Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. It is cold and cloudy today. Another day in the eternal battle between spring and “nope.” Nope is winning today. I guess it doesn’t make much difference anyway, not like I’m going to get out there today. But, you know, I took the time yesterday to unclamp Jane’s breakfast seat from the counter and move it to the right three feet or so because the bright spring sun was shining in the window and into her eyes. I feel like I should have gotten more than one day’s benefits from that. But I guess not.
There are four deer right outside my window, though. That is nice.
Another day another mass shooting. I am still pretty shaken from realizing that these were just going on the whole time during Trump and the pandemic but got reported less. And now we’re all experiencing them again together, large swaths of the country are mourning again. The media ran out of other things to report, so hey let’s go back to that old standby, mass shootings? I just… can’t. These things are to devastating and I find myself avoiding them on the news which then introduces a guilt spiral but what is anyone supposed to do? We give money and we tweet and we write but Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema and Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins furrow their brows and talk about Senate traditions, so people keep dying. And even that is unfair, because we all know there’s an entire political party that’s okay with this. Which means half of the people around you are okay with this. It should go without saying, but I guess it cannot go without saying: I am not okay with this. I will never be okay with this.
A day or two ago my mom and wife and daughter and I were having lunch, chatting. Public schooling came up, and Emma said something with the caveat, “Of course I don’t know if Jane is going to go to public schools anyway.” And my mom, a lifelong public educator, started to get her gumption up and said “what’s wrong with public schools?” And Emma said “The active shooter drills.” And my mom’s gumption settled right back down. There was nothing to say. She knew Emma was right. The link between these mass shootings and our education system is bad, obviously, but it’s hard to imagine the whole thing isn’t impacting public education as a whole, with racial and income inequality ramifications. We are at risk of becoming a country where the rich avoid schools entirely for safety reasons, and the poor have no choice but to send their kids to shooting galleries.
There I go breaking the two people talking in a paragraph rule again.
Every time someone says we’re at the pinnacle of civilization I want to laugh. Every time someone says that America is supposed to be “better in this” I want to cry.
Anyway if you’re upset, and looking to donate a couple bucks today to the cause, Moms Demand Action is as good as any place to start.
Took my mom to another appointment yesterday. This one was at a clinic that I personally have been to before, which made it somewhat less stressful. And the doctor, and her trainee doctoral student, were both super nice and let me go to the whole test and appointment and kept me filled in. It really does make a huge difference in our comfort level when this happens. Plus they were only five minutes late, which is not great but by no means the worst.
At some various readers’ suggestion, I watched John Oliver’s segment on plastic recyling last night. Some minor inaccuracies and nothing I didn’t know but it was a very good segment nonetheless. I think the big inaccuracy is leaving people with the impression that lots of plastic isn’t recyclable. Almost all of it is, but it’s not economically viable in any way. It’s a little white lie in the service of a greater good, but… I do get irked by those (ahem Fauci). I am glad he got into EPR laws, they’re really the only solution. My dream business plan would still be useful and applicable in a world of strong EPR laws. On its own, even at a gigantic scale, would only make the smallest dent in plastic but it would be a net positive nonetheless. It’s just expensive.
I spent a lot of yesterday listening to Paula Abdul. Still a big fan of Straight Up, Cold Hearted Snake and Forever Your Girl, gotta say. She had a pretty solid string of hits there early in her career. Opposites Attract hasn’t aged as well. Rush Rush is pretty solid too.
Also spent more time yesterday than one would imagine reading Paris Hilton’s Wikipedia page and catching up on her career. I have this incredibly complex photo system, but one of the best outcomes of it is that i have a giant folder called Scrapbook with hundreds of subfolders and thousands of meticulously sorted images of album covers and memes and menus and architectural renderings and comics and the like - basically everything that isn’t a photo of a human. And then that giant folder is connected to my screen saver. It’s great it’s a way to remind me of things past. Lets you revisit old albums and experiences and concepts.
And, well, yesterday, by showing me the cover of her first album, it reminded me of Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton is 40 years old, she was the highest-paid female DJ in the world in 2014, and has released over twenty different fragrances bringing in over two billion dollars in revenue. She has over 50 retail outlets around the world. Paris Hilton has a conglomerate empire. It is very impressive.
