Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1207
Bitchin' about Biden, Wolfgang Press are getting back together, Project 2025 is a great liberal meme, the internet went wrong when the book publishers sued Google, a good folksonomies reader comment
Good morning. Hello. What is up. It is Tuesday. I am cranky AF. I am in Fight Club “felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn't screw to save its species” territory today. I am sorry, family. Jane woke me up too early. My head hurts. I’m pissed at Biden. To be clear, I’m sure the dude can run the country just fine and I am still more annoyed with the tedious “Biden is losing his marbles” discourse, but also I am pissed he put us in this situation. Imagine thinking you know how your brain is going to work in four years. Imagine thinking, at, what, 81, 82, that you’re the best bet for saving democracy. Imagine wanting to work at 81. That is sociopathic! I am sick of him, sick of his not stuffing the supreme court, not blocking the filibuster, sick sick sick. I’m still seething at how he told us Trump would fade into the night when he lost, when it was obvious this was not going to happen. I’m sick of his Israel apologism and I’m sick of pretending someone who held the political positions that dude held in the 80’s and 90’s ever had good judgement. I’m bitter AF I have to pretend to like the dude, I have to vote for the dude. I am just angry, so angry, that we’re in this position. Do I still think we can win? Sure, we can, but he is making it harder, not easier, and it sure doesn’t look good.
I honestly don’t know at this point if he should drop out or not. I don’t care. I am not in a pragmatic mode at the moment. I am not in a functional mode. I’m just pissed at him. Pissed we are having these conversations.
Before he fucked up in the debate, I believed he deserved the benefit of the doubt: he hadn’t fucked up yet, he beat Trump in past debates, he nailed is State of the Unions, every important speech and debate. But that run has ended and he no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt. He fucked up on something monumentally important, when he has no room to fuck up anymore. That’s the job. Don’t fuck up. Be a top performer. If you can’t do that you don’t deserve the job.
And we’re all supposed to follow this fucker into battle because… why? Because he says so? Because no one can make him quit and he petulantly doesn’t want to? That’s supposed to inspire me? I fucking hate that this fucker has put me in a position where saying what I’m feeling is a crime because we all have to fucking pretend, because the world is on the brink of ending because of a fucking sociopath. So I’m supposed to give this fucker — who supports a holocaust, who was against federal funding for abortions, who was against exemptions for rape and incest at one point in his career. Fuck, I was ten years old when he held this position, and *I* knew it was wrong. But now we’re supposed to believe the dude has good judgement and open our wallets. Fuck no. Fuck fuck fuck no.
All that being said, obviously I’m going to vote for him, because I’m an adult and the alternatives are stupid.
I have a splitting headache so I guess it’s not the stevia, so I can only assume it’s the Zepbound so I guess I will just stop trying to lose weight so I my head doesn’t hurt who care about heart health anyway.
OK well thank you for letting me get all that out. My wife does not want to hear it. You probably don’t either! None of us do! We’re all trying to hold it together trying to pretend to like the fucking guy. We don’t need anyone trying to bring reality into the situation.
I am listening to a shoegaze band called Sword II, the album Spirit World Tour, because my friend Gibby emailed me a list of new shoegaze bands worth checking out, and these guys were on the list. I like the name Sword II. I think I’m going to name my band Slowdive 2 why not. So far this band doesn’t seem very shoegaze, reminds me a little bit of Habibi or Prinzhorn Dance School.
Oh speaking of music I had a dream last night I got to see Broken Social Scene at a big crappy hotel ballroom kinda like the smaller live room at that hotel from Wet Hot American Summer where ATP NY was in the Catskills. Neither Feist nor Emily Haines was with them, which was sad, but they were as awesome as they ever are. Man I love that band live.
Also Andy Shea was in my dream and he still had his long hair and was drunk and sad about love. And there was a small vacation town with little cabins next to the resort and it was sorta like Alaskaland erm, sorry, Pioneer Park. Man what a terrible name change, Alaskaland was such a better name.
Oh also speaking of music, the Wolfgang Press are back together and making a new album, their first in like 30 years or something and man, that is so exciting. Of course the album might be good, that would be amazing, but imagine if they toured! I mean, I doubt this will happen they barely toured America when they were on MTV and kinda popular, but a man can dream. It would be so awesome to see the Wolfgang Press again. I sure hope they haven’t turned QAnon or something. Actually, what are the odds? Three, four old dudes in their sixties? You gotta figure at least one of them has turned into a ‘free-thinking’ conspiracy theorist. Hopefully it’s just the drummer or something.
I WILL say I am very happy about the world’s awakening to Project 2025, though, I feel like this might be the killer meme of the left for the election. Making overtime illegal, making porn illegal, boy there really is something for everyone in there. Who needs contraception anyway. Why on earth should the federal government negotiate drug prices? Of course they ought to just pay as much as the pharmaceutical companies want what are you a commie or something? The focus on this has been a good thing, and it’s good to see Trump on his toes about something since, you know, it’s sure as hell not his opponent.
Oh hey got a comment yesterday about Folksonomies and Wikis that was really very good and should be promoted to main. From Jacob Kramer-Duffield":
I am pretty bullish on folksonomies etc. continuing because they have *never* been a mass phenomenon. Even at the height of the social web, the % of folks who were truly active on these sites and projects - who were even aware of social tagging as a thing - was pretty low. This is also probably why those sites never quite broke through or sustained relative to investor expectations (though Flickr is still humming along!), but also was never quite the fad-bust cycle outside of very online commentators. And because they're mostly not high-traffic or remunerative corners of the Internet, they'll continue to appeal to obsessives rather than be another place for the maw of spam comments (now with AI!) to ruin.
