Thudfactor

When we were at school our games were simple

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 11:30:54 GMT

Two weeks ago, Fred almost immediately walked away with nine of the ten songs and Sidney picked up the tenth. Last weekend I had to take brief, break, but we’re back now with ten more.

In the US we have a major election on Tuesday. And, of course, today is the day before Halloween. So you would think I’d do a themed set, right? Sadly, no.

However. Several of these songs are extremely NSFW, which matters if you watch the videos. Take, for example, #4. Those lyrics are intensely political and controversial. #7’s video is risqué, but worse (if you work for the US government) — intensely Canadian.

Perhaps the one that will land you in an HR office the quickest is #8.

I guess what I am saying is: when I post the videos for these, maybe don’t listen without headphones… or save it for when you’re home.

The Rules

No searching for answers. Or asking AI.
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

We used to be user-centered, now we're user-hostile

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:00:50 GMT

Today over lunch I was sitting on my couch looking at LinkedIn on my phone. I do this through Safari, not the app. And of course the first thing they want you to do is download the app, which they express with banners at both the top and the bottom of the screen reminding you there’s an app you can download.

Close those or not, a few screen-fulls later the page dims and you get a modal covering one-third of the screen insisting that you download the app. This popup (that you must dismiss) will show up pretty regularly if you have the nerve to keep going.

LinkedIn’s web experience, desperate to convince you the app is better. (It’s better for them, it might not be better for you.)

I wanted to put these two together, so I opened PhotoShop for the first time in awhile. I had to dismiss multiple “hey, take a look at this new thing” popups before I could start working on what I wanted to do. Also, it used to be pretty straightforward to open a file on my computer from PhotoShop. That’s the only thing it could do! But now Adobe is really eager to have you use their subscription-based cloud service instead, or maybe just cut out everything in the middle and prompt and image. So opening something on my desktop took a bit of digging.

It took me awhile to notice the upper left has “new” and “open” buttons. While this feels like it might be priority placement, people don’t absorb screens like they do a written page.

My father, who is eighty and a voracious reader of e-books, tells me he can’t keep track of which series he’s reading. If you get your books from Kindle’s subscription service (Unlimited? Plus? Max?) you have to turn them in, which means trying to look up your past reads is a bit of a pain.

And if you buy your books, well, Amazon would much prefer you buy new ones. They’ve paid practically no attention to library management, so once your library gets a certain size it becomes a real pain to find something you more-or-less remember the title of.

Kindle, of course, has all sorts of suggestions on the home screen for things you could be doing instead of reading the book you last had open.

One of these days I might get a notebook and write down every time that day a web site or app tries to derail me from what I’m trying to do in order to get me to look at the thing they’d rather I do instead. I expect the results would be pretty depressing, which is why I haven’t done it yet.

Once upon a time I gave my email address and phone number to the Democrats. That was a huge mistake. Now I’m inundated with unsolicited text messages from all over the country. Mary Peltola — of this post’s cover image — is in Alaska. I’m on the opposite end of the country and alphabet from her. But she needs that $10 badly enough to pay a consultant person to grovel at me.

The New Republic will let you know how far that $10 goes (most of it stays in the consulting agency’s pocket) assuming you don’t get stopped by TNR’s paywall or their page-takeover popover pitching their email newsletter. The authors of the article insist there’s a reckoning coming — potential Democratic donors are fed up. Only the boomers seem to be donating in sizable numbers, sometimes in ways that are so nonsensical that soliciting them feels like elder abuse. Talking Points Memo is skeptical.

And yet Democratic small donor giving has become a more and more critical part of Democratic campaigns as Republicans have become increasingly and now overwhelmingly reliant on billionaires. And I have yet to see any real evidence that that source is being burned out and tapped out. We are all exhausted, harassed and hate the mails. Fundraising email rhetoric has become, essentially, self-consciously parodic and self-awarely stupid. I couldn’t agree with you more. And I think it’s a problem. But again, it keeps happening because it works. I don’t think there’s any evidence to date that that has changed.
How to clean up and improve the Democratic fundraising colossus (gift link)

That’s a little like saying “this oil pressure light is on, but the engine is still running so…”

As someone who has spent a career trying to make things accessible and help people accomplish their goals online with as little frustration as possible, it is fucking depressing to be confronted multiple times a day with stuff that’s designed to extract more out of me, even at the cost of standing in the way of letting me use the product I’ve signed up for / subscribed for / bought outright.

For about a week there my own car was reminding me — every time I turned the engine on — that I could buy a Peanuts theme for my dashboard. Only $20! I’m sure they’re mystified why I didn’t bite.

The common principle involved here seems to be “what are you going to do about it?” which is, of course, also the organizing philosophy of our current political regime.

The second attempt to get something useful out of Adobe’s AI generation tool. Success was limited here, but the first attempt failed completely — all I got was a sad AI-generated puppy cartoon and a message that an error had occurred.

Increasingly I feel like I have to prepare for every interaction with anything commercial: be alert for dark patterns, scrutinize every transaction for the hidden motives, question every ambiguous checkbox or switch control. If I flip this, does it turn data collection on or off? Or it just consent theater?

