Good morning. Hello. How are you? #421
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Okay I hope? Do you have Juneteenth, observed off? I hope so. Man, crazy how “fast” that became a holiday. I mean, after, you know, hundreds of years. MLK day was passed as a Federal holiday thirty-eight years ago. At Timehop last year for about six months straight, our this-day-in-history feature at the end of your day was in important moment in black history. There are, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know, a lot of them. It would be kind of cool if we added a new Federal holiday from black history every three-four decades, until there were 250 of them, or enough so that we didn’t have to work at all, ever. Maybe this is the path to the Star Trek future we deserve and need: in 7,500 years.
Programming note: I forgot to do an “outro” and say goodbye at the end of yesterday’s edition. I was plugging along, doing the final bolding and writing the little into blurb when I noticed it was 9AM and time to go get Jane. So I had to just bolt. I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye to you guys. You deserved better. I’m making progress having Jane say “I love you, bye!” every time mommy, Grammy or myself leave. I hope she never asks why we do this so I don’t have to say “well, in case one of us dies before we see each other, again, of course.” I hope, sincerely hope, none of you died yesterday. God, that would suck.
I had the most restless dreams last night. I was performing some sort of complex experiment, in a lab — and, like all my lab dreams it was in the Genzyme cathedral building on the Charles River in Boston. But it was sort of a lucid dream and I knew I was sleeping, and I was experimenting on sleep, but I was worried I was oversleeping, but I knew it was okay because this is what I was supposed to be doing. Eventually I snapped out of it and woke up and popped up and checked my clock and it was only 4 AM. So I went back to sleep and the dream shifted a bit, and some woman came and got me from my lab and took me up to corporate and offered me the job of lead producer on the next Gears of War video game. In the dream, as in reality, I had never played Gears of War and I had never produced a video game. And I am not a particularly good producer, at least not for longer than fifteen minutes. I told her this, and she knew, but she said because of my lab experiments, she thought I was the right person for the job. I was very flattered. Now I kinda wanna produce video games.
Important NextDoor alert:
I have so much to do today and I’m not going to get it all done and it is stressing me out. It does not help that I have a very bad headache. I need to go to the doctor, and I need to do my gardening video, at least shoot the footage, which means I need to do several hours of gardening. And if I’m going to the doctor I should probably, ahem, shower. It’s my first day off of a nice, long, vacation but I suspect I’m going to feel this way most of the time and I won’t actually get a vacation at all, so, yay me!
I think I finally figured out how to turn off the evil video notifications on Facebook yesterday that won’t ever go away. I feel like a decade ago we might have vociferously decried this dark pattern UX, complained enough that Facebook got a little embarrassed about how shitty that particular notification is — right now it is recommending a Ben Shapiro video to me! But we’ve all just given up complaining about it, we know they’ll never listen, and the internet is so much worse than that now anyway. What is the point. So, that is cheery!
The everyday banal evil of Facebook’s UX.
So I was washing out a small Pyrex bowl yesterday. It was filled with leftover queso, had been sitting, soaking in the sink. But of course soaking a bowl with cold, hardened queso in it is not going to do anything. You had to use hot water, and the sprayer, and a scraper, etc. And it got me thinking. I remember vividly this moment in 10th grade AP Physics class, I was sitting next to my girlfriend Anne, and Brian was sitting with us. And the teacher, who was really great, Ms. Reynolds, was going over something real quick. It was as if she had already covered this material and was reviewing, except I know that wasn’t the case because I had never missed a class and I always paid attention back then. I think what was really happening is that this was her AP class, we were a bunch of bright kids, and she was just plowing through the really basic part of a lesson real quick. And she got to the concept of a Universal Solvent, and she was like “well of course you guys know this, what’s the universal solvent?” And everyone in the room except me said “water!” And she’s like “that’s right, okay, don’t need to cover this, moving on.” And I very vividly remember thinking “wait a minute, what? Water’s a universal solvent? This makes no sense.” But I was kind of mortified and embarrassed I was the only one in the classroom that had questions so I kept quiet.
And, honestly, since then, I still have questions! What’s the deal here? I guess somewhere in the last 33 years I’ve realized that we need to add the element of time to the situation, and yeah, okay, maybe water will dissolve Pyrex in, like, ten thousand years? BUT STILL. I don’t buy it. And you know what? I just Googled it, and look at this!
We need to take the statement "Water is the universal solvent" with a grain of salt (pun intended). Of course it cannot dissolve everything, but it does dissolve more substances than any other liquid, so the term fits pretty well. Water's solvent properties affect all life on Earth, so water is universally important to all of us.
All my life I have been laboring under a lie! I was right all along! It is complete BS that water can dissolve everything.
