🧠💩 brain dump (Digger, sameness, hardcovers suck, Lucy's football)

Happy Wednesday! In no particular order:

• Saw Digger yesterday. Wonderful to see a movie this confidently weird and swing-for-the-fences ambitious. Yes, it's flawed, and overly long, but it also literally changed the way I saw the world as I walked out of the theater.
• Our Digger show was sold out last night. But that's LA for ya.
• Digger is not what you think it's about.
• People are mocking Tom Cruise's performance as a shameless Oscar bid. But he is a fantastic actor—what else would one expect? "Stay in your lane"?
• People also seem gleeful that Digger is a financial bomb. These are the same people who complain about the sameness of the world, only to balk when something genuinely different appears.
• Of sameness: I take my mom to McDonald's often. She loves it. At 85, she can eat whatever the fuck she wants. Every time I use the touch screen menu I feel like I'm in a giant food ATM. Restaurant, reduced to iPad.
• My car is a phone that I happen to drive.
• More sameness: during road trips, I tend to seek out Starbucks, or Targets, or Whole Foodses, because it's what I'm used to, and also because I stupidly believe it's too risky to try something local. Like I'll die or something.
• I only read real books, preferably paperbacks, because I have a hard time recalling what I've read on Kindle. I think it's the sameness of the experience: same device, same feel, same font, same colors. Books, reduced to data.
• I don't like hardcover books. They're too heavy and expensive.
• It turns out hardcovers are also very American. In the rest of the world, paperbacks rule.
• That said, I loved seeing all my books come out in glorious, heavy, expensive, American hardcover. Because I am an asshole.
• Mark Zuckerberg said his Muse AI agent will free up time to connect with family and friends and hobbies. (Tech bros said the same thing about social media and email and computers in general.)
• Agentic AI will give you zero additional minutes of free time.
• Agentic AI assumes you super much desire to live like its creators: a bunch of antisocial managerial executives.
• These promises of agentic AI remind me of what I call the Law of Lucy's Football. Lucy tees up the ball, Charlie Brown goes for the kick, Lucy pulls it away at the last second, Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Every time.
• I loved Peanuts as a kid, and still think Snoopy & Woodstock are adorable. But in truth, the comics were never actually funny. I diligently read all of them anyway. The characters felt like friends, then family.
• That feels like some kind of metaphor for something.

See you later!

👋 Dave