Good morning! Hello. How are you doing today? You survive your storm? Not sure what was with NYC having a storm same time as us that was weird. Not the same storm. Ours turned out to be nothing. I deeply, deeply, want to say “nothingburger” here — I believe that word should be exclusively used for storms and Muller reports. Alas, someone said something mean about the word “nothingburger” a year or two ago. And I am insecure so I guess I just won’t use it anymore. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Still feeling a bit emo about ambition and whatnot, but I’m coming back around to balance. Yesterday, when the comments from you guys were flying fast and furious (clearly I am not alone in thinking about these topics, a fact of which it is nice to be reminded), I jotted down a note: “Ambition is only bad when you’re not fulfilling it,” so maybe that’s all that’s going on here. But I don’t think so, because my work ambition is actually going according to plan, and it’s also because I’ve just spent so many years trying so hard to not be ambitious. I really tried! I turned down jobs! So many jobs! I made conscious efforts to keep my ambitions at a more human scale. I tired so hard. And I do not feel better for it at all. Still, though, nice, pithy, self deprecating blow-off, isn’t it: “Ambition is only bad when you’re not fulfilling it.” Sounds profound. Sounds true. I’m just sad because my ambition is thwarted. And maybe it is a bit — but it’s not because I’m failing. It’s because reality happens at such a slow speed. You can concoct a grand plan, and execute it perfectly to a tee, but in your head, the grand plan took the blink of an eye, and in reality it might take a decade. But we don’t have decades, we’re getting old. And there are only so many of these plans we can enact. Hence, midlife crisis.
But hey, good news, AdTech is hot again. Wooooooooooooo.
I have not gotten a PS5 yet. There was a restock at target fourteen minutes ago, but I missed it. Sadz. Clearly I would not be so depressed if I had a PS5. Are there even any games for it yet? I don’t even really want to play games. I just want to lovingly set it up, spend an hour trying to figure out my old login for the Playstation network, only to give up and make a new one, pay Sony some money for some vague reason because internets, meticulously poke around in the UI and look at every screen, and then maybe make an avatar. That sounds deeply satisfying. Try and remember what it was like when new gadgets brought joy. I’m convinced it can happen one more time. I’m convinced the PS5 is the answer. Sony’s such a great company. They never really let the internet ruin them. God. They still make camcorders. So wholesome. Google “Sony Scandal” and the only things that come up are where they’re the victim. Sony, man. Sony.
Michael Avanatti got thirty months in prison for his shenanigans trying to extort Nike. Remember that guy? He just spent 100 days in solitary in that horrible prison in New York. Yes, I know, which horrible prison in New York, there are so many of them. The one in Manhattan. Anyway, his ordeal’s not over yet, now he has to go to to California and face more charges around embezzlement. I’m gonna go ahead and say three years in jail for a non-violent attempt at extorting Nike is too long. It’s funny how so many people are for prison reform until it’s some greasy guy they hate and then they say throw the book at them. Man you should have seen Twitter salivating over the prospect of him getting ten years (the sentencing guideline was around ten years). I’m the same way, though I save that ire for the Trump administration. Avanatti? Giant fine, one year or less at a country club prison, ten of probation. That’s my sentancing recommendation.
Oh and good news! The FDA saw the light about their insane decision around the Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm and rolled back their recommendation, confining it only to Alzheimer’s patients with very light cases. I’m shocked. But pleased. That was nice. Nice to have a bit of good news.
I bought some Didi stock yesterday. I had this complicated idea in my head that when the Chinese government announced that Chinese companies could no longer do VIEs — the method by which they list on American stock exchanges without actually being owned by foreigners, the Cayman Islands holding company would declare independence from the Chinese entity (I am simplifying a bit here) and say “well, we have a contractual agreement to use this IP, these trademarks, this source code and this customer base outside of China, so even though the Chinese government is making Beijing Didi renege on the deal, we still consider it valid, and we’re just going to keep on doing our thing, also we have, like $4 billion in the bank now, so we’re going to just keep acting like we’re a real company” and no one stopped them. Felix Salmon pointed out to me that they shared the same CEO, or they might, and that added a layer of complication to my fantasy, wherein the very few non-Chinese members of the Didi Global board would muster a quorum, fire the current CEO for absenteeism, and hire a new non-Chinese CEO and voila! A new company. They could just keep on doing Didi in the rest of the world (not that I know if Didi even operates outside of China). Or they could get into some new line of business, with all those newly-obtained (living the -ly hyphen dream) IPO riches. This, I say, is the kind of wacky boardroom drama I would love to see in a movie instead of the half-assed corporate governance sort of thing we see in films like The Dark Knight. I want boardroom sci fi. I would read the shit out of that. Anyway, my $100 in Didi stock is probably going to go down more, but a boy can dream.
