Good morning. Hello. How are you? #537
We are all delusionally magical creatures. In addition to being actually magical creatures
Good morning! Hello! How are you? What is up? What day is it what’s happening? Wednesday. Okay. I like Wednesdays. I can do this. Have the Timehop monthly review meeting this morning that’ll be fun. Oh hey it’s December 1st. Oh hey I got paid today. That is exciting. Too bad I already spent the entire paycheck on a prescription drug that insurance should have covered. Man, doesn’t matter how rich you get, America still finds ways to make you a cliche of misery.
BUT. Christmas time!
Holiday cards! Fill this out! Last chance! Last chance!
https://www.postable.com/thewebbles
One thing I am enjoying is that Jane gets to turn on the tree every morning, that is nice. And before we set up the tree, we asked Jane if she remembered turning on the tree last year and it seemed like she genuinely did and she seemed genuinely excited to do it again. And she is. And every morning she stops and says hi to the Hello Kitty ornament before she turns the tree on.
We also asked her if she remembered other things from her past: getting milk from mommy, old toys, stuff like that. She said yes to all of it, but I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth or not. I am trying to think of questions that are more lie-proof, but it is hard!
Big news, I figured out what I was doing wrong on one of my two remaining tasks in the No Man’s Sky Pioneers Challenge Redux this week. Turns out I needed to have a conflict scanner installed, which means I needed a Walker Brain, which is always such a pain. But that is done. This challenge ends next Monday, but I gotta wrap it up before I go to New York Sunday. One more challenge to go: Explorer level 16. I am at level 11. But it is so tedious, so many dumb little missions. I wish there was a quicker way. Maybe there is. Maybe I am missing something.
Got my Amazon book royalties yesterday. Eighty-Eight whole dollars. Very exciting. I love getting seven weird direct deposits in my bank account at the beginning of every month. My secret ambition is one day the amount of those deposits is greater than the amount that I spend on Amazon that month, but we have a ways to go yet.
Got some more done on the GMHHAY book. It is really quite engrossing. I want to just plunge in and spend hours and hours on it each day, but I have a job and a kid and I can only spend an hour or so a day on it. But, man. It’s just. Wow, shit has really changed over the last two years. But one thing that’s amazing is that since last April we have had lunatics hell-bent on re-opening the whole country no matter the cost. They’ve been wrong about the statistics, every time (remember when Elon Musk told us we’d only have a few thousand cases?), but I gotta hand it to em, they really have been consistent in their views.
But it’s the more subtle, personal stuff. Lockdown is still a thing, but it’s so different now. More like a semi-permeable membrane of a lockdown. It’s hard to remember how hard core it was at the beginning. And especially the first month, when even those whackadoodles mostly complied.
Also, wow, personally I was just not in a good place last April. With my father and Annie Duffy passing, with the economy in ruins, millions of people losing their jobs, Trump in charge, the racist, murderous cops and ensuing protests. It’s amazing we all held it together. Freaking amazing.
Yesterday I edited a long rant about gun control and cop killings and then went to bed and learned that there was yet another school shooting. Against my better judgement, I watched a video taken by one of the kids, and one thing that struck me was how calm, collected and trained the kids were. All of those drills. It’s like they expected this to happen. When I was a kid, they’d teach us about getting under our desks because a nuclear bomb was coming. We all went through the motions, but we mostly ignored the drills, because we knew a nuclear bomb was not survivable. But these kids. They understand that their actions mean life or death, that no one else is going to help them, that this mortal risk is a permanent part of their lives, and they are trained. It’s as impressive as it is crushingly, crushingly sad.
Having a discussion over in my Slack group about Jack Dorsey’s departure from Twitter. The professional scuttlebutt seems to be that this has been in the cards since the standoff with the hedge fund activists a year or so ago. That from that day forward, Jack was a dead man walking, that the end of a “staggered board” was a signal, that the quiet notification in one of their annual reports that they reworked their succession planning was another one. I don’t know about all that, but I do know that all this talk about how Twitter should have been innovating more, adding this feature or that is wrong. Misguided. The only thing that Twitter should have been changing, growing, innovating on was trust and safety. Beyond that, Twitter is the product it should be. It does not need to change. The users don’t want it to change, the users aren’t dying for another new feature. Shit I even PAID for Twitter Blue, their new paid feature set, and there’s nothing in there that is useful, really. I pay because some segment of the money goes back to creators. But hey. That is now built.
