Good morning. Hello. How are you? #864
Evaluating Twitter replacements. EY's failed breakup. A suspiciously cheap copy of Robert Frobisher's Cloud Atlas Sextet.
Good morning! Hello! How’s it going? Happy… Wednesday! Good times who doesn’t love a Wednesday. When I was a kid Wednesday was piano lessons and choir practice day. Got to go to Wendy’s after school before all that. Super fun.
Spent some time playing around with various Twiter alternatives yesterday. I was already on the first two… ummm…. Sproutable and… Post? They were fine. Yesterday I checked out Bluesky and Substack Notes. I posted an important announcement that Dragonslayer had been remastered in 4K and was out now.
Performance was much better on Substack Notes. It has a built-in early advantage if you’re in the Substack ecosystem at all, because anyone whose Substack newsletter you subscribe to is automatically “followed” and anyone who subscribes to your newsletter automatically follows you. So it kickstarts the most difficult, miserable part of any of these networks, figuring out who to follow and tweeting out into the void. I like it a lot. It’s quick and easy to find new people to follow. The only problem is that in order to “follow” them on Substack notes, you have to subscribe to their newsletter. You don’t really, you can subscribe to their newsletter, then go into preferences, and turn off the option to have every newsletter emailed to you. I tried it for one friend, but it is a lot of clicks, and not intuitive, quick or easy from the Notes app. Their architecture seems to indicate they could have an early lead in this race, but unless they fix that particular quirk, I don’t know how long that lead will last.
Bluesky seems okay. It is a much, much better version of Mastadon, in that it’s “federated,” so that, you know, there’s no single algorithm or company owning the thing. I generally find these companies evil but I am not overly concerned with this sort of thing. I think the old managers of Twitter were doing “good enough” on this front and am not really looking for some bold innovation in my social media. Other than that, Bluesky is basically a Twitter clone, and if it “won” and everyone used Bluesky — federated into and along with Mastadon and whatever — I would be absolutely cool with that. I wish everyone could just use a single service and be done with it. I don’t love Substack’s business model — they go on about not taking ad dollars but they aren’t going to mean it in the meantime and in any case, taking VC dollars is worse. Sproutable seems to have the best non-VC model. Bluesky seems to be operating off of Jack Dorsey’s Twitter profits, essentially, so it’s unclear how that would last in the long run. I don’t remember how Post got its money, and I haven’t looked at T2 yet.
Notes has proven fun, Bluesky quite usable. I will pop into both and try and contribute a smidge of content here and there in an effort to help kickstart ecosystems. I think I am able to, like, turn this paragraph I’m writing right now into a Substack Note? I still don’t quite get it but then I am very, very small.
One of these things needs to win, though, and we all need to settle on another one because Twitter is so, so stupid now. Just utterly incompetent. Accidentally exposing people’s nudes, taking down speech around the world becaude a single government (India) said it had to be taken down in their jurisdiction, just an endless series of malevolance and incompetence.
The API thing is a nightmare, of course. He killed our API access, even though we were involved in good faith talks with them to pay forty-five thousand dollars a month. The new API, even at the $45k level, isn’t capable of doing what we need: it’s not a matter of scale, but of functionality. The thing just doesn’t really work. So we got turned off. We can’t reach the contact that we were talking to about the enterprise level — they probably quit or got laid off, they didn’t know anything anyway — so we bought the $100/mo level to at least see if we could get the Twitter Archive Uploader functionality working again. They took our money, but it’s been a week and we have not gotten access. Awesome. All pro.
Then of course we have the petty-ass feud with Substack about them making a competitor product. I’m so confused. Why did Elon Musk pay $44 billion for Twitter if he thought it was so easy to make a competing product that would matter? What does he even care? How is this guy so dumb, so devoid of impulse control? Even though he’s on Ozempic, which supposedly helps impulse control. Counterpoint: Elon Musk.
