Good morning! Hello! How are you? How was your weekend? Did you have a nice time? Get some stuff done? Not die? A+ for you. My weekend was okay. We had some friends over Friday! That was lovely. Our friends Rex and Michelle were in town, on their way home from acquiring the cutest new puppy ever. It was lovely to see them. Unfortunately, I drank too much. Now, I suppose there are a lot of different ways to evaluate the phrase “I drank too much.” I did not drink so much that I would, you know, require medical attention, or even drink too much by my own, personal, pre-pandemic standards. When objectively counting the number of drinks, it was high, but not astronomical, not alarmingly high.
But none of that matters because the fact of the matter is I drank enough to give me the all-time worst hangover. Just horrible in every way. Profoundly existential, and physically debilitating. I also over-slept on getting Jane out of bed, despite my pre-bed hubris and insistence I could pull it off, and managing to set my alarm clock appropriately. Nope. Didn’t do ny good whatsoever. Emma had to cover for me, and now, thanks to her covering bedtime for me the night of the visit, and then covering breakfast, I am in a daddy-bedtime-K-hole at the moment, doing three sequential daddy bedtimes as compensation. I deserve my punishment, punish me, punish me, I am bad.
Because, god, you know. It’s been getting worse and worse, but the profound existential guilt that I feel when I wake up with a hangover is becoming absolutely insane. I mean, the minute I woke up, I felt, like, life-endingly depressed. I should draw a distinction between “life-endingly depressed” and suicidal. It’s not suicidal, I don’t want to die, I’m just convinced that I have acted so deplorably, so terribly, that I have no right to participate in polite society. I need to go be exiled to that small Spanish town where Jeremy Irons ended up at the end of Damage (I know I’ve mentioned this part before, because, look, I just happen to have this image handy).
Even after Emma reassures me that I did not do anything terrible — which, to be clear, she should not have to do, as I am a grown-ass adult — I’m convinced I did something awful. It’s the worst, it goes on for hours.
Kingsley Amis, in his infinite problematic wisdom, spoke of the metaphysical hangover, and while I think what he described and what I feel in these situations are slightly different, I’ve co-opted the phrase a bit in my concept of the existential hangover. It’s horrible. Horrible.
But that was not enough, no siree. This time, in addition to the normal hangover — tackle with lots of water and Advil — and the existential hangover — tackle with moral penance and guilt trips — I had the absolute worst nauseous hangover. Just the absolute worst. All day. Felt on the verge of puking all day. No amount of anti-nausea medication would help. It was horrible.
I drink so much less now, during this pandemic, that I suppose it’s not surprising things have changed. Plus I’m getting older. Plus a friend sent me a nice bottle of a new homemade Fernet that I had never had before so I was exploring uncharted territory. But my god. This can never happen again. I shudder to think of the complaints my liver was registering. It was awful. awful. The nausea persisted, in a much lighter form, into the second day, even after ten hours of additional sleep.
And in a lot of ways, the existential hangover continued, because I am still sort of convinced that I can’t be trusted in polite society and should just keep doing this pandemic quarantine thing forever because I am a bad person and I deserve it.
In some bits of good news: I passed one month on no nicotine, that is nice, that is a good thing, I am proud of that. And my leg is healing nicely. If you saw it, you’d probably still be horrified by the bruise but it is much diminished, less than one-fifth its original size, and what’s left — down by the knee — is fading nicely and will probably be gone in another week or so. I’m actually pretty shocked at what great range of movement I have back. It still hurts to lift my leg, pivot on it, or close them, but the pain is manageable. I think in another…. mmm…. imagonnasay three weeks or so? I could probably go to PT and start stretching the thing.
Before the hangover, on Friday, I did manage to get my podcast done, so that’s a thing I accomplished. Here it is if you prefer your nothingness in audio form:
Let’s see. What else what else. I did manage to get minimal gardening done. Harvested a shit ton of peppers, two tomatoes, enough for a nice salad at dinner on Sunday when I could manage to hold food down again. Checked in on the compost, it’s lovely. Checked in on the seedlings, they are coming along. It was a super-human effort to accomplish this, I felt like puking the entire time but we managed. I’d be proud of this if it weren’t so pathetic.
Other than that, well, hrm. I peeled and diced ginger for my lunch? You guys keep telling me not to peel ginger and just to dice it but my brain can’t process that and it seems crazy to me, so I keep spending insane amounts of time peeling ginger, but, I mean, at least it was a task I could handle. I also did the shallots, which was far less pleasant, my god, my eyes, my eyes. And I made waffles for Jane for the week. Kitchen day. Managed to do our evening walk, that was nice, and last night we ran into one of the neighbors we don’t see much, turns out she had had a hip replacement. Good talk. Yeah, I cannot say I did much.
In one way, though, I was kinda glad for the distraction, because the internet was nothing but 9/11 and for some reason, I do not want to think about 9/11 this year. Some years, I would do the whole essay thing, and remembrance thing, and so on, but I just. I don’t know, man. I think I’m mostly done with thinking about 9/11. Like yeah it was personally kind of traumatizing that day, and some of my coworkers died int he plane crashes, but, I mean, there’s just too much baggage. Since 9/11, more than 200,000 people have died in the Yemeni civil war, half a million in the Syrian civil war, a hundred thousand in the Mexican drug war, a hundred thousand in the Kivu conflic, a quarter million in the Iraq war, 200,000 in Darfur, half a million in the war on terror, a thousand in the Boko Haram uprising, a thousand in the Kenan election protests, 1,500 in the Andijan protests and shit I don’t even know what those are. A thousand in the 2005 Togolese democracy protests, and over 4,000 in the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
There wasn’t that a bleak AF paragraph? American lives aren’t better lives. I don’t know why this is so hard for some people to grasp. And I don’t know why it is so much easier me to grasp, so I can’t, like, you know, get on my high horse or anything. I have just always felt this to be true, known this to be true.
