Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1382
Jane is sick, primer on Bluesky for newbies, organizing monthly expense, a dream of a self-hosted streaming playlist service, Bro that's not important you just like hugs.
Good morning! Hello! Hello! Hello! How are you? All well? No, no, of course not, all is not well, my god, I am very tired of people pretending it is it is really exhausting. I am not a fan of people expecting me to be productive. This is not something I am currently good at.
Jane is sick this morning, bad cough, no more fever though. Doesn’t want to go to school. She is in bed with Emma, causing Emma to lose sleep, and disrupting the organizing principle of our marriage and my life: letting my wife sleep in.
This is throwing my weekly recycling and Walmart run into chaos, but what are you gonna do. Sick kids. Her first missed day of the school year, though. Last year we had, like, 12 or something at this point.
We are listening, this morning, to the new Kill Rock Stars re-release of Elliot Smith’s From a Basement on a Hill. (It is worthwhile, every six-to-nine months, to pop on over to the Kill Rock Stars website and see what’s up, you will be pleasantly surprised). Pretty no-frills re-release. It’s a “new transfer,” but not a re-master. No colored vinyl, no eco vinyl, no 180 gram. Nice, shiny cover, though.
Man, when compiling my full concert archive a few years back, I was struck by how many times I saw Elliot Smith perform. Something like six or seven. I remember liking him, thinking he was just fine. I did not obsess. People around me sure obsessed, though. I feel like that came later, though? Except Ramona, she knew right away. Jill (RIP) would kind of stalk him when she lived out in LA. Apparently his name was Albert? Wikipedia says Stephen. Maybe I am remembering that wrong. Heatmiser was great, think I only saw them once? Nick was into them, I think? Memory is hazy. Oh and that club in LA she would take me to where we saw Elliot once and Ryan once… Three of Clubs was that it? God, what a place, what a place.
Good record, though.
People are flocking to Bluesky this week it really is something. Couple readers asked what the deal was, so here, in a nutshell, is the deal:
Bluesky is a non-profit public benefit company. It was “founded” by Jack Dorsey but he owns none of it and has nothing to do with it because somewhere along the line he got butthurt they decided to focus on moderation features, at the request of the community, instead of plowing forth with federation, i.e., the interoperability of many different social sites. There are some technical differences of opinion at Bluesky about the tech underlying Mastadon, they wanted to go their own way, and somewhere in this boring-ass technical discussion, Jack threw a hissy fit and abandoned them. It was also around the time Elon was really getting started destroying Twitter, and Jack’s tantrum feels to me like it might have been semi-related to wokeism or some shit but whatever. Point is, he’s gone, which is good. He’s trying again with something called Nostr but we can ignore that.
I have said in the past that Bluesky was a non-profit and it turns out this is not true. It is a public benefit company. There is a difference. A public benefit company is better than a normal company, but it’s not as good as a non-profit, and it can be reversed.
The CEO is a woman named Jay who mostly seems okay, but I worry about her since she comes from the crypto world, is young and idealistic, a liability in my mind these days but that is probably just my on personal baggage, and so far she is mostly doing everything right.
I would not characterize Bluesky as a panacea, as the be-all end-all of wonderful social media, because, well, wonderful social media does not exist. It is a terrible invention. BUT they are trying, they have what are probably the best moderation, safety and privacy tools on the planet at the moment. If we all gotta get our fix, we should probably be using them instead of any of the other services. They are the caffeine-free Zevia of the social media world: mostly harmless but still soda.
Lots of people seem to have woken up to Twitter’s awfulness because of the election? I don’t know, this whole thing is confusing. It is somewhat frustrating that it took, oh, I don’t know, the loss of the republic for people to realize how bad that place was and its potential for evil. But better late than never, I guess.
Most are going to Threads, which is, well, not as bad as Twitter. I do not paint all Silicon Valley execs with the same brush. Zuck is mostly intolerable, and it is fucking disgusting he normalized and congratulated Trump on his win, and boy has that dude really fucked up in the past when it comes to politics. But I do not actually find fault with his current approach to trying to keep politics off of Facebook and Thread, that is just fine with me. He does not seem to be actively, joyously participating in the downfall of kindness.
So we have the more normcore celebs and people finally moving off of Twitter for Threads, and the slightly less clueless ones leaving both for Bluesky. This is good. There are still so many people still on Twitter, and it is fucking annoying. Celebs, non-profits, and institutional accounts are the biggest problems, so if you have any influence with any of these, please get them to at least set up accounts on Threads/Bluesky and cross-post their content if nothing else.