No place exemplifies this experience like my friendly neighborhood Kroger, a store that looks large and attractive but ruins my mood every time I have to visit. Despite being quite large, the aisles are narrow — just barely wide enough for two carts. And each aisle might have one or more pinch-points caused by mobile temporary sales displays. These not only block one of the “lanes” of the aisle but also block product on the shelves. They are placed here to draw attention, but also to slow you down — slow shoppers spend more money.

And slow shoppers themselves become an obstruction. Because the walkways are narrow, the shelves high, and every corner is a blind turn it’s almost impossible to get through a grocery store without several near-misses with fellow shoppers.

The website is barely better; each page is excruciatingly slow to load, and every search result peppered with products that are kind of like what you searched for but not really. Contrary to common wisdom about the importance of fast checkouts, Kroger’s process is multiple steps — and each one is designed to put even more things you could buy in front of your face.

Some years ago, Kroger and other retailers realized they could take advantage of our expectations by marking up bulk goods. Do you assume that small bottle of laundry detergent is more expensive per ounce than the enormous one? Double-check that. But to do so, you might have to bring a calculator because you’ll have to do some unit conversion. Grocery stores don’t like to make it too easy to compare prices, so they’ll pick different units for price breakdowns — even within the same product line. At Kroger, “serving our customers” has taken on cannibalistic overtones.

Most spaces are wide open to compete on terms of usability, and I keep hoping we’ll have a moment where stores decide to compete on service rather than extraction again. It’s a process that seems to be working for Aldi.

Planet Money says that Aldi is now the fastest growing grocery chain in America, despite the stores being “small and a bit shabby.” It’s become one of the few stores of any kind I like going into. The aisles are kept clear and logically organized. The space is small, but somehow I can get three-quarters of my groceries there anyway. Prices are significantly lower, in part because of the obvious cost savings Planet Money identified:

There’s no music in stores, because speakers (and licensing fees for muzak) cost money. The staff places products on shelves still in the cardboard boxes they were trucked in on, because artfully unpacking fruits, bread, and jerky sticks would mean higher labor costs.
Planet Money: How Aldi is pushing down grocery prices

Aldi also doesn’t have a staff dedicated to figuring out how to trick people into spending more time and money in-store. It doesn’t have a marketing team designing weekly circulars to your mailbox. Because most of the brands are store brands, it probably doesn’t spend too many resources selling prime shelf real-estate to brands. There’s just a lot Aldi doesn’t do. I get in and out fast, generally without any hassle, which is good for me but also means Aldi doesn’t have to spend quite so much on a giant large store footprint and matching parking lot.

All of this makes me wonder: is the continual psychological assault on customers even cost effective? If Aldi is growing leaps and bounds by not doing these things and cutting prices to boot, who is actually profiting from making people miserable?

Maybe we’ve just hit a bad patch. Maybe someday, again, companies will act like they like their customers — not like we’re the regrettable delivery mechanism for currency. Maybe it will happen before I give up entirely and go live in a cave, because honestly that latter choice is starting to feel more and more attractive.

Towards a non-slop AI workflow

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 19:30:50 GMT

Over the last couple of days I’ve been working on a side project based on the classic “Expanding the Square” Notan art exercise. The original exercise is intended to teach a sense of balance in composition. By restricting the tools to a glue stick and two pieces of paper — one black and one white — students are forced to focus on shapes. You cut a shape out of the black paper, then flip the cut shape around the edge of the paper and glue it down. The idea is to have each cut piece mirror the hole left behind.

These rules, which have you gluing down every piece of paper you cut in its reflected location on the white background, pretty much guarantee an abstract result even if you are trying to be representational.

I’m a real sucker for these kinds of exercises, but unthrilled with the mess of scissors and glue sticks, so I made a digital version that is approaching what I’d like it to be. And yes, I used AI to code it.

The full result of one of my recent tests with the project. The tool I used to create this was written with the assistance of AI; the artwork itself is my own product (for better or worse).

I am very fortunate because my employer has given me access to AI tools and the freedom to use them how I see fit. There are no usage quotas, no mandates against committing hand-written code, no one looking over my shoulder to see if I’m ten times the developer I was yesterday. This lets me focus on questions like “why” and “when” to use AI as opposed to “how.” I’ve come to the conclusion that it is possible to produce quality output with AI, but only if quality is your goal. And as I’ve mentioned a couple of times ( Designers becoming technologists won’t save us, Why scrum fails ), quality is simply not a goal for most companies right now.

In companies with AI-first or AI-only mandates, a lot of the focus is on generating and shipping as quickly as possible. What’s getting shipped doesn’t seem to matter. The math behind Frederick Brooks’s 1980s essay “No Silver Bullet” remains unchanged: the real time sink for software development is in deciding what to write. Speeding up code generation is speeding up work after the main bottleneck.

That’s not to say a 10⨉ developer sitting behind a 1⨉ product team is necessarily 9⨉ the waste; it’s just to say that if developers are going to deliver 10⨉ the features, the product team and the market has to keep pace. Customers seemed overwhelmed with unasked-for features before AI hit the scene. I doubt they can absorb more.

And a lot of the software we have to use is total garbage. AI is getting a lot of the blame for that, but people felt that way before AI. AI has contributed to the problem by making it far easier to ship ill-considered and poorly-tested work to customers. Engineering and design teams were an imperfect but occasionally effective backstop, but AI has neutralized their ability to force minimal quality standards over the objection of product and marketing teams.

