Good morning. Hello. How are you? #636
Happy birthday sis, Azusa Plane, OG Google, skipping Godspeed, Juju, Billionare implosions, meeting coping psychologies, "spending time with Jane."
Good morning! Hello! Happy Wednesdasy, how’s it going? I am good, thanks. Today is my sister’s birthday. My sister is amazing. I hope she has a wonderful birthday. I hope she took the day off. I hope the snow is melting. I hope little Lucas is very kind to his mom today. I know, of course, Matt will, because Matt is always kind. My sister chose her husband very well. BIRTHDAYS. HAPPY BIRTHDAY VAL.
I’m listening to Azusa Plane, an amazing space rock band from Pennsylvania, Philly area, iirc, that I saw live once in Providence, Rhode Island in 1997 and always loved. Yesterday I was reading an article about California’s halting attempts to build a nationwide hydrogen fuel station network for hydrogen powered cars, and they quoted the owner of one of these cars who lived in Azusa, California, which is a great name for a city and got me thinking about Azusa Plane, and how I hadn’t listened to them in a while. So I listened to all of Result Dies with the Worker, which includes a recording from the Rhode Island 1997 show I saw. Then I saw that there is a 5-disc box set up on Spotify. I have most of it on 7” and 10” single and whatnot, but I am lazy, so I decided to listen to this box set. To my recollection, Azusa Plane is named after a place thing in some classic japanese movie. Seven Samurai, maybe? It is hard to Google, because all you get is the band. This is a thing that has always sucked about Google. Once one thing with a name becomes big, you cannot find the original source of it. I call this the Weirwood problem, since Weirwood definitively predates George RR Martin — I came across a mention of it in Olaf Stapleton;s 1930 novel First and Last Men, but did Stapleton invent it? Who knows! Google won’t help. I defy you to find an answer to this question on Google. Google, pretending to be all of the world’s knowledge since 1998 but secretly making the world dumber because people believe that.
I wonder about how an OG Google would perform these days. How a pure, original version of Sergei and Larry’s original PageRank/Backrub Google would perform today compared to current, overly-algorithmed, editorialized Google. Would it be better or worse? It is kind of surprising to me that no one has tried this. Yes the web is exponentially bigger than it was when Larry and Sergei made the first Google at Stanford, but also we have AWS and myriad web dev and scaling tools that were not available to them. Seems like it should be relatively doable. I suspect a) that the one true obstacle to this test is the existence of a world of web crawlers and protocols dictating whether or not things can be crawled, which didn’t really exist back then, so that all other changes and cruft aside, you can’t remake OG Google today. And b) it would be 100% SEO’d garbage. BUT if you could account for just those two things, somehow, I bet OG-ish Google in many aspects would outperform current Google. So much of Google today is ads, helpful modules that give you misinformation, non-organic search rankings. It really is astonishing.
Anyway, in catching up on what is going on in the world of Azusa Plane, I found out that the main guy, Jason DiEmilio, committed suicide in 2006, a side effect from his constant torture suffereing from an illness called hyperacusis, which sounds horrible and terrifying. This is very sad, and ironic, given Jason’s illustrious career making beautiful noise, in the end, noise killed him. And yeah, that hit me again yesterday. Really trying to stop thinking about dead people this week, sorry. I will be moving on, I promise. Kind of stunning to me I’d not heard about this in fifteen years, though. I kinda consider myself a fairly heavyweight Azusa Plane fan. But I suppose in order to know I have to, like, hang out with otherAzusa Plane fans, and that… is not something you run across very often in adtech, alas. Or by staying at home for two years.
Speaking of staying at home last night Godspeed You Black Emperor! played Cat’s Cradle and I did not go because a) COVID rates are escalating wildly again here in North Carolina, b) I think because the fucking NC dept of Health and Human Services isn’t reporting daily anymore so who knows, and c) I was talking to an old friend yesterday (remember how I said I missed old friends? I find that when you miss old friends it is often helpful to… text them. This seems a life hack many people are unaware of) and she was telling me about her kid getting COVID and a fever of one hundred point eight, so, yeah, I was a little shook about it, espcially after our near-miss last week and quarantine. But man, I am sad. I remember buying those Godspeed tickets and being so excited and thinking surely this Covid thing will be under control by then. And now I have tickets for Snail Mail on my birthday end of next week and… will I make it? Who knows!
I know a bunch of people are going to shows – a friend of mine in SF saw both Mogwai and Spiritualized last week daaaaamn. Honestly, I was probably just feeling lazy. Maybe when this pandemic is over I’ll find out that I am actually just not as much of a show person as I used to be. That’ll be… weird.
Also listened to Siouxsie and the Banshee’s Juju in its entirety for the first time in, like, twenty years. I remember vividly in high school it was my good friend Renée’s favorite Siouxsie album and she had it on CD and it was so impossible to find on CD in Fairbanks, Alaska, I think she had the only copy? It was, like, mythical. I don’t know why I didn’t make a cassette copuy of Renée’s CD, I really should have. Juju was, like, a gap in my Siouxsie knowledge. I mean, of course “Spellbound” and Chris used to play “Night Shift” and Man Ray for years, but man, there are some solid album cuts on Juju. What a record.
Huh Bill Hwang just got arrested by Federal Agents. I wonder what that guy did wrong. Can’t a man lose $20 billion of his money and other people’s money in peace? (Fun fact: If you Google “how much money did Bill Hwang lose?”, the first search result is off by $19.6 billion!)
