Author: Stagger Lee

Twitter was born on the phone. The shortcode was 40404 to text in a tweet, and the very 140 character limit was based on the 160 characters available for SMS so that you could use commands like ‘d username where the hell are you’ (why you wouldn’t just text in that situation, I don’t know). In fact, when the iPhone first arrived in 2007, it’s arguable that Twitter was one of the original killer apps, not least because it’s something that translated easily to the simplified web interface of a 480×320 screen. For the longest time (read: before they artificially limited access to the API), Twitter apps were the playground for new iOS developers; features as important as pull-to-refresh had their start in Twitter apps.

And all the while Facebook foundered. There were SMS features with Facebook, there was a rudimentary web interface and a succession of horrible apps (to this day, deleting the Facebook application from your iPhone is generally regarded as an easy way to recover 10% of your daily battery usage) and the abortive Facebook Phone (a cheap Android with Facebook as its US and horrible pricing).  I’ve seen people refer to Twitter more times than I can count as “the friends who live in your phone”, something I’ve never ever heard said of Facebook.

And yet.

Facebook might have won in the long run because it went for people who didn’t have smartphones. While Twitter was on a growing mobile platform, Facebook was on the PCs of everyone’s mother. Everyone was using it at work. It’s been almost six years ago since I argued in this very space that Facebook was the new AOL and wanted to be, and sure enough, it’s now famous for AOL-caliber penetration and discourse. Facebook is shorthand in the Valley for “your racist aunt sending you Donald Trump graphics with lies Snopes debunked two years ago”, but out there in the wider world, Facebook may as well be the Internet.

And this is what Twitter is chasing, to its detriment. 140 character limit originally defined by SMS? About to go. The system of shorthand that evolved from within the user base itself (RTs, dot-cites, the very @ itself)? Now built-in, in a fashion that isn’t even consistent from website to mobile site to mobile app. Even the straightforward linear timeline is going away, no matter how much Jack Dorsey protests, because just giving you your own personal firehose in order is less ad-friendly than mining the stream and percolating up things that make for better traffic and ad impressions, never mind the loss of a linear narrative.

Twitter is brilliant in its simplicity, because it was a dumb app and a dumb protocol. I described it at the dawn of time as “blast texting” and given that SMS/iMessage is my primary social network these days, that isn’t far wrong. I’ve been making use of it since 2007 and in the simplest form, with the fewest followed people, it’s quite handy (even if my more populated accounts always seem to make things worse at some level; the Vanderbilt-related one…but that’s another story for another time). But the more they make it like Facebook, which I abjured the regular use of years ago, the less valuable it becomes.  Once again, not everything has to be the market leader, but in Silly Con Valley in 2016, nobody knows how to do anything else.

And so Twitter chases the least common denominator, while I try to figure out how to persuade my friends to consider alpha.net or Peach.

Antonin Scalia was the intellectual firepower of conservatism on the Supreme Court for thirty years, for better or worse. The phrase “evil genius” springs to mind, as his jurisprudence and perspective reflected both in equal measure; while he could be surprisingly forward thinking on issues of net neutrality and castle-doctrine privacy, something – perhaps the intense Catholic devotion, perhaps just age – prevented him seeing the individual lives behind sweeping arguments against women, against gay people, against the criminally accused (not to deny him his scathing and correct judgement in Hamdan). Ironically, his closest friend on the court was his ideological foil, Ginsburg – perhaps because game recognize game, possibly because when you’re one of nine demigods up on the Olympus of American jurisprudence, there are few others who understand what it’s like up there. 

But he’s gone now, and as predicted, the GOP is closing ranks to argue that Obama should not be allowed to send a nominee to the Senate, despite years of precedent to the contrary. If it were the day after Election Day, and a new President was already elected, then absolutely, sit on things for the two months and change until the new candidate is sworn in. But we are almost a year out from Inauguration Day for the 45th President, and the idea that Obama should be obligated to shut his administration down early is beyond risible. Then again, in a word of perjury-trap impeachment and government shutdown over the debt ceiling and potential default and a President elected when another candidate had more of the popular vote, it’s pretty clear that precedent and norms mean nothing to the modern GOP. That the party of the Confederacy should argue that the first black President deserves three-fifths of a term, to quote numerous Twitter wags, is hardly suspending by this point. 