And on that note I suppose we must commend (chokes down vomit) Eric Adams for ordering all City of New York social media accounts to set up Bluesky accounts as well.
Bluesky’s biggest problem up til this week has been its lack of users — lack of diversity of posters. It really been just an echo chamber of political pundits, which is exactly what I don’t want right now in my social media. I want musicians and artists and actors and weather reports and non-profits, and Bluesky has been lacking all of this, though it is getting a bit better.
And Threads is too, with some of the more addicted celebrity tweeters finally fucking seeing the light and moving over: Stephen King, Judd Apatow.
But there is a long way to go.
So, anyhow. If you’re on Threads and like it, that’s probably ethically fine at the moment. If you’re on Twitter, get off of it. Unless you’re committed to constantly fighting with assholes, in which case, yeah, we need people to do that. But can you also at least join one of the other two platforms (ahem Ellie Mystal) so us normies can read your shit too?
Hold please Jane has wandered down to breakfast lets go check in on her.
Hrm. Maybe not. Wonder where she went.
Flipping the record…
Yesterday I took an hour or so to compile all of my monthly bills and my god, it is so depressing and alarming. I should have done this ages ago. I mean, I do my expenses in Quicken every day, so I was academically aware of them all, but the budgeting tools in Quicken kinda suck so the full horror was never readily apparent. It true that the small shit adds up but it’s also the big stuff you don’t think about: pest control! So fucking expensive.
I wouldn’t saw we spend a thousand dollars a month on television shit but I wouldn’t say it’s that far off. The TV shit is deductible, at least, thanks to Emma’s job, but still. Just insane.
I did manage to shave $500 a month off just going through the exercise. There is another chunk imminent after I decipher the NASA-in-the-60’s-complexity-level spreadsheet I had to make to figure out the Disney+/Hulu/Max situation, getting us off of cable and onto some streaming cable replacement (assuming Youtube+ but if you have a recommendation let me know).
And the next tranche will be finishing up this project of getting fiber run between the houses, so I can then cancel the Chore House internet AND my Backblaze AND my Dropbox subscriptions, which work out to just under $400 a month. The equipment to do this, though, is about 5 grand, so there is a spreadsheet listing how long it will take to pay for itself, and currently it’s between 12 and 13 months, which is not terrible?
Anyway the modern world sucks and monthly bills are annoying AF and I wish my daughter wasn’t coughing.
Watched Alien Romulus last night, it was fine I guess, it was a movie, it was an Alien movie more or less, shockingly exactly the same formula as other Alien movies. The asshole was even more assholeish and his inevitable death was not nearly as satisfying as it should have been. There was some interesting new directions of thinking about the ramifications of the alien acid. Honestly it better than I thought it was going to be I thought it was going to be terrible.
Jane has joined me in my office for the day. I told her I had a very important question, she got excited, I asked if she could give me a hug. She said “Bro, that’s not important, you just like hugs.” It’s true, Janey, but that does not make them any less important.
Justa playlist for you today. I have a dream. Maybe it’s already possible? I’m not sure. My dream is that I can make playlists for you and self-host them. Like out of my house. I mean, I already have the gear and knowhow to self-host, that’s not the hard part. What I want is some sort of streaming interface. I already own all this music. You’d just get to listen to a playlist, not copy anything. I would presumably pay some sort of licensing fee for this software that went to the artists. I am 90% sure this does not exist because who else would need or want this. But it sure would be nice to not give you Spotify links, and not do that whole ringomorale with posting links to 2-3 different streaming services.
ANyway, today we have some great new stuff from Fucked Up, some pretty good new music from Doves — new album early next year, pretty exciting. The new Cold Cave is just great. Ditto new Mount Erie. Like this new Lucius song a lot. And we have some classics from Catherine Wheel, Tsunami, Faces and of course Elliot. Oh and a new discovery: a sexy goth band called Sacred Hearts.
Have a lovely weekend. I am sorry that, once again, I cannot fill you in on the latest Walmart trends, but we’ll be sure to include the Walmart trend report next week. Shit you know what would be hilarious? If the only paid tier of GMHHAY was a financial analyst tier for analysts covering Walmart and was, like, $1,000 a year and I could make a living off of this.
New life dream alert.
—
Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.
i'm still on twitter but haven't posted in eons and have locked down my account. i stay on because of work—but i can tell you that my central employer has self-deplatformed and is only keeping the account because they don't want some wingnut taking over the handle. i think my division will do the same and take our shizz over to bluesky