Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1201
Headaches, Apple campus delays, falling space debris, golf llamas, watching Civil War at 1.75x why is all Star Wars TV content 30 mins long?, more AI whining and Nvidia stock schadenfreude.
Morning. How’s it going? Doing okay over here. Still have a headache. Haven’t had Stevia in three days. Probably not enough to draw a conclusion but not promising. Alas. Mother-in-law has shoulder surgery today, full replacement, thus taking up my wife’s time for the next two days. Which would be fine cuz Jane has camp. But she decided this morning, while we were in bed, that she didn’t want to go to camp today. While we were talking about how much I needed her to go to camp. And it looked like a lark, like a decision made capriciously. A decision that could easily be reversed. But its finality and firmness has been stunning. What was made on a lark has become a core part of her identity in the span of 40 minutes. Breathtaking. Depressing.
Mostly a current-events issue today, with a rumination on the use of time in film. Estimated reading time, forever.
PSA: Anyone who says “but there are some good AI uses” is an industry shill. There aren’t. There are honeypots. There are PR initiatives. There are small little niche quirks that will die off as non-economic as the arms race continues. There are some “not really AI but clever tools” stuff but, then, the whole industry is falling over itself to call a bunch of disparate, non-AI stuff “AI,” so, I mean, reap what you sow. Fine I’ll just lump it all together with the bad stuff. Stop putting AI in the name of your “cool tool for designers” if you really want to be a “cool tool for designer.” Why align yourself with the enemy. If Adobe called their new rubber stamp thing something like “extra magic rubber stamp image fill” instead of “AI image fill,” it wouldn’t have gotten that scarlet letter in Instagram, and it’s not like their stock moved anyway.
It is really weird to me how militant I am becoming about this but it is really sad to see the entire world falling for Silicon Valley’s bullshit again, and again, god. Come on. They do not have our interests at heart. And, once again, they are literally endeavoring to suck up all the electricity. Again! They’re last joint is still sucking up all the electricity! Bitcoin’s floundering didn’t do a single thing for its electricity consumption.
Happy to see Nvidia’s stock finally falling, though. Just took a week or so for people to see the writing on the wall from the Apple announcements. I was right, ha ha, if you took stock advice from GMHHAY you are insane but in this one instance, you woulda made a killing. Not that I know how to short stocks, because shorting stocks is mean and I am a good person.
Pretty pissed about Jamal Bowman losing his primary that is some sketchy-ass shit right there. I am feeling a few life-long political grudges forming inside me at this moment. Hakeem Jeffries escapes my grudge machine by the skin of his teeth, but not really. This is pretty much the nail in the coffin of me supporting Hillary I am done.
Pour one out for the Squealing Pig, that cozy bar in Boston by the MFA that someone burned down yesterday. Smashed all the windows, set a fire to it. Why you gotta do a thing, man. That place was just the best. I can still smell its coziness. I miss it even if I haven’t been in 20 years.
We are listening to the new album from doom metal masters Thou, entitled Umbilical, in hopes that Jane will get annoyed and decide to go to camp. It is not working. Maybe Jane will join a doom metal band. I would be 100% okay with that path in her life.
I had half a joking idea to start posting these GMHHAYs onto LinkedIn, in addition to Facebook and Threads, because I don’t like that I only post to Facebook-owned properties. I thought it would be funny. So when I wrote that “Thoughts on Thoughts on Flash” edition (thank you for your kind words, by the way, it is heartening to see so many people also miss Flash as an artistic medium), I posted that one to LinkedIn. Five comments, one report, 23 likes, 1,300 impressions. Not bad I think we will do it again. Will it be this one? Tomorrow? Tough to say, tough to say.
Actually I lied, today. It will be today.
North Carolina news:
A small suburb of Raleigh on the other side of Raleigh, about an hour away from here, is set to become the Ozempic capital of America, with a new $4 billion factory from Novo Nordisk. We also have a Pfizer factory here in Chatham that, I think (?) made the covid vaccine for a while, so, you know, we are on it.
A chunk of a SpaceX dragon crew rocket landed in North Carolina at a glamping resort, but that was about four hours west so hopefully I do not have to be “being brained by falling space debris” onto my list of things I gotta worry about (bonus points for anyone who got the Nurse With Wound reference).
