Psalm 51 by Seth T. Hahne
Psalm 51 by Seth T. Hahne
Some good news came this week in the form of more Velocity Girl remastering. This time it’s a compilation of non-album tracks from various places being released by Slumberland Records. The collection is called 1989-1992 and the contents are precisely what it says on the tin.
The first available track from the release is my favorite song by the band, “Forgotten Favorite.” Even after the remaster, it’s still a bit muddy, but I’m not sure if there is anything more the band could do apart from rerecord the track completely. It’s still a stellar song through, with a shoegaze-worthy crush of guitars that’s as propulsive as anything put out by UK pedal hoppers. Despite some muck still on the recording, the vocals are pristine, and Sarah Shannon sounds heavenly.
Wired Magazine has the success story of the Anti-Spotify, AKA, Qobuz.
Qobuz now has 1.2 million active monthly users, and its streaming revenue shot up 45.7 percent in 2025, compared to 8.8 percent growth in overall paid music streaming. Around a third of its revenue now comes from the US, its biggest market. Those are still teeny numbers next to Spotify (293 million paid subscribers) and Apple Music (more than 100 million).
People who have Qobuz typically have little but good things to say about it.
The newest differentiator is the refusal by Qobuz to provide AI slop on their platform. While Spotify has become inundated with AI music and even impersonators, Qobuz has taken a firm stance against it.
If anyone is interested, I have two free months of Qobuz studio to give away.
I’ve been getting car sick when trying to read in a vehicle in motion since I was a kid. Little did I know, my favorite computer manufacturer has a solution for that, which was brought to my attention by this piece in The Verge. The technology is called Vehicle Motion Cues.
According to big-S Science, this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the eyes staring at a static display while the inner ear feels the car turning, braking, and accelerating. Motion Cues solve this by placing dots around the periphery of the display that move in harmony with the motion of the car. When the car turns right, the dots sweep across the screen to the left; when the car brakes the dots slide forward.
I can’t wait to try this out, especially on a long trip.
Louie Mantia offers some new drive icons based on the datatapes from Star Wars, and they’re pretty fun.
The Imperial data vault on Scarif contained thousands of datatapes, one of them being the plans for the Death Star. After the plans were broadcast to the Rebel fleet, they were transferred to a small datacard.
Just wrote a glowing post about the Sennheiser HD 650 headphones last month. Well, the honeymoon is over, and we’re already citing irreconcilable differences. Love stinks.
Conor Dougherty writes for the NYT about growing older in skateboarding and the loss that can come with that. I felt gratified when he used the same description of curbs you can ride with ease that I did in a post a few weeks ago: low stakes terrain.
At a time when people are lonely and disconnected, a bunch of 40- and 50-year-olds gather around low-stakes terrain, reconnecting with old friends and joking about tricks they can no longer do.
The article doesn’t just explore loss from the perspective of losing a friend to a terminal disease, but also the loss that comes from getting older and losing the capabilities you once had.
I had been thinking about this very subject as a kept noticing the perfect-height curb that stretches across the elevator section of the parking deck I use when I go into the office. A few old dudes could teach that curb a thing or two about the grind.
Source: At an LA Costco, Skateboarding and Learning About Loss
It was cool meeting Rivers Cuomo in 1994 on the first tour of the Blue Album.
Watched: Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC 🍿
Nightclubbing chronicled the rise and fall of Max’s Kansas City, a legendary New York club that helped birth the NYC punk scene and was sort of a rival of CBGB. I sensed that it didn’t take too much embellishment to highlight the wildness of that time and place. My favorite line in the film is uttered by trans singer Jayne County when she describes fighting with a guy who was heckling her and jumped on stage while she was performing at CBGB. To paraphrase, “I punched him and he fell off the stage, hit his head on a table, and gave himself a concussion.” Amazing how easy it is to self-administer head trauma when someone punches you. That was the scene at those clubs 45 years ago.