Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1466
Fish update, a pillow problem, A way out of Apple's EU ATT dilemma that they won't take and you guys don't care about, Tolkien's 1950's cosmology conundrums.
Morning morning. Got up at 6:20. Sucked still. Nothing seems to have improved about that miserable chore in the week I had off from it. Alas. Jane forgot her glasses and socks, I forgot the snack and water bottle, we were out of practice. But we got ‘er done. Got there early, got our Wordle done. Woo. We are ALL PRO.
While waiting in the car line this morning I took a sip of my Zevia all natural no-GMO, no-artificial-sweeteners cola, and it was one of those swallows where you accidentally capture an air bubble and suddenly you feel like you have something akin to a heart attack or the worst heartburn ever. I knew what it was, but it sucked, and my mind decided to drift off into imagining it was an actual heart attack, and I was gonna die in the car with my daughter sitting there, so, I dunno. Feeling a bit guilty about my recent relapse on red meat. Need to nip that in the bud again. Should probably google something morbid like “worst foods for your heart” or some shit. I got a second third fourth act in me still, I swear.
Gotta make $5 million so I can start my recycling non-profit. Someday.
Good to have life goals.
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!
We are still listening to Michael Hurley still this morning. Listened to him all day yesterday, very satisfying. We are listening to his 1976 collaboration with the Unholy Modal Rounders and the Clamtones, Have Moicy! It is not my favorite, bit too chipper. I like him drunk or depressed, myself.
I have an important fish update for you, because I know GMHHAY was very interested in our recent purchase of fish. To answer some reader questions: we got six giant bags. They were a mix of catfish, grass carp (I always want to spell that with a K because of my old boss), blue gill and minnows. They cost either $560 or $5,600, it is not quite clear. They fill the bags with water, dump the fish in, then stick an oxygen hose in there and pump the bag full of oxygen and you have 40 minutes to get those fishes to their new home. Mission accomplished. I have been informed we only lost a single fish in the transfer. RIP, fishy. Your service is greatly appreciated. You will not be forgotten. Maybe GMHHAY can raise the funds for a small plaque in your honor on the Red’s Storage property.
So, on this trip to Boston, I took my pillows, and it was just great. Slept like a baby. So I guess I am that kind of person now, that needs the exact correct pillows to sleep. But here is the problem: I use two types of pillows. I have an amazing, firm, buckwheat pillow that I cannot recommend enough to you. It is from the amazing Beans 72, who have the greatest website in the world. You should buy one of these pillows. They are amazing.
That is my firm, main pillow. And it was easily replicated between my house and the Somerville apartment, I did that when we first got the place.
But in addition to that I have two flimsy, thin, utterly wispy things that are, like, 60 years old or something. And I cannot live without them. Seriously, they came from my house growing up. And I love them and I can’t live without them. And this trip proved it. And I am sad. So i am trying to, like, find pillows like this in this modern world and it seems… pretty impossible? There does seem to be a market for thin pillows, but all of the thin ones also say that they have support. These pillows have no support, except emotional support, har har. The closest I can find on Amazon are this one and this one, but a) it is clear they both have way too much structure, and b) who wants to buy a pillow without touching it.
I AM YOUNG AND HIP AND COOL AND I DO NOT WANT TO BE A PERSON WHO TRAVELS WITH PILLOWS.
Help me, GMHHAY, you’re my only hope.
So Apple is getting fucked by the EU, and assorted individual countries, losing assorted cases involving App Tracking Transparency, or ATT. If you are an iOS user (or TV OS but not, weirdly, Mac OS, who knows), you know this as those prompts you get asking you if you want apps to track you or not. Since the getgo, I have maintained this is a well-intentioned but utterly bungled initiative by Apple, and boy are the chickens coming home to roost. I have three major complaints with ATT, and each on of them is something that the EU is agreeing with. Or, rather, assorted member nations. And not all of them agree with all of them. And they are interlocked and it is kind of close to impossible to solve all the problems. Well, no, it’s not, it’s easy, but Apple is stubborn and self-serving.
BUT, to whit:
1) ATT is self-serving, and hypocritical. Apple, and other people, even people who know better, insist Apple follow’s the same rules as everyone else with ATT, but this is not true. They sort of do, they (maybe, who knows!) follow the actual data management rules, but they give themselves these giant, custom, super wordy boxes to write all sorts of text to convince the user to click “accept” and other apps don’t get this perk. This was just evil from day one and the EU is totally right to harp on it.
