Good morning. Hello. How are you? #471
Important LBJ Ashtray update. Pronoia-adjacent. Aborted panic spirals. OnlyFans. Ghost Guns.
Good morning, hello, etc. etc. How goes it how is your Wednesday. It is day 13 of no nicotine. I am on Sparks album number 21, Exotic Creatures of the Deep. Might be getting a little tired of Sparks after four straight days of nothing but Sparks, not going to lie. I successfully got through my board meeting yesterday. There was a point i was getting a little punchy and one of the directors asked if everything was okay in my life and I had to admit I was off nicotine for the first time in 20+ years and, this guy having been through my vape phase and lozenge phase, gave a chuckle, but was also very supportive. The plants are hot but doing okay. Jane had some good poops and only tested her boundaries by saying a slightly malevolent “no” once. The reel feel was 106°F with a zero percent chance of rain but it rained anyway. Kari is visibly pregnant on Mythbusters, we are now on season seven. They just did the double-dipping episode — turns out Double Dipping is fine. I watched about 60% of Contact, which I am thinking I only ever saw once in a theater and remembered about fifteen minutes of the whole astonshingly long film. If you had told me Matthew Mcconaughey was in it I would have called you a liar. Also I am just now learning how impossible it is to spell Matthew Mcconaughey’s last name. What is that. Jena Malone is in Contact too did you know that? Jena Malone is such a good actress she deserves more prominent roles.
Programming update: So, it turns out that while you cannot search Caro’s LBJ books in the Kindle app on the Mac or in the browser, you can search them in the Kindle app on iOS. Man, a lotta references to ashtrays in the LBJ Caro books. LBJ smoked a lot. Had a little cigarette shooter where he shot his cigarette butts at people. I forgot that part. Anyway, here is what it says about the LBJ Ranch ashtray:
…and sent aides hurrying off to return with large cartons containing souvenir ashtrays bearing a map of Texas with the ranch’s location indicated by a star,
It’s also from book three — Master of the Senate — and not book four. Okay. So it seems I incorrectly inferred that an ashtray that bears a map of Texas is shaped like Texas. So, given that the ashtray that I keep finding on eBay has a map on it, and on that map, the LBJ ranch is marked with a star, I am supposing that this is, in fact, the ashtray in question. I would submit, however, that this ashtray depicts a map of the Texas Hill Country, not Texas, and also contains a small image of Texas in the corner. Now, that “image of Texas” is a shape of the state, and I suppose we can call an image of a state a “map” even if the map bears absolutely no information on it. But then again, there are two stars on the ashtray – one on the map of the Hill Country and one inside the image of Texas. I think we’re getting to semantics here, and we can probably give Caro a pass. I mean, it’s not like this guy has the ability to write a 4,000 page biography here, we gotta focus on brevity, right? Oh wait.
In any case, this example is going to be on your journalism and metaphysics exams, so please don’t forget it.
I’m in kind of a funk this morning. Board meeting went well, but I had a work setback late last night, at an hour I absolutely should not have looked at my email or Slack, and it caused me to get my mind racing on solutions and tactics and whatnot, and I couldn’t sleep, stayed up too late. I wanted desperately to have a nice drink to settle down, but given I had that whiskey the night before, I didn’t really think that was a good idea. I’ve been reading all the short books in my immense reading pile of physical books in my bedroom. Ha. That is an exaggeration there are probably 100 books in my bedroom reading pile — er, piles, there are four of them — and I’ve read three so far. But in any case, I picked up another one, and I started reading it, Cass Sunstein’s book about Star Wars, which I do not remember buying or owning, nor did I even remember that famed economist, legal scholar, white house advisor (and lesser husband to the majestic Samantha Powers) Cass Sunstein even wrote a book about Star Wars. It’s not bad. I must admit, I’m kind of jealous that dude can get a book like that published. Anyway, after two and a half hours, I managed to pass out. And, now, I am fucking exhausted.
