Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1090
The Walmart fake flower aisle, The last Shaker's new barn, visiting the farm, contractors are weird, @fter Midnight, the modern American business writing style, bathrobe sizing
Good morning! Hello! How are you? 8:44 and all is well. Jane is at school. Cranky AF last night, cranky today. Girl needs to sleep, but she refuses to acknowledge this. Frustrating. Taught her about the G-Wagon today. Told her it was the second-most expensive car at school (I assume the Model X with the matte black ceramic coat is more, but actually, I am not sure). I was thinking, as we rattle off car models every morning, that each year will be about A Thing in the parking lot. Next year, maybe we’ll do trees. The year after that, maybe cloud types. There’s a whole world in a car park line, just gotta have the right attitude. Maybe in year 6 we’ll do… shit, I don’t know. Paint colors. Suggestions welcome.
Speaking of the G-Wagon, saw it outside of a school line context yesterday. Speed demon. Shame.
We are listening to M.Sage and Zander Raymond doing a synthy ambient EP entitled Prayellowgram. I do not know who or what recommended this to me, and I do not know who M. Sage or Zander Raymond are, but it’s great. It’s like an Orb album if you took the drums away. Discogs and Wikipedia tell me very little about these mysterious people. Apparently the M stands for “Matthew.” He releases stuff on several labels I’ve never heard of. We might be in Windham Hill territory here.
Thank you to those who wrote in about Chrome. Interesting band. Been around a long time. Bill says they’re great live. Mentally noted.
We are down to 16 hours, 49 minutes in the 2023 “To Investigate” list.
Just back from the Friday Walmart/Recycling run. There was an elderly black woman in a wheelchair, who was watching me do my cashier aisle collection of Doritos, Diet Coke, Churros flavor KitKats (they’re back) and Icebreaker mints. She looked at me like I was absolutely terrifying for some reason. Probably cuz I was moving around real fast and a big white man in a black hoodie, I don’t know. Anyway, I just smiled at her, a big ole friendly smile, then she slowly smiled back, and we just sorta stood there smiling for a second. It was nice.
Fun fact: if you need a large quantity of foam, it is cheaper to buy a mattress pad than foam from the craft aisle. Like 50% less for the same stuff. Crazy.
Also it occurred to me today my favorite aisle at Walmart is the fake flowers aisle. They’re all bright and festive and tumbling out into the aisle and you gotta weave your way through them and it is a synthetic version of walking down that flower street in Manhattan – 23rd is it? Slightly west? Anyway, it’s fun.
Busy day yesterday, just so busy and I talked to so many weirdos. A major financial drama in my life — gonna say one of four? — was resolved after a month, so that was nice. But it involved talking to the lunatic old man bank teller at my local bank. Then I went to the farm to talk to the foreman doing the cleanup about which old wood I wanted, coordinated on reclaiming a bunch of the barn wood for my attic remodel. Planned out how to get Andres’ crew there to delicately remove the floor in the old farmhouse for re-use as the studio floor. Figured out how to get the five pallets of Teco Bloc still at my house over to the new property. Weird dude. All contractors are weirdos, I love it. It is absolutely remarkable how many of these people are in a hurry to get paid but also prefer a mailed paper check instead of an ACH or bank wire.
Then back to the other house to meet up with the electrician dude, who is also a weirdo. He told a different story today, though, that was nice. Usually he talks about working on the Social Security HQ, but this time he talked about how he accidentally wired up a house for a pot grower and it took him almost the entire job to realize why this dude wanted so much electricity powering crawlspaces and closets. Twenty-seven year-old dude. Said he was a “flower grower.”
Anyway, Greenhouse electrical should be done next week. This is huge. Last obstacle to getting the beds in. Talked to my neighbor with the tractor to start planning all thew dirt-moving.
All of this is not to say I did not do a bunch of work at my job yesterday, I just don’t talk about that as much. BUT IT HAPPENED, I swear. Someday I will write the book. But for now, you know. Regulated industry. Lotta stuff going on with the government. Not worth risking writing about.
Did a Viridian (that’s the pool and storage company name) partner meeting last night, a sober one, fake G&Ts for me. This loan isn’t closing for another month, we were hoping it would close as soon as we got rezoning permission from the county but, alas, nope. So things are gonna be tight for another month. But if there is one thing I know how to do, is stretch money at a bootstrapped business. Aside from my stints at Tumblr, Percolate and Soundcloud, it’s all I’ve ever done in business for more than twenty years (as an aside, it struck me the other day Barbarian is 23 years old that is so freakin crazy).
I apologize that I did not get to the questionnaire with Jane last night. It will be a couple more days. But I will get to it. I did tell her about it, though. she is excited.
Following up on AI: several people wrote in to me and told me the things they use it for that are useful. Keep ‘em coming. This is a research project, not a polemic. My friend Tim (genius behind my new “Substack are doofuses” footer) said he does a newsletter about creative uses of it, he’s gonna write a response in his newsletter. I will share. That’ll be fun. A debate. Chad told me about some writing and editing he does with it. I told him I respect that but I cannot do that because writing is intrinsic to my management style. In fact just yesterday I did some masterful managing through writing. He said he did not feel like he lost his agency to use a tool. And actually, to be fair, he’s right.
