Good morning! Hello! How’s it hanging? What’s new? Happy Friday. I am listening to Live this morning, to go with my Blind Melon thing yesterday. I like Live, I gotta admit. Turns out Throwing Copper is a good album. I pretended I didn’t like them back in the day, but I did. When I saw them, Ed Kowalczyk was all super intense and emo and serious. During a breakdown in a song, he was like “Do you feel it? You gotta feel it. Otherwise it’s just a rock concert,.” Which, of course, is exactly what it was. I mean, the guy was just trying to connect with his audience, give him a break. But I decided that was the most hilarious thing and I mimicked him and mocked that for, like, a decade. Not cool.
Also checked out Pom Pom Squad, who were great, and listened to another Sonny Sharrock album: Ask The Ages. Today I gotta check out the Preoccupations and Cathy Jain. Big day.
In one more music-related news item, I purchased a ticket to a rock concert scheduled for December 1 in New York City. That was probably ambitious. I am a COVID pessimist. But I needed this act of optimism in my life and I feel good about it. I probably should have bought two tickets, but figured if I do make it I’ll probably be bawling half the time and it was best to do that alone.
We’re on day eight of no nicotine which means I have to stop telling you every day and only tell you once a week now. But it helps me to tell you. It is a dilemma.
Thank you for all your reassuring words about band t-shirts. I feel much better. So much better that I bought a band t-shirt yesterday. From Freezepop. Consider picking one up. I actually tried to buy a second band t-shirt yesterday, from the band Stars of the Lid, who have new merch and I want one of those t-shirts so bad but they don’t make 2XLs and I’m long past aspirationally buying XLs. But, man. Look at this thing I want this thing so bad:
Sigh. Swoon.
Also Adam from Stars of the Lid says they might have new music out by December. I mean oh my god what if they tour again.
Jane is at Grammy’s this morning and I ought to take this opportunity with a free morning to, like, oh, god, I don’t know, go somewhere or something but what is the point going places is overrated this is my life now just between these walls there is no world beyond I am in a vessel in space I am silent running.
I failed to get a PS5 again (wow this is turning out to be a tedious GMHHAY edition all about capitalism I am sorry). It was from Sony Online. They have a queueing system where you sit in this queue for an hour then you get to go into the store. It’s the third time I’ve done it. The first two times, they ran out of PS5s before I even got through the queue, which, fine I guess. Didn’t make it at my place in line. This time, I got through the queue, into the store, but they were sold out anyway. I mean, what is the point. Also, this whole queue is stupid. There’s a countdown to an onsale, and then when the counter gets to zero, your browser refreshes and you’re in the queue. Seems to me at that very moment, they can tell if you’re gonna make it or not. Okay, well, maybe there will be some cart abandonment or disqualified buyers (1 per customer stuff), but it seems like they could dell most people yes or no right then. Maybe they do. Maybe I’ve never even gotten that far, even though I’m always there at the first possible minute. Who knows. But I’ve been trying this for months now and I never get anywhere.
So OnlyFans is giving up porn. Or not. Sort of. Maybe. It’s not entirely clear.
So much OnlyFans news happened yesterday and it is all so confusing. The morning started with Axios leaking OnlyFans’ pitch deck to VC investors. Apparently their pitch deck didn’t mention porn, but no one mentioned or seemed to realize that they were thinking of getting rid of it. Also it’s not even clear why they’re raising money or need money. They make so much money. Net revenue went from $375 million in 2020 to projected $1.2 billion this year. Free cash flow last year was $150 million. Why do these people need to raise money? Axios said that the founder wants to cash out and the company wants “more legitimacy,” which… sure. Yes. But also OnlyFans is about as wholesome as porn can get, and as much as I’m sure it’d be nice to get a check for, like, a billion dollars, which is like the largest I can imagine a VC round being, 2021 projected cash flow is already a billion dollars, so, wtf?
