Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1400
Weekend IT fibre-running chores, winter carnival at jane's school, griping about hollywood's annoying habit of enshittifying sci fi utopias, crooked walls in space
Good morning, hello, hi friend, how are you? Look at that, issue #1,400. A nice, round number. Just doing some quick math to check on when we’ll get to issue 2,000. Looks like it’ll be a little under two and a half years. Wow. Mid 2027. Incomprehensible. I can’t believe it’s going to be 2025. I remember through my entire childhood thinking about how I’d be 28 in the year 2000 and it seemed completely elderly, completely out of reach. Never really formed a coherent paradigm of the years since then. Stupid, insane, just wrong that I am 52 years old. Just wrong.
Welcome to Monday. We are listening to Lo Moon, an LA shoegaze-adjacent band that I like very much. A young Dan Nigro did some production work for them prior to blowing up with Olivia then Chappell. And I recently learned yesterday that their singer (one of?) is a nepo baby, child of a Eurythmics and a Bananaramarian. And a Shakespeare Sister? I did not realize Shakespear’s Sister was Bananarama adjacent. Learn something new every day. Anyway, one more song for my work-in-progress playlist “Nepo Baby But Good,” which currently has 10 tracks on it, 32 minutes. I need ten more musician nepo babies who write solid music.
Almost Christmas, woo! We are going to Boston Friday. If you’re in town, let me know, maybe you can come to our annual Christmas Eve party. Definitely looking forward to a 12-hour drive with Jane up the eastern seaboard in Christmas traffic. Hrm maybe we should leave early. Tempting.
Did all my Christmas present wrapping, well, you know. Gift bags, mostly. This is a thing I did not expect in my life: My wife is very conscientious about wrapping paper waste. I am not sure if it’s the hassle or the environmental destruction or what. But she hates picking up all the wrapping paper after Christmas. In my childhood heart that was a time-honored, beloved tradition, but over the years, I have kind of realized she’s right. So it’s gift bags for everything, usually the same ones as the year previous (though I bought a few new ones this year). Those gift bags have seen some shit. They are beloved old members of the family now.
Chores chores chores! So many great chores this weekend. Well, I mean, mostly all the same type of chore. Home IT. Finished burying the fiber optic cable that now runs between the houses. Really got in the mud for that one. Sunk up to my ankles. For a while I thought maybe I was finally encountering the quicksand I had been lead to believe was rampant in the world. Also, Jane helped and it was so cute. We just had the best time tromping through the woods, stretching the cable out, using my nifty wiring loom tool (my god I love that thing) to get it into it’s conduit, trenching where appropriate, burying. Just the best time.
Sunday morning I did the wiring to my Mother In Law’s house, our ADU. I had run the CAT-6 cable to it from our server room, and buried it, but just left it long and unterminated in her bushes. I found a way to get that cable into the crawlspace and then up into her living room without making any new holes in her walls. I deserve an award for this because I fucking hate running cable in walls. Got her on the master property-wide network. She is unimpressed. I used an old Unifi AP-PRO which only runs Wifi 5. She is getting 400 up and down. She gets 500 up and down from her AT&T router. I am going to need to beat this. I have a Wifi 6 AP coming for her now.
Then I got the fiber cable presentably entering into Chore House. It was just going through the window, which was not okay. So I drilled a hole through the wall (gah) and put some conduit on the exterior wall, ran it up through the conduit and into the kid’s room closet which was the server closet when I bought the house. I hate that the IT infrastructure of Chore House is in a kid’s room closet. BUT the good news is, through the diligent pulling efforts of Jane, we have about 20 feet of extra fiber, so I can console myself by knowing that all of this is temprorary, and eventually I can re-run the fiber up to the attic and have the IT infrastructure in a proper server closet near the studio. That made me feel a lot better about what appeared to be, honestly, a kind of slapdash job.
Oh also, Jane and I did a very important chore. I think it’s best if you just see a photo of it. Sorry Facebook readers, you’re gonna have to click through but I swear it’s worth it.
