Good morning. Hello. How are you? #837
Taxes, Apple Card is customer-antipathetic, Spotify enshittifiction, obsessing about non-alcoholic sprits, Elon and his AWS bill
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Did you have a good weekend? I do hope so. It’s a challenge, you know. An act of rebellion to have a good weekend. They don’t want us to. Man’s trying to keep us down and all that.
I had a pretty good time. Lotta chores. Made the waffles, made the tom yum bone broth (didn’t forget the chili peppers this week, that’ll help), refiled the pills, took out the compost, dismantled a palette. This one I just sawzalled apart didn’t delicately take each nail out like I did the other one. Leveled the minisplit condenser which sits on this concrete pad on a steep hill. Just a lazy joke of an installation, and it’s slowly leaning down the dill and you gotta prop it up.
Did my taxes. That was a big job. Went through every purchase and categorized it all, gathering all of Emma’s freelance expenses. So many 1099’s in this house. And two K1s that never show up until, like, August or something, so I always have to file an extension, and guess what’s going to be on the K1s and pay our tax bill and deposit Emma’s SEP check all months before we can really file. And of course Emma’s freelance and her income’s all over the map each year so she doesn’t really do quarterly, so we always gotta get the taxes done early enough that she can come up with the money in time. Quite the logistical dance. But still! First week of March, I think this might be the earliest I’ve actually gotten it all done. Very proud of myself.
Also I would like to say that Apple is complete BS with the way they handle statements with the Apple Card it is just a complete joke and an insult to their customers that they aren’t compatible with Quicken and the like. You gotta manually go into the app and download each month’s statements individually, one by one. You can do it in a web browser but only if you want a PDF. It is so customer-antagonistic it borders on parody. It makes it so I don’t use my Apple Card for anything but Apple purchases specifically, cuz the rewards are too good there to pass up, but for every other purchase it’s unusable. I forgave them at the beginning but the thing is.. what? Like eight years old now? They do not care. Honestly you get the distinct feeling there isn’t a single person at Apple working on the Apple Card experience. It hasn’t changed at all since launch.
So I kinda went all in on this non-alcoholic binge it really is pretty satisfying and surreal. After reading all of your recommendations in the comments — thank you for all of those — I purchased five non-alcoholic whiskeys, a non-alcoholic amaro, a non-alcoholic vermouth and a non-alcoholic gin. So far only the amaro has arrived — Dr. Zero Zero — but it is shockingly accurate and good and it’s been lovely to sip on my non-alcoholic Budweiser and my non-alcoholic amaro and man it really does convince me it’s the real thing. It’s just fabulous.
On saturday I was sore sore sore after some pretty intense house labor and then walking up the big neighborhood hill with Jane on my shoulders. Emma suggested I take a THC gummy to kill the pain. And she suggested I take two cuz one didn’t really do much for her. I have taken one a few times and I think I took two once, in the year or two that we’ve had these in the house. But it was a weekend so why not, so I had my two THC gummies and a couple fake beers and a fake amaro and my god, my brain was 100% convinced I was drunk. It was majestic. I felt all of the guilt of drinking too much. I passed out quickly.
And then I woke up without a hangover feeling right as rain and it was just the greatest thing ever. SOLD.
A non-alcoholic fernet seems to be the holy grail here. There seems to be one company making one that people approve of — Harmony Alpine — but it is sold out everhwere. Seems to be another one called the Bitter Note that doesn’t seem quite right (no rhubarb) but might be close.
Anyway, very into this. Always fun to find a new thing to obsess about. I will give you tasting updates. So far I’ve been into fake Budweiser a whole lot and the Athletic Golden Ale. Each tastes a smidge fake on their own, but if you throw back one then the other, it’s a shockingly realistic experience. I think this is probably part of the trick — mixing up your non-alcholic beverages like you would in a wildly irresponsible bar night.
