Good morning. Hello. How are you? #443
Do you need brand studies? Do you code in Go and want a new job? Do you like Barnett Newman? Civ VI? If the answer to any of these is yes, this is the issue for you.
Good morning, there. Hey buddy. What’s shakin? How you doing? All going okay? It’s Friday. Is that exciting to you? Or are you a cool guy who doesn’t have to worry about the days of the week, maaaan, because you’ve broken free of the shackles of capitalism. I mean, good for you. I am happy for you. I really am. I follow your instagram without a shred of envy or resentment, really I do. I do have today off. I have used up most of my remaining vacation days for the year on making 4-day weeks, because that’s the way the world should be. I didn’t get them all, or even, I think, most of them, but I got a lot of them. It really is fantastic. Well. I mean. It’s better than 5-day weeks.
I took an extra day this weekend because I’m gonna get back into the gardening. My Farmer’s Almanac calendar tells me I can start planting fall crops, so it’s time to start re-planting a ton of the stuff that the deer and squirrels ate. I am also going to start applying netting and cages to things. This is the weekend. I will get into it.
But dammit, I just realized that I was supposed to go to the doctor this morning and get a blood draw. I have to do it fasting and it’s a giant pain because they don’t open until when I have to get Jane up, and that’s when breakfast is. I’m for two hours before that, fasting, but they’re not open. So I waited until a day that Janet took Jane for the night, and I was going to run over before I ate anything. But I totally forgot and had some Lipton noodle soup and saltines and Kraft deluxe singles like I am eight.
Crap crap crap crap crap.
Also I have a giant freakin zit on my nose and I was going to go “on camera” for my Gardening YouTube this weekend. I mean, I know only ten people watch then but, you know. Gotta be professional. Drat.
I’m feeling pretty good this morning, though. OH YEAH. I’ve got a couple work-related things here I need to do. To whit:
Do you need brand studies?
I have been helping an old friend of mine, an old Barbarian, with his new startup. It’s pretty cool. The whole thing revolves around very fast, very affordable brand insights and empirical research and surveys about brands, brand initiatives, new products and things like that. We’re talking like 1/10th as expensive as the big boys and 5x as fast. And it’s legit, and it’s real, and it’s real, verified consumers, who actually care about your brand, in your demographic. It’s good stuff. If you’re interested in a really good, really cheap, really fast brand study, let me know.
Timehop is looking for backend engineers.
We are hiring. Backend engineers. We’ll probably be hiring other, non-engineering roles very soon (ahem Marketing and Client Service). If you are backend engineer who feels comfortable in our environment, which is Go running atop AWS (Elastic Beanstalk, Aurora RDS - MySQL, DynamoDB, Kinesis, Lambda, CloudFront, S3), you should check out this job description and come talk to us!
The job is remote. If you live in New York, you would have the ability to go to a real sweet office if you like, but you don’t have to. But it is really sweet. Look at it:
I would really like to go back there someday. Maybe next month. Probably.
I was going to make this a whole work-related edition, but I think that’s enough for now. Good to get those out of my system.
Yesterday a friend of mine was passing through Houston and went and visited the Rothko Chapel and we had a conversation about it in the Slack. Felix said he found Turrell’s color tunnels more meditative, and I said I was mostly into the Rothko Chapel despite Rothko. That I enjoyed how that great architecture was born of the fantastic bickering between, like, four architects, but that my very favorite thing was Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk. That I’ve loved that thing since high school. My two favorite pieces of art when I was a kid were Broken Obelisk and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which I finally got to visit a few years ago.
(Sorry for the not-full-width picture, that’s the only one I have handy from a 1995-or-so visit.)
(God, that was a great day. I was stuck at that awful Summit tech hipster ski resort thing and just not enjoying myself, so I borrowed my coworker’s rented Range Rover, and drove, alone, over to Golden Spike, which I had never seen, then through a bunch of cattle ranch land to Spiral Jetty, on a random weekday, no one there. Just amazing. Amazing).
Anyway, then Felix said “wait is that the original location of Broken Obelisk? It’s not site-specific, is it?” And I knew, of course, that there is another one at the MOMA. And I dimly remembered from my fevered Barnett Newman fan days that there may have been one or two more.
But I hadn’t actually investigated this topic since the internet had been a thing. And… man I just love it when that happens. Like when Emma and I were first dating, and we both had rudimentary smart phones (I think I still had my beloved Sidekick, or maybe an iPhone 1), and we could settle arguments by Googling things. Emma often jokes that that made our relationship possible. It was a heady time. All of the things your parents, friends, television or teachers taught you, you could now look up, double check, update your knowledge. It turned out that about half of what I knew was wrong! Circumstances had changed since I learned it, or I had mistaken hyperbole for fact when first learning it, or I was lied to, or urban myths made their way into fake facts. It was great, back when the internet helped you debunk facts rather than the way it is now — did you know that 12 people are responsible for 60% of all anti-vax propaganda on social media and while they have been banned from many platforms, all of them are still active on Facebook? Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not but Jen Psaki says it is and I generally still trust her.
