Randoming on June 3, 2026 🪦🔢🏢🔱✨
Random thoughts too long for a Mastodon post, but not long enough for a full-blown post.
- 🪦 It’s finally happening (insert GIF here). On Friday 06-05, I will make my initial payment for my mother’s burial, sign papers, then hand over the box holding her cremains. The current thinking for the exact burial date will be in early July, with the replacement tombstone being delivered anytime between August and October 2026. The end is in sight.
- 🔢 Even though it’s been a couple weeks since the end of my New Mexico vacation, I still feel less inclined to hop back into habits or patterns that were commonplace beforehand. Breaking a routine has caused me to question some of the routines themselves, which is no bad thing.
- 🏢 A new guy got hired at work for my team, so I will no longer be the “rookie" as of Monday 06-15! He’s being talked up as someone who can hit the ground running, though that’s a lot of pressure to put on someone just starting up. I hope for his sake that he can take this expectation in stride, or possibly push back upon it if need be.
- 🔱 I have not been a fan of Pitchfork gatekeeping its record ratings behind a paywall, even though I understand from a purely financial perspective that this database is a valuable thing. Culturally and historically, though? It’s a poor look. More and more of their reviews require a subscription, though I can’t figure out a pattern: a Miles Davis pre-fusion album goes behind the paywall, but a retrospective on Fanny does not. On top of that, I am still angered a bit at their write-up of Yes’ “Owner Of A Lonely Heart,” because it was structured to compare the two Trevors (Horn and Rabin), while getting quite a few facts wrong in the process of sticking to this narrative. This is one era of the band I know pretty well, as it’s still somewhat boggling to think of Yes merging with The Buggles, but you’d be led astray if you read this article to find out more about that period. The actual story is interesting enough on its own, so check it out.
- ✨ I’m starting to warm to the idea that AI is censorship, not in terms of subject matter, but in how so many conversations end up talking about it. AI has become the “only” acceptable topic to discuss, and good God is it boring.