Good morning. Hello. How are you? #701
Raccoon memes, head ailments, olive oil, ten-inch Old Navy 2007 brown bears, Adtech M&A shit, Westworld reruns, ruminations on news consumption
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good. Really committing to raccoon memes. Made a separate, specific folder in my photo scrapbook folder for them, so I can file them away. Opened that folder into a window on one of my big photo sorting Spaces so I can rapidly file them away. Now this collection of raccoon memes will grow and grow for years and decades, piling up un-viewed, until I die, and Emma take sout the When I die doc and follows its instructions and wipes my computer, except even then the raccoon meme folder will live on, because it is backed up in my Dropbox, for which Emma will keep paying for years after I die because you never know when you might need, like, that invoice from a handyman who worked on the house thirty years earlier or something. So the raccoon memes folder will continue to live on, until Emma gets sick of paying the bill, or has taken the weeks needed to go through the whole Dropbox, or until she dies. Unless at that point Jane keeps paying for the Dropbox. How long can this possibly go on? Digital files will never be anything but ephemeral. For good measure I will someday put the raccoon memes on a USB stick or something and stick a copy in the storage space, but I suspect that won’t last even as long as the Dropbox, cuz Emma is going to pay someone to gut that storage space like a fish the second I kick it, just you wait and see. Emma is not a fan of storage spaces.
Spent all work day yesterday listening to Olivia Newton John. Man her 90’s albums were a trip. The kids album, the Christmas album, the Gaia album, I really liked that one. So weird.
Fantastic news I am now convinced that my head feels like it’s sunburned all the time… because it’s probably covered in zits underneath my hear. WTF. I keep rubbing my head and finding bumps. The low-level burning I feel all around, I am realizing, can be localized. It is emanating from a series of spots that hurt when pressed. This is probably not good. Being human is such a chore. Turn me into a immortal raven sidekick.
Freakin Harris Teeter stopped selling my brand of Olive Oil and I am ripshit. I mean, at least it’s not on their website anymore, and I really dont’ want to go back to that pestillent hive of scum and villany to check the actual shelves. Maybe it’s just backordered or something, but they don’t have it in any variety or size. This is very upsetting. I mean, good on me I am a depression granny and I keep six bottles – three organic EVOO amd three Sicillian SGI organic EVOO. I like my olive oil. I use it for everything. I use it for high-temperature wok cooking. It is fine. Gawd. I’m going to have to, like, pick a new olive oil and order it on the internet from one of my two different friends who have olive oil companies now, aren’t I?
There’s another ten-inch Old Navy 2007 brown bear on eBay. I think we have… three in reserve? And Jane is just not demolishing them the way she did when they were younger, I think this specific ten-inch Old Navy 2007 brown bear that is currently serving in the capacity of the friend known as Brown Bear might just go the distance. I probably don’t need another one. So I feel really bad for this eBay seller, because they probably looked up their ten-inch Old Navy 2007 brown bear and saw it had some value, and so they set a kind of high opening bid on the thing. Too high, if you ask me, the world’s only dedicated collector of ten-inch Old Navy 2007 brown bears. And now I have exited the market. Which means the market is going to implode. Which means this dude or dudette is not going to get $49.99 for his ten-inch Old Navy 2007 brown bear. I have dashed the hopes of someone I don’t even know. Fifty bucks is a lot of money. I wonder how they will take it. I forgot to look at their seller stats, to see if they’re a pro or not, or if this is their only auction. Okay, I just looked. They have 45,232 ratings. They have 1,935 items for sale. Okay, my conscious is clear. Hopefully they re-list the thing at a much more reasonable $8 or so and then maybe I’ll have one more go round in the world of ten-inch Old Navy 2007 brown bear collecting.
My work life has been thrust into some measure of chaos due to M&A competition. And the trophy item everyone is fighting for is Unity Technologies. Unity of course makes the Unity Game Engine, which, along with the Unreal engine, is how many, many games are made. Unity also recently bought Weta Digital, Peter Jackson’s digital FX studio in Wellington. Peter kept the practical effects and creature shop Weta FX. Made a cool bil off of the deal. But outside of our biz, most people don’t know that Unity is also a mobile advertising powerhouse. They’re like in the top five. And they were gonna buy another top-five mobile advertising powerhouse, IronSource. That all happened like a month ago or so. But then yesterday, the 100 pound gorilla in the room of in-app mobile advertising, AppLovin, offered to buy Unity, but said they did not want IronSource. So who knows what’s going to happen now. Seems sort-of similar to the whole Spirit/Frontier/JetBlue saga that’s been playing out all year if you pay attention to airline M&A. But it’s a bit different cuz Unity is the buyer in one scenario and the seller in the other. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going to happen — both deals are all stock, all three stocks have been through the wringer this year, and they’re all moving around these days so the numbers are constantly changing.
