Good morning. Hello. How are you? #647
Mike Gill, gardening, writing vs bullet points, mass shootings and the fermi paradox, the verious styles of Semiglutide injection pens.
Good morning! Hello there, how are you? Did you have a good weekend? I had a lovely weekend. Only two days, but it was still quite nice. No one died, for starters, that immensely helped. Just your normal, run-of-the-mill weekend, really quite nice.
First:
Michael Gill, 45, filmmaker, musician, and beloved by creatives from Boston to Hollywood, died suddenly but peacefully of natural cause at his home in Los Angeles, California on May 6, 2022.
Mike was born at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. on December 20, 1976 and grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. He briefly attended Hofstra University before turning to his passion for music, playing drums for Johnny Too Bad and the Strikeouts, the Damn Personals, and the Murder Mile. Mike spent many years in Boston, Massachusetts, where he was an integral part of the local music scene, working at the famous Middle East Restaurant and Nightclub and using music videos as a gateway into a filmmaking career. He directed music videos and other content for local and national acts including Freezepop, Guster, Dropkick Murphys, Mission of Burma, Piebald, Jimmy Eat World, and many others. Mike was especially passionate about documentaries and editing, and he could be counted on for his support of independent and local projects no matter the budget. His feature film work included Fat (2013), Hedgehog (2017), and The Amazing Johnathan Documentary (2019). Mike moved to Los Angeles in 2017 and quickly found a new home, expanding his ever-growing circle of friends, geeking out about Hollywood history, and living life to the fullest. An avid fan of Star Wars, those who knew him would be relieved to know Mike celebrated one final “May the fourth” before his passing.
Mike will be remembered by so many for his boundless love, humor, and genuine nature. No traditional services are planned, but friends in Boston and Los Angeles will be gathering to celebrate Mike’s life at later dates. Donations in his memory can be directed to Against Malaria, The Life You Can Save, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, or UNICEF. We hope you are one with the Force now Mike.
I’m gonna go with Against Malaria, there. Looks like they need the money most, I always default to global vs national charities and the worst client I ever had worked at Unicef and I am still hurt by it.
Thank you, Jes, for writing this. <3
Got my podcast done, (abrubt and horrifying subject changes is really kind of the theme of today’s issue, sorry) it is kind of sad, not gonna lie. But it is also kind of happy. Watched SNL this weekend and there was a skit where Selena Gomez and, um… gonna say Heidi Gardner? No. Melissa Villaseñor, did a skit of a talk show called A Peek at Pico, about the goings-on around Pico Rivera, and at one point, Selena Gomez said something like “It’s like when you’re sad, but that also makes you feel good, but it’s sad” and Melissa Villaseñor said “that’s good.” Yeah, the podcast was like that.
Selena Gomez was great, only lost it once, but there were a higher-than-normal number of clunker sketches this week. I am not one of those people who thinks SNL is “no good anymore” because I am old and secretly wish it was just the SNL of my youth. Mainly because I didn’t watch SNL when I was younger. I remember I had this whole giant problem with it when I spent that one semester at UAF. I’d get to class on Monday and everyone would be like “did you watch SNL this weekend? So good.” And I would haughtily say no, I did not, because I had friends and things to do and act all cool n shit. Well yeah okay whatever twenty year-old Rick. You can have friends and watch SNL. Even back then.
Got a bunch of gardening done. It does not make it on the weekly gardening video, but I got the raised bed that the squirrels had been invading covered with new, stronger netting that supposedly they can’t chew through (we’ll see, AFAIK squirrels can chew through anything) and I attched it with a strong bungee cord all the way around, so, no holes for them to squeak through. So far no incursions registered on the security camera. Of course, this netting is so fine no pollinators will get through so, you know, might not get any cucumbers, but I will remove it when I get back. This may fail completely. But I am trying. Those cukes are like freakin Fort Knox now. I also tried the Irish Spring thing but I think that’s only for deer. And before we leave Wednesday I’m gonna put squirrel feed corn out in the woods.
Here is this week’s video. I added a really arty intro and outro to it I hope you enjoy it:
Oh, and Emma wishes me to point out to everyone that our property will not be unprotected, that mother-in-law lives here and will be here the whole time, so don’t come rob us.
Other than that, spent a lot of the weekend preparing for this trip. Planning, fixing things up, getting the cat cam installed (it is SO GREAT), bringing things to and getting things from the storage unit. More work laptop prep, etc. I still have a ton to do, but I’m pretty sure I’m not forgetting anything, so long as I remember to actually look at my list.
