Good morning. Hello. How are you? #395
Surprise Sunday edition, home networking, podcast, CDC changes its mind, the MOVE bombing, Substack has raised $80 million and can't make pictures work.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Surprise! It’s a Sunday edition! I bet you didn’t see that coming! No one expects the Sunday edition (said in a Monty Python voice is Monty Python still funny in the 21st century?). I was gonna do my usual thing and write a Saturday edition, have my one day off on Sunday. But then Friday night I got sucked into trying to fix a home networking problem, and was suddenly up waaaay past my bedtime and I decided I didn’t want to be sleepy all weekend, so I slept in an extra hour till 8 something on Saturday morning, which meant I didn’t have much time till Jane woke up, so no edition. And I slept in a little bit this morning too. So I will barely have time to finish this today, but… well, you know. The nothing-topics are piling up. Gotta get the list cleared off. Plus I’m convinced if I ever take two days off from this thing, I’ll realize how great it is not having to write it every morning, and the whole façade will collapse. You guys always tell me how productive I am, but it’s all just hanging by a thread. If I stop doing any one thing, within 36 hours I will be a puddle on the couch with three empty bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos around me, and my daughter will have gone feral.
Home networking, man. It can just suck up all your time. And make you hate yourself for it. Like if you have some home improvement project that is, like, making a retaining wall or digging a hole you don’t think “my god this project is such a waste of time it’s distracting me from all those real projects.” But if you spend three hours trying to nail down the interplay between your two firewalls, port triggering and port forwarding and where do I punch these pinholes so these stupid doorbells will work, and you’re telling me that the Ring doorbell tries to claim forty-five thousand ports for its use? My god, how stupid is that. Oh and, great, those ports overlap with the ports AT&T uses for your television, so it’s possible you’ll never get the stupid things to work right — well, that does not feel like a productive use of your home chore time. Which is kind of funny because it totally is and in a way it’s magical. Like if you could go back to your 1999 self and be like “yeah I spent the afternoon implementing a technology that allows for the wireless transmission of realtime data and video anywhere on the property to your phone, which I know right now is a very stylish black lump of plastic, but eventually will be a less stylish slab of glass” it would sound… kinda noble? At least as noble as digging some post holes over the weekend or fixing a leaning tree. But in reality it’s just a timesuck. And it’s never done. You never have perfect wifi. There’s always some stupid, lingering problem. At this moment, there are forty-nine devices on our network. It’s a dream to think they will ever all play nice together.
So yeah. Sorry I didn’t get to this Saturday. Weekend editions do seem kinda dumb anyway, don’t they? I subscribe to this newsletter about the VC industry from Dan Primack that I scan every morning to see what deals have been done, and I positively resent that it has a weekend edition. I did have a dream last night that USA Today had a weekend edition and it was amazing. It wasn’t, like, a newspaper. It came in a crate and it was a giant product sampler: the logical extension of the bloated ad inserts of the weekend editions. Except the products were awesome it was more like a high ind Birch Box than, like, shitty soap samples. There was an RC Car in there and a really nice pair of lady’s shoes (silver ballet flats, but extra posh). I would subscribe to that weekend edition.
Speaking of weekend editions also got the biweekly podcast done. It’s a fun challenge to try and do that thing on top of these and have them all thematically gel, but not say much of the same stories. There’s a bit of overlap but it’s mostly (I think?) unique? This one is extra rambling, I was in quite a scattered mood. There’s a really good story in there wrapping up the work sociopath story, except I botch the middle of it and leave out a key moment. Oh well.
Oh great it’s one of those mornings where Substack can’t actually process imagery. Eighty-two million dollars raised, and you still break all the time. Lovely. Well, hopefully it’s up and running again before we need to send this out. [Edit from the future: They did not hurry up.]
Thank you for your kind words about my CDC rant, seemed pretty well received. It’s worth noting that less than 48 hours later the CDC backtracked on one thing I was complaining about: schools. They were like “oh hey big whoopsie we didn’t mean it about schools, they should just keep on doing what they’ve been doing.” It’s worth pointing out they said only K-12 schools: apparently day cars and preschools and the children that are aged for them are magically exempt from this new risk. And, of course, you could take this big new exemption and ask yourself: well what is so different about schools than the rest of the world? And the answer is “well, that’s the one place we want your kid to go. The rest of the time they can just fucking stay home.” Woo!
Speaking of COVID, on Thursday Johns Hopkins University changed the layout of their much-used COVID dashboard for the first time in over a year. I’ve been checking this thing at least once a day for fourteen months. And then, suddenly, boom. Looked different. Not a lot different, but notably different. A much bigger focus on vaccines and vaccine uptake, logically enough. It’s all good but it’s really messing with my muscle memory of checking specific stats every morning: they’ve all moved around on the page.
Another thing I wanted to mention on Friday that I passed on, in favor of that CDC rant, is that it was the anniversary of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. This was a massacre in 1985 where the Philadelphia police decided to bomb a house of black anarchists, because there had been neighbor complaints about noise and some parole violations. They ultimately burned down sixty one houses, killing five children and six adults. The police let the fire burn. No one from city government was prosecuted for the attack.
I was thirteen when this happened. It made national news. I remember it vividly. I can still remember the pro-police framing that the news organizations had, but that even with that framing, even during the Reagan administration, there was a widespread belief that this was wrong. Nothing happened, but we knew it was wrong. I still think about it all the time. It really was a turning point in my political awakening.
Yesterday I was doing Jane bedtime, sitting up in the playroom, and I glanced over to the door and glanced back, and in doing so, my eyes got one of those flickers like an 80’s television turning off, you know, the click-off that HBO uses on it’s ending screen for its shows. And for the briefest of moments, against my will, I thought “oh shit the simulation just had a glitch and now I know for sure we’re living in one!” It lasted about two seconds before I was like “ah, no, that’s just the glare against my glasses of that light that Jane has repositioned.” I was both relieved and bummed. I think it’d be just fine if it turned out we were sims. But, sad news: I did not unilaterally, and singularly, uncover this huge secret. The mystery remains.
Welp. I have a bunch more to tell you, but I guess we’ve made a decent dent. Jane is up, it’s time to get her out of bed and start breakfast. I can’t actually send this out because Substack is broken, and images don’t work. That is annoying.
I got a playlist for you here, but I can’t put the nice image that usually goes with it. It’s just a mix. It has Hayden, Iceage, Matt Sweeney and Bonnie Prince Billy, girl in red, Donovan, The Apartments, Ought, Pulp, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Sundays, Chop Chop, Wolfsheim, Veronica Black Morpheus Nipple, Spiritualized and Mercury Rev. It’s a good mix. I wonder if more people will download it or less since you can’t see what’s on it. We shall see!
I had a really great story about a bunny but I will save that until you can see some pictures of the bunny.