Morning morning morning hello hi how are you? I am… eh, let’s say 70%. I think I have strep, I think we all have strep, I think Jane had strep and some sort of horrible flu at the same time, that must have sucked. Emma is going to the doctor in 2 hours to test for strep. If she has strep, I’ll go today, get a test, maybe get on antibiotics. I thought I could power through, but this is getting worse. Drat.

So yeah, sore throat. And the fucking toxic fumes that cover our planet because of stupid-ass poison ICE cars is not helping. It’s becoming like cigarettes. I smell that shit everywhere now that I am not driving one. It’s the worst. I cannot believe we just let people do this. Did no one else pay heed to the crying Indian? Jesus.

Saw an electric Escalade this morning, though, that shit is sick. And absurd. Kinda like my truck. Only worse. But at least it’s electric. Illegally parked on the curb to grab their Starbucks from the Teet, too. Can’t stand those people. But at least it’s electric, she said as she bought an Escalade, he said as he bought an F-150. Zero costs of ownership, no toxic fumes choking everyone up. Smart-ass Alaskan naysayers note that I said “choking everyone up,” because I know they still emit upon manufacture, OKAY? We are all broken.

Update from yesterday, not that anyone wants to talk about general strikes yet. Well, no, about six of you did that was nice. Anyway, it occurred to me that were I do to a one man band strike it would be at Thom Tillis’ local office. Dude is retiring, the office is nearby, he’s sick of Trump’s shit anyway and would probably tolerate it. But, you know. By the time I work up the courage, he’ll be out. And we’ll have a Democratic senator from NC because Roy Cooper is gonna win that shit you just watch.

Had a great dream last night. Went to London, saw the Hold Steady open for some band I didn’t know at the Royal Festival Hall, after party in Camden at an awesome indie bookstore slash venue. Eva was there, hi Eva. Doug too. Then Doug and I went to Bushwick to a different Indie venue slash bookstore and saw Sarah Shook and the Disarmers play, whom I never seen in real life. I bought a bronze tiger to go with the bronze lion I’ve had since childhood. Then we watched a comedy show in the back room with Mia and Eva and a big tough bald dude who looked like he was in FSU in Boston in the 90’s. A+ dream no complaint. Also included some quality NA beer made by Blue Sky brewery who really needs to make an NA beer.

Bottom of the Hill is closing in SF and after the Phoenix Hotel announcement really feels like the end of an era in SF, or the acknowledgement that a certain end of an era is new. Not closing till next new years, though, so now I have an incentive to get out there for one last show. Fingers crossed.

2026 Bingo card. Inspired by Hank Green and others, I made a Bingo card of my predictions for 2026. And we really are getting on in the year and it would be absurdist if one of my predictions came true before I even published the bingo card so here it is. Apologies for some of the dire predictions, trigger warning, etc. etc. Though some are fun. I tried.

I don’t know what’s up with the font on the Star Wars one sorry.

Do I need to talk about this? Nah. Let’s just see how we do in the next year.

Also the McCartney Starr Jagger Richards was Sean’s idea and I stole it because Sean is not going to make a bingo card. Is Sean reading yet? No idea. Imagine if he is and now he wonders if I was writing about Sean all the time all these years.

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 a band called Cardiacs today. Album is called LSD. They sound like they wanna be the Oh-Sees a bit. I am working my way through another best-of-year list that I got from the socials. Speaking of which if you want to cleanse your Blusky timeline a bit, not that you’re on there, you should follow I Heart Noise. Boston label that fills your timeline with amazing underground music recommendations, just Tweets constantly really is a labor of love. And just a wonderful timeline refresh. Also they reissued the Turkish Delight albums my old label originally released.

Speaking of the socials I am, as we speak, experiencing a viral skeettweet. It is not too unpleasant — one thing Bluesky does well is let you limit who can reply to you, so the whole thing isn’t making my life miserable. Just stressing me out that it might make my life miserable. I have really begun to take for granted my hard-earned internet obscurity of the 2020’s, as opposed to the 2010’s. And I assumed that this insightful Tweet, like all the others, would disappear into the ether. But nope, it got picked up. Which, ostensibly, if you read it, is the goal, but still. Largest viral tweet of mine since the Twitter days, maybe 12, 15 years. Four thousand likes, a thousand retweets. Terrifying.

I have long viewed my writing in here as the canary in the coalmine for the efficacy of Palantir and the like. They are all scanning the internet, but they’re still too dumb and lazy to look at a link and scan a newsletter (except probably on Substack who are probably enthusiastically collaborating). The thing I love about newsletters is people are too lazy to read them. I can say the worst things about the orange turd and no troll will ever find them because who wants to slog through all of my tangents and pedestrian domesticity and music recommendations and ramblings about exhaust fumes. No one does.

Except you guys. Some days. And I love you for it.

But yeah one day the secret police will get more effective, Trump will tighten his grip, Palantir will get better, and they will just arrive at my door and take me away.

But until then let’s keep dancing.

When Sean was telling me to sign him back up, I reminded him about the bolding, where I bold the main point of every paragraph. Or I guess I told him about it, since I did not do it back in the Facebook days, back when he read. And I got to thinking about it. It is my one sop to the modern attention span, the modern world. I know you guys are busy and I know some of you guys have a bit of an obsessive completion need, but you have time constraints, so I make it when you have to skim, you can just read the bold lines and get the gist of the entire issue, all topics. I spend a lot of time on this!

