Good morning. Hello. How are you? #635
Oh right Elon can't actually change anything about Twitter after all. Jupiter Ascending. Pajamas.
Good morning, friend. Hello, there. How are you? What’s today? Thursday? Ah yes. The BAT PEOPLE will be here in twenty minutes. Apparently it is not okay to have bats living in your attic and in nooks and crannies of your home exterior. This does not make you Batman, I have been informed, but rather can, like, mess your house up or something. So Emma found a “humane” bat removal service. They have a business card that says WHAT’S IN YOUR ATTIC in a 70’s horror movie font that is pretty rad. I am a little sad the bats are going, Jane likes the bats a whole lot, we all do.
So I realized yesterday I am probably getting my knickers in a twist over nothing about this Twitter Elon Musk brouhahaha because, in fact, Elon can’t change Twitter, he can’t remove the moderation, and nothing is going to change. I can’t believe I forgot about this, because it was such a huge part of my life when I worked at Tumblr, but the reason why Elon Musk will be 100% unable to turn Twitter into his free-speech-paradise-aka-hellscape is… because of Apple. Apple won’t put up with it, Apple is not going to let an app with a bunch of Nazis get through the app store screening process. Apple DGAF about Twitter’s size, and they DGAF if they have to just kick it off of iOS. They will do it. And Elon can sue about it but he will almost certainly lose. And sure he can go it alone with mobile web on iOS and only an Android app and he can bitch and moan about it and he can rally his fans to quit Apple just like Trump did and it will work out about as well and in any case, the 90% of users will go “oh, well, if they have Nazis on it yeah Apple should just kick em off that’s fine I use Twitter too much anyway.”
So I guess now I can just sit back and watch all of this play out. I think we’re all basically wondering whether this will turn out to be another bold, visionary move by a genius man with a history of brinksmanship and bold visionary moves, or is this the moment where he inevitably fails, having pushed his hubris too far, in some Bill Grossian flame out. I am leaning toward the latter, but the stress of what would actually happen to Twitter was making me feel crazy. But now I’m 90% sure nothing is going to happen to Twitter. So I can just enjoy the sparks and watch him get into a giant fight with China.
I’ve been doing a bunch of research into the interaction between Apple’s privacy changes on mobile, aka App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which has been a huge part of my life for the last two years and I wrote a rare single-topic GMHHAY about and Facebook. My world with Timehop and Apple’s ATT is very straightforward. We ask people if we can “track” them or not. We don’t track them, but Apple makes us say we do, I am bitter about it, the whole thing is BS, but it’s all very clear to me, I get it. But what I’ve never really understood is Facebook’s interactions with ATT. Facebook announced earnings yesterday, Apple is still hurting them but they are on the mend, it will probably pass. But their stock over the last quarter has really taken a beating from Apple (more evidence Apple DGAF and will kill off Twitter if it has to). But it feels like, to me, that Facebook is sort of doing this to itself?
So. You’re using Facebook on your iPhone. It has to ask you if it can track you across sites. You say no. So now, on your iPhone, Facebook can’t track you across sites, which means when you see something on Instagram that you want to buy, and you go to that site and buy it, Facebook can’t get the credit anymore. Makes sense. But what I don’t understand is why this has anything to do with the rest of Facebook? If I’m in a browser on my computer, it would seem to me they don’t have to listen to Apple’s ATT prompt and your decision? But they do. And I don’t understand why. My sense is that somewhere along the line, Apple and Facebook talked and Apple said “No. If they say don’t track in iOS they mean don’t track anywhere, and if you do, you’re violating our TOS and we will kick the app out of the app store.” Because why else would Facebook shoot itself in the foot like that? But I can’t find anywhere that confirms this conversation actually happened. Or is Facebook just “playing it safe?” Which seems weird. In any case, the threat from Apple (if it happened) or Facebook’s clear belief the threat is implied is definitely more evidence Apple is more than willing to not put up with Elon’s shit.
As an aside, does anyone here know anything about Facebook CAPI? I am doing some research into it and I have some questions. Drop a line!
Robin Sloan, an amazing writer who I immensely respect, wrote a great piece about thw Twitter/Musk situation. It is short and I encourage you to read it. Even though it is fantastic, I don’t fully agree with it. He says, among other things (paraphrasing here), “just quit Twitter, I promise you you won’t even miss it.” But I don’t believe this. I will miss Twitter. I miss every old social network. I still miss Makeoutclub. I still miss Livejournal. I still miss Friendster, Flickr, I miss OG Facebook. I will miss Twitter. So much.
