Kirk McElhearn, writing about the lack of syncing of the Recently Played playlist between the Mac and iOS on Apple Music:

This is a huge mistake. If I’ve listened to some music through a playlist on Apple Music, I may want to go back and check what I heard, to listen to certain songs again, add them to my music library, or check out more music by some of the artists I heard. Especially if I’m listening on a mobile device and didn’t have time to note what I heard.

This is frustrating but is a perfect problem for Last FM to solve[1]. I wrote about Last FM as a part of my switch to Apple Music last week:

Last FM is like a journal for music listening and is a required part of my music listening experience. I like having a running log of what I’ve listened to and knowing that I can look something I’ve listened to up with ease. I also like sharing what I listen to with the world because music is a communal experience. There is little in the world that feels as good as finding and sharing an artist that you fall in love with. I want to contribute to that ecosystem and Last FM automates that process. The method of capturing a track that you’re listening to and adding it to your listening history is known as scrobbling on Last FM. Where Spotify integrates scrobbling natively, iTunes and Music on iOS don’t. In order to scrobble your listening history to Last FM you’ll need a third party application on Windows, iOS and Mac OS X. Here are the applications I’m using.

Since writing about the methods I use to scrobble from Apple Music I’ve found that it’s not as cut and dry as everything getting scrobbled when it comes to the Music app on iOS. Florian Eckerstorfer explains:

First of all, scrobbling works for everything that is in My Music (that is, your library). It does not matter if the song is stored locally, streamed from iTunes Match, streamed from Apple Music, or a song from Apple Music that was made available offline. The same is true for playlists, scrobbling works for you local playlists, as well as Apple Music Playlists. But now things get complicated. Let’s take a look at the For You and New sections.

• If you play a song, album, or playlist directly in the For You section it will not scrobble.
• If you play from the detail view of a playlist that you previously added to My Music it scrobbles.
• If you play a playlist directly from the For You section it will not scrobble.
• If you play a song, or album that you previously added to My Music from the detail view it will not scrobble.
• If you search for a song, album, or artist and play from the search results it will not scrobble.
• Everything in Radio, including Beats 1 will not scrobble.

Basically, only music in My Music and Playlists will scrobble, with the one exception of saved playlists.

As I wrote previously, the difficulties of using Apple Music are real and extend beyond the multitude of features buried throughout. I’d love to see Apple collaborate with third parties like Last FM to extend Apple Music but the focus should first go to simplifying the existing UI. Luckily Last FM integration isn’t lost, it’s just cumbersome for the moment; much like Apple Music itself. That said, I’m still loving the service and listening to music more than I have since college. I’d call that a tie.

1. And makes my need for a workflow seem a lot less crazy. ↩

I’ve been listening to podcasts for over a decade and agree with Marco Arment that they’re awesome. I also think podcasts are continually becoming more mainstream and am hopeful for the future of the integration of technology all around us and it’s ability to make podcasts as ubiquitous as radio. With the rate at which new podcasts are launching, it’s easy to miss great shows so this is the first of an ongoing series of podcast recommendations. I want to take the mrecommendations a step further than why I like particular podcasts and provide some metrics to help provide context around how the show fits into my podcast rotation and may fit into yours. When I converse with people who don’t listen to podcasts (or don’t listen very frequently) I find that one of the reasons is that there’s just too much to listen to and not enough time. Not every podcast is a must listen, especially interview shows. These metrics are bound to evolve and hopefully will be helpful in getting you interested in adding the show to your favorite podcast application. Let’s get to the first recommendation.

Reply All’s tag line is “A show about the internet.” which is an apt description of the podcast. Each episode explores an event or topic where the internet played a role in one way or another. Some episodes are straightforward in their title while other episodes use the internet’s involvement in the story as the crux that takes a turn you might not have expected. The show is hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman and is produced by Gimlet Media. PJ and Alex come across as longtime friends on the show which isn’t a surprise as they previously created and co-hosted TL;DR in 2013 before moving to Gimlet in late 2014 to launch Reply All. The show is in my top 5 podcasts primarily because it’s such a fun show with interesting topics and a great chemistry between the hosts with they’re varying opinions on different aspects of the topic each week. I genuinely enjoy listening to Reply All due to the consistency of the show’s quality across it’s 31 episodes and the production quality that all of Gimlet’s shows employ.