But again, this is the result of decisions actual humans have made about what they want to do with their time and resources. And for many companies, especially the largest and flashiest ones on the stock market, that’s to produce tons of shovelware and then spend marketing dollars trying to convince people to like it.

Hammers don’t kill people, humans do.

We could make other decisions. We could (for example) choose to ship code at the same pace but ship better code. My “Expanding the Square” toy is a small example of that. I have a reasonably working project that I have only put a handful of hours into. I don’t remotely feel like I’m done with it, but it is in usable shape and it’s gotten there quite a bit faster than it could have if I’d done it by hand. The source code has automated tests and there’s a log of architecture and product decisions, things I have never done on a personal project before.

There’s also a running list of UX concerns. The log is AI-written (I save my creative writing energy for these blog posts), but the observations are not. The observations come from me using the software, reflecting on my experiences, and trying to match those up with the goals I established for the project beforehand.

Having the idea is the easy part. Making it good involves time, attention to detail, and reflection. I have put as much time into using this app and thinking about how to improve it as I have writing it. That’s a huge improvement in the ratio of coding to thinking, and it’s a re-allocation of my available time to solving the problem I want to solve (“what does a good app like this look like?”) than solving a lot of the bookkeeping code problems that get in the way (“why is my vite config suddenly broken?”).

Also notable: this workflow was not “write a prompt, turn the agent loose.” On these individual projects (and to a lesser extent on my real work output) I mostly play the role of a highly-engaged product owner. AI practitioners bragging about have ten agent threads running 24 hours a day cannot keep up with the output enough to possibly be thinking or checking the outcomes. More likely they are assigning some of those agents to do that work for them, too. They are not working, they are cosplaying the C-Suite.

A side-effect of this is that my AI spend and use is actually shockingly minimal. On my pay-as-I-go¹ plan with OpenCode, this project has so far cost me $1.49. This is not exciting to people who want to brag about how many tokens they are using, and this small project is a very poor showing for half-a-week’s work. But only if you are measuring by volume.

To the extent that volume is a measurement of software quality it’s an inverse relationship. Scrum tells us we should maximize the amount of work not done in the quest to deliver value to customers.

Spending trillions of tokens in order to deliver absolute garbage to people not looking for it is not delivering value. At least, it’s not delivering value to customers. But that’s not AI’s fault — that’s a problem with encouraging (or even forcing!) people to use AI as much as possible without stopping to think about how much improvement we’re actually seeing.

Pay-as-you-go is a strong incentive to use AI judiciously. ↩

You ain’t got no money, they will put you out

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:30:54 GMT

Last week’s game was almost perfect. The two missing songs:

“Don’t think ’cause I understand, I care. Don’t think ’cause we’re talking, we’re friends.” Sneaker Pimps, 6 Underground
“And I got that good-girl faith and a tight little skirt.” Taylor Swift, Style

We had a tie last week — three each from Frodis Caper and Sidney, two from ER. The stand-out song for me in the set, though, was Bull Moose Jackson’s dirty blues number “Big Ten Inch.” Ten-inch records at the time of Jackson’s recording were either shellac singles played at 78 RPM or 33⅓ RPM LPs — the latter of which would eventually settle into a 12” size instead. (See VinylGearHQ) This song was recorded and released on a single, but it was dirty enough that radio stations wouldn’t play it.

Aerosmith recorded a cover of the song in the 70’s, and it’s much better known. But Jackson was the first. Aerosmith, like many white hard-rock bands of the time, drew significant inspiration from the blues while not always pointing people back at the originals.

This week there are not one but three songs that are much older than their more popular covers, so if you see lyrics that look familiar but look at the date and think “no, that can’t be right,” maybe that’s one of them. One of the other seven songs is from a band that was full of horrible interpersonal drama from the very beginning, drawing on infidelity between the members for their hit songs. And no, it’s not Fleetwood Mac.

The Rules

No searching for answers. Or asking AI.
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

Stretched out on a tarmac

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:30:54 GMT

Last Week, y’all guessed 6 out of 10. ER with one, Sidney with one (and one that was already guessed), and Frodis Caper with four. Of the four remaining songs, three were big hits and two are common enough on nostalgia radio — but the lyrics come fast and furious.

“When you see me coming, run — before you see what I’m running from.” Gnarls Barkley, Run.
“The lawn may be green, but you better not be seen. Walkin’ through a gate that leads you down to a pool full of a danger.” B52’s, Private Idaho.
“When we’re walking, rolling, and rocking — it is one time I’m glad I’m not a man.” Tom Tom Club, Genius of Love.

The fourth one… well, I think you would have to be a super fan. Also it was really difficult to find a video to go along with this song.

“Bothering your livestock — they know what I need.” Spinal Tap, Sex Farm.

A little over a year in, and I feel like I’m starting to reach more for “notable” songs and less for immediately recognizable ones. It’s becoming more difficult for me to think of songs that I haven’t already put up, and while I could recycle songs with other lyrics I feel like I ought to keep digging a bit. This week, I’m not so sure how many we’ll get. None of them are obscure. Some of them may just have fallen a bit out of fashion.

Every time I think I’m going to get less than 5 identified, though, y’all surprise me. So let’s see if that holds up.

