oMg I cAn’T BeLiEvE iT’s NoVeMbEr AlReAdY.

Well here we are. Right now you’re one of the following:

1. Nursing a candy hangover

2. Nursing a real hangover

3. Thinking about wtf are you doing today now that it’s Friday

4. Scrolling through this realfastwaitslowdownnnn

What you actually should be thinking is, what are you gonna do with that extra hour of sleep you’re getting this weekend (if you live in North America) . Or if you’re like me, you think you’ve got an extra hour so you stay up way too late and it ends up making no difference in the morning anyway.

Huh. All these years I thought it was for farmers. At least that’s what I told my kids. The farmers control how much daylight we need because they need the sun to grow their crops.

I thought this was all connected to the Farmer’s Almanac or something - isn’t that how we decided what time it was during the day? Farmers looked up at the sun and said it’s lunch time?

I know, I know - this is a hole I’m digging myself deeper and deeper into.

Also shout out to the new AI thing Google is doing. It only took them like 15 years to summarize the search result for me. If you’re an avid reader of this newsletter you’ll remember that I covered Tiktok being the place where younger people are going to search these days. Does this new AI feature claw back those young people on to Google now?

I doubt it - my oldest daughter lives in SnapChat, CapCut, and TikTok trends. The only reason why she knows about Google is because they make her use Google Classroom at school.

Google has officially graduated to Facebook status as old people software.

This week's issue is a 5 minute read…but if you skim through probably like a minute?

🎵 Tyler creates

💰️ Russia hates

🎴 Hush travel rates

Chromakopia: An Album Review

The first time I listened to Chromakopia I will admit that I did not listen to it the way Tyler, The Creator wanted me to. It was not front to back straight through, although I did make my teenage daughter sit in the car and listen to the second half of the album with me.

When I asked her what she thought of it:

I wanna listen to K-Pop

“St. Chroma” kicks the album off with an industrial head bop. And then you look back at the album cover (👆) and it makes sense. The industrial clack clack clack continues on in the next track “Rah Tah Tah” and all I can picture is Beyoncé dancing on stage to “Hold up/Countdown” and the intro scene of Frozen.

What I really enjoy about Tyler, The Creator albums is he really tries to take you on a journey. Where in the 90’s, interludes and skits became popular in rap albums, they often times were just there as fun filler versus adding value to the album’s “story”…if there was a story to begin with. A great example of this is the transition between “Rah Tah Tah” and “Noid” - this is why he wants you to listen to his albums back to front.

You ever listen to a Tyler song and it sounds like it’s part of another song either at the beginning or the end? Yeah, that’s on purpose because it usually is.

For me, “Darling, I” is an ode to Tyler’s vast musical taste alongside the fact that he definitely grew up listening to 90’s RnB. This track makes me want to go to Woo Lounge in Dundas Square in 2008.

By the time you get to “I Killed You”, Tyler’s signature hazy, jazzy clouds floating in a summer sky sound comes out. Given he wrote, produced, and arranged all the songs, would you expect anything less?

When I first heard “Take Your Mask Off” immediately I thought there were sneak disses in either the first or the last verse directed towards Drake, because that’s the cool thing to do these days in rap. But a combination of the lack of internet chatter on this and me listening to it again realized he’s really referencing himself if anything.

Throughout the album you continue to get the industrial *clank clank* in other tracks. You also get a somewhat new flow from Tyler, kinda like the Kendrick Lamar whiney west-coast flow - you know what I’m talking about. I’m not a fan of it, Tyler is born and raised in California but he never tried to sound like anyone but himself and thus created his own flow and sound. This is basically what Drake has done as well - when was the last time we heard him sound like Nothing Was The Same through in through.

Artists evolve - blah, blah, blah.

Chromakopia is a great album sonically. It sounds great with headphones on, it sounds great while driving in the car. Tyler does a great job wrapping the album into a sonically sound package alongside all kinds of easter eggs from past albums.

This truly is an album you can listen to from start to finish in one sitting and I’m really glad Tyler tries that hard to give his listeners something that actually makes them want to listen the whole way through.

Also this is cool:

Russia Sues Google for ALL the Money

We all learned a new number this week - $20 DECILLION

aka

$20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Bruh.

How did we get here: Back in 2020 Russia took Google to court for banning an ultra Russian nationalist channel called Tsargrad. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Google banned more Russian channels until it finally pulled out of Russia when the country seized their bank accounts. A Russian court imposed a fine of $1025/day with the total fine doubling every week since 2020 - and that’s how we got to a DECILLION.

Firstly, there’s nowhere near that kind of money in the world - the GDP of the world is around $100 trillion. And Google only did $88 billion in revenue last quarter…only.

Secondly, it would take 7.41 x 10²² Elon Musks to actually pay the fine.

Lastly, Google doesn’t operate in Russia anymore so they probably have nothing to worry about. Kinda like this guy I know who moved to Hong Kong years ago after failing to appear in court in Canada for a traffic offense, suffice to say he’ll never be back in Canada.

And in case you’re wondering, it would take 1579 years for the world’s GDP to reach $20 Decillion.

Shhhh, I’m “Working”

When my wife and I worked in the same office we used to go on dates and do our work in a bubble tea restaurant. No one at work knew we were dating, let alone that we were working from the comfort of a canto-pop filled restaurant. But with a pretty decent internet connection, no one could tell the difference.

It seems the rest of the world has caught up to our secretive ways.

When Covid hit the world basically threw their papers in the air and said f*ck this sh*t. It really didn’t matter where you worked as long as the work got done. And frankly, if you were in an office job, as long as the internet was stable enough to take a video call, it really didn’t matter.

And so the “hush trip” became a thing.

As you would suspect, hush trips blew up with all you digital nomads flying off to Portugal, Costa Rica, Thailand, Bali, and wherever else my NGMI Slack group reported from (IYKYK).

But as innocent as it sounds to just pick up and leave to Croatia, your employer may not appreciate that you’re logged in to work from a completely different continent. Security and privacy concerns, as well as the simple fact that if they needed you to come into the office, all weigh heavily with employers these days.

As much as employees have been appreciating the freedom remote work / working from home has provided, this is partially the reason why employers have fast tracked return to work policies, when once they might have not thought otherwise.

Hush Trip Tips

1. Ensure you’re going to have similar if not better connectivity than your current work environment.

2. Pick a destination that you’ll feel comfortable working in, since the point of this is to travel and STILL get your work done.

3. Stay ON TOP of your time zones - last thing you need is to slip up because you didn’t realize it was only 2PM work time while you’re pounding back margs in the pub.

4. You probably need a co-conspirator on the inside - someone who can vouch for you while you’re away “working”.

5. Get your damn work done!

Hush Trip inspo:

@frankielapenna.10

Man Crashes Bike While on Live Virtual Work Call | frankielapenna!!