Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1469
Pillow saga resolution, mall run, Pulp and Stereolab using AI, Spike Island didn't seen very baggy, learning 3D printing and gridfinity, cheap CA glue, cable staplers, a rambling thing about having nice stuff, revisiting On-U Soundsytstem
Good morning, good morning. Little late today. Did the Walmart and the recycling run. In the rain. Unpleasant. But Jane got out her cute Morton Salt Girl umbrella, except it’s clear with little rainbows and flowers on it. Very cute. She is very concerned recess might be inside today.
Walmart wasn’t doing the reduced distractions hours, which is mildly concerning. Maybe Trump got to them.
And our long national nightmare of a Turkey Chomps shortage continues. Very sad.
CA glue. The generic equivalent of Krazy Glue. You can get it for super cheap if you know where to look. Walmart… not really it. The glue is displayed in three different sections of the store, cheapest stuff is in the hardware section. Made great use of those secondary price tags where they do the “per oz” or whatever pricing (I think in this case it was per gram). Cheapest was $0.349. Most expensive was, like, $2. Insane. On Amazon you can find it down at, like, $0.02 or so, but it is not easy. Amazon doesn’t have per-unit pricing, and, of course, all the merchants are out to get you. But the deals are there. The More You Know™.
Some housekeeping items:
I have been informed that the title of the new Pulp song is based on Spike Island the island, or, more likely, the famous Stone Roses concert held on Spike Island attended by 28,000 people. I did not know about this concert. Wikipedia says that it was called “'Woodstock' for the baggy generation” but, I mean, seriously, look at this very non-bagsy lineup: Dave Booth, MC Tunes, Dave Haslam, Paul Oakenfold, Frankie Bones, Gary Clail and Ruff Ruff and Ready. That does not sound very bagsy to me. Where are Northside, Senseless Things, the Milltown Brothers, Inspiral Carpets. Cmon man. No Wannadies? Pish posh I say on your fake bagsy Woodstock.
I would have loved to see Gary Clail, though. Gonna listen to his On-U Soundsystem collab right now. Formative high school jam, that album. Oh shit, only one song on Spotify. Might need to make a new-years-resolution exception and buy that record.
“Privatize the Air” still a pretty timely tune, as it turns out.
I have also been informed by Boston’s resident doomsayer Luke O’Neil that both Pulp and Sterolab use AI in their new videos. Pulp apparently ironically but still. No wonder Gen-X sucks. I mean if we can’t even have solidarity between the musicians and visual artists, we are fucked. Bad juju.
Also on the music front, before we move on, I would like to formally register a complaint. I broke my vow and purchased a record this year, a copy of the Willard Grant Conspiracy’s Ghost Republic, new old stock, unopened. Had a download card. It didn’t work. C’mon man if you can’t keep your free album download site running for twelve years what are we even doing.
Emma and I went to the mall yesterday. I had a little free time at lunch and she suggested we go to the food court and then look at pillows, and we did. I chose the Thai fast food at the restaurant. It was a mistake. Not Thai at all shoulda just gone with the fast food Chinese.
We found some I think that will work. They were three hundred dollars each what the fuck. But they were on sale, 50% off. Which was still insane. But Emma actually knew exactly when I bought these pillows, and it was 2008, which make sense. I thought it might have been in the 90’s when there was a Linens N Things over there in Allston kinda new the new Harvard Business School. But it was not, it was 2008. So, this calculator site tells me that $90 in 2008 works out to about $140 today, so, I mean, fair play I guess.
Also Emma just bought them for me as an early birthday present because just yesterday I was talking about how I didn’t need anything. So, bob’s your uncle
Thus ends the great GMHHAY pillow drama of 2025. Lasted four days.
Semi-relatedly:
We got a new 3D printer. Well, I got one for Emma. Emma wanted it and asked for it, so it wasn’t one of those gifts you get people because you want it. But I did very much want to have one around, so I could use it to make Gridfinity shit: the open-source modular storage system. I am very excited about Gridfiity it is exactly up my obsessive organization alley.
Having a 3D printer now means I gotta learn a bunch of new shit. Which is, of course, never fun for us Gen-X Trump-loving losers, but I am going to do it. But I could use your help, if any of you out there are 3D printing nerds. I need to start with the really basic shit: what are all these different types of filament? What do I use for what? Are there any mnemonics or charts or anything? What do I do with different nozzles and baseplates? If you have an n00b tutorials handy, hook me up.
The other thing I need to learn about this week are cat-6 cable staples. Like I think you just get special staples for the staple gun you already have, you don’t need a special staple gun, is that right? Does anyone know anything about this? Hrm. Crap. The most elementary googling tells me you need a special gun? I don’t like that, that sounds very hard on my hands and I love my electric stapler. I guess I could use the electric stapler to staple up cable ties then tie the ties but that is a pain and you gotta cut em all. BOOO. Anyway, advice welcome.
Hrm is that all I have today? Don’t feel like writing about politics. It’s friday. OH. But I did have an interesting idea in the parking lot this morning, let me think about it and see if I can make it make sense. There is that scene in a popular recent television show where someone says they couldn’t live poor. And there was a drunk guy at Walmart I just steered clear of because what is the point just let him cut you off no need for a fight at 8 AM at Walmart. And then of course you think that that guy just thinks that’s the way the world works: that you can be an asshole and people let you. Which is true, of course, but by and large for most people (with rare exceptions like Herr Orange) this just means you have a lower quality of life. But, then, mostly, a lower quality of life is just fine. It’s like not having a nice car. So long as you’ve never driven a nice car, you don’t know the joys of quick acceleration or throttle response or good shocks or those rear view mirrors with LCD screens in them, your current car is just fine. That’s the paradox with nice stuff; better to have never experienced it at all. Because once you have, the less nice stuff that you were just wine with before, well, now it’s intolerable. We know all this, of course. But then I was thinking, shit, maybe this was all just a thing Humans weren’t really supposed to figure out, and our makers were gonna use it for heaven and hell — maybe heaven and hell are just, you get the opposite later of what you get now. For everything nice you have now, you gotta endure shitty stuff. And for everything shitty you have now, you get nice stuff. Feels like a very easy hack our Will Wrightian creators could use to, like, easily tap into our euphoria and horror without, like, programming a bunch of other shit or dreaming up some complex new milieus.
Wait shit what is the plural of milieu? Hrm apparently milieus and milieux are both valid. Well okay then.
I feel like I would maybe… well, on balance it would be a net negative for me. I have a lot of non-nice stuff, but I have a lot of nice stuff. Very slow computers and very healthy snacks would be my afterlife, I guess.
That was kinda weaksauce what do you want its early on a friday morning. But at least it’s my last 6:30 AM wakeup for a few days.
Oh crap the studio materials are coming and it’s raining. I gotta go over there and get them out of the rain. Bye.
I don’t have a playlist for today but I am listening to some dude’s compilatiom of a ton of Gary Clail/On-U Soundsystem dub productions, so I will leave you with this playlist today. Listening to this makes me connect some dots, why I love dub so much, because of Davey in high school and him always playing me On-U Soundsystem 12” of Depeche Mode n shit. Oh man I need to dig that 12” out.
All right, have a nice weekend. I don’t leave for Alaska until Monday night so you will get a Monday edition, next week, at least. Can’t say about the rest of the week yet.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.