Good morning. Hello. How are you? #750
Dreams of a space-station-based anti-empathy spa relaxation chamber, ruminations on Meta's metaverse. Half-Cocked the film.
Good morning! Hello there. How are you doing? All well? Is it cold where you are? We had our first frost here in Chatham County, NC last night. My minisplit has turned itself to heat. It’s over on the far wall, above the record player. I just went over there to put the record on and it was so toasty warm. I am wearing pants. It is novel. I remember that one time where that one bar at the Maritime hotel wouldn’t let me in because I was wearing shorts. Not the club in the basement. Not the bar on the south side. The one on the north side. It’s not even listed on Google Maps. Weird. I’ve been there a few other times, I know it exists. We had a Barbarian party there once. And one time Me, Ryan and Aug went to a Marissa Miller party there to launch her new Vans edition. I got a free pair of Vans. Ryan said his name was Rusty Shackleford and he was a race car driver and it wasn’t all “blood sweat and gears,” you know. That seemed to work with the models. Aug was there because we were supposed to go see Yaz at Terminal 5 later. I did not go. Terminal 5. So far north. But Aug did. He is a more committed Yaz fan than I am. I regret never seeing Yaz. That is shame. Though that was not because of shorts.
I wonder if this means my pepper plant died. My watermelon plant mysteriously died, completely shriveled up, last week. I wonder if we briefly hit 32 degrees some night and the various weather apps did not tell us. I should go pick the remaining peppers tonight. That’s shame there are a lot of really good looking baby bell peppers on the plants still. I wonder if I should try and overwinter my peppers again. I tried once, in the garage, but I failed because apparently you’re supposed to still water them now and again but no one told me. I was gonna pull everything from that bed and plant cover crop for the winter, but I suppose I could try and over winter the peppers, as an experiment? I don’t really want them all in that bed next year, but I could attempt a transplant in the spring, and even if it fails I’m no worse off than I am now. Hrm. Maybe.
Also kinda stressed about the drip irrigation. I wonder if I should drain it. Must research. Luckily it’s warming back up tonight so, you know, I still have some time. This was just an early warning frost.
I’ve been having a rough couple of days this week, owing mostly to parenting and it’s been causing me to re-evaluate my life, indulging in various dreams of escape. No, that’s not right. Not escape… change? Dreams of changes like moving and such. But interestingly, no mapped out dream of change seems indisputibly better than my current life, so I guess that means that despite my various trials and tribulations my life is more or less on the correct course. So that is good.
But one thing I’ve realized, because of this exercise, and my current aforementioned anxiety about the mid-terms, is that I feel every injustice so hard. Every mistreatment of others hurts me and appalls me and drives me to distraction. They all make me irrationally angry and I can very easily spiral if I let myself think of more than one at a time, and my thoughts very rapidly go to Old Testament vengeance. So when I let myself dream of “escape” from my life, it’s not really my personal life, it’s this anger and helplessness and outrage at the injustices of others.
My thoughts go to those insect-avoiding monks, but that’s not quite right, that’s just a starting point, because it seems to me that those monks are just exercising a form of narcissism, as if their actions and the injustice they cause are all that matters, or, as they would like to haughtily but factually incorrectly say, all that they can control. This is, of course, BS, as any social justice warrior since the dawn of time will tell you.
But of course, I am doing neither, all I manage to pull off, while keeping myself together, is to occasionally harange my readership about these injsutices, keeping things entertaining enough surrounding these harrangues that people put up with them. And I donate money, of course. But you know, this sort of more normal-ish internal debate about “I should be doing more” and “how can I do more and keep my life” and “haha you fool there’s a lot more you could do and keep your life,” — that is all the normal, daily internal dialogue on the topic. When things get bad as they have lately, my fantasies turn to either gloriously complex fantasy plots of biblical retribution — perhaps making use of a judgemental archangel to send “them” all to a demon realm (it is very tempting to document these fantasies in detail here in writing but I would prefer not to be visited by any federal agencies).
OR, my thoughts turn to this very specific, yet imagined sci-fi contraption: a sort of anhedonic chamber, sensory deprivation tank, but that the sense it is depriving me of is empathy for others suffering from tyranny. Just… as a pause. As a therapy. A salon, a spa, where you could go in and for a brief respite from the helpless feeling of anger and pain one feels when thinking of the evil that people perpetuate on others. I picture it on some sort of Space Station — like the Babylon 5 one or the Deep Space 9 one — and you drive up in your spaceship — which lools sorta like Rick’s flying saucer from Rick and Morty — and you stroll through the space station’s esplanade, barely keeping it together, and hand your space money to some alien attendent at the spa and they place you in the anti-empathy chamber and you can finally relax. It’s a feeling akin to heroin or something.
