Good morning. Hello. How are you? #759
Halloween wrap-up, the rewarding emotional hit of a new EQ curve, SF bar nostalgia, a new weak theory of mobile ad softening.
Good morning! Hello there, happy November, wow, November. That is pretty crazy. Year is flying. That is fine I suppose what is time, just hurtling toward the grave its all good.
We went Trick or Treating yesterday. Well, Emma and Jane did. I drove them there and picked them up and drove very slowly through the neighborhood because there were a bajillion kids walking around in costumes, and tons of cars piled up behind me because I dared to follow the speed limit. I don’t think I could live in Briar Chapel, man. Too much tailgating. Tailgating stresses me out.
It rained for trick or treating but not until most of the little kids were done or at least had gotten a good run in. But those older kids and teens got soaked, which is kind of funny.
I do have to say, though: there is a stunning amount of creativity in the American suburb. I mean, my god, so many of those costumes are just amazing. When I was a kid, like two people in my class had nice, hand-made costumes. They were definitely an exception rather than the rule. But these days, it feels like every kid and most of the parents have amazing hand-made costumes. There are just so many. I am deeply envious of the home owners in Briar Chapel and every other weird, dense, American neighborhood where they can just sit on their stoop with a table and a bowl of candy and see ten million amazing costumes. It reminds me of when I used to go to DragonCon with Freezepop and I got to sit at their merch table all day in the Marriott lobby and just look at all the costumes. Just amazing. Humans are so creative.
I wonder what other outlets this boundless amount of creativity has in the American suburban family except for Halloween. Minecraft, maybe. Conspiracy theories. Maybe this is the problem. Maybe 90% of American families are just looking for a creative outlet.
Oh hey maybe we shouldn’t have killed off humanities education for Stem!
I’m happy Halloween is over — it gives me anxiety. I should really have a therapist, and I’m sure eventually we’d get to why Halloween stresses me out but I honestly have no idea. Dressing in costumes stresses me out. I can overcome it, but it is scary! I do not enjoy it.
But I am sad Halloween is over because my wife loves it so much and puts so much creativity and energy into decorating and it really is kind of fun, I have to admit.
In my office cleaning this weekend, I ditched the set of speakers that had been hooked up to my turntable and replaced them. I had been using a set of Oda Live speakers, which is this set of hipster, Brooklyn-made speakers I got during the pandemic. A couple old coworkers work there. They sounded amazing, revelatory. There were a few problems, though. The Oda live system was primarily made to be an interconnected art project thingamajig where you listen to live broadcasts at set times. And that never really worked for me, what with being a parent of a toddler with a job and all. They did have an auxilliary input, though, and so I used that input with my phonograph and it worked pretty well. They definitely sounded better than my old speakers. For the first year or so I had to battle with Oda the company because they kept interrupting my listening, or just randomly playing shit when I was in the other room and it was a real problem. There was no way in the app to stop it. Eventually I just blocked all network traffic to the thing and that mostly did the trick, though occasionally they’d just mute out for a few seconds while the device looked for a network that could not answer. Eventually during the pandemic they were like “lol nope we lied no more live broadcasts.” And I figured they were going out of business. I had cancelled my “membership” by then anyway. But looking at their site, it looks like the live series is continuing? It’s just weird, though. The performances don’t have a schedule, they just happen whenever the artists and company feel like it. It was too frustrating to have paid all that money then miss a performance by, say, Microphones, because I had to do bedtime in another room.
Anyway, if you want them to try it out, drop a line I’m sure we can work something out.
But really, the weird thing is, I switched back to this crappy pair of Bose desktop speakers that I’ve been using for various applications for, like, at least a decade. Bose Companion 2. Thirty-six bucks on eBay. And I’m so much happier. By any objective measure, they don’t sound better than the hand-made, hand-tuned-by-hipsters-in-Brooklyn Oda Speakers. But… I guess there’s something about a fresh EQ curve that gives you a sense of the new? It is an interesting sensation. I like it.
(Aww crap man side 3 of my new Tom Waits Alice reissue has a giant deformity on it now I gotta spend an hour trying to see if it’s cleanable and then, gulp, get in touch with the label about a replacement, which I hate.)
All this talk about Twitter and Elon is making me nostalgic for my SF days. Leah Culver, an old friend an engineer at Twitter, posted a hilarious Tweet the other day and it got me reminiscing about when I first met her and we would drink at Tunnel Top, a bar near the Barbarian offices in SF and near our old fantastic and favorite clients Goodby.
