Good morning good morning. Hello. Hi. Finally writing one of these on time for the first time in, oh, three weeks. Very exciting. Jane is recovered. Mostly. 90%. Took her to school this morning. The sunrise was overwhelming. Lotta moms and dads stopping and taking pictures as we drove through American Suburban Utopia. All very quaint. I bet none of them spend their entire day on the internet.

I am even getting enough sleep.

Before we begin, let us welcome one of my best friends, Sean Drinkwater to the GMHHAY newsletter. While sitting at a bar last week, Sean (mayhaps drunkenly) told me that he missed reading GMHHAY back in the Facebook days. I offered to sign him up for the email. He said he’d like that. WE’LL SEE.

Oh man I have so much to tell you. So many single-topic editions. I have so many great notes in my GMHHAY Topics Notes.app note. I will try and not blow my wad/blow my roll all in one edition. Blow my wad/roll: a non-sexual metaphor regarding cash that has become disgusting and sexual. Most unfortunate.

Speaking of things that have become disgusting and sexual, I went to twitter.com and oh my god the whole non-consensual porn thing is so much worse than you think. First off, porn stars are now unironically asking Grok to strip them, which is real weird. It’s like Guy Fawkes volunteering to help build a factory or something. Absolutely insane and depressing. And this morning they were, you know, putting Nazi bras on the Swedish Prime Minister, so, you know, there’s that.

It should be said that Grok does — at least now — seem to have some semblance of safeguards in place, as in it won’t show nipples or genitals. Silently fails. Doesn’t scold or acknowledge, just doesn’t do it. But people get around this by saying things like “put them in a dress made of cellophane” and Grok happily complies. Also I don’t know if these pathetic, minimalist safeguards were in place when this whole brouhaha started. I suspect not. But maybe. I am trying to be fair here. About the Nazi revenge porn site. Really is something. Also, they say things like “now cover her face in donut glaze” to mimic, well, you know. And Grok just goes for it.

Sometimes I think back to when I was young and dumb and full of in my 20’s and how I ran a (very tame!) page on Livejournal decrying the moral lapses of a certain local rock band (I have since been proven correct in the world’s largest publications on this topic, but no matter). I think about how I have spent, oh, three decades feeling guilty about putting that “negativity” in the Internet. And then I think about Twitter today and these kids putting Nazi bikinis on Holocaust survivors, and, well. Can you have imposter syndrome about your trolling?

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 so back on music today. We are listening to Uboa, an oder album called The Dissolution of Eternity and it is so freakin good. This band rules. Self-described goth kitty death industrial. Buy the shirt. It rules. Kids love it. I have it in black and pink. Bill called them Dead Can Dance meets metal at one point and that is not far off. And actually I am looking on Discogs now and this “album” is from 2025, a split with Whitehorse, available only in Australia? WTF. I need it. I have added all variants to my Discogs wantlist.

OMG it’s on their Bandcamp, this album. Twenty-six Euros. Sold. My god, this last song is insane.

I missed you Discogs wantlist, it has been three weeks.

Actually I was shocked that I only had one record waiting for me when I got home. Sorry, one vinyl that’s what the kids are calling it, right? That was really sad. Best part of traveling is coming home to a stack of vinyls. Hey. Language evolves.

And while we’re at it, I guess I am just not going to get to a whole single-topic GMHHAY about my departure from Spotify. But that is okay, the whole thing turned out far less dramatic than I thought it was going to. And it got all wrapped up in my switch to Android.

In the end, the answer is Apple Music. I switched to Apple Music. Surprise surprise.

I was going to switch to YouTube music, though, and I actually did for a couple weeks. I did this because a) I thought the Apple Music interface sucked, b) I thought Apple Music behaved like Spotify and if you were playing song A at your desk, when you went to your car it would continue with song A, not Song B, the song you were last listening to in your car. That was a super annoying aspect of Spotify. But Apple Music does not do that. You can listen to a different playlist (and shuffle setting) at your desk and in your car. That is huge. And c) I was switching to Android and I assumed Apple Music does not exist there, or if it did, it sucked. But to my complete shock, Apple Music does exist on Android and it is every bit as good as on iOS. Except Airplay. No Airplay on Android, which sucks. Except through an open source project, which is pretty good but not perfect. But then I got pretty good at getting Apple Music to play to Airplay from my watch, so whatever.

YouTube Music was really good, I gotta say. And of course Youtube has the huge advantage of having by far the largest selection of music, it is not even close. I have, for a long time, been working on this “Thank you WFNX” playlist, an ode to the Boston alternative station that soidified my new wave education in the early 90’s. But it is impossible to make on Spotify or Apple Music because they do not have “Like a Drug” by The Eat Their Own or “Windshield” by Green Magnet School. But YouTube does.

