Good morning. Hello. How are you? #695
Some whining about zits, sleep, the FTC, and tantrumy kids. And a very beautiful record box.
Good morning what’s up how’s tricks? All swell? I hope so. I have a zit on my nose it is killing me, maaaaan. Right where my glasses go. Constant nagging pain. Just fantastic. Still super tired, but a) I have decided it’s probably because I am slacking on exercise, so I tried to be a bit more physically active yesterday and took a really nice walk in the later evening in the dark after it started to cool off and it was just lovely, and b) I went to sleep an hour earlier, which does not seem to have helped me this morning feel less tired, but while I was in bed, for the last hour, after I had “gotten enough” sleep but my alarm hadn’t gone off yet, man, that was just lovely. Really a fantastic time. Screw reading books and trying to educate oneself. I am going to sleep all the time.
Also I took a nap yesterday but it doesn’t seem to have helped much.
Sleep sleep sleep I need so much sleep. “I need to sleep” as Pavement says in that one song.
Has anyone updated to MacOS 12.5 yet and is it a terrible idea and why? Is there even a point. What is the point.
Got the dehydrator working, turns out a) I should point a fan at it, b) dehydrated peppers are still a little rubbery. I put them into the spice grinder and it worked great, tons of chili powder. I’m now on peppers round two. I will probably have… about three gallons of chili powder when all of this is done. Those squirrels won’t know what hit them.
So Facebook fixed that extra-click problem for me, that is nice. Don’t say I never say anything nice about Facebook. Also Lina Kahn is kinda total BS for trying to block this piddling little acquisition by Facebook of a little VR Fitness game company called Within Unlimited. I mean, yes, okay, good for you, poppy Biden gave you your extra vote and now you can start to block these things, and that is cool, but you guys just let Amazon buy One Medical, and you just let Microsoft buy the infinitely bigger game company Activision. But Facebook can’t buy a piddling little company with, like, less than a hundred employees? I mean these people are all monopolists here, btu I am detecting a smidge of uneven application of the rules on this one.
[Okay, to be fair, turns out the FTC is still reviewing the Activision deal and, I presume, the One Medical deal, but the Activision deal is just the latest of a series of game studio acquisitions by Microsoft: ZeniMax, Rare, 343, The Coalition, Mojang, Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, bsidian Entertainment, InXile Entertainment, Double Fine.]
The craziest part is this quote: “In its complaint, the FTC alleged that Within’s Supernatural app competes with Meta’s own Beat Saber, a VR rhythm game where users hit targets in time to music. Meta also has the financial resources and expertise to easily add features to Beat Saber or develop a separate dedicated fitness app that could more directly compete with Supernatural, the FTC said.” Umm… okay, so the fact that Facebook could just build this anyway, presumably without the FTC’s interference, means that they shouldn’t, like, give other people some of their money instead? Spread the wealth in the tech ecosystem? Go ahead and be a monopolist anyway, just don’t let anyone else get rich off of it. Okaaaay. I suppose the flipside here is that Within would someday grow to be a viable contendor to Facebook’s VR endeavor? LOL yeah right, and also, you just said that is basically not gonna happeneither way.
I am spiritually pro Lina Kahn and a tougher FTC but I really don’t think this is a situation where you an just sort of chip at things opportunistically as they come up. I also very, very much sense that there is a sort-of “enemies and favorites” list at the FTC about these giant tech companies. Good monopolists and bad monopolists. Apple and Microsoft (oh, so ironically to us Gen Xers) are the “good” monopolists where the new, tough-on-tech FTC still operates with a light hand. Amazon falls in the middle, leaning toward bad, Facebook and Google are bad. Apple is sitting here completely destroying an entire industry with its monopoly power, but because one of the people they’re destroying is Facebook, it’s all good (never mind, of course, that the fact that Facebook can be destroyed, so easily, is sort of a point in the argument against them being much of a monopoly). There’s a pervasive sense of unfairness.