Because this is a huge pivot point. If Obama gets to do his duty, any candidate who gets through will replace Anthony Kennedy as the pivot point, and for the first time since God knows when, the Court will have a majority of Democratic nominees. (Thurgood Marshall joined in 1967 and no Democrat President got a nomination again until 1993; since 1980 Republicans have named 7 members to Democrats’ 4). The stakes for this election have just skyrocketed, and that may not be to the benefit of the GOP if the Democrats can make their voters aware of the consequences. 

House rules: everyone gets safe passage across the river. There will be plenty of time tomorrow. But for today, I would note that in 1986, Scalia was put on the court by a 98-0 vote after hearings that went like shit through a goose, largely because of the lengthy and rancorous elevation of Rehnquist to Chief Justice immediately before. I would argue that putting Scalia on the court was a substantially more consequential move, which as Chuck Berry would say goes to show you never can tell. 

As it turns out, driving an iconic Silicon Valley heritage corporation into the ground and then running a spectacularly incompetent GOP campaign for Senate that loses during a Republican wave election doesn’t rally voters to support your candidacy for President of the United States. So Carly Fiorina is out, along with Chris Christie (too Yankee) and Rand Paul (too glibertarian and too weird) and…who’s left at this point? Kasich (too unknown, too occasionally not nuts), Carson (too hopelessly unqualified and weird), Gilmore (one term as governor which ended in 2001 and you’re going to run for the White House NOW?), Bush (too Bush), and of course the Glimmer Twins, the beautiful duo, Trump and Cruz.  A hairdo like an onion loaf and a face like a fist. One tabloid star who thinks the White House is an entry-level job and has not the faintest idea how politics works, and one God-bothering Texan  who is universally reviled by his elected peers and has not the faintest relationship with the truth. 

Normally, this would be a layup for the Democrats, especially with the economy in not utterly ghastly condition and gas prices creeping down.  But on that side, it’s either a seventy-something self-described socialist who gets the kids fired up with things that are patently impossible to pass, or…Hillary.  I feel better about Hillary than I did eight years ago, but not much – I do think she learned from some of her mistakes (although with Mark Penn supposedly in the mix again, I think the ones she didn’t learn from will be more telling) and I think she has one big advantage (if you can call it that): she has been the most reviled, hated, slandered, and thoroughly put-upon woman in politics for the last twenty-five years, and it won’t make a difference if her enemies double-dog hate her, everything is pretty much out there already. The downside is that the Washington press has never liked her (or her husband), which is a big part of what helped Obama along, and the fact that…she’s been around for a quarter-century, which is how an old Jewish dude from Vermont can suddenly be au courant with the youth vote.

My big fear, as always, is that like Occupy Wall Street, Bernie will bring out a tidal wave of youth support…and when he doesn’t win the nomination, the wave breaks and his followers go back to whatever they were doing instead of getting behind Hillary. Look, this isn’t like the old days. The worst candidate the Democrats can put up is still better than the best one the GOP can offer, because if the GOP wins, they have the White House and Congress and there is no safety catch on the United States of Alabama. And a lot of people are saying “well with a GOP Congress Hillary won’t be able to get any more through than Bernie!” It’s not about that anymore.  It’s not about bringing around the progressive Jerusalem. It’s about keeping the Confederates from working their will.  At this point, we’re voting for a Democrat to be the finger in the dike, preventing the redneck flood. You can’t expect any more. That’s all they can be, until redistricting and demographics and hopefully the long slow arc of the universe bend things back around toward a vision of politics that isn’t grounded in Dixie in 1968.

So all I want out of a Democratic nominee is simple. I don’t care about the student loan stuff, because they can’t pass it.  I’m not interested in single-payer health care, because they can’t pass it.  I care about the Supreme Court and the veto pen, and that’s all I can care about. I need one thing and one thing only out of a Democratic candidate for President: victory in November, because the alternatives are too horrifying to contemplate.

So whoever, fine. Clinton, Sanders, I honestly don’t care which one gets it. As long as they fucking win.

 

ETA: did I forget Marco Rubio? Maybe, but as one Twitter wag put it, he failed his Turing test. In a world where anti-immigration sentiment is the driving force of the GOP primary electorate, Rubio fucked up by going along with the GOP’s postmortem in 2013 and trying to actually accomplish something on the immigration front. Bad mistake. You can’t really do that when a huge chunk of your base is voting solely on the basis of “who will shit on brown people the most” and if you don’t believe me, watch the numbers come in on March 1.

