Good morning good morning happy Robyn and Courtney Barnett release days. How you doin. It’s Friday. Oh shit do I get paid today? Nope. Not till Tuesday. Alas. Yet Justworks has already taken the money out of our account. And we recently switched to two-day payroll clearing with them. Mysterious.

So Dems “won” and the Senate passed a clean bill funding the TSA. House hasn’t passed it yet, so agents still not getting paid, even though Trump said yesterday he could have been paying them all along. Dems got what they wanted on this — no funding for ICE, the rest of DHS funded. But in the end it probably won’t matter. Republicans are gonna try and pass ICE funding through reconciliation. Though they may shoot themselves in the foot by trying to add a bunch from the SAVE ACT and a bunch more. We shall see, we shall see. God this is a lousy-ass timeline.

It is unclear to me how this is a Dem win other than in a “getting some exercise” kind of way. They kept Fetterman in line, they held the line. But to what end? What are we gaining. But I suppose we had a shit hand, and getting exercise may prove useful in the future? I don’t know I am a very small bear.

My neck is killing me today. My hands are healing very slowly — Craig was right all along. I developed a weird cramp like a twisted ankle while walking home with Jane. My god getting old sucks.

Sean and I watched The Rise of Skywalker again last night. I have only seen it three times now. I went through a lot of emotions, but ultimately ended up at my original thesis: being locked into a single film (to complete a trilogy) fucked them, and they should have done what Avengers did. It is… Well, I mean, yes, absolutely, it is a failure. But I would say there’s a lot to like? A lot of great individual lines. Several interesting subplots. That end up going nowhere, really, but are interesting. Like in The Force Awakens, having some unresolved mystery like Rey’s parentage is just fine because you are kicking off a trilogy and everyone knows it. Well, media literate people anyhow. But when you’re in a movie that is explicitly billed as “the conclusion,” it is annoying AF.

If Palpatine’s a clone why did he have a kid? Why even bring up that random lady’s parents for Lando to dig into? Why is Rose even there if you’re not gonna use her? Why do some stormtroopers break free of their mind bonds? Why why why?

Also they did not need the stupid dagger. It makes no sense. I want to write 10,000 words about this fucking dagger and how it is exemplary of the whole movie. They find a Sith dagger, it has some secret words on it, C-3PO reads the words. Boom. You’re done. Don’t need the dagger anymore. “Ah, but Rick,” you say, you weird ROS defender you. “They needed the dagger to hold up to the horizon and look at the crash to find the Sith Wayfinder.” No they didn’t! The message on the dagger gives exact coordinates and says where the Wayfinder is. And if you are not smart enough to go to those coordinates, look at that giant wreckage of a Death Star and think “yeah I bet the emperor had an office in that thing and it had a safe,” then my friend you are not worthy of a Sith Wayfinder. Do a little homework. But they kept this in the movie. Why! It makes no sense! Didn’t need it for Finn (criminally underused) to meet his stormtrooper friends. Didn’t need it to find the wayfinder. Didn’t need it to split up Rey and the gang so she could face Ben alone. Didn’t need it! Added nothing! Yet you spent time on this! Instead of, like, resolving plots!

Why I ougtta.

Also it is absolutely fucking insane how much of the plot revolves around Ochi of Bestoon, who is never in the movie. Do you know who Ochi of Bestoon is? No. No you do not. They didn’t even make an action figure of the dude. But he is absolutely integral to the movie. Bonkers.

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 new Robyn this morning. Track three so far. I am liking the songs that didn’t come out as singles more than the advance singles thus far. This is often the case when you are a bang-pulling moody goth boy. Slow equals sensitive and oh my emotional paaaaain.

It’s good though. Maybe I’ll buy it on vinyl…. nooooo… god. Imagine if I suddenly decided I needed all the Robyn records on vinyl that would take so much time and money nooooo.

Found a candidate for best most norm core CEO: BOAR’S HEAD. DO you remember there was a big Boar’s Head health scandal like a year or two ago? No? No. Of course not. At the time everyone was like “oh man Boar’s Head is going down no one could ever survive this why the hell does Boar’s Head control this market anyway it oughtta be commoditized.” LOL NOPE. Boar’s Head survived. Everyone’s forgotten the scandal. But one thing I remember is that, at the time, it was not even clear who the Boar’s Head CEO was. I mean, I am a somewhat reluctant CEO, but talk about professional life goals, assuming you do want to be a CEO. No one even knows. That sounds like dream.

