Good morning. Hello. How are you? #758
Weekend parties, Halloween, my second TikTok, and a bunch of crap about Twitter
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Happy Monday. And Happy Halloween! Have a good weekend? Mine was all great, thanks. Did a small amount of gardening. The baby bok choy are coming in in droves now it is out of control. I hope they’re good. I don’t know what baby bok choy is supposed to taste like.
We had a birthday party for Jane and it was a lovely time. Maybe 6 or 7 kids, and a bunch of parents whom I like. Got to talk to my old coworker Nora, who lives in Raleigh, that was great. And the old babysitter Lauren who lives over in the next neighborhood but obviously wasnt babysitting much for us during the pandemic. She has a great halloween trick or treat thing every year because her neighborhood is great for trick or treating and ours, alas, is not, so we’ll see her tonight. The best thing about that neighborhood and trick or treating is the jello shots for the grown ups. One more night of Halloween I feel like it’s gone on like two months. Emma loves it, she loves it. I like it fine but I’m ready for a different season and I love Thanksgiving.
Gave party guests baby bok choy as a party favor on their way out.
And neither Emma nor I remembered to take a single picture of Jane or any of the kids during the party. I did take some pre-party photos of Emma’s decorating, though, which really was something:
After the party, while I was “cleaning up,” I ended up doing a major minimalizing reorganization of the downstairs bar area, and I am very happy with it, it looks great.
On Sunday, the minimalizing urge continued, and I did a major rework of my office. Well, I took a ton of shit out of it. I announced to Emma I was going to donate or sell the two large Ikea Klippan faux-leather loveseats I have had since owning the Secret Clubhouse coworking space in Williamsburg. They are great but I don’t use them, and they take up a ton of space. Emma did some research and realized that they can be used outside with some slight modification, so she claimed them, upholstered the bottoms with plastic, covered the bottoms in Scotchguard, and ordered some all weather couch covers for them off of Etsy, so now they are outside on the lower patio. We probably should have thought of that before the party. I also got rid of my vintage Atari Crystal Castles tabletop arcade game, and my Fender Sideman — the first drum machine ever made. I haven’t actually gotten rid of either of them yet, but I wheeled them out of my office to the garage and took all the photos needed to list them and give people a month or so to claim them. Neither of them work. They both worked when I got them, and worked for years, but they both broke in the move down to North Carolina seven years because they’re both too delicate to spend any time in a semi truck I guess. I had visions of getting them repaired but I have learned a thing about myself: I hate vintage gear, I hate taking care of it, and I am content to use emulators. It is a miracle I didn’t ditch the Farfisa or Rhodes, but they made the cut. I also got rid of a small table. Moved the treadmill into the window so it has a lovely view of the pond now.
Anyway, the effect is great there is so much room. I’m probably going to add a small workbench to the situation, but for now, I love it.
And ues, that is a massage table back there. Everyone who works on the internet should have a massage table nearby. The number of times you need to go lay down with your head in a hole is… well, it’s a lot.
I also made my second TikTok ever, the second in a series, discussing the tissue paper stars that Taylor Swift adds to her mail orders of vinyl records. It got 1,593 views, which is 49 views more than the first one. On the one hand, this is amazing: I don’t use TikTok at all. I think it is evil, for a variety of reasons. But I’ve had an account forever. I have, like… 40 or 50 friends… followers? Whatever you call them. But to get 1,500 views with only 40 or 50 followers, and to get that pretty consistently? I can see why people are addicted. I have, like, 10,000 followers on Twitter and I doubt 1,500 people see a Tweet. I have 50,000 on Tumblr and I doubt more than a hundred people would see a post.
And now I said the word “Twitter” and I suppose we have to talk about it.
I am sad that Elon Musk owns Twitter. He is a terrible person and what’s really astonishing is that in, like, five days, over a weekend, one weekend of owning Twitter, he’s managed to show himself as so much more terrible, it really is something. First off it really gives you a sense of appreciation for all the people who have run Twitter who did not reveal themselves to be horrible assholes by running Twitter. So, hats off, I guess, Paral, Ev, Dick. Nice job not posting right-wing nut job conspiracy theories to Hillary Clinton about a man who lay in the hospital on the verge of life. You managed to not do that, unlike the current CEO of Twitter. Bar is low these days, I guess.
