Good morning. Hello. How are you? #515
Happy birthday Jane. I would like to retire to an airship.
Good morning! Hello there, what’s up, happy Tuesday. I woke up on time, yay me. I am, I am embarrassed to admit, looking forward to Daylight Savings Time in a week or so. It’ll be nice for it to be daylight as I’m waking up again.
Had a long involved dream where I was Anna Taylor-Joy. I was still married to Emma, so, you know, that was pretty awesome. I had a hit song on the radio, which was about how to buy a pair of cheap black panty hose from CVS and turn them into something couture. I was hanging out in the Harvard Square pit with Noah Brier and an Indian girl from one of my BU Art History classes whom may or may not have actually existed in real, non-dream life. The Harvard Square Pit had been turned into a WeWork. Substantial portions of America had been turned into WeWorks, actually. I hadn’t been back to Boston for a while and I didn’t know this and Noah had to tell me. There was a gutter punk at a desk, using a laptop in Harvard Square. Only they had developed a very innovative urination system, maybe inspired by stillsuits, so they could keep working. I went on a long rant about how WeWork needed to develop some standardized design language so that you could easily understand whether you were in a WeWork or not, because WeWorks had a different set of laws than the rest of the world.
To get to Harvard Square, I had flown up from LGA. Getting to LGA from Manhattan, I thought that the NW had already been extended from Astoria to LGA, and I took it at, like, midnight, thinking I could get to LG. But it didn’t go there, and I got out of the train when it was pitch black and kept walking toward LGA, ending up lost somewhere by the Bowery Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant, with a few scary looking dudes wandering around and I was viscerally scared I was going to get attacked. Luckily it was very dark, I was waring my hair up in a bun (with chopsticks) and wearing a trenchcoat, and the silhouette I cut looked masculine enough that they left me alone.
It was near there, as I finally found the Astoria Ditmars stop, that I found my Indian Art History friend, so I brought her back to Boston with me. We sat in 1A and 1B.
Aside from that scary incident, I gotta say that being Anna Taylor-Joy is pretty sweet. Anna Taylor-Joy had a bit part in the Vampire Academy, which I just added to Plex last week or so because there is a CHVRCHES cover of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” in it. Now I have two reasons to watch it. Also my trench coat was magical. One moment it could make me look like Columbo and one moment it looked super sexy. Unless you think Colombo is sexy in which case it always looked sexy.
Today is Jane’s birthday! She is four years old. I made a cake for her last night, she helped, I messed it up, because I messed up the buttering of my springform pan. But ganache covers all wounds, so it looks serviceable this morning. Four years, that is crazy. Jane has spent almost half her life in quarantine. I should look up the exact day it’ll be half her life, probably sometime in December. She says that she is going to start pooping in the potty now that she’s four. She is so excited about her birthday it really is adorable. I can’t wait to see how excited she is when she gets out of bed. This is new she barely comprehended her birthday last year. She really has become a little person in the last year.
I gotta remember to write my monthly birthday letter today.
Speaking of kids, congratulations if you have a kid 5 years old to 11 years old, you can go get them vaccinated now, or very soon. I am jealous. Looks like the vaccine timing for kids 6 months to 4 years has been a) split into two cohorts and b) pushed back at least a month or two, and I am so bummed about that. Like really, really sad. I am, it probably does not need to be said, really sick of this whole thing, and two more months is a lot.
Hopefully they pleasantly surprise us and keep to a Q4 submission of data, but when, in your whole life, has a pharmaceutical company pleasantly surprised you?
Last night I got completely obsessed with Airships. I want to live in an Airship. A big one. Like Hindenberg big. Or close. Bigger than the Graf Zeppelin and anyway, that thing didn’t have any heat. The Hindenberg was so cool (and heated!). The cabins, the entire passenger area, was inside the big balloon part. The little gondola at the bottom was just the part where the piloting happened. The whole non-engine, non-piloting interior was about 10,000 square feet, so, you know, that seems enough for permanent living. It had a lift capacity of 500,000+ pounds. You could bring your car along with you. There was a bar and a positive-pressure smoking room with an airlock. Fun fact: The Zeppelin company wanted to use Helium for the Hindenberg but the US Government had a monopoly on Helium and wouldn’t let them have any. The Hindenberg also had a bicycle-powered backup generator for the radio, which seems useful. And two redundant generators that provided 35kW of power, each, so, you know, more than enough for hanging out and reading books and staring out the window all day. Oh and it had a pneumatic tube message delivery system! I mean come on!