But I also kinda wish there was a preference setting where you could turn it on and off. That would be cool. Some days I am annoyed with myself for even this single minor sop to, you know, encouraging the reading of my words, and it strikes me as an artistic compromise and would Masami Akita of Merzbow ever make a pop song come on man art is supposed to be impenetrable and hard does Knausgård bold? Well, I do not know I have never read Knausgård. On my list for this year.

Hey how many UX designers do you think are working on Apple Music? One? TWO? Five? How many do you think are working on Spotify? Five? Ten? Twenty? I do not know, I do not have any inside knowledge but I bet those numbers are, as Matt Levine says, directionally correct. I also think that Spotify’s user interface is better than Apple Music’s. Also think this is probably related to the number of UX designers on the App(s). BUT I also think the two are not linerally correllated. If I had to guess, I would say that Spotify’s UX is, mmm, gonna say 1.4x as good as Apple’s and I am willing to bet they have three, four times as many UX designers.

Some sort of project management triangle thing going on there.

Anyway, Apple music needs:

• Key command for “view album in apple music” (and a slightly more clear wording for that particular command

• Key command for “Edit Playlist.”

• Key command for “Share playlist.”

• Better command-L functionality, where it goes to the actual song, not just the playlist

• Ability to sort playlist folders non-alphabetically

• Ability to single-click on a playlist to rename it.

• To put the play/pause buttons back at the top because this stupid bubble at the bottom/sop to Liquid Glass is the stupidest thing ever.

• To stop telling me I can only play music in one place at once and just switch the music

• To let the music keep playing when a modal dialog box comes up.

• The duration of a playlist should be listed at the top of the playlist, not the bottom

• When they pop up a modal dialog box with two choices and one is highlighted and one is not, they should fucking let you hit return to choose the “default” button. Seriously. Why else is it highlighted?

None of these are deal breakers. It is mostly going well. But it really is… well, I was gonna say stunning, but it’s not. Apple has a terrible habit of shuffling around its UX people, not touching Apps for years, decades in some instances, then coming in, doing a couple fixed, breaking a bunch of shit, then never touching it for another few years.

Walter Isaacson had a thesis in the Steve Jobs book that Apple transcended the innovator’s dilemma but it is a lie. They just hide it in the boring Mac apps that people use every day, but aren’t glamorous.

Gonna tell you something about Apple that is so brilliant it would make a killer Verge piece. Man I am so smart:

They should put Johny Srouji, head of hardware, in charge. Make him the CEO of Apple. There were rumors a few weeks back that he was thinking about leaving. He denied them. The rumors died down. But then a couple days later there was a big announcement from another tech company about a new big hire and I was pretty sure that was the job Johnny turned down? Anyway, seems like he has decided to stay. And that is good because (and this is the brilliant part):

For my entire life, for all of Apple’s history, they were the choice of people who preferred a good UI. Apple existed because of its software primacy.

That is reversed now. Apple now exists because of it’s hardware primacy and the software mostly sucks. I mean I know Alan Dye is gone (and he used to be a client and was a nice guy but still), but. I mean. Look, Liquid Glass isn’t great, it’s mostly dumb, but the bigger problem is the fucking company decided to pin a whole WWDC and OS update launch cycle on a shitty UX update. Not bug fixes, not some awesome new hardware, a UX update. I have not yet experience an Android update cycle in my new Android life, it’ll probably suck, but jesus. At least it won’t be a UX update.

The more I think about it, there really is no other rational choice.

Jane was terrible to me in the car this morning. She was nice till I inquired about school yesterday, then she turned horrible. Obviously something happened and she doesn’t want to talk about it. I don’t think it was a major incident or we woulda heard from the school but I am not sure how to teach this girl that talking about it will make her better more than snapping at her daddy will. I did not enjoy it.

BUT it was still better than the terrible school drop-off incidents of Kindergarten and First Grade, so we will take it. And she is getting better about brushing her teeth. Not 100% but… 20%? 30? Progress. Slow progress, but progress.

I took her to Girl Scouts last night and the troop leader, who is a pediatrician and awesome, taught the kids about cybersecurity and multiple layers of protection and 2FA and the limits of obfuscation and she did the with bubble wrap, Tupperware, and streamers and my god I should give her the $5k a year to do the cybersecurity training at my work. It was so good. Just wonderful. And the kids loved it. She really made me realize how much further I have to go as a parent. She was kind and firm and the kids listened and she never lost her patience and she didn’t groan or roll her eyes or exhibit all the little micro-impatiencies that I routinely do. Just amazing.

Life goals.

All right. Shoegaze playlist for you, all new bands. I love them all. Shoegaze rules right now. Oh wait I lied one old Boo Radleys song, thank you Pitchfork for the reminder of that album. Flatwaves, you will recall, ranked #1 on my 2026 list to you might want to check them out.

Oh right. Thoughts on my new sharing paradigm:

First: I did not love the tiny type on the playlist screenshot yesterday. I have tried to make the text bigger today, with limited success.

Next: I am working on making these more sharable for people who do not use Apple Music. What I have done today is endeavor to use the sharing functionality in this nifty app SongShift that I used to move all my playlists to Apple. Here is the link:

https://songsha.re/open/305b782068714bac83324fc2010a6bf917679674668338933

BUT you will need your own copy of SongShift. Which is a useful program to be sure. And if you have it, you can click that link and copy my playlist to Spotify, Deezer, Amazon Music, Last.FM, Pandora, Soundcloud, Spotify and more.

BUT it is an extra step.

And I bet none of you will use it.

And I don’t feel great adding a Spotify link for you.

So. I don’t know.

I welcome your thoughts.

Internet enshittification at your service.

BYEEE LOVE YOU.