Of course, we ought to give him credit for deleting it, right? Except this is the thing these days: Elon keeps Tweeting out right wing insanity, letting a few hundred thousand of his biggest fans see it, then deleting it. He did this a few weeks ago with this gem, and I don’t believe a single reporter has even mentioned it:
I cancelled my Twitter blue, of course. Like that’ll do any good.
But really, at its core, despite his clown car of a war room, Elon’s already given up the game: he has no short-term transformative game plan. So far he’s really only done two concrete things with Twitter since owning it. Well, two concrete things that indicate a future direction of the comapany as opposed to, you know, routinely violating California labor law (that’s a whole other mystery. Dude has been employing people in California for years. How does he thing he can get away for making up cause? How does he think he can flout the WARN act?)
Anyway, the two things: He’s written his sycophantic letter to advertisers, and he tweeted about a made-up “council” that will handle censorship decisions and said that nothing will change until the council convenes. The council will be bipartisan or some nonsense, so I’m sure it will be as productive and decisive as the US House of Representatives. Which means nothing will change.
So. These two things give up the game. He is going to keep things mostly the same, but do so in an incompetent, chaotic manner. He will essentially make the running of Twitter the reality show to excite and engage people, continue to say horrible batshit stuff, and run Twitter pretty much like it always was.
Because he has no choice. Twitter was losing a billion a year ish. His debt service is a billion a year, ish. Even when you’re worth a hundred bil, when most of your money is locked up in two companies of whom you don’t want to sell the stock, there are only so many years you can afford to lose $2 billion. And that number will balloon quickly if advertisers start to bail.
So far he’s tipped to possible solutions to this: layoffs and this idiocy around paying for a blue check mark. Never mind the stupidity of turning what was a legal, trust & safety product into a status symbol, but these two are only going to get you so far. And if the advertisers bail, they’ll at best stop the bleeding. Fire half of the employees, average salary of $200k you get $0.7 bil. The most generous, insane, out there projections for Twitter NeuBlue is 10 million people pay $20 a month. That seems completely insane, but he has a lot of fanboys, so who knows. $2.4 billion a year. Call it three. Fuck it. Call all of it together $4 billion a year.,
You plugged your $2 billion a year gap and now you make $2 billion of revenue. Whoo hoo! That’ll definitely transform Twitter’s value to $44 billion.
And that’s if the advertisers don’t bail. Which you clearly say you want to happen. Except everything you’re doing shows that you will probably manage to fuck that up. Where you gonna find 3,500 people to lay off without touching the account and sales org? Trust and safety? You think gutting that isn’t going to scare advertisers off? Or the users who those advertisers monetize? I mean… the best case is… the status quo.
There was never a brilliantly transformative plan. Not in the short term. Maybe in 5 years you can figure out some mythical open source block chain monetizing magic trick. Maybe. You’ll be lucky to not have burned through another $10 billion by that point.
I mean, I suspect he desperately wants to ditch advertising, but he is not rich enough. Which is just the best. I love Twitter, but if this is the money soak that removes tens of billions of dollars from an evil man’s fortune, then I suppose the sacrifice could be worth it.
But dear god, the miserable, miserable time we are all going to have to endure becuase of this sociopaths showboating.
I’m leaving out whole angles of hell that owning Twitter will entail. I’ve had a bet going since this was first announced that owning Twitter would manage to fuck Elon in China with Tesla. I desperately, desperately want to see that happen. My schadenfreude knows no healthy limits when it comes to this man. The best overview of the miserable thicket of pain that Elon has gotten himself into when it comes to legal, espionage, politics, trust and safety is this glorious piece by Nilay Patel, which really was a nice cathartic read.
I wish I could just sort of ignore the whole thing until the downfall comes, because there is going to be so much misery for all of us in the journey, but I am too much of a glutton I guess. I love Twitter too much, I always have, even though I barely post anymore.
Emma said something funny and relevant. She said “where am I gonna go? It’s not like Medical Twitter and Black Legal Twitter is going to let me into their Slack groups.”
Here’s a rawwwwwwk playlist for you this Halloween. High energy. Guitars. Some screaming. Lotta fast beats. Not, like, metal, just good old fashioned rock and roll. These take a very long time to make, the rawwwwwwk playlists.
Okay! Talk tomorrow. It’ll be November. That is… something.