Links, October 24, 2025
§Garbage’s Shirley Manson Speaks Out Against Music Industry Economics: “This Is An Alarm Call”
The fact that they are not even able to sell a record and it’s taken from them by rich motherfuckers on streaming platforms who get paid royally by record labels, who get paid royally by Ticketmaster, who get paid royally by merch companies, who get paid royally — the list goes on and on and on. There’s accountants. There’s lawyers. They’re all fucking getting paid, except for the musician.
§color.js
As much as I tire of JavaScript, this library looks like a solid replacement for chroma.js, which – while otherwise fairly solid – is architected around patterns which make tree-shaking difficult. They’ve also built out some web components for working with color and a few apps as well.
§How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface
If for whatever reason you must use the current Apple operating systems, TidBITS (who’ve been covering macs almost as long as I’ve been using them) has some tips on how to make them more tolerable.
§Million-Mile Tech
I did upgrade my phone — with a new battery and leather case. This isn’t what people typically think of when they say they upgraded their phone.
A meditation on intentionality and longevity in technology. I’m still using an iPhone 12, chipped and on its third case, and might next year replace it with an iPhone 14/15, because this one is having trouble holding a charge all day. It doesn’t matter too much because I work from home and can charge it at my desk, and rarely need an all-day charge. Unlike the author of this piece, I’m not doing it because I’ve “cultivated a lopsided fondness for a material possession that’s now a well-worn friend, but rather because I resent having to have a phone to participate in society.
§Where Did All the Public Bathrooms Go?
Following a chain of links from the above, this is something that I as a person with kidney/urinary tract issues has been paying attention to for decades. When I lived on Portland’s west side, I kept a mental map of all the publicly-available bathrooms, just in case.
In 2011, a United Nations-appointed special rapporteur who was sent to the U.S. to assess the “human right of clean drinking water and sanitation” was shocked by the lack of public toilets in one of the richest economies in the world.
§US-EAST-1: All for One, One for All
They recall the last time their product went down. That time, the incident was isolated and internal—a misconfiguration pushed to production by an engineer. That time, the customers were angry. The company had to publish a postmortem, and fight to assure the customers that they could still be trusted. This time, the support lines are eerily quiet.