Good morning. Hello. How are you? #914
Why are big brands still advertising on Twitter? Grout update. Pillpack research. Prayers for ran — er, sun.
Good morning! Hello there. How are you? Happy Friday. How exciting. I am working today, but I don’t have any meetings, that is very exciting. Jane is at Grammy’s, so momentarily I will be doing the weekly recycling/Walmart run. Gotta get some muriatic acid. Muriatic acid is one way to tell what type of grout you have. There are three types of grout: cementitious (what a great new word to learn), traditional “sandy” grout, and epoxy grout. Epoxy grout doesn’t need to be sealed, it is already sealed. Upon learning this yesterday, I assumed I had epoxy grout in my shower and that’s why it hasn’t fallen apart in the eight years I haven’t sealed it. But upon looking it it, it does look a bit sandy and flaky. So I am gonna buy some muriatic acid, that’s a way to tell which grout you have.
I don’t know why it took me, oh, thirty years to figure this grout situation out. What is with our brains? Sometimes they just route around information you don’t know. They get scared to learn something. Your brain decides it’s too much work. It’s so weird. Every time this happened to me — well, every time I consciously realize I am doing it (and that takes a while) — I try and face it head-on. Just learn the fucking thing. It is almost never as hard as I’m scared it will be. Especially with Youtube! Youtube makes learning shit so easy. The internet sucks but that Youtube, not bad.
(Also, side note: remember when Youtube got a bunch of shit for Alex Jones and shit? They cleaned that shit up. Somehow Youtube is the exception to the enshittification rule. How this is the case, I have no idea. I wish someone would write an authoritative history of Youtube.)
Anyway, bit ‘o advice this Friday morning: scared to learn something? Just go learn it. It’s never as bad as we fear.
One thing that really sucks about manually re-setting up your Mac is that you lose your “learned words.” This is weird. I mean, I guess Apple’s logic is that when you are setting up your Mac, you have the option to use the Apple Migration Assistant, and the AMA will transfer over your dictionary. But the fallacy here is that you want your dictionary synced across all Macs. Many people use more than one Mac these days and it’s silly that we have to keep manually updating our learned words or manually moving the files in ~/Library/Spelling to another machine. And Apple implicitly knows this because your “text replacements” — the shortcuts you make to fix, say, “ducking” to “fucking” — are synced with your iCloud. Why not your learned words? It is dumb.
Speaking of Apple, why do they still advertise on Twitter? Why does Disney still advertise on Twitter? It has been a central pillar, assumption of advertising since the dawn of advertising — and for the entire existence of the internet — that big brands cared about brand safety and the content their ads run next to. And Twitter is as un-brand safe as it gets. Yet these brands seem to be happily running their content next to Nazi tweets, racist tweets, transphobic tweets. I don’t get it. There is something going on here. I see two possibilities:
Elon has somehow blackmailed/bullied these brands into advertising, and they are scared to stop because of the backlash they will receive from Elon fanboys. I don’t entirely dismiss this idea. Elon made vague threats, then he had a meeting with Tim Cook, and suddenly Apple was advertising on Twitter again, even though absolutely nothing got better and nothing changed. Oh, also, Apple still lets Twitter have a shit-ton of porn but Tumblr doesn’t get to. That hypocrisy still going strong after a decade. But now it’s even weirder.
The entire theory about brand safety that all of us in advertising have believed for more than a century is wrong, or incomplete, requires a corollary or something.
Anyway, sure, a lot of brands have left Twitter, but not all “family friendly” big brands have, and it is freakin’ weird and no one seems to be figuring out why. I want to know why. Do you know why? Do you work on a brand still advertising on Twitter? Will you anonymously drop me a line and let me know what the hell is going on? Thanks.
I finished my “To Investigate” playlist second listen. Sixty-one hours of new music. Took two weeks. In that time, I made a “New Investigate” playlist and added everything to it that I wanted to check out in those two weeks. It is now thirty-five hours long. Which means that if I had kept adding that to the original playlist, I would only be about two-thirds of the way thought it (60-something out of 90-something hours) and it would take at least another week to get through it. This is ignoring all the records that have arrived. There is a new Swans album sitting on my table and I haven’t listened to it yet! It’s out today, btw. Spotify does not think it’s worth putting one of the formative bands in my life into my new releases playlist today. Checks out. Definitely need yet another remix instead.
Thank you for all your help on lists of household chores. Man houses are a shit ton of work. Gardens are work. Porches are work. Pools are work. Septic systems are work. HVAC systems. Just garbage. Hot water heaters. Grout. Fucking grout.
Oh one more question: anyone use a pill-pack-type service for their parent’s — or, I guess, their own — pills? I gotta set this up for my mom today. Seems that Amazon now owns the OG Pillpack. Are there any other services of this type? When I was in Fairbanks a month or so ago I went to every pharmacy in town, none of them did it anymore. They couldn’t get the actual packs. I smell a monopoly brewing. Someone get me Lina Khan on the line. She could use a distraction from Microsoft/Activision, a merger I am okay with for some reason. But anyway, if you know of a Pillpack-type service, let me know, I would be greatly appreciative.
I did the math yesterday and I have had seven drinks since mid-April, and I’ve only drunk on seven evenings since March 1. This is unprecedented in my adult life. Not having hangovers is pretty awesome. But I wish I lost some weight from it.
We finished Ted Lasso last night. Spotty season, but ended up quite nicely, very heartwarming, made me a bit emotional. Nice and cozy, everything in its right place, even if it was weirdly unrealistic with its use of time at the end there. But I enjoyed it. Also recently watched this video — wait I already told you about that. Cozy Sci Fi. So I am back to reading Cozy Sci-Fi and my god it makes me so much happier than dour Busines books. Still gotta read Ben Smith’s Traffic since apparently I’m mentioned in it, but as much as I can, it is Cozy Sci-Fi for me for a bit. Every night I am excited to read my book. It is a good feeling.
Still sun forecasted for Columbia, MD on Sunday. This whole thing is stressful. Emma has bought us lots of rain gear. We are almost certainly headed there unless the forecast is 100% bleak. I’ve got a rough plan for a backup to head to the Atlanta show if things go to hell. It’s also still bit up in the air about whether Grammy is coming with us. Baltimore plans unclear. Weather sucks. But I will see the Cure come hell or high water. We asked Jane yesterday if going to that place where we saw Pet Shop Boys to see The Cure in the rain was something she wanted to do and she said yes, she wanted to give that a shot. Wish us luck.
Beyond that, I don’t have high ambitions in the garden this weekend… because of the rain. But if I can get my tomatoes clipped, and maybe some new cucumbers planted, I will be happy. I gotta weed the flowers at the new property. The old owner really went to town on her landscaping and gardening and everything is in bloom. It’s not my style of gardening, it’s more floral than vegetal, but I have to admit, it’s really nice. The smell is really nice.
A moody and quiet playlist for you, the one hundred and twentieth since this ridiculous endeavor started. All new music. Except Spectrum, cuz Sophia Coppola got me back into them. Pretty into nepo baby Gracie Adams, gotta admit. Working on a “nepo baby but good” playlist. Got any suggestions? New Slowdive! Very excited. I have tickets for DC already but gonna try and get a seat during the public sale at 10AM this morning. I’m hoping at some point they do a second US tour like the last album and they play Cat’s Cradle again but I don’t want to take that chance. Plus 9:30 is a pretty good club.
Have a good weekend. Next time we talk, if all goes well, I will have gone to Walmart and seen the Cure and they will have played “All Cats are Grey” and “Untitled” for the first time in yonks. Ta.