The Rules

No searching for answers. Or asking AI.
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

It’s the details that make the difference

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 11:00:50 GMT

Did you know there are corner shapes in CSS now? Things I once spent hours trying to fake with bitmap images or SVG can be handled with a line or two of extra code. The new property, corner-shape, is already available in Chrome and on the way in Firefox and Safari. (CanIUse).

I wanted to try this out, so I made a little demo in CodePen:

See the Pen corner-shape: scoop pattern by John Williams (@elfinjohn) on CodePen.

Did you get a message saying that the demo doesn’t work in Firefox or Safari? I didn’t and was super confused. Even though I wrote the demo, and I knew going into it that there was no Firefox or Safari support, I opened the pen up in Firefox and was surprised it didn’t work. Since it got me once, I added a @supports statements that show either the demo or a browser support message.

Since I was going to post links to this, it also occurred to me that someone might click through who was relying on a screen reader. So there’s also a screen reader description of the demo.

I added a bit of animation. Animation is really useful for getting a sense of how specific values affect these new corner-shapes. But because I am motion-sensitive I set the animation to play when someone requests it, not automatically on load. Because I hadn’t done any Javascript yet in this demo I made the toggle turn the animation on and off without using Javascript.

I laid the demo out in a grid pattern, but my first version doubled the borders up. So I did some CSS to fake that. And then I felt like I wanted the demo to be responsive and fill the viewport in a pleasant and balanced fashion, so that took a little more code.

At that point I realized I had a lot of code that wasn’t related to just trying out the corner-shape, so I added a lot of code comments. Since a fair amount of the code was setup-related (font families, the @supports logic, margins on body) I moved it all into a separate file so people focusing on the demo code didn’t have to wade through the rest.

That’s a lot.

The gulf between a program that works and a program that works for other people is orders of magnitude larger than the gulf between a program that works and no program at all.
@mralancooper

Some of it is reusable and I’ll probably set up a template project so I don’t have to do quite so much next time. But what started out as “here’s an interesting way to demonstrate corner-shape” turned into a lot of other side-quests related to accessibility and legibility.

This is the difference between writing code for yourself in that moment, and writing code for other people whose expectations and capabilities are very different from yours. It’s why vibe-coding a prototype feels like magic, but then trying to make the code production-ready becomes a frustrating slog.

Most of the work isn’t the feature. It’s making the feature comprehensible, usable, and attractive for people you don’t know and will never meet.

That’s what I wish more non-programmers understood about the work we do.

Designers becoming technologists won’t save us

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 11:00:50 GMT

Dolphia Arnstein says designers deliberately ignored technological skills, which removed them from the technical discussions and made them irrelevant:

Designers create mockups. Engineers override them based on technical constraints the designer didn’t know existed. The designer spends days in “alignment meetings” trying to advocate for the user, but can’t speak the technical language needed to actually influence the decision. Business stakeholders step in to make product calls because they can at least understand the technical constraints, even if they don’t understand users.
Why AI is exposing design’s craft crisis

You should absolutely list me in the “designers should learn how to code” camp. I’m primed to argue in favor of this position. My arguments are well-rehearsed. I have stories and examples and even — somewhere — a slide deck. But this is not our problem right now. I could wave a magic wand¹ and make every designer on earth a competent front-end engineer and it would make no appreciable difference.

This is because the business stakeholders don’t understand the technical constraints, either, and they don’t very much care. The arguments about user experience designers are having (and losing) with stakeholders are similar to arguments about code quality that engineers are having. Right now, learning to code would just put designers on the losing side of a different, but functionally similar, argument.

“Why do we care about the code being maintainable if Claude can just re-write it?”

The more urgent craft crisis is that engineers and designers alike have all been focused on doing our jobs well but business stakeholders have come to see this effort as waste. Arnstein gets close when she says:

Design has been deprioritized during a business cycle championing technology and marketing […G]rowth teams route around design, making decisions that move metrics even when they compromise user experience. Princeton found that 1 in 10 of 11,000 shopping sites used dark patterns. Zurich University found 95% of popular Android apps had at least one dark pattern. The European Commission found 97% of apps used by EU consumers contained dark patterns.

As engineers we’re arguing against these moves, too. Business teams, always organized around “make the number bigger” approaches, won’t center a customer’s needs unless they have to. Our current regulatory environment makes it far easier to profit through selling people’s personal data, then selling the company to a Google or Amazon. Many companies want customers, not the customer’s money. The customer is the real product. The money comes from somewhere else. Ask LG — do they make televisions? Or is their primary income stream collecting and selling the data of viewers?

If you have any significant doubts about this, you probably don’t spend much time interacting with the world around you. Search has degraded significantly. Web sites slow to a crawl because of the weight of data trackers and heavyweight advertising. Anyone with a newer car has a silent passenger logging everywhere they go, and a louder passenger trying to upsell us through our touch-screen controls. Touch-screen controls which, by the way, many of us don’t want.

Every time a confirmation dialog asks you to do something or turn something on and your options are “OK” and “not now,” you know you are dealing with a company that really doesn’t care what you think.

In the past, engineering and design teams could more-or-less force the conversation about users and software stability. Not to the degree we wanted, of course, but we had a seat at the table and a voice simply because the work couldn’t be done without us.

