Good morning. Hello. How are you? #385
Tangents, writing, the parolee dilemma, retail products, woke sci fi series, book covers, Googling weirwood.
Good morning! Hello! How are you, chief? Can we still say chief? Yes, right? Can we say it in this context? I think so? Let me know if not in the comments below. Here have a button:
Man. Sometimes I start writing these and with the very first sentence I’m off on some tangent I had no intention of going on when I started writing the first sentence out. It really is wild. But I gotta say, I love writing these things. Thank you so much for subscribing/reading. I was thinking about it yesterday: this is the most rewarding outlet for my writing I’ve ever had in the last twenty years, possibly ever. Like maybe the LiveJournal heyday was as rewarding, but that’s about it. Books? Nah. Personal journaling – I mean, it’s super useful, but it’s “rewarding” the same way a dam preventing a flood is rewarding: ideally, you don’t notice it. But these emails? Just great. I’m really enjoying it. Thank you guys so much.
And thank you everyone for your sensitivity and patience around my writing these last two days on the heavy topic of sexual assault. This is, obviously, a topic where people have strong emotions, and it can be very scary to write about in public. Shit, one time I wrote an article about internet futurists and them being wrong and how I shouldn’t have listened to them and it got, like, a million views or something and with it came a torrent of online grief. On a relatively benign topic. But, man, those dystopians were so mad: we knew the internet was going to be hot garbage! How dare you have thought otherwise! Like thank you, internet dystopians, that was literally the topic of the article.
It has always been true, I think, that any piece of public writing is an opportunity to lose a friend, to offend someone, to inspire someone to anger or hatred. It can be a scary thing to put a piece of writing out there. A writer needs an audience, but a writer would also to prefer a modicum of comfort that they’re not going to get crucified for writing something. Well, that’s probably not true for all writers, there are probbably some who live for that shit, but I am thin-skinned. I don’t know how people like Taylor Lorenz do it. It is just… god. What strength.
(There is a sexist angle here, I think we all know. The abuse I have received online has been nothing compared to what others have to endure. I know this. I am just a total fucking wimp.)
But even on the humdrum level: a letter to a friend, a business email, a casual comment on a Facebook post. Any of these can escalate out of control at the turn of a hat. Writing is weird. You craft it, trying to get your thoughts down accurately, but it’s a faulty medium, and we are imperfect translators. Even when something looks well-crafted, monolithic, permanent and coherent on the page, oftentimes it’s still a muddled mess compared to the original thought. It captures maybe 10% of the original intent. Yet once it’s on the page, it is considered permanent, intentional, planned. And is judged accordingly. Yet it rarely is permanent, intentional, planned. It’s a conundrum.
Anyway.
Yesterday marked the end of my two-week waiting period since I got my second Moderna dose. I am now fully vaccinated. I’m gonna go hug a sewage worker. Naw. Honestly, I don’t know what’s going on. Are we all gonna be going out this summer? Even if 35% of America doesn’t bother with the vaccine? Even if our kids aren’t vaccinated? It really does seem… like things are a bit muddled right now. And I really only want to go out if I can see other people who are going out. I’m not some elderly person who thinks that I absolutely need to get on a cruise ship or go to Aruba or some shit. I want to see other people, and if they’re not going out too, what’s the point of going out? It is an inverse prisoner’s dilemma. A parolee’s dilemma.
Got a care package from my friend Nick at Belleflower Brewing yesterday and I am very excited to try his wares and wear his wears. I only allow myself a single drink on nights when I watch Jane, but tonight is that night, so I am very excited.
In less positive retail news, I am ripshit at Clearasil. I’ve been using this basic-ass foaming facewash of theirs for, like, god, I don’t know… Thirty years? For easily the last twenty years, Clearasil’s been trying to lose me as a customer by changing the packaging, or releasing another product that looks similar but isn’t quite the same, and costs more. But, with careful retail excavating, you could usually find the basic Best Self Daily Clear Foaming Face Wash. Historically, I’ve distrusted them so much, though, that whenever I find it, I buy like 5 tubes of the stuff, because I know it’s going to take forever to find it again. I last did this maybe three years ago, and have just run out. And here we are, they have yet again completely revamped the product line, and it seems like this time they’ve completely gotten rid of the original formula. They have this new version, Gentle Prevention Daily Clean Wash, and on Amazon, in the image gallery for the product, they even have this little image of the old product, with an arrow pointing to the new product. As if they are they same. But oh no, they are not the same.
One thing that’s been rewarding about this, though, is discovering how many other people are as ripshit as I am about this:
I’m late to this party because I stocked up. This product bait-and-switch happened a few years ago now, I am only just learning about it. But, man. I am so bummed. Fucking Clearasil, man. Why you gotta do a thing.
