Good morning. Hello. How are you? #762
Top Gun 4k UHD Blu Ray, a special pair of Wirecutters for the closet, not too much about Elon or Taylor just a little, hommages to errands and Venmo.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? All well? Excited about Friday? Happy Friday! I am excited. I have the day off. Gonna do errands. Suzy, I know you’re excited. My friend Suzy, a loyal reader who is so kind and clicks the like button on these posts with great frequency, well, she just loves errands. Errands are the best. A day running errands is a great day.
Just back from the recycling center, where I got to see the big truck pick up the big dumpster of recyclables, that was exciting.
Then to the Walmart where I bought a pair of wirecutters for my bedroom closet because I am a lunatic and have been obsessing over the length of the wire on my otherwise perfect, now uniformly-matching clothes hangers. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to hyphenate when the word ends in -ly but that is a dumb rule. Sometimes, they should still be hyphenated. Anyway, the little part of the hangers that makes the hook that hooks over the rack pole, they’re not all the same length. Some are extraordinarily long, and it is annoying, because you’re trying to lift a shirt off of the rack and it gets stuck, because your muscle memory is off because this one is longer than the others. And then you slip, and maybe you drop the shirt on the ground, or it comes out of your hands and it is so annoying. And the fix is easy, except your wirecutters are in the gargae and you’re just trying to get dressed here, and you’re not gonna go to the garage before you get dressed, are you? So the solution has been obvious for quite some time and finally I overcame the massive amount of effort it took to, you know, remember to write “wirecutters” on the shopping list (one does not typically have their phone in their hand while getting dressed, at least I don’t, maybe I’m projecting here). And it is done. I brought the new pair into the closet, picked a hangar at random, it was one of the too-long ones (it really is like one in three that are too long, I swear) and snipped the end just like that and man I feel so good about it I can’t even tell you.
Snipping the ends off of a hangar with a new pair of wirecutters is a joy that — forgive me for hazarding a guess here — you will never know.
Also exciting news about Walmart: They finally, they actually had the 4K UHD Blu Ray of Top Gun Maverick. I’ve been checking every day for this film at Walmart for, like… months? Even though I knew the Blu Ray release date was in November. Nope came out last week, but Walmart did not get a 4K copy. Or it got one copy, and it was sold before I got there. There was only one copy of Top Gun Maverick on 4k today, so whomever else is looking for it at the North Chatham Walmart, I am sorry. I won’t rip it today, though. I’ll give the one man band over at MakeMKV a day or so to update his encryption keys. That guy is the hardest working guy in tech, I swear. Also I already gave him enough work this week with the log dump for the new 4K UHD release of Jodorowsky’s Sante Sangre. Man, the packaging on that is amazing, strong reccomend.
I’m also gonna go voting today, in about 2 hours, with my wife, that’ll be fun I do love voting and so far our precinct seems pretty devoid of gun-carrying lunatics hell-bent on destroying Democracy, NBD, we all just pretend it’s not happening.
I was driving this morning at sunrise, and it was foggy, so it was one of those mornings where the sky looks orange and sort of on fire. Like a nearby forest fire. And all these cars were lined up at the light, waiting to turn, to go to work, and it struck me that this is what these people are going to do right into the flames. Democracy will die around them, the planet will fall apart, and they’ll just… keep going to work every day. And here I am saying “they” to, you know, feel superior, but, shit, I’ll probably just keep going to work every day too. Because what else are we to do, what else are we to do.
Thank you Taylor for recognizing your best customers at Taylor Swift dot com Taylor Nation Shop The Collection Now and pre-qualifying us for the tour ticket pre-sale. Or pre-qualifying us for pre-qualifying for the pre-sale. It is a little murky. The email implied we are skipping one step before ticket buying but there sure seems to be a lot more steps. Anyway, smart move, because I wasn’t gonna bother with the pre-sale, but now I am invested.
Speaking of presales I have a Yo La Tengo at Cat’s Cradle presale in seventy-nine minutes. Exciting!
Lol thank you Spotify Music Radar playlist for trolling me with a 37-minute noise overture by the Telescopes in the middle of my playlist. I’m gonna listen to it all, believe you me, but maybe not right now.
So Elon is firing like half of Twitter in about three hours. “Twitter” sent out an email to employees yesterday saying that if you got an email at your Twitter account, you weren’t laid off, and if you got one at your personal email, you were fired. You’ll find out soon! Oh and if we made any mistakes just drop a line. Signed, “Twitter.” That’s the most galling part. A dude who has owned Twitter for eight days, who has not once spoken to the employees, has not once communicated with the nearly seven thousand employees who make up Twitter. Well, he’s “Twitter” now, and you are not. The fact that the dude couldn’t even sign his name to it. Couldn’t even communicate to these people as himself. That really is something.