Other weekend events: Jane’s gymnastics, she is getting pretty good! Not, like, good good, but she can do flips on the uneven bars n shit, it is kind of crazy kids are crazy.
Went to Walmart wait I already talked about that Friday.
I dunno, man, did I do anything other than Chores. I guess I watched some shit. I watched the first episode of the new kid’s Star Wars show and it was pretty and had potential but I dunno, man. I am just.. I dunno I am tired of angled walls why are all the walls in sci fi angled it is so dumb. It makes sense in certain situations where things are pre-fabbed and assembled (I guess? Not sure why they can’t prefab a fucking vertical wall). But in Star Wars suburbia? WTF. And why are they bussing their kids all the way downtown from suburbia for primary school? Why do the robots have shitty robot voices instead of normal ones? It is dumb, dumb.
Also at one point a villain says he only wants “cold hard credits” and I just had to lol, because, c’mon man, the word “credit” has meaning.
At another point a hoverbike — a technology that is light years, probably centuries ahead of where we are — sputters out gasoline fume exhaust. Because I guess ultra-futuristic-tech runs on gasoline. Well okay then.
But my biggest gripes aren’t really Star Wars related, but Spielbergian, because this show is really channeling ET and the like. Why do all the adults suck? Why does society suck so much?
Putting the Spielbergian kids ethos into space is interesting, because this is supposed to be during the Republic of star wars, after Palpatine is defeated. The good guys. But of course Star Wars is hellbent on making the same mistakes as Star Trek and painting the society created by the good guys as shitty and terrible, no such thing as a good or harmonious society here nope, no siree. But then layering the Spielberg shit on top of it makes it seem positively dystopian: absolutely shit adults, terrible societal systens, absolutely evil child-rearing practices. It’s enough to make you wonder if Disney isn’t secretly making fascist propaganda, saying “see? those woke libs only dream of making a society of mindless shitty automatons.” And I hate it so much.
I hate the absolute fear and creative bankruptcy of Hollywood when it comes to describing a sci-fi utopia. It will piss me off till the day I die, because it seems increasingly clear they are never going to fix it, and they are slowly going to turn any semblace of sci fi utopia (not that there were many to begin with) into garbage in the name of “edginess,” which, honestly, is basically the same thing as a stupid-ass internet edge lord at this point.
(Tangent: I was well into an edible some evening this weekend watching the Timothy Dalton Bond film Licence to Kill, and they made tire-screeching sounds when a dude underwater made a quick you-turn in a scuba suit and man, that just brought me joy. So maybe this is all on me.)
Speaking of which, why the fuck does Carlos the Jackal have a fucking wife and kid what the fuck, after all the stupid-ass remakes I hardly expected them to be trying to off De Gaule or anything, but come on, maybe maintain at least an ounce of spirit of the original? A spouse? a kid?? What. The. Hell.
I read that book at way too young of an age.
Friday night after gymnastics we went to the “winter carnival slash festival of lights” at Jane’s school and… it was actually pretty awesome? Seriously solid light decor, I mean, really good. Food trucks. Book fair. Art projects. Craft booths. It was fun! We knew parents. We knew kids. We were members of a community. It was weird.
Jane freaked out and did not want to watch a bunch of kids doing Christmas carols and actually as I write this I kinda think that even though she kept saying it was too loud (cuz the announcer was waaay too loud, but not the kids), I think it was something else.
I kinda think she was just jealous she was not up on stage singing.
Justa mix for you today, mostly new to me, except The Hated, Eddie Rabbit, REM. Oh and EMA, sort of. That song came on this morning on my drive back from dropping Jane off and it is great. It was in my “all the good” playlist of 8k+ songs, but I don’t remember it. But past me was right! It was good!
Okay gotta go. The Neurodivergent-afffirming Pediatric Speech Therapist Tenants at Chore House are informing me that they have no internet this morning, so I clearly messed something up even though I touched nothing but the fiber and the fiber connectivity is confirmed and, I don’t know, man.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.