Elon has stopped paying his AWS bill, and in retaliation, Amazon has stopped paying their ad bill with Twitter. Or threatened to. Or something. But I have to say in this one instance I am deeply sympathetic. I’ve never stopped paying my AWS bill, but I have definitely slow rolled it and can tell you exactly how many days you can go before Amazon starts seriously threatening you with shutting you down. And, you know, that is actually very useful information to have, so I can empathize. I suspect it is either a lot longer or a lot shorter for Twitter than it was for us, though. Actually, no idea which. Is it shorter because the bill is huge and letting it go too long is a giant financial liability for Amazon? Or is it longer because shutting off Twitter would be a far more serious act than shutting off our wee little app?
But mostly I’m profoundly empathetic for your entire app being a slave to the Amazon ecosystem. For years, Amazon was our largest (non-labor) bill, and Amazon was also our largest customer. The whole thing just felt kind of.. icky. And I doubt Amazon is Twitter’s largest ad customer, but still. It’s always a weird dynamic. We are free of that now, which is (mostly) nice. Amazon’s not our largest customer anymore and that makes me very, very happy. It’s always weird when you have these sort-of-symbiotic relationships with the big platforms, that also feel depressingly predatory, like they have your number dialed in, like they don’t care what you do, they’ll make money off of you anyway.
God, I wonder how big Twitter’s AWS bill is. I shudder to think. It must be huge.
I wonder who AWS’s largest customer. God it’s probably the military or the intelligence community huh. Never mind, I don’t want to know.
Spotify is starting to manipulate me and I don’t like it one bit. I work very hard to avoid their “algorithms” and it mostly works. Except I listen to my release radar every week, which is theoretically just a playlist of new stuff from artists I have listened to in the past. Yes, that’s an algorithm of sorts, and no, I don’t like it, but it seemed constrained enough that it was worth it. But of late it’s just getting more and more enshittified. Never mind the fake artists of the same name, and the weird remixes of artists that I listen by no-name people that appear for a week and get taken down. That’s been going on for a while now.
Now they’re just straight-up adding shit to my Release Radar playlist by artists to whom I have never listened. Artists whom I have no urge to listen to at all. Artists that don’t sound much like anything to which I listen. And sometimes these are pretty good! But I can’t escape the feeling there’s a plot behind it. They’re always bands no one has ever heard of — and I mean no one. It’s sketchy.
On top of that, they’re just straight up not giving me new music by artists to which I actually listen. I’ve listened to Algiers a ton, every single album. But there was a new Algiers album and Spotify didn’t even tell me about it. It’s getting worse and worse every week.
Enshittification continues.
And yes, I am still trying to quit Spotify. I have stopped listening to it everywhere but my desktop computer. Everywhere else — the car, the house, the phone — I am listening to Apple music. But it’s desktop interface is still pretty crappy and, really, Release Radar was what was making me stay with Spotify. But I guess that is drawing to a close. Alas.
Jane’s Spanish obsession continues. We’re all getting decently proficient. I am still worse than the rest of the family. My DuoLingo streak is only like six days. But I’m progressing. She’s been coloring fold-up cutout people and cats and those are very cute. She’s been doing a lot of parkour still, which is great. Really close to doing a cartwheel now, she’s almost got the run-straight-into-a-roll trick down. We’re still doing daddy-Jane dance party (Fiesta de baille de Daddy y Jane). We did a lot of Lady Gaga, whom she liked, but not the scary videos and not the endless plots. I forgot how many Gaga videos have plots. Then we did Beyoncé who she loved, and then we ended with PJ Harvey which went over better than I thought, so that was nice. She helped me assemble a hardware wagon this weekend, threading bolts and screwing on nuts. She’s a lot better at that than she used to be. LEARNING.
Justa mix for you today. New stuff mostly, but more Ting Tings, an older Goldfrapp tune that i love. Well, mid-career. And a late-career Pierces song that I like from my review of their entire discography last week. Those two should make a new album. Of the new stuff, very into this Hot Chip/Eno collaboration, the Hayden/Feist collaboration and the new Tennis song. Lotta good stuff!
Hope your week improves continuously from today forward, every day better than the last. May nothing but happiness come through your door.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? #837
Whoops forgot the playlist link. Post is updated: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2atljtDxeNCH5WegrRXT6D?si=e6e89558b2304811