Picking my favorite episode is difficult since it’s actually a two part story that was released in May of this year. Exit & Return Part I & Part II tells the story of Shulem Deen and how the internet broke down the walls of his communication boundaries and left him exiled from his community. It’s the heaviest story that Reply All has told but is also such an interesting story of how religion and the internet can collide. I truly can’t recommend these episodes enough and think everyone can find themselves somewhere in this story.

The Stats:

Typical episode length: 30 minutes Explicit: They always lead the episode off with an explicit warning when the shows contains explicit content. New Episode Frequency: Weekly Skip-ability: I wouldn’t (and don’t) skip any episodes.

Find & Subscribe: Show Website | RSS | iTunes | Overcast

I can distinctly remember the summer of 2003. I was only a year into working in IT and realizing that I could seriously pursue this as a career. I was working two jobs, imaging Macs and performing various summer related tasks for my school district’s IT department during the day and serving up corn dogs, pizza and fried cheese on a stick (yes, really) at local fairs in the evenings and on weekends. I had just purchased my first iPod, the iTunes Music Store had recently launched and I was pouring a steady stream of my earnings into it. I spent over $500 that summer building the foundation of my music library and discovering new artists. It was exhilarating to have the vast landscape of music available to download on my iBook G4 using my Treo 650’s Edge connection[1] with the tethering that I wasn’t supposed to be able to access. That summer opened me up to a world that my protected upbringing had previously been able to easily divert by driving past the record store and turning K-Love up on the radio. Over the next eight years I’d spend hundreds of hours building my iTunes library to the nearly/merely 13,000 songs that have made the trek with me through a slew of computers and migrations. Then it all changed.

When I first heard about Spotify in 2011 I thought “That makes total sense.” after my brain processed the idea of having millions of songs instantly accessible in my pocket at one monthly cost. I’d been running Subsonic to have always-on access to my music library on my iPhone but it was fiddly and required me to maintain it which, as any nerd knows, takes way more time than you think. The convenience was as important as the music library to me at that point. Fast forward to today and I’ve become a Spotify addict. It’s one of the few apps I use daily and it’s lead me to discover some really terrific artists just like the iTMS had done for me as a teenager. With that said, I’ve switched to Apple Music for a multitude of reasons and with some changes to my music workflow[2]. Here’s my impressions after a week with the service.

Why I’m Switching

Back to Native

For the majority of my time using an iPhone I’ve had a home screen that primarily consists of apps Apple didn’t create. Until 3 weeks ago the only Apple apps on my home screen were Messages, Safari and Settings as seen above. I’ve been a Google Voice user since the service launched in 2009 and have gone through many iterations of how I use it on iOS including jailbreaking my phone to integrate it with the native Phone and Messages applications. Currently I use Hangouts to manage the handful of phone calls that I make and to text with my friends and family that don’t use iMessage. Since moving to Chicago and starting to work with a new team I’ve had more hurdles than ever before explaining how to get ahold of me between my carrier issued (or burner as it’s lovingly referred to by my coworkers) phone number and my Google Voice Number. Google hasn’t helped the situation as they continue to phase Google Voice out and roll these features into Hangouts which has a lackluster interface that’s shoved into GMail almost as an afterthought on the desktop. Google Voice continues to be cumbersome to use on mobile if you’re not on Android where it’s services are integrated into the OS and might not keep me around much longer.

While Spotify isn’t nearly as fragmented as Google Voice has become, the announcement of Apple Music prompted me to dust off iTunes on my iMac and I realized how much of my personal music library isn’t a part of Spotify’s catalog and how much of it I miss having in my music rotation. While Spotify’s desktop application allows you to intermingle your local music files with the the Spotify offering, the mobile applications don’t. This leads me to use the native Music application on my iOS device to access a range of music from The Paper Raincoat to Girl Talk[3] to Taylor Swift (yes, really) who famously pulled her music from Spotify last year. With Apple Music all of this music is intertwined with the streaming component of the service and provide a fully rounded music library. This is the dream come true for me.

