Month: June 2024

The watch alone isn’t sufficient. I didn’t realize how frequently I need the camera, especially when I need to confirm something at the grocery store or get a pic of that thing on the road. There might be a little more utility with my own phone number, rather than a test number, but Signal is too much a part of my routine for the watch to stand alone.

The Apple Music piece works great, but I also find myself dependent on SomaFM and RadioGarden, neither of which is on the watch. And honestly if I’m out doing pub night stuff, I need reading material, which probably means the phone anyway. In short, the use case for cellular on the watch is for when I’m away from home, without a phone, with access to public transit or other people and no WiFi. Which is a mighty thin reed.

I think in the grand scheme of things, what I want is a world where I don’t need the phone. Having the Internet on my person at all times is an invitation to be too much in this world in a way that becomes more untenable with every passing day. The trick is going to be to put aside the need to see it coming, the anxiety of being caught unawares, just long enough to remain sane.

And if at any point the cellular is a $5 add-on, then sure, why not. But at this point it’s a $25 add-on and that’s not going to work. Still, better to have paid $35 to get it out of my system and be done with that glee.

Well, if that was what we can expect the rest of the way, we are deader than fucking fried chicken. A press that does not push back on lies at all, that embraces the framing of bad actors, that has spent the past thirty years somberly reporting that opinions differ on the nature of the Emperor’s new wardrobe and who is to say what is true – that is a media that will carry a liar around the world while the truth is trying to get a word in edgewise.

The structure is broken. Thanks to 1929, we are fixed at 435 Representatives and thus 538 electoral votes. If the Congress expanded at the rate it should have in order to remain proportional to population, we would have a couple thousand members of the House, and the gerrymander afforded by the Senate would be reduced. But then, the Senate itself would be less of an issue if the filibuster were properly done away with – which couldn’t happen because the Democratic majority hung on two senators who have since left the party to huff their own righteous farts.

The problem isn’t that Biden is old, or sick, or too moderate. The problem is that the structural issues in our government skew things one way in the favor of those who lie, those who trade in bad faith, and those who benefit from keeping a broken system that puts a thumb on the scales. And their commitment to keeping it broken has gotten them a Supreme Court whose “NOT TOUCHING YOU” jurisprudence is allowing states to secede in everything but name and keep pocketing blue-state tax dollars while they establish theocratic bigotry – and then point the finger of blame at the victims for fighting back, with the willing compliance of a docile press.

The time to fight back was 2001, when the Court gave defeat to the candidate with the most votes. The time to fight back was 2009, when there were enough votes to break the filibuster and end the obvious practice of using it to defeat legislation that would have won on a majority vote. The time to fight back was 2016, when the Senate refused to allow a vote on a new Supreme Court justice with no pushback from the press or the electorate. The time to fight back was 2021, when one side used actual physical violence to try to undo the result of an election.

The time to fight back is now. But there are too many people who will roll their eyes because Joe doesn’t give them tingly feelings in their chicken parts, too many people who will say that Trump is good for the markets, too many people who will shrug and say there’s no difference really, and the indolence and malice of the stupid will deliver a body blow to American democracy that we might not come back from this time. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

The courts are rigged. The Congress is broken. There is no plan B. It’s Joe or nothing. And when the public doesn’t grasp and act on that, we will all be absolutely fucked.

Everyone has two apps.

It’s mostly WhatsApp and Spotify, because that’s what the rest of the world runs on outside the United States and China. But as I look through Reddit forums and reviews of “feature phones” and blog accounts of “going light,” the recurring theme is always that if I just had [APP] and [OTHER APP] this phone would be perfect.

In my case, for the Apple Watch, the two apps are Lyft (or some other ride sharing option) and Triode (or some other streaming radio app that can handle SomaFM, Bluegrass Country, Arctic Outpost Radio and Radio Siamsa). But in a pinch I could actually try calling a cab, and Apple Music will cover most of the music options in some other form. So it’s not a dealbreaker.

In fact, a quick Sunday test down at the local proved that any WiFi you’ve already saved credentials for will still work with no phone present. I didn’t need the cellular while there. Which means if I could only harvest the WiFi credentials for the Duke, or the local downtown bars, or the San Jose spots, I might well obviate the need for wireless altogether. Which is devoutly to be wished when it looks like the actual cost of moving to Visible full time will be an extra $25 a month, and that ain’t hay.

Because really, where am I going with just the watch and no phone and no WiFi (or WiFi that depends on an interstitial page)? Pub night out once a month? Disneyland in another year or two? Maybe biking down to the farmers market? Church? Not a lot of use case under those conditions. If it were $5 a month to add it to USMobile, sure, it’s no big deal and a nice thing to have, but not for $35 a month sack and all, not while work is still floating the bill for my primary number.

