Good morning. Hello. How are you? #447
HVAC nope, Netflix nope, Clubhouse nope, Twitter nope, Inflation theories nope, Spearfishing nope, explaining sounds to Jane yep.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? What is it? Thursday? Okay. The big thing here is I have to remember to get my blood drawn tomorrow morning before I eat breakfast. That is, assuming Janet takes Jane for the night. I want that blood draw. I am going to be a Wegovy guinea pig. Fuck it. Why not. Or at least, I’m gonna try and get the insurance company to pay for it. I may do it even if they don’t pay for it. We’ll worry about that later.
Emma is waking up in sixteen minutes, which is an unprecedented event. The HVAC peeps are coming to replace some part of the upstairs unit. If you had told me how much work HVAC units needed when you bought a house… well, I probably still would have done it, but my god it’s like we’re on a first-name basis with these people. And it’s not because our system is particularly defective or anything. They just… break. Everything in a house breaks. All the fucking time. When we first moved in, Emma once asked me in exasperation if there was a startup that was like a super for houses, and I had to say no, but here it is six years later and I would still totally pay for such a thing. The business model would be a failure, of course, but wouldn’t it be nice as a consumer?
I just want to throw my chips down with this Wedbush analyst here who thinks that it is by no means a sure bet that Netflix will succeed in this new games initiative. Team Michael Pachter all the way (aside from, you know analysts and finance in general, and I don’t really know that guy, he was fine as a client but don’t take this as an endorsement sort of way that you do these days because you don’t want to accidentally endorse an abuser or something):
“While Netflix commented that it will initially focus on mobile games, we question whether the company has any idea how difficult the mobile games business has become,” he wrote. “The business graveyard is littered with the corpses of content companies that have failed at making mobile games, with Disney the most prominent failure. Even video game publishers like Activision, EA, Take-Two, Ubisoft and Nintendo have tried for years to create compelling mobile content, and each has had lasting success only through acquisition.
“If the company creates mobile games, it is unlikely to create more than a handful per year in the context of over 40,000 new mobile games produced each year,” he said. “Few of the 3.5 billion mobile gamers in the world will add a subscription to Netflix in order to access its 2 to 3 new games each year.
“To the best of our knowledge, only Sony, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have made any progress in streaming games, with Sony acquiring two companies (Gaikai and OnLive) that cumulatively spent over $1 billion trying (and failing) and with Microsoft, Google and Amazon the three leading cloud service providers in the world,” Pachter noted.
It does feel like the only real way to grow in mobile gaming is to buy pre-existing studios, with solid teams with a history of working together and delivering, and then leaving them alone. It’ll be real interesting if Netflix thinks it can, like, make their own games or studio.
Just wanna make sure I get that down for the historical record. There’s this article going around this morning about Clubhouse and how big of a failure it is and how no one uses it and how we were all duped and I’m like “Not me, not super smart me, I was not duped, no siree I knew all along Clubhouse had no longevity where, I ask, is my pony.” I want my pony.
I even tweeted about my Netflix gaming skepticism, albeit in a single direction:
I’ve since read they plan on starting their gaming initiative only on mobile, in-app, not on set-top boxes. I should be excited about this, as a purveyer of advertising technologies to mobile gaming companies, but, then, Netflix is pretty advertising-averse, which is a very hard position to take in the mobile gaming industry. Though I guess most everyone already has a Netflix subscription so who knows maybe it’ll be fun. Free lives and extra levels for everyone!
Then again, this is why I don’t tweet very much anymore. I try to be positive on Twitter, but it is so hard. Twitter would be so much easier if I just let my id run wild. My Twitter would basically be nothing but quote tweets with the comment “Nope.” added to each one of them. Nope to everything. Big nope. Let’s just take a look at my Twitter feed right now:
Nope:
Nope:
Nope:
Okay this one seems all right:
Three nopes out of four tweets. Seems about right. Now watch. I’ll go check out this Goon Sax band and I’ll love them and I’ll think “Well, I have Twitter to thank for them” and I’ll stay on twitter. Which is really true I have discovered a lot of great music on Twitter, I’ll give it that. Okay lemme add that album to my “to investigate” playlist. Only about 14 hours left of old music in that queue. Almost got it cleared out. Happy to start listening to new music again. Actually, I am right now, because there was an album in there — Bliss Land by Hattie Cooke — that I had missed and I had never listened to. It’s good. Dark and synthy. Recommended.
