Good morning. Hello. How are you? #473
Andy Shea, Afghanistan, more Apple BS, in defense of Nirvana boy and Windham Hill. Unrelatedly.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? What’s up? What day is it what’s going on here? I am a bit muddled this morning. And running behind by, oh, thirty minutes or so because I just browsed through the Mythbusters prop auction catalog. Some good stuff. Not cheap, though. Not cheap. Gonna have to think on that. Anyway, day 14 without nicotine, two weeks, yay me. Three more failures at getting a PS5 (one just seconds ago!) And I am all done listening to all 27 Sparks albums. No Sparks for me today. Except I started watching Annette last night, which I am not particularly enjoying. I mean, it’s very interesting in a lot of ways but I have a very low tolerance for piggish behaviour in my films these days and don’t especially need an entire film about toxic masculinity in my life. People say the last bit is better, though, and I have about an hour left, so I will finish it. We’ll see.
I went to Walmart yesterday and bought snow peas and carrot shred because the snow peas from Harris Teeter taste like complete ass and I am a failure at growing them in our absurdly hot climate. God I hope we don’t lose snow peas to climate change. I also got a ton more mints because I’m still plowing through these things every time I get a nic fit. Also their insanely reasonably priced, delicious organic grapes are back in season, so that is exciting. But most exciting is that they had the special Walmart edition of the Olivia Rodrigo album. A few weeks ago I actually took the time to fill out the Walmart customer satisfaction survey they send me every week and I told them if they were going to have a vinyl section maybe they should, you know, actually have vinyl in it, and care about it, because it’s been unchanged for months. I don’t know if my complaint was the cause, but for the last two weeks there’s actually been new vinyl and they haven’t just thrown it all in a big lump, it’s actually sorted within its dividers. So now I have in rotation on my phonograph Billie Eilish, Lorde and Olivia Rodrigo and I guess I’m just a teenage girl now, who also happens to listen to Calla and Coil.
Aug reminded me yesterday, via his instagram, that yesterday was the one-year anniversary of Andy’s passing. I am not good with. birthdays and anniversaries. Just yesterday, I had to think for like 10 minutes to remember, exactly, when my own daughter’s birthday is, I couldn’t tell you exactly what year my wife was born, and I have no idea what day my dad passed away last year. I realize given that I am an executive at a nostalgia company that focuses on what happened on this day that is very odd, but that’s the case. Anyway, that is sad. I still think about Andy every day, still miss him every day. I still have this rock sitting on my desk, that I gotta take back to New England to his grave and set down with all of the other rocks. I really thought I would have gotten that done by now, damn this pandemic. Soon, soon. Well, probably not soon. Someday.
Also we still have copy’s of Andy’s book available. If you want one, drop a line.
Damn Afghanistan is a mess. How completely fucked up. This has entered the complexity phase where I don’t pretend to have any answers, I don’t think there are any simple answers, and I know this is probably wrong, but I can’t help but thinking, over and over “we never should have left.” Of course that is probably an indefensible position and I am by no means an expert, but this situation is no good. And whatever we salvage out of it, it’s still going to be absolutely no good for the women of Afghanistan. God. It’s enough to drive a person crazy.
It should also be said, however, that 2,266 people died at home yesterday of a disease that is basically preventable at this point, because they don’t want to get a vaccine. How completely fucking insane is that? This wave is bigger than the wave last summer now. It’s enough to drive a person crazy.
Apple announced some changes to their app store and the media got carried away with it and I bought it like a sucker. The Washington post said “Apple says it will let app developers collect payments outside its App Store, a major concession bowing to antitrust concerns” (n.b. Apple already “let” you collect payments outside the app store) and I thought that, you know, it meant that you could, like, use a different payment process within the app, but it doesn’t mean that. The WaPo has since changed that headline to “Apple loosens rules for developers in major concession amid antitrust pressure” which is more accurate.
Except the “major” part.
It looks like all they have really done is loosen the most absurd, immoral, patently indefensible rule: they are now letting you tell your customers that there are other ways to pay. Because yes, prior to this, Apple actually curbed your speech as a developer, and kicked you out of the app store if you said “hey you can buy this cheaper online.” It was fucking evil, and, good for them that they’re going to stop being evil in that one particularly, extra-evil way. But you still can’t, like, process a credit card in your app without Apple taking a cut. Heaven forbid.
Also the whole thing is just a set of proposed rule changes, as part of a class-action settlement, that have to be approved by a judge (this isn’t the Epic Games/Fortnite lawsuit, this is a different lawsuit of a bunch of smaller developers). And I am kind of thinking, at this point, that the judge should reject it. These rules are window-dressing. This is not real change.
