Hello Thursday!

Typing on phones seems to be something very polarizing for people — they either love it or hate it. Grace falls very much into the “hate it” camp. For anything longer than a couple of words, she sets down her phone and pulls our her laptop. She has tremors in her hands, which I imagine contributes to this, but even before her tremors got as bad as they are now, she didn’t really like typing on her phone.

On the other extreme, I've known people in the K-pop fanfic community who would do almost all of their writing on their phones. When one of them first told me about this, I was gobsmacked. “You typed a couple of thousand words on your phone?” But now, after gaining more familiarity with my phone, it's not such a big deal, and I've done it myself.

I find now that it's more a matter of choosing the right tool for the job at hand. For jotting a quick note, or even writing a short newsletter article like this, I'll use my phone unless I happen to already be sitting at my computer. If I have to do page layouts, academic citations, or editing that involves a large amount of copy/pasting, I'll go to the computer. If I’m doing something where I need a lot of accents, umlauts, or tildes, or if I need to type something in 한국어 or 日本語, I'll pick up my phone even if I’m sitting at the computer, because on my phone my international keyboards are just a keypress away. (I do almost all of my writing in Upnote, so I have it on my phone and my computer. Sometimes I'll be typing on my computer, need to type something in Korean or Japanese, pick up my phone to type that in, then put down my phone and go back to the computer.)

Grace recently bought a computer-style keyboard that connects to her phone with Bluetooth, and at the same time I’m sitting over here wondering if there's some way I could connect a tablet to my computer so I could use an Android keyboard on my computer. This is a time when I'm not being ironic when I say “I love living in the future.”

Ouch! Painful song review

The final line of The Bias List’s review of AllDay Project’s “Do It Like This” — “It’s almost so stupid that it comes back around to being fun, but they haven’t yet found that magic formula so it’s just bad.” This song is indeed everything that line would lead you to expect, but if you really want to hear for yourself, I included a link in the song title there. 

How software support should be

I’m sure you’ve all been there: You have a problem with a piece of software. You try getting support from the company that made it. You end up at the company’s “user support forums,” which is just a website where the company has offloaded product support onto the users, who are scrambling desperately, trying to make the product work without any support from the people who can actually make the product work. Then when you get there, you discover that the company has known about your problem for literally years but chosen not to fix it because they think spending their time adding new AI-based “features” is more profitable. The users in the forums have found a workaround, but it’s clumsy and unpleasant and much more difficult than it should be.

Sounds familiar, right?

What if I told you it didn’t had to be that way?

Once you stop laughing, let me tell you about my experience with Read More, the reading tracker app I use. It’s a great app, does everything it’s suppose to do, and — get this — the premium version is $1.50/year. (That’s not a typo. One dollar and fifty cents per year. Because not every app is worth five bucks per month.) Read More is developed and maintained by a company with a staff of one, Shunan. This past weekend, I noticed that a recent update had introduced a bug into the app: Whenever I entered an amount of reading for a book, the app would increase the current day’s reading goal for that book by one page, so that if I had read exactly as many pages as the goal had been, I was now one page short of the goal. So I emailed Shunan to report the bug and went about my day. Twelve hours later, I got an email from Shunan not only thanking me for the bug report but also telling me that they had been able to reproduce the bug and had submitted an update fixing the bug to the app store!

Pretty amazing, right? But it gets better. A couple of days later, I got another email from Shunan, asking me to confirm that the update they’d sent out had indeed fixed the problem I was having. (As it turned out, there are two ways of entering reading progress, and it only fixed the problem in one of them. I really hated having to tell them that.)

TL;DR A solo developer can properly support an app. Ergo, a multinational corporation could properly support an app. They just choose not to.

Things to check out online

• Love Ice Cream? This Harvard Study Has Some Surprisingly Good News — As per usual, the headline overstates things. What the study did find is that “participants who ate small portions of real ice cream every week showed a lower statistical risk of developing type two diabetes and heart disease compared to those who ate none.” Did the ice cream itself do anything to decrease the risk of diabetes and heart disease? Or does it just happen to be that case that people who eat ice cream also have other behaviors that decrease the risk of diabetes and heart disease? I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it’d be impossible to figure this out from the study data, but it’d be really damn hard.

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve finished reading

• ArtForum, February 2026 
  

• Ritual Income, Witch of the Demesne vol. 1 (B.L. Brown) 

• Vogue, September 2026 

• Midwest Design, Fall 2026 

I’ve continued reading

• Once Broken Faith (Seanan McGuire) 

• Minnesota Monthly, September/October 2026

• Art in America, Fall 2026 

• Wanderhome RPG (Jay Dragon)

and I’ve started reading

• Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 23 (Yuto Tsukuda) 

• Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, vol. 4 (Shio Usui) — I’m one chapter in, and still despair of getting an ending by the end of the volume, but I guess we’ll see.

• Witch Hat Atelier, vol. 14 (Kamome Shirahama) — I love this series. Beautiful art. Great story. Wonderful magic system and worldbuilding. My only complaint is that Kodansha, like so many (all?) other English-language manga publishers runs one an approximately one-year delay from Japanese publication. Given the series’ publishing schedule in Japan, this means that English language readers who choose not to read scanlations are two volumes behind. // Leaving aside my complaints about the lack of timeliness of the manga publishing system, if you’re looking for a place to fill the “education of a wizard”-shaped hole in your media diet that was left after you realized what a horrible person J.K. Rowling is, this series can fill it. Seriously, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

If you missed any past Thursdays, you can access the archives here.

And as always, THIS NEWSLETTER CONTAINS 100% HUMAN-CREATED WORDS.

Have a great week, and I’ll see you next Thursday,

Jason