(Leah owns the Pink Painted Lady now and her restoration of it is a great source of quality home improvement content).
And then that got me thinking about all those other fantastic SF bars, some of which I can’t even remember the name of anymore. Paige bar, of course, and Zeitgeist of course. House of Shields and Doc’s Clock and Killowatt and Buck’s Taven and that one that was my favorite that I can’t remember the name of with all the Blanton’s bottle stoppers even though I had like five parties there. They were all so great. SF had such a great night life when we were that age. And those weird hipster dance parties. It was a good time. I miss it. I wonder if the kids in SF go out and get hammered on weeknights now. Probably not, probably for the best.
One time I was at that bar and I ordered a Blanton’s and was complimenting the bartender on all the Blanton’s tops and he stopped and said “wait, explain these to me,” so I did, I explained how every bottle of Blanton’s has a top with a horse on it, but in the horse’s tail there is a letter, and that all the letter’s together spell “BLANTONS” and that people tried to collect them all. And that I was only missing the rarest one, which was the T. He was fascinated, said he didn’t know this. Said he was the co-owner of the bar, and that the Blanton’s tops were his partner’s thing and he never really got it. And also that his partner and co-owner had just died. Man, that was sad, he looked sad, and I expressed my condolences.
A little while later I was sitting with my friends chatting and the bartender came up and handed me a Blanton’s top with the letter T in it, thus completing my collection and it is now one of my prize posessions, in a pride of place in my library of mementos and externally-stored memories. It meant so much to me.
And now I can’t even remember the name of the bar.
Fuck.
Sold a brand new Porridge Radio LP (accidentally bought two) on Discogs and had to mail it and it doesn’t fit in my mail box and so I stopped at the combination convenience store-car wash-gas-station-post office-Burger King except it’s not a Burger King anymore it’s a taco stand and I knew this for a while, I knew it was the first phsyical location of some popular food truck and I’ve been meaning to go but I had no idea it looked so nice. Excellent graphic design, digital menus, a sign outside saying they have Bolivian empanadas and now I desperately want to go. Tuesday is taco tuesday in our house, but it’s hard for me to go get take out on Tuesday because I have a meeting right up to dinner time and the meeting has an unpredictable end time but this place looks so good. Maybe I can cajole Emma to actually set foot in there and buy us dinner tonight.
Got a new comprehensive theory of mobile ad revenue brewing, here is a first take;
Apple’s ATT killed off Facebook’s ad business moreso than most. This is for complicated Facebook-specific reasons that on the face of it don’t quite make sense because if you have first-party data, Apple ATT shouldn’t hit you so much. But, put simply Facebook’s first-party data is inextricably tied with second-party data — that of its ad clients — in a way that pretty much caught them flat-footed and unable to serve any ATT-compliant ads with any confidence.
But then we are seeing softening in the social ad market on YouTube as well, which is stunning and surprising. Eric Seufert, who is really the best to read on this stuff, is thinking that YouTube’s ad revenue dip is ATT-related, since Google’s Search ads, which, as the king of first-party data, would be unimpacted by ATT, did not slip.
No one’s quite sure what’s going on there, and with other social platforms whose advertising is softening, such as Snap. Is it Apple? Is it a recession? Both seem possible, but as social platforms and apps release their financial reports, Seufert is leaning toward ATT more than the recession.
I am inclined to agree, though what gives me pause is that we are not seeing the same dramatic softening in the mobile gaming ad revenue, which is also primarily first-party-data driven, and, thus, theoretically more immune to ATT. And that is what we are seeing. But I also agree with Seufert that I don’t think it’s recession-based. Yet.
So. What is it then?
I think it is… a softening of social advertising. I think this is partly because TikTok is hoovering up the attention in the room with social, and, in companion with that, I think… advertisers are just getting sick of advertising on social.
Because we’re getting sick of it too.
Fingers crossed.
Justa mix today, mostly new. New Rihanna, which is exciting, though, you know, six years since the last album getting a little nutso. But you do you. New Sharon Van Etten (two albums in the last six years with another on the way). New GBV stuff is their strongest in a while very into it. Very into this gay goth shoegaze band from Brattlebroro, Vermont called THUS LOVE. I don’t know how I got into them but they rule. Seems like something Bill must have told me about, but if not, Bill, it’s right up your alley. New Suede is great. Threw a couple oldies on here for good measure gotta sprinkle ‘em throughout, you know?
Until tomorrow! Tuesday is my busiest day, wish me luck.
That GBV isn't new, it's a new 'greatest hits' collection from the mid-90s EPs!