Outside of the one library to rule them all, Apple Music fulfills two nuanced features that are hugely important to me. The first is true background sync. I have a two hour commute via The “L” most days of the week and am underground for about half of the trip. For commuters like me offline sync isn’t a nicety, it’s a requirement. While Spotify has background syncing, it isn’t able to truly run in the background. If the application isn’t actively playing music or open and left open then syncing stops. When you have playlists that are 1,000s of songs deep, the time involved in getting the whole playlist synced for offline playback requires you to babysit Spotify for hours every time you restore your device. Being that I do this about twice a year, it’s become more of a nuisance to get Spotify ready for daily use. I’ve been using the native Music app for the last three weeks and started using Apple Music when it launched last Tuesday with no offline sync issues after one request to do so for a few large playlists.

The second feature that I’m most interested in is the sound quality of Apple Music. While sheer numbers would indicate that Spotify still offers a higher quality file, I will refer you to Kirk McElhearn’s post regarding the quality of Apple Music’s tracks that pre-emptively refutes that claim. I believe he’s correct in the expectation that Apple Music provides higher quality files through the AAC/MP4 codec. So far in my usage of the service I’m glad to have found that iTunes is downloading M4P files to a new folder within the iTunes folder structure. These files are nested in a new Apple Music subfolder in the same way that the music I have accumulated over the years is nested within the Music subfolder of my iTunes directory on my Mac. I much prefer this method of offline music storage to Spotify’s obscuring of the file names and folder structure within a buried Library folder. It can be easily managed and the fact that I’m getting copies of the songs just as though I’d bought them from the iTMS (albeit with DRM wrapped tightly around the Apple Music files) instills a sense that I’m getting what I paid for in a way that Spotify’s offline syncing just doesn’t. The perceived value of Apple Music is definitely greater for a nerd like me.

Beats 1

Beats 1 is touted as perhaps the biggest differentiator between Apple Music and other music services. Initially I wasn’t sure that it would be something that would grab on with most users and that it might become a bolted on radio station in the same way that radio has always been bolted on in iTunes and Music on iOS. After my first few days with Apple Music I can say that while I’ve enjoyed tuning in and letting Zane Lowe, Julie Adenuga and Ebro program my listening experience I’ve been more enthralled to see the impact Beats 1 has had on the people around me. I’ve watched Beats 1 instill intrigue in those who weren’t really aware of Apple’s new music service. Beats 1 looks to be not only the biggest differentiator but also the biggest feature that will bring Apple Music to the forefront of the music service mind space. My coworkers have all upgraded iOS and iTunes to fully use Beats 1 and favorite tracks they discover when listening. Clients asked me about Beats 1 while I was on-site with them over the past week. Our work group chat has had more after hours conversation and it’s been about Beats 1. We’re all tuned in and discussing the good and bad about what’s being played and how well the DJs handle the transitions and mix of music. It’s brought about the nostalgia of listening to the radio where we’re all on the same page enjoying and discovering music together. I think Neil Cybart explains it best in his Beats 1 is the New iPod and Apple’s Latest Bet post:

Consider how during what was arguably the most important day in Apple’s music history, nearly the entire discussion was centered around Beats 1. The 30 million songs now available for streaming are nice, but we are already used to that with other streaming sites. Lots of curated music playlists are helpful, but something seems to be missing. Apple’s intention on launch day was clear. The buzz surrounded Beats 1. What was Zane Lowe saying? Who was he playing? What are other people thinking?

It’s been fascinating to watch people I know who are paid users of other services all start conversing about switching to Apple Music. Beats 1 has been a core driver in these possible conversions and proves that Apple’s investment in building great programming that’s driven by proven tastemakers and the artists themselves was a bet that will pay dividends.

Workflow Changes

I listen to music on multiple devices and am a longstanding last.fm user. Spotify has made the process of remotely controlling your library and scrobbling tracks to Last FM natively from their applications easier over the last few years. These processes are different (in both good and bad ways) with Apple Music so I wanted to provide some context on those thinking about switching.

Last FM integration

Last FM is like a journal for music listening and is a required part of my music listening experience. I like having a running log of what I’ve listened to and knowing that I can look something I’ve listened to up with ease. I also like sharing what I listen to with the world because music is a communal experience. There is little in the world that feels as good as finding and sharing an artist that you fall in love with. I want to contribute to that ecosystem and Last FM automates that process. The method of capturing a track that you’re listening to and adding it to your listening history is known as scrobbling on Last FM. Where Spotify integrates scrobbling natively, iTunes and Music on iOS don’t. In order to scrobble your listening history to Last FM you’ll need a third party application on Windows, iOS and Mac OS X. Here are the applications I’m using.