The car has a bad transmission, which is a sealed unit and will cost $6000 to replace. That’s bad arithmetic in a car that’s going on ten years old and over 100K miles and barely gets 23 miles per gallon at the best of times, and that’s before you consider that the speakers are randomly static-laden and the sunroof occasionally goes half-up of its own volition and the car stereo is iPod-era and doesn’t work well with the iPhone.  It’s one of those things where there’s so much to fix and straighten up that you despair of fixing it at all – and the promise of being able to find something at least partly electrical is very attractive.

Right now, the three contenders are the Prius V, the newest Chevy Volt, and the Ford Fusion Energi. The Prius is just as it says: big hybrid wagon, proven technology. But ultimately fuel-burning; there’s no all-electric option there.  The Volt will go all-electric for 50 miles, which is enough to get to a Cal game or up to the city – and if you don’t find a charger, you still have the gas generator charging you back up, with an ultimate range far enough to drive to Disneyland on a tank. Splitting the difference is the Fusion Energi – only about 20 miles all-electric, but enough for me to go to work and back or for us to get groceries or run the quick errands without having to dip into the gas motor. 

Personally, the Volt is at the top of my list, but I haven’t sat in one or driven it or anything – but I do really like the idea of an American-made electrical vehicle (and a Chevy at that, given that my family literally bought nothing else from 1969 to 1993) without the complexity of a six-speed transmission to deal with and with support for Apple CarPlay and modern phone integration. But with the others, I also like the idea of a car that I know I’ll have room to sit in and have a grown-up midsize ride.

And that’s the thing – I’m starting to get like that with the house. The facing on the cabinets is peeling, the carpet on the stairs needs to be cleaned if not replaced outright, one of the toilets makes a noise and another has a rickety seat and has to have the handle held down to flush, and the whole thing needs a massive allergen flush to get the dust out so I can start breathing through the night normally. (Maybe.) Things being how they are, though, it’s not like we can sell the house and start over somewhere else; unless you bought AAPL at $15 in 1997 and sold it all six months ago, the only way you sell a piece of property in Silly Con Valley is if you’re leaving for good and never coming back.

And in a way, I suppose I’m a little like that about myself. I’ve been dealing with this sleep study and its aftermath for months now – what started off as a “am I sleeping wrong on this shoulder and causing my neck/shoulder pain that way?” turned into claustrophobic masks and allergy shots and a million wires in my scalp, and even now, when I can finally just barely make it through the entire night without ripping the BiPAP mask off my face, I’m not sleeping any more soundly or waking up any less, which begs the question whether the sleep clinic knows how to do any more than “positive air pressure”. I genuinely suspect they don’t, which makes me wonder how I’m ever going to property evaluate things like posture and head elevation and whether I need a different pillow or mattress or God knows what. The shoulder still hurts, by the way, and there’s been a recurring pain in the left hamstring for a while now and we haven’t yet sorted out what the deal is with the dust allergy and whether that’s helping or not, and my heart rate and blood pressure and cholesterol are all elevated from even four years ago and only respond sporadically to changes in diet and exercise, if at all.

As with so many things, the problem is that when there’s too many things to fix, you despair of ever being able to get them all fixed, which in turn leads to despairing of getting any of them fixed.  And it’s often tough to undertake a new approach when it’s going to be a long time before you see results, if ever, and then ask why you gave up this food or that drink or did this much extra exercise only to see your LDL or triglyceride numbers budge not at all. It’s not just energy of activation that’s tough to overcome, it’s the willingness to try something new that’s going to take take a lot of time and effort and isn’t guaranteed to pay off in the end.

Maybe that’s why I don’t have any hobbies. Or why I’m not a gamer. Actually there are plenty of reasons for that, but we’ll get to that later.

It’s strange how some things (take, as a completely random example, all American football) can put you in an incredibly shitty mood for no apparent reason (okay, because it strikes at deeper emotions about your place in the world and the state of our civilization, but bugger all that for now) and some other things (like, say, the right pair of boots and the right jacket and the right song randomly coming up on the iPhone) can put you in a good mood…and what do you do? You question WHY you’re in a good mood all of a sudden.

This, bluntly put, is incredibly fucked up. If there’s one thing I like to think I’ve figured out in the last ten years, it’s that life is poor, nasty, brutish and short, tomorrow isn’t promised to you, and you need to indulge in the things you enjoy and stop doing the things that make you miserable. So if some combination of Aldens and second-hand Navy peacoat and a random Irish song combine and put a smile on your face, the thing to do isn’t to mourn how that public house isn’t there any more and you haven’t seen most of that gang in person for years and there’s nothing like that here…the thing to fucking do is to bathe in the warm glow of your memories and take that energy and point it toward laying waste to all in your path and bringing honor and pride to the memory of the rifles of the EUS.