I definitely got a little close there to a panic spiral of, like, negative thoughts that are not particularly healthy, where you decide to take your panic about this one specific event and apply it to your entire life, like oh wait what if everything is going wrong what if I am a failure. This is never good. It does no good to think that way. If god herself came down and said “you are a failure, you will always be a failure” (wow what an asshole, god), you are still vastly better off assuming you will never fail, assuming everything you do will work out, because even if it’s just one time out of a thousand, that attitude will, occasionally, manifest itself into something positive. Whatever, I don’t want to get into hippy dippy land here, and I’m not, like, a believer in that, what was it called, pronoia. Maybe pronoia-adjacent. Pronoia-sympathetic. Practical-Pronoia-Pretending. Something like that. It’s not true but it’s better to assume it is.
It was an unpleasant night, is what I’m saying. Hopefully I can shake it off today.
We got our property tax bill. It was 42% higher than last year. During the pandemic. The rate did not go up but they went out and did a reassessment of every property in the county. People were ripshit about this, saying they should have waited, which is pretty funny since the same people complaining about how they should have waited b because pandemic seem to be the same people complaining that there’s not really a pandemic. Or something. That’s probably not true but it felt like it. Ours went up a lot, which is weird. Like, yeah, okay, in the six years we’ve owned this property we have done a lot of work on it, we build a whole second house, we redid a previously unfinished basement into a nice situation, we added solar and batteries. But the thing is, the county knew all of that already? Like every one of those projects had permits that we filed with the county. Why didn’t they already know this and factor it in? Weird.
The other weird thing is, our assessment is frighteningly accurate. Like back last year during the midst of the recession we did a refinance because yeah. And as part of that we had to get one of those pandemic walkaround appraisals, and that guy botched it. It came in so low, and in that situation, a low appraisal was not in our interest, so I, like, pushed back, gave the guy a bunch of pictures, a list of improvements, and he re-did the appraisal. The new appraisal was right in-line with the County’s re-assessment, done maybe four months later. But they figured all this out from walking around the property that the first one could not. Weird.
I want to find some grounds to complain here, but I can’t. It’s shockingly dead-on, the assessment. And they didn’t raise the rates — I thought they did, but I was wrong. Also I’m one of those idiots who does not fold his property tax into his monthly mortgage payments because, you know, get your laws off my body or something. Whoops.
I would like to make a propsosal that everyone have a COVID letter, like a Christmas letter. Why didn’t we make this a thing? It seems so obvious, in retrospect. We all should have 2-3 page letters just sitting handy on our desktop that we could attach to every email from an old friend catching each other up. I just had a nice email exchange with an old friend I hadn’t heard from through the entire pandemic, and we caught up on everything we’ve both been doing since 2019 and it was quite nice, but i feel like I coulda done a better job filling him in and vice versa, if we had pre-prepared letters on our desktop, How I Spent my Pandemic. Make them more heartfelt and informative than just the 3-4 lines we are assigning to this heady topic in our emails. God I would love that so much. Can we make it a thing?
I really want to redo our master bathroom. I wish I had had this thought last April or so, though I suppose construction material pricing would have made that prohibitive. It seems… impossible to redo your own bathroom, but also completely possible? Like I already know how to replace a toilet, do walls, replace a sink. Tiling is the one thing I’ve never done, I was watching some tiling tutorials on YouTube this week and it looks difficult and kinda tedious but not impossible? I suspect I will not actually personally redo our master bathroom because the ideal re-working of our master bathroom involves some pretty serious pluming and wall demo and who knows whats a load-bearing wall but I really kind of want to. Maybe I should start with a smaller bathroom. My old friend Tara posted an instagram photo of her redone bathroom (I’m pretty sure she did it herself?) a few weeks ago and it looked so good. Our bathrooms look dumb we should redo them.