Mac OS X: Simplify I first found out about Simplify from Brett Terpstra when he started creating jackets for Simplify and created the beautiful and simple Sidecar jacket which I use to this day. Amongst the many features that Simplify provides for music application management and information is scrobbling support for the foremost music application on your Mac. I primarily use Simplify for the information on the current track and scrobbling. Simplify is $4.99 and is available on the Mac App Store. Alternatives: LastFM Scrobbler for Mac OS X or SimpleScrobbler

iOS: QuietScrob One of the biggest limitations I expected on iOS with scrobbling is that the application needs to be running at the forefront for real time scrobbling of what’s playing in the Music app on iOS. This expectation stems from my time before Spotify when I would jailbreak in order to have the Music application or Subsonic scrobble in real time. While you no longer needs to jailbreak iOS to do this, it’s still not perfect.

If you’re like me, you don’t want the possibility of any tracks being missed during this process. Initially I was going to recommend the combination of QuietScrob and CloudScrob to ensure this wouldn’t happen. Unfortunately I had an issue with duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate scrobbles being uploaded for the same play of a song and skewing the data when using both applications so I had to pick one application and I went with the former.

QuietScrob is beautifully designed and runs in the background using background app refresh to scrobble in as close to real time as you’re going to get on iOS right now. It’s the set it and forget it approach to scrobbling. I also think QuietScrob’s free to paid conversion method is clever and effective. The application is free to install but requires you to open the app and watch a video ad in order to unpause scrobbling after so many tracks have been scrobbled. You can remove the ads for a one-time $0.99 in-app purchase if you like the application. In the short time I’ve been using QuietScrob I’ve had a few instances where I’d listened to music and noticed that it hadn’t been scrobbled. This was typically after a device reboot but it still didn’t fit my expectation of 100% tracking of my listening history. QuietScrob doesn’t (at least for me) look at your listening history in order to fill in the gaps since the app was last running. If you’re looking to ensure nothing is missed and are willing to remember to open an application regularly then CloudScrob may be a good alternative for you (Just don’t use it in tandem with QuietScrob).

CloudScrob is an incredibly simple app that looks at the timestamps on songs in iOS, compares them to what’s already been scrobbled on your Last FM account and scrobbles the tracks that aren’t already listed in your listening history. I’ve found it to be 100% accurate and the most dependable way to ensure nothing is missed. Unfortunately I don’t want to have to remember to open the application regularly to ensure my profile is up to date so I’m sticking with QuietScrob as my primary method to scrobble from iOS. CloudScrob is $0.99 on the App Store.

Alternatives: Scrobbler for iOS or SmartPlayer

Remote Control

When I’m cooking and doing other chores at home I like to have music broadcasting from our iMac and to other speakers through airplay (that setup is another post in itself). I need to be able to control my music while I’m busy without needing to stop off at the iMac to do so. Spotify Connect has enabled this type of control from my iPhone for awhile now and I’ve grown accustomed to having this feature. Luckily Apple has long offered remote control of iTunes using their Remote application so I’m not at a loss in making the switch. Apple is actually able to take things a step further with the Apple Watch to provide these controls on your wrist and it’s become my new standard for remote control of my music.

Conclusion

I started writing this post before Apple Music launched and have continued writing it through my first week with the service. There are important features that come with Apple Music that I didn’t cover here as it wasn’t what I set out to write about but they’re clear advantages for the service. Siri integration is the most obvious and unexpectedely useful part of Apple Music, especially with the Apple Watch. It’s worked beautifully the handful of times I’ve used it and it never fails to delight me when it does. Unfortunately the additional features are a double edged sword that lead to a UI that’s working to include a decade of features on top of everything that’s new about the service. This leaves a hefty UI with what feels like a lot of application easter eggs that provide a steep learning curve for most iOS users. While Apple Music has plenty of hurdles in it’s UI and expanding feature bloat, it’s ability to finally provide a truly all-in-one music library is enough to make it my primary music service. The native integration with the OS, curated discovery and artist driven communal listening experience on Beats 1 are just the icing on the cake.

1. Remember Edge? Those were the days! ↩
2. Sigh, every good nerd has their workflow for how they consume anything. It’s a blessing and a curse. ↩
3. I’m not a dunce. Yes, Girl Talk is on Spotify, but not all of his music is.

