Good morning. Hello. How are you? #743
More Elon Twitter ranting, giving up the MX Fuel dreams, Scrivener's flaunting
Good morning, friend. Happy Tuesday. How’s tricks? Holding up so far? I am good, I’m listening to this new 2018 Pink Floyd Animals re-issue. How a 2018 reissue can be new is beyond me, but so it is. Lots going on in the Pink Floyd world these days. Roger Waters is out there saying batshit things about Russia and Ukraine, it’s really sad. And he’s doing this right at the moment that Pink Floyd is selling their publishing rights in what was going to be a blockbuster deal, but a) economy and b) Roger Waters saying batshit things about Ukraine is apparently giving some investors cold feet. I suspect that is fine, Pink Floyd have enough money, they’ll be okay. The Roger Waters thing is really disappointing though. Really evidence of how people can lose nuance and complexity in their world views when they just fall back onto heuristics, onto short cuts. It seems perfectly reasonable in any default international politics situation to assume that the US is probably to blame for things. Reality, however, is much more complex, and you can’t just take the “probably” out of that sentence and still be right.
Elon Musk said in an interview recently that old people shouldn’t be president, because they’re one or two generations removed from the population, and therefore out of touch. I suspect there’s some truth to this, especially with your rock idols. It is sad to see rock idols fall out of touch and turn loopy. It bums me out. Of course, Elon Musk ruined this somewhat intelligent insight by, in the same interview, stating that billionaires know best: “If the alternative steward of capital is the government, that is actually not going to be to the benefit of the people,” says Musk. The fact that he can say both of these things in the same interview and not notice the massive hypocrisy is really something. Spending an extra few years as an underpaid servant to the people really makes you lose touch, but flying private everywhere and having your blood replaced periodically? Totally in touch with the masses.
Elon’s gonna get his deal done, I guess. I was wrong a few days ago. Well, probably. Matt Levine says the banks probably don’t want to do the deal but they will, it is unheard of them backing out, and they’ve lost more on these sorts of deals in the past than they will on this one, dem’s da breaks. This seems incredible to me but debt financing is hardly my forte so I will defer to Mr. Levine.
I maintain hope, however, that the deal will fall through. I’ve had Kanye blocked on Twitter for years, but this week’s absurd events were enough to break through my protective wall: Kanye returning to Twitter, Elon welcoming him back as if he already owns the place, Kanye then immediately using the platform to say he is going to murder jews, then getting blocked is just… yeah, nice job. Oh and then Elon tweets out that he talked to Kanye and he “gets it” now and he’ll be better. Okay cool. So a) Kanye is now going to stop a long history of spewing hateful things because Elon talked to him and b) Elon’s plan for content moderation is to personally talk to each person who said something hateful. Checks out. Definitely plenty of free time on Elon’s hands for that on.
God it’s so depressing to write about these things I don’t know why I do it. One of the best, best things about Good Morning Hello How are You is that I can completely ignore whole topics that everyone in the world is talking about. And I do it all the time! I did not write a single thing about the Queen’s death. But for some reason I feel compelled to spout off on this nonsense. I guess I do sort of agree with Elon that the world needs a platform like Twitter. I just think we already have it and we don’t need him to ruin it.
In other news, I think I am going to give up the Milwaukee dream. I had settled on the Dewalt battery system during the pandemic, and it was a ton of work, to sell tools, buy tools, donate tools, get rid of battery chargers, swap things out and standardize the whole house, both my tools and Emma’s, on the Dewalt 20 volt system. Almost immediately afterwards, though, I had regret and wished I had done the whole thing on the Milwaukee 18 volt MX Fuel system. And I’ve been secretly hoping to find some method of slowly switching to Milwaukee. Like I would start by “needing” a tool that Milwaukee makes but Dewalt doesn’t, thus giving me an excuse to introduce the system into the household, and thus once I had one, it would be perfectly reasonable to buy other tools on the Milwaukee platform, because, well, I already had the battery system. And then it would slowly take over, and slowly, one by one, I would replace the current tools as they died — not that tools ever die under my level of workload but whatever.
