Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1461
Man Ray karaoke night, Beth Gibbons solo, I don't know what your parents do, LLM update, rants about Trump's third term, the Abundance Agenda and the special elections today.
Morning morning morning. Feeling pretty achy this morning. Went out last night. Became a more extended night out than anticipated. Went to French Club with Abby and Emily than through connivance we convinced Sean to go to a Wine Bar which was funny. Then we all went to Man Ray for their Karaoke night, which was hoppin’ and hilarious and amazing. The hostess sang Portishead, she nailed it.
It reminded me that Beth Gibbons is playing on Friday. I looked it up on setlist.fm and she only does one Portishead song, “Roads,” as part of the encore. Debating spending $56 to buy a seat in the back of the balcony of the Orpheum and arriving just in time for the encore. The show is only half sold out. Too expensive, too big of a venue, artist not performing any of the music people know and love. I don’t love the latest solo album, but hey artists can make the art they want. I am not faulting the artistic side of this. The show should have just been $20 cheaper and in a venue half the size. I feel kinda bad for her. Her management maybe let her down.
LLM update, my friend Sev tells me his brother consults with non-profits who are super-leery of AI and want similar tools, all running on their own steel, and says it can be done. Not cheap, but not terribly expensive. Ballpark of $25k. Which is definitely not steep. I could afford it but I do not relish the conversations with my wife about it, and I suspect some percentage of the money would have to go to companies I loathe. Though maybe not, maybe it can all be done with open source. I also worry/suspect that once the thing was up and running, and fed, I would ask it a couple questions then think “meh.” And I would be out twenty-five grand. So we are, most likely, putting a pin in this project for a spell.
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Was feeling super down yesterday. Forgot one of my security keys on this trip to Boston, vastly complicating the execution of the pool job this week. Read the news, got in major existential angst about the state of the world, really just super depressed about it. Became paralysed and lethargic. Had luckily gotten most of my work done by then, but it was still… well, you know. Happens to all of us these days.
But then the work day ended and I went outside next door to the playground where my daughter was playing with my the daughter of my ex-bandmate and friend of 30+ years, my good friend Jussi, and two old college friends I hadn’t seen in eighteen years. Then I went out with more friends and you know what? Weirdly, going out and doing things with friends makes you feel better. It does not take away the existential angst of (gestures vaguely) all this, but it helps.
While we were out last night at French Club, I confessed to Abby and Emily that I never know a single thing about my friend’s parents. That I have dated people for long periods of time and not known about their parents. That for the vast majority of people I know, I know nothing about their parents. Emily, it turns out, is incredibly good about asking people about their parents. I quizzed her about a ton of friends of ours and she knows so much about parents. It is amazing.
You, reading this right now? No idea what your parents do. Or did. Or if they’re alive. Or together. None.
But hearing Emily’s stories about people’s parents? So much tragedy, heartbreak, love, joy, chaos. Parents, man. What a trip. I should really learn about your parents.
Also I don’t know my friends’ birthdays or astrological signs and for a lot of my friends I don’t know what they do for a living.
Today is the day for two special congressional elections in Florida and the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin that Musk has poured $20 million into and committed a felony bribing people to vote in. The media paints it as a close race, and maybe it is? I looked up the polling and the Dem was up 8 points, but of course, they did get $20 million in bribes spent against them so I suppose that anything is possible. The stakes, for us, are that if the Dems keep their majority on the Supreme Court we can expect a reasonably fair redistricting for US Congressional seats, and given how close the majority in in the US House, that is a big deal. The stakes for Elon is about getting actual dealerships into Wisconsin, not that anyone is buying Teslas anymore.
Anyway it would be awesome to do a hat trick and win all three of these races but I suppose I am not going to get my hopes up because 49% of Americans think Trump is going a good job on immigration. Notably, exactly 100% of that 49% of Americans are immigrants or children of immigrants.
I do think I need to take issue with the complaints about the media’s portrayal of Trump’s sideshow-of-the-week this week, talking about a third term. Everyone’s angry that the media is not interpreting the constitution and saying going for a third term is illegal. But that’s the point. I think we need to face up to this possibility. He has the courts (because every Democratic president for 40 years has been an idiot about the courts) and he will just put some stooge in front of him on the ticket, he’ll run as VP, and then the stooge will resign. Because then he will not have been elected to a third term, and that’s the word the amendment uses.
Because of course he will. Because the courts will certify this. And more relevantly it is exactly what Putin did. And it is pointless for the media to pretend there is currently an obstacle to this, because there are no obstacles to this, aside from his own rapidly failing mental state and his disastrous policies. Why on earth should the press pretend otherwise?
The Dems, of course, if they have learned a god damned thing about anything, would run, like, Tom Hanks with Obama as VP or something, but they won’t, because they are old and dumb and prefer to write miquetoast Tweets (on actual Nazi Twitter) instead of winning. (N.B. This is not an endorsement of Obama, but I am sure he will any day now stop golfing and give me my once-an-election-cycle lecture that I need to do more, before he goes and golfs again).
Man I really… I kept it together about being angry at Dems for a long time but I really just can’t control it anymore. Abundance agendas and reducing actual government waste who the fuck has time for this bullshit. World is crawling with lethal billionaires who made their money in our cesspool of corruption and yet here we have supposed progressives telling me we have too many regulations. Okay then. Glad those regulations stifled Elon Musk. Poor guy. We’d all be so much better off if we just unshackled Charles Koch of burdensome regulations. Ezra Klein really shit the bed when he grew a beard.
I hope and prey that you, the well-adjusted reader of this newsletter, have no idea what half that paragraph meant.
You guys read that times article about Gen X Career Meltdown? That was some depressing shit. I don’t think it’s really confined to Gen-X, though? I think Millennials are suffering it as strongly or perhaps moreso? Younger, so maybe a bit easier to teach new tricks, but also potentially with less savings (all that avocado toast lol) and seniority? I guess I should feel smug that I left every aspect of creativity behind in my career path and now work in some of the least creative industries in the world but at least, for now, my job seems safe, ish. But god. Fucking AI, man.
Let’s end with a pleasant Jane story. Jane is great. She makes me happy. Seven is a pretty great age. It was lovely to watch her play at the playground with her friend Ada, they see each other only a few times a year but they always seem so happy to see each other and play. She drew me a nice picture this morning. She is playing Lego Racer 2K. She lets me sleep till 8:00AM. We went to the Ukrainian place again this morning. They did not have any babkas. Jane is handling it much better this trip when they don’t have babkas. But they did have babkas the first time we went there this trip so I leave you with this photo of Jane doing her trademark happy hands with a babka.
Got a shoegaze playlist ready for you today, that’s a relief, didn’t think I had any ready. Mostly new stuff, all awesome, love the new bdrmm, the new Fennesz, new Colour of Spring. Good stuff.
All right well I got a bunch of work to do now. I hope you have a lovely morning. Ta.
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