VioletPixel

Justin Michael's notions and miscellanea

📕 Steal Like a Human

About a week ago we drove to the Oregon coast and spent a little time in Manzanita. While we were there we stopped by a charming little bookstore called Cloud & Leaf. Nothing initially caught my eye, but on the way out I noticed a 10th anniversary edition of Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. I've always wanted to read it, so I picked it up.

Tonight I sat down and read it cover to cover (that's not a boast; it's a short book and easy to get through in a single sitting). It's quite good, and I recommend it.

The book was originally published in 2012, and 14 years later it's anything but out of date. There are some offhand references to how the Internet worked back then which no longer bear any resemblance to reality, but it's nothing that detracts from the material in any way (although a mention of Google Reader made me pine a little for a particular time online that will never come again).

Many of the thoughts and ideas in the book weren't new to me, and likely wouldn't be new to you, but it's nice to have them so succulently and expertly packaged into a single, handy tome. The book serves as a good reminder of the ingredients required for a solid creative foundation. The book is full of things I needed to hear—things I needed to be reminded of—and I imagine the same is probably true for you as well.

Looking through the lens of our present moment, one thing in particular caught my eye:

A picture of a page from Steal Like an Artist which has a hand-drawn two column table. The left column's header is, 'Good Theft,' and it contains the following items: honor, study, steal from many, credit, transform, remix. The right column's header is, 'Bad Theft,' and it contains the following items: degrade, skim, steal from one, plaiarize, imitate, rip off.

It's interesting that generative AI takes almost everything from the "bad theft" column and only one thing from the "good theft" column.

A few pages earlier, Austin writes:

What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.

The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That's what you really want—to internalize their way of looking at the world. If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.

Today the effort required to mimic the surface of others' work is close to zero. The flood of knockoffs is unprecedented. So much is so shallow. The seemingly-pervasive disregard so many people have for ethics, honor, and credit is suffocating and disheartening (to say nothing of the other small, tiny, inconsequential issues like, say, the environment and a massive consolidation of power).

Despite the state of the world, this book reminded me that the journey—our personal creative journey—is replete with rewards that will never be realized if we take shortcuts. I knew that before I read this, in both my head and my heart, but having a physical artifact harmonize with those thoughts and feelings is comforting and delightful.

This is a tough time, but there's hope. The only way out is through.

🥧 Lo-Fi Pi

Russell Samora and Kevin Litman-Navarro created lo-pi radio:

Live lo-fi beats from the digits of pi, forever.

A little bit more about how it works (press the ? button on the site for more details):

How the sound works: Every note of the melody you hear is the next digit of pi, in order. Each digit is a note in the Fmaj scale. 0 and 9 are rests (silence). Digits are not skipped or changed, but we've created a set of simple rules (and some fiddly ones that aren't worth explaining) that decide when each note plays and how long it lasts to best match the underlying progression.

Surprisingly good background music!

🇺🇸 Hope

A screenshot from Apple News with the title, 'How the nation shifted from 2024,' followed by a map of the United States that shows the percentage-point change in margin between the 2026 House races and the 2024 presidential election by county. Each county is represented by etther a blue arrow pointing up and to the left or a red arrow pointing up and to the right for Democratic and Republican shifts, respectfully. The length of each arrow represents the change in margin (longer means more change) and the thickness of the arrow indicates total votes. The map is overwhelmingly covered in blue arrows, with only a few small red arrows peeking through here and there (with one long, solitary red arrow in Alaska being the exception).

I keep going back to stare at the map shown above in Apple News. It's wonderful to see how dramatically most of the country shifted their stance in the recent election. Opening the News app and smiling is a strange sensation, but a welcome one!

Zooming in, look at this list of amazing things:

That's just the stuff I could find that's been confirmed the day after the midterms. There are probably many other noteworthy things I missed.

There are also lots of interesting things coming up:

Now, all of that said, things aren't going to get better immediately, and there's still a lot that didn't go well during these midterms. A few really disappointing things that stood out to me include several anti-trans measures being passed in various places, the billionaire tax in California doesn't look like it's going to pass, and it looks like most white men are still voting Republican despite the overall shifts we saw yesterday.

On top of that, Republicans have and will do many things to sabotage progress and further their own agenda at the expense of others. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) Republicans signed into law back in July of 2025 has many staggered beginning and end dates, and many of them were purposefully scheduled to happen after the midterms. A lot of these things were delayed to minimize the negative effect on the midterms (which, thankfully, didn't work) and, in the event of a redistribution of power, to make Democrats in office look powerless when these things take effect.