This is a very good — and heartening point. That being said, this Khannate record is still not listed in Discogs and, gawd, I’m going to have to do it myself, aren’t I? I got no time for that.
Man the internet just sucks now. The internet is useless now for search, for answers. The internet as a communication medium is fantastic. As an information medium it is a holocaust. The answers are there but they take hours to find. The internet can tell me how to buy a Honda acty with a dump bed. It will take me 20-40 hours research this. This insane. It should take minutes. Seconds. But it’s all cruft and scams. YouTube is the only way now really. Even Reddit and forums are uselss.
There is no AI without the internet. But the internet is fundamentally flawed. LLMs have a bias toward consensus, toward the most common conventional wisdom on a topic on the web, but the only consensus on the internet is SEO and scams.
I feel an inkling toward a completely different approach toward knowledge retrieval. I don’t know what it is but I’m increasingly convinced it won’t be built on top of the internet. It will be built separate from it.
Two possible paths are electron penetrating scans of libraries and massive amounts of paid interviews and transcripts: books or people.
Books: Like… basically, take this fact that all well-read people know: books are smarter than the internet. Go from there. Ditch the internet, start over, using only books. Sure there’d be some disinformation, and there would be knowledge gaps, but my god, it would also be so much better. For a lot of subjects, at least. Maybe not Youtube-friendly tutorial subjects but basic knowledge, at least.
People: spend billions interviewing people, millions of people, about their life, work, skills, beliefs. Transcribe it all. Boom. A better new language corpus than the internet. God, it would be so good. God, Silicon Valley is utterly out of any good ideas.
The moment the internet went off the rails might have been when the book publishers sued to stop Sergei and Marissa from manifesting their affair by scanning the world’s books (man that musta been so nerd sexy). That was a decently noble endeavor, and the publishers saw the writing on the wall, put a stop to it, and basically killed the internet’s potential as a knowledge base. Even now, with LLMs, the publisher suit against Google looms large. Has any LLM model developer even tried to build one off of, you know, a physical library?
Got a hotel reservation confirmation email for this funeral I am going to on Sunday and it told me to “pursue your passion.” Okay.
Spent some time on Tumblr yesterday because I am sick and.. it was kind of nice! Tumblr is mostly the same. They shove a bit more content in your face, algorithmic bullshit, not shit I asked for, but also I kind of did, becuase it’s all tags I follow, and it is all shockingly relevant. I still wish I could only see things from accounts I follow. I probably can, I just couldn’t figure that out. I am proud that ten years in I am still helping monetize Tumblr. It was, and is, a great platform. The world would be a better place if we all went back to Tumblr.
Oh hey behold: Look at my new electric bill at Chore House now that the solar is up and running for a month. It should be lower, and this is peak summer (well, the next month will be), but still! Not bad:
I have to do bedtime tonight and I am not up for it. I just.. I love the bedtime part and then I put her to bed and she just starts begging me to stay. And I have tried everything and nothing works. To be clear, I’ve tried everything including staying in all its myriad forms. I am not trying to just leave. I’m just.. I don’t know. I can’t stand the whining. The begging. And when I do stay she just climbs all over me, kicks me, abuses me, won’t talk about anything, acts like a lunatic. It’s boring and exhausting. When Emma stays, Jane lays down, acts like a little angel. I ask her about this and she’s like “well mommy doesn’t like it when I act like that.” I don’t either! How have I ever given you the impression I want you to kick me constantly at bedtime. Gawd. And she doesn’t care if my head hurts, or my neck, or my foot. Just pain, pain pain. I do not resent her or blame her for these things. They just exhaust me, loom over my day, stress me out, reaching hours earlier into the day, coloring my entire day.
God, look at me, whining about whining today. I will shut up. FITTER HAPPIER MORE PRODUCTIVE.
Here is an ambient playlist for the day, noteworthy for Nick Laudadio’s “A Prayer for Those Who Die Online,” which is written for, among others, Andy Shea, so, topical to today’s GMHHAY. Kinda thinking about going and seeing Andrew 3000 do his flute thing live has anyone done this? And also very excited about this Pan·American (option-shift-9 for that dot in their name) collaboration with Kramer. Great record.
Okay I promise I won’t bitch about Biden anymore I’ll get back on the train soon enough but JESUS. Maybe give us all a two minutes hate or something. Actually, that’d be amazing. Instead of emailing these invites to go meet Jill Biden in Charlotte for five grand, have one of their fundraisers call and expressly invite you to yell at them for a few minutes, get it off your chest.
That might work.
How will you feel if he wins and then steps shortly thereafter steps down and his VP, naming her own VP, serves out the term?
i'm so with you on the biden thing—but i'm *more* angry at the DNC. HOW can there not be a plan B in place after the last two elections? have we not *all* been watching the same slow-motion wreck, frame by frame?! the hubris of it all, and the lack of planning—it's astounding. baffling.
and what if biden drops dead tomorrow? do they seriously not have anyone waiting in the wings other than kamala? because where the fuck has she been for the past four years? i feel like i've only seen her once a year during the state of the union address—and *that* can't be good.