Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1520
Slack and Ford doing BS enshittification money grabs, All of Us study, Brian Eno dreams, art teachers' art teachers, Daddy School.
Morning morning. I woke up before ten today. Still. It was hard to get out of bed with ten supposed hours of sleep. Woke up again at 4 AM, but managed to go back to (fitful) sleep pretty quick. Jetlag is real, man. Jane had trouble falling asleep too, after sleeping till 11 AM (!!) yesterday. It’s nearly 9 now and she is still asleep.
One day we will all be back to normal.
But… Chores! I did manage to catch up on work yesterday, though. Got most of my housekeeping chores done. Life is slowly returning to normal. Made my Lowe’s order to work on the attic studio again this weekend, I am sure you’re all very excited. Haven’t been back to Chore House yet, actually. I know as soon as I go over there I will be overwhelmed with the number of chores I need to do. Settling in easy.
I forgot to wish my friends Frank and Jussi happy birthday. They share the same birthday, a best friend on each coast. It was last Saturday. I did have the benefit of seeing Frank that day, that was nice. Solstice babies. Happy Birthday Frank and Jussi.
And, of course, moment of silence for our friend Phil who passed away on June 21, years ago. Canoe accident on a big lake in a storm. Super sad. Miss that guy. He was a phenomenon.
Had this really fractured dream last night about Emma and I staying in a guest house in London that was actually Brian Eno’s house, and he let renters stay in a few rooms in the front, but if you had the courage you could wander to the back of the house, where Brian Eno was holding court. The back of the house was this giant, hangar-like, cavernous space, and it was fitted out as a recording studio but also as a place for really swell cocktail parties. The instruments in the studio were exclusively synthesizers and percussion. There were maybe 40 different stations, each one had two or three synthesizers and a few pieces of percussion. And Brian Eno was holding court and there were a bunch of old people in there, like it was sort of like Eno’s equivalent of hanging out at Mar A Largo or something: all old people, retirement fun.
There was also a part where we had a company party in the studio, only it morphed into an arena, and it was some sort of Gladiator-themed thing, but I didn’t really go for that part.
And a part that involved the same densely packed, highly urban city that is in many of my dreams: a fictional city I have grown to know and love through the years, I can see the map in my mind. Only this time we were flying into it, and the landing approach was absolutely terrifying and insane. Did not like. Loved the city, though. A local showed us to the nightlife district. Which was behind Brian Eno’s house.
Brian Eno is 77. It is gonna be sad when we lose Brian Eno.
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We are listening to Carey Seward this morning, a Fairbanksan with whom I spent a good amount of time on this trip. I think I sort-of knew her back in the day maybe, a little bit, but she is good friends with my friend Dave. She was in the awesome Shakespeare troop back in the day that I loved. The album is called Pure Fiction and I am enjoying it.
If all goes well I might get through the “To Investigate” queue today.
I’ve been thinking about art teachers these last few days. My friend Willow, whom I saw at the reunion, is an art teacher, and I saw a bunch of my friends who had the same art teacher in High School, Dana Stratton, that I did. And several old friends are successful artists in their own right. And I suppose this applies to all teachers, but I am thinking mainly about art teachers here, but: Every art teacher in the chain of art teachers all the way back that was involved in ultimately training a successful artist? Well they all get credit. Like, their art teacher gets credit, and that art teacher’s art teacher gets credit, and that art teacher’s art teacher gets credit. Art teachers all the way down, turtles all the way down, each one of them a contributor to the artist’s eventual success. There is something kind of heartwarming in that. They should give awards. When a person gets an oscar or a Turner Prize or something, they should go up there with a chain of art teachers going back, like, five generations or something. A whole posse of art teachers being celebrated for their contribution.
I don’t know if that makes any sense. But teachers are pretty awesome.
Slack has informed me that they are going to add AI to slack and charge me more for it. You do not seem to be able to, you know, have Slack like it is now, and not pay for a bunch of features you are morally opposed to and do not need. You will note I did not say that the featues weren’t useful. Maybe they are useful. I don’t know and I don’t care. Because I don’t need them, and I don’t want to pay for them. Lotta people seem to think “useful” in a vacuum is reason enough for something. “Useful” is only ever one facet of a thing. What’s the flipside? What’s the cost? Anyway I am pretty pissed about this.
I suppose I could switch to Microsoft Teams but who am I kidding.
Fucking hate tech companies.
On that note, Ford sent me an email saying that my “free trial” of BlueCruse is ending. BlueCruise is their version of self-driving. Only it is responsible, I’ll give them that. It only works on mapped roads, all of which are limited-access freeways. So, you know, obviates most of the insanity that Tesla has, pretending that it is capable of driving city streets. I kind of like it.
But the thing is, there are no limited-access roads near me, and I only ever use it on long road trips or when I go to the airport. And on the airport trips, it’s only like 10 minutes, it’s really only a novelty. So we are talking once a year or so, when I drive up to New York or Philly or something. It’s quite nice on those trips.
But they want $50 for a month for it. Fifty dollars a month! It is fucking insane! Six hundred dollars a year to rest my arms for a hot sec once a year. Absolutely bonkers.
Also.. I have owned this car for… I don’t know. Twenty months? Weird time to decide that my free trial is over.
I really like my truck. I love it, actually. But this is fucking insane and makes me kinda hate Ford.
Also… where do they think they get their data from BlueCruise from? From drivers! My truck reminds me once a week or so that they are hoovering up all my driving data. They’re not paying me! But then I have to pay them to make use of that data. Montly!
Absolute bullshit.
Have you ever heard of the All Of Us study? It is a long-term medical study that Obama started, where they are trying to make a giant sample of one million Americans and use the data to learn about diseases. It is a replication of the phenomenal UK Biobank study, which has 500,000 UK citizens participating. The All of Us study set out to get 1 million Americans. Apparently so far it only has 300,000. I kinda think its worth doing? Has anyone heard of it? Done it? Maybe we should all do it.
Assuming Trump hasn’t killed it off.
Jane and I did Daddy School last night. It had been a while. I was kind of out of practice. We started with a nice discussion of Architecture and form vs function and talked about buildings she liked and aspects of our house that were form-driven (skylights, high ceilings) and aspects that were function-driven.
That was all great. But somehow we ended up talking about averages, medians and modes, and I was a bit rusty on how to calculate a median or a mode. But she loved it, just loved the math. I think we are probably going to need to do a course on that again because she’ll love it even more now that she grasps it, because that girl loves knowing things.
Anyway we set up all the stuffies (still feel weird about that word) in little toy desks on her bed, which was a new twist. They used to just sit in a circle. But now they have desks. Which means we only get foor students. Poor Red Bear got “deleted” from class because his clothing was distracting and there were not enough chairs. Really dove right into 80’s school district politics there with the distracting clothing concerns.
I let it go.
No playlists done quite yet, we are getting there, but I would like to alert you to this very cute video from Bon Iver on their Youtube channel. There is a fun new video, which is a good time, but in addition, they made this little video. The new music video has a phone number in it, so in this video, Justin and the director of the video listen to voice mails people have left from seeing the number in the video and calling it. It is a little bit of a rip-off of Noah Kalina’s latest project, the Hotline Show, but it is a fun time and a nice, charming, happy change of pace for Bon Iver and I, for one, appreciate it.
https://www.youtube.com/live/P684Ac2FSig?si=ZG_liJvSLIz_CYbh
Hey you have a lovely Thursday. Be safe out there.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.