Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1451
Grocery store runs, unpleasant car stickers, Middle Earth book 9 , that new Marx, Twins, Ai versions of your own voice, Music brings light, chomps shortages.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? All good? I hope you are still asleep. Morning is for the birds. Got another 5-day run of 6:30 wake-ups. Hard to describe the kind of despair that sends me into. Trying to ignore it.
Rough day yesterday, too many things went sort of haywire at the same time, snapped at too many people. Trying to make things right on that today. It’s a process.
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We are listening to two songs on repeat this morning: The last track on the new Jennie album, Jennie from Blackpink. The album is mostly an interminible album of “pop bangers” add nothing to the genre, but Jennie pulled a New-Order-on-Sirens-Call and put a nice, emotional, melodic acoustic number as the last track on the album. It is called “Twin.”
We are also listening to the new single from death-metal-meets-drone outfit Planning for Burial. It is called “A Flowing Field of Green.” Also Planning for Burial released a new shirt yestrday, exceedingly relevant to my interests:
Get one and we can be Twinsies. Twin Twinsies. Because it’s a Fender Twin. Or Twin Twin Twinsies if you also start listening to the new Jennie song, “Twin.”
Is Chore House gonna need its own cat once the studio is done, I wonder.
Just back from dropping Jane off at schoool, where she made me go upstairs and get the glasses she forgot, except she did it with kindness and man that’ll get ya. She drew me a nice picture of a tree in the car and then we killed it with our Wordle. She is wearing a Bluey t-shirt. She asked me this morning why I wear band t-shirts all the time and I explained the concept of supporting artists and how important music was to me and how I thought music made the world better and don’t you agree, and then she went on a nice little speech about how much music brightens her life - “it makes everything more bright,” she said.
Bring’s a tear to an aging rock daddy’s eye, it does.
We discussed Kacey Musgraves migration from country to pop, and how she is kind of following the Taylor playbook.
And then we talked about Mark Lanegan for a while as we listened to his cover of Nick’s “Brompton Oratory.”
I left her, went to the grocery store and bought lunchbox-sized Oreos (weirdly not with the Oreos, but prominently displayed on an end cap) and popcorn. Does anyone actually buy popcorn in a jar anymore? Am I the only one? The whole popcorn section is microwave and stove top, with one little old school bottle of popcorn on the very bottom shelf. Also I miss the chap bag of generic popcorn kernels.
They did not have Turkey Chomps at this grocery store either, which means they are currently out of stock at all three grocery stores, which means we have a shortage, people. Red alert. I am trying a “lightly peppered” turkey stick by a company distressingly named “The New Primal.” It is not as good. Which really does lead you to believe they are doing some pretty disgusting voodoo with those Turkey Chomps. Maybe RFK shut em down.
I don’t know why I’m telling you all this plenty of actually interesting things are going on in my life. Look at me, five years into GMHHAY and still self-deprecating about the small stuff in life not being “actually interesting.” So wrong. God. Ambition requires extensive deprogramming.
Here is a picture of a car I saw yesterday while coming back from my self-indulgent, $22 lunch. I have questions.
Big news yesterday, I finally discovered the key command in Spotify to send the “play head” back to the song you are actually listening to. Which means I don’t need to scroll through 66 hours of music to see what track is coming up next. On a Mac, the key command is the quite-logical option-shift-J. Weird choice, but it is there, and my life has noticeably improved because of this discovery yesterday, so I thought I would share it with you.
Hey do any of you AI savants know if it is possible to make a synthetic version of your own voice? Like… in theory it should be sort-of doable now for a human to, like, read a long-ish script, maybe two or three times, into a computer, and then computer goes beep beep boop boop and eventually sends back a version of your own voice? I have decided I want this. I want to be able to type words and have them come out in my own voice. So that when I am old and having trouble talking, I can type it out and it will sound like myself. My young, hale and hearty self, with my basso profundo that people fall for and listen to me just because of the seductive tibre. So all the nurses will be helpless to resist my requests for extra helpings of hospital mac and cheese. I am joking but I do think this would be useful. It has to exist, right? Or is it another example of an actually useful thing they could be doing with AI but are instead focused on putting artsts out of business?
Anyway, if it exists, someone with more knowledge on the AI topic, let me know?
Also maybe I can have it take my place in work calls.
I have a whole what-I-want-from-an-AI post coming your way, and I am sorry. Apologizing in advance.
Last night, after a poolco meeting and a long, very helpful talk with my wife, I went to bed and I finished the pithily-titled Sauron Defeated: The End of the Third Age: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Four (History of Middle-Earth Book 9) by Christpher Tolkien and JRR Tolkien. I am about ready to be done with this History of Middle-Earth journey. I will then give Lord of the Rings a quick re-read but I want to move on. I mean, this book was… fine. Literally half the book is fan fiction about Tolkien’s nerd club of old Oxford Professors cosplaying as time travelers that was barely adjacent to Middle Earth, along with a spicy helping of 100 pages of a made-up language that Tolkien himself eventually got bored of and abandoned. I may have skimmed that part, don’t tell anyone. The Oxford Dons theoretically make up a frame story of the second age — specifically the very part they are dealing with in the Amazon series Rings of Power, and wow, imagine how pissed off the fanbois woulda gotten if they had actually put that frame story into the show.
I am kinda thinking once this whole Middle Earth extended visit is done, I might tackle Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, aka the books behind that Natalie Portman flick Annihilation. Jeff VanderMeer is very good on Twitter Bluesky and seems a good dude.
Though I did buy that new hipster translation of Marx. Should I read Marx in the year 2025? That seems… ill-advised for my mental health?
And it turns out that Emma and I both seem to have purchased the new Facebook tell-all, Careless People, in order to Streisand Effect Facebook’s shitty PR team. I think maybe we shoulda done a slight bit of coordination on that front, she’s a “whistleblower” but also.. kinda responsible for a genocide? Doesn’t need that much of our money.
Last night Jane invented “The Butt Butt dance” which involves grabbing your butt, wiggling a bit, then falling on the ground flailing. She showed it to one of our neighbors on a walk. But then she made up the “goo goo ga ga” dance which was… actually a pretty good dance! We were impressed. Also impressed she let us go for a walk at all, which my mental state desperately needed. OH AND she let me have my seat in the evening when we watched a Real Civil Engineer episode. She was ruthlessly stealing my seat every night for a while, making me sad. But now she is letting me sit in it again. And it is just great.
Take what you can get, man.
Moody and Quiet playlist for you today. Was a little short so bookended it with a couple oldies that have been in my brain lately. Oh yeah and two weeks ago while working in the attic I had this amazing run from the Apple Music on Shuffle of Akron/Family, Teenage Fanclub and Bright Eyes and it was so good I put the whole thing on this playlist. The other half-ish is new, including the Jennie song I just told you about, new Doves, new Panda Bear. Oh this Ted Lucas guy isn’t new but I just learned about him and I am his new biggest fan even though I don’t know anything about him or even what decade he is from I should probably Google him and make sure he’s not a Nazi. That’s a thing you have to do these days.
I keep forgetting these days to say good bye to you after the playlist link. So… good bye!
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.
You have that AI voice thing in your iPhone, sir. It is called "Personal Voice" but I cannot vouch for how well it works; I got sick of repeating phrases to it.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/104993