Good morning. Hello. How are you? #769
Really pushing the limits of Substack email size here. Taylor presale. Broken Dishwasher. Pickleball influencers. Drawer organization. Inflatable neck collars. Elon's regulartory liability long-tail.
Good morning. Hello. How are you today? I am good. I’m listening to the new Sault album, 11, which, to clarify, is not one of the five new albums Sault put out last month. So, you know, no big deal, sixth album of the year. Imagine being that productive. Mind boggling.
Mimi Parker’s obituary in the New York Times was published yesterday and it made me sad all over again. It is worth a read. Still feeling this loss something fierce. She was so remrkable.
It is cold out and I am wearing a nice, thick, warm, long-sleeved shirt and thick winter socks and I am cozy, everything is cozy. Are you ready for the big day? Today is Taylor Swift presale ticket-buying day. Did you get your code? Are you re-arranging your whole day and getting your daughter out of bed early to accomodate Taylor’s dictatorial ticket-buying schedule? It’s gonna be great, it’s gonna be great. I am totally going to succeed in getting tickets, you just watch.
Our dishwasher broke last night and that is a hassle. It is almost certainly a clogged intake filter, and Emma really made a go of fixing it, but our model has the intake filter underneath the unit, and far, far in the back, so you can’t just take the kick plate off and get to it, you gotta take the whole unit out, which is a bit more than we felt comfortable doing at 10PM. Also we didn’t have the part. So now I gotta wash dishes manually for a few days, which, I guess will be fun. Why not.
Oh and I forgot to mention to you yesterday that I got an episode of my podcast done last weekend: that long-running companion to GMHHAY, the Webb Chatham Report, that has been going for a little over five years now.
This episode’s topics include: Politics, Elon and Twitter, SBF and FTX, missing shows, Jane, Jane’s birthday, Halloween, going to a party, Gardening, Seed organization, new workbench, work, Santa Sangre, Top Gun Maverick, The Big Chill, Seven, Electric Dreams, Porrige Radio, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Stereolab at Cat’s Cradle, Taylor Swift’s Midnights, Nitcher Ebb, Cocteau Twins, Tom Waits, Peter Murphy, Godflesh, Rainy Day, Dead Can Dance, Anaïs Nin, Louis and Bebe Barron and the mysterious bootlegging of Bells of Atlantis/House of Incest, Jon Brion and his cover of Waterloo Sunset that’s forever etched in my brain, the connection between Jon Brion and Anaïs Nin via the Corona Theater, Alaska Tapes, Kathryn Mohr, Stargazer Lillies, Carly Rae Jepsen, Suede, Tindersticks, Here it Is: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, Daniel Lanois, The Morelings, Orange Yellow Red, Visiting Diplomats, 93MillionMilesFromTheSun, Lucrecia Dalt, Nelson Angelo and Joyce Moreno, Alice Bowman, Fin Del Mundo, Ane Brun, Sting, Babehoven, Dear Nora, Plains, THUS LOVE, Sault, Love and Rockets, Beggars Archive reissues, Skullcrusher, Bonny Light Horseman, Lacing, Indigo Sparke, Dry Cleaning, Telescopes, Big Joanie, Maren Morris, dreamcastmoe, Will Sheff, Tylder Childers, envy, Mike Plume Band, Pearla, Resident Alien, House of the Dragon, Star Trek Lower Decks, Andor, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Great British Bake Off, The End is Nye, The Peripheral, Doctor Who, Tales of the Jedi, The Crown, Sting Bring on the Night, Dracula Sucks, Sex World, Warewolf By Night, Cloak and Dagger, Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings and Rankin/Bass’s The Hobbit, Faith Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagen, The Return of the King Appendices revisit, Fast Forward by Stephen Morris
Also, I crack a joke in this episode that I bet like three people listen to it and I haven’t checked the analytics in years. That it used to be doing really well but who knows. I just checked right now and, weirdly, in August of this year, after being steady at about 1,000 subscribers for years, it jumped to about 3,000, which is really, really weird. Still, though, podcast analytics. You can’t trust them. They’re just people that hit your RSS feed not, like, you know, actual listeners.
While the neighbors were over the other day we were talking about another set of neighbors, and explaining how they run a group for newcomers to the area and do mixer events and stuff like that and it’s really pretty cool. Then Emma mentioned that these neighbors were the first people from whom we ever heard about pickleball. And we thought about it a bit and that was verrrry early pandemic, like April or May 2020. Definitely that first spring anyway. That is pretty impressive. You hear about pickleball everywhere these days: America’s parks going through pickleball wars and whatnot. These neighbors set up pickleball courts in their driveway for the pandemic.
Says Emma to our guests: “They were pickleball influencers.”
Really very impressive.
Last night as I listened to MSNBC I got my new workbench drawers completely organized and, while Substack will not let me post six or so high-res HEIC files without rezzing them down and I’m two lazy to do that, I will give you this single sample of the organizational majesty that now resides in my home studio. Okay, actually, I lied they are too good and I do, after all, have that Photoshop droplet on my desktop expressly for this purpose. Behold:
I’ve tried a lot of different organizational paradigms (is “paradigms” the pulural of “paradigm?” Seems like it should be more exotic) regarding tape organization. I am not a big fan of the pole-through-the-hole approach, it’s a pain to get a specific roll of tape off. I am too lazy to build a complicated shelf rack. This seems like it is working pretty well. I am excited about it.
Tell me you’re not jealous of having a dedicated cable tie drawer in your life:
And look at this masterpiece, the main drawer:
Tool drawer:
And, finally, the exciting “computer and adaptor” drawer, my god, isn’t it beautiful?
I am filled with a deep sense of pride and comfort and inner peace from this project.
