Good morning. Hello. How are you? #835
Complaining about lawyers, complaining about Twitter, complaining about the black guilt in the heart of all Americans, complain complain complain.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? All well this morning? I do hope so, cuz I’m cranky AF. I’m annoyed with my lawyers, who are going so slowly and being so poor at communication and it’s driving me crazy. You always read these articles about lawyers who work through the weekend on deals and deals getting done in a day and shit but the reality for us plebe companies is so much more humdrum. They work on your shit when they feel like it. You pay the same rates as the big companies — hell, for all I know, you pay more, because they can command discounts. But you’re a second-class citizen, your shit gets worked on when they feel like it, when their bigger clients aren’t taking up their time. I guess in all those breathless articles I read about lawyers getting shit done quickly, what’s going in the background is that they’re ignoring all their other clients, and that’s what I happen to be. All those other clients.
Also I guess the whole thing I’ve never thought about with these bigger full service firms is it’s really a ton of specialists who don’t really necessarily work together all that often. So, like, even if you love one lawyer, they might need help from an IP lawyer or privacy lawyer or employment lawyer, and they gotta pick one out from their firm’s stable of people, and that person might suck. So, of course, this sets up a dilemma: do you go to a bigger firm, where they might have multiple options of all those people, but then you’re even more just a cog in the wheel? Or a smaller firm, where they might not even have a single one of all these people, and then you’re coordinating like six different law firms, which is a giant hassle.
But I try not to talk about work too much in here. I am sorry. But my god it really gets my goat when you are the client and you’re still treated like you don’t matter. There are few things that upset me more than paying large amounts of money to be ignored and feel belittled. I can get that for free in the rest of my life why do I have to pay for it.
Sorry, sorry. I am listening to Larraji, he is helping me calm down. Man I really made an error when I did not go see Laraaji when he played in Durham. What was I thinking. Dammit.
I’m so sad about Twitter. It is completely broken and none of these replacements are going to replace it because everyone is replicating modern Twitter, which is all pros and arguing, and not the Twitter of yore, when normies were on there acting as the audience that made it absurd and fun and gave all the pros some attention. My timeline is just decimated now. Not a single real-life friend anymore, or at least rarely, even if I use lists. It’s all news publications and reporters and activists and a few die hards that can’t give up the dream. None of the replacement services are making an effort to court the normies. Turns out we did care what you had for lunch! Plus Twitter was all about rubbing elbows with the famous people but also subcultures bumping up against each other. The closest real-life analog I can think of is when I was at this internet conference at a posh hotel in Orange County, CA, and the other conference center in the hotel was hosting a meat-packing convention, but we all had to drink in the same hotel bar every night and the results were so weird and fun and unexpected. Good Twitter of the old days was like that and now it’s just… not.
And all of this is ample evidence that Elon Musk was 100% wrong, and that old management — the management everyone gave shit to, from all sides of the debate — were not wrong. The old management was like that lunatic gardener that buries dead fish in his planters and used to be in the army and makes stupid jokes and doesn’t know how to use perlite and professional gardeners look down him because he’s not no-till or something (I am thinking of a specific, actual gardener here so forgive my use of a male pronoun) but his garden fucking rocks and you can pretend it wasn’t his doing because he seemed bad at management — er, gardening — because he didn’t do it the way you liked, but the garden fucking rocked. Twitter rocked under all it’s shitty managers. Except the current shitty manager, who is the manager who is supposedly fixing Twitter.
I was doing an interview yesterday with someone who had worked at one of the big tech giants on a mammoth, gargantual piece of software — one of the big pieces that’s been chugging away since the oughts serving massive amounts of internet users. She was going on about how infinitely complex it is, layers and layers upon decades of code, gum and duct tape and twine, and how no one there can really do much to it because it just keeps going, and everyone’s so dependent on it, and making a complete replacement would take years, maybe decades. And Twitter is probably even bigger than this. And people care about Twitter in a way that they don’t care about this bit of ubiquous software. And he just went in and ripped its guts out.
It’s so violent. It’s so stupid. It’s so hubristic.
Hrm maybe I should just keep complaining about stuff, I don’t really have anything on my list of topics for today I am flying blind here. I guess I could complain about The Mandalorian last night.