My buddy Stephen announced he was going independent today. Let me just take this internet armor off for a minute to say I’m so proud of Stephen. He’s poured himself into his writing and podcasting for years now as a side gig and he’s finally able to take it full time. I have immense respect for the amount of hard work and dedication I know Stephen put into getting himself prepared to sustain the independent career. It’s not easy to be steadfast in saying no to so many things so you can say yes to the the long term goal. Speaking as someone who has similar long term goals of going independent I’m proof that sticking with it is difficult [1]. Stephen joins Shawn Blanc, Myke Hurley, Marco Arment, Jason Snell and many others in proving that if you put in the effort and continually invest in your craft it is possible to live sustainably doing so.

Ok, now that all of the feels are out it’s time to help support Stephen’s independent career in the best way possible; buying a t-shirt! I’ll leave it to Stephen to describe the thought behind the design.

The quote on the back of the shirt comes from the original Macintosh unveiling in January 1984. After an impressive multimedia demo, the computer spoke:

Hello. I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I’d like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a computer you can’t lift!

Obviously, I can talk, but right now I’d like to sit back and listen. So, it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who’s been like a father to me … Steve Jobs!

In so many ways, this single demonstration explains almost everything about Apple. Take good technology, infuse it with something special and you’ll end up with a great product that can change the lives of its users.

1. 6 months between posts is bonkers. My Illiad length post that explores why it happened is currently being drafted. ↩

As much as I enjoy Merlin Mann as a podcaster, this piece he published last night reminds me how I first fell in love with his writing.

And, even nine goddamned years after I’d left Ohio and improbably found myself in a pretty good college in Florida, I still craved the Reds cap that I thought was worthy of my childhood.

Then, one day—maybe 1988—I was at at sporting goods store in Tampa and I saw my Rosebud. A gorgeous and worthy and seemingly authentic Reds cap that brooked no mesh nor foam nor notch dingus. A classic 7⅛″ felt cap with authentic stitching and the humbly round shape that befits a journeyman megafan.

Just go read it and try to suppress that lump in your throat when you do. I hope this is a sign of more to come.

Part of the service at Soul City Church yesterday was devoted to grieving and praying in response to the attacks in Charleston, South Carolina, this week. I didn’t expect it and it overwhelmed me.

I tend to tout my ignorance of current events and am often truly lost when conversations include it. I somewhat purposely avoid what’s going on in the world as it’s easier to bury my head in the sand than it is to face the horror that is the evening news. I’m not proud of this but I bring it up because I know I can’t be alone in this. I’m part of a population that tends to avoid anything that encroaches being politically charged because it all feels like an amalgam of garbage that has a negative outcome no matter which side you stand on. I’m also outing myself because it’s unacceptable behavior and yesterday’s service made me realize how apathetic and weak it is that I’m not doing something about the racial divide that our country seems to be unable to move past. I’ve lived in the North and the South for a nearly even split of my life and I’ve seen it from Cleveland to Memphis to Chicago. In some parts of the country it’s spoken in hushed tones; in other parts of the country it’s put on display as a part of the fabric of the region as best articulated by John Stewart in his opening monologue for this past Thursday’s Daily Show. The unavoidable fact is that, like sexism, there is a racism bias that effects all Americans and the only way we can fix it is to accept it and address it.

I’m aware of the blatantly negligent racist attacks and murders1 that have been occurring with increasing frequency in the United States over the past few years as anyone in the country is. It’s been too loud of a noise for anyone not to be aware of it. I’ve watched the stream of tweets and video that follow as the protests break out across the country. I’ve been in downtown Chicago while death walks were underway. I’ve seen the wretched way that some have reacted by causing destruction and taking their anger out on cities and other people. This is war and it’s occurring inside our country. We are tearing ourselves apart and the ripples of hate continue to grow. This is why I can’t help but fall apart when reading the responses from the family members of the victims of the Charleston murders as they forgive Dylann Roof when given the opportunity to address him in court. Forgiveness is powerful and has the power to actually move the human race forward. The strength that it takes to forgive someone who murdered your family isn’t something that comes without the greater strength of faith. Amongst all of the darkness is this light of forgiveness and I have faith that it’s the start of a path to peace.

