There’s been discussion over separating art from the artist for decades. We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again.

Everyone has to make up their own mind, but for me, I take no issue with casting Harry Potter aside. It’s unfortunate, because thousands of people worked to create a beautiful, visually rich universe for those films. Yet, knowing she receives royalties for all of it has completely soured me.

This issue may be more visible in the United States than it is in Japan. I see people uncritically loving Harry Potter more here than I did back in the States. And I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t bother me. Some people frankly don’t know. Or they don’t care. But that’s what gives her the wealth and power she has, ignorance and indifference.

In my almost two years in Japan so far, I’ve noticed people tend to shy away from discussing serious issues, perhaps for fear of discomfort. On that, I cannot abide. In spite of any discomfort people may have, trans people—and any other marginalized group—deserve our attention and their issues addressed. Otherwise, we rob them the ability to be comfortable. And they have a right to that all the same.

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Ever since my very first website, I’ve had a donate button. And over the years, some people have been very generous and I’m very appreciative of that.

I’m no stranger to talking about money. It’s part of my job. For most of my career, I’ve been a contractor, specializing in helping indie developers and companies create app icons and icon systems. And that means writing, negotiating, and signing contracts. Discussing payment terms and amounts is really normal for me. While some people might not look for a new job all that often and seldom deal with those things, I am regularly having that conversation.

But when it comes to my website and the things I make for fun, I hesitate to bring it up. I don’t like talking about money in that context, I suspect because I feel shame when asking for donations. Even though—rationally—I don’t think I should.

These days, most personal websites exist as a single page to merely state someone’s profession and link to their email. But for 20 years, my website has been a free-to-download repository for over 1000 icons and over 100 wallpapers.

I make all of it in the time I have outside my day job. I love it that much, ever since I was a kid. My most-favorite hobby is basically the same thing I do for work. To me, it’s never been a case of “choose a job you love, and you’ll never have work a day in your life” (that’s bullshit), instead, it’s been a case of extreme luck to have people hire me to do what I already love to do.

Last year, I made over 450 freely-downloadable icons to use on your Mac. That represents almost half of all icons I made in the last 20 years. While you can apply them to folders and hard drives, a lot of them exist outside a context that necessitates using them for anything practical. I love making them as art, and I think they’re nice to look at and fun to collect.

Despite all my fears around asking for donations, I’d like to ask you to think about it. If I ever made something you liked and you want to show your appreciation for it, there are a few ways to do that:

Firstly, I’ve put many of my designs on t-shirts, which you can buy from Cotton Bureau. I guarantee you’ll look cute or cool in them, whichever of those descriptors you prefer.

Secondly, I’ve made some fonts based on pop culture logos, which you can buy from my type foundry, Crown. Even if you don’t have any use for them, they’re something you get in exchange for your money.

Thirdly, I’ve made playing cards and poker dice under my Junior brand. I’m proud of them, and whether you want to play familiar games with my poker decks or new games with my Japanese hanafuda decks, they’re a worthwhile addition to your game shelf or closet. You can buy them from my friends at BuyOlympia.

Fourthly, you can donate directly via Stripe. This method is perfect for when you liked something I made or wrote.

Lastly, I started a Patreon account for LMNT. This is new. You can subscribe to one of three tiers: $5, $10, or $20/mo. There are no exclusives or rewards if you subscribe, but if you want to “set it and forget it” with regard to donating—instead of remembering to donate every so often—this may be perfect for you.

On the modern web, my website is an anomaly. I collect no data from you, there are no ads, and I have no sponsors. There’s no cookie pop-up, no email newsletter pop-up, no anti-ad-blocker pop-up, no subscription pop-up. I don’t artificially throttle downloads or put a page in between that makes you wait to get you to buy the capability for faster downloads. My website doesn’t make external requests. I do not require you to jump through any hoops to access any part of my website or any download anything from my website. There are no paywalls. My website does not run on any third-party service that benefits from it. I don’t even put watermarks on wallpapers because I don’t want a logo to get in the way of you enjoying it.