If you’re happy, stop fucking asking why.

It’s almost over with, and not a minute too soon. The NFL gets its slime on enough without adding a soupçon of inconvenience, and this has been a rough week for the train and the traffic and everything else. I just came from two hours of additional walking patrol to be eyes and ears for the cops so that nothing untoward happens, and the road closures are bad enough without the fact the light rail has been commandeered for stadium travel only. If you normally take the VTA train, you’re on a bus bridge today, and good luck finding it.

And for all of this, I still have a rooting interest, despite my determination not to watch a minute of the game – I want Denver to lose, partly because of residual venom when I backed them only for them to shit the bed against the Niners, but largely because I don’t want to have to put up with the avalanche of Peyton Manning fellatio if he falls ass-backward into another ring through no fault of his own. One more loss in the championship should shut that down quickly, and offer the added attraction of the hidebound NFL and its media apologists losing their shit over Cam Newton.

Which is its own problem – I love what Cam Newton does for the league, or to it, but I resent the fact that he’s the living breathing incarnation of why Vanderbilt’s ceiling is nine wins once a century or so. Which is one of the things that made Vandy football so difficult to watch last year and this, and why I largely punched out on college football.  Now I find myself doing the same thing with basketball – partly because Kevin Stallings is past his sell-by date as head coach and excels at making a nickel out of twenty-five cents, but largely because the SEC cares about one thing and basketball isn’t it – and the caliber of officiating and decision-making reflects that, especially when the ref show blows for 52 fouls in a 40 minute game.

So what does that leave me with? At least we’re competitive in baseball. Plus, there are a handful of teams and sports that I can engage in and root for without being emotionally over-involved.  Baseball is at the top of the list, just because you can’t get too high or too low when you have a hundred and sixty-something games to get through in six months. The expectations for the Oakland A’s are about right too; with the Giants having three World Series wins in five seasons, it’s starting to feel a bit like rooting for the house. But the San Jose Giants are immense fun to go watch in person, as are the San Jose Earthquakes. As is the English Premier League, for that matter, and despite all these years of trying I still don’t have a team I’d rather pull for than Fulham, so I don’t have to be too too stuck into any particular result.

And then there’s the Warriors, Golden State and Santa Cruz alike. That’s a pretty easy lift when they’re defending champs and Golden State is on course to set records for season victories and home winning streak and Steph Curry is the most electrifying man in sports, but I’m not under any illusion that’ll last forever…so just enjoy it while it does. Sadly, though, the featured sports of college athletics are pretty much a no-go zone these days. It’s unfortunate, but it’s what self-care and mental health require.

So it looks like March 15 will be the event in which Apple unveils the next round of stuff: new Watch information (and possibly new bands), an iPad Air 3 with some sort of compatibility with the Pro’s accessories and special features, and of course the much-debated iPhone 5SE, so-called, which the Great Mentioner now thinks will be running the chipset of the iPhone 6S alongside the camera of the 6 and the form factor, more or less, of the 5S (or perhaps the current iPod Touch).  The logic behind giving it the 6S chipset is that Apple doesn’t want to produce a new phone which will be two generations behind current come September, so we will presumably get to Columbus Day with all Apple phone offerings running either the A9 or the notional A10 in the notional iPhone 7.

And the rumors are flying about that – now in addition to the absence of a traditional headphone jack, we are asked to believe that wireless charging (at some distance, no less) are part of the package for the 7. It’s starting to sound like Jony Ive is serious about creating the Movie Phone – complete slick and modern and no wires ever and is never plugged in and magically juices up. It’s a nice thought. I’m not sure it’s what I want to gamble on just yet. Having the wireless tethering to the watch and Bluetooth headphones has already proven harsh on the battery without having to stand within a foot of the magic pad to get some charge back in the damn thing.

In a lineup like that, too, the 5SE moniker makes even less sense.  If the phone is a smaller version of the 6S without TouchID (and a 8 MP camera rather than 12), why not just say 6C and make it “compact” rather than “cheap”, have the 6S and 6S Plus, and then the 7? Why stick to the 5 numbering at all? I’m trusting that this will all get cleaned up sometime in the next five weeks.

