Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1559
Living with fascism, 2021 GMHHAY vol 2 updates, Scrawl, The UK shoulda sold me Giphy, a fleeting moment of peaceful childhood nostalgia
Good morning good morning. Much better morning. I was in a terrible mood all day yesterday. Actually just sort of hung my head and cried, failure-of-a-man style, it was just great. After the entirely self-inflicted Jane fight, I got, I shit you not, like four horrible fire-drill emergency emails in my assorted work lives before 9 AM. I just wanted it all to stop. I am still sorting them all, TBH. It’s an entire week’s of work, really. Just thrown at me by 9 AM Monday. Fucking awesome. I don’t really want to be doing any of these jobs. I am old and have lived my life and I just want to retire to my attic build studios and try and be a better parent, k thanks.
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’re listening to Scrawl this morning because I have never listened to them (I know, I know) and I keep seeing them mentioned everywhere these days. I can see why I didn’t listen to them. They are the sort of meandering kinda mellow Slintlike indie rock I did not super like back then because it was “boring” and did not wear it raw, unfiltered, mellodramatic emotion on its sleeve like Nirvana or goth or even Underworld. Rex, June of 44, Slint, Scrawl, Idaho, etc. I mean, I liked it all, but usually I would scan the albums for the one slow song and ignore the rest.
But tastes have changed a bit and I kinda like this now. Ish.
Also PSA: The new Suede album is so so good.
Another PSA: An intrepid reporter has gone through and figured out every single tech exec that sucked up to Trump at that stupid-ass White House dinner. We missed a bunch, including the Zynga founder and the Figma CEO. Fuck em.
Man. Loving under fascism suuuuccks. And it’s just getting worse every day. Last Supreme Court ruling? Fucking bullshit. Killing eleven people on a boat with zero trial? Murder, just straight up murder. And, of course, all of these are trial runs. Chicago? Trial run. They are still planning so much more.
The anxiety is pervasive, I have realized. Consumes everything I do. And then you find yourself thinking how you have to carve out time to not think about it, and then you make a little success there, have some moments where you don’t think about living under fascism and cruelty and genocide, and you feel so much better, not thinking about it. And your self-preservation and innate sense of health start to focus on that: holy shit, I feel so much better not thinking about the genocide and fascism and cruelty. I should organize my life around not thinking about these things constantly. I will feel so much better. And so you do.
But people are fighting, thank you Chicago for your inspiration.
So then you realize fuck, I am blocking it all out, and I’m not doing anything, and that’s how these fuckers win, and that’s what they want. So you start thinking about it and what you can do again.
And in the immortal words of The The, the whole goddamn thing starts all over again.
Some assorted notes from the last third of the 2021 GMHHAY vol 2 book edit. So, you know, when volume 6 or so comes out, you can get some closure on these assorted topics. Assuming this passage survives the edit. You know, it’s a long game.
I was sorta wrong and sorta right being on “team transitory” with inflation, but I confess I was probably more wrong than right. Gotta own up. Of course what would have happened if Trump didn’t win, but then also Build Back Better and MMT and the unknown limits to MMT that even Kelton and her ilk acknowledge are out there somewhere, etc. etc. Lotta factors, but you know what? Inflation sucks, it’s here, we all feel it, we’re all sick and tired of it, so in the end… not transitory!
I wrote a passage about how Biden snubbed Elon when he did a big electric car push and only did it for union-employing shops, so Tesla got sidelined. I made fun of him being butthurt, it felt good. However, it was also this butthurtedness that inspired Elon to spend a hundred mil bribing Pennsylvanians and helping Trump win, so joke’s on us, I guess. There is an interesting question of whether I think we should do it again, knowing what we know now and… yeah, probably. I kinda think Elon was just looking for an excuse to be a fascist douche. But it was def with a sense of foreboding I re-read that passage.
I wrote about the Lumbee, a NC-based tribe of Indigenous Americans, finally receiving federal recognition. Both Trump and Biden want this supposedly, it has been “being worked on” forever, but it is not, in fact, done. Both presidents have done what they can, but it also needs to wind its way through congress and, well, that has not yet happened.
