Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1512
Trip prep, Doctor Who, Kids Kindles, the B1M's excellent Grenfell doc, magic new medicine, why cant we still close real estate deals remotely like in the pandemic, Vinfast sighting, Nerdfighters respect
Good morning, good morning. Running a bit behind this morning. Started packing for tomorrow, and I slept in. Because I can. Because I felt like getting nine hours and I could. Summers rule. Never going back.
Until late August.
So, yeah. We leave tomorrow morning, ungodly early. I do not anticipate getting a GMHHAY in tomorrow, though we have a long layover in Seattle so I dunno. Maybe a midday one. No promises, though. The writing of a GMHHAY is pretty easy to do from a laptop in an airport, but the photos, the playlist, all that: that stuff is kind of a pain. Lotta flipping back and forth through screens on little teeny monitors. I do not enjoy it.
I do not enjoy laptops with their small monitors. You ever open on your big computer a Keynote or Powerpoint presentation that someone else sent you? And it opens in a teeny, tiny little window in the middle of your screen? Because that’s how big their monitor is? Yeah. Do not like small monitors. Actually, I got my laptop right here. I can hold it up to my main monitor and fit four of the laptop screen on my main monitor. Plus I got two more monitors the same size. So my laptop monitor is one twelfth of my desktop viewing space. Not pleasant. I don’t know how people do it.
Oh yeah, they’re probably not blind.
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We are listening to a shoegazeish band this morning with the excellent name of Binge. The album is called Kind. Seriously. These people know how to name stuff. I don’t really know anything about these guys. Spotify recommendation. I think I am really hitting the end of the bottomless barrel of shoegaze bands, though. These guys have no Bandcamp, Wikipedia page, or Discogs page. They have no playcount on their songs on Spotify, which means that each song has less than 2,000 streams. They are pretty good, though. Sound like late-period Swervedriver mixed a little bit with the guitar parts on “Winona”-era Drop Nineteens. Maybe you should check ‘em out.
Maybe we, here, at GMHHAY could get them over 2,000 streams. Help the band out. Like a low-budget, small, shoegaze version of Hank and John Green’s Nerd Fighters. Do you know about Nerd Fighters? Really a wonderful thing in this world. ‘Twas a real happy aspect of my job at Tumblr, those guys.
Oh look. They have a Wikipedia page. They have literally saved millions of lives. Great group.
We have to modify our loan on the Boat and RV Storage Facility construction, which means we have to do another closing. And we have to do it in person, which is a giant pain. Remember when we had this global pandemic and all of the sudden lawyers and bankers just gave up on this dumb rule and you could do closings remotely? Welp. Not anymore. As far as they’re concerned, that whole period never happened. And now we have to do it in person again. Except I am going to Alaska in 22 hours, and then one of my partners is going to South America, and it will be, like, 18 days before we’re all back in town. They couldn’t get the documents ready for me to sign before I left. So now, I dunno, I guess we just can’t pay all of our bills for nearly three weeks. Awesome.
So I watch this sort of construction rah rah Youtube channel. It is sort of, like, here is this major infrastructure or engineering project in the world and how they built it and also here is an ad from some construction management software. It has, historically, been a fun channel and they do a lot of bridges and Jane loves bridges, so that’s a bonus. It is called The B1M. They are English.
But yesterday they did a different sort of construction video, a deep dive into the Grenfell Tower catastrophe in London. And it is an absolutely amazing, heartbreaking production. I had, of course, heard about the Grenfell Tower disaster and I was aware there were significant findings of fault, blame, corruption and incompetence around the thing. But my god. What an utterly terrifying and depressing catastrophe. And hats off to the B1M for this video unlike anything they have ever done before. This dude pivoted into doing absolutely sensitive interviews with survivors of the fire, interviews with government officials and good old-fashioned news-hounding trying to get the UK government to give him anything on record. I don’t even know what’s going on here. It’s like this dude had a journalism degree that he wasn’t using enough in his (really very good) infrastructure boosterism work, and decided to just go for it. And he really did. Well done. Worth a watch.