But the big thing is this: I have to hold off on buying any of this nonsense. I have batteries lying around everywhere (I think I may own at least three lipstick chargers plus the external case) and my iPhone 6 through work is unlocked, so there is no percentage in buying this notional new iPhone until proven by experiment and math that the newer chipset and smaller screen actually work out to superior battery life.  Otherwise, there are much better things I can burn this $650 of walking-around money on, mostly in London…

 

EDITED TO ADD: So at lunchtime today I finally had the opportunity to handle the much-debated Apple Smart Battery Case with an actual iPhone 6S in it. For as much abuse as Apple’s taken over this product, it’s been all in the wrong direction; everyone went mental about the “hump” in back.  Well, spoiler alert: the hump means that the edges are just the same as they would be normally, and the hump fits in (but doesn’t fill in my case) the hollow in your hand while holding the phone. No other battery case I’ve ever used on any iPhone was able to accomplish that (although the Moto X did it internally, with a terrace-stepped battery in the rounded body of the phone itself).  And the practical upshot is that with the Apple case, it’ll draw all its power from the case first and leave the phone fully charged, rather than having to use the case to charge the phone at diverse times. 

The biggest shame on this case is its necessity, not its implementation. The implementation is surprisingly good. It’s only because I’ve already spent that $100 on all the above-mentioned external batteries than I don’t spend it on this.

So on Saturday (really on Friday night), I switched SIM cards in my phones. The iPhone 6, freshly unlocked, took a turn on T-Mobile while my daily driver AT&T account ran through my first-gen Moto X. I only bothered for about a day, but it was terribly illuminating.

For starters, the AT&T Moto X didn’t have any appreciably better battery life than when it was on T-Mobile. I didn’t do any music playback from it, but it was fully charged at 9:30 AM and was down to below 15% battery by 7 PM. I didn’t think I was hitting it particularly hard, either, but with no music happening everything I was doing was hitting the screen, which is the biggest draw in any phone. Meanwhile, the T-Mobile-equipped iPhone 6 was pulling upward of 68 Mbps data download on LTE and seemingly offered plenty of signal anywhere other than on base at Moffett, which is a bad spot for signal for anyone. 

But more alarming was Sunday after I’d switched back. I did some audio playback but not that much – but in the span of maybe five hours off the plug and about three and a quarter hours total use, the iPhone 6 dropped to about 15% battery life. If I had to pin it down to one thing, I’d say it was Twitter, because that was the biggest battery killer while we were in Maui last week. Fortunately, the wife came through with the battery pack I’d loaner her for her day in San Francisco, or I would have had to call it a night and go home at 5:30 PM. But to only get four hours of actual screen time off a phone is kind of a problem.

The Hawaii test worked out reasonably well – I had the external battery case, which is a bulky plastic thing that holds about 3000 mAh and is good for charging the phone from 20% to 80% twice. As long as I can plug it in every night, I ought to be OK with that abroad – bearing in mind that I was never using it for Kindle and precious little audio (other than in flight). But Safari, Tweetbot, Instagram, even Mail – all burn 1% of battery every three minutes of use, seems like, and Reeder even slightly more. I think it’s reasonable to assume in London that in addition to social media and photography, we can expect to hit transit and mapping apps pretty hard (there wasn’t much call for it in Hawaii on account of either driving everywhere or laying out by the pool. Transit wasn’t a thing). More to the point: that bulky plastic case sucks. It’s huge in the pocket and impossible to get on and off the phone (unless you drop it, in which instance it flies apart in two pieces). On the other hand it basically means you only have to take the micro-USB charger. If I want to take an external battery, it’ll mean having a Lightning cable AND a micro-USB if I want to charge both at once.

And here’s the wild card: that iPhone 5se is still out there, notionally packing the same camera and chipset as the iPhone 6 I currently carry but in a 4-inch form factor that represents a display 37% smaller (and presumably less power-consuming) with a larger battery than the original iPhone 5S.  Depending on who you believe, more than half the people currently carrying an iPhone 5S are contract-eligible to upgrade, but haven’t – because nobody makes a 4-inch premium phone anymore.  The battery of the 5se, so-called, is allegedly 1642 mAh, which puts it almost halfway between the 5S and the 6S, but driving a 5S display and 6 chipset. Since the battery size went up 16% from the 5S to the 6, and the screen became 50% larger, the fact that advertised battery life went up slightly in the 6 is suggestive that the same chipset with a smaller display and larger battery than the 5S will yield legit battery life improvements over the 6 and 6S. And if nothing else, I’ll have two or three months to figure out whether this is true before travel time.

