Things I did, noticed and enjoyed - July edition
I did one very big thing, and then a bunch of industry news happened anyway
A lot of big updates happened last week, but it’s the summer, so in lieu of taking a big break, we’re getting another one of these posts about other posts. A posts post. A post-post?
The big thing I did
I have done quite a bit actually since the last time I wrote one these but by far the biggest deal is…
I got married! I can’t exactly give a fair analysis of marriage one week in (although from my brief exploration, it’s The Best) but here’s a few thoughts on the wedding.
Weddings are great, and maybe this is heteronormative of me, but you should have one. You don’t even have to be marrying someone. Just host a big party, in a medium-sized accessible venue and harangue your family and loved ones into giving speeches on your behalf. Have a feast! Get overwhelmed by the outpouring of love for your collective existence! Watch your best friends cry in a way you have never seen before! And then take some notes. If it’s fun, you might run it again next year.1
I really thought I would have some inkling of doubt or fear the morning of the wedding. On TV shows the groom tends to panic at the realization he’s getting married, like it was sprung on him by an elite squad of matchmakers. Maybe he feels numb the morning of, overwhelmed by the enormity of the occasion. But I had no trepidation. I was alarmed to be honest. No one told me you could feel great on your wedding day.
Our venue was near where I used to live before dating my now wife, so I wandered over and sat on its porch. I tried to sense if there was any part of me that wanted to regress. Or if I felt like I’d sleepwalked into this commitment, never processing the world around me. I really thought about it.
All I felt was sure of the person I’d chosen and the decisions I’d made. Sometimes life isn’t like a TV show. Sometimes you just get what you want and there isn’t some last minute shenanigan. You just walk back to where you’re supposed to be and say your vows and you’re married to the person you love the most.
You know that your friends love you when they not only ask for endless shots that technically aren’t in your drinks package, but they also cut you off when it’s about to go too far. The ideal way to end a wedding night is giddy and conscious.
The lesser things I did
The world’s most popular YouTuber gives a lot of money to charity — like an incomprehensible amount — but in a loud, brash way that often seems totally contrary to its aims. For Tapestry, here’s a full episode on the philosophy behind the generosity of Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson.
I walk around wearing noise cancelling headphones pretty much constantly. I love it! I have a light tinnitus and the noise cancelling has helped me control sound exposure. But I’ve been curious if there’s anything of value in that sonic nether space. What exactly is in the noise that’s being cancelled? Mack Hagood has weirdly enough spent his whole academic career looking to answer that question.
I’m a poor reader of poets, but I love the idea of finding poetry out in the real world. Anis Mojgani is one of the best observers of living poetry, and the creator of the Tele-poem phone line. Every day during National Poetry Month, you can dial up his hotline and you’ll hear a new poem on the other end. Here’s the power of an old-fashioned phone line and what happens when you just listen to what’s on the other end.
Things I noticed
NordStar and Postmedia have ended their merger discussions. And it looks like the breaking point was over debt, according to the Globe and Mail. The final debate was over how much debt Postmedia’s largest lender, Chatham Asset Management (a U.S. hedge fund) would own in the merged company. Chatham controls Postmedia, as the largest debt holder, and NordStar executives were perhaps worried what that would mean in a merger. Then the whole thing went poof. Sometimes mergers just vanish.
The most astonishing thing, for me, was the claim coming out of NordStar that it has no debt on the books. Revenue is apparently tight and shrinking, but hey, if that’s true, they have a match in a dark cave that Postmedia does not.
After saying they wouldn’t tweak Bill C-18/Online News Act, the government is proposing some big tweaks to lure back Meta and Google. The heart of these are deeply technical in a way I won’t bore you with, but I think Sara Bannerman summarized these proposals best for the Globe and Mail.
“The draft regulations would allow Google or Meta to meet its obligations under the Online News Act, in some cases, by not paying for news.”
“Rather, they might ‘pay’ for news by providing training, infrastructure, or data agreements that would make Canadian news media more dependent and interlinked with platforms that, as we have seen, might pull out of Canada if providing news doesn’t meet their business model,” she said.
The tweaked ONA would be nearly identical to the Australian version of this act. The downside risk here is it ties big companies to platforms that provide less and less traffic to news sources. On the other hand, it could bring back some traffic to smaller media outlets like the Narwhal, who need search and social more than say, the Toronto Star does. Google and Meta haven’t agreed to anything, and Meta has been firm they’re not going to negotiate at all, so it may be too little too late.
I wrote a bit about the flaws of the ONA, but I did like Aaron Wherry’s analysis that while the merits of the bill are up for debate, the actual fight is about power.
The lesson might simply be that, no matter how much fun the apps are, allowing individual corporate entities to accumulate so much unchecked power always comes with downsides.2
The spicier version of that argument was made by Paul McLeod for his newsletter Smash Cuts. He does a much deeper cut into accusations of ad market fraud and cartel behaviour from Google and Meta than I did. Talking about the ad market is tough! It’s like explaining to someone the electrical wiring behind your drywall. Your home only functions because its there, but it’s hard to picture.
Things I enjoyed
Hadestown (musical)— I was worried that the NA tour would disappoint, but boy it did not. Matthew Patrick Quinn’s Hades goes for a industrialist shock jock take that felt distinct from the cast album and the original 2010 concept album. He was powerful, yet pathetic. Chibueze Ihuoma (who returned to the role for my showing) took a bit to warm up, but by the end he brought a real sweetness to Orpheus. The workers build a union midway through Act 2. The set design is a lot of fun. It’s a great time!
It is so weird the song “Why We Build the Wall” came out in 2010. You could not write it after 2016 without it being too corny to include. It’s like when the U.S. Senator in 2013’s Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance tries to beat you to death while screaming, “Make America great again!” Fiction is sometimes too good for reality to pass up.
LaserWriter II (book) — I love books about the pre-smartphone, pre-social media era of technology. LaserWriter II is a fictional reflection on the brief window when you could open up a printer and have a faint sense of how it worked. It’s also a picture of tech culture in the 90s, which feels almost like a different universe. The writing is breezy, while having enough heft to feel existential.
Past Lives (movie) — I don’t love the pieces that make up Past Lives. The English dialogue is clunky, and I’m unconvinced that the Korean dialogue is better, it’s just subtitled. But the sum of its parts is so strong, it’s hard to deny. The cinematography, while highly referential of Wong Kar-wai, has a beautiful, dream-like quality. The whole thing feels like fable until the end when reality finally hits. Ah, the ending. It’ll make you weep!
Of course, the thing I recommend the most is have a partner who has a lot more skill in planning and execution, so that by the end it feels totally effortless.
Who would have guessed.