Good morning. Hello. How are you? #536
Editing the GMHHAY book. Some words from the vault about streaming services and aliens and Rhode Island goth.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? I am good. It is chilly. My fingers all hurt with arthritis. I should really do something about that. Really is mildly terrifying. But I think I will continue to ignore it instead.
Programming note: Holiday cards are going out this week. Please fill out this form if you want one. And a few of you I will be bugging today via text/etc to double-check that you’ve not moved. It’s funny. Emma will ask me “did so-and-so move?” And, right before her asking me, I would have been 100% sure that you had not moved. But by being asked, I am now completely unsure, convinced that I have been wallowing in self-absorption and not noticed your move and feel like maybe I am a bad friend. So, yeah. Now I’m going to go ask a bunch of people if they moved or not because I’m an idiot. I apologize in advance.
https://www.postable.com/thewebbles ← Fill this out! Pretty please!
Important musical update: If you have been wondering if Wet Leg is going to be a one-hit wonder or can sustain their brilliance, their third single dropped last night and the song and video are fantastic. They are now three for three. I am so excited to see them next week.
Their album was also announced, and Domino has an exclusive clear vinyl version with bonus 7”.
Had a good, solid, productive work day yesterday. In the twilight of my vacation, I was feeling that old familiar overwhelmed-ness about the number of tasks I needed to turn my attention to. I will say, though, I was not feeling that dread that you usually feel (you don’t? Really? Just me?) about returning to a job after a vacation, so that was nice. Just sort of overwhelmed with the amount of work I needed to do. SO. Get this craziness: I made a list of tasks, and then worked on each task, one by one, without interruption from meetings or children. In doing so, I managed to maintain focus and get a whole lot of stuff done. Isn’t that wacky? I would try and continue the run today and get more done, but I have a bunch of meetings, exactly spaced out throughout the day so that I have no long, interrupted span of work time, so, you know, I guess not!
One thing I did yesterday was make a draft board deck for the board meeting next Monday. It was pretty good! I feel good about it. That is nice. I also got our taxes done, finally. Well, I mean, the accountants got the taxes done, I just signed a lot of things. And I made a smidge of progress on our insurance applications. Caught up with David, our head of sales, on various client and sales stuff. Started the process for getting our second PPP loan forgiven. Did some prep work around a new employee. Productivity! Exciting.
And then I turned my attention to the manuscript for the Good Morning, Hello, How are You? book that Lisa had just turned over to me. She did a majestic job, cutting 50% of the chaff away, leaving the golden wheat behind. It’s still hella long, but it… it’s something. I did a lot of prep work on it, putting it into the book-sized page layout, doing some basic formatting, getting all my hot keys set-up to start reading the book and doing a pass on editing, proofing and formatting. Then it will go back to Lisa for a final copy check. I also need to write a foreword. And I was thinking of adding an intro from one of you, actually. A reader. Any volunteers?
After doing all of those things, I only actually read and edited maybe ten pages of the book, but my god, it really is kind of fascinating to go back and put yourself in the mindset of the early pandemic. When we had no tests, no vaccines, no masks, were still washing our fruit and quarantining our mail. There’s so much I’d forgotten. The free-fall of the economy. The pundits who told us it would all pass in a few months. I’m glad to have this book. No one will want to read it — there’s a reason no one had heard of the pandemic of 1918. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel like an… god help me… an important historical document.
One thing I am wrestling with is how much set-up to do in the foreword. Like imagine someone reading this that has not read GMHHAY. Do I let events unfold, like let them figure out my dad is in hospice and terminal and that I had just come back from a visit and that I was planning on visiting him several times this year? Or do I let the realization dawn on the reader as they go. I am leaning toward the latter, but not sure.