So.. yeah. That was kind of weird. Life gets a bit much and people maybe think of running away to Florida or semething. And I thought of a space station anti-empathy spa chamber.
One would think meditation would do the trick but it doesn’t. I can just feel my senses flowing outward, touching more and more instances of tyranny and injustice at once, until I feel an entire world pulsing with tyrants, large and petty, committing atrocities ranging from weaponizing the police against voters to haulocausts to writing batshit anti-abortion laws to the nexus of evil that has surrounded JK Rowling. All at once. When I am just trying to relax here, maaaan.
It is not healthy. I mean, it’s not, like, my whole life or anyhting but boy, I sure wish I could make some peace with that somehow. Usually what happens is I think “well, you’re not going to give up your life and become some sort of activist you don’t have it in you,” so the whole episode gets wrapped up with some quality self-loathing, I steady myself with the lovely platitude that “kindness begins at home” and go hug my daughter and get back to my gardening and hey brah life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da man someone should make a mashup of those two songs it would work.
A friend posted on Facebook yesterday about how a friend of theirs (I did not know this person) died and they were working on cleaning out their belongings. I just started crying. It has reached that stage.
Charlie Wartzel’s newsletter yesterday was very good. It was about Meta and the metaverse and the concept of instantly apparent utility and how when he first saw the iPod he immediately understood the value proposition — more songs in your pocket than a CD — and that is not the case with Meta’s metaverse, it is not clear at all what the value proposition is. It was a great analogy and I think it’s valid in a lot of ways. I deeply, truly believe that Meta’s metaverse offering, as it stands now, is deeply flawed and quite likely to never work.
But I also think that the point is a little unfair, because I think it is choosing two different points on two different product journeys and unfairly comparing them. I am reminded of every garbage MP3 player I owned before the iPod. And a lot of them were absolute dog shit but also, they were still “more songs in your pocket than a CD” but no one wanted to use them except for me and a couple other lunatics.
If we pause for a moment and assume there are still smart people at Meta and that Zuck himself is still smart — I recognize this is an increasingly difficult supposition to make but we also have to accept it’s probably still true — we should assume that Meta knows this. That meta understands that they are very early in the quest to find the killer app, the obvious value proposition. But they have faith they will get there, the way the scientists at the Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research and other groups were when they were working on OCF and PXFM, before they ever got to MP-1, let alone MP-3, let alone WinAmp, let alone those crappy pre-Apple MP3 players. Meta may well understand they’re at that point, maybe just shy of the Winamp phase, let alone the iPod phase.
I mean, if that were the case, you can still quibble with Meta’s strategy: probably dumb to hype it so much to the financial markets and consumer public if you think you’re still in the applied research phasee. But it would make it rational to, you know, work on legs. We don’t have a killer app at the moment. We are building tools and doing research now in hopes that a killer app will emerge in the future. But we don’t know what that app is. In the meantime, people want legs. Maybe legs will help with the killer app. I guess we’ll work on legs now.
Do I think this is actually the case, in reality? Eh, 80-20 no. I suspect they think their offering now is compelling. They are, of course, wrong. And they will almost certainly be unable to acquire their way into it like they did with Insta and WhatsApp (and Friendfeed!) because, lol, the UK CMA. I think it was probably a major strategic bungle to double-down on a future that was so unclear. But also I don’t know if they had much choice. They needed to supply a growth narrative. They needed to home-grow it cuz M&A is effectively off the table. Oculus is their one asset that arguably still has a growth path in front of them. What else were they supposed to ?
You may remember me talking about the Half-Cocked soundtrack a couple weeks ago. Since then, I coincidentally learned that a) right now Half-Cocked is going through a resurgence, with a filmmakers-attended screening taking place at the good ole Nighthawk Cinema in Williamsburg down the street from my old house. Wish I coulda gone. And b) the male co-writer of the film lives near me in Chapel Hill. And c) he has a fantastic instagram. Lotta Half-cocked activity going on. So I finally got to watch the film last night and it… was really good! Quite charming. Really took me back to those dissonant indie rock days of the early 1990s. Recommended.
Seems I have an ambient mix available for your listening pleasure today. A second day in a row of quiet, contemplative music? Well, yes. But I am on the mend, I swear. I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. Really loving the new Brian Eno. Brian Eno is 74 I wonder how much longer he can do this I hope it’s another ten years I hope we get at least one more amazing solo genuine full Brian Eno album, but I’m happy to get this one. I need to buy a copy. Little bit longer of a mix than usual because the Nils Frahm song is an epic 26 minutes and I did not want you to feel short-changed we are known for providing value in our mixes here.
Talk tomorrow!