Apple has delayed their campus in RTP, 30 mins from here. Or they are asking the state to delay it, another couple of years. This seemed inevitable. Remember when companies were all falling over themselves to build expansion campuses outside of Silicon Valley so they could underpay their workers? Even as they all insist we go to the office, they also all seem to be giving up on this particular approach. The market’s cooled, firing Silicon Valley workers is considered fine now, there are only like 50 or so people in your company who have you by the balls, the rest are replaceable. So we will just pay them less and insist they come to the same offices we go to, in Palo Alto or wherever. Honestly, I’m a little murky on the macro trends here: secondary campuses are out (exhibits: this Apple delay, the fake Amazon campus in DC, Google in NYC). Working from home is out. I guess maybe they really drinking their own AI kool-aid and they think they won’t need humans. Or something. I am sad about this one cuz it woulda given my home value a nice boost.
Yesterday I finally took advantage of the feature that appeared in the Plex Media Player about 3 months ago, a feature I had been yearning for for years: the ability to watch your feature films at a speed other than 1X. I watched Civil War. I started it at 1X, but it was very clear this movie was too slow. So I bumped it up to 1.5X. And then, eventually, 1.75X. I do not feel I missed anything. I slowed it down for the end and when that character got killed (spoiler alert, people die in a civil war), there were a full 40 seconds of people moaning about it while people were still shooting, which is a thing I can never handle, the arbitrary slowing down of time in film for emotional manipulation in the middle of highly dangerous situations.
Of course, what I’m saying here is I do not like “art,” because it is an artistic choice to slow down time in that moment and drive home the emotionality of it. I mean, directors need to use all sorts of tricks to get us to care about people we’ve only known for four to one hundred minutes. And I guess that’s fine, I just hate it when they do it in a way that’s unrealistic, where they are emotionally shocked, while unprotected in the middle of a massive firefight with automatic weapons. And, of course, the rejoinder to that is, well, people lose it all the time, and they forget where they are even when it’s not safe. And that is true, but those people get shot!
Anyway, it was awesome watching Civil War at 1.75x because the film is too slow. Of course this gets you thinking about time as an artistic element in films, and the director’s use of it, and whether you are truly experiencing the art the way the director intended, blah blah, and no, of course I am not. I’m sure Alex Garland would be mortified and appalled to know that I watched his movie at 1.75x. But, then, the choice is not me watching the movie at 1x vs 1.75x, the choice is between watching it at 1.75x and not watching it at all. Given its middling reviews, it’s not clear I ever would have watched it at normal speed. In a theater? Sure. But at home? No way. I am a convert. I’m not watching anything at 1x again.
Which is weird because earlier I was watching the latest episode of Star Wars The Acolyte, which is fine, not great but fine, mostly, but also it got me thinking that… why did they decide to make all this Star Wars content at 1/2 hour episode lengths? It is a weird choice, when you think about it, and I have a half-baked theory that the entire canon suffers for this arbitrarily-chosen-at-networks-behest-to-launch-a-streaming-service duration. And I thought “maybe this is just too short of a duration to really learn to attach yourself to characters, to bond with them, to get to know them.” I don’t really think that’s true, look at The Good Place for cryin out loud. But I do wonder: did anyone think about this decision from a… artistic? Star Wars? point of view?
Anyway, no major breakthrough here. But I do not really feel like I missed anything watching Civil War at 1.75x speed. I feel like I missed things not watching it in a theater — even in 4k on my 75” TV it’s obvious this thing would breathe better on a film screen. But that bargain had already been made. I feel like I connected with the characters just as much as I would have at 1X at home. But not as much as 1X in the theater.
(Also forgive my arbitrary switching between capital and lower-case Xs in my multipliers I am too lazy to fix them).
As for the plot, I’ve come to believe that Alex Garland wanted to make a war journalism film, and he chose a US Civil War because it was the only way to get US audiences to care about war journalism films. Which was a pretty canny move, actually: it was the highest-opening-weekend A24 film ever. Mission accomplished.
Also everyone mentioned Suicide (the band) being in the film but no one prepared me for the first song in the film being by the Silver Apples.
Cool, Jane just made me drive her to the camp, look at it, and drive her home. Didn’t need that thirty minutes anyway. Apparently she cried at camp yesterday so now she doesn’t want to go. Even though it was like five minutes out of six and a half hours. Whatever. Do what you want, kid. Maybe this one weird millennial trick of working through your kid’s feelings and listening to them accomplishes nothing. Maybe absentee parents were on to something.
Run wild, kid.
Media of the day, hrm, I got nothing? That seems inconceivable. Hrm here, watch the Pink Pony Club video. She’s getting huge, Chappell Roan. Big enough people think she’s an industry plant now. What a crazy year for her. Only been four months since I learned about her and she’s blown up. The world is a crazy place. Also this is her best song AND her best video, you don’t get that every day.
Guess I should go find my daughter and make sure she’s not eating paste or something.
my favorite song of chappell roan's is "after midnight"—catchy as hell!