Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1452
Pillpack enshittification, Unifi tech support sloth, hipsters at the Jersey Mikes, Ozempic drama, The Pit in Harvard Sq, computer me voice update, a $22 lunch in the burbs
Good morning. What is up. Sunny outside, kinda warm. That is nice. Got lots of sleep, that is nice. My mom is out of the ICU, that is nice. Have a slight headache, not so nice. Mom has a roommate now, and the room is shitty, not so nice. Emma had a migraine last night I hope she is doing okay, not so nice.
Still haven’t solved my Time Machine-UNAS PRO interaction. Unifi has emailed once on the support ticket. Sent them a bunch of info. No word. Lovely.
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
Trying to cancel my mom’s Pillpack.com account, or at least pause it, since her medications will be completely different after this. Amazon owns Pillpack now. Just sucks. You can’t pause your medications online. There is a “pause” button, but it does nothing, in multiple browsers. If you click help, it goes to Amazon’s shitty UX and says you need to contact your “care team” to cancel. They can only be contacted by phone.
Something real fuckin nefarious about preying on old people and not letting them stop getting drugs.
I remember when those Pillpack guys pitched us back when I was a VC. Nice guys. Good exit for them. But of course then the product got enshittified. Nothing else really out there like that, either. Real shame.
So goes modern capitalism, etc. etc.
We are listening to a band called Curses. I don’t know anything about them. The album is called Another Heaven. So far, sounds pretty good. Kinda gothy kinda Interpolly. Oh I explained Interpol to my daughter yesterday that was kinda fun. Let’s just say it was a very Boston-in-the-oughts-centric description, around how much Carlos liked the ladies.
Thank you to everyone who wrote in about turning my voice into a computer voice. Tim writes in to tell me that a company called HeyGen can do it. Sev writes in to tell me that a company called 11Labs can do it. I wrote back to one of them and said yeah, that looks cool, but it’ll be some SaaS payment, and it’ll be obsolete or broken by the time I need it, Apple should just do it in the iOS. And lo and behold, Jon and Josh both wrote in from the pacific northwest (alliterative names, same region, don’t even know each other) to tell me that iOS can, in fact, make your voice into an iOS voice. I am going to try this. Will it be any good? TBD. Will it be a product Apple cares about and nurtures or abandonware? Equally likely with those dudes these days. Though they do seem to take accessibility seriously, so mayhaps they will maintain it for the next ten, twenty, dare I hope thirty years until I need use of it.
God it would be so awesome to make it another thirty years. I can do it I can do it.
Huh this Curses band is great, song #2 is super catchy and uses a straight up Fairlight orchestra hit, stick that 80’s nostalgia right into my ears.
I don’t know with whom I was talking a week or so ago about the Pit in Harvard Square, but based on my information and belief and Sean and I’s drunk stagger through it mid-last year, I swore up and down to this person that the Pit was still in Harvard Square. And I was right! FOR NOW. But apparently I was right only by, like, four days. It is gone now. No more pit. This is a shame since Amanda Palmer is back in town and she could go do her statue panhandling thing there again should for, some reason, she need to get a fresh start. Back up and take a different fork in the road, if you would. Boy this paragraph is some real Boston-rock-in-the-90’s inside baseball. But I will miss the Pit. RIP Pit.
I have been feeling vaguely nauseous (god that word is hard to spell. Pointlessly so. Might I suggest nawshus) for a week or two, decided it is probably my Ozempic, even though I’ve been on the same dose for six weeks now. Didn’t take my shot Sunday, and boom Bob’s your uncle, by Monday I felt great. Then I spent Monday and Tuesday feeling awesome and not nawshus, but kinda stressed about my weight. So last night I took the shot again, and now I feel a bit nawshus. This is a dilemma. Should I go down a dose? Last time this happened as well, and I stopped and switched to Mounjaro and that was worse and I had to switch back. Then it took me a year to get back to this point, at a decent dose, losing weight. A lost year of weight loss the new album by Defective Frequency.I am in a pickle. But I am gonna try another week. It was only a week or two of nawzeeah and I had like weeks without it on this dose prior to that.
Why am I telling you all this. I think it is hilarious that a third of America is on these drugs and I am literally the only one who admits it or writes about it.
Anyway, as a circumstance of this, on Monday I was ravenous. Emma was at grand jury duty (which sounds so fun someone pick me please). Jane was at school. So for lunch I did something glorious and old school: the 1-2 punch of going to a sub place and getting McDonald’s fries. Went to Jersey Mike’s. People fuckin love that place what is it about Jersey Mike’s that inspires such devotion? They don’t even toast! Due to the Ozempic drama, I was juuuust slightly more hungry, I thought, than a regular sub would satisfy, so I got the stupid giant jumbo. Figured I could save it for leftovers.
I did not notice until I got to the counter it was $18.
And the fries at McDonald’s were $4.
So I spent $22 for lunch on Monday. I felt like I still lived in the city! I recollected I used to spend that much for lunch every day!
Also while I was waiting for my sub, a ton of young, urban professionals came in and got subs, using the app. Like I am so confused. I am not talking the young moms of the nearby 30-something neighborhood. I am not talking the legions of medical workers in the area who would have been wearing scrubs and sneakers. I’m talking air-pod wearing, screen-glued, fashionable 20-somethings like you’d see at a SoHo Chopt. WTF. Where are they living where are they working, why are they going to Jersey Mikes, can I, like, start a thai lunch takeout place?
I think I’m going to need to sit outside Jersey Mike’s with a notebook and interview patrons for a week.
Justa mix for you this morning. Lotta good new stuff. New Alan Sparhawk, from a forthcoming album with Trampled by Turtles. Does not sound like a mouse making doom techno. Kinda awesome. A song from an artist named Pami that Nick alerted me to that I find very catchy. A track from my old Boston rock compatriot Jake and his recent band Dream Eaters that seem pretty huge on TikTok. New Doves. I don’t know this Ted Lucas fellow but I’m very into this album. Aparently a lost Motown rarity now on Third Man? Needs investigating. Listened to this Truck Violence band yesterday for the first time and I enjoy their punk meets post punk, Gallon Drunkian stylings. Have listened to the new Bob Mould twice and it is growing on me.
Have a lovely day. Be kind.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.