Good morning. Hello. How are you? #469
Gardening, sleeping, capitalism sickness, Sparks, OnlyFans payments processing, Google trying to buy Epic hahahaha, The Trade Journal Cooperative, John Lewis' March and Run
Good morning! Hello there. How are you? I am okay. A bit out of sorts. Been having some sleeping issues. Yesterday I accidentally slept till 10 AM. Like, I forgot to plug my phone in, and the battery ran out, because I have all the power management settings turned off and my screen is set to stay on unless I manually lock it, and apparently I forgot to do that too, and the alarm didn’t go off, and it was a Sunday morning, where I allow myself to usually sleep in, so my brain didn’t think it was weird I was sleeping in. Comical confluence of errors. I ran upstairs to get Jane, and she was fine, she was awake, but not freaking out. I came in, and I hadn’t put my hair up yet, and she said “oh! Daddy looks cute today!” So, that was nice. But of course since I slept so late yesterday — ten and a half hours — I couldn’t fall asleep last night, didn’t fall asleep till nearly 2, got five hours. Lovely. Like the old days. Whatever. No fear. I can handle it. What day is it what’s going on. Okay yes. Monday. Right. No meetings. It’s going to rain hopefully. Happy plants. It’s 7:32. We have 88 minutes before Jane wakes up. Okay. I am functioning. Right.
Day 11 of no nicotine. It is still unpleasant. Maybe a little bit easier. But I feel so proud about making the progress. I mean, you know, we need accomplishments in life. God I hope I don’t mess this up.
Programming note: Thank you to Julie who informed me that Stars of the Lid had updated their site and there were now XXL shirts in stock. I got one. I am so excited. Yay band tee shirts. It really warms my heart how many of you still wear band tee shirts.
How was your weekend? Mine was okay. Mostly uneventful. Did some gardening. Planted some more soybeans. Checked on the compost. It is doing lovely. Just lovely compost. Looking forward to fall where I vacuum up a ton of leaves again to make more leaf mould compost. Oh! I got stung by a bee. That sucked. I was working on trellising for the new cucumbers, because they’re really going gangbusters, just fanstastic. And I opened one of my outdoor tool chests and immediately got stung. Not sure if they’re growing a hive in that chest or what. I was blinded and distracted by three dragonflies who were really having a go at me at the same times. If dragonflies stung I would assume I got stung by a dragonfly. Anyway, not a lot of “action” during gardening, but my gardening video this week is very cute for the amount of Jane that it has in it:
I’m feeling pretty good about the garden now. I’m definitely going to get enough peppers to stock up for the winter, which was my primary objective. For a while there, I wasn’t sure that was going to happen. But we’re looking good now. Fall cucumbers look great. Even my beleaguered tomatoes are at least producing enough tomatoes for our Saturday salad. I mean, I’m not gonna have enough to can or anything this year but at least they’re producing the bare minimum. One weird thing is mu luffa plants are giant but not producing any luffas so I don’t know what is up with that.
But the best thing is I’ve learned a lot, and I feel good about next summer. I should even be able to get my drip installed, which is good since next summer/spring I envision a 2-3 week trip up to New England: gotta go see all the Boston and Portland and Providence and Western MA friends and finally bring my rock to Andy’s grave. It’s still sitting here on my desk, awaiting its journey. Gotta figure out the logistics of the trip, though, in tandem with the garden. It is something to think about. Working on it.
I harvested a bunch of the fennel and some of the baby celery and made a fennel, celery, apple and parmesan salad and it was very yummy. Just tasted like freshness:
The other big thing I got done this weekend is I got one of those cable-run holes done from a wall-mounted, powered screen, down to the floor so that you don’t have the unsightly cable showing. This was for my Electric Objects EO-1, which I love, and is right inside the door of my studio, But for, mmm, imagonna say three years, the cable has bothered me. Well, I finally got around to fixing it. Go me. With an assist from my wife. Go Wife. It looks so much better.
Saturday I was thinking to myself “well, I don’t love the new Lorde, but I suppose I should own a copy of it, put it next to the other two on the shelf, you know, for completists sake,” and started poking around on Discogs for a copy, and there were, like, six different colored vinyl versions out there now, including one deluxe one, and I’m sort of looking through them all, looking at the photos, looking at the different colors of vinyl, and of course in the end I decide I have to have the most deluxe one, and I’m sitting there just sort of staring, locked in this infinite loop: “this is dumb you don’t even like this record,” and then “but if you’re gonna get it you should get a really nice copy” and I just sat there stuck in that loop for, like, ten minutes, and eventually I knew there was no way out of the loop other than to just buy the stupid record, because otherwise it would keep festering at me for days. And so I bought it, and I immediately hated myself for it. This is a sickness, this is capitalism running through your veins, you don’t need these stupid plastic platters, just stop, just stop. I really do need to stop. It’s absurd. I should just sell them all. But I love them so. And simultaneously I have been thinking it would be fun to try and obtain vinyl copies of all 25 Sparks records, and my brain saw no conflict whatsoever between holding both of these lines of thinking at the same time. Ridiculous.
Speaking of Sparks, I finally got around to watching The Sparks Brothers this weekend and it was great. I do love it when big budget directors make documentaries because they have so much money they can do all sorts of wacky things with their documentaries like special effects and puppet shows and whatnot and get the biggest stars to appear in them. This was the second documentary this month I saw in which Gillian and Stephen from New Order appeared, and if they aren’t the biggest stars well then who is. Anyway, it’s as great a movie as everyone says, and now I am methodicaly listening to every Sparks album, more or less in order. Ima gonna say that i have heard about… eight of them before this? Number 1 In Heaven, of course, and all the new ones since, let’s say, Balls. I think I listened to Music That You Can Dance To once as well. But in any case, as someone who has listened to nine different Sparks albums and seen them live, I was shocked at how little I knew about the band. I legit thought they were German. Or Dutch. Or something. Kind of like Yello. I lumped them in my brain with Yello. I had no idea they’d been around so long. I had no idea of their 70’s fame. If you had asked me I would have guessed Number 1 in Heaven was their debut album.