Was walking down the Somerville Community Path the other day and they have a little pollinator garden, and, while it’s still dead from the winter at the moment, I could tell even in death that their pollinators were as tall and treelike as mine, so I guess that’s just the deal with pollinators. What the world needs is pygmy pollinators. Cute little knee-high pollinators, not six-foot-tall pollinators with two-inch-thick trunks. Cute pollinators, that’s what I need in life. My life would be complete with pygmy pollinators.

Did the worst thing and peeked at X the other day, and, god. It is rotting people’s brains. I wouldn’t say I have a ton of friends still on there, but there are maybe 20 or 30. And I can see it rotting their brains. I can see why they think it’s not, why they think they are still being themselves, but it is very, very obvious from the outside what it is doing to them. It is worrisome. It is depressing. There is this whole thing going on where it is taken as an article of faith that Elizabeth Warren’s housing bill is anti-renter because “renters will be locked out of single-family homes.” This is not an opinion, they are claiming that the facts of the bill say this. And none of them are even questioning it. And, like, the counterfactual isn’t some complex reading of the bill: the counterfactual is “an individual could buy a house and rent it to someone.” It’s so weird. They are all just… factually wrong? Comfortably, factually wrong. I mean, never mind wrestling with the very interesting ramifications of “would it be good or bad if more landlords were small businesses and single owners rather than large corporations,” just completely misinterpreting something stone-cold obvious. Because they are all in an echo chamber. It is fucked up. It is sad. It makes me actually, like, mildly fearful of even hanging out with these friends.

Many such examples exist, he said, lazily.

Get off Twitter, man. It is rotting your brain. I mean, Bluesky is probably rotting your brain too. Excellent article I read about this last night, about libertarians adopting the language of the far left. Really nailed a thing I think has been rumbling around in my brain.

Ohhh and Platner’s gonna win, isn’t he? I mean, I guess I prefer the geriatric to the (maybe) former Nazi. I think we should probably pick the non-Nazi. BUT I am also gonna recognize reality here and admit that Platner is out-polling the democratic geriatric and the Republican geriatric. Substantially. Both of them. He’s gonna win. Again, not my choice. Don’t @ me.

Sooooo if he is gonna win, I think we gotta basically spend some time getting this fellow to not follow The Way of Fetterman, we gotta get this guy taught how to Act Right™ and maybe we can spin the whole thing as a positive example that you can get out of the Manosphere and be a Real Human again.

I mean and I guess this is uncouth to admit but a) a bunch of people are gonna vote for the guy and they are giving him the benefit of the doubt and b) we doooo want the seat and c) Even Fetterman (oh god don’t kill me) is probably better than Susan Collins in his voting record (oh god don’t kill me).

Oh god don’t kill me.

FINALLY back on my shit getting GMHHAY vol 2 done. I wrote the intro yesterday, Emma re-sent me the cover, gonna get my print proofs ordered today. Very exciting. Not sure why I completely dropped the ball on that project for six months whoops.

It did get me thinking though: If I took the million or so words of GMHHAY in its entirety and told an LLM to spit up the best 5,000 sentences, do we think it would be any good?

I wonder, I wonder.

Jane endured her double punishments yesterday, for her cruelty to me Wednesday night and her absolutely insane tantrum yesterday. She endured them both with dignity and aplomb and a distinct kindness, so I don’t know what’s going on, man. Being an absolute angel again today it is great. We have been having very long conversations about population and population density and she is very interested in Wyoming right now.

We were talking about our big American road trip. I have a giant list I am gonna drive her all around the country will probably take most of a summer. Which age is best? I told her I wanted it to be when she was young enough that she wasn’t a surly teenager and still liked spending time with her dad. She said she didn’t think she was going to be a surly teenager (ha!) and that that only happens to boys. And.. she’s wrong but how wrong is she these days? I feel like this might ebb and flow through the decades and generations. I feel like right now there might be fewer surly girl teenagers than the 80s. But I could be wrong.

I wonder I wonder.

Don’t @ me.

Him no playlist today I don’t think.

Which means we are done.

God, it’s 11:15. I didn’t even wake up late today. Just moving slow.

Byeee.