Good morning. Hello. How are you? #943
House work, some thoughts on the shitty conversational UX of Threads and Bluesky, teaching Jane evolution, missing winter, lots of contractors around this week
Good morning! Hello there. How are you? Oh man I am groggy. What’s today? Tuesday? Oof. Lotta week to go yet. Okay. Let’s do this. Force quit notes. Restart notes. Getting pretty tired of that little routine. I wonder how many years of my life will go by before Apple fixes it. Lovely.
I got a haircut. I forgot to mention that. Did it Friday. It is very short. I am happy. My neck has a tannin but it is less hot in the sun now that it does not have a blanket of hair on it. Lotta merit in short hair. I wish I could have long hair but it looks like ass these days after a certain length, alas. Man I miss my long hair. When people told me I looked like Kurt Cobain and not Chris Farley or Seth Rogan. I would show you a picture of my haircut but my god my face looks wide.
Been raining a lot. That is nice. The heat is still a beast though. I am ready for winter. Can’t stop thinking about it. It’s gonna be awesome. I will have greenhouse so I can still garden. And I will be able to go back to complaining that my Care Bear cardigan doesn’t have pockets. That’s gonna rule. Some evenings I put it on when Emma and I are watching the TV and it’s so nice. But too hot. Bring on Winter.
I’m about seven records into listening to the entire discography of Einsturzende Neubauten right now. It’s been pretty lovely so far. Forgot how great those early albums are: Halber-Mensh and Fünf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala especially. So god. I’m up to 1991, so, you know, not up to anything I haven’t heard before yet, but it’s been a long time since I listened to any of this. Remember that period around, mm, gonna say 1991, 1992, where Neubauten was coming to America with some regularity? I think I got to see them three, four times. Miranda Sex Garden opened on one tour, if I recall. The New York show on that tour was freakin awesome. Also only one lineup change in forty years is not too shabby. Blixa really kept it real, too. I kinda love that he quit the bad seeds. I was annoyed about it at the time but it makes a lot of sense if you think about the divergence in their music as they’ve aged.
Anyway, strong recommend. Though I think the HVAC guys probably thought I was a complete weirdo. HVAC work in the attic started yesterday. God, what an operation, tearing up floors, running ducts around the steel beams in the ceiling. We discovered a major obstacle at the beginning of the job and had to re-route a bunch of stuff. But I think it’s working. So anyway, rest of the day I was working out of my little makeshift office over there, and whenever those guys would walk out the door to get more ducts, they’d hear this creepy-ass German dude wailing from my office. Probably think I’m a satanist or something.
Today the electrician’s coming back for more garage work and the HVAC guys will be there. Regular construction site over there. And we had the solar people at our house because one of our inverters died. And the garage people are coming Thursday.
And I finally found a structural engineer. That was a journey. I found this guy and it took me a month to get ahold of him and he was real dubious about taking my job. Did some basic work looking at Google maps, and he sort of half heartedly offered to help me with my pole in the middle of the room, but when I told him I was looking for some weight calculations on the roof because I wanted to double-sheet it, he was like “yeah, that’s hard math, I’m old, I don’t really feel like doing all that math.” And he just passed on the job. Which was pretty funny. BUT he did refer me to a proper firm. He’s like “you should call these guys in Raleigh they have a bunch of young lackeys and one of them will do it, I’m sure. I can’t be bothered.” Well okay then. So I called them and it ain’t cheap, but they’re dong it.
Progress.
I “won” the finals at the end of the Diamond League in Duolingo – this new thing where there are three rounds of extra competition above Diamond league where you have to end up in the top ten each time. I don’t really get it. But it sucked me and and I made it through and got a special little trophy icon and boy don’t I feel special.
And then last night my high school friend Frank started texting me in Spanish and I could barely decipher any of it.
I have a long way to go.
Yo soy triste.
