Good morning. Hello. How are you? #562
The Boston Music Scene loses another one, Record orphans, Crypo essays, camgirl financial experts revisited, wood and pollution, a plea for pedal-lifted toilet seats.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? What’s shakin? Mondays, amirite? Have a good weekend? The sun is NOT shining, because it’s the dead of winter and the sun does not rise here until until 7:27 AM. Actually, it is 7:28 now. I guess I can see a dim glow behind the trees, over the pond, but I would not say the sun is shining.
Let’s see. A random round-up, I think.
The Boston music scene lost another one this week. I knew Jason years ago, only slightly, through my good friend Jen. I ripped a few tapes of his old bands, though, in the great tape ripping of the Early Pandemic. But Jen and others have stayed in touch with him. This marks the fifth person during the pandemic from that scene that I’m aware of that’s passed away during the pandemic. My heart and thoughts go to my friends who are grieving about this.
I got a record in the mail (Marine Research’s Sounds From the Gulf Stream) and the seller was one of those people who uses old, cheap records for packing material. Those people always make me sad: giving up on a poor record, deciding that no one wants it. I always feel bad for the record. I mean, sometimes it is irredeemably scratched or something, but these were in pretty good shape. I gave them deep cleanings on the old vinyl washing machine—really a great invention, always fun to use that thing with its very loud, industrial strength vacuum motor—put them in new anti-static inner sleeves and poly outer sleeves. Spiffed em right up. They didn’t look as good as new, but they looked decent. I found the releases on Discogs, added em to my catalog: they were worth, like, $5 each, which, actually, was only a buck more than the Marine Research record that I had purchased. Vinyl merchants are very different from us CD merchants. A $5 CD is, like, one of the pricier items in my catalog. But to vinyl merchants? Not worth it. Thusly I am now the proud owner of two 60’s easy listening/South Pacific records: Andres Kostelanetz’s Lure of Paradise,
and Hawaii by Ray Kinney & His Coral Islanders. They both got naked ladies with leis on the covers, natch.
Woah we just had a power outage for like fifteen seconds, took a second to have the Powerwalls kick in, so my computer restarted. Even though it’s on a battery backup AND a Powerwall. Really gotta investigate that. Mysterious.
This guy—apparently one of the founders of Signal—wrote a really great essay about crypto that I quite liked. He brought up two points I hadn’t really considered. One was a really good insight about platforms moving faster than protocols, and I’d never really thought about that before, but it is true, and very wise.
The other thing he brought up was that so much of the current web3 world is sitting behind two large dev companies—platforms that make dev tools so that people can use normal-ass things like JSON bundles and APIs with the crypto world. I know about this whole thing but I didnt’ realize the dominance of two companies: Infura and Alchemy. I knew that web3 was going to get co-opted and centralized eventually. Just like they did with web2 (Matt Mullenweg had a really good Tweet thread about the ahistoricicty of web3’s views of web2 and its original, decentralized vision). But i had no idea how far along it was. It was also super interesting to learn about OpenSea’s dominance of the NFT market, especially on the back-end with their APIs. I didn’t realize that the iOS wallet apps Rainbow and Metamask were just using Opensea’s API to display your NFTs, and that no one is actually parsing this stuff from the actual blockchain. It’s all very centralized. I’d heard a lot of people bitch about the unreliable nature of Opensea’s API, but I didnt’ realize how dominant it was. Nor did I realize that Metamask is basically just sitting on top of Infura and not even, like, actually looking at the Blockchain. Crazy!
I will say that the essay tends to conflate all of web3 with NFTs, and Ethereum/Bitcoin. I don’t know/think that all those crazy Defi dudes using, like, Ancor and Tomb and Pendle and Francium and Open are also subject to the grip of Infura and Alchemy. If it is, he didn’t really go there, and a glance at their websites seems to indicate a focus on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and NFTS.
Oh this is funny, speaking of NFTs, I was reading this Bloomberg article about the drama in the NFT community of Pudgy Penguins, which was an interesting article. And then at the end it says this:
But for some collectors, hope springs eternal. Maddie Springs said she bought her first Pudgy Penguin -- featuring a red background and a lei-- for about $7,500 on Thursday.
“I’ve seen a lot of drama,” she said. “I think they are going to come out of this, I think it’s going be a good investment.”