So Axios has done another update on OnlyFans, talking to a bunch of sex workers about the situation. This is just so insane. It seems like now most OnlyFans workers are moving to two new sites called LoyalFans (which seems legit-ish) and Fansly (which seems kinda sketchy and no one seems to know who owns it). This is not going to end well at all. I hate myself for saying this, and it would be less than ideal, but one thing that would work, I suspect, if is Amazon let them all move to Twitch, since, yeah, imagine MasterCard trying to tell Amazon what to do lol. But beyond that, like, what’s the point of all of this? MasterCard will come after these companies eventually. They will either manage to implement all of MasterCard’s kind of insane policies, in which case why didn’t OnlyFans, or they will not, in which case, what are these people supposed to do, and where does this end? They’re just trying to make a living here, god, this really is an incredibly stupid world we live in that things like this, injustices like this, just happen every day to whole groups of people and nothing ever gets done about them without some giant outcry and so far I can’t say I’ve herd from a whole lot of members of congress trying to tell MasterCard to cool it.
Depressing.
Wanna know something else depressing? Ghost Guns! Like, I remember, like, twenty years ago, when I was a big Wired reader — remember when that magazine was important and a must-read? God I read the whole issue cover-to-cover back then, probably even into the 21st century. Anyway, I remember when this whole issue started to burst onto the national consciousness. The ATF flipped their lid. And then there was that whole period about ten years ago with Defense Distributed and the feds suing them, and them just releasing the CAD files, and thinking “wow, yeah, that’s not going to end well,” but also “wow the feds are going to shut those guys down so fast.” But they did not shut them down so fast, they’re still in business, those files are still out there, and now ghost guns are everywhere and it’s just as bad as everyone feared! I mean this is not super good! What a country.
It’s fascinating how the sort-of compromise, middle-ground positions the republicans used to take are just out the window now. Nowadays republicans don’t see any need for serial numbers on guns. Nowadays not a single Republican house member votes for the John Lewis voting rights act, a subset of our older voting rights act, with less teeth, than the one they all used to vote for! It’s like a mask is off, they know now it won’t matter, they’ve gerrymandered themselves into safety, they’re not even trying to get new voters through moderation anymore, just through propaganda. It really is something.
Okay okay. I am going to stop. I will try and stay functional today.
Lorde record came in the mail. It sure is a nice piece of capitalist detritus. Has a giant poster and an autographed 12x12 card. 180 gram vinyl, too. Bonus picture disc 7” in a pocket in a heavy-duty gatefold sleeve where the photo on the 7” lines up with the photo on the sleeve and its pocket. Verry nice. Good job, Lorde. I don’t regret buying this. Plus a mashup between Faith and Loaded is a great idea. Even George Michael’s estate and Bobby Gillespie think so!
God I am tired.
Let’s do a mix. Bit behind on making these what with not listening to anything but Sparks for five days now. Some days I think I should just stop making these mixes. They’re so much work. Why do I put so much work into this it really is ridiculous. Like ten people listen to them it’s absurd. Wait actually I don’t know this do I? You can’t tell how many people have listened to one of your mixes in Spotify, can you? Just how many likes? Oh god don’t tell me I don’t want to know I’ll just pretend a million people are listening to them. Like The Game Mechanic once said – he streamed for almost a year with less than 10 viewers. Gotta just keep going, acting like you have a giant audience.
Anyway. Moody and Quiet playlist today. Fits my mood. SAD. Get it?
Not to end this on a schmaltzy note, but I was just thinking “what would make me feel better today” and realized the answer was that in a few minutes I get to get Jane out of bed and give her a hug. So that is just lovely.
Have a good Wednesday.
i listen to your mixes! usually after i’ve finished reading. and while i’ve “liked” some i definitely have listened to MANY more than i have liked. i use the like to bookmark a playlist for later listening 😊
also congratulations on nearly 2 weeks of being nicotine free! after i stopped smoking, i transitioned to the patch and wore that for far longer than is recommended and then 2 years ago, in a moment of utter stupidity, i switched to a juul. ugh. you’re giving me hope that i can lose the juul and just live life without nicotine!