Good morning. Hello. How are you? #813
FB evil, LA trip planning, CT scans, Swell, Hello Fresh, Plex, Elon looking defeated
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Man. I had such a crazy day yesterday. Overwhelming. Not any one thing? I don’t think? Just… a lot. A lot of work, a lot of personal life. It was just an all around relentless day.
First: Fuck Facebook and letting Trump back on, but I guess this train already started rolling with Elon and Twitter. Nick Clegg’s all like “oh don’t worry if Trump does anything bad again we’ll kick him right back off.” The dude is doing bad things all the time! He is relentlessly, constantly, ceaselessly doing bad things. He’s a constant stream of crime, sedition and racism! He is, at this very moment, routinely and repeatedly using racist slurs against one of his own cabinet members. There has never been a time, since Facebook kicked Trump out, that Trump has not been willfully, repeatedly violating their terms of service. It’s so stupid.
So, again, reminder that if you’re feeling the urge to get off of Facebook, you can subscribe to GMHHAY on Substack. I 100% do not want to be the reason anyone sticks around on Facebook. Yes, the GMHHAY comments are better on Facebook still, but someday, if we all dream, we can get all those comments moved over to the (pretty good!) Substack version. And, of course, Substack is no angel but at least the whole thing is open and modular, I own my contact list, and I can leave at any moment and take you all with me.
Okay. So. Emma and I are strongly considering — it is not a done deal yet — spending three weeks in LA this Late May and early June. From Cruel World ish, even though in the end we might not go, lol, to June 6th ish. We have so many friends there we haven’t seen in years and we miss you all so much.
This is looking to be a monumentally expensive exercise. Far more than our 3 weeks in Boston/Salem last year, because we’ll have to fly, and we’ll have to rent a car. So if any of you have a free house or car to borrow or house-sit or something, please let us know. Car especially. God. Those things are expensive.
But the prospect is exciting. Stressful but also exciting.
My friend Ben and I are trying to enable downloads on each other’s Plex, which is a thing Plex can do supposedly. There is a FAQ about it, and we meet all the criteria. We both have the Plex Pass and we both have servers updated to a recent enough version and we are both logged in and all of the settings are correct. It is very frustrating! It doesn’t work in either direction so it’s probably not some weird thing like our browser or a quirk of our setup. Has anyone gotten this to work lately? I don’t suppose anyone out there has any pro Plex tips on this topic?
I got my CT Scan test results yesterday and it revealed “mild coronory artery placque build up” and a diagnosis of “minimal coronary heart disease” which… should be a lot more terrifying than it is? My doctor was like “Yeah I should probably see you before May and bump up the dosage on one of your medications” but she did not seem unduly concerned, and I was so freakin busy I didn’t really have time to process it yesterday. I just googled it but that was a terrible idea so I won’t be doing that again until after I talk to her on Monday. Am I burying the lede here? Is this a bigger deal than I think it is? Eh, don’t tell me I want to live in blissful ignorance for a few more days. Talk to me about it on Monday.
Maybe an hour after I got these test results I got an email from a band of which I am a huge fan, Swell. I did not know this, but apparently last April the lead singer and guitarist of Swell, Dave Freel, passed away due to “sudden and unexpected complications from heart surgery.” This is so sad! I’ve loved this band since I first saw them open for Medicine at TT The Bears in 1992.
Also maybe not a good time to learn about someone duing from sudden and unexpected complications from heart surgery.
The remaining members of Swell are touring Europe, where like any good American band they were always better received, as Swell on a tour honoring Dave. I’d love to see this tour, see “Swell” one last time, their music is so unique. But I suppose there’s zero chance of coming anywhere near me.
I did learn from this email, and the accompanying tour dates, however, that a town clled Clermont Ferrand in France has a Rue Serge Gainsbourg. I can find no connection between Serge Gainsbourg and Clermont Ferrand, so no idea what’s up with that. But then again, like I said, I was pretty busy yesterday so I didn’t have time to dig too much.
I watched Elon’s presentation yesterday. He visited his Nevada Gigafactory to announce a major expansion of the plant and, one would imagine from the text of the speech, rally the troops. But the whole thing was so fucked up. The plant employs thousands, and they were to announce an expansion that will employ thousands more. When he did similar things at the Texas plant they gathered everyone, had a giant party, and he spoke to the entire workforce. In Nevada, he was just talking to like 50 people, and it was behind a weird crowd control rope even though the whole thing was taking place in what looked like a small hotel conference room. They filmed the thing and put it on YouTube but my god. He was so, so low energy. Honestly, Elon looked defeated. He looked sad. He could barely crack a joke. The crowd seemed to be true believers and they were sympathetic and tried to help him along but he could barely deliver his lines. Looked like he wanted to go home and curl up in a ball. They chose a camera angle that prominently displayed one of his security goons lurking in the background. Nevada Governor Joe Lomabardo was there too and that dude is no king of public speaking but he made Elon look like a mannequin.
The whole thing was sad. I mean, I am not a monster, and I do feel a bit of schadenfreude, but I kinda feel bad for him! Mostly I hope and wish maybe the predicament Elon has gotten himself into has, maybe, maybe, caused him to question some of his actions? Dare to hope?
Nah, probably not. He’ll probably just zombie around reading teleprompters while being devoid of emotion, never deviating from a script ever again.
Actually, honestly, that would probably be a profound improvement in global discourse.
Finally: Isn’t it kind of crazy how Hello Fresh just… beat Blue Apron? My memory of the early days of meal kits is kind of fuzzy but if it serves me, Blue Apron basically invented this category and Hello Fresh was something of a fast follow? Hrm Wikipedia tells me that Hello Fresh is a Rocket Internet company, an investment firm notorious for fast follows. Except Wikipedia also tells me that it was founded in Germany and launched in the US at around the same time as Blue Apron, so not a fast follow I guess? But I never heard of it until years later, maybe 2018 or so, and then suddenly it just… won. Totally trounced Blue Apron. At least, it feels that way to me? Anyone out there still a Blue Apron customer who prefers them? I am curious.
And alas, seems that Hello Fresh is anti-union. The workers in their New Jersey center are unionizing, but the other two fulfillment centers voted against it in dodgy elections after forced employee meetings with anti-union messaging. God. Hell world. Make it all stop. Everything is terrible. We are terrible.
Cheery ending!
Shoegaze! All new! America! Shoegaze renaissance! So much good shit! It is amazing!
Have a lovely day. Just lovely. The best. Have the best lovely day.