2) ATT overlaps, and not perfectly, with the EU’s own consent mechanism, GDPR. As in a user in the EU has to consent twice: first to Apple, then to the EU, and each one of them mean slightly different things. Apple’s is “simple” with only one click, but essentially tells you nothing. The EU’s is robust and detailed and a pain in the ass. This sucks for European consumers, and they get consent fatique. This is a totally legitimate complaint of the EU, except for the fact that they kind of brought it on? I mean, you could argue that if Apple came to them and tried, prior to launch, to work with the EU to make it so ATT handled GDPR, no one in the EU would have been able or willing to work with them. Except…. there is a whole world of CMPs, or consent management platforms, that cropped up post GDPR to allow app makers to outsource this entire process and still comply. Apple could have made a CMP for its app devs, but… didn’t. For some reason. See item 1.
3) Apple’s enforcement of ATT has been an absolute joke. Right now the markets are absolutely punishing a certain company who will remain nameless for relentless violation of ATT rules, with all these short researchers delivering the goods in terms of concrete evidence, and Apple has done exactly nothing. So, you know, those of us who actually follow the rules? We are suckers. Absolute bullshit.
So, it looks like, in Europe at least, ATT will be killed off. And it would be hard for Apple to save it, because different countries are harping on different parts of it.
Difficult, but not impossible. There is an alternative to Apple dropping ATT: Make a CMP for your app devs, enforce your fucking rules, and stop treating yourself as a special exception. A CMP from Apple would be awesome.
Apple still has an opportunity to do this. I will not hold my breath.
Sorry, that rant should have been in the Verge or something, but you get it instead, because punditry is the devil’s path and leads to writing bullshit like The Abundance Agenda.
Still working my way through volume ten of The History of Middle Earth, just about done with it, and Tolkien is now in the 1950’s and he is having this giant crisis of confidence in the entirety of the cosmology of Middle Earth. Having already read the Silmarillion I know roughly how this crisis of confidence turns out, but apparently for, like, a year or two he got really concerned that his entire made-up history of the universe “didn’t make any sense.” Which is awesome. Like the scientist in Tolkien was like “yo dude it’s super weird that you’re saying the world was flat but then ‘made round.’ And your whole myth about how the sun was made is cheesy because if it were true Telperion would have been blinding.” And, like, yeah, that’s the point of myths? They’re mythical? Middle-earth would be a lot less fun if it had a big bang?
And then he gets caught up in knots forever about “the gift of Iluvatar,” which is one of the coolest things about Middle Earth and a thing that, personally, gives me a shred of optimism about death: that men are mortal and this is a gift of god, it is special in its own way, and the immortal Elves kind of envy it. There is a plan reserved for humans that is distinct from that of the elves.
But then Tolkien’s like “okay but that is weird because all animals die and how are humans special and also maybe I need a myth of the fall and obviously humans and elves are the same race because they have babies like Elrond and so none of this makes sense humans must have been immortal too at some point so it must be Melkor’s fault” and writes, like, hundreds of pages about this. That he eventually tosses. But they were really good. Tolkien wrote a really good myth of The Fall that you probably won’t read and he didn’t actually finish.
What’s funny about all this to me is that, basically, everything is magic and supernatural power until some specific point, that even Tolkien’s conscious brain couldn’t influence, the idea that the magic was enough… just stops. A world made whole from singing? Magic and fine. Elves and mortal men having babies? Not okay!
Magic only works so far, people.
Like tariffs, I suppose.
I don’t have a good Jane story to close out today, so please enjoy this picture of her looking very sad for a while.
Got a goth playlist for you, and look. I admit my idea of goth in the year 2025, my idea of goth made in the year 2025, that is, is different than, say, the goth you’d hear on a Friday night at Man Ray. Not a lot (any?) of the synth goth on here. My goth is more, like, Nick Cave’s Faulkner book goth, not, like, Depeche Mode’s second album goth. No judgement! I liked a few of those songs last Friday and meant to Shazaam them, but forgot. So it goes. Is Blake Mills or Ethel Cain goth? I mean… sure! We welcome all (depressed) comers.
Until tomorrow, fair friend.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.