I think I figured out why both Threads and Bluesky are such shitty replacements for Twitter. I mean, Threads is the better one, but they both are actually terrible at handling conversations. This was a subtle thing with Twitter but they were really good at, erm, Threading, and putting replies subordinate to the main tweets, and making conversations legible. Bluesky is so bad at this, so my entire timeline on Bluesky is typically one or two conversations, a million Tweets/Skeets/Whatever, all higgeldy piggeldy on my timeline, illegible and so, so annoying. I would be content to actually read this, erm, Thread, if it were comprehensible, but it’s not. This has the added unfortunate effect of making your entire timeline dominated by one or two people that are chatting and having a conversation at that moment, and, gawd, I don’t need to see every single reply it is tedious. I know there’s some setting somewhere in Bluesky that supposedly changes this a bit, but as far as I can tell it just allows you to see even more of this.
And then with threads, like, the “for you” tab is… kinda terrible? I mean, there seem to be tons of interesting people on Threads that I’m not following — and threads sort of surfaces those, when a friend does a reply on them. But there’s no real algorithm and, paradoxically, right now I want an algorithm there because my real-life friends aren’t on there very much yet, and there is currently no other method of discovery.
All of this has the effect that on both platforms my feed is predominantly populated by absolute psychopaths. I mean, these are people I choose to follow because they do say some interesting stuff, but my god, they post, easily, a hundred times a day. Maybe more. It is absolutely bonkers and I do not understand it. I mean, sure, you are a SAG writer on strike and you have nothing to do, go ahead Tweet all day (though sometimes I’m like “there’s a march going on in your town why don’t you get out of the house and go walk the picket line). I guess. Like a hundred times. But others of these people claim to have jobs! How do they post 24/7 when they have a job? I am genuinely confused about people who Tweet constantly all day it really is something. I wish I knew one of them well enough to sit ‘em down and really delve into their psyche. Are they happy? Do they like it? Does it make them happier? No idea!
Also I think that the word Tweet needs to go the way of Kleenex and become a non-copyrighted term. (N.B. I do not know if this actually happened to Kleenex or not but you know what I mean). I am going to call them “Tweets” on all platforms. Not like the word belongs to X anymore.
I took a stab at teaching Evolution to Jane yesterday. When she wants to learn something, she says “let’s learn something!” And then I sort of go through subjects until she picks one: art, chemistry, economics, physics, biology, etc. And she’s been picking “biology” lately. And I stupidly tried to teach her Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species, and she was interested but then she asked why we do this and I was like… oh shit. Evolution. okay. Here we go. It was.. not easy! It’s easy to understand evolution in a fake way, like pop culture way, she got that right away. But she had trouble grasping it happened over generations, because, well, she didn’t know what generations were, so we had to do that. And then natural selection involves a lot of bears eating the brown bunnies in the snow, etc. etc. so that was kind of unpleasant. I think she sort of got it by the end, but I think we have a ways to go.
And then we spent DDJP dancing while learning how to pass and chip a small stuffed soccer ball and she is getting pretty good! She can pass with some accuracy and she can lift the ball into the air and get it where she wants it to go. She has zero interest in learning how to dribble a soccer ball yet. And drop kicks are comically bad still. But it made me really nostalgic for my soccer years. I was never very good (was I? Actually, who knows) but I sure loved that game. I shouldn’t have stopped. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten so chonky.
Oh and at one point that big storm passed through. it wasn’t too bad here, but it was… picturesque. And Jane and I turned off the lights and sat in the window and watched it silently for a few minutes.
That was nice.
Oh god I have no playlist because all I’ve been doing is listening to Einsturzende Neubauten. Hold please. All right. Goth playlist was almost done, let’s just sprinkle it with a few golden oldies, rearrange it for flow and we are good to go. Now let’s go MOPE.
All right talk to you peeps tomorrow it’s been a good time today let’s go face our ten meetings now. And Jane. And the electrician. And the HVAC guys. And the chiggers.