I spent a lot of time, so much time, playing No Man’s Sky I was so dysfunctional and depressed in 2021. As opposed to now where I am functional and depressed. Anyway, one of the currencies in No Man’s Sky is Nanites, except they are also a building material. Maybe equivalent to Wampum or something. But even in my edit, I do not know if I should be capitalizing “Nanites” or not. So I belatedly apologize for my inconsistency. Hello Games, the publishers of No Man’s Sky, capitalize it but you can’t trust them.
When Twitter sold MoPub to Applovin I said that it was a stupid move, that MoPub had the potential to be worth infinitely more than Twitter, that Mobile in-game advertising was the one part of digital ads that Google did not own outright. The market cap of Applovin is $185 billion today, more than Twitter ever was, more than current X even with its Grok facelift. MoPub was a stupid fucking sale and I was totally right about it.
I was also right that the UK Government should have sold Giphy to me instead of Shutterstock or whoever the fuck the ended up selling it to. They explicitly wanted an online ad competitor and I gave them that path, from a small company, and they didn’t fucking take it, they let Facebook bury it and look! Nothing has happened since. That sucks, I was right, and I am still bitter about it. The way the UK made everyone go through this whole rigamarole of a forced divestment to further the online ad market, and then just let Facebook sell it to whomever was fucking stupid and I am bitter about it. In the end it was an utter waste of time and the UK should be embarrassed at how badly they botched it when they had a perfect good, exactly to-the-goals bid from yours truly.
Last night after a pool company meeting I was walking the “Serenity Walk” over at Chore House to go round to the side of the house where the hole I made is, to measure the distance to the hole from the ground with my laser measurer, so I knew how long of a ladder I needed. Gotta do it in the dark, so this was the day. But that’s not the point.
The point is as I was walking the serenity walk, and I looked over the side down to the little crick/creek below, I suddenly felt like I was in rural Oregon at my grandfather’s old house, on the Sandy River off of Ten Eyck road, and I felt like I was in actual wilderness and… well, it was pretty cool. This property is kind of amazing. Ans it was a good feeling, that dip into childlike wonder and nostalgia. Healed me a bit, not gonna lie. Going to his second wife’s 90th next month, that’ll be nice. Maybe I can find the property. Emma and I tried about ten years ago and I got close but couldn’t find it.
Jane still has a cough but we took her temperature and gave her a covid test and she was fine. And she really wanted to go to school today because the Brain Break (whatever that is) was a K Pop Demon Hunters Brain Break (should “Brain Break” be capitalized? Who the hell knows) and like all kids she loves that movie. Most watched movie produced by Netflix ever. Only it wasn’t produced by Netflix, it was a Sony Animation jam and they didn’t have any faith in it or believe in it so they sold it to Netflix. I hope that exec has lost their job. Kinda like the biggest mistake you could make in film production. But yeah who are we kidding. Probably not.
I wonder if K-Pop fans are annoyed their genre blew up. Like when Geffen signed Nirvana or something. Four songs in the Billboard top 10, right now, are from that film. Insanity.
We did, however, forget to bring Jane’s backpack to school, somehow. We both forgot. So I had to go back. Back through all the school traffic, back through the drop-off line, back through the cop who does traffic direction.
But I was so grateful that we didn’t get in a giant fight I didn’t mind one bit. Plus that really long, French version of “Bloodletting” by Concrete Blonde was playing, and that was awesome.
Psych playlist for you today. Mix of old and new. Someone recently talked about how NYC Ghosts and Flowers was an absolute garbage album, worst Sonic Youth album, so I gave it another listen and, no way man, it’s great. Major Stars played the Model last week and I am super jealous I didn’t get to go to that, that is just crazy. Though I did recently learn that I was at their first show ever so that is pretty cool.
“Butthurtedness” is a great word and my spell checker should have accepted it. I hope you have a lovely day. Will see you tomorrow.
—
Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.