Spoilers
It was… fine. It had some moments. But it felt too side-questy, and then the side-quest went away. Why do you need a stupid droid and wait now you don’t care if you get the droid after all so we just spent a ton of time talking about a droid that you don’t need and you didn’t even bother going on the side quest they just gave you to get a droid brain or whatever? But oh never mind, I’m not gonna get it anyway I’m gonna go on this other side quest, so then there was a weird pit stop and my god this dude has been talking about going to Mandalore for like a fucking year now across two TV shows just go and look at the stupid planet do people not just go look at the planet? Shit you’d think there’d be space tourism to a planet that got glassed, just to see what it looked like. And also the Empire just left other planets in the Mandalore system alone, with their castles and clear water? That seems like very poor military tactics.
Okay that’s over you can keep reading.
Maybe Taika Waititi will come back. Except he seems pretty busy, gobbling up the options to half the IP of my childhood. My wife informed me last night that the dude is supposedly working on a Star Wars film, a Flash Gordon film, a Time Bandits film and a sequel (?) to the original What We Do in the Shadows film. My god he makes me feel so utterly unproductive. I bet his lawyers get things done in less than three weeks.
Oh and I’m very obsessed with shop vacs right now. I need a new shop vac. I had hoped to get one that had that whole bluetooth dust control thing going on, but Dewalt, whom I have chosen as my tool brand, with some regret, doesn’t seem to be as far along on this as other brands, and they don’t have many compatible tools, and all that shit is super expensive. I have tool regret. But not really. I wonder which brand I should have gone with. I do feel an affinity to the Milwaukee brand but they are too expensive. I do like Dewalt but they alone amongst all the major tool brands do not feel compelled to join the space race to make as many different tools as possible, so there are tools I want that do not exist on the Dewalt platform and that upsets me. Especially in the outdoor power equpment category. I need a baby chainsaw, dammit. I cannot convey to you how tempting Milwuakee’s baby chainsaw is. Look how cute this thing is. It is ridiculous. BABY CHAINSAWS.
Finally picked up Howard Zinn again — been reading PDFs on my Kindle Scribe instead. Court opinions, decks for work, longish New Yorker articles about the problematic nature of the word “indigenous.” But last night I was like “all right, I gotta finish this book,” so I got through the chapter on America’s treatment of the indigin — first nations. God. I mean, again, nothing new, but so awful, so harrowing, so horrible, just relentlessly horrible. It really fucks you up.
It is not at all surprising to me that there is a movement afoot in America to ignore all the horrors America has perpetuated because what else are you supposed to do? There is no “solution.” There is no “making it right.” You could hand off the sum total of the entirety of our GDP to the people — inside and outside our borders — that we have wronged and it wouldn’t make a dent in righting our wrongs. And the way you inevitably feel like they are “our” wrongs, as a society, even as you try and weave a narrative that you are not personally culpable, or ancestrally culpable, but you know, secretly, you also kind of are. It’s all too much. It’s unfathomable. There’s no way to process it into a place of peace, even if you sin-eat and aborb your guilt into acceptance and repentance. It simply cannot be done. I’m not the kind of guy who looks at that tangled, monstrous mess and thinks “yeah fuck that, put it in the closet and forget about it,” but I sure as hell understand the people who are, and shit, I find myself at times wanting to as well. The fortitude, the strength, the self-abnegation it takes to keep these thoughts at the fore of your life is debilitating and necessary and, essentially, fatal. There is no way out. There will never be resolution. I literally just wrote about my desperate need of a consumer product while all of this is in my mind. They cannot coexist, yet they inevitabliy coexist, horribly and endlessly.
It can really drive you crazy.
I did the dive and I found my ancestral culpability and it is about thirteen generations back in one small branch of my mostly pauper ancestors, with two of America’s most idealistic, righteous and mostly good presidents, they only two to not own slaves, but even they are problematic. JQA signed the treaty legalizing Jackson’s aboinable war against the Seminoles and taking Florida.
God. That’s an irredeemable offense to have in your family right there. Florida.
Finally downloaded DuoLingo so I can keep up with my daughter in Spanish. I got two lessons done. I don’t think I learned anything. But it’s fun. Maybe I can, you know, learn a new language at the age of 51. That would maybe make me feel less useless.
Ambient mix for you today because it is keeping me sane and I don’t have any other ones ready, but tomorrow is Friday, we’ll have Walmart and Release Radar and upbeat content and a weekend on the horizon and I promise I won’t be such a downer.
Ta.
although i enjoyed the mandalorian premiere, you're not wrong, haha! and i wholeheartedly agree with your twitter review—if i didn't have to be there for work, i doubt i'd even think about it.
BUT i think you're wrong about coming to terms with america's horrid past. i think acknowledging it as a nation and putting in place policies that mitigate the effects of systemic discrimination would go a long way—even without reparations. restorative justice, man! it's healing. (but legit lol, re: florida)
BTW, battery electric.