But if I were a betting man I would bet that this whole thing has put Unity in play, and some larger entity is going to swoop in. And if i were betting man, I would say that entity would be Microsoft because Lina Kahn’s FTC clearly plays favorites, and they don’t have any real grasp of in-app mobile advertising as its own, rapidly consolidating market. Insert long rambling essay here about the federal government’s predilliction for defining the ad market in a million different ways depending on their goals at the moment. Sometimes there’s a “digital ad market” distinct from, say, television, sometimes there is a mobile game ad market, like in the decision handed down in Epic v Apple. Who knows. But Microsoft and AppLovin and Apple aren’t monopolists in advertising, Google and Facebook are, even though Facebook barely exists in this world these days. So, you know, Apple and Microsoft are the only ones who could get away with it. And I don’t think even Apple could get away with it, but not because it is the actual, secret monopolist in mobile in-app advertising, no siree, no FTC’s gonna stop Apple there, the FTC wants to have Apple’s babies it loves them so much. They got played like a fiddle. But I do think them buying Unreal’s chief competitor while locked in an endless lawsuit suite with Epic might be, maaaaybe a bridge to far.
In any case, it’s funny how a tech industry giant is getting jostled around because of the ad industry for a change. Usually it’s the other way around, the ad industry is the plaything of tech, we are usually those buildings in Metropolis that crumble when Superman and Zod fight and get smashed through them without a thought. I get the sense that Unity Engine and Unity’s ad biz have always had an uneasy alliance within their company and I get the sense Unity Engine thought it was in the driver’s seat. Surprise!
Still watching Westworld reruns and it really is great, much better when you know what the hell is going on, and I’m still catching little callbacks from previous seasons that I now notice in Season four. It is so hard for us mere mortals to rememeber WTF happened in previous seasons of shows when we have to wait two, three years for another season. And the people who live and breathe the show, of course, remember everything. And there’s some cohort of superfans out there that notice and remember everything — Westworld had a ton of these back at the beginning. Are any of them still going, I wonder? But between the makers of the shows and the superfans, we often get left out, and casual viewers can’t shake the sense that, like, half the show is flying over their heads, which I do not super love but most of the time I can’t be arsed to remedy it. But I am remedying it here. There was a schtick with an hourglass this season that turned out was a direct callback to a season two subplot. Same with the incernating room. But the craziest thing is that in Season one they went to great lengths to show that all the pyrotechnics were controlled by the command center, and not actually explosive material. But now in season two all the fake nitroglycerine is suddenly real nitroglycerine that works just fine without command center intervention. It is as weird as the bullets, which still make zero sense. The animals still make no sense. They keep showing vultures in season 2, and other scavengers picking over dead bodies. Did Ford and Arnold make a big batch of vultures? Are those host vultures? Or did vultures, like, somehow migrate to this island in the spratleys? Neither option makes much sense. But the vultures add atmosphere.
It’s still pretty awesome, though.
A friend politely hinted yesterday that maybe I should take a two week break from the news, due to my long rambling bit about Trump and the raid. I told her that stoping reading the news for me is like a catholic taking a break from god, which, I suppose is also maybe good advice, but also very central to their core being? I was raised by newspaper-and-weekly-reading parents who impressed upon me that keeping up with current events was one’s civic duty. I know she is maybe right, but I don’t even know how I could, really. I mean, history rhymes as, okay, fine Twain said and not George Lucas. I take a two week break from the news and lose myself in my book and my book is Nixonland and then two more books about the history of conservatism and… I am reading the news. It is the same thing. The same thing has happened over and over. I know this friend was making a good and important point, and maybe I’m just some sort of sick addict. I know I’d be happier if I ignored the news for two weeks. I don’t think I’d be better person, I think I’d be worse. It’s weird. I believe that in a utopia, people shouldn’t have to worry about this shit. And I believe that we might choose to worry so others we love don’t have to. Not having to worry about the state of the world is a gift, it is clearly a much more pleasant state of being. But for me, personally, it is tantamount to sin. This is maybe unhealthy. I had a fleeting thought last night that maybe someday, when I hit sixty-five or so, I could indulge in being happy. Just turn off all the worry for everyone else, everything else, and be happy for a few years, as a retirement, now his watch is ended. And it did occur to me, fleetingly, that that is kind of sad, I could just be happy now instead, wouldn’t it be nice to be happy in your life. But most of my unhappiness is about the plight of others. I mean, not all, but it’s probaby like… 70-30? Choosing to be happy, for me, means choosing to stop caring and worrying about other people and I don’t think I’m even able to do that, let alone rationalize it.
BUT, as a gift, looks like today’s issue had no current events in it. So, that is my sop.
W Hotel in a Better, Alternate Universe mix today. Starts off with two all-time classic-Rick favorites, ends with an obsession from the last year, mostly new stuff in the middle. Never even heard of this Jane, Inc. band, but I am super into them and obviously I approve of their name. Jane will have to eventually join this band, co-opt it, kick everyone out and take over the name. I will now parent her accordingly.
Okay talk to you guys tomorrow.