I’m asking that the rest of us pray for peace. Pray that we can forgive one another for the centuries of hatred that we allow to divide us. Pray that we can be conscious of our own biases and work to eradicate them. Pray that we can be the generation that isn’t lethargic about racism as we raise our children. Pray for the peace that only God can bring in our broken world.

If you need to grieve and are in the Chicago area looking for a place to pray with others who are trying to figure out how we move forward as a human race; Soul City Church is opening it’s doors to pray for peace as a community tonight at 7p.

1: Let’s not sugar coat this. It’s murder when you make a choice based on a bias and it leads to the death of another human.

If you’ve ever followed a link to YouTube and found yourself looking back on an hour that you wish you could get back then I hope to be of some assistance with the occasional YouTube escape. These will be spontaneous trips to YouTube for things that are worth your time.

Today’s escape started with the official lyric video for Death Cab for Cutie’s first single from their upcoming eighth studio album Kintsugi. The song is titled “Black Sun” and it makes me excited for what’s to come on the new album.

From there I found the intro to a YouTube playlist of music videos and performances that Ben Gibbard and Nick Harmer had created in anticipation of their 2011 album Codes and Keys. In it, Harmer mentions The Decemberists at the same time that I noticed an NPR Tiny Desk concert with The Decemberists in the watch next sidebar and jumped over to it.

This little acoustic set featured three songs from their then-new album The King is Dead which is my favorite Decemberists album to date. The three piece ensemble’s pure talent is showcased in three songs.

“Down by the Water” “Rox in the Box” “June Hymn”

From this Tiny Desk concert I jumped into Iron & Wine’s appearance on the concert series and was amazed at how quickly 17 minutes can go by. Sam Beam is an amazing and engaging singer and songwriter with a humility that comes through in his awkward but honest talk between songs.

Iron & Wine played 4 songs in the set: “Half Moon” “Big Burned Hand” “Tree By The River” “Naked As We Came”

All three of the videos are worth your time even if you’ve never heard of these bands. I would encourage you to take 35 minutes to catch some great music from truly talented artists.

To pull the curtain back just a little, oftentimes the thing which most keeps me from writing is a fear of putting my own narcissism out on display for all to see. So often my first draft is little more than my own self-centered view of the world — a world where I sit at the center. This is not the world I am trying to build up, but when writing, how can any of us write about anything else but what we know and what we have heard? We write about what we know and what we feel. We write from our own soul and our own heart and we share what we’ve seen through our own eyes and what we’ve heard through our own ears. We write from the inside out.

Such great perspective from Shawn Blanc. One of my goals this year is to write more and fear is easily one of the biggest reasons things don’t make their way onto the page.

It’s funny what you find yourself needing to buy when you move from warm to cold climates. One of the things you think you can get away with avoiding is gloves. That’s a mistake. Whether you drive or commute via public transit you need a good pair of gloves. When I started searching for a pair I ended up purchasing the North Face Krestwood E-Tip gloves and have been really disappointed with how they work with touch screens. They have a seam that rounds your finger tips and unless they’re a really tight fit you end up fighting to interact with a touchscreen even though they have “E-Tip Technology” built in. I’ve often found myself ripping them off in frustration to use my phone for 2 minutes and then put the gloves back on.

That’s not what I wanted. Back to the drawing board.

This time when I went looking I found that The Wirecutter has already done the heavy lifting in the search for the best touchscreen winter gloves. I’ve purchased their number one pick, the Glider Gloves Winter Style touchscreen gloves and have really enjoyed them over the last few days. The one thing to pay attention to is the sizing guide for the gloves. I went with the medium size as the Krestwood gloves had been slightly large for my hands in the same size. The finger length on the Glider Gloves is really the main thing you’ll notice. While I think I have pretty small hands, my fingers feel too long in the medium size so I’m swapping them for the large size. To find out more about the Glider Gloves and other touchscreen gloves check out The Wirecutter’s write up.

I look at my alternative everyman predicament this way. By letting go of what you thought was going to happen in your life, you can enjoy what is actually happening.

That is what I do.

I’m That Guy.

You likely won’t know him by name but as soon as you see the first image in the piece you’ll know exactly who he was and your heart will drop. This is a sad loss with the silver lining of Taylor’s beautiful writing on what it’s like to be fame-ish. It’s a must read.