Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1565
Doubts about not using my insurance on my truck, GMHHAY vol 2 cover work, Wisp, Why can't Apple just do another Snow Leopard, ill-advised political rambling
Good morning good morning. Hello. Just back from dropping Jane off, first trip in this Chevy Trailblazer rental. Went decently. Overly perfumed smell is mostly gone, thanks to me leaving all the doors open for an entire day. One more day should do it. It is so weird using a brake pedal. It took me forever to find the wipers. Jane sort of liked the car, no whining, so, you know, that was nice. Lotta whining in our lives these days.
The people at the body shop told me it might only be two weeks that I am without my truck. That would be so nice.
A lot of people have told me that I am crazy for doing this repair — which amounts to seven thousand dollars – without going to my insurance. But, like, wouldn’t they just raise my insurance rates if I went to them with a highly expensive, total self-own of a wreck? I feel like in the long run that would be more expensive? Am I wrong? Am I stupid? Should I have taken this to the insurance company? Inquiring minds want to know.
Worked on the cover a bit for GMHHAY vol 2. Picked 6 ish photos that were from the period in 2021 that the book covers, posted them in the Slack group, had the GMHHAY Slack vote on them. There was a pretty clear favorite, and I kinda like that one, so I guess we have a photo. Now I turn it over to my wife for some text treatment, because as much as I love fonts, I do not particularly like laying out title text. I am too damaged from the Ray Gun slash Chank Diesel slash Emigré days. IYKYK.
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 the LA-based Shoegaze band Wisp, with their one vinyl release, an EP entitled Pandora, white vinyl. It is very good I like them very much. I saw them open for Slowdive, they ruled. They are coming back and playing Durham I really should go. Last time I went to a show at that venue I was all like “this venue rules and it really is not far from home I should go to shows here all the time” but here I am about to skip a show there. I am so old and boring.
Apple is releasing their new OSs today for Phone, Mac, TV and Vision Pro (which I still kinda want? Don’t @ me). I will not be updating any time soon, because Apple has a multi-decade history of baking pointless, flashy visual effects into their OS that relentlessly, needlessly tax the processor. Then they certify the OS down to older machines that couldn’t hope to handle the additional processor overhead. I have heard that on the AppleTV, at least, the doofy “liquid glass” OS paradigm is only available on the newest, 2nd generation 4K model, and not a single other model. That is awesome, Apple should do that more often, they should do it with this OS right here and make Liquid Glass only available on the new iPhone 17 series.
There are features of the new OS I would love to have, but, yeah. Gonna wait a while.
Also, I and thousands of other people have been saying this for sixteen years, but Apple needs to do another Snow Leopard-esque OS release, where the entire OS release is focused on efficiency improvements and bug fixes. Snow Leopard was, far and away, hands down the absolute most popular MacOS release of the 21st century, and this fact makes absolutely zero impact on Apple deciding to do another one, despite needing it desperately. Really does make you wonder.
Stressful times politically these days. Should I talk about politics? I ranted a bit to the GMHHAY Slack Group yesterday about how you don’t have to post to the internet about certain topics, just because everyone else does. One of the fundamental, basic tricks of being an online human is you must retain the right, at all times, to choose what you are going to talk about, don’t let other people choose it for you.
It is absolutely insane how brain-rotted I see almost every major American pundit getting by the Internet.
There is a fundamental contradiction, fallacy, curse at the core of the modern political internet; the people who become pundits, who become “thought leaders” are absolutely, insanely, to their own mental detriment terminally online. Bluesky makes this more clear because it has no algorithm, so you get everything in the exact order it was posted like the “good old days.” I will take the entire weekend off from the internet and looking at the Socials, and then come back and it is the same 10, 20 pundits, relentlessly posting. They post all weekend. They are in arguments with bots when I go to sleep, I wake up and they are already arguing with bots again.
We should not make a single person a political leader who is terminally online. You should not be listening to anyone who cannot fucking take a day off.
And yet how else do you even become a political leader these days.
We are so fucked.