And then! By the afternoon Bloomberg comes out with its story. No more porn! Or not. Maybe. OnlyFans seems to be drawing a line between “nude photos” and “sexually explicit conduct,” allowing the former and banning the latter. They wrote to one creator and said that nudity was gonna be fine, but they were updating their guidelines to ban things that were illegal, like “nudity in public,” which, umm…
So, okay, I guess good for you for your enlightened porn banning? I just don’t get this. Something else is going on. In the immortal words of Dan Ackroyd in Grosse Pointe Blank: “That punk's either in love with that guy's daughter or he's got a newfound respect for life.” There has to be more to this story. Why don’t they just go public? Why doesn’t the founder just, like, hire a CEO and chill on the beach?
Bloomberg suggests — and this seems to be what everyone’s saying — that the changes are coming from mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers, and, yes, these people are notoriously bad for porn companies. Just awful. Part of it is due to the insane amount of chargebacks in the porn industry, but also there’s just a general sense from the payment industry that they can smell blood in the water with the porn industry and take advantage of it, charging insane, usury rates, and the whole thing should totally be illegal. But of course it’s not because even though OnlyFans is obviously one of the safest approaches to porn we as a society can take, we gotta kill that shit off.
Killing off legitimate payment flows to adult creators is not going to be a good thing in the end.
Crazy. Also, this is crazy:
More than 300 creators earn at least $1 million annually. Around 16,000 creators earn at least $50,000 annually. More than seven million "fans" spend on OnlyFans each month. It has even more users who only consume free content.
I’ve been watching a bunch of demos for a new game, Humankind. It’s a new 4X game that people are saying could be a Civilization-killer. So I’ve been watching good ole Potato McWhiskey do a tutorial/run-through of it the last couple of nights. It’s pretty absurd, I’m basically taking an eight-hour class in how to play a video game. It is hella complex and I feel lost and confused. Is this what it’s like to learn Civ? I don’t know, I’ve been learning Civ iteratively for twenty-five years. I can’t even decide if I want to learn a new 4X game. Like… I play too much Civ VI as it is, do I want to get hooked on another one? I don’t know. I’m not, like, actively looking to get hooked on another bad thing, you know?
The game looks good, though. Lotta clever mechanics that take a genuinely different approach than the CIV series, and I like it. I am tempted. I don’t love the graphics, though, the weird busy terrain and trippy fog-of-war reveal animations. But I might be able to get over that. I don’t know. I don’t know. God what am I doing. This is a terrible idea.
Did you guys know that the Pontiac Silverdome, once the largest stadium in the NFL, the home to the Detroit Lions and Pistons and Express and Mechanix and the Michigan Panthers, host to Super Bowl XVI, Wrestlemania III and Pope John Paul II, is now gone and the land is now an Amazon fulfillment center? I mean, I knew the thing had closed up shop, but I had no idea it was completely demolished and Amazon bought it. Makes sense.
We have a plumber coming today. Got a broken sink. Some toilets might need re-sealing. And I want to get a price estimate on a new spigot out in the yard. But I’m not sure if plumbers do that or landscapers do that it is very confusing. On my YouTubes it seems like there are landscaping companies that handle this stuff, since it requires trenching and stuff, but, like, our landscaping company just seems to, like, mow grass and stuff? I don’t know. I figure at least the plumber will know who I am supposed to ask, or maybe they all have biz dev partnership deals with one another, bring each other in on jobs when there is an opportunity. That seems like it would be the logical thing to do. We will find out I guess.
Let’s do a mix. CLUB MIX. Time to dance. I don’t remember half the songs on this mix I’ve been making it since June I don’t listen to a whole lot of club mix plus they’re weird to make in Spotify because, you know, you really ought to mix a club mix, beat match, do the whole nine yards instead of putting it all on a mix tape with gaps between the songs. Anyway, it’s a fun mix. Have fun.
Okay! Let’s go pretend I’m 12 and have some Lipton noodle soup and cheese and crackers for breakfast because I am not a functional adult or a healthy person and it is Friday and I am quitting nicotine so that’s why I’m gaining weight not because I still eat cheese and crackers for breakfast.
bands*
I think you might enjoy this playlist of band who combine shoegaze, drone and doom elements https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3DgEEGi8Vl3SmTdxRhO9Iy?si=728fe7978a7c475d
I too was too cool for Blind Melon. Haha. It's funny how much music I let play through on the radio now whereas 25 years ago I would have changed the station.