One year ago today, which I now realize is April Fool's, I bought the LG OLED Flex as the crowning touch for my home office. Coincidentally, a review of it would be the last thing I wrote for Waypoint. Now this isn't buyer's remorse speaking, but I do have to concede I got less out of it that I hoped or expected. Mostly because our dogs have a distinct—indeed, vast—preference for having me play games and do work in the living room. So here I am, working in my office at 4:30 in the morning so I can knock out a lot of the work and gaming that works better up here before I transition to a day of puttering downstairs, where our poodles can drowse contentedly on the couch while keeping an eye on me.
To be clear, it's not that they are incredibly anxious dogs or that they won't let me work in separate spaces in my house, it's just that I can tell how much happier and more relaxed they are when they feel like everyone is gathered in one space. So, if I have a day where I don't need to be in my office, with my back to the rest of the house staring into a monitor, I try to spend more of it in the living room and dining room. I don't think having dogs draping a paw over your mouse hand or sleeping between your legs is the best thing for productivity, but it might be the closest you get to the dream of getting all your work done without having to wake up and get out of bed.
Speaking of work, this week we're going to be working around a short Cado absence. With my ethernet adapter seemingly irreparably on the blink, that might cut into my streaming ability (note to self: buy a USB ethernet adapter) but Patrick should still be with you for some Daddy's Dogma. Speaking of, did he seriously roll a cat-person version of me for this game?
There's one other bit of business I'll point out here, and it's probably a theme we'll hit a few times this month so apologies in advance if you get sick of hearing about it. April will mark a year since we learned we were being laid-off by VICE, and one of the first things that happened when that news broke was that tons of folks canceled auto-renew on existing subscriptions to what was Waypoint Plus and is now Remap.
To be clear, if you hate auto-renew as a matter of principle or if it's anathema to how you do your budgeting (I didn't have the luxury of using auto-renew or auto-pay on anything during most of my career, so I certainly get it) then I am certainly not saying we need you to turn it back on or even want you to. But if you're in that cohort that wanted to make damned sure that VICE didn't get a dime of subscription money for a podcast and a team they were firing, then we'd appreciate you turning auto-renew back on for Remap.
It helps us have a consistent baseline that we can plan against, because frankly it's a heck of a lot easier to have people cancel and opt-out whenever they decide they don't want a subscription anymore rather. That does, inherently, mean that occasionally people will get charged who then realize they mean to cancel (even at Remap, this has been known to happen!). But the value of auto-renew is not the small amounts of extra money you get from late cancellations. It's the fact that reminding people to sign back up for a subscription they like and were enjoying is a much harder thing to do. It basically makes much more of this a sales job than a creative job, something we're generally keen to avoid.
So if you were part of that wave of folks who turned off auto-renew starting around April or May of last year... we'd appreciate it if you consider turning it back on for the Remap era.
- MONDAY: Increasingly we don't do stuff on Monday! I guess it being the Monday after Easter makes it feel more like the kind of day you'd typically get off at a company, but really it's just turned into a day where we handle errands, focus on side-projects, or do the kind of work that just doesn't fit into a regualr work week very well.
- TUESDAY: For Library Tier subscribers, Patrick and Rob write about their feelings coming away from their first in-person event in over a year.
- WEDNESDAY: The long awaited HOA on grocery shopping and its discontents.
- THURSDAY: Usually we record Remap Radio on Thursdays, but with Cado out, we might end up shifting that. Maybe we'll do something else! Maybe another article will come out. Who can say? Oh, it's my job to say? Well, Remap is all about discovery and emergent narratives, so we'll learn what Thursday is going to be together. How about that?
- FRIDAY: Another episode of Remap Radio and Patrick plays more Dragon's Dogma, timing TBD.
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