Good morning. Hello. How are you? #894
I overslept. Thoughts on my failed Giphy bid. HBO RIP this is so stupid. This one neat Spotify desktop trick. Teaching Jane to butter me up.
Good morning. Welp. It happened. I overslept an hour. Why is it, at this advanced age, do I still insist on manually turning my alarm on every evening? Why don’t i just use that “MTWTF” feature? This is absolutely 100% an recipe for inevitable disaster. Someday I am going to forget, and last night was indeed that day. What’s worse is that I supposedly have a backup, where quiet music turns on in my room at 6:30 in the morning, but that hasn’t worked in weeks because I have not been praying to the Apple Homekit gods enough and it’s decided I’m a heathen or something. I don’t know. I have no idea why Apple Homekit decides to sometimes just not work. Are my plants even getting watered? Who knows.
In anycase it’s now 8:06 AM, which is when I like to be wrapping up my GMHHAY to you and getting to my other morning chores, which are clearly not going to happen this morning prior to Jane waking up. Alas. Farewell, sweet Quicken Transactions. It’s days like this I have to “trust the system” and hope that I have enough topic prompts in my notes, enough photos to add photos, a nice as-yet-unseen photo of Jane, and a playlist mostly complete.
It is so absolutely insane I write this thing every day what is wrong with me (okay, five days a week, but still.). The Tuesday fiction is helping though, thank god, since I have so many meetings on Tuesday. I’m thinking I’m going to use Tuesday for some special stuff for a while. This particular piece of fiction won’t take too much longer, then I have some more fiction and a few other ideas for Tuesday. We will see.
And on Monday, my new system with the map games was implemented, and, amazingly, I got every country right on every map — Europe, Africa, Asia, Central America, the Carribbean and South America — so I don’t have to do them this week. That saves about 10 minutes in the morning this week. I’m very excited ahout this.
So. Shutterstock bought Giphy and this is all over and now I can talk about it. For about the last… mmm… I’ma gonna say eight months I have been making an effort to buy Giphy. Well, for Timehop to buy Giphy. I had a whole vision for it, it was absolutely going to further the goals of the UK government’s regulatory authority, the CMA, who is forcing Facebook to sell Giphy. I had a pretty good chance, too. And I thought I had a pretty good view of the landscape of potential purchasers and how much they would pay and I thought my bid was a decent one. I had a few other tricks up my sleeve to make our bid more appealing to Facebook — er, Meta — that did not, in the end, pan out, but really could have.
In the end, I completely spaced on an entire sector of possible purchasers, i.e. the large online photo companies. This does not seem unreasonable, as there is no immediate obvious synergy between the large online photo companies and Giphy, and no immediate strategy apparent. And after reading the accompanying investor presentation deck, I’m not so sure I was wrong, per se. But on the other hand, I think Giphy is a great company and had a ton of potential regardless of who owned it, provided they did the brilliant, clever, correct things with it, so it might not be any more absurd for a photo company to own it than an adtech-and-nostalgia company.
This is the second time I have endeavored, and failed, to purchase a storied old tech company. Each time I incorrectly calculated too few bidders who would be interested in these properties. So it’s not completely horrible that I have lost in the bidding process each time, given that I am generally a stalking horse/lowball bid, and who knows, maybe someday if I keep it up I will actually win one. I mean, I suppose I do actually run one these days, so never say never. In any case, I was very, very excited about the combined potential of Giphy+Nimbus, our adtech offering, and I am somewhat sad to lose. I still firmly believe that our bid was the best one for furthering adtech competition, but, then, I know nothing about the other bids, but, then, it’s not like Shutterstock has some giant ad network situation, but then, who knows, maybe they do. In the immortal words of the adtech genius Eric Seufert, “Everything is an Ad Network.”
It was a pretty fun process, though. And boy, investment bankers. They are a hoot. They really don’t like me. They deal with me because of my resume and the company and whatnot, but they can sniff “lowball” bidder on me from a mile away. It really is their magic power. And they’re not wrong. And I suppose it’s because other bidders have whole giant teams on these projects, but I don’t, because I know I’m a lowball bidder, so I keep the HR cost of our bid low and do it all myself. Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe I should hire a bunch of actors to do the next one with me.
So I have the new desktop Spotify layout on one computer but not the other one that I use semi-regularly, so it’s sort of a confusing time in my life, going back-and-forth between the old layout and the new layout. BUT, I do have a PSA: If you go into the preferences on the new Spotify layout, you can turn on a toggle for “use compact library layout” and your playlist list on the left will get rid of the little photos and extra information and return to a layout where you can actually see a bunch of playlists at once. If you are someone who has dozens (or, ahem, hundreds) of Spotify playlists, this is amazing. Now, the only difference between the new Spotify and the old Spotify is that the new Spotify inexplicably bolds the type on the playlist names.
Speaking of pointless corporate moves I suppose we should talk about the HBO apocalypse last night. So. Not only did WB get rid of the HBO name, which is without a doubt one of the stupidest business moves of the last one hundred yesrs, but they actually killed the HBO Max app. Did they just kill the logo and branding, so the next time you launch the app it looks different? Oh, no, it is so, so much worse. When you launch your old HBO Max app it says something like “oh yeah this app doesn’t work anymore, you gotta download a whole new app.” It is so ridiculously dumb.
But the absolute most stupid part of this is that The Succession finale is this weekend. There was absolutely no reason to do this before the finale, othber than the hubris of some exec who set an arbitrary deadline and clearly needs to be fired. This is going to be a giant clusterfuck. Of course their thinking was probably the opposite: “Oh goody, we will use our most successful show as a hostage to force people to download an entire new app.” I’m sure their servers are completely ready for this.
Oh and also the Apple TV app is half-baked, missing tons of functionality and was clearly rushed out the door to, again, meet an arbitrary deadline.
Even if they didn’t just kill off one of the most successful and recognizeable brand names of all time for no reason, the incompetent launch of this app on its own is a firing offence. None of these executives deserve to earn six figures let alone the seven or eight they probably do, and I weep for the thousands — thousands! — of employees who sucked it up and worked hard to make all of this stupid, incompetent shit happen in a slightly less idiotic and horrifying way. Even as the executives probably think its those employees fault, and not their idiotic timelines, for the bugs and backlash.
I really am stupidly worked up over this I can’t believe people get paid shit tons of money to make such stupid decisions.
I’ve been teaching Jane to “butter me up.” I’ve been trying to explain to her that the way to get me to do something when she doesn’t want me to is to say lots of nice things. I figure even though someday it’ll be annoying, it’ll be somewhat less annpying than her screaming and whining. But she doesn’t quite get the concept of buttering someone up. It’s funny, even since she was a baby you could see the human deviousness in her, the cleverness and subterfuge all kids have and utilize in order to get what they want. But the whole concept of buttering someone up seems somewhat difficult for her to grasp. She thinks it’s clever and fun and loves it, but she really just thinks buttering me up is a game and she can just play it whenever, regardless of whether she wants something of me. So now every once in a while out of the blue she decides she wants to say lots of nice things about me, and on top of that, because the point of the game hasn’t clicked for her, she does it even while she doesn’t want anything from me.
It is so great.
Goth playlist for you. Mostly new. Except for The Moon Seven Times, because I think of them all the time, Ordo Equitum Solis, because they seem to fit the overall very, very moody dark tone of this playlist, and my own goth masterpiece “I Was Right,” which I love so, so much. Is it serious? Is it a joke? Even I could not say.
All right well I have fifteen minutes left to do the bolding and subhead and copy to Facebook, but I think I made it! Whew. See you tomorrow.