Today Depeche Mode released Ghosts Again from their upcoming album Momento Mori. In January I mentioned I have a complicated relationship with the band but ultimately I was cautiously looking forward to the new material.

And here it is. And I must say, I love it. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in a way no Depeche song has done in a long time. So bravo gentlemen.

You may have heard that the Super Bowl is this coming Sunday. And it's here in our fair city. Well, it's in Glendale to be fair, and we used to live in walking distance of the stadium before we moved into Phoenix proper.

As you can imagine it's the only thing the local news is talking about. There are "NFL experience" events all over town, concerts, and visitors. Drove past one of the smaller public airports this morning, the private jets of the rich and famous are already arriving and parked.

This is my one "football" game I watch a year. I don't have a horse in the race obviously so just hoping for a decent game. The fun of it is really going to see friends and the odd frosty beverage while the game is on TV.

When the never ending summer has day after day of the same weather you yearn for something, anything, that's just different. Variety, after all, is the spice of life. And we Phoenix residents are a funny bunch. We're never more happy when clouds appear over the mountains, even happier when they deliver rain.

So at this time of the year it's nice to be…cold. It's been bitterly cold here in the mornings every day this week. Like, see your breath and make sure your plants are covered, cold. My car's dashboard pinged a 'low temperature outside' warning as we hit 32°F driving to school.

There's just something about being able to wear a coat, sip hot Americanos, and breath in that crisp air.

Back in December I wrote about Twitter and Mastodon lamenting the possible demise of the service I've grown to love; and noting we have that Mastodon lifeboat to climb in if such a demise came to pass.

Time passed. Idiotic management decisions aside, Twitter still held together. Sure the tech folk I follow have abandoned Twitter in favor of Mastodon but like 85% of the people I follow are still there. So I've been trying to better allocate time to switch between both services.

And things were mostly fine.

Well, until today.

Last night around 11pm ET, Tweetbot and Twitterrific stopped working, with authentication errors. They’re still down, as are other popular clients. Twitter has said nothing, either publicly or in communications to the affected developers, so your guess is as good as mine whether this is an unintended outage from Twitter’s skeleton crew staff or a strategic decision to pull the plug on third-party clients.

The API is still functional so this was a selective and intentional targeting of third-party clients. I've been a happy Tweetbot user for years and this is an incredible poke in the eye and fuck you to the developer community.

The Twitter experience was always so much better with no algorithmic timeline, no promoted tweets. Just chronological order like the good lord intended. So I've installed the official Twitter iOS client today and it's…not great? Look at all those ads and "hey add your birthday to your profile" messages interspersed with actual Tweets. Yay.

So this is another death cut for me. Only 994 left to go? But seriously, what to do from here? Unless everyone I follow on Twitter also jumps ship I'll still want to hang around and interact with Twitter peeps. A social network lives and dies by who's there. What a sad sorry state of affairs.

Fucking Elon Musk, that guy has a lot to answer for.

What happened was, my car decided it wouldn't recognize either key fob just out of the blue. So I'm here at the car dealer having all the things diagnosed. As I sit and wait, the chap sitting across from me is asleep and snoring. And they have The Price Is Right on TV. Please send help.

I have a complicated relationship with Depeche Mode. But first some history.

The very first Depeche Mode song I can remember hearing was Shake The Disease back in 1985. I must have been eleven years old? There was a boy who lived across the street that I was friends with. He was a couple years older than me and had bought the song on 7" single. I can distinctly remember him bringing it over and we listened to it on my Dad's record player in our living room.

I didn't know it at the time, but that would change things forever. I'd found the exact song, the exact band, the exact type of music that would become the soundtrack of my youth.

One of the first albums I ever bought on vinyl with my pocket money was The Singles 81→85. I played that album to death. And it was the start of my teenage Mode vinyl addiction that spread to buying every album and 12" remix of any song I could get my hands on. Any excuse to go into a record shop to look just in case there was a rare mix I didn't own.

It wasn't just vinyl. I'd go on to buy every single VHS tape of videos or concerts – eventually wearing out my copy of The World We Live In And Live In Hamburg. Over the years I'd end up seeing them live six times, the best of which on the Devotional tour at Crystal Palace in London 1993.

So why a complicated relationship?

The Depeche of the Alan Wilder golden years is my favorite band of all time. Hands down. Not even close. To me, this body of work will never be bettered:

Construction Time Again
Some Great Reward
Black Celebration
Music For The Masses
Violator
Songs Of Faith And Devotion

Alan left of course. The band continued without him and would release a further six albums. All of which I still bought, because Depeche Fucking Mode.

But herein lies the rub. Any long time fan will tell you the albums of the later years are (whispers) not great.

And so we fast forward to the year 2022. Two major things happened. Fletch passed away. Dave and Martin announced a new album.

So, yet again, even after being burned so many times before, I find myself looking forward to a new Depeche album. Maybe this time it will be good?

There's nothing that lies more than the lying liarpants that is the MacOS upgrade time remaining screen.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

I've been a music stats junkie ever since I heard about last.fm in 2006. And every year I look forward to the end of year review. Unlike Spotify with their 'Wrapped', last.fm actually do this correctly by acknowledging that December is a month in which people still listen to music.

So how did it shake out? 20,493 scrobbles – a slight increase over 2021 – but I'm still listening to less music than I used to. Podcasts are 100% to blame here. And there are only so many hours in the day for competing media attention in my ears.

No surprise Depeche were the top band. Fletch's passing meant I went on a bit of a nostalgic re-listen to their body of work. A decent year for synth acts overall and I'm really loving Korine at the moment. Kinda funny that stalwarts Rammstein still make an appearance in every one of my end of year lists. And I really really really loved Suede's new album and played that a lot.

Here's to 2023 in my ears!