I don’t know many websites like mine (anymore). It seems like most sites have resorted to doing all of that kind of stuff.

Despite all evidence that points to increased revenue by doing any of those things, I’ve rejected every single one in favor of just putting a donate button at the bottom of every post. Not in the middle. Not obscuring the page. Only at the bottom, out of the way. I know not everyone can afford it, so I don’t push it. But for those who can, I’d ask you to click it. I don’t need your money to do what I do. I’m going to do it anyway.

But I’m asking you now to consider buying something or donating, because it makes things a little easier for me to justify devoting time to making this nice place on the web not just for me, but for you too.

Every one of these ways supports what I do, but some more than others. In the interest of transparency, here’s a table that details how much I get from each of those methods:

Thanks for thinking about it.

If you like this, you can make a one-time donation, donate monthly, or buy something from my shop.

I understand that American football—and by extension, the Super Bowl—is a popular subject and that this seems like a simple question, however, I refuse to believe this kind of question represents how most people use or expect to use Siri, aside from testing its limits for the sole purpose of journalism specific to critiquing Siri.

No matter how specific any one of these questions may be, there are an infinite amount of them. There is no limit to the questions that one could ask virtual assistants about facts and statistics. I reject the premise that this is even a competition Apple needs to be a part of. I don’t care if other “AI” chatbots get these right more often, because this problem will never be 100% solved anyway. And we have to recognize that.

While it is reasonable to expect Siri could support specific historical statistics like Super Bowl winners—even if Apple hard-codes the answers—it is not reasonable to expect data accuracy for every question of the sort. Because everything is actually a lot.

Today, it’s who won Super Bowl XIII. But if it gets that right, then tomorrow, it’s who was MVP of Super Bowl XIII.

The first search result for “mvp super bowl” on DuckDuckGo has all the answers to exactly that question. No one would actually need to ask Siri, but if they do, Siri should not be making guesses.

When asked trivia that can’t be answered by Apple’s own service integrations or partnerships with database owners, Siri should simply not answer the question and perform the search for you instead. That’s what it used to do. That’s what it should do.

Or you could just perform the search yourself, instead of placing trust in a service that has been an unreliable source of this kind of information since 2011.

There are databases that contain these kinds of statistics that Apple could partner with, but unfortunately, there are not databases that comprehensively contain every statistic about everything a human could ever ask. So we should probably stop judging Siri, virtual assistants, and LLMs by this forever-goalpost-moving metric.

At what point do people expect it to answer who the winning quarterback was for the Super Bowl? The losing one? What about which team never won the Super Bowl? Which player has played in the most Super Bowls?

Instead of listing every Super Bowl question I can think of, it’s easier to admit that any attempt made to answer every theoretical question will be flawed.

Even with increased accuracy in some areas, it’s impossible to know how reliable it actually is about everything else. If Siri one day answers the Super Bowl question correctly every time for every game, that will imply it can accurately answer similar questions, too.

But it won’t. And we won’t know whether it’s right or wrong without double-checking the answer anyway. So instead of relying on Siri for this kind of data, just… don’t ask for it.

For what it’s worth, Siri has never been 100% reliable, and we all know that. But because there are several apps and features that Apple makes that are effectively 100% reliable, I understand how the expectation exists.

Siri will never be 100% reliable for this kind of request.

I don’t pretend to represent how most people use Siri, but—for contrast—here’s what I usually ask of my HomePods:

These requests are based on the faith I have in specific service integration. I know my HomePods are connected to the Internet, Apple Music, Find My, and Apple Weather. I can somewhat confidently make these kinds of requests based on that understanding.

But no one really knows all of Siri’s integrations, right? Even if someone thinks they do, there still are limitations for what we can request from those services.

I can ask where my phone is. I can ask where my friend is. Both work because I understand there’s Find My integration. But before heading out this morning, I used that faith to ask my HomePod a question I was less sure it could answer.

