Good morning. Hello. How are you? #410
Rain and gardening. Not non-participles. Taylor almost redeemed herself with those pretty paper stars. Storage Wars relapse, bad movies, and Jeremy Allaire.
Good morning there, friend. How are you faring this grey and cloudy morning? I just assume it’s grey and cloudy all over the United States this morning. Man, we had some crazy-ass thunder all day yesterday. Power went out a couple times briefly. Nothing the batteries couldn’t handle, but still. Pretty crazy! I hope my plants are happy. I will admit it’s been nice not having to water them all week. It looks like I might get a break in the rain tomorrow to do some gardening, that will be nice. Oh I had an epiphany about gardening and depression yesterday: if you suffer from depression, consider gardening even if for no other reason than it changes your perspective on rainy days and makes you like them.
Today, I am working, but I don’t have any meetings on the calendar. I might actually get some time to look at all of the marketing materials and start a refresh on them. I think it’s hilarious how little marketing our company does. Make a career in advertising but… don’t do any advertising. Love it.
SO. It seems that nouns like rice and wine that do not have plurals are not, in fact, called non-participles or at least not any more. It’s crazy! I vividly remember this. My friend Ivelisse has been doing research on this subject over the last day and they seem to be called: mass nouns, irregular plurals, unmarked plurals, zero plurals, defective nouns, and pluralia/singularia tantum (the former being a noun that has no singular form, the latter no plural form; e.g., scissors/dust respectively). But I swear none of these things are the term I was taught, and none are close enough to easily mess up with “non-participle,” so now I am at a complete loss and my entire worldview has been shaken and I can’t trust anything anymore. I need to track down Mrs. Vogel, my fourth grade teacher, except I can’t remember if it was definitely fourth grade.
As an aside, can you remember the names of all of your elementary school teachers? I cannot anymore. Seem to have lost this memory somewhere in the last decade or so.
I almost feel like yesterday’s edition of GMHHAY is the first one where the permanent web version deserves a disclaimer about this topic.
A second programming note: when I wrote that long rant about Taylor Swift, the record sitting in my entry way was not, in fact, my copy of Folklore. It was two records by The New Year — their third and fourth albums. So I stand by my rant. BUT I must acknowledge that yesterday afternoon the postman came by and dropped off a package that contained Folklore, so in the end I received the album six days after release date, which I still believe to be BS. I am very impressed with the way Taylor includes yellow tissue paper stars in her deliveries from UMG, though. That indicates both a level of detail and operational efficiency of the Taylor org that I can really respect.
Question: You know how on the email version of these GMHHAYs there is a little subhead title thing where I put a quick summary of the day’s edition’s contents? Should I put those on Facebook? Would that help the skimmers?
I started watching season 12 of Storage Wars yesterday. It has been… maybe four years since my Storage Wars obsession? I remember because it was right around when I started my podcast and I spent a lot of time on the early episodes of the podcast talking about Storage Wars. But then I ended up having watched it all, and there were no more new episodes, so I just forgot about it. Somewhere along the line, more new episodes came out, but I didn’t notice or care, really, plus it’s one of those shows that airs on one of those Sharper Image-type cable channels (Discovery, I think?) that doesn’t have its shit together with streaming, and it doesn’t show up in Hulu for, like, a year after they air. BUT, from back then, I still follow Mary and Ivy on social media, and one of them mentioned something the other day about new episodes on Hulu, so I went and looked and, sure enough, there were new episodes. So I dipped back in just like Renton having to check the quality of the smack in Trainspotting after years of being clean. And it felt so good. I mean, the editing is terrible, and the thing borders on professional wrestling-level kayfabe, but it is still deeply, oddly compelling. It was good to be back.
