Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1083
Covid wastewater levels, why aren't people getting boosted, year-long effort to get off Spotify, being thankful for shit is complicated, the greatest capitalistic invention, anyway.
Good morning friends! Hello! How are you? Thursday. Oh goodie, new NC Covid numbers are out today. I’m sure they’re gonna be just fine, just fine. Hrm maybe let’s go look together, shall we?
Sixty-two people in the US were documented to have died of Covid yesterday. Almost no one is recording deaths anymore, so that is probably 1/10th of the real total. It’s the highest I’ve seen in months. Florida accounted for one third of them, surprise surprise. Indiana a bunch as well.
Here in NC, in the Piedmont, regarding wastewater Covid levels: Raleigh was a mixed bag (1 up, 1 flat, 1 down), Cary looking good (2 down, 1 flat), Durham mixed (1 up, 1 down), and a big drop in the Carrboro/Chapel Hill. Hrm. Well that is promising. Maybe we are just about done with this wave, the largest since December 2021. But I gotta say, this is not a promising graph for the fourth year of a pandemic: just more and more Covid in our wastewater all the time.
And I swear to god, no one is getting the latest booster. Shit I bet most of you, my pro-vax friends, haven’t gotten it. Nationwide adoption is 20%. Insane. The whole thing is insane.
Anyway.
Man I love that word. Anyway.
When I do my quick, two-second edit of each days GMHHAY, I probably remove two, three anyways a day. Such a great word. We are leaving that topic behind for happier topics. This does not mean we are ignoring that topic. If we were standing face to face, and I said “anyway,” it would mean I could speak for hours on this topic but I bet you don’t want to hear it, so I am going to politely move on. Niftily implies that you are not belittling whatever serious topic you’ve just left behind in order to talk about Taylor Swift, you’re just changing topics to be polite. Weird thing to do in a newsletter that people voluntarily read, but maybe that is part of GMHHAY’s charm.
In a fit of health productivity, and as atonement for missing my PT appointment Monday, I scheduled a new eye exam and a new round of neck trigger point injection shots oh my god I cannot wait for that but it’ll be a few weeks. I also made progress on this stupid banking saga mistake I made like two weeks ago that I still haven’t gotten resolved. It’s such a ridiculous thing and it is taking so, so long to get fixed and it involves another polite southern woman who is pretending to be helpful. I seem to be plagued by these people these days. Think it might have something to do with living in the south. Actually come to think of it, there is a third one, at another bank, who is driving me crazy not directly answering my questions because she thinks I’m an idiot so she politely writes essays of “helpful information” that have nothing to do with my actual question. These people are going to be the death of me, I swear.
[Should “southern” be capitalized?]
Or come to think of it maybe it’s cuz I just spent a few weeks in Boston and I am weak right now.
But that’s not important right now. What is important right now is that I need you to know that I purchased a Sharper-Image-level idiotic gadget this week and it is the greatest thing ever. I bought a pair of fluffy boot-like slippers that you plug into the wall and include heating elements all around them that electrically warm your feet.
And they are the greatest thing ever.
I am wearing them right now and they rule.
I should have bought a USB-powered pair so I could plug them into a battery pack and I can be mobile. I will almost certainly buy a pair like that. I could also try the battery-powered ones but I don’t have as much faith in those. But my god, this whole world of electrically heated slippers. It is the greatest thing. Why did I take so long to dive into this absurd world of capitalistic dopamine hits? Look at these things:
Did I just open Photoshop at 8 AM to Photoshop out a KitKat wrapper and a lot of dust on the rug? Yes, yes I did. But still! Look at those things. They are amazing. Strong recommend. A+
Yesterday I also got my 2023 “best tracks” playlist migrated from Spotify to Apple Music. To recap: Back when I was pissed at Spotify about Joe Rogan I began the process to migrate from Spotify to Apple Music. I experimented with different apps to migrate your playlists over. The two best are SongShit and MusicMatch, they both have different pros and cons. If you had to pick one, I’d go with MusicMatch. Anyway, this was an insanely grueling process. But I got it done.
But two problems emerged: First, the desktop app for Apple Music is too fucking confusing and did not have the features I needed. Second, Apple Music is not as widespread and I couldn’t be bothered to make my daily playlists in both Apple Music and Spotify, that is too labor-intensive for quick, daily use.
So I kept using Spotify for GMHHAY playlists and listening at my computer, but in all other instances, the I use Apple Music. I pay for both now and it is stupid. But I use Apple Music when driving, when walking around, when traveling, etc.
This year that becomes absolutely necessary because Spotify has a limit of 10,000 songs on a playlist, whereas Apple Music has a limit of 100,000. And this year, my master playlist “All the Good,” which is a giant playlist of every song I have ever even momentarily liked, has crossed the 10,000 song threshold.
Also, I’m no longer making daily playlists in Spotify for you guys. I will still occasionally be throwing a playlist into the Media of the Day slot, but I don’t feel so bad about that only being an Apple Music link if it isn’t daily.
