Good morning. Hello. How are you? #738
Luffa problems, Elon's problems, GLOW was robbed, Roland Barthes on Wrestling, Kindle Scribe, what would the neighbors think.
Good morning! Hello there! How are you? All well? Holding up okay? I used to ask that because we were in the throes of a pandemic and under the thumb of a fascist wannabe-dictator. Now I ask that because maybe we’re still in the throes of a pandemic, dealer’s choice, and maybe we’re on the precipice of a recession that is maybe, just maybe, going to be intentionally induced by a man who is overly fanboyish toward Paul Volcker. Hanging in there okay? I hope so.
My luffa plant has gotten out of control. It’s taking over our entire porch. And I don’t think it has a single luffa on it. I want to grow luffa’s so bad. This is my second year of trying, and, boy, luffas grow great in North Carolina. Well, luffa vines do. Do I have a single luffa? I mean, I can’t exactly see inside all of this thing, but it is not looking promising. All the research I do about luffas say it needs to be hot hot hot for them to grow. And this thing grew okay during the hot heat of the 90’s and 100’s of summer. But since it’s cooled off into the 70’s and 80’s it has grown way more. Yet in neither of these two climates does it seem to have produced a single luffa. I am sacrificing my porch for this I demand a blood payment. Or a luffa payment. I don’t know what to try next year there are not a lot of master luffa growing guides on YouTube. And I only learn gardening from YouTube. Maybe a different type of luffa seed. To the Baker Creek catalog I go!
Not a lot of fellow travelers in the anti-narrative millieu, eh? That’s okay, I am content to walk this path alone. Makes for a better story. Bah duh bump.
Win some lose some.
Speaking of which, looks like Elon saw the writing on the wall and caught up to, you know, a fifth grader to see that he was out of options and has to actually go do what he agreed to do. I don’t think we need to look for a master plan here. Occam’s razor no doubt applies: he thought he could get out of it because he was smart, or special, or just… wanted to. He was wrong. Now he realizes he was wrong, and the longer he continued to deny this, the dumber he looked and that guy cannot handle looking dumb. And boy, those text messages made… well, no, that’s not fair. Elon mostly looked okay in the text messages. I almost felt sorry for him, all those sycophantic billionaire losers fawning constantly. Gawd. You know how there are people who don’t want to be rich, and say they don’t care about money, and you think “well that’s weird?” If ever there was a comprehensively compelling argument in their favor, it is Elon’s text messages. That’s what you have to put up with as a billionaire? Jason Calicanis saying he’s “ride or die bro?” Yeah, pass, thanks.
Anyway, my unhealthy, inappropriate schadenfreude (that I really shouldn’t have and am always trying to purge) is having a great time with this, seeing Elon have to eat some crow, watching him try and pretend it’s all part of some master plan. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he says, lying. Also it’s so sad the way the dude still owns x.com, from his first startup, and every now and then tries to pretend he’s going to resurrect it. This is not the first time.
But unhealthy schadenfreude aside, I am super bummed again that this dude is going to own Twitter, is probably going to let Trump get back on it (man wasn’t life better without Trump on Twitter?). I more or less like Twitter the way it is. They could do better about harrassment, but at least they’re trying. I reject the thesis that Twitter is run by incomptent people and if only a smart person ran it it would be so much better. Most of what is good about Twitter is also what’s bad about Twitter and you cannot tear them asunder. I can definitely think of worse people to own Twitter, lots of them, but this is still bad. Bad bad bad.
Our best hope now is that owning Twitter is simply one step on a path towards getting himself out of this jam, and in the end he plans on only owning it for a short time, enough time to polish it up with his Elon aura and then either re-IPO it or sell the bulk it off to his billionare fanboys. Since no single billionaire fanboy, save for maybe Ellison, is rich enough on their own to pay Elon’s price, they’ll have to own it in a big syndicate, and, you know, put a board together, and hire professional management, and… great. Right back to where we started from. Fine by me.
Unless he has somehow convinced himself back into thinking he can actually run it, in which case, god help us all.
I know, most of you don’t even care about Twitter. But I do. I care about it in lots of ways. I care about it as an early user, as a current user, as a pre-IPO shareholder, as a friend of many of the people who built the thing. And, really, as someone who believes that, for everything, the news is better in a world with Twitter than without.