Also they got a new bidding team in Storage Wars and these two are just awesome:
Because it was raining, and it was Emma’s night with Jane, I had, like, three hours to myself in the evening. I thought I would watch a movie. I chose Zack Snyder’s new zombie movie, because, like, I watch every Zack Snyder movie. Usually they are not good, but I don’t find myself feeling bored (woah, just as I wrote “feeling bored,” the Pet Shop Boys sand “being bored” on Spotify, from their newly-remastered 1994 Live in Rio album). And this one sorta started fine, there was a pre-titles sequence that was interesting ish, then a completely over-the-top and amazing title sequence, and I was pretty into it, but then the movie started, two dudes sat down at a table and talked about the plot of the movie, and I was like “oh, yeah, okay, I get it, that’s what this movie is going to be,” and I just couldn’t go any further. I really wanted to see Tig Notaro too, because she had been re-cast into the movie after it was completely finished and I wanted to see how that worked, plus Tig Notaro is awesome. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
This happened last week too with Mortal Kombat. And, I mean, like, it’s almost like I keep choosing obviously bad movies to watch and they turn out bad. This should not be surprising. But I like bad movies! And usually these kinds of movies hit just the spot. But not these days. I find them unwatchable. I’m gonna have to, like, re-watch Marienbad or some shit.
Last night I also showed Emma a slideshow of my thinking for a re-arrangement of my office since, as we know, it is unwise to rearrange furniture in this house without consulting her. This was a good idea because Emma is the furniture rearranging master, and she had very valuable insights. I think we have a rough plan of approach an I kinda wanna start it tonight or this weekend, but I think I’m going to need at least two uninterrupted days for it, maybe three. Last time I did this over thanksgiving break. That won’t work this time, so I’m thinking July 4th holiday? Hopefully sooner, but who knows. Anyway, I am excited, I think it will solve all of my layout problems. Of course, this will be the fourth rearranging in six years, but this one is more of an enhancement of the current arrangement, I think.
I read in the news the other day that Circle, the crypto startup raised an absolutely insane $440 million in venture capital. Just astonishing. Crypto aside, Circle was founded and is run by Jeremy Allaire, and I have to say congrats. Jeremy is an old-guard tech dude who’s done so much. Really one of the most astonishing careers in tech. I first met him when he was CTO of Macromedia, because Macromedia had bought his previous company that he founded with his brother, the Allaire Corporation, the creators of Cold Fusion. In his capacity of CTO of Macromedia he visited The Barbarian Group because — and you may not know this — we were really pretty good at Flash (god I miss Flash). Not long later, Jeremy left Macromedia to go to a VC firm, General Catalyst, to be an Entrepreneur in Residence. In that role, he engaged TBG to help him prototype out his next product. Not, like, we did anything meaningful or had a hand in inventing the thing or anything, just sort of animatics. Animated wireframes, if you will, to get the idea across to people. That company went on to raise more than $100 million before eventually going public. It is called Brightcove.
During the Brightcove era, I would mainly run into Jeremy on airplanes, flying back and forth from Boston to SF. But more relevantly, in the early Brightcove days, a young woman named Emily Welles got a job there, helping Brightcove design player skins for their major media clients. Eventually Brightcove realized they did not want to do this production work in-house, which is relevant to my life in two ways: first, the managerial tactic they used is one I have referenced and used many times since: designating certain people or firms “official implementation partners” so that your clients have someone easy to go to to get their work done. Which leads to the second way this was relevant to my life: In their case, Emily, who was a freelancer, became one of those first official implementation partners, thus launching a lucrative career as a freelance designer primarily for television networks and helped pay for my house.
Anyway, haven’t seen Jeremy in years — our paths only crossed a few times once I moved to New York. But I have followed Circle, even though I’m not a Crypto guy. But if it ever goes public, I would invest in it. Jeremy is a genius and has an uncanny ability to see the future that I find far surpasses most of the people this industry endows with any sort of mantle of vision.
Okay! Let’s go make breakfast. I am excited. Jane’s at Janet’s so I get to make something else for breakfast, and it doesn’t have to take an hour. PLUS, I have two eggs left in the carton, and I get to use them up, according to my preferred egg-removal pattern, which is to take them one at a time from one end to the other. None of this “balance the load” nonsense. It is a carton of eggs you can hold it with one hand even if four eggs are in it all at one end. It’s not the One Ring for crying out loud.
Playlist! Industrial! Dance! Man Ray! Stomp! Raaaage!
TTFN!