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Stygian torment as a Service: Comcast-Xfinity and Why Customer Experience as a Discipline Is often A Demented Circus of Rage

…I know, that headline is maybe too subtle. Consider this lede an amuse-bouche of ha-ha before the tasting menu of livid unhinged hatred of my current ISP, and their staggeringly poor performance in some of the most basic of tasks.Customer Experience is often reduced to “it’s just a cost center, so we need to focus on keeping that cost low”. But customer retention is for most industries (read:…

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP: X "The 4th of July"

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Hey Reddit...

…maybe that’s the sign that you pump too many damn ads. Because the limit you’ve set (5) is pretty damn low given the sheer endless volume you’ve added over the last 12-18 months, which I suspect in nearly an order of magnitude higher. And it doesn’t make me want to pay for a subscription, because the enshittification pattern was already set far earlier, so you already abrogated the trust much…

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Sounds That Have Been made, EP 141: Nate Smith w/ Lalah Hathaway "Automatic"

The Pointer Sisters are known for a long string of about a dozen hits through the 70s and 80s, many of which have been covered by others, but never as well as this take of one of their most peculiar chart-toppers.Automatic was the first Billboard hit that featured the lower range of Ruth Pointer (the only current surviving member of the group), and was a dance club staple for a hot minute. While…

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UX Dark Patterns: A Menagerie of Mediocre Weird

Almost all of what I bother to watch on Youtube falls into fairly clear buckets: Domestic and International news and commentary from mostly fairly well established, and low-on-ragebait sources (e.g. The Financial Times of London, RTP, Times Radio, Monocle, DW) and academic/institutional talks (e.g. CSIS, Commonwealth Club, London School of Economics) with the occasional talking head with a…

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NO MORE KINGS - Schoolhouse Rock

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How Elon Can Take Revenge On Trump

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Vetting the Newest Papal Dude

I have not chimed in on the new Pope for a litany of reasons (see what I did there? No, no you probably didn’t, heathens), not the least of which being the satirical lean I could apply would be epic. That said, for those that need a reason to evaluate him, his order, The Augustinians, helped to pioneer one of the most prevalent (and often one of the most boring) beer categories in history,…

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Hella Abatanado

It turned out so good, I’m keeping it and naming it: the Hella Abatanado is a complete piss take on the Portuguese variation of an Americano, made into a coffee cocktail. A coffee base made from Sical brand expresso and Flowerhead Tea‘s “Fuck the Grind” vanilla and cacao maté (pulled together in a French press), then punched up with Mr. Black coffee liqueur, Macieira Brandy cream, Raft smoked tea…

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Excerpt of the Day: Kissinger edition

I know I know, Kissinger is evil blah blah blah. Kissinger was many things, some of them quite questionable then and certainly now, but the truth is he was also an astute observer of political behavior, and had a broad and deep understanding of the international system; while steeped in realpolitik to the point of being almost devoid of a moral compass, he also was quite incisive. He wrote the…

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Art: Disquiet 56 (desvendando-se no incerto)

The last few weeks have been deeply, disquieting. I went through some old artifacts on the peninsula and found some things I suddenly wanted to contend with, and ended up finding a path with that go forward, yet based on immense introspection and my perennial habit of abstract rumination. The sub-title is Portuguese for “unraveling into the uncertain“. Built from two painting layers involving…

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Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 140: A-Ha, the Movie

A-Ha are mostly remembered in the US for their sole megahit, “Take On Me” but they actually charted globally for decades, sold almost 100 million units, have a Guinness Book record for one of the largest concerts in history (6 figure attendance), and…seem to be in a strange marriage of convenience with each other; they collectively barely stand each other, yet understand what their fame, and that…

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Art: The Canticle of False Hopes

It’s a thing where as I expand my various scripts & filters to generate patterns or distort images that the process of generation, distortion, shearing, merging, and in many ways play god to pixel pushing has expanded my compositional approach immensely, for both analog and digital. Often I get results that really blur the space between the two; occasionally I make it still look mostly analog,…

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Art: Imperium of Ghosts

After years of only occasionally playing around with sobel edge detection operations in my art, I’m finding some of the filters/scripts I’ve been mucking about with of late, are starting to produce useful results. In this case, using various configurations of them on portions of the two base paintings I scanned to start this (one, acrylics on hardboard, and the other various inks on watercolor…

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Art: Disquiet 55 (Olissipo)

I had started working on something that was getting progressively more gobshite, and it was frustrating, because so many times before, sessions like that often take a hard turn into something that actually works. I had given up, as it wasn’t. Until it sort of was, the next day. I took one layer out of that work that was mostly various inks (and IIRC some water soluble colored pencil) on…

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The Trump Administration Is a NatSec Nightmare, by their own Admission

So, I’ve just read a piece by Jeffrey Goldberg (Editor of The Atlantic and by historical standards, a Neo-con Republican of Reagan era bona fides) called The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans, and when I started reading I thought it would end in a Project Veritas grade bit of disinfo op clownery. But after a full read, it appears to be real. Basically a chunk of the Trump…

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Art:  gone by sin too slowly

This was one of those things that was developing from a set of recent experiments with variations of my process of painting on various media, then scanning them in and torqueing them into something clearly borne of, yet entirely divorced from said sources.In this case I found a few new tricks in some old software toys for generating geometric forms, which then get pushed and pulled into the mix;…