He did not, as people feared, do all of this before last Tuesday in order to avoid stock compensation vesting. I assume that’s because he understands California’s WARN act, and he understands that he has to give sixty days’ notice before any mass layoff event, so today will technically be the notice of layoffs and all of these people will presumably be technically employed for another sixty days at least and I assume he is a good person and will not count those “employed” days as severanc — lol yeah right. It does seem there was probably a lawyer in the room, maybe, who explained to him that he was stuck paying that severence either way, but… we shall see, we shall see.
The fact that the letter was just signed “Twitter,” though. That really is something.
I am embarrassed to have Tesla products in my house I swear. Can’t really sell and replace whole home batteries, though. But I swear, I am done. Also, the app sucks.
I was in my Venmo app the other day, getting ready to pay a man for a Factory Records rarity, and I notices that there were still a ton of public transactions from my friends in Venmo. And it got me thinking to “back in the day” when I was a VC and a hard-core tech “industry” guy and kept track of every startup and all that. And there was all this guff and clamour and cynicism about Venmo and their weird social feed tied to a payments app thing. Everyone was so dubious about Venmo. And there were all these other payment apps that were supposedly competing with Venmo as well but they were all really competing against Paypal and who was ever going to beat Paypal, lol.
But here we and… Venmo won. I mean, Venmo just completely, utterly won. Venmo’s acquisition history obscures this. It was sold very early on to Braintree for twenty, thirty million if I recall. And then Braintree was later sold to Paypal for $800 million ish. God, I hope those Venmo founders had stock in Braintree. But, I mean, Paypal’s market cap today is $88 billion, and what percentage of it do we think Venmo is these days? Half? Venmo was just an incredibly successful, mind-bogglingly successful startup, into a world of massively-entrenched incumbents, and it won.
Also, whatever Paypal exec (or was it eBay then let’s look. It was eBay, Paypal was still an eBay subsidiary) that did that purchase should be knighted into the tech hall of fame. I would posit that the acquistion of Braintree by eBay/Paypal was a more phenomenally successful acquisition than the previous legends: Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram or WhatsApp. I suppose Instagram makes a buttload more money than Venmo (some half-assed Googling indicates it makes about 8x more), but a) that may be true right now that is true let’s see in another decade and b) boy it sure is easier to make money with Venmo than Instagram.
Venmo, man. Silent hit.
Also hats-off to eBay/Paypal for utterly crushing the innovator’s dilemma.
Hells yeah, weekend. I am excited. Emma took Jane to her playgroup at the playground yesterday (hence the drawing above of Mama Hello Kitty driving Baby Hello Kitty). The neighborhood tech-guys-turned-contractors are rebuilding our dock this weekend, that is exciting. Plus the frame store and voting and I am redoing the garage storage and I am going to organize my seed packs which will be very fun. So much potential for putting small things in boxes. My god is there anything more satisfying. I’ll do some gardening but it’s been pretty warm and I think I can get these luffa’s a little bit bigger before picking them and I’m still getting tomatoes and peppers. Just a few more weeks, garden, few more weeks.
Also check out this ice cream sundae Jane sculpted out of Kinetic Sand. I mean, is that disturbingly perfect or what. Look how she’s doing the little excited thing with her hands. Man, I hope she keeps doing that thing until she’s old. It’s the best.
W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe playlist for you. Shit, man, I haven’t been to a W Hotel in so long maybe their lobbies play awesome music now. Well, this is awesome music too. But then maybe I would need to retitle this series, now up to volume 56, which is hilarious. If you hit up a W Hotel any time soon, Shazam what they’re playing and drop me a line, will you? Anyway this is all new except for Single Gun Theory, who I have been weirdly missing of late, underrated band, Single Gun Theory. I am very into this new John Cale Weyes Blood track have I told you about this? It is great.
Okay! Have a lovely weekend and thank you for your time and attention in these urgent matters.
There is nothing more satisfying.
ERRANDS! i love them so much and i really miss NY errands. there was something very satisfying about plotting out a perfectly efficient errand run in NY.
i don’t get the taylor nation pre-pre-sale thing. i waited half a day to get through the ticketmaster pre-sale queue when the tour was announced and then spent another hour just trying to complete the signup process. very buggy. way too much traffic.