Allison Brie is still sad that Netflix cancelled GLOW, called it the “heartbreak of [her] career,” and man, she is not wrong. What a travesty. That is such BS. Glow was so awesome.
Don’t know why I was thinking about that yesterday, but what a great show.
Oh right I remember why I was thinking of GLOW. Because this Narrative Economics book introduced me to this glorious essay about professional wrestling written in 1957 by none other than Roland Barthes. God I love it when French people come over to America and write essays about pop culture things it really is the best.
Roland Barthes was killed by a laundry van. That’s some BS, right there.
So I’ve been half-assedly shopping for a large-format e-reader, one that will handle PDFs. Been keeping my eye on three or four different companies, products by Remarkable, Boox, Kobo, etc., but none of them quite seemed right. One problem is that even though I’m explicitly interested in this thing for PDF reading and annotation, it seemed really dumb to buy something that couldn’t read all the e-Books I already own, since I am, regretfully, locked into the Kindle system and, as much as I would love to migrate out of it, I don’t particularly see that happening any time soon. So I guess my problems have been solved with the announcement of the new Kindle Scribe, a 10.2” Kindle with a new handwritten notetaking and annotation system. Looks like it should solve all my problems — all of them, losing weight, curing depression, etc. But man. Lock-in is such a bitch. I am so resentful. It’s crazy to think back to my original, first Kindle book purchase and how naive I was and how benign Amazon seemed. Lol. Now they just run the entire internet. Did not see that coming. Though of course, I should have since Bezos was, you know, one of Google’s first investors. Did you know that? People forget that.
I just looked it up and my first Kindle book purchase was Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma in 2009. Thank you, past Rick, for not embarrassing me on that one.
Emma has begun her halloween decorations the house is already almost completely covered it really is something. We were on our evening walk last night so we walked past the front of the house and I could get a good look at it and, wow, yeah, there’s a lot. I told her I thought it was still too early and she asked me when I thought would be an appropriate time to decorate for Halloween and I said “October 20th” and the gasp of horror out of her mouth was really one of the best things I’ve heard in a while. Just outright disgust at my constrained ideas of Halloween decor season.
She’s also picked out a bunch of halloween outfits for Jane, and left them out, and gotten Jane excited about it, so now every morning when I get Jane out of bed and we do our morning routine, Jane picks out a Halloween outfit, and I gotta admit, that part is pretty great.
Also Emma basically left halloween decorations up all year inside the house, and I was fine with that. So I am forced to confront the embarrassing, uncomfortable reality that I seem to care what my neighbors think, and I want to be a good, normal neighbor. Whoops. I suppose I should be thanking my wife for forcing me out of my bourgoisie comfort zone and taking what counts as a risk in my staid life these days. So, thank you.
Shoegaze playlist for today and something exciting just happened. I was about 10 minutes short on this playlist, and I looked down at the bottom of Spotify to the recommendations, and in the recommendations was “5 Listens” by the band Difference Engine, which is my friend and former Barbarian partner Aubrey’s band, pre-Barbarian. I first met him when he was playing in Difference Engine, I remember him vividly. I had driven down to NYC to see His Name is Alive’s first show in NYC at Brownies, and Difference Engine opened and me and my girlfriend stayed at a friend of hers’ house in the village and the next morning I walked out of the apartment and onto the landing, and there was Aubrey, who was staying in the apartment accross the landing. We got to talking, discovered we both lived in Boston, and the rest is history. He would go on to produce my band and be the CTO of my company a decade or so later. This is also the first time, I think, that Spotify has recommended a friend’s song to me. I hope he’s “in the algorithm” now and making bank. Someone needs to make bank off of Spotify.
Talk tomorrow!
i decided to switch up my morning routine and save GMHHAY for the evening and i swear i felt like something was missing all day. may have to rethink my routine reiteration…♥️
I have a kobo. It's pretty good. The interface is a little bit glitchy compared to kindle but it does what I need it to. Like the hit area for buttons is either a bit too small or a bit off and I have to make several attempts to, say, delete a book. I've had to reboot it a few times too because it suddenly decided that every book on it was protected with Adobe DRM. (They were not.) Nice big, non-reflective screen though so I can make the font big because my eyes are old.