Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1552
Rough day, Alaska summit, tech enshittificaiton, noise-cancelling as hearing protection, friends on the playground, crappy emails, Charlottesville basically worked.
Good morning hi howdy wow what is up. At the playground this morning. Splash pad is already hoppin. Kids are climbing our fence to get to the wild grapes that trellis it, acting as a barrier between our apartment and the playground. A child lost a swimsuit. A small plane drones in the distance.
Absolutely garbage work day yesterday. Well. Maybe that is hyperbole. It was a workday filled with absolutely sociopathic emails, people just saying the stupidest shit. And the first few I answer with grace and patience; but as the hits keep coming, eventually one email crosses a threshold and you're just done with the patience, and you end up snapping at ONE email that acts as proxy representation to ALL emails. And maybe they did not deserve the accumulated ire you've held back from the previous five emails. But also they totally deserved it.
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We are listening to Nilufer Yanya this morning. Newish single, “Dancing Shoes.” We’re working on the To Investigate playlist. It has about 21 hours in it these days and the scroll bar tells me we’re a little less than halfway through it.
Pardon me. Got another mysterious Docusign I need to investigate. Both of these things are true: Docusign fraud exists. I also need to sign like 1-2 legitimate Docusigns a day that I am not sure I even need to sign. This one just came in and says: "Nimbus ACH/EFT Incoming Payment Authorization with Service Conditions Nimbus." What does that mean. Is this the culmination of the six-week Byzantine process we have been navigating in order to change our Justworks from 3-day payroll holds to instantaneous transfers? The one that required me to schedule a phone call with an Indian call center representative just to read to them numbers off of a form they just sent me?
Or is this complete fraud and I sign it and our entire corporate bank account is drained.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Modern tech world sure is garbage. Tried to look something up yesterday: a definitive answer as to why and how noise-cancelling headphones do not work as sound protection because I do not believe that shit for one second.
But the entire internet says it. No one documents their sources, no one is an actual authority. Just fucking AI-garbage spam articles even if you avoid AI. And I have zero doubt Gemini or some shit wouldn't do any better. Because the answer, if it exists, exists in research papers. And the research papers, the actual science in the world, is locked up by evil publishers. No wonder all our AIs are garbage when they trained on datasets specifically engineered by capitalism to not include actual science.
What a world what a world.
I was listening to this social media savvy ear doctor tell me noice-cancelling headphones are no good while I walked by a jackhammer with my noise-cancelling headphones on, turned on the noise-cancelling, and the jackhammer got like 80% more quiet. But I'm supposed to believe that's not real. Because the internet has told me to not believe my senses. Without saying why.
And yes, I know how to get to the bottom of this but it is going to take so much time. The internet was supposed to make things easier. At this point it would probably be quicker and easier to walk to an actual library.
What's going to happen here is a research-savvy GMHHAY reader with JSTOR access is now going to send me some relevant articles and that, my friend, is why the slow, human, bespoke internet is the only good internet left.
The park is silent. Where is my kid.
Oh there she is. She's playing with Quinn's mom. Quinn is MIA. But Quinn's mom told me yesterday that she was at Charlottesville when the shit went down, only 20 yards from the murderous MAGA truck that killed Heather Hayer, and she as only that far away cuz she was just returning from a counter protest group on the other side of the protest.
In a lot of ways these days it feels like it worked, that protest.
Wow and actually she just came over and told me that last night her friend called; the one she was with at the protests, and told her it was eight years ago yesterday.
Shit now this sounds like a LinkedIn story or a Trump story. Please sir. My children are so scared of wheelies.
That joke's not gonna make sense to you if you have a healthy relationship with social media. God bless you.
So Trumpy Pooh and Putin are gonna meet in Alaska. Doesn't seem clear yet which city in Alaska. But I suppose it's conceivable it'll be my home town, where Reagan and Pope John Paul II met when I was a kid. I saw the Popemobile. It was cool. But this will not be cool. Putin's stirring up nationalist bs about "getting Alaska back." How fucking crazy is that. What a world that suddenly after 150 years, Alaska's sovereignty is up for debate.
Highly displeasing.
So, Lisa's chugging away editing GMHHAY book two and I sent her down a rabbit hole because I used the term "PFOAS." There are, she points out, PFOS, and there are PFAS, but not PFOAS. And I knew the first two of these things but in my head I concocted a super group of PFOS and PFAS that was called PFOAS and I legitimately thought this was standard industry and/or scientific parlance. But lisa went down the rabbit hole far enough to learn that no; in fact; this was not a thing. It seems I had just completely made this convention up.
... but also it should kind of exist? My science is admittedly lightweight on the subject but aren't they both forever chemicals and don't we often lump them in the same group when having a conversation about environmental regulation?
Also I am pretty into this linguistic convention in general, though I struggle to think of another example where it would work: two initialisms, one letter off, and the two initialisms are both part of the same super group. Closest I can come up with is PVC pipe and PEX pipe, and we call them PVEX or something. Except I don't even know if PEX is an initialisms it might just be a brand name and capitalized Pex.
Last night our friends Seth and Monika and their kids came to the playground and Sean and Jussi came out too and the kids played and we all chatted and then we went inside and got Taco Tuesday except we got a Mexican pizza and it was all delicious and all three kids were almost completely well-behaved and it was a lovely time. The kids were just distracting enough that we didn’t get too too much adult catch-up time, but we got some, and it was very nice. Seeing friends is so nice.
Jane just brought me a grape leaf. It was tied in a nice knot and turned into a small carrying case for wild grapes. It was very cute. I was too chicken to eat the grapes. But we went inside, she washed them and she ate them. How very wholesome. No seeds.
Got a moody and quiet playlist for you. About 45 mins of new music but then I filled it out with some classic Rick 1989 ish moody teenage hits.
Watched episode 1 of Alien: Earth last night. Highly promising. Noah Hawley, Alien, Earth, solid. I liked it. Optimistic about this show, even if the tech in the show is no way gonna be ready for us in the 100 years from now that the show takes place.
Until tomorow.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.