Good morning. Hello. How are you? #400
Rewarding calls with startup founders, big new personal project, Ring doorbell hate, books and memory, UFOs and how to not fall for conspiracy theories
Good morning, there, wasssuuup. Hello. How are you? Hanging in there? Going to rock shows? Got any summer travel planned? Gonna see some family, maybe? Or a friend? I hope so. Wow. Four hundred of these things that is just… good lordy lord. WellI guess I’m proud of that. That’s a body of work right there. Can I put this on my resume now? Well, I guess if I bind ‘em up and call it a book I could put it on a CV, if I ever make a CV again, right? That’d be something. Gotta be looking for the angle.
Wow so I am looking through my files here and I wrote not a single note into my “topics for GMHHAY” notepad yesterday, nor did I take a single photo. I am flying blind here. It’s been a while. We can do it. Oh right, here I can insert some verbiage about it being Friday and how we all like Fridays, etc. etc. Cool. Yay Friday.
The reason I have no notes or anything is because I spent yesterday doing projects. I spent the first half of the day doing prep work on the deck for my upcoming board meeting at work next week. Lots of charts and exporting CSVs from Dashboards and importing them into tables in slides and whatnot. That felt productive.
Next I had a really good call with a new guy I just met who is working on a cool new startup in New York. We were introduced by a mutual friend and he was telling me about his startup and then he mentioned how he was founding it with this esteemed older woman (well, not like “older woman” but older than this guy, who’s a good bit younger than me) and I was like “oh I know her! She used to be a client.” So that is exciting. I kind of overwhelmed him with too much information about convertible notes and caps vs discounts and laid out two possible funding paths for him, and it was a lot. So I told him to text me when he has questions. His startup idea is pretty genius. It’s gonna be like catnip for a few different classes of investors. He’s gonna have a good time.
Then I spent the rest of the day editing my new film, which is the project I’ve that I’ve been alluding to all week. I guess I’ll tell you about it now. I’ve been working on a film that captures, in time lapse, an archetypical “pandemic routine day.” Like from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed, it just follows me around the house and the neighborhood and observes me in a routine pandemic day. I had the idea months ago and I’ve been meaning to do it as a sort of historical document of this time of my life. And I kept procrastinating on it, thinking it would be overly laborious and tedious. But then I bought my tickets to Alaska and I realized that this phase of panemic life, at least, is coming to an end soon, so I better get to it. So I just did it.
And you know what? It came out pretty well! And you know what else? My hair is so bad right now. And I gained so much weight. I look truly, truly awful in this film. And I’m really kind of torn about it. Part of me wants to text Pooja, get my hair cut, and do the whole thing, taking additional care to shoot me from only the shoulders up or something, ha. But on the other hand, this is what pandemic life is, this is what I am supposedly capturing? This is what I supposedly want to remember? I mean, it’s not, of course. What I want to remember is being able to spend so much time with Jane at this particular age and things like that. I don’t really want to remember that I bloated and that my hair turned into something you’d pull out of a drain. But I don’t think my inner artist will let me clean it up. I think it needs to stay.
The other thing that’s interesting about it is that it is insanely, uncomfortably intimate in a way I didn’t expect, and I don’t think I can post it to the internet. I might put it up on my long-neglected-but-I-still-pay-for-it-every-year-because-it-hosts-the-videos-in-my-portfolio Vimeo account behind a password, though, and you guys can, like, individually text me for the password or something. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll say “fuck it” but…. like, my wife and mother-in-law are not especially psyched about it. And I don’t love the idea of putting my entire house on the internet. I also had to spend like 20 minutes going frame-by-frame through my diaper changing scenes. I, like, did my best to position the camera so that it was just Jane’s head but I didn’t do it perfectly. Then I got all creeped out and did a bunch of editing there. And, of course, just like all good Hollywood entertainment, I skipped my bathroom breaks.
I remember when I was a kid watching TV and reading books that I could not get over that no one ever went to the bathroom? Did anyone else go through this phase? When in the seventh or eighth grade, I first started tapping out fiction — overly influenced by Douglas Adams — I made it a point that everyone took bathroom breaks. It was kind of great. God I wish I still had any of that writing, or any of the writing I would do when I was waiting for two hours every day in the office of my high school. My mother was the Vice Principal and for my freshman and sophomore year I got rides from her, so I had to stick around school till she was done. Freshman year especially I didn’t really have any friends or extracurricular activities so I would just hang out in the office. They let me use this IBM Selectric typewriter, that was my only toy. And I would tap out absurdist fiction. I wish I had ANY of it still. I deeply regret that my archivist instincts did not kick in until I was sixteen.
Hrm well, anyway, I have a pretty good rough cut of this thing across two days of filming — for which I wore the same outfit at the same time each day. I did two outfit changes across the day so that I could wear the same clothes for two days and not have them be pretty dirty. Hrm actually, come to think of it, there are some good stills in here I could share with you, which would also solve my “I don’t have any photos for today’s edition” problem. Here’s one:
I’m like those movie trailers who say “look at this amazing movie” but all the footage is from the first couple of minutes.
Oh this is fun — in about ninety minutes, Emma will be headed off to a doctor’s visit. And Jane is over at Janet’s house tonight. Which means in ninety minutes, for about another ninety minutes, I will have the house to myself. Well, except for the cats. I can’t tell you the last time this happened. I am drunk with possibility.
I will probably sit in front of the computer and answer emails and work on marketing materials and prep for an employee review.