I have come to accept that this is fanciful. First off, in shopping for a new compound miter saw, I discovered that Milwaukee tools, it turns out, are way more expensive. By all accounts, they are more durable too, so if you are a hardcore professional, the extra expense can be worth the money, mayhaps. But I think we all know I am not a hardcore professional carpenter. So it would be, like, aspirational at best, poseur-ish at worst. Also Milwaukee tools are much harder to purchase, they are in far fewer retail venues. Do I want to be locked into Home Depot? I do like the pretty red more than the Dewalt yellow, and I am obsessed with the Milwaukee packout system, but I just don’t think I can justify this level of expense for my level of carpentry needs.
I therefore choose to be a mature, self-aware individual who understands his limits and resists the urge of pretty red branding. Be proud of me.
I could theoretically use the Packout system without, you know, buying Milwaukee tools but that seems, well, insane. Maybe in a good way. It would go on the chaotic neutral quadrant in some meme four-quadrant chart.
Every day, I finish writing this GMHHAY, and I select all, command-A, then copy, command-c, hit send on the email, then open up Facebook, and paste the entry into there for the Facebook readers, command-V. Then I copy the Spotify playlist URL and paste it into the comments on the Facebook post, then I copy the Substack URL and paste it there as well, as a temptation to the Facebook readers to click on the link, see the fully formatted GMHHAY edition on Substack, replete with pretty photos, and decide they want to subscribe as part of their lifelong efforts to get off of Facebook — I don’t want to be the reason anyone is still on that platform. Then I await the arrival of the email in my inbox, then I copy the contents of the email, command-C, and then paste the entire entry into Scrivener, my book-writing app, the greatest app ever made. Copy and pasting from the email, as opposed to the WYSIWYG editor in the browser, does the best job and maintaining the formatting for Scrivener.
Anyway, I have a giant Scrivener file that has been keeping every entry of GMHHAY since the beginning in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. Of course, out of this file has already come a 750 page book, that was heavily edited down. The file is big. It has a lot of words. As of yesterday there have been one million, one hundred and forty-five thousand words that have gone into Good Morning. Hello. How Are you?. That is crazy.
Relatedly, one thing Scrivener is not super great at is saving large files. I mean, it’ll do it, but it takes almost a full minute. Well, to be clear, saving a backup does. And I have Scrivener set to make a full backup to a second location every time I save, because I am paranoid and I’m not gonna lose 1 million words.
Did you know on the Mac you can hold down the Option key and click on your desktop (or any app you’re not currently using) and it will hide the app you were in as you switch to the new app? Try it? It is great. Once you’re aware of it, you’ll use it all the time. I learned this back in the 90’s in my MacTemps/Aquent days and I still use it hundreds of time a day. The trick is part of my main workflow, part of my subconscious.
But here is the mystery: When I paste the day’s new entry into Scrivener, and I hit save, a box pops up showing me the progress on writing the new backup version of the file. It takes a minute or two. That’s fine. Normally when I dialog box pops up on some app and I need to wait, I just hide the app using the option-click trick and work on other stuff and check back later. But somehow Scrivener manages to keep me from hiding the app once I have hit save. And it manages to do this immediately, even before the dialog box pops up. Like I can’t just do it really fast, hit save, then immediately hit option-click to hide it before the save box comes up. I don’t understand how this is the case. I don’t understand how Scrivener is blocking this OS level functionality, and doing so so quickly. It does not compute.
It is a mystery to me, a mystery that flaunts itself in my face every morning. Reminding me that even after thirty years of sitting in front of Mac computers, there are still things I do not understand about them. It is an affront to my self-perception.
Plus it’s really annoying.
I think I’m gonna need to copy and paste this entire passage and paste it into a Scrivener support ticket.
It’s Daddy bedtime tonight. And I need to call my mom.
Moody and quiet mix for you today, primarily new stuff. Very much digging this Maya Hawke album, loving this new Gloria de Oliveira Dean Hurley album, and the new ambient Sam Prekop album, all recommended. Missing Caroline Crawley from Shellyan Orphan this week. Thinking of Mimi from Low and hoping for a speedy recovery.
Until tomorrow.
That Milwaukie pack-out system looks appealing as hell. Also reminds me of a couple European workshop YouTubers I was watching last year. I think they’re both Germans, which figures I suppose. They use their workshops to build bespoke workshop/tool organization systems. Righteous shit.