When I was in high school (shit, man, I wasn’t going to talk about this ugh) my and my awesome girlfriend had this book, it was called, like, 10,000 Questions or 1,000 Questions or something like that and it was just this little paperback book of “provocative” questions, using that word before Fascist Internet Edgelords ruined it by “just asking questions.” Anyway, the one we all had the hardest time with was the one around this exact topic: If you were god and you had to choose one, which would you choose, the death of a loved one, ten deaths in your city, a thousand in your country or ten thousand in a foreign country. I can’t claim I was perfect I probably selected ten in our town. But it was real fascinating how hard that specific question was for us, compared to the others, ostensibly-as-difficult. It got me thinking about it at an early age, I guess. It stuck with me.
Okay, anyway, I’ll stop. The point is that I did not want to think about it, I didn’t want to delve, I didn’t want to re-live it. And, so, I’m not going to. Maybe at fifty. Cuz I’ll still be around in thirty years, right? right?
Here’s a picture of Jane’s drawing last night I have no idea what’s going on here I think it might be one of our kitties? We had a kitty problem yesterday morning, Jane wants to pet Roy in the morning but she wants to direct it like a little kinderfascist, and insists upon Roy being in a specific place in the bedroom before she pets him, and I’m like “look this cat has laid down and is waiting for you to pet him that is about all you can ever hope for in a cat you gotta just go with it,” but nope. She is insistent. God, this is gonna happen again this morning isn’t it. She spent all day processing the incident. It was pretty interesting. Just talking about it the rest of the day. Let’s see what she learned from it.
OH RIGHT. The other big news. On Friday, after I wrote, and after I did my podcast, judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rodgers issued her ruling in the Apple v Epic lawsuit. To recap, Epic Games is suing Apple over practices involving the App Store, specifically, the arbitrary 30% cut and the inability for developers to use other payment systems, or to, you know, even talk about other payment systems. Over the last couple of weeks, related to other litigation, Apple has made a few concessions here and there, but they have been mostly minor and cosmetic, not touching what I think of as the three most egregious app store practices: the curtailment of speech (euphamistically termed “anti-steering provosions,” the app store lock-in, and the price-gouging.
So, if you think of the main issue as those three points, Epic won one and a half of them and Apple won one and a half of them. Rogers ruled that Apple can no longer stop people from, you know, talking, from telling their customers that there are other ways to make in-app purchases besides the app store. This was most noticeable with the Kindle app, which does not let you buy Kindle books, and is unable to explain to you why or how to actually buy a book. This specific instance, with the Kindle, is probably the absolute most visible example of Apple’s absurdity, so I am glad that’s been killed off (almost certainly, maybe not, we will see. But probably).
More impressively, Rogers ruled that devs can use other methods of payment for apps in the app store. This is a leeetle vague, as she said:
[Apple is] permanently restrained and enjoined from prohibiting developers from including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing and communicating with customers through points of contact obtained voluntarily from customers through account registration within the app.
So the question would be you can link to it, but can you just, you know, embed it, and it does seem like maybe the answer is no? But still, a button will be huge. We will see.
So. Anti-steering is gone. Price gouging? Allowed to stay. app-store lock-in? Theoretically still standing, but, as Rogers notes, in-app-purchase is a huge part of the App Store’s revenues, and if people can start steering people away, this will crumble, I am confident. People love saving money, they will go to great lengths to save money. You see this in the Twitch community where everyone knows that buying Twitch Sub Tokens is waaay cheaper on desktop. Devs are infinitely resourceful, and people infinitely love saving money. I predict a huge portion of App Store revenue will, over time, disappear.
Some people say that this ruling is unquestionably a win for Apple. It wasn’t. Yes, Epic is appealing, but that’s basically because the judge invited them to appeal. The number of Very Bad Things the judge said about Apple in this lawsuit is astronomical. And the number of exculpatory things she said was very small. Apple claimed in their PR-spin comments afterward that Rogers found they weren’t a monopolist. This is not true. She said Epic didn’t prove it. She all but invited them to try again.
Also bad for Apple is the market determination. When you’re thinking about a monopoly, you have to choose a market. Apple wanted the market to be all games, so they could look like a (relatively) small fish in a large pond that also included the Playstation and XBox. The judge disagreed. She said the market was digital mobile gaming transactions. This is not good for Apple. Apple has a huge market share in this market. And while she did not call them a monopolist, she did say that they had the power to move this market, that their pricing seemed arbitrary and exorbitant, even if it wasn’t proven (yet) that it was monopolistic. There are fertile grounds for appeal here, from Epic and others.
The wall is crumbling. The downfall of the anti-steering provisions, along with the concessions Apple’s made in the last few weeks. I don’t think the App Store is going to be dead this week or this year, but it feels like it may well only be a matter of time.
Anyway, I’m reading the entire ruling, and I’m only halfway through. Hopefully I’ll finish today. But it’s already clear that this is not even close to all good for Apple.
Let’s do a mix. W Hotel mix! Woo! My favorite! More Sparks! There was a Her Space Holiday EP in 2018 I missed! Belinda Carlisle! A bunh of new stuff. My god the new Saint Etienne is so good I really think it might be their best album ever. It’s like if their entire career took a totally different direction and they decided that they really loved the ending of their first single “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and they were gonna just use that as their launching point. And the new Annie EP is really good too. Strong recommend.
MISS YOU GUYZ.
I find that if I take 200mg of ibuprofen before bed when drinking I'll feel about 50% less horrible the next day.