Hrm well, that was a pretty good run of stuff off the top of my head. Oh right I also got yet another stupid node for our router so that I can continue the self-induced misery of working on the network to get the fucking doorbells to work. God, I swear. I wish I could just get rid of these Ring monstrosities. They’re OLD, we bought them before Amazon bought Ring and before their buddying up with police departments around the world. I’ve done my best to turn off all the data sharing, but there are limits to what Ring actually turns off. But they’re wired into the wall and it’ll be a giant pain in the ass to replace them, and nothing ever happens on our street anyway, so, I guess it’s okay. I don’t know. It doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t have any smart home shit in my house, I thought pointing away from it would be an exception, but I was wrong. And now I am, like, spending money to make them work again and it just irks me so much. But our Wifi network is gonna be sweet though, so that’ll be useful. I guess. God, I hate home networking so much.
Oh and I finished my re-read of The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu last night. God, that book is just as good the second time around. It doesn’t really matter if you know the plot. Well, I had forgotten most of it aside from the broad outlines anyway. I moved on immediately to The Dark Forest which, I must remind everyone, I name-checked in my amazing, amazing song Space Force:
I really love the idea of the Wallfacers it really is pretty brilliant.
I wonder what’s up with the supposed TV Adaptation of the trilogy that the Game of Thrones guys were working on. Just like they were working on a Star Wars property that never panned out, and they were working on that weird-ass, problematic slavery thing that, thankfully, never panned out. Hrm well, some quick Googling and this click-baity story tell me that it’s not cast yet, no release date, nothing. BUT it does seem that Rosamund Pike and Rian Johnson have signed on as co-producers? Daaaayum. That significantly ups the exictement level for me. The timing could work out perfectly here. It’s been three years since I first read these books and I remember nothing. Now it’ll probably be three years again and I’ll remember nothing again and I’ll rediscover it again for the first time. Lovely.
Oh, actually, one interesting thing on that note: Emma and I had a discussion about that last night. She doesn’t like reading books because it’s a massive time investment in something that, ultimately, you’re not going to remember. And… here I am re-reading this book I loved, that I read only three years ago, and I remember almost nothing and… she’s not wrong? But at the same time, she is wrong, because you do carry that book with you. You carry its meaning, it’s point, you carry certain specific plot elements and devices that resonated with you, certain characters. It’s a paradox. She’s right that you don’t remember it, but also… you remember it.
Oh and the other thing we talked about last night is this whole UFO Brouhaha. We haven’t watched the 60 Minutes thing yet, though. But it just seems… like. Okay, so there are these super high-tech aircraft that can go 13,000 mph and pull 700gs and a) we keep running into them, which would imply they totally want us to find them, but b) they keep making us find them up in the upper stratosphere and never bother to, like, come down and actually meet us. Part of me wonders if it’s all not just the same single probe, who’s got a limited AI and is supposed to stay in the upper atmosphere but not talk to anyone. I don’t know, it just doesn’t really make sense.
Also years go I read this “real history” of Area 51. I know, I know. But it was, like, reviewed somewhere reputable and it sounded interesting, so I read it. What the book actually turned out to be, though, was a pretty comprehensive history of Operation Paperclip, what the scientists in Nazi Germany were working on before we got them, and, most importantly, which scientists we didn’t get and the Russians did, and it made a very compelling case for the Russians getting all the best scientists for certain types of aircraft design that were less traditional, not just jet powered, forward-moving planes. And then they posited that the Russians, at the height of the Cold Wars, so how gloriously freaked out Americans got from Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast, so they basically faked Roswell to freak us out. It all seemed perfectly plausible. Kinda weird no one ever adapted it for a prestige TV show, actually. I mean, it was ten years ago, the world wasn’t as ravenous for content back then.
Anyway, I digress. It’s not a stretch to extrapolate out a Russian program from these beginnings, take it forward 70 years and god knows what they could have accomplished. Everyone is thinking the Chinese these days, but I don’t think they have the institutional long-term knowledge to do it. But Russia does! And they’re not THAT broke! And that is totally the shit Putin would love, along with his weird energy weapons that are totally a thing and are totally being used on us right now.
My guess is there is a larger story here. About the myopia in research of the American Military Industrial Complex. About the failure of our spycraft against Russia — something we have notoriously had problems with. About the groupthink among our scientists, not pursuing totally viable avenues of research, spanned over years, over decades, over almost a century now. While some other country has pursued lines of research we shunned, or our researchers were fearful of pursuing because they were shunned. That’s my theory.
Also, Aliens are totally real.
I’ve been doing a lot of self-examining about why this isn’t more of a big deal for me, and I see it as a good sign: I’ve successfully innoculated myself against conspiracy theories. I’ve been working on it my whole life, and here’s the secret to not falling for conspiracy theories: the debunking route is a fool’s errand. The trick is to accept you can’t know one way or the other, accept that it’s not for you to know, and accept that it doesn’t matter for your life. It doesn’t matter, to you, right now, whether Schrödinger's cat is alive or dead. When the time comes, that cat is gonna get pulled out of the box, check it out then, and worry about it then. And if the cat never comes out of the box, it’s not your problem. Same thing with conspiracy theories. The paradox is that some conspiracies are real, so they can’t all be fake. This is true. But you know what? They can all be dismissed! For now! The temptation is to think we can be smarter than the conspiracists. Our pride makes is think that we can figure it out, and our brain’s innate pattern matching desire augments this. Fight it! It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.
Hrm well that’s not a half-bad edition for not having done any advance prep. Yay me. Let’s do a mix. Justa mix. Justa Store in Fairbanks, I am coming for you. Soon. Kinda on a 90’s/early oughts jam this last week or two. I don’t think there’s a single new track on this mix. That’s okay, there’s a lot of great ones. God, Rollerskate Skinny were so good. Saw them once and it was… majestic. And Hair and Skin Trading Company, god I loved them. Oh and the Drops, sigh, swoon. And Don Lennon, Boston’s absent comedic musical genius. Yeah. Good mix. Enjoy.
And enjoy your weekend!