Fortunately, the Walmart generic Equate brand foaming face wash isn’t too too bad. I’ll get used to the different scent in, oh, probably about six years. Man, Equate is such a fun brand. I would love to work on it I bet it is super fun to work at Equate. I think it’d be a great time to work at a generics brand that makes, like, 10,000 products. Seems like a potential wellspring of fun branding opportunities and/or market penetration opportunities.
One last note on capitalist American products, I’ve decided I’m not a huge fan of the Key Lime Kit Kat. It was fun while it lasted, but I preferred the Apple Pie and the Birthday Cake. One Kit Kat I would love to see them try in America is some sort of Chili and Chocolate thing, I think that’d be really good. Or that Japanese Ocean Salt one, I think Americans would like that. But I think our think our journey together has ended, Key Lime Kit Kat. Thank you for your service.
I got an email about the Dead Can Dance tour and apparently now it is a career retrospective tour? I am so excited. I am pretty sure when it was first booked it was a tour in support of their then-current album Dionysus. Which would have been fine, but a hits tour? Hells yeah. Very exciting.
This very cute girl was a holy terror to her mom last night at bedtime, three hours of resistance and screaming. She managed to break the glass on a framed piece of art on the walls — an original Haçienda drink menu — and then, having done that, refused to listen to Mommy when she asked her to not step on the glass before she could clear it up.
She did learn to play the melodica yesterday, though. It was fun watching her try and work out that she had to blow AND press down the keys at the same time. But once she got it, she was off to the races. She immediately heard the music playing — a Rachmaninoff piece — and started…. no, I’m fucking with you. Jane is normal. It sounded like ass.
Finished Woke Sci Fi Series book #3. I loved it so much. Just so good. And after the single plot event around 70% of the way through the book, nothing else happened and it was just fantastic. It’s one of those series that has a teaser from the next book at the end of the current book, so I immediately dove into book #4. Same thing as the other two times: a totally new batch of characters. Every time this happens, I am bummed. But after two books now, where I’ve ended up liking the new characters, I’m ready to accept it and just keep going. It is definitely a weird paradox, though, for an author to write a series that is so charater-driven, and never revisit any of these great characters. But I do think part of the reason she doesn’t feel the need to is because, yes, these characters are great, but it’s only because they’re well-written, well fleshed-out. They’re just average people, though. That’s a large part of the point: there’s nothing special about any of them. We connect because they’re human. Well, not all of them are human. I am using it in the Kirk-calling-Spock-Human sense.
Also one thing I love is that the book has the actual spaceship from the book on the cover. Like you know how it is with sci-fi space books, they spend all this time describing a spaceship and you’re like “I think I have an idea of what the spaceship looks like, but I’m not sure,” and if it’s a popular series, maybe you go to the fan Wikia for it and see if there’s any good fan art out there of someone who took the time to read and re-read that description of the spaceship like ten times and then extrapolated out a logical image of it, thank you, obsessive fan artist (fun fact, my wife used to be a great fan artist). And of course back in the 60’s and 70’s they might have put a spaceship on the cover, but you could never trust the cover art of, like, an Asimov paperback or anything, because the publishers had so much power and who the fuck cares what Asimov thinks about airbrush art anyway. But this book is a modern book, so presumably Becky Chambers had some say about the cover and presumably we can trust that is what the spaceship actually looks like. And it’s interesting because there are two different covers for each of the books in the series — not sure if it’s a hardback/paperback thing or a US/UK thing (they always have such better covers) — and the other design is clearly a classier cover, but it does nothing to explain to me what a homesteader ship looks like.
Yeah, you don’t see that every day.
Oh actually this reminds me of one more thing: Google and pop culture. Some term gets huge on Google and suddenly it becomes basically impossible to figure out where the word came from, what it originally meant. For example: Weirwood. Go ahead, Google it. There’s nothing but Game of Thrones shit. There’s even a suggestion about “Are Weirwood real trees?” But it is not super useful.
And yet, when reading a book from the 1960’s, I came across Weirwoods. I don’t remember what book right now — I have it written down somewhere, I think it was Olaf Stapleton’s First and Last Men. Or maybe the Hyperion series? Yeah, actually, I think that’s it But the point is, it was before Game of Thrones. And it is impossible to find this out using Google. I mean, you can do a specific search of Google searching only for entries prior to the publication of A Song of Ice and Fire, and you get some tempting leads: A Conan the Barbarian mention, a mention of a series called Forgotten Realms by Ed Greenwood published in DRAGON Magazine 128 in 1987. But you also learn that there’s a Weirwood, Virginia that predates that (it’s sparse Wikipedia page says nothing about its name’s origin). And a road in California. So who knows! It is frustrating. Is it a real tree??? Is it the name for a different real tree? This has bugged me for years.
Today’s mix is a psych rock mix. So, you know, freak out. Do it. Just freak out and let your hear flap around. Take it out of that pony tail. Just go ahead and lose it. You have permission today.
Oo! If I wrap this up now I have time to water the plants before I get Jane. Okay! Let’s do it. I’m coming plants!