Delta’s change in lounge policy will move me further from using them as my preferred airline. While the lounges are crowded, limiting the duration to 3 hours before departure (not boarding) will do little to alleviate the problem.

Often I occupy a spot in a lounge for a long time. Here’s a list of some of the reasons why:

• On standby for an earlier flight
• Traveling to the airport with others (co-workers, family, etc.) where my flight leaves after theirs
• Bad weather inbound
• Holiday crush
• Delayed or canceled flight
• Hotel checkout time
• International travel
• Something about my work calendar that needs me in a place with power, good wifi, and relatively low noise at a specific time unrelated to boarding
• When I arrive, needing to wait for co-workers, family, etc. so we can carpool to the destination

The list goes on. Other business travelers and those frequently taking to the air may have others.

I have ideas for Delta (and AMEX) on how to address lounge overcrowding, at least a little bit:

• Expand the Priority Pass access to include airport restaurant access and/or gate delivery food service
• Have a service desk for things like standby flights, rebooking, etc. near the check-in desk
• Staff the toll-free service numbers, social media response, and in-app chat so flyers can get fast help
• Have separate policies for domestic and international lounge access
• In international gateway airports, partner on a separate international lounge (like in Atlanta) and offer arrival lounge access
• Take reservations

The list goes on. Mostly my ideas revolve around people. So far, that seems to be one area outside of investment.

It’s easier to blame customers, in the short term. How dare they use our product!

“Claim your account”:

“Post dot news”, the Andreessen-funded probable cryptocurrency grift masquerading as a social network that I

busted on yesterday

(and that considers dunking on billionaires to be hate speech) is creating fake “placeholder” accounts to try and get their users to bully news organizations into signing up.

This is the kind of shit that Yelp regularly does.

Hey, remember in 2020 when Yelp decided to non-consensually funnel more business to their partner Gofundme by creating a “fundraiser” for your business whether you wanted one or not?

SF Bar Owner to Yelp: “Fuck All of These People Entirely”.

Hey, remember my 2012 long-form art project entitled, “I would like my business to not be listed on Yelp”? Part 1, Part 2.

Good times, good times.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Well made music stirs emotion. Music can encompass or traverse genre. Emotion? Maybe it is patriotic. Maybe it’s passionate. Maybe it’s funny. Maybe it’s emo and shoe gaze-y. Maybe it’s a lot of things and you can’t quite figure it out because you’re too busy being emotional because of that well made music.

My Achilles’ Heel, musically, is Chumbawamba’s 1997 irritatingly hopeful and delightfully disjointed British pub anthem, Tubthumping. It makes me want to cry every time I hear it. I used to actually cry every time I heard it. Why?

Part of my emotional release is right there in the chorus for all to hear — I get knocked down / but I get up again / y’ain’t never gonna keep me down — over and over again, Sisyphean in its repetition, and significant.

I did that, taking the knock down and getting up again, but not always in a healthy way for me. I made poor decisions based on false equivalence and self sacrifice for things not quite hope shaped. There’s a fatalism there, too, that I tend toward.

The other part my emotional release is in a lyrical bit — Don’t cry for me next door neighbor.

I do not understand why that bit gets me like it does. I expect it’s because I want my emotional process — illness or depression or whatnot — to be mine and not have someone close to me weigh in because that’s how I do it (for better and worse). Granted, in such a case the closeness would be geographical. I further expect I also didn’t want pity, but to have someone to whom I’m only geographically close to expel tears on my behalf would be too much.

Songs that people think should trigger an emotional response? Harry Chapin’s “Cat in the Cradle”, Elton John’s “Rocketman”, maybe the gawdawful “American Pie” by Don McLean. None of those rank in my book.

Throw a “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot at me, a song about sacrifice and circumstance, and we can talk about a tear jerking song.

this is why the future, be it NFTs or Memoji or the howling existential horror of the Metaverse, looks so ugly and boring: it reflects the stunted inner lives of the finance and technology professionals who produced it. As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer.

It is also obviously a pyramid scheme, in which the need for a salable commodity is imperative and endlessly renewed, but the commodity itself does not matter because it is useless — not even useless the way all art is useless, because you can get the images and whatever grains of nourishment your hungry little soul might find in them for free, but useless the way a canceled stamp is useless, useless like a receipt or an envelope that has been torn open. NFTs are an occasion for commerce masquerading as art, just as so many ostensibly meaningful experiences of the 21st century turn out to be occasions to spend money masquerading as life.

That’s how they feel to me, anyway. Presumably there is someone out there right now — not [NFT hawker Sean] Lennon but one of this followers, someone who consistently refers to him as “Sean Ono Lennon, whose dad was John Lennon from the Beatles, one of the greatest bands of all time” at a speed 1.5 times faster than normal talking — who saw SkullxNFT and experienced it as some of the most beautiful and emotionally moving art in history, right up there with the Mona Lisa and Avengers: Endgame.

(Via Vice via The Overspill)

TIL: I’m slightly taller than George Clooney, slightly shorter than Christian Bale, Ben Affleck is almost my weight, and 45-50 Lego Batmans can fit inside of me

(Via The Economist)