Siri could not answer this question.

I know that isn’t an Apple Intelligence request, and that’s what today’s criticism is focused on, but I think being unable to answer that question is a much more damning critique of Siri than who won a Super Bowl.

My faith in that question is rooted in specific knowledge that battery level data is visible in the Find My app. I assumed—wrongly—that since battery percentage was visible in the app, it would be available through a Siri request.

No one understands the bounds of reasonable requests to make of Siri. That’s what makes the Super Bowl question seem reasonable to some people.

Forget Siri for a moment. Can you get this historical Super Bowl data in Apple’s own Sports app? Not a chance, right? No critique about that. Why do we expect more of Siri?

Instead of expecting Apple to provide answers for those types of questions with Siri, I would rather Apple spend the effort to provide exact parity between the visual interface (apps) and voice interface (Siri).

If you can’t do it in an Apple app, Siri shouldn’t either. But if you can do it in an app, then Siri should absolutely support it. That’s something we can expect. That’s something that can be 100% reliable.

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When it comes to family—parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews—presumably you’re allowed to love them all. You can love as many friends as you’d like, no problem. The amount of people you can love is limitless, unless—of course—we’re talking about romantic partners.

Then, we’re only allowed one. (At a time, that is.)

I used to talk more about non-monogamy and polyamory. And while I suspect some people did not like that very much, for some others, I received many private messages expressing excitement for being a visible person saying it out loud.

So here I am, once again, saying how frustrating it can be sometimes. How alone it can feel. I know there are others like me, who feel like their heart allows room for more than one person to love romantically. But I think this is one thing that is much, much harder in Japan than it was in America.

I don’t think I was ready for that. It was already difficult.

It’s not all about finding partners, but rather finding people who understand. There’s a sense that everyone is different and everyone’s views are to be respected, but respect does not mean genuine understanding. Tolerance is certainly a step, but what I’m really after is acceptance.

It matters less to me that everyone agrees about the right way to have a relationship. There are many, many ways to have one. It’s more that it’s quickly dismissed because of what they think it is instead of what it really is.

To me, polyamory is about there being more than one way to love. It’s an acknowledgement that monogamy is just one way to love, not the only way.

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Gunpei Yokoi, a designer of the original Game Boy, described his philosophy as “lateral thinking with withered technology.”

Instead of focusing on the newest, shiniest, and often most-expensive components, Nintendo focused on maximizing the potential of more mature and cheaper technology.

Despite backlit color displays being available at the time, Nintendo opted for a four-shade monochrome display. They made the most of that choice, producing a vast library of games that people still enjoy today. At release, Game Boy required four batteries and had the potential for a whopping 30 hours of battery life.

Sega introduced Game Gear a year later with a backlit color display. To accommodate that choice, it required six AA batteries, which is one reason for its larger form factor. The battery life was a mere 3–5 hours. While Nintendo made efforts to reduce the size of their product while gradually incorporating newer technology, Sega doubled down on their strategy, introducing the extremely-novel Nomad handheld, which still required six AA batteries—or an AC adapter—to power it. To be clear, Nomad did not intend to replace Game Gear. Its even-shorter battery life may have assured that.

Sega never made a handheld again. Nintendo is famously still at it. As of now, of the top four best-selling consoles of all time, three are Nintendo handhelds (Nintendo DS, Switch, and Game Boy).

Though Nintendo employs more-modern technologies now, they are still criticized for not having the most-modern technologies that their rivals are all-too-happy to include, often at the cost of compatibility, affordability, and energy efficiency.

This is not a condemnation of using cutting-edge technology. But if given the choice, I prefer “lateral thinking with withered technology.” I think that’s a great philosophy to consider when making anything.

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I saw a few posts and headlines that made me do a double-take. Not because they were particularly shocking, but because they are incredibly avoidable.

