Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1478
Happy birthday Aug, North American Killdeer nest. Shoegaze obscurities. Dreams of Apple making a phone with a keyboard and a stripped-down OSX Lite.
Oh god oh god oh god. I don’t want to write today. But if I skip a day it’s all over. I skip enough days, giving myself the weekend and holidays off like some sort of union member. I can’t skip a random Thursday what would that mean for the project. In a hundred years when people are studying GMHHAY for its cultural relevancy they’ll gwt to April 24th, 2025 and think “well that’s when he just gave up.”
Oh shit April 24th. Isn’t this the estimable August J Stone aka Aug Stone’s birthday? I was just reading his newsletter yesterday. He interviewed Steve Kilby of the Church. That’s pretty awesome. He talked about one of his old songs, “New Val,” the inception of which I was present for. Oh shit I ended on a dangling participle or whatever you call that no not a participle a preposition. I have internalized my mother’s grammar rules but I sure cannot remember what any of them are called. Anyway New Val got me all nostalgic for Mod Night and how we would go out dancing five nights a week, just insane. Slow dancing to “Glory of Love” with absurdly beautiful women like it was a normal thing adult humans got to do. What a time, what a place, what a world. Boston dancing in the 90’s.
Happy birthday, Aug Stone.
We are listening to a shoegaze band called Luster this morning. When I posted that last shoegaze mix for you, Spotify did its thing where at the bottom of the playlist it recommended a bunch more music, and I threw all ten songs or whatever into my “To Investigate” queue and, man, did it deliver. I hate admitting that, of course. And I bet half these bands are fake, commissioned by Spotify to be shoegaze or something. But they’re all really good! This Luster band is great. Sounds like Loveless. Love the drum machine-shoegaze combination.
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Some links relevant to recent GMHHAY postings:
Thank you to Ivelise for alerting us in the Slack to this amazing page maintained by, of all people. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Lest We Forget The Horrors: An Unending Catalog Of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, And Crimes. Exactly what I was looking for. Newly depressing and shocking to see it all in one place — with a helpful key! But necessary.
And Florian in the Slack alerted us to this new org: Unbreaking.org. An org dedicated to undoing all of this fuckery, once we get the chance. Seems to be running on Buttondown, so props to them for that. I love Buttondown. Although, I gotta admit it is a bit rickety. Not sure I’d recommend it for something as mission-critical as un-screwing the republic. Anyway, I signed up. We’ll see if it pans out.
Finally, regarding my somewhat selfish rant about how there should be one big protest to rule them all and it shouldn’t just be one org, it seems that Indivisible (and, presumably other orgs) are involved in the impending Mayday protest. This is good. Also I do like the Mayday symbolism why not. Buuuuuuut… Mayday is a weekday, which is a pain, which is fine but then we are back to the “a little notice please” gripe. Even harder to get a weekday off. But still. I should do this. We should do this. Please refer to my hilariously amateur protest song from a decade ago:
Sometimes you just gotta show up.
Important news: we have a North American Killedeer nest on the storage unit property and we have to halt all construction within like 20 feet of it or something and the fish and wildlife people have been called in. What is a North American Killedeer, you ask? Why it is a bird, a type of Plover. It is called a Killdeer because, according to Wikipedia, “Its shrill, two-syllable call is often heard, sounding like ‘kill deer.’” It is not a particularly threatened or endangered species, but it is subject to the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1918 and man I want to live in an era when governments had their shit together enough to make treaties about migratory birds can you even imagine our current government being even capable of doing this even if they wanted to? Lolz.
Anyway, the nest is not where we need to put one of our concrete pads, so we’re just gonna leave em alone and work around them until they hatch and head on their merry way.
Here is a nice picture of their nest. Putting their nest, unprotected, in a pile of our gravel does not seem to be the most safe move a bird can do, but what do I know? They are not endangered, and humans are, so clearly they’re doing something better than we are.
I will leave you today with two petty complaints about Apple, two things I wish that behemoth, all-powerful company was doing instead of, you know, sucking up to Trump.
1) I still hate slabs of glass. It has been 20 years since Steve foisted these blank slates on us as “phones” and they still suck I still miss the keyboard. I want buttons and a. keyboard. I hate this. I hate it so much. I really like that Clicks Keyboard, it is good hardware but: a) It is vertical, I want horizontal, and b) Apple is not helping them or making the OS friendly enough for keyboards — let alone horizontal ones - so as good as a job Clicks do, they can’t nail it without Apple’s help. You can use an iPad entirely horizontally, but not an iPhone, and that sucks. Better yet, Apple, just fucking make a keyboard yourself. It is so weird how there are all these foldables now and the foldable part is just more fucking screen. Give me a keyboard! Hate hate hate.
2) I think it’s high time Apple made a stripped-down “mini” version of OSX. OSX Lite or something. Take out Siri and Time Machine and iCloud and all that stuff. Just an OS. That runs. I do not need any of that stuff on, for example, a Mac Server. Apple charges an arm and a leg for storage and then fills it up with junk you don’t need, and can’t delete. Shit you can’t even delete the CHESS APP, what the hell is up with that? Fourteen megs of my hard drive I will never, ever get to use for anything. WHY. I remember someone, at some point, endeavoring to sue them for false advertising for stating hard drives were a certain size when you couldn’t actually use that much storage and while I’m sure that was destined to fail, it’s heart was in the right place.
Gone I want it all gone I want a nice, minimalist OS without cruft. So much cruft. Is it a gig of cruft? A terabyte? WHY. I want to know what every single process is in the activity monitor. WTF is biomeyncd which is using sixty-five percent of a processor right now? Why? Vamoose! Vamoose!
Oh shit Jane anecdote what do we got today. She had a field trip yesterday and gymnastics. Big day. We laid down the new law that if she was mean at bedtime, no more Real Civil Engineer the next day. My god she loves this dude making bridges. So many bridges. She talks about struts and braces and I wonder if she is going to be a bridge builder when she grows up. This morning in the car she would not brush her hair that made me sad but then she gave me a hug as compensation so, sorry classmates, you gotta see her with messy hair but at least I got my hug.
Got a work music playlist for you today I remember almost nothing about most of these artists it has been months. Yonks. Except Milla, of course, no idea what she’s doing on here but I will just have to trust my February self that he knew what he was doing.
See Rick that wasn’t so bad? You got through it. Not even a terrible issue, if I may say so myself.
Yeah but you gotta do it tomorrow to.
Stop.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.