Did you hear about Cat Person? Apparently the woman who wrote that short story used the real autobiographical details of another woman without her consent. I guess that’s allowed? That’s fine? It’s just weird, though, because, like, it wasn’t done in a winky, knowing, meta way. She just kinda lifted them because they had dated the same dude. The real-life woman wrote a very moving essay about the experience (side note, it’s interesting how often Slate gets these great essays. You think that pub is almost dead, and then, boom). I don’t have a clean, pithy comment on this, I just find it very interesting. When I was a young, budding writer, who still thought he could write fiction in novel form, I wrote so much autobiographical fiction. Roman a clefs by the unfinished dozen. I used to worry and fret about exactly this topic so much. Well, sort of this topic, because I was thinking about people I actually knew, actually interacted with. The author of Cat Person didn’t even know this woman. But still, it seemed a huge grey area to me — I’d read biographies of people and they would say “oh, yes, harrumph harrumph, this character in Fitzgerald’s second novel is clearly based on so-and-so,” so you were definitely allowed to do it, but there were rules, there were limits. First names were not allowed, and key things needed to be changed. Like, I’m sympathetic that Kristen Roupenian did not foresee the huge viral hit that Cat Person was going to be, but don’t all authors, even before they have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting famous, wrestle with this? Dreaming of when they get famous and their ex reads their story, recognizing themselves but also complaining it wasn’t accurate? Isn’t that a fundamental part of the authorial fantasy? I guess not!
Two Projects I Did not Successfully Get off the Ground While at Barbarian Group, That I deeply Wish I Did a Mini-Essay by Rick Webb
In 2004 or so, way before anyone was really doing it, we came this close to convincing a major airline to implement seamless, simple, carbon-neutral travel. Just a little checkbox when you’re buying a ticket. Yes, carbon offsets can be bullshit, but it would have been a decade or so before this finally happened, and the current UX still isn’t as good.
This one was really good. It was for Al Gore, but backed by, like, Virgin or some shit. The exact details of the clients elude me, but it was definitely a combination of a giant brand and a major climate NGO. The whole thing was basically a clearinghouse for getting lightbulbs changed from bad ones to good ones. The brilliance of the approach was that everyone could play a role, regardless of how little of a role they wanted to play. You could donate time — to be on a local team that went around changing lightbulbs. You could donate money — to pay for lightbulbs. Or, if you were just a greedy bastard, you could just sign up to have your lightbulbs changed and, thus, saving money for free. The idea was to make it a virtuous ecosystem.
That second one was so ambitious. I wonder if it would have worked. I still think there’s something there — something that harnesses the greedy as much as the virtuous and the lazy to make the world better.
Let’s do a mix. Goth mix. VERY GOTH MIX. This is a very, very goth mix of new(ish) goth. The end is, daaaayum. Some dark shit. In different way. The perkiest song on this mix is by Cold Cave. By far. Feeling down today? Listen to New Goth vol. 6 it’ll hit the spot. Or maybe don’t. Becoming Animal is a new (not really, it’s 4 years old) record from Cindy of Cindytalk fame. Garbage did a track with X and it’s fantastic. There’s a new (actually new!) Dead Can Dance. This is just a great mix. I even put a Nick Cave song on it even though I’m kinda sick of that guy but I gotta admit there are some pretty good bits on Carnage.
Oh hey it’s Friday that is exciting. Wow. Week went by pretty quick after all. I guess four day weeks will do that. Almost like we should have a universal four- (ahem three-) day workweek. I still haven’t done that piece of writing I need to do this week for work. This is not to say I haven’t tried. I have. I have even made some progress. But it’s been VERY HARD. I am really going to try and finish it today. REALLY.