Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1028
Jane's school refusal, solar roof going on, "we'll be talking," Bandcamp is not advertising's fault, Pepper X, a lingering Instagram bug, UK record import dilemmas
Good morning, hello, etc. etc. Absolute chaos here this morning. Jane was in full-on school resistance mode. It was sort of our fault. She had a cough all night, didn’t get enough sleep it felt like. And she said something as literate as “I’m worried my cough may be a distraction to the other students.” Like pulling a perfect Ferris Bueller at the age of five. Just insane. We all got in bed and snuggled and it was great and I was content to lay there for an hour but it slowly dawned on both Emma and I that 1) suddenly she didn’t seem so sick, 2) she seemed very sure she was going to get to watch videos all day, and 3) both of us had insanely busy days and this was going to be a giant hassle. So slowly we switched to “you really should go to school” mode. It took an hour of massive resistance to finally get her there. Resistance every step of the way. She literally made a protest sign about her breakfast at one point. It was really something. All in all, took an extra hour to get her to school. I had to go in, be reminded of all the school shooting shit by getting buzzed in like I’m a criminal or something god I hate that. They asked if she had an appointment this morning and I said no. They asked what the reason was for her being late was.
“Massive resistance,” I said.
No one even smiled.
So all of that made me a late for you, but also an hour late to meet with the roofers, who got to the other house at 7:15 AM and started tearing all the shingles off the roof to put the new roof on. It sounds like a charnel house in here or something, constant scraping, scrawling, mewling, thumping and dragging noises coming from all directions. And the guy I was supposed to meet, the foreman, he’s already gone, off to another job in Durham. So I missed him. He’ll be back in an hour. Which means I need to sit in this sound for an hour. Lovely.
Also I have six meetings today and the first one is in 45 minutes so I have no time for my whole morning computer routine. Awesome. How is the world going to keep spinning if I do not reconcile my Quicken transactions every. single. day. clap emoji three times or something.
Luckily, I had a spate of lightweight topics after the last two days of rather intense entries, so let’s just plow through, shall we?
Related to the Katie Notopoulos piece yesterday laying much of the blame of the internet’s shittiness on advertising, I have two additional bits.
Bit one, an important comment from my wife, raising a point I had completely missed: “…advertisers' extreme wariness of their brand being anywhere near something toxic is the only thing saving the Internet! Also it has a pretty big impact on the programming on Fox News...”
This is a huge point I forgot. And of course it ties into the two different kinds of advertising, direct and brand, and the brand people are maybe fighthing the fight for a good clean internet and the direct people maybe care less and I would have made that argument a few years ago but it’s a bit more blurred now, direct and brand, and it’s all very interesting, but Emma’s larger point remains: by and large, advertisers want a civil internet.
Bit two: Bandcamp lost half its staff. This is a bummer. I think what happened is that the owners sold out to Epic Games, and then the company grey a lot, then Epic had to do a downsizing, and they looked at Bandcamp, now with a much higher staff count, and they sold it off to a new company, who did not have Epic’s endless resources to keep paying the bills forever, and had to downsize to get the thing to cash-flow-positive, because they are not a particularly big company? I do not actually know. Maybe at one point Bandcamp was profitable. Hell, maybe it was profitable at the end. But I suspect not. There are a lot of things to explore here about the need for a founder to cash out when VCs aren’t involved, the risks of ever selling your company, etc. etc. BUT the one thing related to our topic is that Bandcamp is now at high risk of enshittification, and the whole thing — Bandcamp and Epic Games both — is utterly unrelated to advertising. Shitty things happen on the internet even when ads aren’t involved.
I mean, I guess that’s obvious, but. Yeah.
The new Peter Gabriel album, I/O, finally has a release date and after the majestic show I am totally ready to buy the deluxe version, and I got a bunch of emails about it, but all the links to buy the deluxe version are from the UK, and the thing is hella expensive, and so now I am in that situation I often find myself where it’s not clear to me if there will ever be a US release, so I should wait a few days, or there won’t be one, and it will sell out in the next three days while I wait. I have been burned on this topic in both directions and it is very painful either way. Pointlessly spending an extra hundred bucks for a box set you coulda gotten cheaper sucks. Missing out on a limited edition box set only to see it on Discogs for like $200 more as the only option a few months later also sucks. I have no idea what to do. Please feel profound sympathy for this very real plight.
I was in a meeting yesterday and at the end of the meeting, I said my usual sign off “Talk soon,” which I have been having some theoretical problems with of late, in certain circumstances, because in fact, often I do not have any intention of talking soon to this person. In fact I would prefer it if we don’t talk for a long time. But the guy I was talking to on this Zoom call said something similar yet clearly superior:
“We’ll be talking.”
What a great sign off. Non-promising, but also leaves the door open. Brilliant. I am totally co-opting that one.
Found the craziest bug in Instagram, it’s been there for maybe a year or two, and I thoguht I was going crazy because I thought I was the only one who had it but as I got a new phone twice now and the bug has persisted, I’ve become increasingly convinced it was not me. So finally I Googled it and it turns out the bug is related to having the home screen on your iPhone set to Zoom mode (i.e. bigger app icons). If you have it in Zoom mode, Instagram will keep giving you alert badges on the icon even when you have no new alerts. What a wacky bug! And how the hell has it gone on so long. Good ole attention-to-detail Mossari seems to be busy with something else these days. No one minding the edge-case Instagram bugs. I cannot convey to you how much this bug fucked with me for years. For a long time I just turned my Instagram badges off completely, but then I missed all these messages because so many people use Instagram messaging. So then I turned it back on but I had to delete every single message after I read it, leaving no threads, because it was the only way to get the badge to go away. All because of the Zoom setting in iOS. Which I have now turned off. And now my app icons look skinny and weak and small and puny and I do not like it one bit. The end.
Finally, important news that the Carolina Reaper controversey has been deprecated in importance because as of this week there is a new world’s hottest pepper, and it’s name is so bad-ass: PEPPER X. Pepper X was made by the same guy as the Carolina Reaper so I guess he’s not a fraud after all.
So I guess the takeaway here is don’t get your news off the internet from Welsh metalheads with poor editing skills.
Here’s a playlist I made in 3 minutes that is basically “depressed Rick in 1993.” Man that first Smashing Pumpkins single really fooled me. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, won’t get fooled again. Tomorrow Wendy is probably a softball here but it’s a brilliant song and we haven’t talked about it in a year or so. Martin Gore’s solo album was so formative to me probably moreso than Depeche Mode ever were. Bark Psychosis, man. Man. Wish I coulda seen that band live. And I am breaking my rule and putting a Mark Kozelek song on here because 24 came out when I was 24 ish, and I miss that hilarious brilliant chaotic joke of a feeling of feeling old at 24. That’s a joke the Comedian from Watchmen could love, which I was also very into in the early 90’s.
Thump thump thump my god this house is so loud.
Until tomorrow.