I’m trying to figure out what is going on with Dispo and Spark and David Dobrik. If those words mean nothing to you, David Dobrik is a famous YouTuber, Dispo is an app he co-founded that is an Instagram competitor that just raised $20 million from a group of investors lead by Spark Capitol, a VC firm (full disclosure, Spark is one of our investors as well, six years ago, before I got to Timehop)1. Business Insider reported that Dobrik had a video where a member of his “squad” talked about a sexual encounter that the other party to has recently come out stating that it was sexual assault. Apparently Dobrik ends the video by saying “we’re going to jail.” But this is all second-hand because it was reported by Business Insider, on their pro version, to which I can’t bring myself to subscribe, even as a business expense. And Dobrik has, unsurprisingly, taken the video down. He apologized, on a secondary, far-less-viewed twitter account. I get all of this, this all makes sense. Here’s the part I don’t get: Dobrik stepped down as CEO of Dispo. Whether he was fired by the board or just quit, this obviously good. But then! Spark Capital announced that they were going to “sever all ties with the company.” This is… crazy? Like the whole point of being on the board is to exist when things go bad and step in when a CEO needs to be fired or replaced. It is to provide adult supervision. And yeah, Dobrik is out but: a) did you fire him? or b) did he have one of those agreements that some CEOs get when there’s a lot of demand in their financing round where he couldn’t be fired? But even if he did, the dude quit! So that problem was solved.
And of course, I strongly suspect that even though Dobrik stepped down he probably owns a metric fuckton of the company still (my guess would be 60-70%). So are they walking away because they can’t in good conscience work towards enriching this guy? I could get behind that. But now the fact remains that some random Dobrik associate has twenty million dollars in the bank, with absolutely zero oversight (Crunchbase lists no other board members). This is bonkers! How is Spark going to handle this with their LPs? What fund is this coming out of? Are they okay with this? It seems like this might have been the right thing to do but also I think maybe I would explain it more to people? I would also think that maybe I would try and get our money — our LP’s money — back? Something seems… I don’t know. The whole thing seems real weird.
Let’s do a mix. And I just made this mix. Like, while writing this. This morning’s shuffle play was very good, and while I did do a bit of editing and curating, this is basically what I was listening to while writing this. Only I had to stop when that MUNA song came on. I have to stop and listen to the words every time that song comes on. I had completely forgotten about that Foals song, it is so epic. And I do have a soft spot for this Jakob Dylan album I remember it coming out, my friends at Autotonic were promoting it, and I got a copy, and I listened to it all the time. Was never a Wallflowers fan, but I sure like this record. And here we have the title track for the Mandy Moore album that came out in March 2020, just as the pandemic hit. I felt really bad for her - she did get a bit of a press run, appeared on Good Morning America and whatnot. But Mandy Moore has a giant new fan base from This is Us that is unaware of what a great musician she is, and it was a great moment for her to merge her two fan bases but, well, the world broke. Obviously many people had bigger setbacks than Mandy Moore during the pandemic, but, you know. Grief is not a competition, etc. etc. I, myself, am the opposite type of Mandy Moore fan, who likes her music but has never seen a single minute of This is Us. Some days I think about it, but I don’t know much about it other than it involves grief and, well, I am too tender for that sort of thing at the moment.
Okay, well, ta ta for now. Let’s try and have a good day. Let’s try and do some small amount of good.
It’s unclear if Spark did the whole round or not, Crunchbase only has them listed as participating in the round, and I am also too cheap to pay for Pitchbook.
I joined Dispo bc I love photo apps in general, but have had only one photo 'developed' while tryig it out, and then hadn't thought of it in weeks bc life is so busy, and then this all happened. Should I even keep using it, I wonder...
Thanks for sharing the Foals song. I really want them to be better than they usually are, and this song makes me want to explore them more again. The first song of theirs I heard was Spanish Sahara and that was perfect that I'd kind of written off the rest of their stuff as nothing else came close. But now I again have some hope for Foals.