Finished The Bond King: How One Man Made. Market, Built an Empire and Lost it All by Mary Childs yesterday, the biography of Bill Gross co-founder of Pimco. It was mildly interesting, I wish it explained bond trading a *bit* more, though I guess it doesn’t matter, and I wish it had a chapter on Pimco’s sale to Allianz, that felt like it was missing but I suppose it was just boring. But the ending! The last few chapters were superb. Such a great portrait of a meglomaniacal genius imploding. I mean, I suppose they don’t all implode, or they implode early enough that they can bounce back, like Steve Jobs, but wow. Just reading about his lies, his backtracking, his abuse, his compulsions to absolutely do the wrong thing, and his billions of dollars shielding him from consequences for so, so long until they just.. don’t. It sure sounded like the path some other media-savvy-slash-over-exposed billionaire is on.
It turns out in the purchase agreement, Elon Musk has said that he will not disparage Twitter or any Twitter employees. This agreement will be in effect until the deal closes, which is gonna take about six months or more. If he does, they can back out, and he has to pay them a billion dollars. I’m increasingly convinced this was Twitter’s genius plan all along, because they probably knew what is completely obvious: that Musk will be completely unable to abide by this aspect of the agreement. He has already arguably broken it, in the first forty-eight hours of its existence. If I were them I’d give him a written warning right now to shore up their case when he breaks it a second time, and a third time, which should be, by, oh, next Monday or so? Seems like a pretty easy billion dollars!
I wish I didn’t care about this. You probably don’t. It just makes me so sad. The whole slow-motion aspect of it sucks, too. Twitter will keep on being Twitter for the bulk of this year. Probably. Assuming the trust & safety team has the stomach (and headcount) to keep up their moderation right up until the day the deal closes. And it is, of course, no guarantee Elon means anything he says, he might just make a few changes around the edges. His comments this week exhibiting sixth-grade understanding of free speech are not reassuring. Maybe Jack will speak some sense into him. God, I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence. But Jack’s been in the trenches, he understands the reality of free speech and the internet. It’s unclear to me why we all have to suffer while Elon re-learns the wheel and turns Twitter into 8chan. Or maybe the China thing will cause him to suddenly “see the light” about moderation. He’s already started saying he will remove what’s illegal, as a probable sob to China, but of course the speech China will be pissed about is speech that is made in the US, and legal in the US, but would be illegal in China, were Twitter in China, but it’s not, and they’ll want it removed here. I am rambling.
In the immortal words of super-genius mouse The Brain from Animaniacs: No good will come of this.
Oh fantastic one of my meetings today just got cancelled. God. It’s been real wall-to-wall meetings today. Been a while since I’ve had so many meetings I’ve felt the giddy thrill of a cancellation and the reclaimed free time. Usually these days it’s more like the relief from dread that you feel about every meeting when you only have a couple meetings. Are you like this? If I have twenty meetings in a week, so be it, it is a meeting week, I will just do meetings that’s the job for the week. If I have two or three meetings in a week, well, that means I could theoretically also get some actual work done and so each meeting is a giant imposition and I don’t want to do it and it gnaws at my brain all week. I can’t say I miss having 40 meetings a week, like I did back in the Barbarian days, but there was something to it. You couldn’t really spend a ton of time dwelling about each meeting before hand. You’d arrive at the meeting and kind of shake your head and open your eyes wide and say “okay what’s this one about” and then just dive in. You’d have done some background thinking about the topic, when on walks and such, but you had no real ability to stew over it, or do any solid meeting prep. Well, at least for, say, 38 of the 40 meetings of the week. Because two of those meetings required you to make an actual deck or something so they were they only two you worried about all week in your non-existent free time.
I think about this a lot. Back when Timehop had its security incident, oh, three years ago now or so, I was immedistley thrown from my more adult, civilized schedule of a few meetings a week, no weekend work, reasonable hours, right back into working every waking hour, eating at my desk, constant meetings. It wasn’t actually that hard. Your body remembers.
Like my body remembers when I arrive back in Fairbanks, Alaska in the winter. Put me outside here at home in North Carolina, in the winter, when it’s 30 degrees out and I’ll be like “wwaaaaaah it’s sooo cold.” Put me standing at the door of the Fairbanks International Airport when it’s ten below zero and i’ll be like “this isn’t too bad.”
I have this note from a few days ago and it is losing relevance as the days go by and my four days alone with Jane recede into the distance. That time was really hard! Jane was mostly good but being alone with a kid for four days is exhausting and it really took a mental toll. But then I also realized:
If in two or three years, someone tells me they just had to spend four days alone in a house with their four year-old kid and no one else, I will feel slightly envious and nostalgic.
One thing I have to constantly remember about this pandemic is that when Jane was born my primary goal and concern was to find a way to be with her in her childhood before she gets to kindergarten as much as possible. That I needed to stop traveling so much. The pandemic can go blow, but at least it gave me that. It will not last forever, Jane is going to have a life of her own in a few years and I won’t get to see so much of her and then the amount of time we have together is just going to go down down down for the rest of each of our lives.
I have to remember that.
Today’s mix is a moody and quiet one, about half new, half old, some real beloved oldies on here. I tried to mix them together, I think it mostly works. There is a new Mandy Moore song today. Mandy Moore really got screed by COVID her last album came out first week of March and no one noticed, it is not half bad. Mandy Moore is a very talented individual. She is playing Durham in a few months. Will I go? Probably not! Though Emma and I went to a Mandy Moore show at the Paradise in Boston once and it was great. New Cannons album is great that band is better than you think, their videos are so polished it almost seems like they’re hiding somethig but nope a very solid band. I have done significant digging into Sol Invictus and as far as I can tell they are not racist fascists like many of their 90’s apocolyptic folk compatriots but if I have missed something let me know and I will ban them. New Lucious is awesome, and that one was for you, Keith.
Have a lovely Wednesday, everyone.