BUT, back to Broken Obelisk. It turns out I was sort-of right and so was Felix. Broken Obeleisk was not site-specific to Rothko Chapel. They were first placed in DC, at the Corcoran (at the height of the Civil Rights movement, near the Washington Monument) and in front of the Seagram building. Those two were taken back to the foundry, just as the third one was being finished, and they were all together for the first time. Then one was sent to the Rothko Chapel (people think it’s the DC one but no one’s sure), one sent to the MOMA (the new one) and one to University of Washington (the Seagram building one, but, again, not sure). A fourth one was made much later and is now at Storm King.
But more generally, yesterday I got to enjoy that increasingly-rare (fuck it I am all-in on the hyphenated ly-word construct, it just makes sense and is responsible for most people’s confusion about hyphens in general, it’s a dumb exception and I’m not gonna be bound by your rules anymorree man, this is the way I live now just accept it no I am not embarrassed and yes I am acting my age) experience. That is, the experience of looking something up, that you once knew a lot about, on the internet for the first time. It’s just so rewarding. You knew everything — or a lot — about a topic thirty years ago but, surprise, there has been a ton of new research about that topic since then, or research made more accessible. And now you just learn a ton more. And it’s just so great.
I had a long dream last night about Civilization VI. I was playing in this “online evaluation by the experts” thing where I play a diety game and Potato McWhiskey and Sir Ducksalot and The Game Mechanic all observe me playing, and then they give a critique. And the whole thing was livestreamed. And I did okay. It was a Kupe game and I am a little weak on Kupe games. And when I was done, I got to answer questions from the audience. And they were like “wow you’re pretty good how long have you played” and I was, sheepishly, like, “uhh… well, I have been playing Civilization for thirty years, and I have about 6,000 hours in Civ VI,” knowing full-well, thanks to a Potato livestream I was watching the other day, that most of the people watching and critiquing weren’t even alive when Civ I came out.
And Sir Ducks and TGM didn’t say anything, but Potato gave a very robust, and accurate-in-the-real-world critique of my playing style. “Yeah, you’re really good, I think you could beat me once in a while. I can see your weaknesses, though, you don’t make use of great generals enough, you are too into Sim City-ing, you don’t plan your districts efficiently enough, you should make more use of pins, and you’re too lazy about your policy cards.” And he is totally right! That is exactly how good I am. I could beat him once in a while, but not very often. Maybe once every five to seven games.
And then, suddenly, I was working as a floor cleaner at Fred Meyer.
Jane and I have taken to eating our breakfast together, bite by bite. Like we sit there and each take a bite and smile and laugh. It is very labor-intensive, in the sense that I can’t read or anything while doing it, but it keeps her engaged and she likes it and it is very fun. I tried to get her to do it with Mommy — er, excuse me, Emma — at lunch but she was not having it. Breakfast lives in a separate world from the rest of the day. She won’t do “Fingers and Circles” — the very thorough routine I taught her for wiping up her hands and face — after any other meal as well.
There’s a new bug on my computer were the process corespotlighthd takes up like, literally, 10,000% of my CPU processing power for a good 10-15 seconds and freezes up my whole computer. Seems to be a known bug and you can just kill it, but, wtf, man. Emma’s having Kernal panics too. Feels like maybe both computers need a clean install, but it’s only been, like, eight months? That feels too soon.
I wish they’d hurry up with the M1 Mac Pros.
Hrm well I think I’ve run my course today. I still can’t see a bloomberg.com article in Safari. Joan Robinson needs a biopic.
Let’s do a mix. Which has two Dawn Richards songs on it, which I just noticed, but it’s too late, there’s no going back now maaaan. This smooooth mix isn’t quite as 70’s cheesy as previous ones, a bit more modern take on smooooth, Neil Diamon excepted, because I Just love that song.
Okay, well, talk to you Monday. Unless you listen to my podcast. Which I am going to go record right now. Because it’s a day of talking and writing about myself, I guess. A friend asked me about therapy and whether writing was my therapy and I was like “Yes.” I’ve had therapists, but they just sit there and have me talk at them anyway, and it feels like I can emulate a therapist by writing and imagining what they’d say. I am probably wrong, having a therapist might be better, but this seems good enough. Also it took up so much time getting there and coming home. Maybe it’ll be easier now with Talkspace or something like that.
Anyway. Have a lovely Friday, have a lovely weekend!