Also, more and more of them are pulling this form of psychosis where they argue with a bot, then block a bot, but then proceed to tell all their followers why they blocked the bot. Like, dude, just let it go. You are arguing with a robot, that is bad enough, you don’t need to brag about it. Also? Just block everyone. You do not need to performatively disagree with people on the internet. And in any case, 90% of X and 75% of Bluesky are bots. So many people are arguing with bots constantly.
Last week I talked a bit about the, ahem, recent assisinational bullshit, and I did so obliquely, making a reference to the “two school shootings” that happened that day. And yet then I talked about political killings. We all knew exactly what I was doing and saying, because, you know, it was “in the moment.” But then this morning I was thinking that I do kind of aspire for GMHHAY to be, like, a diary of a layperson during this miserable period of rising fascism. The two are obviously somewhat at odds, and that is something which which I must reckon, and am still reckoning.
Especially in in a situation like this, that so many people feel compelled to follow and talk about. This topic has broken out of its confinement in a big way. Like I go to my Facebook page and totally normie, non-online friends of mine are writing long, sadly misguided, depressingly simple-minded passages about current events and you can tell that this event has seeped offline.
And, of course, we have an administration that is expertly honed to literally capitalize on any event, no matter how politicized or violent, and leverage it to further their fascist goals, whipping up a frenzy. When they are in a dry spell, they expertly, deftly turn a logo redesign or a passing quip in a celebrity interview into outrage in order to further their goals. But when they have something like this? Well, shit, it’s balls-to-the-wall, all cylinders firing, hey guys we decided the entire left-of-center of the US needs to be eradicated.
You can see how those last two paragraphs are related, right? We feel compelled to make these dumb-ass statements, because they want us to.
Here’s my basic thesis for these events:
This dude was famous on the internet, so the internet is going to churn and buzz and freak out about it.
This dude was “in the media” and had created his own media platform so the media thinks he’s important, because they are jealous of his media platform. I know this tendency of the media firsthand from my Tumblr days when Tumblr was the hottest thing in the world for journalists and my god they loved writing about Tumblr. The media is incapable of covering itself dispassionately.
The dude was a right-wing activist, so the right wing is going full tilt making hay out of this.
With all three of these being true, this is a perfect storm.
And far, far too many people of all political stripes think that the media and the internet are real life.
And, of course, this dude is dead in real life, the media and the internet shape real life, that is true. Echo chambers are real things. But the term “echo chamber” still has a meaning, the effects are still happening.
And you do not need to be in the echo chamber.
Easier said than done, we’re all addicted to our phones, blah blah. And it is true. We need to take positive, active steps. It does not need to be absolute.
You know what the absolute easiest thing you can do is to make this world a better place? Don’t start arguments on the internet with strangers.
Seriously. You know we see it, right? The internet serves right up to us all your indignation and snappy comments. You are making them to bots. People want you to do this.
Just stop. It is not a human being on the other end, it is a piece of code engineered to make you do exactly what you are doing.
Here endeth my public service policy rant.
Jane was pretty good this morning, despite “car games.” I tried to placate her with Wordle, went fine, and spelling bee, where I was told that “CUNT” is not a word. No, I did not try this in front of my daughter, but it is still a word, NYT.
Maybe you deserve to be sued for $15 billion by a whiny brat.
We tried to meet a friend of hers at the playground yesterday but the friend went home to school vomiting! Very traumatizing thing for seven-year-olds. Jane still remembers vomiting from, like, four years earlier. She was visibly horrified at her friend’s predicament.
“It’s the taste,” I said.
“It’s the taste,” she said.
“So gross,” I said.
“So gross,” she said.
Got a post rock playlist for you today. I just learned that this Slow Teeth band, who seem pretty awesome so far, are from the next town out west from me, Saxapahaw, NC. That is kind of awesome, no one is from Saxapahaw, but there is an awesome venue there and I’m going to see Stereolab there this Sunday and Boris on Halloween. Yay Saxapahaw, yay post rock bands from Saxapahaw.
Have a lovely day you take care now, y’hear?
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.