Notes

KISS Destroys Anaheim '76 4K Upscale with Updated Audio

This YouTuber spent four days gathering the songs from the new Kiss LP Kiss Destroys Anaheim 50th Anniversary Edition, upscaling the video bootleg, then syncing the songs to the video and filling in missing time in the video that they didn’t use in the release of the anniversary album. Amazing.

This is my second favorite KISS concert, now with the best video and audio imaginable. For the record, the KISS Largo show in 1977 is my favorite show of all time. This video edit is the absolute best version.

Dolly’s Happy Heart

Dolly Parton –

I was born with a happy heart. I’ve always tried to let that shine even during my dark times. I’m one of those people who, even if things are not right, goes about trying to make it as right as I can rather than just lying around on my ass and wallowing in it all day. I think, “Well, I can either do this or I can do that.” I choose to get up and try to make it better if I can…

Of course, I try to improve every day. If there’s a better outfit, I want to wear it. If there’s a better song, I want to write it. If there’s a better record, I want to record it. If there’s a better movie, I want to make it. I will continue to be as good as I can be. And I intend to keep coming up with new ideas all the time.

Tim Curry, 1946–2026

Tim Curry died Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 80.

Nobody ever walked into a movie the way he walked into The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He originated Frank-N-Furter on a London stage, then put it on film in 1975. The movie flopped. However, midnight audiences found it, and fifty years later people are still throwing rice at the screen.

And that was just the (in)famous role. He charmed audiences as Wadsworth in Clue. He was Pennywise in the 1990 It miniseries. When my daughter was young, she watched The Wild Thornberrys and his iconic voice was there. Personally, I loved his appearance on an episode of Criminal Minds. He was Rooster in Annie. The concierge in Home Alone 2. And so many more.

A stroke in 2012 took his mobility but not the voice. He kept working. He published a memoir, Vagabond, in 2025, the same year Rocky Horror turned 50. I’m going to have to pick it up.

Nobody made bad look like so much fun. Don’t worry. He’s just going home.

Quit taking the good ones. Seriously. Knock it off.

Dolly

The news broke right after lunch and I did what I suspect a few million other people did. I stopped what I was doing and just sat there for a minute.

Dolly Parton died in Nashville at 80, after what her family called a brief battle with cancer. Her nephew Bryan Seaver announced it, because she’d asked him to years ago. She even planned the goodbye. Of course she did.

The numbers are staggering. I really had no idea. Fifty studio albums. Eleven Grammys. More than 100 million records sold. She wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” and either one alone would be a career. But the numbers were never really the point with Dolly, and I think she knew that better than anyone.

She was maybe the last public figure in America that everybody agreed on. Country fans and pop fans. Red states and blue states. Your grandmother and your teenager. Nobody pulled that off. She did, and she did it without ever pretending to be anything other than a girl from a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains who liked big hair and bigger songs.

Most importantly, she spent the money on other people. Her Imagination Library has mailed hundreds of millions of free books to kids. She helped fund the research behind a COVID vaccine and barely mentioned it. When the family announced her passing, they didn’t ask for flowers. They asked for donations to the book program.

The songs will outlive all of us. If you only listen to one Dolly song in memoriam, make it this one.

However, what I’ll remember is simpler than that. She showed you could be enormous and kind at the same time, and that the kindness was the real act.

Epic Spaceman

YouTuber Epic Spaceman uses animation and storytelling to help us understand the scale of things. After zooming out into the immensity of space and zooming into the world of atoms, his latest is a literal deep dive into the ocean’s depths.

So cool.

New Words

Stuart Heritage, writing for The Guardian, lists, with explanations, several new words that have come from our current tech landscape.

A few of my favorites:

Captachore

How much time do you think we have collectively spent, as a species, convincing robots that we are not robots? By now, we must have wasted several millennia ensuring we have clicked all the various parts of a bicycle on a captcha grid of someone’s front garden, or sliding a jigsaw puzzle precisely into a pixellated hole, or clicking a box that says “I am not a robot” as if the internet has suddenly discovered the honour system. Listen, if we ever want to pretend to be robots, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, by covering ourselves in tinfoil and beep-booping our way into an enemy moon-lair.

Hostageware

Not to use hyperbole, but this might be the very worst thing in all of modern society: buying a product and then realising you need a paid subscription to use it. Want a video doorbell? That’ll be a fiver a month. Fitness tracker? £30 a month. Want to print things at home, on the printer you bought, with the ink you also bought? At least a fiver a month. Want to be able to play the £70 game you bought for your £500 console online? That’ll be £7 a month for some reason. Making any sort of purchase these days is like entering into a mafia protection scheme with the worst companies in the world. God, I hate it.