Ghost is a recently-popular (but actually more than a decade old) blogging platform. People have been moving from Substack (nazis) and Wordpress (bozos) to Ghost. A couple weeks ago, Ghost announced they’re introducing native support for custom fonts, “with even more control over your brand.” WOFF web fonts have existed for 15 years.

Read.cv is a professional networking site, like an alternative to LinkedIn, where users could share their résumés and portfolios. People have been flocking here not just as an alternative to LinkedIn but also for people in need of an online professional profile. They even offered blogging tools. Anyway, the team was acquired by Perplexity, an AI search engine, and Read.cv is shutting down. Read.cv was never about AI and had nothing to do with it.

Adam Mosseri from Instagram announced they’re raising the cap on reel length from 90 seconds to 3 minutes. He says while 90 seconds was initially chosen to focus on short-form video, this change will allow users to “tell their stories” better. Of course, Instagram has always been restrictive. Even when it was only for sharing photos, they could only be square crops. Because they said so.

I went to sleep seeing TikTok’s ban become effective in the United States: being removed from the App Store, delivering alerts in-app to its users, and Oracle preparing to shut down TikTok’s US servers. And then I woke up to news that Donald Trump is taking credit for saving TikTok, despite he himself calling for its ban 5 years ago.

Platforms, man.

Custom typography is easily available if you make your own damn website. You don’t have to wait around for anyone to provide that functionality for you. It’s been here.

Sharing your résumé and portfolio is easily done if you make your own damn website. You don’t have to hang your hat on a platform that will sell out to an AI company.

Publishing video is not terribly difficult—of any length—if you make your own damn website. You can embed a YouTube URL if all else fails, but if you learn how to encode a video for the web on your computer, you can simply upload the file to your own website.

None of us will ever control our own identities on third-party platforms. You relinquish control over your identity when you choose to present yourself on one of these platforms. You can be rate-limited for posting too much. You can be suspended by a bot that determines your behavior is bot-like. The platform can pivot at any time from one thing to another. The entire platform could shut down. You have no control, and jumping from one to another will only mean that you have to do it all again later.

Or, instead of all this, you could learn how to make a damn website.

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As Mark Zuckerberg changes content moderation policies at Meta, I wanted to re-read my post from last year.

Content moderation is a much bigger issue for platforms than it is for independent, decentralized websites. Without those features mentioned above, posts have limited range and have a hard time gaining traction. Surfacing those posts by functioning as a platform is what enables potential harm.

Whenever I beat the RSS drum, someone always asks about discoverability, so I want to put this bluntly: it is through algorithmic discoverability features that harmful posts become visible. Whether they are original posts, reposts, or replies, harmful posts are only able to successfully reach their intended audience by depending on those features functioning as social media websites built them.

It should be a little hard for any post to gain traction. That’s a necessary filter to reduce your exposure to things that will deeply upset you and derail your day.

Maybe we should build social networking around blogs and RSS feeds. Individual entries in RSS feeds do not need titles, and entries can be anything of any length. They can contain rich media and rich text. They can be everything we have with traditional social media and more. We can link to each others’ posts to quote them. There are no ads. There is no centralized service. There is no company selling your data. You have complete autonomy to move to another RSS reader. You can like whatever you want locally and never have that data stored on a server. Your website is your profile. While Bluesky and Mastodon have domain name verification, if you were to post directly from your domain, no verification is needed. Online verification is an invented problem.

As for discoverability? Link generously. Link to people you like who say and make things you like. That’s how everyone discovers more people like that. Replies? Honestly, more than half of social media replies I’ve received over the last 20 years have been unwanted. It’s better on some platforms than others. But in general, replies I receive via email are significantly more meaningful and thoughtful. It functions as a filter.

The only reason we don’t have this at scale now is because we don’t have a good RSS writer for regular people. Making an RSS feed is not very complicated, but it is more complicated than it should be for regular people.

How does this relate to content moderation? The people you do not want to hear from, the content you do not want to see? You’d never see it. Maybe it exists, but by removing the mechanisms that bring that content to your eyeballs, most harmful content will stay far away from you. This is just another invented problem by social media platforms.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It never did.