AI has robbed us of that leverage. Stakeholders have always been comfortable with making demands and judging results. The promise of AI is that they can now make those demands of a robot. The results are plausible enough to survive initial scrutiny by people unschooled in either discipline. It makes our efforts seem … wasteful. Especially when we insist on doing a “good job” in ways stakeholders cannot easily comprehend. The work of the LLM appears to be “good enough,” so all of these other things engineers and designers are constantly moaning about feel like distractions. Or worse, entertainment.

Last year I said Scrum often fails at companies because scrum is quality focused and many companies couldn’t give a hoot about quality. The same now goes for engineering and designing teams. So yes, designers would do a better job if they learned how to code.² But would doing a better job get you anything? In this business environment, is being conscientious and careful actually rewarded? Is any business actually trying to meet user needs?

The dozens of subscription requests I decline, privacy invasions I block, and takeover ads I have to close in every app, every day, everywhere, suggests otherwise. The business’s attention is elsewhere. That’s the craft crisis.

Perhaps I could name it “Opus.” ↩
Also, front-end engineers would do a better job if they learned design. Fortunately, many of us are frustrated designers. ↩

I'm bought for the price of a flagon of rice

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:30:54 GMT

Last week we got to 8/10 lyrics identified in pretty short order. The two left:

“Red hot mama, velvet charmer, time’s come to pay your dues.” Nazareth, Hair of the Dog
“Take your hat off, boy, when you’re talkin’ to me.” Belly, Feed the Tree

This was the second time around for Feed the Tree, a song that gets stuck in my head pretty regularly. (And now it’s stuck there again.) Apparently no one else remembers the song, so I’ll let it be.

This week I’m afraid I’m mostly back into the 80s. One step forward, two steps back! It’s later than I want to be in front of a computer on Friday, so I’ll let you get to it…

The Rules

No searching for answers. Or asking AI.
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

This is where we used to live

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 11:00:50 GMT

This week’s lyrics game has a lyric from the Barenaked Ladies song “The Old Apartment.” I started listening to them with Gordon and saw them in concert while “One Week” was still a big hit — so Stunt was never far from my CD player. I tried to like the double-album Barenaked Ladies are Me(n), bought the kid’s album Snacktime because it came out around the time my son was born.

Then there was apparently an acrimonious break-up between Steven Page and the rest of the band. They put out an album making some digs at Steven, Steven’s debuts took a swing or two at them, and I haven’t listened to much of either of them since. It’s strange to think about how much they were a soundtrack to my young adulthood and then how rapidly they dropped out, largely without any conscious thought on my part. I didn’t at any point think “oh, I’m done with them.” It’s just — I couldn’t really cope with the drama.

I didn’t want to take sides, or even understand why, and so I just stopped listening.

Or maybe I just stopped listening because I got old? Had a kid? Stopped having the energy and attention to really listen to music anymore? There’s a lot of stuff I really liked from that point in my life that I have … negative nostalgia? for. I know I used to like it. I can’t explain why I don’t anymore. Why I stopped following the artists, why I don’t even listen to the old stuff anymore.

I often wish I had a closer relationship to music now, more like I did back then. But I’m having real trouble cultivating it.

Now I can hear the sun

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:40:54 GMT

Last week Frodis Caper and Sidney fought over seven of ten identified lyrics — Frodis with 3, Sidney with Four.

“One love, one house, no shirt, no blouse” tickled the brains of a couple of folks. That one was The Neighborhood’s “Sweater Weather.” “So let me hold both your hands in the holes of my sweater” is the specific earworm there.

Lazlo almost got “Give her some funked-up Muzak, she treats you nice,” Steely Dan’s FM. It’s “no static at all” because FM’s audio fidelity is so much better than AM radio.

What didn’t seem to ring anyone’s bell was “John Wayne’s got nothing on my fringe game.” This would be Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop.” Macklemore, you may have noticed, has been in the news a lot recently for pissing off a really rich person and torpedoing Ed Sheeran’s concert tour in the process.

This month I’ve made a concerted effort to pull the stats up for the 21st century — which might make it a bit more difficult for some of you. It certainly makes it difficult for me, I’m more comfortable with the latter half of the 20th. Not just in music, but in general. Good luck anyway!

The Rules

No searching for answers. Or asking AI. (I’m looking at you, the singer of #9.)
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

People tell me that I’m paranoid

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 20:40:54 GMT

Last week we had 7/10 identified, with a rather large number of almost simultaneous identifications from Fred, Frodis Caper, and Glen. The three that were unidentified:

“The world, and the world, turns around. The world and the world, yeah — the world drags me down.” She Sells Sanctuary, The Cult
“People may smile, but I don’t mind. They’ll never understand the kind of fun I find…” Doin’ the Pigeon, Bert from Sesame Street.
“I pull my shirt off and pray. I’m saving myself to suffer the heatwave.” Election Day, Arcadia.

For that last one I would also have accepted the band “Duran Duran.” Arcadia was a side project missing a member or two, but it still sounded a lot like them. Grace Jones makes a guest appearance in this song. Another from the album features David Gilmour and Sting.

Anyway: Election day, because that season is coming up fast in the USA — early voting actually starts today in Virginia.