Yesterday I took a picture of my new prescription, the lotion the dermatologist gave me for my head. And I Googled the name of it (Betamethasone Dipropionate Lotion USP, 0.05%), and read the WebMD and Wikipedia pages for the stuff. Got familiar with the idea of using it. So last night as I was reading about Pippin stealing the Palantir away from Gandalf, I would run my hand through my head and find a spot that needed this lotion. Then I would pour some out into my hand — not a lotion really, more the consistency of mineral oil or something — and apply it to the spot.
And, reader. That shit is so good. These little itchy spots been bugging me for months and that shit took care of a few of them overnight. Amazing.
Modern science.
I promise I will stop talking about weird itchy spots on my head.
And I promise I don’t have lice. Hug me.
We finished what they are inexplicably calling Season 2 of Doctor Who the other night. Six of the Eight episodes were just great. The two-part finale was an absolute abysmal mess of a let-down. Apparently they learned mid-season that the man who plays the Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, could not return for the next season due to some renewal shenanigans and uncertainty with Disney, because apparently Doctor Who is a Disney thing now like everything else in the world. So they had to work in a regeneration scene. Maybe. Supposedly. And they did it so badly. Honestly it feels like they learned this fact and decided it was a good excuse to… stop making good TV.
It is crazy I still watch Doctor Who. Been watching this shit since I was sixteen years old. I have seen pretty much every publicly-available episode, thanks to my high school girlfriend (hi Anne) and her older brothers. How much of it do I remember? Eh, not much. Seems unlikely I could ever sit through old school Who again for a rewatch, given the pacing and what the modern world has done to my brain. But I dream of it.
Doctors, ranked: Jodi Whittaker, Tom baker, Christopher Eccleson, Peter Davidson, David Tennant, Peter Capaldi, Matt Smith, John Pertwee, Ncuti Gatwa, Sylvester McCoy, William Hurt, Jo Martin, Patrick Troughton, Colin Baker, William Hartnell. I have no opinion on Paul McGann. I mean, I watched that US Doctor shit live in 91 or whatever, but I don’t remember it.
Honestly, they have done a very good job casting the doctor in the modern Who era. I’m a bit nervous given the cliffhanger on this season but I assume that’ll be some temp thing, some dumb Russell T Davies story that will ultimately end up with a new actor.
Oh also I have been watching this woman do recaps. She is great. I was sad New Rockstars wasn’t doing them but honestly I like her better. This woman knows her Who.
Jane is sitting behind me, playing Mini Motorways on her laptop. Bought her a Kindle, they have kid’s Kindles. I was re-purposing one of my mom’s old kindles for her, but it didn’t really work for a variety of reasons (Micro USB, peeling ruberized coating). And I had enough points to get Jane the kids one. Which supposedly comes with this all-you-can-eat Kids Kindle book subscription service sorta like Youtube Kids, where you set the age range and they can read a bunch of books. But it seems like it’s all Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Harry Potter, fuck that TERF. You can also send books to their kindle, though. So we can buy books for her and send them to the device. Honestly I don’t know if she is going to take to this thing at all. I love my Kindle, but the interface is kinda clunky. Jane likes to read, but the books have to sort of draw her in and I don’t know if the experience will be enough to pull it off. But we a) want to encourage to read more, and b) want her on her iPad less so thought maybe this would be a Nicorette-like replacement or something. I don’t know. I will keep you apprised. I am unconvinced.
Looks like I don’t have any playlists for you today. Oh man I bet we don’t have many playlists for the next 12 days or so. Sorry. I did watch a lot of my Youtube Music Watch Later Playlist last night, though. So, here. Have this live Caspian video from their 20th anniversary concert last November. Man that band is so good. I miss them. Woulda been amazing to see this show.
Until.. well.. I don’t know. Could be as long as next Wednesday? We fly tomorrow, and then we have a short jaunt to Denali on Monday and then it is my mom’s funeral on Tuesday. So. Yeah. I might get one in. But no promises.
Byeee.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.