It feels like it doesn’t occur to anyone in tech that Twitter is mostly great the way it is, that is a classic design product. One of those things that people love, that they use constantly, but isn’t necessarily glamorous and no one expects it to grow anymore. Fernet. ThermoWorks thermometer. Shun knives. We don’t expect these things to innovate in their field.
Look, my tech career is not at that level, but one thing I know a little something about is running a much-loved, highly-used service that has found its place on the internet, that is beloved by its users, that is profitable and mostly perfect. That is exactly how the users want it to be, even as finance people tell you over and over again that it could do this or that to radically change and grow. So maybe I’m projecting. But also maybe Twitter is just fine the way it is.
Where Jack failed Twitter is he failed to definitively decide whether Twitter the company would be Procter and Gamble or it would be Old Spice. In fact, he made it worse, he made it more likely that Twitter is an Old Spice and not a Procter and Gamble. He killed off Vine, with two hundred million users which is absolutely indefensible. Vine could have been Tik Tok. Vine could have won.
He sold off MoPub, a completely understandable, and completely ill-conceived, totally wrong move. Selling off MoPub the way they did is like Dell selling off VMWare for a $10 to Lenovo or something. Just insane. Advertising in-game is a unique place in the ad world: it’s one place that Google and Facebook haven’t won, haven’t dominated. It’s a place where ad revenue is growing. It’s a place where you can prove your ad worked — this is so phenomenally rare in advertising. And Mopub was by no means winning the war but they had a great position, a position that could have made a real difference. I mean, thank god they didn’t sell it to Google or Facebook, but still. It was an idiotic move. Absolutely idiotic. Although I suppose I should qualify this one, because it’s unclear if Jack is to blame here. The paradox of this move is it is absolutely unclear if Jack wanted to do this or the brilliant PE activists did.
Anyway. I am thinking about cutting off my hair. Like myself. Like without help. It is too long, it is getting absurd, it does not look good, I wear it up all the time. I was hoping to do it before New York but I guess I will probably do it after? I had really promised myself I would not cut it till this pandemic is over but surprise! This pandemic will never be over. There’s been zero word lately about the vaccine for kids under 5, no idea when this is going to fucking happen. So maybe I’m going about this wrong. Maybe this is like the lucky coin you rub while you’re standing in TC’s pub during a fifth game of a Red Sox world series and secretly the entire outcome depends not on the skill of the baseball team but how hard you rub that lucky coin, except in this case, the lucky coin is that I need to cut the hair, because my hair is secretly the problem, that the entire pandemic is still going on because I haven’t cut my hair. An illogical point of view but one, admit it, you have totally had about some such thing in the past. We are all delusionally magical creatures. In addition to being actually magical creatures, I suppose. A healthy mix, I am sure.
Spell-check tells me “delusionally” isn’t a word. All the better.
Let’s do a mix. Moody and quiet mix. It starts off with a bunch of artists that start with A, that is a coincidence, honest. I mean, yes, just before I posted this mix I threw on the beautiful, haunting, “Love Song for a Vampire” by Annie Lennox. But it’s all a coincidence, I swear. Anyway. I like this mix. It is pretty. It is solid. It is mostly new. Except four songs. That Cranes is from 2008 but I had only ever listened to their 2008 self-titled album once before last week. It’s good! Man, Cranes were awesome. Hen Ogledd and Emma Ruth Rundle are this week’s new obsessions for me. I mean, Emma Ruth Rundle was previously an obsession in partnership with the death metal band Thou, but this is a new separate obsession with just her music, totally different thing. And the Evangenitals song appears because yesterday I was editing the section of the GMHHAY book where I rave about Kestrin Pantera’s movie “Mothers Little Helpers,” which uses this song over its closing credits. Splendid choice.
Talk tomorrow! Bye! Have some buttons!
why not get a proper haircut in new york at a fancy salon?