Yachts are cool because you can live on them and you can sail around the world and go lots of places while you stay at home. I want that. Except yachts can’t go on land so you can’t go to Austin or Fairbanks or Palm Springs or Vegas or Fallingwater. You could get a motorhome, or a van conversion, or a trailer, and those all seem pretty awesome but they are small and they can’t go to Europe or Japan or Buenos Aires. So. What are you gonna do? Buy a yacht and a motorhome? Fuck that, buy a Zeppelin.
It turns out, though, that modern airships suck. I thought that there was a bunch of modern airship innovation going on and that pretty soon we’d have cool-ass airship yachts. This belief was reinforced by the appearance of bomb-ass safari/hotel airships in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. Upon reading that book, one of my thoughts was my god I want to live in an airship like that couple. Really the most uplifting part of that otherwise miserable novel.
I knew that Sergei Brin was working on an airship, but he does not seem very far along. He seems to be the only person working on big airships right now — not as big as the Hindenberg, but close. He says they’re for humanitarian purposes, and I believe him, but you know he’s throwing in an extra bil to make a personal yacht version. They’re still a ways off, though. They only have one prototype, the Pathfinder-1, and it’s not any bigger than the only airship anyone really uses anymore, the Zeppelin NT. After the war, the Zeppelin company was basically defunct, but they had a couple grand left, and all of their plans, so they threw it all in a trust and had the mayor of some Bavarian town administer the trust, to be spent only on the development of airships. Forty years go by, and the trust now has enough money to start making airships again, and they make one now called the Zeppelin NT which is really the only current airship in town. The Goodyear blimp is (well, are, there are lots of them) a Zeppelin NT now. There’s also the Airship Industries Skyship 600, but it’s about the same size: small gondola, 14 people capacity.
There were a bunch of US military programs, and one of them made a single prototype airship, the Hybrid Air Vehicles Airlander 10. This guy is big, but it’s mainly made to be a drone, over battlefields and shit like that. They did plan to make a human-piloted version, but only a 2-seater, so, you know. No good for an air yacht. Plus, it’s ugly, look at this thing:. Who wants to fly around in a butt:
So, you know, billionaire status aside, looks like I will not be retiring to an airship yacht. I am pretty bummed about this.
Got my Plex library rebuilt yesterday. It was tedious, but it at least it was a known-quantity tedious. I could have, like, spent the entire day wading through online forums and with tech support from two different companies, and I’m sure I could have recovered the old libraries and catalog files without having to rebuild the library, but I am by no means sure it would have been any quicker than just powering through and rebuilding them again. Plus I got to, like, go through all the movies and change the covers to covers I like — just an extraordinary waste of time, but so, so satisfying. Plus Plex has made great progress on this: I have a folder of 100-200 movie covers that I re-apply every time I have to rebuild my Plex library, because Plex has been so bad about doing it automatically, but this time, I would say that 90% of those covers were already applied, including a few, I am convinced, I made myself. Impressive. Also the “fix match” functionality to match your movie to the online metadata is waaay better and faster than it used to be. Much-welcomed improvements, there. It was definitely tedious to go through every Plex friend and re-add the new libraries, but I think it’s done. If you’re a Plex friend, and something looks wrong today, a) refresh your Plex, and b) if that doesn’t work, let me know? Thanks!
ANYWAY. Happy birthday, Jane. Let’s do a mix. Jane mix! Which was… you know. Hard? Not the most even flow. But still, it’s got a little something to it. A lot more Jane songs than Rick songs. But too many Mary Jane songs, and those are not applicable. Also Jane should probably not listen to this mix for, like, ten to twelve years.
Talk to you guys tomorrow!
yay, jane birthday!
i very much enjoyed your hilarious dream and the photo of the big, juicy ass ship.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JANE! and i want a yacht with a helipad (and helicopter of course) for inland travel ☺️