What I really aspire to be is a random dude that documentary filmmakers really want in their documentary, and you, the viewer, is not really sure why that person is in the documentary, because they don’t really have anything to do with the subject’s life, do they? And you’re pretty sure they’re in it just because of the perfect mixture of semi-fame and deep, deep fandom of the subject of the documentary. Like the guy from Visage or Amy Sherman Palladino being in the Sparks documentary, or David J in the Wax Trax documentary. There’s a real art to it. Why, I ask, was Patton Oswalt in the Sparks documentary? Because he’s a fan? Weeird.
I watched a few other movies, too. I think I’m back on movies. For a good long while it was like pulling teeth to get me to watch a movie, but now I’ve been watching 2-3 a week. I think the secret is to just watch 30-40 minutes of it, whatever I can fit in at the time, and not worry about trying to watch it all in one go. I’m currently watching The Green Knight and I can tell I would love sitting through it in the theater, taking all of its weirdness in in one go, but that’s just not in the cards for me these days, so I am trying to stop it at interesting cliffhanger points and watching it like a Netflix serial. It is kind of working. It definitely works better for documentaries, though, which is maybe one reason I’ve been watching so many of those lately.
So Axios is now saying that the OnlyFans debacle is 100% at the instigation of the payment processors, specifically MasterCard, who were making OnlyFans adhere to very strict new rules around KYC (know your customers) — which is reasonable — and content moderation — which sounds reasonable but was absurdly impractical in reality. Another article (that I can’t find at the moment) says that Mastercard insisted that OnlyFans also moderate every livestream which is just… insanity. Axios also points out that OnlyFans is still telling its users that everything is going to be fine, and it is definitely not going to be fine, which is problematic as this “means that some of the creators who should be making contingency plans aren't doing so, choosing to believe media reports from Axios and elsewhere are ‘fake news.’” Fantastic.
This is bad. It’s only MasterCard right now, but it will be others eventually. Someone needs to end this gridlock. Sex Workers are humans, are workers, are participating members of society, and doing this on OnlyFans is about as safe as it can get for them. Banning payment for legal services is hugely problematic, as is the monopoly power these payment processors have over our society, as is driving sex workers into dark web payment options, where fraud, predatory interest rates, insane transaction fees, and full-scale theft are serious risks.
This is without talking about how difficult it is for sex workers to even have a bank account.
I did a bunch of research around this a year or two ago. The industry has changed somewhat since then — there’s been a new round of clampdown on PornHub specifically, that isn’t letting up even as PH institutes most of the changes asked for. This round has been carried out mostly by the credit card companies, but there are other players in the ecosystem that are just as gunshy, from the gateways to the banks. A wholesale rebuilding of the system is not impossible, but it is labor and revenue intensive and involves serious regulatory hurdles that would take time and money. MindGeek (Pornhub’s parent company) and OnlyFans wouldn’t be able to pull it off, since they’re not American. But someone needs to do this.
More details are coming out about Google’s insane, batshit consideration of buying Epic Games while Epic was suing them. I mean this is just fantastic. And, okay, it was only something they thought about, so I guess good for them realizing that buying a company to shut it up, all while anti-big-tech sentiment was growing in the country, and more and more politicians were railing against your monopoly power, maybe wasn’t the smartest idea. I just love that, though. Like I feel like such a big rich asshole buying the deluxe version of the Lorde album but Google’s all like “what if we just spend $10 billion to make this problem go away?” Fantastic. Doing that would definitely prove that you’re not a monopolist like the suit claimed.
The new edition of the Trade Journal Cooperative came in this week and it was just great. Tim’s editor letter made my day. Tim tells the story of the Boyko family and their family-run media empire that publishes the National Fitness Trade Journal, other publications and runs several bodybuilding competitions. Love a good family-run company, especially a media empire. I mean, I’m sure they’re all Republicans but it still warms the heart. If you don’t subscribe to the Trade Journal Co-Op I strongly recommend it. Subscribe now to get the fall edition. You can use the affiliate code GMHHAY. Just kidding, I don’t have an affiliate code I am just frontin’. Like those fake-it-till-you-make it Tok Tok influencers who aspirationally mark posts as Sponsored to look more popular than they are.
Finished the John Lewis comics. Finished March book two and three, and Run book one. Ready for more. Hugely inspirational figure and great format, though it got a little bit too into the weeds of internecine politics between Lewis and Stokely Carmichael or between the SNCC and the NAACP and whatnot. Still. Strong recommend. The slipcase box set of March is cheap on Amazon. They’re on Comixology too!
Okay let’s do a mix! Justa mix. Old and new. Some old that was just discovered. Some old that just popped into my head: the other day I just woke up with “I’m From Further North than You,” in my head, because, well, I am. Ha. No. I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about the “counting all the stars, was just happy to be there” line. It’s a great song. A real late-period Weddoes gem. The guy from MAN ON MAN was in the Sparks documentary, so that’s a nice bit of synchronicity and coincidence. And I recently gave the The Secret of My Success soundtrack a spin for the first time since I lost the cassette in 1988 or so, and it really hit all of the right buttons.
Okay! New week! We can do it! Give me your worst. Oh god, please don’t, I’m sorry I said that I didn’t mean it please just make it an uneventful boring week please please.
good job on day 11—closer to two weeks than to one!