Still, it’s interesting to have a thing on my arm that would use the same phone number and give me everything I need and absolutely nothing I shouldn’t have. I’m still trying to will a slightly better future into existence. Of which.

I don’t know exactly when I first gravitated to the idea of the shutdown-night phone. I assume it was in those dark days of late 2010/early 2011 when I needed to detach from the world, and it became a thing as social media and news and everything else crept into my space. Sometimes you need to filter it all out, put it all away, force the world to leave you alone – but at the same time, you don’t want to cut yourself off from absolutely everyone and everything. You still need music in your ears, something to read, the ability to be contacted in an emergency especially if you go out to do this, possibly some way of getting a cab back, etc etc and so on and so forth.

Some amount of this could be put down to phone addiction and FOMO on my part, certainly. But I think something has shifted in society. The phone is barely a phone any more. A contemporary iPhone has about as much in common with a Nokia 3310 as a virtual reality headset has with a pocket calculator, and that’s not a comparison I make lightly. Cyberspace is now the sea in which we swim, and the phone is the flippers, the wetsuit, the oxygen tanks. You can splash around on the beach, but if you’re going in, you won’t last long without it, and people expect that you will be in the sea now. Boomers act like a cell phone is a sign of wealth and luxury, and in the meantime, going to the San Francisco Farmers Market without one would entail finding train schedules somewhere, buying a ticket from a machine, taking cash for payment and finding a book or Walkman or something on the ride up. Do you need a phone? No, but modern life without one is a much higher degree of difficulty.

Which is why I had the shutdown phones – simple dumb phones first, later superseded by the Moto X or the iPhone SE, devices that I could pare down to just the Kindle and Wikipedia and music apps and maybe Lyft if needed and…that meant another SIM card and another phone number or having to constantly move between. It was preposterous and ultimately pointless, especially once the Downtime controls in iOS meant you could lock out all the offending apps and notifications for the duration of a Sunday night. And that’s when the separate phone stopped being a thing.

But the temptation to bypass those controls is occasionally too much to overcome, especially when one is not in a great frame of mind. And you’re back to “I want to set the degree of isolation higher, but without having to give it all up.” Make it possible to leave the house and go to dinner with just one phone, a dumb phone with the same number, be able to contact people if need be but without having to delete a bunch of apps.

I say all this to say: I have temporarily activated the cellular feature of the Apple Watch through Visible, the Verizon MVNO. I could not do it through my work account, because they won’t allow it to be activated, and if I’m going to have a second line it should be on a different network than my main line, so Cricket and Consumer Cellular (both AT&T) are out, and Visible is the only other MVNO that supports Apple Watch.

Because the watch then becomes the dumb phone: leave the iPhone at home and you can still place and receive calls and texts on the same phone number from your arm. You can pay for things. You can get transit and walking directions, you can look up when the next bus is coming, you can even pop in your earbuds and listen to your music. But you can’t get into a doom scroll, you can’t go numb surfing the web, you can’t stare into the watch display for hours on end. That’s for the book you bring with you (okay, probably the Kindle this day and age).

The question then becomes: where are you going with your watch that you aren’t going with your phone? Church, sure, and pub night, and maybe a quick run around the block or to the gym or down to the market and back without needing to grab your phone. But the cellular only kicks in when there’s no connection to the data of the phone itself or to the WiFi. Which means it’s a very occasional fallback at best, one my wife has already test-driven for months and found no use for.

But then, she’s a lot better at putting down her phone than I am.

I guess we’ll see. On the second attempt, I had a blowout on my e-bike, and had to wait for help with no phone and no earbuds. So the immediate limitations are of a piece with, say, the wee little SonyEricsson Z520 that the old Apple lab crew standardized on in 2006. But the functions of a phone from back then, albeit with modern processors and networks, are sufficient to have all alone on one arm. So at some level, it’s worth asking: is it enough to leave the phone at the bedside and venture out with a device you can’t get lost in?

We’re going to find out.

So in a moment of mental abstraction, I managed to leave my teal 16 oz Yeti tumbler behind at Union Station in Los Angeles. I’m bummed, too, because it was a limited edition color that suggested the best days of high school and was a sort of birthday present to myself. I have since replaced it with an 8 oz Yeti tumbler that has the California graphics on it, which is the perfect size for cocktails or as an overflow/keep cup and might be a better size for bedside use and portion control. Because I already had the 16 oz stackable Yeti that was actually closer to 19 ounces and is sort of an all-purpose size, which was going to just be the cocktail shaker going forward…and of course there’s all the other ones I already have, even though many of them are not going to be regularly used. (The Vanderbilt ones are going in a drawer just because the logos are no longer obtainable, the work one is in the bag, and the water bottle…we’ll see. It has not been great for travel purposes so far.)