I mean, I get it. You operate a giant burreaucracy, constrained by laws and an actual board with board members who vote and an advisory panel, you don’t really get to pick your battles, you’re not a despot you don’t get to wave a magic wand and have the entire organizational apparatus hup to and do your bidding. It’s not possible for an FTC chair to, like, actually act methodically or decisively, certainly not in a coordinated, sweeping way with an eye toward an entire industry. Things weren’t set up like that. You only get to say yes or no to the potential battles that are placed in front of you. And this deal was so small it was quicker to get to yes/no than, say, Activision or One Medical. But still.
And I, of course, being a good tech citizen who has spent his years assiduously avoiding working for monopolists and trying to develop competing technologies under a brutal monopolistic environment, ought to be for this sort of thing, but the fact remains that these companies are still 100% our best, by far, chance at ever making a buck. Killing that off, killing off the most likely path to an exit for every company out there trying to put a dent in the monopolists, well, it’s hard to imagine how that is going to help things.
Also, it needs to be said, everyone knows it: TikTok has pretty much destroyed Facebook’s monopoly. Facebook does not own their category anymore. Not in the way Google does, or Apple does, or Amazon does, or Microsoft does. It really feels like everyone here has decided what they want to do, what needs to be done, and are ignoring the very obvious facts on the ground, that TikTok has eaten Facebook’s lunch, and our national champion is falling to a company backed by a repressive regime hellbent on using TikTok to stir the shit pot of American culture.
And, finally, VR is not a thing yet! No one owns VR, no one’s won. VR might not ever be a thing! The metaverse might not come about! And every single one of these tech giants is pursuing it, and Meta has no inherent advantage in the race, aside from their cool new name. If these tech giants all want to blow billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions, chasing this cool new things, let them! It is a money hole. It will do what you cannot: bleed these companies.
I treated myself and bought this thing and it just arrived last night:
It’s twelve years old. It smells brand new. One of the records is still unopened. The smell, my god, it smells glorious. And it’s all matte paper and it’s just… phenomenal. I can’t even handle what a glorious piece it is. It is called, weirdly, Cocteau Twins Box One, even though there has never been a box two, which there totally should have been. Seriously, though, it is so beautiful I want to hug it all day. Except then I’d get my grimy human juices all over it and ruin the pearlescent coated matte finishes. I busted my archival gloves out for this one.
And in a few days it will just… go on a shelf and sit there for the next three decades I guess.
My car needs to get an inspection and Emma says all I have to do is call the inspection place and they will come get my car, do the inspection, and bring the car back but I am unable to accomplish this task because it involves talking on the phone and that is just too much to bear. So we will see if I pull this off. I have 29 days left to accomplish this task.
All my recent pics of Jane have me in them, so you get this one that also includes the Kitty Twins. The one on the left is named Calico. Even though it’s a Siamese. Its sister is named Siamese. It’s a long story. You can tell Calico from Siamese because she has lost her whiskers from an extended period where Jane loved her more. Now she loves them together. They are twins. Jane is excited about the concept of Twins these days. Twins can look alike but they can also look different. Luckily I have plenty of time to coach her on not being weird around any of my real-life twin friends since all our twin friends are far away and we miss them very much. Also Jane has been a holy terror this week and I’m dreading my bedtime tonight and I am constantly wondering if this will ever end, these tantrums, this lack of empathy. At two it gets better at three, at three it gets better at four, its lies, all of it, lies! Parents are just too kind to other parents, newer parents to tell them the truth when they’re only a few years into this journey: that it never gets easier. The truth is too overwhelming we’re all in denial.
A club mix for you. This sweet CocoRosie remix I added less than two weeks ago is already gone from Spotify, shrug, but I’m leaving it on here in case it comes back. And yes, I’m putting two Beyoncé songs on here but tell me if you were in one of those Vegas clubs like Encore right now, the week that RENAISSANCE (all caps, natch) came out that you wouldn’t be liable to hear two Beyoncé tracks in an hour. Methinks yes. I’m comfortable with this breach of ettiquitte.
All right, talk tomorrow, wish me luck, wish me sleep.