Also PSA: Ozempic, Wegovy and Semiglutide are all the same thing. If you see a reporter state, without explanation, that “Ozempic hasn’t been approved by the FDA for weight loss,” like I did today, that reporter is bad at their job.
Good news everyone, EY has decided to abandon its ridiculous breakup plan, splitting their consultancy practice and their audit practice into two separate companies. Basically it seems like the US leadership botched the plan and partners in various quarters of the world decided they didn’t like the plan and the whole insanely complex house of cards came collapsing down. I am greatly oversimplifying, but that’s the gist. EY is a giant partnership, so the bulk of the partners on both sides — consulting and audit — had to agree to the split. Audit partners were gonna get giant payouts or something (maybe it was stock I can’t remember) so that they would agree to “sell” the consultancy to the consulting partners. But every country has a different EY company, owned by different partners, and they had to get them to all agree and it was, it seems, just a little bit too much cat herding.
I’ve been following this for a while, academically, since Ernst & Young, as it was named back them, was my first real, full-time, corporate job back in the day. I do not have a reason, but I’ve been viscerally against the plan. Probably some subconscious bias from my past there, where my group supported both audit and consulting. Man I miss that job. So much pirated software and free pens.
I was doing my daily scan of the new items for sale on Discogs — items from my wantlist, shipping from the United States, new today, sorted by price low to high. And a copy of Robert Frobisher’s Cloud Atlast Sextet, second pressing, came up for sale for the mere low low price of $80, which is about $240 less than any other pressing ever. And it was the first I’d ever seen shipping in from the United States. And I looked at the seller and they had some other real gems, just absurdly cheap. Oh, and the more I looked I realized that they were, in fact, all absurdly cheap and, oh, I see, this is a new seller with not a single rating.
So what did I do? Well, shit. I bought it anyway. I sat there with my finger on the button for, like, five minutes, saying “this is a scam don’t do this.” And then I’d say “well using Discogs had to start as a newbie at some point, they all had zero ratings at some point, and someone had to be their first buyer.” It did not occur to me until just now that this is not actually true, because I had plenty of ratings when I started selling, because I had been buying. Whoops.
Anyway, the dude almost immediately emails outside of the Discogs system, which never happens, and says my order is coming. He has used cc and cc’d like two or three other buyers god this is such a scam, no BCC. Then like ten minutes later he’s like “well Discogs suspended my account but I am still going to send out your order.” And then like an hour later he emails again and says that the order is sent.
So. Will Robert Frobisher’s Cloud Atlast Sextet be arriving at my house in a few days, $240 saved, or have I been scammed? Really could go either way. I hope I’m not scammed, though, cuz the dude has a hella affordable copy of the orange vinyl edition of Taylor Swift’s Reputation that I’ve had my eye on for a good while.
Had a lovely night off from Jane. Watched a bunch of Dragonslayer. Slower than I remember, even though it’s only like 100 minutes. Phil Tippet’s dragon rules, was worth every penny. Movie was robbed of the Oscar for VFX what’s so exciting about Raiders of the Lost Ark’s VFX anyway. Watched episode two of this season of Succession, so we’re now finally ready to watch the spoiled episode tomorrow. I’m glad something big happens. I’m tired of the same plot rehashings. Succession is a masterful show in every aspect except for actual realistic characters and plots. Everything else is marvelous and the characters mostly do what we want of them so we don’t mind, but my god are they all utterly Potemkin Villages of actual humans, even devoid-of-humanity, loathesome rich humans.
Got a live mix for you today. About 2/3 new and the rest old. Starting off with Phosphorescent at the Music Hall because that show freakin ruled. Like James Murphy says, “I was there.” Got a Journey track with the fake Steve Perry and man, that guy is a very good fake Steve Perry.
Keith doesn’t like it when there’s no post-mix farewell, so this is for you, Keith. Have a lovely day everyone. I hope it’s as sunny and warm where you are as it is here. Winter feels truly over. Until I go to Alaska in two weeks, since my mother informs me there’s a 10-foot pile of snow outside her door.