There's a long road ahead. It's going to take time for the folks elected yesterday to take office, and more time still for them to have a substantial impact. There's a big mess to clean up and a lot of hard work to do. The amazing shift we saw in these midterm elections was just one step—a huge step—on the journey to a better world. There are many steps that still need to be taken in the months, years, and decades ahead. Stay strong, stay focused, and keep moving forward.

But now, right now, let's enjoy the overall win. For the first time in a while, despite the lingering problems and issues, I have hope that this country can turn itself around and make some progress toward a better world.

🤬 Siri Recap and Live Rewind Now in Beta

Jason Snell at Six Colors:

With the release of the first developer beta of watchOS 27.3, Apple is unleashing the last of its Audio Intelligence features on the world: Siri Recap and Live Rewind join Sound Recognition and Music Recognition (a favorite watchOS 27 feature of mine).

These other two new features have been met with a lot of skepticism, as they walk right up to the edge of making your Apple Watch a device for covert recording.

I still think Siri Recap and Live Rewind shouldn't exist, and I maintain that Apple's privacy-forward approach doesn't go nearly far enough. I was holding out a tiny hope that they would cancel these features before the beta, but here we are.

Apple could still decide to cancel these features before they're fully released, but I doubt that will happen. I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that.

🗳️ Please Vote

The only way things get better is if we exercise the power we have, and one of the greatest powers we have is our ability to vote.

I know, the choices aren't perfect. The system isn't perfect. Sometimes it's a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. It can feel bad or wrong to participate in a system you don't agree with, or select a candidate you don't fully align with. Still, it's the system we've got. Not voting isn't an act of protest, it's a choice to not change anything. A choice to not make things better.

If every eligible citizen voted, things would be very different. We're not going to get to that point overnight, but you can help us get one step closer.

Please vote. Encourage others to vote. Help us all collectively make a difference.

🔙 Dave Shea is Back!

I was delighted to see one of my archived RSS feeds light up with a new post:

Creating a new personal website in 2026 is certainly a choice.

The commercial web is a disaster of privacy invasion, pop up annoyances, and ads that drown out content. Most social media is a dumpster fire best left in the rearview. Bots outnumber people while siphoning up every thought you or I publish. Minor algorithm tweaks by a major tech company can wipe out small businesses at the drop of a hat. Corporate earnings growth has seen to wringing out every last cent that can be made from exploiting the wreckage of what was once a free and open sphere of information sharing.

But, a human-centric internet can still exist if we want it to. I want to add my voice back with those keeping craft and humanity alive on this place we all used to love. Why not get back to my roots and revive some not-quite-forgotten skills that have languished for years, and just have some fun again? Those of us who were there still remember what this place used to be, here’s my small part in bringing it back.

That's exactly what I've been doing with this site. The more the merrier! Welcome back, Dave.

🚀 Space Shuttle Discovery's Starboard 's' is Upside Down

Jason Snell on Six Colors links to Jason Torchinsky at The Autopian (which he found via Paul Lukas’s Inconspicuous Consumption) who writes about a Threads post by Sin Or Gospel that points out the typographical error:

On the space shuttle Discovery, the S in Discovery is upside down.
As a typography obsessive this gives me an odd thrill.

Wild.

⛔️ How to Remove Slack's New Menu Bar Icon on the Mac

Speaking of annoying things that are difficult or unintuitive to remove, I noticed Slack added a new icon to the menu bar on my Mac today. I immediately went looking through Slack's settings for a way to turn it off, but came up empty.

Then I remembered you can remove most menu bar icons by holding Command while you drag them off the menu bar (keep holding until the little "Remove" popup appears, then let go).

That worked fine for now, but we'll see if Slack tries to add it back again later.

🚫 RemoveMacAI: Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27

Om Lahore:

RemoveMacAI turns off Apple Intelligence and deletes its models. It also switches off Mac Analytics and personalized ads, fixes small things like the wallpaper click that hides every window, and clears out old installers and caches. You see each change before it happens and can undo it later.

On my partner's MacBook Neo, Siri AI somehow turned itself on and she was understandably upset about it. This got it turned back off.

I particularly like that this app doesn't require you to turn System Integrity Protection off, and disabling Siri AI didn't even require a restart. Nice.

🌈 Magic Color-Changing Roman Glass

Dalya Alberge at The Guardian:

Depending on where a light source is positioned, the Lycurgus Cup changes colour, from jade green under normal lighting to ruby red when lit from behind – an astonishing feat of optical engineering that has confounded historians and glass-makers for centuries.

Now scientists from the University of Sheffield have replicated its remarkable optical behaviour, using an ancient recipe derived from a fragment of the Roman “dichroic” (two-coloured) original.

Don't miss the video embedded in the article. The extent to which the colors change is remarkable, and it's quite beautiful.

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