Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1399
Turn off autocorrect your life will be so much better. Holiday cards. We don't need 2,000 cubic feet of dirt.
Good morning, hello hello hello. Happy Friday. I hope you have it off. Everyone should have Fridays off. Honestly, Mondays too. Three-day workweek feels about right if you ask me.
Reminder that if you would like a Webbles holiday card to fill out this form. To answer reader questions, yes, it’s a physical card in the postal mail, delivered to your door. Or as close to your door as the post office deigns to deliver these days, since they seem to now have a policy of not delivering to new neighborhoods but rather insisting on a single bank of mailboxes at the start of the neighborhood, even though this is literally their only job. And congratulations to Research Triangle Park, where after fifty years, the USPS has finally consented to actually deliver the mail to the thousands of offices. Only because Congresswoman Deborah Ross, friend of the GMHAAY, pushed them to.
But I digress. And no, I don’t mind the cost of mailing you this postcard. I think it’s fun, and I am proud of my wife’s work. She is annoyed at the size of our Christmas list and points out that we mail like 500 cards out and get 100 back but I don’t care, I consider that a win, more joy going out into the word than you get in, etc etc. Be the change you want to see in the Christmas card world.
We are listening to our “To Investigate” playlist, it is pretty great, we’re listening to Marika Hackman at the moment, know nothing about her, but she is pretty great. We knocked off 8 hours of the list yesterday, it is down to 39 hours, 50 minutes. So, good progress. But I don’t think I will make much today since I won’t be in front of my computer, I will be doing chores and, I am just learning now, errands, because my Banking app for PoolCo won’t let me deposit this client-pool-construction-milestone check because it’s over the electronic deposit limit so now I gotta go to the bank today grr.
We did get a few pieces of vinyl (formerly called “records” but I guess we don’t say that anymore) in the mail this week that are, as yet, un-listened to, but I think I can do those tomorrow while Jane is playing Cities Skylines after breakfast. Right now we have an LP by A Winged Victory for the Sullen — I think this one completes my collection — and a 7” from Cindytalk that I have been looking for forever, thus completing my collection of all the physical vinyl releases from them. Lotta releases by Cindytalk only on CD, though. Someone should do something about that.
Just back from Walmart, still doing the reduced-stimuli hours, no Walmart Radio, and I have to say… I kinda like it? Maybe Walmart Radio was a bad idea, maybe Muzak was a bad idea. I mean I still kinda like it when I hear the Cocteau Twins’ utterly absurd version of “Frosty the Snowman” on Muzak during Christmastime, but maybe it’s all not worth it. Shopping in silence is pretty awesome.
Muzak: a word that went from brand name to genericized, except it’s obscure and no one under 40 knows what the term means.
Update: My pools-and-storage partner Rocky informs me that Sam the engineer was able to re-jigger things and we no longer need 2,000 extra cubic feet of dirt to be delivered to our site. This is fantastic news. He also informs me he reads this every day, so, hi Rocky.
In thrilling and exciting news, I have completely turned off auto correct on my iPhone. I am 99% sure you couldn’t do this before, and I tried to do this before and couldn’t, but maybe my memory is shit (ed: my memory is shit). But anyway, the point is, you can turn it off now. It is in settings —> general —> keyboard, because of course. It’s got a lot of options but you can turn off auto-correct, predictive text, auto capitalization, spell check, and smart punctuation, among others. I think those are the five that make life miserable: adding apostrophes to “its,” turning “we’ll” into “well” for no good reason, changing phrasing, capitalizing “joy” for no reason, etc.
I have been using this for, uhh, maybe three, four days now? And yes, I make a ton of typos. So many typos. BUT: 1) I fucking love no autocorrect it is amazing. 2) It is so much better. 3) I am already getting better at making few typos, because I have to. It rules. It is so good. The whole system was a complete failure and it should be abandoned.
Now if they could just give us control back with their stupid-ass auto-brightness bullshit that makes it impossible to read the kindle app in the daylight. I wish I could film it. You can just sit there on a park bench in the sun, holding your phone, not moving, and watch the white text on a black background in the Kindle app get brighter and dimmer every ten to thirty seconds for no reason. There is no way to turn this off. Or, I don’t know, maybe there is. Whomever did the UX design for Apple’s settings app should be tried for war crimes.
Anyway, turn off auto-correct. It is needlessly making your life miserable.
Does not bode well for Apple Intelligence, though I think we all know that is going to suck. Remember ten years ago when they told us Siri was going to be amazing?
(I will say that the speech-to-text stuff has gotten pretty good and, out of desperation with the shitty state of autocorrect, I’ve found myself using it more and more and I hate myself for it.)
Jane is dressed like a Christmas present today. She has really taken to this ten days of Christmas-themed spirit-week dressing for school. Early every day. I hear that these spirit weeks make for increased attendance, but also I hear that most kids don’t dress up? It is somewhat confusing. If the only kids that dress up are the ones who enthusiastically love school anyway (Jane fucking loves school), then how does it increase attendance? Real mystery. Debasting whether I should go to this “winter markt” tonight. On the one hand, it seems insanely, absurdly cheesy AF. On the other, well, that is my lot in life these days and what good does it do to hold onto your teenage cynicism, maaan. Plenty of things to be cynical about in the world these days instead of elementary school winter markets. Except I can’t help it. The whole thing is so cheesy. I was not cut out for this I am supposed to be an old man going to night clubs or something like David Bowie in The Hunger. Before he gets that vampire virus and stuck in Catherine Deneuve’s attic of shit I’m gonna have to watch that again aren’t I.
All right, well, we’re gonna keep it short today because I… I guess I gotta drive to Pittsboro to deposit a check. Cool. Stay strong, GMHHAYians.
Ambient playlist for you today, really one to keep you awake on this cold winter day, I am sure.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.