Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. Sun is shining brightly through the window of the studio from the pond. It really is gorgeous. Oh hey. If you’re reading this in email form, you can have a picture of it to see what I’m talking about and why I always mention it.
Isn’t that nice? See that’s some influence marketing, right there. I wonder if Substack resizes images for emails. I guess we’ll find out!
I had this terrible dream last night. I was climbing in some rubble behind a building. The building was the building at Bedford and S. 2nd that Suzy and Kellianne used to live in in the year 2000. I always used to stay with them there. I loved that place. The location of the building was across the street from Powell’s in Portland. So: bi-costal (is bi-costal hyphenated? no. oh well not gonna fix it) hipster central. Anyway, I was climing in this rubble, mostly dirt but a little concrete and rebar. Reminded me of a quality dirt pile on which I used to play on Aurora Drive in Fairbanks when I was a kid. Only I wasn’t a kid in the dream I was my age and I was having a grand ole time.
Except then I sort of disturbed this lump of poured concrete and out came a grizzly bear whom I had just awaken from hibernation. He was PISSED. I jumped back and ran away yelling “BEAR! BEAR!”
The hipsters of Portburg sprang to action. And they really were, like, 100% clichéed hipsters. One was a clown on those cutlass-shaped stilts people went gaga for for a hot sec in the 90’s. Lots of porkpie hats and other various hipster hats. One guy dressed up in pink and white stripes and white linen pants like a candyman or something. Except they were all heavily armed. Because this is America and now even the hipsters are armed. And they were fucking PSYCHED to kill that bear. Just PSYCHED to have an excuse to use their fancy too-big guns. And they killed the bear and they were SO PROUD.
And I was just standing there crying, saying over and over “It’s my fault. I killed the bear. It’s my fault.” Just sobbing uncontrollably.
And the hipsters just thought I was soft.
So good morning to you too!
I spent six hours yesterday getting the new WiFi to work. “It just works” the Korean Gangster Tech Reviewer said. “It’s so easy and the app will guide you through everyhting” the Philippine tech review said. LIES! All of it, lies! Road block after road block. To be fair not all, or even half, of the roadblocks were Asus’ fault, but some were! But also a bad, brand-new, still-in-bag CAT-6e cable screwed me for an hour. And have you tried to replace your WiFi recently? It’s like giving a complete blood transfusion to your house. It is IMPOSSIBLE. Emma and I are both generally anti-smart-home and don’t have any Alexa speakers or any of that stuff but it is absolutely insane how many WiFi devices a modern house has and how impossible it is to change the WiFi network on most Internet of Things devices. Ring doorbells and their Chime counterparts? Gotta take em off the wall and plug a cable in and MAYBE it’ll work after the fourth try. iBaby baby monitors? Complete reset, plug in a USB cable, run an app, hit “ok” through six dialog boxes, launch the app a second time, THEN you can change the WiFi. The Oda speaker was blissfully easy, thank you hipsters you are not all gun-carrying bear killers, some of you make the best speaker systems out there. The worst is the Electric Objects EO-1, which I love love love so much, but… the purchase of the company by Giphy has not been great for the ecosystem. Their support pages tell you that to change the WiFi network, just use the app! Great except the app isn’t in the app store anymore. Luckily I still had an old phone lying around that happened to have the app on it. But I won’t next time. Am I supposed to just save that phone forever? My piece of vintage digital art in the physical world now requires a vintage-digital-physical-world accessory? Seems fitting.
(I should pause here to say the exception is, unsurprisingly, Apple. As soon as I changed the wifi settings on my phone, every HomePodMini and AppleTV in the house automatically updated to the new Wifi settings. I have no idea how. I wasn’t in Bluetooth range of any of them. It’s like they have their own little backhaul mesh and it was very impressive.)
The worst, though, is once things are ON the network, they name themselves every goddamn thing. I knew this already and it has been a constant source of irritation in my life, so Emma and I decided we’d add things one-by-one and keep an eye on them and name them as we go. Ring products? Four products, four completely different names. One actually named itself Ring Doorbell. One named itself Gainspan. One named itself it’s MAC address+mysimplelink. The EO-1 named itself, helpfully, “Anonymous.” There are two Sonos on the network and I literally can’t find them in the house anywhere. And then there is the device named “Others.” What is that?
In the end I got it done, mostly. We have fast WiFi6 throughout our house, everything seems rock solid, and I love the management of the network from the App. Also, props to Asus’ app designer, blazing their own trail, proudly indifferent to the strong suggestion of flat design that Apple has been psychically emanating these last few years. Clean design, devoid of depth (aside from paralax) and backgrounds? Nope, not Asus. We’re putting a motherf—kin galaxy in our app’s background.
The whole ordeal was awful and it felt like it was never going to end but then I remembered the QNAP. Longtime readers will remember how I spent something like four months getting that QNAP all up and running and solid. Remember that? Me neither. Because it’s been running perfectly for months now. These things can seem daunting in the moment, but eventually they get fixed, and recede back into the background of technology that runs your home that just works and you barely think about. Hopefully.
I had hoped that the whole wifi process would only take an hour but I was realistic and gave myself the whole day to accomplish just two tasks: the wifi setup and editing the garden video. I got them both done, but just barely. Out the window were my mad-scientist dreams of soil amendments. Next weekend. I DID get the gardening video done, though. You can watch it and see: 1) Tomato thinning, 2) cardboard shredding 3) compost maintenance, 4) the new giant raised beds, 5) how much weight I’ve gained in the pandemic, 6) how bad my hair is. Seriously. It’s so bad. I’m sorry. I started the video with a hat on (my awesome new Timehop trucker had. Jealous?) but forgot and took it off and MAN my hair is bad. Sorry! The video is great though.