A professional pundit dude wrote a tweet about how people in business are over-reliant on powerpoint and should write more long-form documents, and then notorious written-word dictator Jeff Bezos chimed in as well, about how “slide decks can hide shallow thinking” and so he makes everyone at Amazon use memos. This may come as a shock, given that I write you guys like a thousand words every morning and I write another 750 to myself each day, but these guys are, to use the technical term, wrong. First there’s the obvious lie, sitting right there in Jeff’s tweet, that slide decks are better at hiding shallow thinking than memos. The word shallow is a red herring, because while this may occasionally be true, slide decks and bullet points very rapidly expose contradictory and illogical thinking that can far more easily be hidden in loger documents. But even beyond that, ignoring why, my experience has been exactly the opposite. I used to write so many long-form documents at work, no one read them. I used to write such long emails to clients, god, I still cringe at the thought of writing some absurdly busy executive two pages of words to say what I could have said in two lines. I guarantee you that outside of that conference room, where Jeff sits with them and makes them read the memos, most people at Amazon do not read those much-vaunted memos. The best way to get the word across to a group of people in a corporate environment is, ironically, exactly what Jeff does in those meetings: have a meeting.
Also I love how he claimed “narratively structured” memos require “better thinking” when literally the whole point of a bulleted list is it’s the structure and if you fuck that up, pretty sure you’re gonna fuck up a more complex version as well.
I was going to Tweet all this in reply to Jeff, but I decided it needed a few more words, so I wrote it here, and look! No one is going to read it!
Also I suspect everyone, including Jeff, knows this, and this is why he Tweeted this out instead of writing a Medium post.
Also a white dude killed a ton of people at a supermarket because he was a Tucker Carlson-brainwashed fascist and he streamed the whole thing on Jeff Bezos’ streaming service, Twitch, and later that day I got an ad from Twitch telling me to tune in to Twitch to see all the live action and I’m thinking maybe they should have cancelled their ads for a day or two.
I’m also thinking that maybe a mass shooting deserves more than a passing mention most of the way down in this GMHHAY, but who are we kidding if we gave every mass shooting in America the time it deserves what else would we be able to do with our lives, amirite? God, I am terrible. We are terrible. Helpless. Mad, paralyzed, exhausted, withdrawing and feeling guilty about it all at once.
There’s a new paper explaining an answer to the Fermi Paradox. tldr; Fermi Paradox basically says “if there are so many planets out there in the infinite galaxy that can support life where are all the aliens” and the new paper says (and I am paraphrasing here) that basically civilizations get to a point where they fuck themselves up so bad they are at a pivotal moment where they either don’t rise to the occasion and they collapse into garbage or they realize the error of their ways and then turn their focus onto, you know, getting their house in order. The paper calls it “homeostatic reorientation” but you know, it’s “getting their shit together.” Essentially focusing on getting your shit together sort of, I guess, (I should probably read the whole paper) causes a civilization to “look inward” and “know thyself” rather than “look to the stars.” That sounds a bit unlikely to me because they probably need new oxygen replacements or something at that point, but essentially there’s a bottleneck and very few civilizations make it through the bottleneck and out into the stars. Basically they’re positing William Gibson’s Jackpot theory here: that most civilizations just fuck up everything so badly and they are so unable to face it that they collapse. I am trying to stay somewhat optimistic here but things like the Buffalo shooting really make that impossible. Even if you become a techno-utopian and think magic science will magically scientifically fix the environment and save us from climate change, we’ll probably still keep shooting each other with a bullshit US Senate scratching its balls instead of helping humans.
I upped my dose of Wegovy today, only this particular dose is a dose of Semiglutide that also comes in Ozempic form. Not all of them do. Wegovy has a different dose regemin, so some doses — like 1.7mg — only come in Wegovy so you gotta pay the big bucks. But this one has an Ozempic form so it was dirt cheap. Comes with a different stabby mechanism, though, a bit more complicated. Definitely like the Wegovy stabby bit better, but it is worth, mm, gonna say $10 not, you know, $1564.
Moody and quiet playlist for you today. Some more remnants from my journey into pre-Wet Leg Hester and Rhian, a lot of new stuff, aoldies from Billy Bragg, Bark Psychosis and Thalia Zydek (just got Eve on vinyl). This one has feels, I warn you. Might not start off that way, but.. yeah. It’s a grower.
I swear I’m not as sad as this playlist or this entry is. I’m feeling good today. Better than I have any right to feel, which is a gift, not a sin. Maybe. Yes?