Did some research into my Rhodes yesterday. I need to send it and my Farfisa Compact Deluxe in to get serviced. I have found a place in Chicago that an work on both of them but I have no idea how to get them there. I feel like they will get totally fucked in freight. I kinda want to road trip ‘em there, which would be fun, but, then, road tripping back to Chicago three weeks later or whatever to pick ‘em up would be a pain in the ass. Don’t suppose anyone has any solutions for me? Maybe two road trips to Chicago would be worth it. I could take four different routes or something lol. Or maybe I could fly with them one way? ugh that would suck even more. Flying sucks now.
Anyway it is a 1978 Rhodes Mark I Seventy-Three Stage Piano. I don’t know what “Mason Band” means unless this used to belong to the band program of Mason City, Ohio, which, wow, has a very extensive website Mason City seems to take their band program seriously! Maybe even enough to carve their name into their Rhodes.
So I rewatched Jupiter Ascending this week. Well, it took like a week and a half, I watched it in, like, 30-minute increments. Look. That movie is not bad! Or, I mean, it has some cringey things but they are all clever cringey things! I’m sure when people watched it the first time they thought the thing with the bees or dog-human-hybrids were so dumb and the weird hommage to Brazil is a bit hackneyed but honestly it is a wildly original film in terms of plot and art direction and visual effects. Is the acting a little… shall we say… prequely? At times, yes. Eddie Redmayne is fucking fantastic, though. I think this was just before we all knew who Eddie Redmayne was and knew he was a good actor so we just thought that performance was so over-the-top we couldn’t enjoy it.
The main thing about Jupiter Ascending though is that at the end, I want to know more! I want a sequel! The setup at the end is so great! There is an immigrant housekeeper in Chicago who just happens to own the earth. So much potential for wacky hijinks I would totally watch a series about Jupiter Jones and the events after this film. It only made $184MM worldwide on a budget of $176MM, so that is a flop (you gotta at least double before you’re not a flop because advertising) but were I Warner Bros I would be resurrecting this property. There’s so much you can do with it. Fight me.
I also finished my two-week-long re-watch Star Trek the Motion Picture and if anyone wants to make me a cosplay outfit of Spock’s white outfit he’s wearing when he arrives on the Enterprise for the first time, or his awesome black outfit, well, that’s just great. I’m gonna make it back to DragonCon someday.
Amazon sucks and my Ring Doorbells — which we purchaed before they were owned by Amazon and I never would have gone all in on them if I knew Amazon was going to buy them — uses the exact same notification mechanism to tell me someone is at the door as it does to send bullshit marketing and spam notifications to my phone. So I just turned them off. So now my doorbell doesn’t ring on my phone anymore. It’s been three days and I’m kinda like… this is fine? I’m not home. Leave it at the door. But god, Apple should be kicking them off the app store this is a direct violation of the rules and I know this contradicts my previous statements but that’s because Apple is not, actually, so be beautiful, fair, neutral arbiter and they kinda wing it and make shit up as they go along, but after this long everyone has a pretty good sense of their biases and they’ve definitely abandoned enforcing notification spam. And ad fingerprinting. But they still care about porn and Nazis.
Been thinking about being a pajama guy. I’ve always thought Pajamas were sort of emasculating and ridiculous but also… my legs get cold in bed? Maybe I should get over this! Men of GMHHAY are pajamas awesome do I need to get over this and start wearing pajamas? Also isn’t there a risk that once you start wearing pajamas you never wear real clothes again because believe me I do not especially care what the people of north Chatham County, NC think of my sartorial options when I am at the dump or the Walmart.
Here’s a modern synthpop mix for you. It is pretty chill. It is synthy. It is cool. Who doesn’t love synth pop. I’m leaving this glorious Palace/Nathan Jenkins remix on here even though it’s gone from Spotify because who knows, maybe someday it will show up again and this mix, which no one will be listening to then because it’s not April 28th, will have an extra song in it. Added value over time.
It is now 8:21 and the bat people are not here yet. They lied. Or, actually, who knows. I don’t have my Ring motion alerts on, LOL. Maybe they’re working on the front of the house right now. I’ll never know!
Okay let’s go look at the garden. Until tomorrow!
Johannes Hofer defined nostalgia as a disease of the mind: “Nostalgia […] is sympathic of an afflicted imagination. Hence, from the living spirits entirely by its own momentum along uncommon routes through the untouched courses of the channels of the brain to the body, and by revisiting the oval tubes of the center brain, it is originated by arousing especially the uncommon and ever-present idea of the recalled native land in the mind.”
I think the issue with Facebook and ATT is that the vast majority of their users (even more so for Instagram) access via mobile only (https://www.statista.com/statistics/377808/distribution-of-facebook-users-by-device). They are 100% still tracking on Android and desktop but these are generally less valuable users.