Ten years ago yesterday Emma, Jussi, Abby and (probably others) I saw OMD at the Paradise in Boston and my god they were so good live. Thought they were gonna be a nostalgia act and, you know, great old songs you love so yes in that respect but. SO solid live. Just great. Went and saw them again at Stubb’s at SXSW a week or so later and a lighting beam fell on the stage and almost killed them and ended the show.
And twenty years ago yesterday, Nick and I began our Tunisia trip. I had seen Mike Figgis’ The Loss of Sexual Innocence, in which Julian Sands (greatest actor of the early 90’s) is (spoilers) brutally murdered in the Sahara by a band of Berbers in blue garb with blue face paint. I became obsessed with them and had to find them. The fact that they had a bunch of Star Wars sets in Tunisia didn’t hurt either. So off Nick and I went in search of the Blue Berbers. We saw a lot of Berbers in the sahara and I even found a blue turban, and we saw a picture of a Blue Berber at a roadside stand just at the edge of the Sahara. I asked the man operating it “where are the Blue Berberds!” but he wouldn’t tell me. Nick and I and two guides had our little fiat break down in the desert, we spilled all the water available for miles out of a camel feeding trough and had to spend the night in the Sahara which was terrifying but also awesome. We came home with our passports covered in Arabic than 9/11 happened. I “lost” that passport not long after because traveling with it became impossible.
When we were at the Star Wars hotel (made out of the set of the Lars compound, where Luke grew up), we met this other American dude and it turned out he was from Boston and worked at the Nickelodeon with our friend Seth so he kept us company for a few days, but wisely decided to forgo our mission into the heart of the Sahara to see the Blue Berbers. Smart guy.
Man. You guys on Facebook are missing a lot of great photos.
Yesterday my vinyl copy of The Arms of Someone New’s album Promise came in. I love this record so much, I have loved this record for 20 years or more. Shit, more like 30. About 7 years ago, Emma and I and Sean Drinkwater were eating dinner at Walter Foods in the Burg and the song “Hollywood” came on and Sean was like “What is this amazing record” and I hadn’t listened to the album in maybe a decade at that point and I recognized it but couldn’t place it and so Sean asked the server and he went and checked and told us and ever since then I’ve been re-obsessed with it. So, thank you, Walter Foods. I miss you. Are you still open? I feel like I heard you closed. That’s too bad. I miss running into Jay Parkinson or David Karp eating alone there. I miss my semi-regular dinners with Dorothy there. That place was great.
Promise was on this label C’est La Morte records. I was obsessed with C’est La Morte. They put out so many good bands and albums that you’ve never heard of: Area, Beautiful Pea Green Boat, Handful of Snowdrops. The amazing Doctor Death compilations. Every single record on C’est La Morte seems lost. The label has done nothing to put these albums on Spotify or get them re-isssued. Bands seem to have serious problems with them. I wonder what is up with that whole situation. If I had inifinite wealth and time I would untangle that knot, get all of those bands their albums back and make beautiful vinyl re-issues of all of them. Handful of Snowdrops has alluded to the possibility of them soon re-issuing their CLM album. I hope they do. I wonder how I could learn about CLM’s fate. Do any of you guys know anything?
I gotta talk to some podcast guy today who wants to interview me for his Trek podcast about my Trek book and I legit do not know if we are doing the podcast or a preliminary chat. This is mildly stressful. And my mom has her PT coming in… oh shit, 40 minutes. And I gotta get Jane in 10. Gotta wrap this up!
And, finally: Joe Manchin has alluded to the fact that he would be amenable to filibuster reform. Not abolishing it (alas) but at least making it so people had to fuckin show up if they wanted to stop a bill. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style Filibuster. Fine. That alone would make a big difference. Republicans would have to pick and choose their battles, and they’d have to actually vote against a $15 minimum wage, which outperformed Trump in Florida by 10 points. Slow work, but promising.
On that note in my free time this week I’m going to peruse the Stimulus bill. Hrm maybe once it’s out of reconciliation. There is so much good in there. It’s the largest amount of money from the Feds to the Native American tribes ever. It will cut child poverty by a third, at least. It’s not everything but there is so much good in it, and I need to remind myself of that. I’ve mostly spared you guys my political obsessions of late, but it hasn’t really tamped down. I’m like the survivor with the adrenaline still coursing through them. I’m not going back to normal any time soon. I already gave two different NC Senate Dem candidates a bunch of money.
But I will spare you. For now.
Okay a mix! I did a bunch of work on these but most of the ones I finished are so depressing. I finished the “most depressing” songs playlist, which I will call vol 1 because I’ll probably make more. But we don’t need that kind of energy on a Monday. I mean. Maybe we do? Maybe Monday is the right day to do it? No. Let’s not. I’m right on the edge. We’ll keep it pleasant. W Hotel playlist. God I love that HER song. I listen to it on repeat a lot not gonna lie. Anyway, enjoy this chill playlist. We’re not long for W Hotel lobbies now. We’re almost there. I can just smell the signature scent. I am ready to shell out $10 for some French Fries. Just a few more months. I’m gonna make Kristen come and meet me at the W Union Square and drink overpriced lobby wine. It’s gonna rule.
Hope your Monday is lovely!
Happy to see you here. I'm here for the insider photo content and music recommendations. Hope to see you in your driveway soon!