Change The Promise When You Take The Picture
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
My program hit the floor on Tuesday, left a note to tell me where
My program hit the floor on Tuesday, left a note to tell me where
So I pinned a photograph beside it, now I see who's sittin' there
Change the promise when you take the picture
Same night, same breath, same deal
Tell 'em it ain't filtered, tell 'em what it might reveal
Hide it in the fine print and the collector's gonna call
I scrubbed the names out the ledger, swept the numbers off the page
I scrubbed the names out the ledger, swept the numbers off the page
But a picture's got no pockets, it's the whole room on the stage
She was writin' down her heartache when the screen froze up and died
You bolted every shutter, but I'm paintin' from inside
Change the promise when you take the picture
Same night, same breath, same deal
Tell 'em it ain't filtered, tell 'em what it might reveal
Hide it in the fine print and the collector's gonna call
Only shoot it when it's truly broke, after all the sweepin's through
If the shutter sticks, send the letter, let the picture go
Who gets to see that photo, how long it hangs on the wall?
Watch the first ones land in daylight 'fore you swear you checked it all
They'll forgive you when you stumble, they'll forgive you when you fall
But not the camera in the corner that you never told 'em at all
The band
The Technical Debt Collectors
A gravelly, swaggering voice calling out over a band that struts. Twelve-bar phrasing with a repeated opening line, and a lyric that is all debt, interest, collection and somebody eventually paying.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post An Error Report Is A Data Collection Decision.
Adding a screenshot to every error report makes bugs faster to reproduce, but it quietly changes what you collect, so the privacy promise has to change in the same breath.