This is so great. Maddie Springs is the cam girl I wrote about over a year ago when she was giving investment advice about Warren Buffet and holding. I don’t usually do the quote-long-passages-from-my-past-emails thing, but it really was quite a gem:
So I was on Onlyfans (for the articles) the other day, and this 29 year-old independent content creator was doing a Q&A for her fans. It’s a pretty common schtick in the Patreon/OnlyFans world: paying members get to ask a question and once a month or so you answer a bunch of questions from the fans. I very much enjoy Adam Savage’s for example (here’s one I enjoyed this week about working on R2D2). And it was the greatest thing. This grown woman was staying at her parents house, so she was hiding in her old childhood bedroom, and she had to speak really quietly because for some reason (I can’t imagine) most of the questions were of a deeply personal and sexual in nature. BUT — and this is the interesting part — there were so many questions about stock tips. This isn’t some pervy thing you need to go look up in Urban Dictionary. These consumers of adult content were asking their favorite adult performer in which stocks to invest. It was amazing. And you know what? Her answers were really good! She extolled the philosophy of Warren Buffet, promoting value investing and really getting to know the companies in which you invest. She said she couldn’t get behind the Robinhood and day trading thing, even though she had plenty of friends who did it. She exhibited deep knowledge of the various Reddit forums on stock investing. When the first question was asked I admit I (perhaps sexistly) thought “oh god this is not a good direction for America) but after listening to her answers? I’m pretty okay with the financial advisory industry being disrupted by OnlyFans.
And now she’s being quoted in Bloomberg! Without any qualification about her profession! That is an accomplishment! Fantastic, fantastic. She really needs to take the plunge and become a full-on financial pundit.
My friend Noah posted this this weekend and I have been thinking about it a lot since then. I think I once knew this but had forgotten. Wood, man, it is a pollution nightmare:
I was watching my Youtube videos (my shows!) this weekend, and all these hygge cabin girls are living off in the wilderness, burning wood in their stoves. I wonder if that wood offsets all of the carbon savings they generate from those otherwise fairly emission-minimal lifestyles.
We watched the new Ghostbusters movie, Ghostbusters Afterlife the other night. All in all, I liked it, but it had some deep structural and conceptual problems. But it had heart, it had beautiful cinemetography, solid acting, great cast. I resent Universal for ditching the 2016 Paul Feig film. But I guess I won’t hold it against this film. This film was way more predictable in almost every way, and had a level of fan service I did not think was actually possible. But still, it had something at its heart.
I invented the foot-pedal-powered toilet seat lifter in my head last night, and I am shocked such a thing doesn’t exist. There does seem to be one on Amazon, but it is not available and doesn’t seem to have been for a long time. As a man who gets headaches when he bends over, with a family sick of my shit (er, well, not my shit), this would be a very useful thing in my life. I want one. Industrial grade, with a satisfying step, like a Simple Human trash can step. Oh, speaking of Simple Human trash can steps, Jane just learned how that worked the other day and she was so excited about it.
I guess that’s about it? Didn’t get much done this weekend. Filed some records. Cleaned off a workbench and added a nice power strip to it. Wiped an old computer I’m about to sell, taking the user folder off of it and doing a 3x erasure on the hard drive. Spent a lot of time dreaming of how to get a workshop added to the property. I really would love a workshop. Finished up the last No Man’s Sky expedition redux and got myself a pet sandworm, named him Freddie. Rode him around for a while. Dealt with Jane’s tantrums a lot.
Jane and I shredded a ton of cardboard and mixed it into the compost with this week’s compost. We also spent, like, a half an hour at the utility sink in the garage, dissolving cornstarch packing peanuts with the sprayer, which was really fun. Though I’ve since learned you can compost those things, so I will compost the rest of that batch.
Just took my second Wegovy shot. I lost ten pounds in the last week, which is kind of absurd, but it has definitely slowed down. I’m pretty half-assed in my dieting. I am maintaining a 16-hour fast, but other than that, I’m not really, like, paying attention to what foods I eat. I’m just eating a lot less: My lunch and dinner are both less than half the size they used to be. So here we go on week two.
Hrm well that was pretty much everything on my list of topics. God knows what I am going to write about tomorrow! But that is a worry for later!
Oh speaking of which I taught Jane the word “procrastinate” and she really liked it. Hrm.
Time for a mix, justa mix, a lotta old stuff on the mix, because I was listening to a lotta old stuff this weekend. Emma and I re-watched the “Don’t Come Around Here Anymore” video this weekend, because Bakeoff had an Alice-themed challenge, and, man, that video is still so great. There are a few interesting covers of that song on Spotify but I haven’t gotten to them yet. I listened to a lot of late-period Stereolab this weekend, too: sorta lost the plot on their career toward the end and wanted to re-familiarize myself with it.
Okay, well, it is Monday, let’s endure the shit out of this stupid day. And winter, let’s endure the shit out of this stupid winter. TTFN.
Read that Moxie essay over the weekend and it's just about the first crypto writing I've read that answered questions on literally how users are connecting to blockchain technology etc (generally via one of two dominant companies, rather unsurprisingly). Very clarifying for me.