I am also bereft because it’s been, like, four months in the making planning all of this out — and like a year since I first had the idea. And now it is complete. And now I need a new organizing project.
So as you may recall, I have a fused neck. It is called Klippel-Feil syndrome. I have a light case from an aesthetic point of view (many sufferers have a cleft palatte and require surgery) but a fairly bad one from a “my neck is fucked” point of view. I’ve been experimenting with various methods of massage and stretching and whatnot for years. Emma found a cool two-person massage technique involving a towel, but I am looking for something I can do myself. I do my stretches, and they are helpful, but the big problem is that while my head turning left or right or front and back does help, the direction my yead really needs to go is up. I tried to get this complicated contraption that uses a door and a rope and a pully and a counterweight and it did not work. I don’t especially want a bed-based one because I mostly need this relief throughout the day and it is not super practical to drop everything and go to bed. But, just recently, I found a great device, and I am so happy. It’s inflatable cervical traction collar, and it feels great and I love it and it feels so great I am going to give you this ridiculous photograph of myself wearing it because it is so gloriously absurd:
I made it black and white to be a little more classy. Enjoy.
Last night Kari Lake finally lost, that is great. She is a lunatic and will burn the world down for a kink if given half a chance. So monstrously creepy. I fear we haven’t seen the last of her but I am hoping she sells out and fucks off to some think tank or corporate board or something, but not optimistic about that.
Mark Kelly won by six points and, it bears pointing out, in reality it was never actually close, Blake Masters never really stood a chance. I can’t believe I bought that guy’s “book” back when he was just a sycophantic Stanford note-taker.
Not too much going on on the “billionaires destroying their fortune front” today. We await the FTX statement that typically accompanies a bankruptcy but they have not yet provided. If you are looking for one of the most masterful bits of financial writing in recent history, I recommend the Matt Levine piece from yesterday about FTX’s so-called “balance sheet.” Dude’s consistently brilliant, but this one, especially, is a real gem. I was deep into some financial Excel project for work yesterday when it arrived in my inbox and I literally stopped working, grabbed my phone, stood up and read it while pacing and boy, did it deliver.
SBF’s girlfriend-slash-CEO-of-his-home-office (who doesn’t have one) had a Tumblr and it really is pretty great. I mean, obviously a bad news lady but also… kinda hot, not gonna lie. Check this out:
Elon turned off all “microservices,” which you know, is like pulling all the small parts out of your car to make it lighter. Yeah, sure, you probably don’t actually need most of those parts to make the car go, but one or two make the brakes work and the engine run, and maybe physical mass is not the best paradigm for deciding what parts need to stay or go. I mean, good on ya, your car is now 25% lighter, but it’s also now just a paperweight. This metaphor just came to me after I had started writing this paragraph but I gotta tell you I am supremely proud of it. Anyway, the site is still running, but it’s slowly breaking and the sense that it will crash is now a lot more widespread amongst the community than it was even last Friday.
Everyone’s downloading their archives, or, you know, trying to, but the archive downloader is presumably a “microservice” that is now either turned off or overloaded. I asked for mine three days ago and am still waiting for it. Luckily I grabbed one last December, but I’m sure I was just brilliant on Twitter this year and would like to preserve that.
I assume that any day now, the process by which we at Timehop access your past Tweets to display them on your timeline will break. I mean, to be clear, we are using the most popular, simple, basic features of their primary API but those in the know say that the main API is in imminent danger of dying. Another thing that runs off of the main Twitter API: The Twitter apps. So, we will see.
I should also say that California law requires you to be able to download all of your data from a social platform so if that Twitter archiver really is broken well, hey, they’re in violation of CCPA. On top of being (probably) in violation of GDPR, since their chief privacy officer quit. It just so happens that at one point in the last few years I spent an extraordinary amount of money on lawyers from both continents researching who can be the CPO of a social platform and whether it can be one of your American employees and tldr yes for us but no for Twitter because they are big and have European employees. So in actuality I doubt the CPO of the company was the named Data Protection Officer under GDPR, but I also strongly suspect Elon has already fired the named DPO, or they’ve quit. And, call me weird, but he does not seem to have the personal appetite for being in the weeds of European privacy laws and I’d be pretty shocked if he named a new one.
So, then, this puts him at risk for a buttload of fines in the EU. Fines from a privacy agency just looking to make an example of someone. Fines that could be in the billions and, hence, according to him, banckruptcy-causing.
Off the top of my head, I can think of three or four more means by which they may well be in violation of GDPR if my gut sense of their approach to compliance and, ahem, microservices, is correct. But that’s all guessing. But it’s yet another example of how Elon has fundamentally fucked Twitter in the last two weeks in ways he does not yet forsee. Knock-on effects that will take a few weeks or months to unfold but are almost certainly imminent and are almost certainly not in any way included in his calculations about the company’s finances. He can dismiss US regulators and their pesky consent decree as irrelevant (it’s not, it’s going to cost him) but I think by this point, we all know EU regulators are not to be trifled with. Shit, they just convinced Apple to drop Lightning. That is a force.
After my conversations about Jane and peeing, she was much better yesterday. But I’m not convinced it’s over, and so I thank those of you who write in with some advice. Some really great ideas.
Got a modern synthpop mix for you today. Definitely peters out at the end, not gonna lie. Pressed for time here. Blame Taylor.
Until tomorrow!
oh i forgot! i’m obsessed with your organization. i have a stockpile of washi tape and other larger tapes (masking/packing/etc) and using a pole is so annoying. i just line them up and stack as you have done 😁
it will come as no surprise that i am counting down the minutes to taylor’s presale.
BUT i went to make sure i had a saved payment on ticketmaster and when i click account > payment OR account > update payment (two different entry points to payment) i get a 503 error which makes me a little nervous…😬😳😭
good luck!