But the take-home message of the week and weekend is this: Android is no longer worth the squeeze. It’s nice to have a phone that feels smaller the way the X does, and I wish I had those kinds of features in an iPhone (2 GB RAM, 2200 mAh battery, and AMOLED display, for starters), but right now there’s no reason to rely on it in favor of the iPhone. I don’t know what changed aside from the new number and the unlock, but for whatever reason, I’m happy to just deal with the iPhone alone now.

So about three weeks ago, there was a brief Friday stir when a new app called Peach dropped. At least one website sardonically slagged it off as “the hottest new social media app of the afternoon,” and by Monday it had already been proclaimed dead. Naturally, I signed up for it, as did a couple of friends who sign up for everything that comes down the pipe just so they can have their login name.  And sure enough, of the four or five people I “followed” not one has put anything up in over a week, going on two. 

Social media has a problem. Twitter doesn’t seem to know what it’s for and insists on trying to become Facebook. Facebook wants to be AOL – basically the Internet for people who don’t understand how the Internet works – but is largely a place for baby pictures, game spam and the reposted screeds of racist relatives. Snapchat is for getting the coed in your freshman English comp lecture to send nudes. Instagram, at least, seems to know what lane it’s in and is mostly a photo-sharing service, although one where you’re almost obligated to have it autopost to Twitter.

And that’s the interesting thing. I will see the same things crop up three times sometimes: on the ‘Gram, in Twitter and in Facebook. Usually automatically, as if you have to cover your bases by making sure that it’ll go onto one of the services everyone has. Or maybe it’s just easier to have things automatically show up everywhere.  But it drives home the fact that if you’re on social media for the purpose of keeping up with friends you already have, you basically have to have a very tight and judiciously managed Facebook account – which in turn is the last thing on Earth that Facebook wants you to have.

Things come and go to try to deal with this. Google+ wanted you to organize everyone into circles, which was actually quite sensible, but Google didn’t have any more success convincing people that it wasn’t out to strip-mine your personal data. Path actually capped your friends list at 150 to make sure you were friending, well, friends – but it had an even worse time with data security and sank like a rock. And Peach got traction for about thirty seconds with another largely closed model.

Because the fact of the matter is this: Ed Earl Brown doesn’t want to have to check four apps over and over, and Facebook has the lowest barrier to entry for a civilian. You just fill in your real name, you can tell who the other people are, you’re encouraged to share everything, and let’s face it, Facebook is where the baby pictures are.  If you want to keep up with people you’ve met in real life, your actual friends, then beyond the age of about 28 you’re basically committed to Facebook as the option. That’s why all these other things – Google+, Path, Peach, and whatever comes up next week – sank like rocks. It’s how Friendster got smurfed by MySpace which in turn got destroyed by Facebook; in the end nobody wants to do more than one.

Because there’s another problem, and it is this: social media is inherently shallow. It’s a picture, it’s 140 characters, it’s emoji, it’s perfectly crafted to accommodate snark and shallow reaction. To quote someone more clever than me about these things, “Like anything else virtual…social media is an imperfect repository for the content it is fed, which doesn’t capture the essence of the people who use it.  It definitely doesn’t reflect the things that truly make us who we are – our hopes, fears, aspirations, and burdens.”  And an imperfect slice of the real world is a poor substitute for the real thing, especially when you’re not enough in the real world. Which is why the slugline for Peach made me stop and think…”Peach is a fun, simple way to keep up with friends and be yourself.”

I’m not sure you can be yourself on the Internet anymore. After all, twenty years on, the reason I’m close to my dearest friends is because at some point we stopped being Internet friends and just became friends. Maintaining a shadow life for everyone else, especially in more than one place, is more trouble than it’s worth.  We keep getting an attempt at Peach or Path or Ello or Diaspora or (INSERT $TRENDYAPP HERE) because at some level we want to have a separate space for our actual friends, not just the voices in our phone. It’s how we end up with badly-curated Facebook filters and multiple Twitter accounts and a Peach login…but to get everyone on there is problematic and the edge cases are tough to judge (I really like this person’s Twitter but we’ve never met and I don’t even know their real name so do I want them in my Real Life Friend Space?) and…we all wind up back on Twitter and Facebook in the end.

I do want something like that.  Something ad-free, something without all the cruft of games and memes and reposts and stuff that your aunt forwards. For now, I have it in the form of two Twitter accounts, one identified as me and one not, both accessed primarily via Tweetbot, which are the only accounts that live on the phone. The larger and busier Twitter accounts where I follow and am followed by many more people? Those are only on the iPad or in the browser. The phone has become the bouncer…if only the battery would hold out all day, of which plinka plinka hee hawwww.