Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1393
Internet "negativity" and the United Healthcare CEO, Bluesky's revolutionary trust and safety, bummer about the PBC though, and the investors, it's heated slipper season, greenhouse and pump house cold weather update
Hello hello hello. Greetings. And greetings to that new ache I had in my lower right back, but not where it usually aches. Well hello, sir. Are you just passing through? Gonna stay a while? Have you married into the family and I’m gonna be stuck with you forever? Who knows! Another inexplicable pain for no reason. Cool, cool. Join the party.
Emma is working on the holiday card and it is a doozey. Excited about it. I will be sending you guys the annual “sign up for our holiday card” link in the next day or two. Thrilling.
Hey does anyone have any recycling uses for plastic straws? I am trying to send zero plastic back to the dump, which means that I am going to have to re-use all the plastics that the recycling center won’t take (and recall that I actually went to our recycling sorting facility to do the research here). I checked the Youtubes but it was all a lot of neurotic moms doing crafts. I am looking for something more.. industrial. Like melting it and turning it into vapor barrier or something.
We are listening to the Catching Chickens EP by a band called Nourished by Time, I think I got it off of the Resident Advisor best-of-the-year list, it is kinda cool and soul-ish and R&B but weird, not the cliche’d techno I thought would be on the list. I kinda like it.
The CEO of United Healthcare got gunned down in cold blood on the streets of Manhattan yesterday and an old friend of mine is so outraged that the internet is making so many so inappropriate jokes about his death. And I try not to add to the negativity of the internet world but I just gotta say if this event, specifically, is the event that “makes you think the internet is a terrible place,” for the first time, well, then, look within. This?! People fuckin joke about death when the person they love most in the world dies. Death and humor are not a universal taboo.
I have been thinking for the last oh, decade, that it is real weird that there isn’t more leftist political violence in the United States. I mean, the Republicans want you to believe that ANTIFA is some sort of militant group, highly organized and competent but if that were the case, it’s even weirder that leftist militants haven’t done a single thing in the US in like 40 years.
Speaking of not contributing to the negativity of the internet, forgive me readers, I have sinned. I wrote a totally snarky reply back to Adam Mossari, head of Instagram and Threads about some dumb thing he posted. It was really rude of me. Except! Then it turned out that it was an imposter! I fell for an internet imposter. It can happen to anyone. I deleted my comment but man I sure got a quick comeuppance for breaking the rules and posting negative shit on social media. Whoopsie Daisy.
The fake comment was, ironically, about Threads and how hard they work at removing impersonators hahaha. In hindsight, it should have been obvious. Impersonating Adam to make a point about impersonations. It is pretty funny.
Bluesky seems to have this better in hand. Mostly because they allow for third party block lists and moderation and my god it is so good. I mean, it’s not perfect, impersonators abound but they seem to get dealt with and identified pretty quickly. You can follow a list and block the whole list. Anyone could make one. I can make a list called “lame-os” and you could block the whole list. Brilliant. Not to say they’re without problems, but Bluesky’s trust and safety shit is so good.
I mean, not as good as at Tumblr where we had an army of actual humans doing moderation — my god the SV Board members just fucking hated that. Waste of money, they said. Hated it so much. They wanted us to do what everyone else did — half-ass and outsource it. This is not a conspiracy theory it’s exactly what they would say. Bluesky takes a third way, though, with open-sourcing the thing and it is really a revolution. There’s a good chance that, over time, the difference in Trust & Safety impact between Bluesky and Meta, and really, everyone else will be so profound and unmistakeable that it becomes an actual, mainstream embarrassment for Meta. I mean, a chance. Not definitely, and not imminently, but I can see that happening someday. Causing a full-on revolution of Trust and Safety. Imagine if Bluesky pulled that off. Wowzers.
(N.B. I remain very wary of Bluesky’s ownership structure and investment-taking. I wish it were a full non-profit (as opposed to a public benefit corporation) and I’m deeply dubious of every single investor since, well, to make a profit they are counting on something profoundly changing with Bluesky. A reckoning is almost certainly coming. Though some have escaped it. Sort of. Like Kickstarter. Sort of. Not really.)
(Also I am pretty sure Bluesky being a PBC is a legacy of Jack Dorsey and his sad-ass, VC-normative pooh-poohing of straight-up non-profits because of, you know, shitty things like “laws.” So the sooner they shed this vestige of his reign the better.)
Speaking of Bluesky some more (god Rick, come on), I was wrong yesterday: Buttondown does not expand Bluesky links in-line, so I will have to do that manually from here on out. Sadsies.
In more positive news, it is heated slippers season, people. I broke ‘em out for the first time this winter yesterday and yes, they still rule. Given that I just rolled the dice and bought a rando alphabet-soup fake-brand Chinese drop ship item from Amazon, I sure lucked out because these things fuckin rule. Warm feet, all the time. They are so great.
Given my stellar success here, I might bite the bullet this year and buy the battery powered version, which costs about $40 more. And I say “version” even though they will be from another nameless brand, totally different. But if they’re anything as great as the corded ones, we will have reached nirvana. I will wear these things 24/7 till February or March when things start to warm up.
Greenhouse and pump house are doing great. It’s been well below freezing at night for almost a week now. But so far everything is working I am very proud of myself. Oh, Liisa, I forgot to answer that one email and I can’t find it now, but I suppose other people have that question to: what is a pump house. Well, if you live in Fairbanks, Alaska, Pump House is a pretty good restauraunt out on Chena Pump where we had my 10 year reunion and dinner after my dad’s funeral. But for our purposes, a pump house is just what it sounds like: a tiny house for a pump. Most residences that have their own well have the well and pump in the house — my house growing up had a little crawl space off of the garage with the pump and well in it. But at Chore House, the pump is about 175 feet from the house, over in the woods by the driveway. And they made a little house, maybe four feet by four feet, covering up the pump. It was uninsulated, existed mainly to protect the electric pump and related equipment from rain. But now? Now it is heated and won’t freeze. I love my little pump house, especially since the last owners (and builders) of Chore House put a giant stained glass window in it. It looks so great.
I know I already posted this photo but cmon look at this thing:
I am thinking it needs a giant gargoyloe on top. Working on it.
Righty-o do I have a Jane story for the day? Hrm. She is wearing a grinch shirt today. On the drawing app in the Lightning this morning she wrote “Daddy I love your butt.” Yesterday at dinner she told Emma and I to be quiet so she could watch an educational video about the magnetosphere (I think?) protecting us from the sun’s evil death-bringing radiation.
She has girl scouts tonight. I think I’m gonna go. Emma has been trying to get me to be the treasurer of the program and I think I’ll pass there, as I am slowly realizing I am terrible at accounting (see previous entry about economists doing accounting man GMHHAY needs an index). But I am very into the idea of sitting at the entrance to a Walmart or something and selling cookies. Of course you gotta find a turf not taken by a different troop. Not sure how that works. And you boring-grown-ups here informed me Girl Scouts aren’t allowed to sell cookies at night to drunk club goers but I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.
Here she is with her class yesterday dressed up as a tree. I have low-res’d it and crystalized everyone else’s face, don’t go CSI-ing the thing to invade the privacy of her classmates or something. But I was stupid and forgot to take her picture before school.
Righty-o here is a post rock playlist for you. Including that good Yesness song I mentioned yesterday. And a bunch of other things I have been listening to this week as I plow through 60+ hours of new music. God no one send me to the best-of list for The Wire or Brainwashed until January I need to clear this stuff out.
Until tomorrow. Got a fun edition to wrap up the week. Tralala.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.
could you not call me a “boring-ass grownup”? i’m clearly a dreamshitter.