due diligence when it comes to copy and legal and, in my particular case, medical so why not development?
UX/UI needs technical representation — otherwise you're just drawing websites instead of crafting digital solutions.
1: Brad Frost or Stu Robson, probably.
2025-05-06 12:37:18
Mentions suicide, Prince Andrew, and Jeffrey Epstein
One interesting side effect of following websites' RSS feeds is that, occasionally, I get multiple versions of the same article; edited after syncing. Often these just correct typos but sometimes you can see the editorial decisions writ large.
Take this series from the BBC on the death of Virginia Giuffre.
It looks like they initially ran with calling out Epstein's "abuse" before dialling it back to "accuser" then eventually mustering the guts to mention Prince Andrew — presumably to make it more relevant for the British audience.
At some point they briefly used a less "PR portrait" photograph of Ms Giuffre.
This isn't a critique of the BBC's editorial choices but I am interested in being able to see those choices in public. The BBC site itself doesn't show any version control as each edit overwrites the original at the same URL — this is unique to RSS and that's beautiful and special.
2025-05-04 14:33:10
Happy Star Wars Day!
It's been a long time since I got a free book from a box. This one looked fabulously awful so I picked it up.
I made some tweaks to my website this week. Adding a neat little "Type / to search" functionality to the Search page courtesy of Bob Monsour's "A keystroke to place focus in the search box".
I also updated the photograph of me on the homepage… the day before I got a haircut, naturally!
Spent a lovely half hour in the sunny beer terrace at The Picturedrome drinking a swift half of Hazy Meadow; a 3.8% session IPA. A nice little break in a hectic schedule spent chatting shit with my wife.
It didn’t seem scary so much as inappropriate, like somebody had made a dirty joke at a child’s birthday party.
Lev Grossman, The Magician King