Three Tirades on a Wednesday
A client shoot was cancelled at the last minute due to COVID. Yup, still happening. So here's a whole bunch of words as a result.
Watches
Seven and a half years—that's a pretty reasonable amount of time between upgrades, wouldn't you say? I've owned an Apple Watch since the Series One was simply called The Watch, but in all this time I've only had the Original and the Series 3. This week I bought a new Apple Watch SE 2.
My Series 3 was very, very tired. At 4GB of internal storage, I couldn't even upgrade anymore without setting aside hours of babysitting for a complete wipe and re-install. This, without ANY apps on it. But I wore it everyday, despite its slowness and flaws: it tracked my walks and heart rate, provided a quick glance at weather conditions, and alerted me to the family's text messages (useful for pick-ups ya know).
I'm still getting acclimated to the SE 2, trying to rid myself of my miserly storage habits to take advantage of more than the basics. I can add apps now, I can stream stuff. Whoa.
I went for the largest size, so between this and the vastly superior display real estate I'm getting a whole new experience. Fewer swear words too ;)
Next stop 2029?
Almost a month
As I write this post it's been (checks journal...) 29 days since I left Twitter. But I can't escape the constant barrage of posts, articles, or tidbits recounting Musk's latest unhinged rant or behaviour. This week he's apparently furious at Apple for cutting advertising on the platform (like...everyone else?), and musing about making his own phone and app store. Last week he brought back you-know-who; then a cavalcade of toxic super-spreaders; basically, anyone he could find in the clown car parking lot at the back of the shed.
Because, polls.
This morning, after reading these posts from Nick Heer and John Gruber, I launched Safari to glance at his Twitter feed and get my own sense of the situation: holy smokes—the guy is fucking bonkers. It's horrific. Every thread is a screed of 8chan level lunacy, all madness, fake freedom cries, and calls to arms against anyone not on-board with his "vision". If he actually believes half of what he's tweeting he shouldn't be in charge of a vacuum cleaner, let alone several billion-dollar companies. And even if we dismiss all of this as some sort of theatre meant to rile up ""the libs"", the whole thing is puerile, borderline dangerous, and shows a profound lack of judgment, empathy... or business accumen.
There's an argument to be made for staying, while looking away. For keeping as tight a circle as possible, and steering clear of poisoned waters. But every tweet, every interaction, every user profile, feeds the Musk machine now.
Sometimes you regret certain decisions.
I've never regretted anything less.
The Other Pandemic
Unfortunately, the following tale is somewhat related to the Twitter saga. A few hours after I wrote about that, I had a conversation that provided too much context for my taste.
A delivery person I've known [1] for years came by and we struck up a conversation about a phishing text I'd received the day before. "You know who's behind this, right?", he said, "It's the Chinese Communist party... People are revolting over there, and they need money". Ok. I figured he was commenting on current events, with protests being in the news since last weekend. But then he added "thousands are revolting against the Brazilian government too", and I wasn't sure which side he was talking about anymore. Then he told me we were dormant, in Canada, but that it would all blow up next year, because Trudeau had stolen the election. Like Macron. At this point I gently mentioned that we weren't on the same page here and we should probably talk about something else...but no, he went on.
Turns out he'd also just read that Joe Biden was about to be arrested for fraud. He'd heard this on Telegram. I smiled and just offered that we should be careful with sources... "I've seen it myself!" he said. The stolen elections, apparently.
We said goodbye, I closed the door and looked at Watson who'd been standing there the whole time. I patted his head, gave him a treat and sighed.
I don't know when this stops, or how.
But it really needs to.
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Known as in quick conversations when a package arrives from that shipping company.↩︎