If you’re new here, you’ll want:

The Rules

No searching for answers. Or asking AI. (I’m looking at you, the singer of #9.)
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

Your eyes resemble mine

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:40:54 GMT

Last week there was only one song unidentified, and it is probably my favorite out of the ten.

“Baby got purple hair, Baby got a secret lair. Baby got an army there. I ain’t ever seen Baby scared.” Atom Bomb, Fluke.

The song is a Big Beat classic from the late 90s, originally written for the PS1 racing game Wipeout XL (or Wipeout 2097 if you’re not American). There’s lots of great music that was licensed for that game, including tracks by The Crystal Method and The Prodigy, but I understand “Atom Bomb” was written specifically for the game and escaped containment. All I know is I raced a lot better when that song was playing.

It was also a new experience for me to hear real, CD-quality music in a video game. I remember finding out that it was just playing an audio track off the CD, and if you wanted you could pop the game CD out of the PlayStation and add your own disc in to change the soundtrack.

Speaking of flukes, I’ve rerun several songs from games past that I think were unjustly missed the first time around. In some cases I’ve repeated the actual lyric, but in one case I pulled a more representative lyric because I discovered the one I originally used only showed up in the extended mix of the song, not the radio version. We’ll see if they can get any love this time around.

The Rules

No searching for answers. Or asking AI. (I’m looking at you, the singer of #9.)
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

Make believe I’m everywhere

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:40:54 GMT

Last week y’all recognized only 60% of the lyrics, probably because I went a little further afield:

“The President, he’s got his war, folks don’t know just what it’s for.” Les McCann, Eddie Harris, Compared to What.
“And everything, and nothing, is as sacred as we’d want it to be.” Beth Orton, Central Reservation.
“Rodney’s feeling sexy, Mick is really frightfully bold. Me, I do the only thing that stops me growing old.” Tim Curry, I Do the Rock.
“Sister Watchacallim, I’m indebted to you; it all goes to show what food and fluids can do.” The King Sisters, In the Mood.

The first and last of these are jazz numbers. “Compared to What” has been covered by Roberta Flack, Al Jarreau, and (much more recently) John Legend & the Roots. “In the Mood” is a tricky one, because the most popular version of this is an instrumental, and when modern folks (like Brian Setzer) bother to sing it they tend to change the lyrics to lean more into the naughtier implications.

I Do the Rock was Tim Curry’s biggest hit single. Most performances of this song have been yanked from YouTube, so that was a bit frustrating.

Central Reservation is one of the songs you know if you’re a fan of semi-ambient folk electronica… a narrower niche than I thought, apparently.

This time around I have a favorite song in the list that I doubt anyone will get. Another is a previously-favorite song I have difficulty listening to now, rooted as it is in misguided 90s-era Fukuyamian optimism.

Oh, and there are two songs featuring singers who have been totally cancelled in some corners.

Good luck!

The Rules

No searching for answers. Or asking AI. (I’m looking at you, the singer of #9.)
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

I don’t stay out late

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:18:54 GMT

Last week left us with two unidentified songs:

Walk the Dinosaur by Was (Not Was)
Lose Control by Teddy Swims

I don’t know about you, but reading “I felt a little tired, so I watched Miami Vice” was one of those “So that’s what they’re saying!” moments.

It was a night like this forty million years ago
I lit a cigarette, picked up a monkey skull to go
The sun was spitting fire, the sky was blue as ice
I felt a little tired, so I watched Miami Vice

The week before that game we were in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee at a shopping district called “The Island.” The giant ferris wheel in last week’s photo is the central attraction. This week’s photo is a view from one of the cabs. The bright blue circle with the tail is a water feature where they synchronize the fountains to music. This trip it was surrounded by animatronic dinosaurs, and of course they played the Was (Not Was) song. (The song is apparently a protest against nuclear war.)

For those not aware, Pigeon Forge and its neighbor Gatlinburg are tourist destinations near the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. It attracts tourists throughout the region, including as far away as Ohio. It is near the childhood home of Dolly Parton, and since 1986 has been home to “Dollywood.”

Speaking of, it’s been a rough week for celebrity deaths.

We have some deep cuts in today’s set of lyrics, some of which both Spotify and Genius.com tell me get only niche-level traffic. A few are gimmes. Good luck!

Also: if you use an RSS Reader you can subscribe to updates.

The Rules

No searching for answers. Or asking AI.
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

Photoshopped

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:57:50 GMT

I really like Tofutush’s post about accusing people of using AI:

I’ve seen callout posts which are basically taking a really well-drawn piece of artwork, circling seemingly random spots, with generic annotations like ”???,” “obviously AI,” “what?” …Which, I have to assume it’s just some troll, or at best someone who really has no idea how art works.

This behavior has a chilling effect on artists, especially people who are just starting out to explore a medium. I know people who are afraid to put their stuff out there because they are worried that people will accuse them of it being AI. Some artists and writers are recording their screens as they work. Others are keeping track of all their drafts. It largely doesn’t matter — conspiracy thinking is at work, so all evidence can also be assumed fabricated.

The accusations are often immediately discrediting. Even the whiff of suspicion affects how we feel about the art. Someone posts something online, someone else says “AI obvs,” and now everyone is thinking about whether or not that art piece is AI. They’re dissecting it, pulling it apart — not to react to it, but to try to extrapolate how it was created.