Two technical asides on beginning work on the GMHHAY manuscript: Pages.app, the Apple-produced word processing software I use, paradoxically has its own spell checker that does not seem to use the system-level one. You have to call it “Pages.app” because calling an app “Pages” is basically a complete SEO-killer and confusing. And I am on a new computer since the last time I laid out a big long journal-like book in Pages.app, so the spell-checker doesn’t know any pandemic related words. I keep having to tell it to learn words like “COVID” and “prepper” and “Trump,” which I so did not want to do. Unpleasant.
One cool feature Pages has, though, is the ability to highlight an entire work of text and go to the “transformations” submenu and tell it to add smart quotes to everything. The smart quotes were wildly uneven in the GMHHAY manuscript, owing to the multiple different ways I copy/pasted it into Scrivener before I got a good system going in, like, March of this year when I started using the Substack editor. So I needed to change them all, across hundreds of pages. And I was deeply thankful for this functionality, but my god, would it kill Apple to make their own app multi-core capable? I’m sitting here on a twenty-eight core machine, and changing a bunch of quotation marks to smart quotes beachballed Pages.app for, like, five minutes. Not the rest of the machine, mind, but… still. Having a beachballing app, and twenty idle cores? Silly.
Did Apple change this on Apple Silicon? Is every app that is built for Apple silicon now forced to be multi-core capable? I don’t actually know the answer to this. Anyone checked it out?
I leave you today with something new, or, rather, something old. For the first time, I’m going to re-publish something I previously wrote. I had forgotten I’d written this, apparently I wrote it directly into the Facebook editor in, like, 2015, and nowhere else, so it was lost to the sands of time until Facebook offered it back up to me the other day. I try and never do that, I try and make sure all my writing is filed away in the appropriate Scrivener or something, but I guess I missed this one, so here it is. Six years later and it is still every bit as true. Enjoy:
What's going to happen to bands that aren't on streaming services? If they [the services] win, and they're the future, the world won't know about these bands. Maybe we're building the Star Trek computer right now, and it'll be an AI composed of millions of microservices to the APIs and libraries that are already out there. It's often written that way in the stories. And the poor trek computer won't know anything about Coil's "Ostia" or Bark Psychosis' "All Different Things." It probably won't even know that such wonderful bands like Johanna's House of Glamour and Beautiful Pea Green Boat existed at all. Whole movements will disappear, because whatever random dude that owned C'Est La Morte or Third Stone Records just never got around to putting their catalog up, and the band members didn't want to or didn't care to. History will just forget about them. And they mattered, to some extent. I was in a music mood today and literally everything I tried to listen to wasn't on Spotify, or only one or two songs, or random not-most-important albums. In addition to those above, Handful of Snowdrops. In The Nursery. Kathleen Yearwood. It's scary and sad. And the poor trek computer won't know anything about them, and in 300 years Captain Kirk will be trying to solve some riddle with some alien species and he'll say "Computer, I need to know all goth bands from Rhode Island in the 1990's" and it will give this sad list back that doesn't include Johanna's House of Glamour or Spindle Shanks or Holy Cow and the big alien intelligence, that grew wise to humans by listening to Transmissions on a certain frequency that happened to coincide with the URI college radio station in the 90's will be like "NO SILLY SPECIES YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY NOT RHODE ISLANDERS" and kill us all. It's going to be a real issue.
Let’s do a mix. I’d do a great obscure New England goth mix to go along with that post, but it’s basically impossible, since all of those bands listed are still not on Spotify. Nor are Mistle Thrush, Twelve Tone Failure, Reflecting Skin, Sirensong, I could go on and on.
No one’s gonna like this mix. The Hen Ogledd song is interminable but also brilliant. I watched the entirety of the video last night and it made me very, very happy. I don’t know anything about Hen Ogledd but I feel like we are mining a similar vein here, art from tedium. I like them. That song could probably be like four minutes shorter, but, then, GMHHAY could probably be, like, 400,000 words shorter, so hey. It’s a wash. Also, this mix has everything from gutter punk to moody indie to modern lady pop to the Blues to “Hey Man Nice Shot,” which has been in my head a lot lately, so, yeah. Who knows. But I like it.
Talk to you guys tomorrow!