The World According to Harp

Philip Wegmann, Meridith McGraw and Josh Dawsey, writing for The Wall Street Journal, explain the whole Natalie Harp kerfuffle.

Sen. Jon Ossoff didn’t even use her full name. But everybody in Washington knew who he was talking about.

At a recent campaign event, the Georgia Democrat argued that President Trump would rather ‘travel with Natalie’ on Air Force One than do the hard work that comes with being commander in chief.

The Natalie in question is Natalie Harp, a 35-year-old aide to Trump who has become an object of fascination for both the left and the right. Though she rarely speaks, she is an omnipresent figure at Trump’s side, standing just off camera during Oval Office events, traveling with the president around the country and the world, and tapping out his social-media posts.

She’s really weird. I mean it’s super weird. She’s more than obsessed with him. Michael Wolff thinks she’s a walking “red flag.”

Case in point, the letters she leaves…

Letter One and Letter Two.

The main takeaway from all of this is that Jon Ossoff is really good at this, and he’s going to beat the snot out of whoever the Republicans nominate for President next.

Keeping Book

Will Leitch, writing for The Washington Post, has a wonderful story about baseball scorebooks and what they mean.

A score book gives us what our computers and social media posts can’t: an actual, physical record of what we did, where we did it and who we did it with. A memento, which is to say a memory. It’s not something I have to upload to the cloud. It’s not something I have to subscribe to. It’s not something I have to hope isn’t bought by some private equity firm that will one day liquidate the software that hosts it. It’s a book. With names. Of people I saw, of people I knew, of a life I have lived.

No wonder young adults — the ones I saw at Busch Stadium told me gleefully they were already on their second score books — are embracing something so old-fashioned. Raised on an internet built to vanish, they are seeking out the analog, whether it’s vinyl, or hardcover books, or even a good-old-fashioned diary. They understand what is slowly dawning on Gen X and the boomers: In this age of digital impermanence, you can only really count on things you can hold in your own hands.

Give It Six Months

Anthropic wants to watermark everything Claude writes now. Not invisible characters bolted onto the end. Actual word swaps, buried inside the sentence itself, even in a private chat nobody but you will ever read.

M.G. Siegler broke down what that really means over at Spyglass, and it’s worth the full read.

He brings in John Gruber for the gut punch, and Gruber lands the real objection in one line.

The exact words we choose when writing matter.

That’s the whole fight, right there.

Here’s my hot take. Give this six months and watch it stop mattering. Moonshot dropped Kimi K3 in July. It’s open-weight and cheap enough to rattle chip stocks for a day. That’s not the first time this year that a cheap, open model from China has spooked labs charging premium prices for a walled garden.

The second a good enough model shows up without the compliance homework, nobody debates watermarks. They just leave.

Ultimately, none of this is going to matter. “Using AI” or “not using AI” is a useless designation because AI is already extending into everything from search to customer service to you name it. Most people don’t even know (or care) they are using it.

Do you?

Long Past Time

Ned Resnikoff, writing for Public Comment, argues that it is past time for everyone to quit Elon Musk’s X.

If you are still posting on X, you should stop today. Quitting the site yesterday would have been better, but doing it today is better than doing it tomorrow.

The moral and political case for quitting X is so obvious that it scarcely bears repeating, but I’ll briefly recap it anyway. The guy who owns X—the person to whom you are personally donating if you pay for a blue checkmark—is Elon Musk, an out and out white supremacist who uses X to spread Nazi ideas like Great Replacement theory. He is a major backer, in both money and propaganda, of the global far right. During his brief tenure inside Trump’s Administration, he spearheaded the destruction of USAID, which, according to recent estimates, may result in 14 million deaths between 2025 and 2030.

X is the platform this particular mass murderer uses to seed his most poisonous ideas. A couple of months ago, he used the platform to egg on the Belfast pogrom. Those who continue to post on X—in particular those X users who are not racist psychopaths—are enhancing the site’s usefulness to him as a propaganda tool by drawing more eyes to the platform and making it look like an ideologically diverse “marketplace of ideas” instead of what it is: a delivery vehicle for bringing fascism into the mainstream of global politics. Oh, and perhaps the Internet’s leading destination for those in search of child sexual abuse material.

All of what he says here is true and he continues on making a strong argument against any use of the platform.

I have curated my Twitter account so I’m only paying attention to the few accounts I care about. I haven’t posted there in years.