Not too long before that, you’d get people responding to photos with “photoshopped.” Then everyone would stop saying “how cool!” or ”what a great picture!” and start looking for evidence of fakery. Dropping these comments without any form of substantiation (“Oh, I just feel like it’s photoshopped / is AI”) is just plain mean. It’s a way of drawing attention to the skeptic, not the art. It ruins it for the artist and the audience.

For my part I try not to worry about it much.

My experience with AI is pretty deep at this point. My impression after many hours of use in programming, writing, and art is that it’s super easy to get low-quality output. AI can generate shit at an astounding rate. Getting anything better out of it requires significantly more effort, and at some point it ceases being “AI generated” and turns into tool use. When that happens, there’s considerably more of human intent in there — and the AI influence becomes a lot harder to detect.

Ah.

Now I have said I’ve used AI for writing, and you are probably wondering if I used AI for this writing. Ethan Marcotte collected “AI disclosure” statements from blogs, and the range of attitudes was really interesting. I’ve considered adding one here, although I’m always worried that just bringing the topic up is enough to shift people’s attention away from what I’m trying to say and instead get them started counting em dashes.

Which I use, a lot, and have for forty years. I can’t stop using em dashes any more than some folks can stop putting two spaces after a period.

If I was using AI to generate my posts, there would be a lot more of them. I do use AI as an editing tool, after the first draft is finished. I like writing, even if I am not especially good at it, and I like my words to be my own. But sometimes I like to make a coherent, focused argument and AI helps me do that work. I would never, ever consider that “AI generated.” But this post is unfiltered me. What I post will be barely edited.

I probably spend three times as much time writing with an AI editor looking over my shoulder than I do one of these posts.

But, you see, here I am spending several paragraphs trying to prove that a) my AI use has not compromised what I write and that b) I’m not using it for this post anyway. And I am concerned that some folks will see that I’ve admitted using AI for anything at all and chuck me onto the Immoral Techbro Bastard pile. Which is kind of a distraction, but also kind of the point.

People who do creative work without AI are paranoid that their audience will think it’s AI.

People who do creative work using AI as a tool rather than a generator are also paranoid that their audience will think it’s AI.

Audiences are doing armchair forensics to show off how skeptical and cynical they are about anything anyone shares.

You know who doesn’t worry about this stuff? The slop merchants generating massive quantities of shit, drowning the rest of us out.

We don’t seem to be enjoying anything anymore, neither the making of it nor the experiencing of it.

What I keep reminding myself is that there are always going to be people who critique the method of art-making. If it’s not “smells like AI” it’s “photoshopped.” Then “real photographers shoot manual.” Then ”real photographers don’t use auto-focus.” Maybe ”real photographers shoot film.” Finally, “real photographers have their own darkrooms.”

All the world art fake photographers but me and thee, and I’m not too sure about thee.

All art is like this; arguably all human activity is like this. Someone, somewhere, is going to try to gate-keep. And wherever they set that gate, someone else will have to prove they are even better and erect a new one a few feet away, just a little closer to what “pure skill” actually is.

My father, who turns eighty later this year, learned how to do woodburning as a teenager. He can do delicate, very fine work with nothing but a chisel-tip and the simplest imaginable woodburner. He tells me he stopped in part because people started saying to him “oh, do you have a laser engraver?”

AI has nothing to do with that. It’s just the worry that people look at it and think he took the easy path that’s made it difficult for him to enjoy his hobby.

I don’t want that to happen to me. I hope it doesn’t happen to you.

And if you’re the kind of person who enjoys swooping in, pooping out a AI accusation, and then fucking off — that’s the effect you’re having on people. That’s your art. Congratulations, I guess.

Seems pretty low-effort. But congratulations.

Her name was “Anne”

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 10:40:54 GMT

Last week’s game had only one song left over, and it was David Crosby’s declaration that, as far as he was concerned, the hippie moment was not over: “Almost Cut My Hair.” I’m pleased that we got so many, but especially surprised that player ER managed to get the Flight of the Conchords song almost immediately.

The idea of a “freak flag“ didn’t originate with this song — that was possibly Jimi Hendrix — but it helped popularize it.

At the risk of giving the game away, today’s game has one — maybe two — songs with easily confused artists. It’s rough when you have singers with a solo career as well as work with a prominent band. Especially when the band’s sound is so closely linked to that solo artist. “Is this song 10,000 Maniacs? Or just Natalie Merchant?” is a really good example. (None of the songs below are either.) So if you answer one thing, and I say “that’s not quite right,” you’ve most likely bumped into this specific error.

With that tip, I guess it’s time to leave you to it!

The Rules

No searching for answers. Or asking AI.
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

Put your hands on the wheel

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:40:54 GMT

Last week’s lyrics game landed at 6/10, with Sidney alone wrapping up five. I also had another correct guess on social media, but I can only accept answers in the comments.

The unidentified lyrics were from:

Cruel Summer, Taylor Swift
Lucretia Mac Evil, Blood, Sweat, and Tears
Charlie Brown, The Coasters
Beautiful Things, Benson Boone

It’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve been running this game weekly for a year — this game will cross that anniversary mark. I appreciate everyone who has been participating. It’s been a lot of fun for me, especially as I revisit songs I haven’t heard in years and stretch out into newer music that passed me by as other life was happening.