Also yesterday, I submit for your consideration this article by Eric Seufert, editor of the Mobile Dev Memo: Apple Robbed the Mob’s Bank.
it’s time to recognize definitively that ATT was not primarily intended to buttress consumer privacy. If that was true, Apple would police fingerprinting.
The most bullshit thing Apple has done lately, well, aside from deciding that scanning everyone’s most personal private photos is all right, is make a bunch of new rules around “privacy” and then not enforce them. So now we have this awesome situation in mobile apps where those of us who are, you know, honest and moral people, are following the letter and spirit of Apple’s arbitrary and capricious rules, while tons of other people are flaunting them, making workarounds, blatantly doing things that Apple says you can’t do, and Apple isn’t doing shit about it. I knew this was one possible outcome of Apple’s ATT implementation, but honestly Apple is such a nanny state I didn’t really buy they’d make a bunch of rules and then just not enforce them. It sucks.
It’s almost like none of this had anything to do with your privacy.
OK ok I will stop with the negativity. I swear I’m not negative about everything. For example, I would like to muster a defense for Nirvana boy. To recap, this poor baby god his schlong stuck on a copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind without his consent when he was a baby. The photographer slid his parents $200 for the photo, and they never singed a photo release. Now that photo is all over the world, and that kid’s entire life has been consumed by the situation. Yes, through the years he has tried to come to terms with it, embrace it, pretend it was okay by recreating the photo. He even got a Nevermind tattoo. But a) you will notice that in all his recreations he’s not showing his schlong, and b) this is, if you ask me, pretty classic behavior from someone who’s been abused. Also it should be noted that there’s this infographic going around that shows the original cover and all of his recreations in, I guess, an attempt to prove that this kid’s been trying to profit off of this forever. Which is so weird. Because he hasn’t profited off it, he’s never made a penny in his entire life from this, and in that infographic, whomever made it covered up his penis in the original photo, because they, too, kind of knew that this photo was bad.
I will also note that Nirvana’s catalog was worth an estimated $200 million the last time a portion of it sold, which was fifteen years ago, well before the current wave of insane financial frenzy around the rights of publishing catalogs, and Kurt Kobain’s estate is worth more than a half a billion dollars. The kid is asking for $150k each from everyone involved. Some people are giving him shit because he’s also roped in their first drummer who was gone prior to Nevermind, though he did this because he did apparently play on it, at least according to Wikipedia, and it was his lawyers who did it and, you know, maybe they’re not all Nirvana experts.
Anyway, we’re talking maybe $1 mil off of what is probably a billion dollars of value now, and yes, I think that is completely reasonable for a situation where you completely upended this kid’s life, with no say from the kid, and you didn’t get anything signed. Pay him his money. Settle. While every defendent might not lose, if there is truly no paperwork, Nirvana will almost certainly lose this in court, and the damages could be a lot higher.
Also everyone knows it was an inappropriate cover. Every news article reporting this, even the ones that seem deeply skeptical of this kid, cut off the dick (how symbolic) in the image in their news stories. Because it was bad.
Ha okay maybe that wasn’t entirely positive.
There’s a woman in Belgium and and chimpanzee (who is also in Belgium ha) who are in love and the zoo had to ban the woman from going to visit the chimpanzee in the zoo because the chimpanzee is too into the woman and it is causing problems with his social circle of other chimpanzees.
I feel like this could be a metaphor for some of my past relationships, bah dah bump,
All right well I got a lot of other super fun topics on my list here, but like I said I’m running behind today. I got yesterday’s playlist’s date wrong, did you notice? Whoopsie. Thought it was the 27th, but today is the 27th. Anyway I fixed yesterday’s. Not sure how well Spotify handles changed links, so here it is.
Today let’s do an ambient mix. I’m really into this new Devendra Banhard ambient album that embraces is Windham Hill childhood. Windham Hill gets a bad rap. I did a deep dive maybe 5 years ago and there is so much off the hook great ambient shit on Windham Hill. Anyway, this playlist is so pleasingly mellow. If you want a super mellow day, listen to Ambient vol 7 I swear you won’t go wrong.
Oh wow hey today’s Friday. I was thinking till right this moment that it was Thursday. Well there’s a bit of good fortune for you. Also it’s the last Friday until after Thanksgiving that I have to work. I accepted that I’m probably not going anywhere this year, and used up my vacation time giving myself three day weekends for most of the rest of the year. I feel really good about it.
So I guess I’ll talk to you guys Monday! I’ll get a podcast and gardening video done in the meantime. Have a lovely weekend!
oh my gosh, Windham Hill! my dad had a lot of their samplers and i’m pretty sure i have a will ackerman cd that i used to study to in high school. i can’t remember the title and none of the album covers on spotify look familiar. i’m gonna have to look through my cds…