Including queso.
Well, I’m glad I sorted that out. Been a little bundle of anxiety and cognitive dissonance rumbling around in my brain since high school physics. Needed to go. I should have trusted my instincts back in High School and asked more questions. Who knows where I would be now in that Sliding Doors reality. Maybe I’d have an English accent like Gwyneth Paltrow. Oh god now I need to watch Sliding Doors again don’t I?
Saw that at the Nickelodeon. I loved that theater.
God, I miss movies in theaters.
A friend of mine wrote an article on the internet and people got really mad about it yesterday. They got mad at it for reasons that weren’t in the article, and things he had specifically addressed and disclaimed. I used to joke about how the internet needed Disclaimr, a tool that you could use to assemble all of the disclaimers you needed to put in front of a piece of writing on the internet, so that people did not misunderstand you, willfully or not. It would be a tool that asked a few questions, analyzed the audience where you intended to publish, maybe did a little semantic analysis and suggested one or more appropriate disclaimers to append to the top of your article.
"We noticed you used the word ‘money,’ would you like to disclaim that you do not support all of capitalism’s end results? Would you like to disclaim that capitalism has done bad things? Would you like to disclaim that there are bad people who are also capitalists? Would you like to disclaim you are willing to pay more taxes?” That sort of thing. And then you could just check the appropriate boxes.
I think one mistake he made was that his disclaimers were not in bold, at the top of the article. They were infused within the article, stated at the appropriate moments when the relevant topic was at hand, and of course, no one’s gonna read that. And another thing I’m thinking is that there is probably some sort of law that needs to be defined here. Like, the thing is, the article was really long, so the disclaimers were easy to miss, especially if you were, you know, hypothetically, skimming the article in bad faith.
So the law — and god, please, do not name this after me — would be something like “The length of your disclaimers on a piece of writing on the internet need to be proportional to the total word count of the article in question.”
Also I would like to take a moment to thank you peeps, my readers, few and far between, who make me feel as safe as I’ve felt since the Livejournal days writing on the internet. I still strongly suspect the whole thing will blow up one of these days — perhaps at a half-assed sort-of joke about Juneteenth and the pace of Federal reckoning with racism! But so far, it has worked out pretty well. And if it ends tomorrow, it will have been a good run. Thank you.
Jane had a good outfit on yesterday:
These last couple of week’s she been super not into shorts, even though it was ninety-degrees out. She was adamantly against them. Then, three or so days ago suddenly she was really into shorts again. Her new words are “okay” and “of course.” Okay is not actually new, of course (ha), but she’s been saying it a lot more. “Of course” seems to be her new default answer to any question, which she is using in place of “yes,” and it is the best. She is saying “no” waaaaaay less often and while not the most annoying thing about toddlers the habitual, default answering of every question with “no” is definitely up there. Was that a run-on sentence? Should I fix it? Naaah.
For good measure, here’s a bunny photo from the walk yesterday. After all, all I do is take pictures of my daughter and bunnies. I guess this will get better come Sunday when I get to Fairbanks. Not sure how I’m going to manage to write this thing while I’m in Alaska. At the very least, I suspect it will be very late, since getting up at 7AM here is getting up at 3AM there, and I am not going to be getting up at 3AM. Shit I might even be sleeping in there, till 8 or even 9 (gasp!). So even if I get started on this thing right away, it might not go out until, like, noon or even two. So I suspect the best thing is you all just sort of skip Monday’s edition, read it Tuesday morning, and we’ll all be back on a morning schedule. Sound good?
Let’s do a mix! Moody and quiet one today, cuz that’s all that was close to being ready. I’ve been going through the 50+ hour “to investigate” playlist. It’s all stuff I’ve listened to this year, but only gave them one listen and each time thought “yeah that deserves a second listen.” I’ve cut it down by about ten hours so far, but it’s slow going. I did download it to my phone, so I might try and make a dent on the plane to Alaska, but I’ve learned I am frequently overly ambitious about how much I can accomplish on long flights in my old age. If I finish my (very short) book, I am happy. Anyway, nice moody mix. Use it to go to sleep tonight or something. Or to mope. I strongly endorse moping.
So I guess that’s it. Next time you hear from me, I will be in the “Great” north. I will probably have gone to Fred Meyer and maybe eaten at Taco Bell. Kinda thinking of popping into my old bank from the 90’s and seeing if I accidentally left like $4 in there two decades ago and now it’s worth, like, $6. That’d be something. Maybe drive by my old house and re-live that boundless, flat-bellied potential of youth. Take care, hope you have the day off and enjoy it immensely. If you did, let me know, it’ll make my day.