I’m pretty sure this game didn’t originate with me — I can remember playing it during the Golden Age of Blogging — so I encourage you do run your own, on your schedule, and on your terms. Or use mine.

Here are the ones I know about:

The Film Optimist runs their own game weekly. It’s a bit more challenging than mine.
Frodis Caper has adapted the game for BlueSky.
Fred posts ten random lyrics each week, also on BlueSky.

If you choose to run one, let us know in the comments. If you recognize any of these lyrics, let us know in the comments as well.

The Rules!

No searching for answers. Or asking AI.
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

Away, I’d rather sail away

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:40:54 GMT

I apologize for the unannounced hiatus last week. Rather than post a game I spent the weekend rolling my own comment system for this blog. I haven’t had any problems with Hyvor Talk over the last year or so. But the price has slowly crept up in large part due unfavorable exchange rates, to the point where I’m paying more for comment hosting than many comparable bloggers would pay for a Wordpress setup.

Today is the first great test of the commenting system. Lucky you.

The previous game saw 6/10 identified — more than I expected, actually! Some of these were really difficult and one nearly impossible.

“She calls my name, pulls my train.” There She Goes Again, the La’s (covered by Sixpence None the Richer)
“The club owner said I need to calm down, security guard’s gonna sweat me now.” Get Low, Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz_
“Don’t be a donkey! It’s nothing like The Monkey!” Do the Jellyfish, Neil Sedaka
“We’ve all got our own funny moods. I’ve got mine, woman, you’ve got yours, too.” If You Don’t Know Me By Now, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes (covered by Simply Red, Patti LaBelle)

Do the Jellyfish is really unfair. It’s from a currently little-known ’60s monster movie called Sting of Death which gets a new theatrical release next year as the first new MST3K with Mike Nelson.

There She Goes Again is the same handful of lines over and over again except for a very short bridge. The lyric I chose is from that bridge.

But here, now, is another ten lyrics to guess!

Be aware that there’s now a limit of three comments every ten minutes, so if you have a tendency to post several comments rapidly as you think of new ones, you may get shut out after your third post. This is not a rule to keep you from guessing, it’s a spam mitigation strategy. Sorry about that.

The Rules!

No searching for answers. Or asking AI.
You must provide both the artist and the song name.
I will accept most common covers of the song as well as the originals.

You were clued in

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:40:54 GMT

Last Week we had 8/10 lyrics identified. This week I can’t resist the siren song of the 80s, but there are a couple from after 2000 to challenge you. Especially since going back in time almost 100 years seems to pose no problem.

One of the remaining ones surprised me — I guess people got hung up on the artist?

“Big blue eyes, pointy nose, chasing mice and digging holes.” What Does the Fox Say, YLVIS
“If you want to ride, you gotta ride it like you’re flyin’.” Rock Island Line, Lead Belly

When What Does the Fox Say was absolutely everywhere as a kid’s song, my own elementary-school kid found it extremely annoying. Doing some reading I learned that it was an intentional parody of club music and was supposed to flop as a bit for a TV comedy show, but in a real Springtime for Hitler moment it became an international hit.

Rock Island Line was collected by John Lomax and Lead Belly at Arkansas Cummins State Farm prison. Lead Belly released his own performance in 1937; another hit version was by Skiffle musician Lonnie Donegan. The video in last week’s post is Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Pete Seeger.

So what do we have this week? That’s for me to know and you to find out.

Put the song title and artist in the comments below.
I’ll accept cover artists as well.
But don’t go looking up the lyrics before guessing.

I’m not lost

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:40:54 GMT

Last week we got nine out of ten. And, Fred got a record eight out of ten. First of all, congratulations, Fred. Secondly, I read this as a signal I can reach a bit further afield. The problem here isn’t making a hard set of lyrics to guess. That’s easy. What’s difficult is making them challenging but doable.

In this set, I’ve gone a bit further back in time to the 1920s and 1930s. Once they get that old, it becomes more difficult to decide what’s the “original” and what’s the “cover” because often the songs were published by the song writers, and then you’d have several versions released by singers in quick succession. This is one of the reasons I’ll accept cover artists in the answer — sometimes the issue is pretty muddled.

This is especially true with today’s #8, which was originally in French. Also #5, which was originally collected by Alan Lomax. “My Way,” which was in last week’s set, was also a European import and heavily re-written for the American market.

Good luck!

Put the song title and artist in the comments below. I do accept anonymous comments.
I’ll accept cover artists as well.
But don’t go looking up the lyrics before guessing. That’s cheating.

Thudfactor

When we were at school our games were simple

The Rules

We used to be user-centered, now we're user-hostile

Towards a non-slop AI workflow

Footnotes

You ain’t got no money, they will put you out

The Rules

Stretched out on a tarmac

The Rules

It’s the details that make the difference

Designers becoming technologists won’t save us

Footnotes

I'm bought for the price of a flagon of rice

The Rules

This is where we used to live

Now I can hear the sun

The Rules

People tell me that I’m paranoid

The Rules

Your eyes resemble mine

The Rules

Make believe I’m everywhere

The Rules

I don’t stay out late

The Rules

Photoshopped

Her name was “Anne”

The Rules

Put your hands on the wheel

The Rules!

Away, I’d rather sail away

The Rules!

You were clued in

I’m not lost