Speaking of Twitter their ex CEO’s bathroom leaked in SoHo and ruined the life’s work of an esteemed artist and doesn’t want to pay for it, so that is cool too.
Remember how I said Paul Ford was so smart? Look! AOC agrees with me!
Actually, just thinking about it now, I wonder how AOC got the AOC Twitter handle? Was she an early adopter? Hrm, she joined April 2010. Wow. Okay, maybe three-letter handles were still available back then. That seems… possible? I am impressed. That’s earlier than my two-letter Twitter handle, that i never use thanks to hackers, but, then, I got that through less-than-open means (thank you, friends who used to work at Twitter back when the rules were looser about such things). Maybe AOC had a friend who worked at Twitter too.
I am less impressed with her recent iffy explanations about inflation. I think she is probably, sort of right about it, but she is injecting a bit more confidence into the situation than feels warranted. Fact of the matter is, no one really knows.
I feel like the more honest answer is to say “it’s probably fine, but it’s worth the risk to keep spending and it’ll be come more obvious later if we’re wrong and in any case, the markets seem to mostly agree with this analysis.” But, then, I am not a politician or a pundit I’m just a guy who has a writing disorder, who couldn’t elected to save his life. I remember in high school social studies class they made us watch that Robert Redford election film The Candidate and at the beginning when he first starts running, he just tells the truth when the press asks him things, but then his handlers tell him he has to be more polished, so he gets more polished, and he eventually wins and it’s a media critique, etc. etc. and I just thought “welp, no point doing that job if you can’t just tell the truth,” and kinda tuned out after that. AOC, who also went to my college and has my exact major and concentration within the major, does not seem to have tuned out at that point. I wonder if she had Chuck Alkire for social studies. I liked that guy, he was cool. I have a picture of him somewhere.
Oh hey here’s a fun picture of young Rick that showed up on one of my desktops yesterday. I think this is at Lost Lake? Maybe Harding. One of those Cub Scout/Webelos/Boy Scouts camps I went to before I discovered UAF Summer Fine Arts Camp and stopped being so manly.
Have you ever tried spearfishing? It sucks. The water is super cold. You have to stand there super still, and you have try and stab a living thing with a spear. I, for one, was not into such things. Also, I believe that is a black Member’s Only jacked draped over my backpack. Those jeans are kinda sweet though.
Still no PS 5 luck over here. GameStop is taunting me for it now:
Jane’s really into sounds now. Like the sounds the cats make, the sounds birds make, planes make, but especially the sounds that the house makes. All those sounds you’ve learned to tune out because they don’t signify anything wrong. AC units turning on and off. Floors creaking. She keeps asking “what’s that sound,” and I then endeavor to explain heat expansion in floorboards to her in language she can understand, which is super fun and totally why I wanted to have a kid and I am so into it. She pointed out one sound, though, that I actually didn’t know what it was, I just knew it was fine. I had to ask Emma. It was the chest freezer in the garage. I stand by that purchase that was a good pandemic purchase I am very happy to own a chest freezer. I wonder what the wait time is on chest freezers now. Are they still backordered? Let’s check. Two weeks. Not too bad! Nature is healing joke! For now. Until things fall apart again in the winter.
Mix time! Moody and quiet mix. Lots of newish stuff, except for that amazing Low song. Not that there aren’t new amazing new Low songs. Man, these two new Low songs are just so insane I cannot wait for this album. I talked about it a lot, a year or so ago, but Liar, Flower is Katie Jane Gartside from Daisy Chainsaw’s most recent project (thank you for alerting me to this, Y Mike, in the depths of the pandemic) and it is just great. And thank you Bill for hipping me to Raised by Swans. Man I sure do like this big musical collaboration we’ve had going on over the last year. It is great. I think Nicky hipped me to Wau Wau Collectif. Conrad to John Grant. I think. Memory is hazy.
Okay! HVAC people are here, poor Emma is moping around about being awake, and Jane is already awake so I suppose maybe I’ll go get her. Talk to you guys tomorrow!
also: i love that outdoorsy tiny rick
After a mere two months, I think Annie and I would be all-in on a home maintenance service. We've only had to do a few simple things but the amount of research and back and forth just for basic handyman, HVAC inspection and appliance repair has driven me crazy.
And every time I use something like handy.com, I feel like I'm likely giving a lot of money to a big tech company at the expense of the awesome person actually doing the work.