So, you might get that playlist one of these days.

YouTube Music does not have a Mac App, but I put the website into one of those “Share to Dock” Safari Widgets that make a website into their own app that I love so much, and that was fine. What killed it for me in the end, though, was that YouTube did not have folders for playlists. And I have hundreds of playlists. So that was a non-starter. Apple Music does have folders. You can’t sort things in any way other than alphabetically, which is a bummer, but I can make that work. The UX is wonky but you get used to its quirks. It does everything I need it to do. I will manage.

Oh and I used an amazing app called SongShift to transfer my playlists. But it turns out that Apple Music actually has a button in its settings to transfer playlists from Spotify. I did not know this, and had already purchased SongShift, which has a lot more features. But I have friends that switched recently using the built-in functionality and it works just fine.

So that’s that. Goodbye Spotify. I also already pay for both Apple and YouTube, so less money spent, and neatly obviates any new mental spirals over how much those companies suck too. I am stuck with them. I am not stuck with Spotify. Monopolies. Yay.

And I have spent the absolutely insane amount of time required to set up families in both of these ecosystems. And so my wife can now choose either Apple Music or YouTube to replace her Spotify since is in on my imminently cancelled family plan over there.

Plus I like the subversive idea of using Apple Music on Android. I will never be all-in on any one ecosystem. Fuck ‘em. No lock-in ever. Single-platform-free for ten+ years.

The whole SMS-group thing sucks though, switching to Android has fucked all my groups. One of the two groups that keeps me sane decided of their own accord to move to Signal last night, which works fine. I am so grateful. It is super fucked up that switching phone platforms puts you in this vulnerable miserable emotional state where certain friends do not talk to you. Do not like.

Congratulations to Fairbanks, Alaska, which seems to have finally come out of its weeks-long insane cold spell. My sister said this one was causing people to break that have never broken before. Ten+ days at -40°F. No “feels like,” no “with wind chill,” forty below in the still air. You start walking, moving, slightest wind, you’re talking 60, 70 below. Worst cold snap since the 80’s, they say. Which means I’ve experienced worse, but boy I must have blocked that out.

Anyway, welcome back to a balmy thirteen below today, friends.

My friend Frank came upon a team from Rivian cold-testing the R1S, R2 and, he says they said, the R3, though he has not spied the R3. The Rivian guys told him where they keep their secret Rivian charger, though, so he’s gonna stalk it. I hope he gets a picture.

Oh my god I have so much to tell you I could keep writing forever. Gotta pace myself. Drive home from Boston: We listened to (nearly) the entire Depeche Mode discography. We did not get to Delta Machine or Memento Mori, which was frustrating. If we had remembered that this was our plan before we turned off onto 84 from the Pike, we coulda gotten through them all. But we did get through Speak & Spell, A Broken Frame, Construction Tiem Again, Some Great Reward, Black Celebration, Music for the Masses, Violator, Songs of Faith and Devotion, Ultra, Exciter, Playing the Angel and Sounds of the Universe. Oh shit we missed Spirit too I forgot about that one. Some of those older ones I have not listened to start-to-finish in decades.

My favorite is still Music for the Masses, the first one I bought the day it came out. Runner up is Black Celebration, of course, the one that I first discovered. It’s Emma’s favorite as well. But I have to say that Songs of Faith and Devotion, Ultra, Playing the Angel and Sounds of the Universe? Those later albums were all far better than the single-listen I gave them back in the day would tell you. Exciter is a bit too mid tempo, ironically given its name. Violator is as good as everyone says but it will never be my favorite. I like the B-Sides too much.

We asked Jane what her favorite was and she said “I like Black Celebration” so go ahead and try and tell me I am not a great parent.

Okay! First day with Apple playlists. Let’s see which one is done.

All right we are starting with Justa mix, volume 307. Here is the Apple link:

I am sorta debating whether each morning I also add a Spotify link, or other links. I think I could set up an automation for this in SongShift? But there’s a lot of investigating to set that up, and I would need it to be quick. Don’t want to spend half an hour every morning futzing about with it. Gotta see if they have an android or MacOs version. Will investigate. No promises.

ANYWAY, good mix this one. Spans the new year, started it in December, finished it this week. I just discovered the last four bands on here: Daphne Gale, Schande, Boland Underground and Miss Grit. One of them (won’t say which) might be AI, suspicously little about them on the internet. Will investigate more. The new Wedding Present is their best in years. Kinda like the new Belle & Sebastian. Ready to leave Blondshell and Momma in 2025. Time to mix it up a bit.

Goodbye, friend. Talk tomorrow.