So we are one step closer to switching completely to Apple Music.
SO, I’m thinking my plan is, when I am done getting through the remainder of the 2023 “To Investigate” playlist (only 39 hours to go!) I will start 2024 with the new “To Investigate” playlist (currently already up to 5 hours not bad) in Apple Music and just go from there and be done with Spotify. I think?
I think?
And right around when I get this done, Spotify and Joe Rogan will part ways. And Apple will do something anti-competitive to piss me off. Except, like I said before, I’m already stuck with Apple, so using Apple Music doesn’t expose me to more moral risk.
Speaking of which I gotta get off Substack these guys suck. I was thinking of Buttondown, which looks morally inoffensive (though who knows!) but the free tier is too small for me so I would have to pay money and I am trying to pay for fewer monthly subscriptions, not more.
God I really need to go through all the monthly subscriptions. All these streaming services. Are they worth it? The problem is a ton of them I pay for annually, cuz it’s cheaper, so I don’t even think about it until the bill runs and then it’s another year and UGH. They really get you, don’t they.
I’ve been endeavoring to write five things I’m thankful for at work and five things I’m thankful for in my personal life. Each day. Well. Each day I do my writing, which is five days a week. I picked it up from some self-help book last year, they said it would really make a difference. Been doing it about five months now.
But the thing is, it’s hard! I mean, it’s not hard to think of things to be thankful for each day, but it’s often hard to think of new things. Like do I really need to write down on a paper each day the same things? So you try and think of new things. And some days that’s easy. But on some days you can’t think of anything new, because nothing new happened. So you just sit there, staring at the blank page. You wonder if you can “fall back” on your standard answers. You wonder if that is missing the point of the exercise. You wonder if you’re overthinking it and it is actually totally fine to put the same five things each day. But then you think that would be silly because eventually the whole exercise would become rote, and moot, and shit you might even just put them into a keyboard macro or something and isn’t the point to remind yourself that things are good, not just that you have a couple specific good things in your life? But surely they don’t expect you to only mention your wife once, ever? Clearly you’re allowed to mention her more than once? Well, then, how many times are you allowed to mention your wife and kid? Once is not enough, daily is too much, and wait a minute who’s even making these rules you didn’t even like that self-help book. Also now you’ve been doing this for months and, really, can you say it’s made any difference at all? Maybe you were just a person who was already thankful enough before this. Or maybe, gasp, the author was full of shit! Maybe it never worked and that guy just put it in the book because it sounded good. What do you think the odds are that that author guy actually does this every day, because I bet they are zero.
Anyway.
I am thankful I didn’t have to go to CES this year. I am thankful for soup. I’m gonna make some soup this weekend. I am thankful for Emma and Jane. I am thankful for the pool guys. I am thankful for the greenhouse. And my wacky electrician. And Becky Chambers.
Today’s media of the day is the Chinese adaptation of Three-Body Problem, 3 Body. I was just writing about this to my friend Ryan, and two other people have already asked me about it since the Weiss/Benihoff adaptation for Netflix trailer just dropped.
“Rick, have you watched the dubbed version on Amazon?”
These were my comments:
Yes and though it was bad I loved it
It was slavishly faithful, woodenly acted and a bit cheesy but also kind of perfect
And the theme song rules.1
And it absolutely rules to hear the English of, like, the soldiers shouting in the background, where to them it would sound like just English-sounding gibberish but to an English speaker it sounds unhinged, just like the Russian in, like, Firefox probably sounds to Russians and I loved that a lot.
And they spent a ton of money on it so the effects arent terrible and indeed the eye number thing looked better in that version than it did in the US preview.
I mean the effects arent good but they're, like, less offensive than a Marvel movie. I was wondering the whole time if they coudl pull off the tanker scene and they did a pretty good job!
Oh god the American villain, Mike Edwards or whatever (wait that's the lead singer of Jesus Jones) is played by a whiteface Chinese guy and it RULES
Mike Evans
Also I did not watch it dubbed, I watched it subtitled is it dubbed on Amazon? That sounds worse.
So. Recommended. But not dubbed.
Take care. Remember to put the seat down.
By the very good Chinese psych rock band Rebuilding the Rights of Statues
the photo of your new heated slippers made me roar. thank you for telling us about them and then SHOWING THEM.
i have been doing a daily “form” in my journal for about 5 years. i paused a couple times for reasons unknown. i merged a few different ideas, one being from tim ferriss...mine are:
- 3 things i am grateful for
- 3 things that would make the day great
(follow-up at the end of the day OR next day)
- 3 things that made the day great
- at least 1 thing that would have made the day better
the most useful “data point” of the above exercise has been last component. every so often i go back and look at the 1 thing day to day and without fail i notice a pattern.
i still think naming what i’m thankful/grateful for is a good thing to do but probably more impactful when i feel lost/helpless/sad/angry.
anyway.
I got the recent booster (in late Sept), though i can only think of a handful of others who did.
And also i think i loathed that Netflix Three Body trailer. I need to watch the Chinese one.