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You may have seen Mark Zuckerberg’s five-minute video about how Facebook is doing literal U-turns on many of their content moderation policies.

If you didn’t watch it, I guess you could, but you might just come away so upset and disheartened by how a man who initially built a website to rate the attractiveness of women at Harvard could become so culturally powerful at a global level.

I have used social media for a long time. I have seen Facebook and Twitter both go from novel status-sharing to cultural battlegrounds. I have seen them both pretend to grow up; neither platform was ever built on the premise of providing “free speech” to the world. Pretending they were is just propaganda from their respective founders. It was an evolution formed from opportunity.

Setting aside what free speech means, it is something valued by people the world over. As a selling point, it is universal. The easiest way to capture the world as your user base is to advertise something everyone wants.

As long as people post on websites they do not own, there will always be content moderation. It will just specifically target different groups based on the political climate. It’s not about free speech. It’s about the speech the platform allows and amplifies.

The result of everyone in the world posting whatever they want has not been overwhelmingly positive, however.

Regardless of content moderation policies, while social media has undoubtedly contributed positively to the world by exposing reprehensible behavior and rapidly distributing evidence on a global scale to hold some people accountable, it has also failed in equal measure. It is not always successful as a means for accountability. Arguably, it is an ineffective means of doing so.

In addition, while these platforms have been been great tools for organizing like-minded groups of people who can put pressure on policy at local, federal, and even global levels, that is not limited to …good people.

The decisions Mark Zuckerberg is making are as unsurprising as they are terrible. When I watched the video, Mark said he would move the content moderation team out of California. I whispered, “to Texas,” just before he said the same.

Twitter’s trajectory is in lockstep. I won’t say X is as bad as it can get, because I believe it can become much worse. Both of these platforms will get worse.

This is gonna be so, so bad.

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Yes, I would also like that. I would welcome any standard UI that gives us back some tools we lost.

There’s a refined clarity to this version of Aqua. It evolved gracefully to this point, where every element was distinctly different and yet cohesive. Consider the search field alone. Now, search fields have the same appearance of every other field: squared. The pill shape distinguished itself. Removing that characteristic introduced a level of ambiguity that is unnecessary. The same can be said for so much in modern visual design (or lack thereof).

I’d like to point to something I said almost 5 years ago:

It’s very unfortunate that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. I distinctly remember when Apple claimed one value in the new design language was “deference,” but after 12 years, this approach is clearly not as thoughtful as it was advertised. It is not as accessible as they have wished. We still have thin red text on gray buttons that lack significant contrast. We still have translucent elements and blurred backgrounds that confound reason and rationale. We traded away that refined clarity for over a decade of ambiguity.

I took some time to reformat an old Twitter thread on the subject into a proper blog post, and I encourage you to read it. How much has improved since then?

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I don’t understand the value of AI summaries compared to traditional truncation. While some headlines are indeed long, summarizing them will always remove context the original publisher thought was necessary. (The same is true for personal messages, but that’s not what this is about.)

Headlines are already shortened versions of entire articles. It serves seemingly no purpose at all to summarize them. If Apple wants to—for some reason—further limit the amount of text visible in a stack of notifications to three lines, the better solution is to simply show three truncated headlines, not the Apple Intelligence semicolon-separated summarized headlines.

As it stands, a lot of Apple Intelligence is poorly designed. “Beta” or not, this is irresponsible, especially coming from a company with this much power and influence.

One of the reasons we have mobile screens that are the entire front face of a device (that is, without buttons) was so we wouldn’t be so limited to display all the necessary information alongside the UI for the visible content.

Why is Apple so averse to users just scrolling? What’s actually wrong with a scrolling list of notifications? If a headline needs the full size of a notification, so be it. Scrolling is effectively infinite. The Lock Screen serves almost no other purpose than to display notifications. What space are they actually saving?

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