Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1620
ICE in Raleigh, EV1 sold, Ford Country Squire, Psychocandy, Paradox taking Cities Skylines from Colossal Order, Steam Machine, Cloudflare messing with my pictures
Good morning good morning. Greetings from Chatham County, NC, where your humble scribe feels like a goddamn genius every morning on the pot when he gets his Wordle right.
Just back from dropping Jane off. The 10,000-song playlist to which I listen in the car elected to play “Fairytale of New York” for the first time this year. Am I quite ready for Christmas music? Maybe not, but also it was pretty welcome. I did have to talk over the F word though, so Jane wouldn’t hear it.
Speaking of Jane get a load of this:
Is that not the greatest? My god, my god.
ICE is in Raleigh this week, which sucks. I had fooled myself into thinking that President Miller would not deploy ICE in their goonlike manifestation to battleground states, but he apparently does not expect to ever have to face electoral consequences. I almost never “go to the big city” so this is no skin off my back, probably maybe, but still. It fucking sucks and is evil and I hate that it’s just this roving cloud of evil going from city-to-city in the US.
Reader Mark delivered on the car-in-the-mirror pic yesterday. He is so good at Google Image Search I swear. Every time I try it, it is a catastrophe, but check this out:
Dear Rick - I used the Google Lens image search trick on the side view mirror photo from GMHHAY and it says that the station wagon in your mirror is a Ford Country Squire from the 1965-1968 era - classic! Great name! By the 1965-1968 era, the Country Squire was in it's SIXTH generation!
That guy is all pro. Maybe it’s because he uses Google Lens and not just Google Image Search. Gotta try that sometime.
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!
I would like to congratulate GMHHAY Slack as there has been zero discussion in there over the last couple days about a certain sex scandal/purple prose orgy of absurdity involving a lot of the letter Z. Nothing. Nada. Pure bliss.
We are listening today to the new Blondshell album, Another Picture. It is great as always though I could do without track 3. Wait a minute this is not an album what is this. A Compilation? Outtakes? I do not know. Two new versions of T&A. A collaboration with Folk Bitch, another with Conor Oberst. I guess some sort of filler between albums. Still, though. It is pretty good. And she is only 28! Lotta talent in this woman look forward to her career developing I’ll be, like, 85 years old on my death bed and she’ll be 60, in her Dylan phase or something like that and I’ll be like “I can’t die there is a new Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum album coming out. Rock idles used to be all older than me. Not anymore. I will never know the full arc of her career. Alas.
While we’re in the music portion of GMHHAY, happy 40th birthday to the phenomenal debut of the band The Jesus and Mary Chain. Psychocandy turns 40 today that is so crazy that album is still singular. I remember playing “Never Understand” on WTBU radio at Boston University and the engineer came running in and thought I had broken the radio carrier current equipment. Carrier Current radio, man. Good shit. Anyway this album had a major influence on my life. I am tempted to buy the 40th anniversary re-issue. I just checked Discogs and the only copy I have is the 1985 US first edition, which I bought, shit, like… 30+ years ago? Crazy. Through the years I have gotten to see the Chain play all of Psychocandy in order (for it’s 30th anniversary), and I’ve seen ScarJo and Hope Sandoval do “Just Like Honey” with the band. But the thing I am still bitter about is that when they did that 30th anniversary performance at Levitation in Austin, Primal Scream was also on the bill (awesome set), but Bobbie Gillespie of Primal Scream, who was the first drummer in the Jesus and Mary Chain, did not perform with them, not even a single song. That made me very sad.
(The pictures aren’t working today. I assume this is because of the Cloudflare outage. That sucks. I wonder if they will work in the email version. This is a pickle.)
Anyway, moving on. Big news in the automotive world, for the first time ever, a GM EV1 has been legally sold to a private collector, who has allowed a bunch of automotive youtubers to slowly restore the thing. If you have seen the movie Who Killed the Electric Car, you know the story of the EV1, the first purpose-built, commercially available electric vehicle, a decade ahead of its time. Unfortunately GM did not want to release the thing, it was forced to by California, and once the law was overturned in a lawsuit by the automotive and oil industres, GM took all the cars back, because they only ever leased them. A few people hid their cars (like Francis Ford Coppola) and still retain them but they do not legally own them and cannot sell them and to this day GM is still a dick about it. Unfortunately for them, this one went through the legal process of abandonment in Georgia, GM did not answer the public posting ads with its VIN number, and a court declared it abandoned and ordered it sold. So now, finally, a single one is legally in private hands. This is very exciting and I cannot wait to see it fully restored.
In huge news in the gaming industry, Paradox Interactive has taken the Cities: Skylines franchise from Colossal Order and given it to a new, in-house studio. To my knowledge this is the first time this has ever happened, during the development and maintenance of a launched-game. Studios have switched studios during initial production, and between iterations of a game, but I can’t think of a time they just took a game away, mid-cycle, from a studio. And Colossal Order, man, that’s all they really ever do, build Cities Skylines. They built the first one too. And, like, I know Cities Skylines 2 gets a lot of flack but it is a good game! It is being actively worked on and gets better all the time. But it is has also sold like absolute shit compared to Cities Skylines 1 - like one-eighth as many copies. Though it is young, and not on Mac or console yet.
The weird thing too is that both Colossal Order and the new studio, fully owned by Paradox Interactive, are both in the town of Tampere, Finland, population 260,000. So… how’s that gonna work? You just gonna hire all the same people again? It is all very weird.
And I suspect this means it will be forever before the Mac port comes into fruition.
Though maybe this won’t matter so much because Valve announced the coolest thing - a Steam Machine and man I want one so bad. It is basically a custom PC for playing games on your TV, purchased through Steam, without Windows on it. I think this might be just the thing for Jane and I and all the weird games that we want to play that aren’t on the Mac, like Beltmatic or Cities Skylines 2 etc. It looks like it will be reasonably priced, too? Lotts scuttlebutt about Microsoft giving up on the XBox, which would be crazy but also not inconceivable since they’re AI-pilled and blinkered. STEAM MACHINE.
Man this is a bummer about the images I am in an existential spiral here I thought I was a writer but here I am thinking GMHHAY is nothing without the pictures. Woe is me. Guess we’ll just wrap it up with our Jane anecdote for the day. The other day in random conversation she let slip that quite a while ago, like weeks, a kid fainted in class, an ambulance came, whole works. Meanwhile every single day at dinner, Emma and I ask her how school was. And she said nothing! That girl keeps her cards close to her chest, man. Really is something.
But she is still brushing her teeth. Increasingly grudgingly, but it is still happening. So I will not complain.
Here is a cute picture of her with a necklace across her face. You may or may not be able to see it.
Moody and quiet playlist for you today, mostly new stuff, two old Rick high school classics oh wait oh shit I should put Just Like Honey on here happy 40th Psychocandy. There we go.
All right well let’s send this I sure hope you get to see Jane’s super cute art. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in the Slack! Ta.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.