At Barbarian, the editorial tone of the company was my editorial tone. We do not do that at Nimbus. While we haven’t finalized our post-Timehop editorial style, it’s definitely more business-sounding than it was at Barbarian. So I do, I admit, sometimes find myself sitting in front of a press release template or a tech doc, I just can’t nail Modern American Business style, so I write it and send it to ChatGPT and say “make this bland and american business boring” and to be fair it does a great job. Sometimes it mixes up the concepts completely. Well, usually. And then I have to fix it. Sometimes I do not bother fixing it, because Modern American Business style requires you to be at least, at minimum, 20% full of shit or intellectually inconsistent. It’s a rule.
Brother Arnold, perhaps the last living shaker, was in the news again. The fundraiser to repair the centuries-old barn at Sabbathday Village, the last active Shaker settlement in the world, was successful and the barn has been repaired. Brother Arnold is very happy and my Google Alert delivered. The article wherein I learned this, however, does not mention how many Shakers are still at the colony. To recap for the new: There were three, one died, another joined, there were three again, one left the church to run off with a Globe reporter, down to two, and the reports since then have been cagey about whether there are one, two or three left. There were reports of another new member, but I feel like maybe they bailed? All recent reports only mention Brother Arnold. It is a mystery. Feel like this dude needs to go to a corporate succession planning retreat.
Anyway, if you feel like owning an authentic Shaker chair, buy it soon. Dude is not long for this world and once he’s gone, no Shaker chairs will be approved by an actual Shaker anymore.
Emma bought me a new bathrobe, more of a house robe, in the Hugh Hefner style, except it’s not shiny, it’s that waffle-ish cotton weave (press?) so popular in bathrobes at hotels — the Hotel on Rivington had these in white. I have a few of those. Those are for guests at the other house, and a little tight for me. Bathrobe sizes are a joke. No one wants a bathrobe that “fits.” A bathrobe in your correct size should wrap around you like 1.5 times. But they don’t. I am usually a 2XL. This bathrobe is a 5XL and it is just the right size. The world needs a revolution in bathrobe sizes.
There is a new late night show, hosted by a woman of whom I’ve never heard, but I am enjoying. Her name is Taylor Tomlinson. She is oddly compelling in her weird normal delivery. But anyway, the main point of all this is the show is called @fter midnight. But the thing is, it is essentially an exact remake of the old Comedy Central show @midnight. @midnight was cancelled when its host, Chris Hardwicke got me-too’d. But he was not the creator or producer of the show, these other people were. It’s a fake game show where comedians make funny stuff up for points. Emma and I used to watch it all the time and I loved it for several reasons: it taught me all about dozens of new comedians and it was a one-stop shop for keeping up with the comedy world and I liked that. It was fun to be the last thing you watched at night, because it was hilarious, but it also touched on current events and internet memes. When it was cancelled, we missed it.
So the new show is the exact same thing. I mean, exactly. Same producers and creators too. And it’s great! Great way to end the evening. Been on for two nights and we watched them both. I am very happy. Taylor’s doing a good job and she will get beter.
But!
The show is a TV hour! So, like 40 minutes without commercials. That is too long! @midnight was only a TV half-hour. That was perfect.
I don’t know what to do about this. I want this in my life, but the last two nights I have gone to bed too late because of it, not gotten to read my book, gotten about 10 minutes less sleep. I am feeling these effects. It is a dilemma. I am thinking I find some way to watch half the show, so then I can also watch it on weekends? But it’s very hard to stop a show!
I just don’t know!
Trash bags! TV shows! Modern life is so hard!
(oh and thank you to Josh who gave me the obvious solution to the trash bag problem, donate ‘em to Jane’s school.)
Oh and finally I went back to PT yesterday, got a thing called “therapeutic ultrasound” that ruled, got some cupping done, did some shit with a 1 pound weight that made my arm sore for hours, god, my arm is so fucked. The Southern-polite receptionist lady accepted my printed out copy of my insurance card, and then scanned it into her machine into a digital file. This is, mind you, the woman who said she could not take a digital image. She also insisted she couldn’t take a print out, but when I handed it to her, she did not double-down on that BS. And I politely just let her do all this, without calling her out on her weird made-up rules, because she is a part of my life now. I need her on my side. And I watch other people deal with her and get annoyed, and she just feeds on it.
Colin Robinson in a Southern woman’s body.
Todays’ Media of the Day is this moody and quiet playlist. I find I cannot completely stop making playlists for you. And that’s okay. I just couldn’t handle the obligation of making them all the time. Maybe it’ll slow down even more. We will see. Mostly new stuff on this one. More Mistle Thrush but that’s the only oldie. We’ve talked about a bunch of these bands recently. Into the new Emma Anderson from Lush solo album. Have we talked abotu that? It’s great.
Oh phone call! Talk soon.
I have responded: https://timbrunelle.substack.com/p/090-time-to-set-sail-and-gain-advantage