Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1544
Chisanbop, Marx, GoT trivia diving, teeth brushing resistance, lazy last weekend of summer, GMHHAY book vol 2, nostalgia should be consumed responsibly
Good morning, good morning. Happy Monday. I hope you had a nice weekend. You deserve a nice weekend. I had a mostly nice weekend. Lots of walks, lots of laying around on the couch, a nice night of going out and dancing and seeing lots of friends. Playground times.
I am about ready to go home. We spend a lot of time debating which day to go home, when. And for assorted reasons, we will be leaving Boston mid-day tomorrow, headed back to North Carolina. Jane has a meet-the-teacher event on Wednesday, that’ll be interesting. Second grade. Woo hoo. And school starts next week, so I get to go back to being miserable about waking up so early, but honestly I am kinda ready for it. All summer has been a bit of a struggle to get all my morning tasks and chores done before work starts. It will be nice to going back and having plenty of uninterrupted time for them.
I don’t really have much to report this morning, which is really a shame, since I got a new subscriber this morning, who seems to be a stranger, and now they will read this issue, with literally nothing in it, and be like “why the hell did I sign up for this dumb newsletter.” SORRY. I did warn it about nothing, this newsletter, but it’s usually about more something nothings than this. Snothing.
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 listening to Juno Francis this morning. Album is Melancholia. It is nice. Very W Hotel Lobby encoded. I would listen to this in an elevator at 1AM after a night that was supposed to be a work night but evolved into something a little bit more before you cut it off because you had to be at the client’s offices tomorrow at 10 AM.
I spent, I kid you not, three full hours yesterday just reading wiki pages about assorted topics from the world of Game of Thrones.
(Queue my mental anguish about the italicization of IP names when the IP name is also an individual work’s name. This was a giant problem in the Trek book. It should not be italicized but I can’t help myself. Sorry editor Lisa, in like three years when we get to 2025.)
I have a bad habit about this. Going deep, getting obsessed about some dumb fictional world. Very into universe building. Spent way too much time reading about the Fall of Volantis. Tried to figure out whether that horn on the cover of that one book is Euron’s Dragonhorn or The Horn of Winter. Watched a two-hour-long series of YouTube vidoes exploring the potential that lies within the Stark Crypts. Tried to figure out how the Iron Bank works, to the level of what I did in the Star Trek book, but I don’t think it’s quite there, really. Part of the problem is that Westeros, the Free Cities and Slaver’s Bay all seem to have slightly different economics, so it does not lend itself to a coherent system the way the federation does.
I should probably just go read the books. But I’m still reading Marx. It is going to be a while. Not been doing a lot of reading while up here in MA. We are just finishing up Part 3. It is… I dunno, man. I am not getting a lot out of it. I think once you know what depreciation is you have a hard time just accepting that the cost of 1/10th of a spindle is in the cotton. Or something. Everything feels so far from reality, it feels more like all the other early-economic treatises I had to read in College. Which it is. But people obsess over this one. Well, I guess right-wing capitalist weirdoes obsess over Adam Smith. They are probably both wrong. Steps on a ladder, these people were.
Also, Bataille was better.
BUT here is a great photo of young me that I just received from an old friend who sent me some prints from “back in the day.” Probably… 99 or so? Ashford Terrace era, founding of Freezepop, after the Cindytalk tour, before we started Rockets, I think. No, Rockets was already going, wasn’t it? Yes. Second-album-era Rockets, I think.
So, you know, I have that to feel good about.
Lisa tells me she is about done with GMHHAY vol 2 editing, another pass, another week or two. Very exciting.
I suppose I should start working on the cover. There are many questions to be answered here. How similar do I make it to the Vol 1 cover? Do I use the same typeface? A similar photo? Was I unknowingly locking myself into a design system three years ago when Emma and I designed that cover?
And I am going to have to re-read it, which means I am going to have to re-live, mm, I think it is 2022? In full. This weekend I was chatting with my friend Suzy (hi Suzy) about how you should only dip into nostalgia and journal reading for 1-2 day periods, not whole years. But here I am faced with this task before me. I am kind of dread it.
I mean, I did run a nostalgia company for a while. I know these things. Subject-matter expert. I should check my Timehop, actually. Been a long time. I wonder what it’s like now.
It would be kind of funny to release it as a book and not read it. Tempting, even.
Jane got very mad at me about teeth once this weekend because I brushed them for her against her will, which is just the worst feeling in the universe, and she is of the age now where her resentment for such actions spans into the next day. No more get-out-of-jail-free, forgive-and-forget actions. We have to “make up” now. And, you know, it sucks brushing her teeth. But god. She is still so bad at it, she still argues about it all the time, the cavities are drilling into her cute little baby teeth, and the new teeth are coming in, the ones she will be stuck with for her entire life, and she still does not know how to take care of them.
And this is where people send me emails about this or that hack, or trick, as if kids are logical and consistent and a thing works all the time, which never seems to happen. A thing will work once in a while, then not work again for months. Emma got it turned around by education and illustration of the plaque and junk on her teeth which is so gross and will last… well it’s lasted two days so I guess that’s a win. Two days where we didn’t have to argue about teeth and how “boring” it is to brush them. And how it will be totally okay if she is an adult with no teeth. She doesn’t need them to eat. She can eat noodles just fine without teeth.
But mostly it was a pretty good weekend of playgrounds, walks and a little too much screen time. It is the last week of summer, school starts Monday. May as well go easy on her.
Except teeth.
I don’t have a playlist for you this morning, so I leave you with this great documentary about Chisanbop, which our friend Meghan recently taught Jane, and I learned in elementary school, and I hadn’t thought about in years. This guy is a mathematician who does not usually do long-form, deeply investigated videos, but he really nails it with this one, doing deep original research, interviews with many of the major players, and posting all his material to the internet archive. It turns out it is not, in fact, an ancient Korean system, but rather invented by a Korean American in the 70’s, like maybe 10 years before I learned it. Fascinating stuff.
Have a lovely day, dear friend. I will be back in fine form tomorrow. Probably maybe.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.