I say all that to say this: I am starting to accumulate stuff again. A couple of American Giant resort shirts. A Yeti flask, of all things, which I definitely can’t justify (at least the California keep cup is sort of a memento of 20 years in the state). A new black and gold lightsaber, and the black and red one probably going as a present to someone before long. And I keep looking for hats from the Birmingham baseball this summer even though I need another hat like a hole in the head…

What the Hell am I doing?

I know what tomorrow is (of which more later) and I know it’s 2024, and I think that despite how much better and less anxious I feel on the Zoloft, at some subconscious level I am acutely aware that tomorrow is not promised and the end of the world rests upon the edge of the knife, and this is no moment in history to defer any joy no matter how slim or ridiculous. The sucker punches are lurking in the shadows, and you never know when something you put away months or years ago will rear up and try to whack you in the back of the head.

I think part of it also comes back to my eternal quest to find the 100% right thing. Even though it is just a hair too small, that Yeti was just right in terms of hand feel, balance, and versatility – I wouldn’t have taken it on the train if it weren’t. Problem is, the one I already have isn’t quite right in the hand or quite as easy to clean, but at just over 0.5L it splits the difference perfectly for coffee, soda, beer, what have you. (Although all the coffee goes in my mother-in-law’s old 24 oz mug now, to keep the staining confined to one thing, and I don’t brew tea concentrate any longer, and large-scale consumption of cold beverages is now in the 35 oz which is also the road trip vessel…)

Maybe this is a sign that even though I feel materially better (and people notice), there are still underlying things gnawing at me that I need to come to terms with. Which, like I said, of which and all that.

The Disney park experience is complicated these days, to say the least. Bob Chapek’s plans to monetize every drop of blood that could be squeezed from the turnip is still reverberating through the experience, and that’s even before taking into account the complexity of running parks in totalitarian states like China or Florida. But having done both parks within 12 months for the third time in my life, I finally feel like I have some thoughts on why I like what I do.

Walt Disney World, quite frankly, is just too big and too spread out. You basically have to stay on property, and it’s difficult to things in more than one park per day (barring perhaps a quick hop from Hollywood Studios to EPCOT or vice versa). Lightning Lane and Genie+ are mediated through a terrible application interface that drops you into a browser as often as not, and trying to coordinate activities for a large group is very nearly impossible, to the point that I don’t think you could visit WDW with a group larger than six and hope to do things together routinely. If we hadn’t had our own team coordinator booking things on a nightly basis, I don’t know how we would have pulled it off.

The Disneyland Resort – comprising Original Disneyland and Disney California Adventure – is a lot easier to work with. While there are on-site properties, and nice ones, you can stay in the Sheraton at Harbor and Katella and be just as close to the main gates, and bopping back and forth between both parks is pretty straightforward – even running all the way to Trader Sam’s for a drink or two is not an insurmountable addition to the day. It just feels like the locals’ park, a sensation made stronger during the early days of 2022 when it reopened solely for California residents. Honestly, at this point, I don’t think I ever need to go back to WDW for anything other than Guardians of the Galaxy and maybe a few drinks through World Showcase.

But for best results, you need to hold it to a group no larger than six, just because if you don’t have previously booked reservations, it’s going to be tough to find sit down food (one of the problems with WDW is that you basically have to schedule everything you’re going to do weeks in advance) and more than six makes impossible to find walk-in seating. It also feels like best results can be achieved with a three day park-hopper, taking one day to tag all the must-do in DCA and one for ODL with a third day for mop-up. And you’ll need mop-up, because the number of mechanical ride failures is creeping up. Rise of the Resistance, possibly the best Disney attraction of all time, is routinely down now, but we also ran into issues with Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Pirates of the Caribbean, and of course the closure of everything from Critter Country to Haunted Mansion for construction purposes.

Which brings me to the past thought: we wouldn’t have made this trip if we weren’t going with friends. We have done the Disneyland experience almost once a year on average going back to 2009, even adjusting for the pandemic outages, and honestly if it’s just us, there’s no incentive to go other than to ride Soarin’ repeatedly if it’s the California version, pick up new content in Star Tours, and (for me) attempt to spend a whole immersive day in Galaxy’s Edge, which honestly is not compatible with doing anything else in the parks.

But I was reminded that we were there in June in 2014 and 2019 (at least those visits presaged Vanderbilt baseball championships) by the thick gray skies in the morning. Which are just the best, whether entering Black Spire Outpost from the Resistance end or lounging on the patio at Trader Sam’s. This is the time to be there, honestly, and it was a delight. Again. (Made even better by taking the train down and back. Bring on the high speed rail ASAP.)

Happiest place on Earth? Hard to say. Highly satisfying, though.