Are my eyes really blue?

It’s nice to be able to click “iPhone Mirroring” on my work laptop and quickly bring up my phone. It means things like Signal, personal Slack, even this blog can all be handled from the trackpad and keyboard. All my personal stuff can live on the phone and I don’t have to keep anything on my laptop pertaining to my life outside of work. (I’ll still have Firefox loaded with bookmarks for my soothing background video, obviously, but that’s a lot more innocuous than keeping my personal mail or encrypted messaging and the likes.)

It’s bigger, certainly. Especially with the silicone case on it, which is really the only option to start with. But as much as it pains me to admit it – and it absolutely does – it was time. At some point between late 2017 and early 2020, I transitioned to needing the slightly bigger display, and when I switched back to a smaller device I found myself raising my glasses and holding the phone up to my face a lot closer than I had before. My hope is that with the progressives and a 6.3″ display, that will be less of an issue going forward.

So far, so good. I can do work stuff on it much more readily. I can even plug a USB-C thumb drive into it and do some work. The battery is a lot bigger, and I need to see how well it works to leave Low Power Mode turned off. I’d love to be able to get through an entire day without relying on low power or running out of juice – if I could have this phone top up to only 80% and still be good, like the watch, that would be a big step in the right direction. I still need to figure out the camera – it should theoretically be quicker to bring up and use than ever, once I get the hang of the button, but I don’t have it yet and I missed stuff fumbling for it all weekend. But you can shoot feature films on this thing, in theory, so I can get out of the way and let it do the work.

It does feel like the one device – like the iPad can be saved for shutdown nights when I really need to separate, or kept just for games and video conferencing. Don’t have to tax it any more than I have and it should be able to last another three or four years, maybe longer as just a reader. And if this phone can be made to last for four years – as it should; I don’t need to make another purchase until 2029 on current form – then who knows what will be out there next.

Well, I didn’t think I needed a new phone, but if there are really going to be tariffs and the kinds of economic shenanigans that wreck the economy, better to have all the semi-durable goods in the barn. So now in have an iPhone 16 Pro, with a gargantuan 512 GB of storage. Which is insane. That’s 2000 times as much space as the hard drive of my first Mac thirty years ago. It has 1000 times the RAM. I don’t want to think how much faster the M18Pro processor is than a PowerPC 601.

It’s the same principle as anything these days: the phone is your primary computing device, your window to the internet for better or worse, an extension of your conscience into cyberspace. It pains me to admit it but it’s true: the 6.3″ display is better than the 5.4″ was for work and for reading, and the battery being half again as capacious makes all the difference. I don’t feel I have to stay in low power mode. The size is bigger, which means a lot of two handed use, but it also means it stays out of my front pocket, which reduces the odds of scratching the screen on a pen or a Leatherman or something.

Jury’s out on the slowly-rolling-out Apple Intelligence, although being able to magically clean up a napkin from a picture of my table at Original Pattern was cool (if a little creepy). Hopefully having all this storage means local LLMs will be enough to get the job done, because I’ll be damned if I let some third party run. If they can just make Siri usable, that’s all I really need.

so I guess let’s go. This is my phone of record for the foreseeable future. Who knows what comes next, but if this is going to be The One Device, best to have it be one that can do the job of the iPhone and iPad mini both. We’re going to need all day reading and listening material for a long time.

Well, we had a good run. Well, we had a run, anyway, but something broke in 2009 and the powers that could not cope delivered the country to the billionaires.

Bigotry defending wealth. That’s what a majority of voters chose. That’s what a majority of Americans chose, either deliberately or through indifference. This is just what America is now, and there’s no denying it, and there’s no fixing it in my lifetime. All we can do is try to keep things from getting worse as quickly as they could, protect the ones we love closest to us, and try to endure, and hope to plant the seeds for those who will come after.

It may be a while before I can think of anything else to say, but there’s nothing complicated about this. This is what America is.

And so we come to the end. 48 hours from now, all that can be done, we will have done. And then it’s just the waiting. The only question is what is the result and how long will it take.

A quick result is at least decisive. If it’s obvious for him, then we know what we are as a nation, and it will be time to reckon with spending the rest of our lives fighting a rearguard action against the United States of White Alabama. Which, at least you know. Or she wins decisively enough to call it by Wednesday morning, at which point it’s just about snuffing the dirty tricks as quickly as possible and not letting the enemy do what they tried last time.

If it wears on, that’s bad. Either we slowly bleed to death, or we win but the enemy has a foundation for another four years of saying they were cheated, of saying things were rigged, as if a complicit media didn’t sanewash a decompensating bigot for years and fly interference for the same things they hyped up to force Biden out of the block. And the longer it wears on, the more likely a rigged system tips against us – the House refuses to elect a speaker to create chaos, or the Supreme Court interferes to pick their preferred candidate for the second time in a quarter century. Either way, every day this wears on is bad news.

It should never have come to this. The time to stomp it out was in 2000, when the SCOTUS gave victory to the side that didn’t have the most votes, and we just let that go. The time to stomp it out was 2009, when Republicans laundered themselves into the Tea Party and mainstreamed bigotry as “economic anxiety.” The time to stomp it out was 2016, when Mitch McConnell tore up every last unwritten rule to steal a Supreme Court seat while the Republican Party rolled over for a reality-TV carnival freak. The time to stomp it out was 2021, when there was broken furniture in the Capitol and blood on the steps and Republicans were still willing to admit violent interference with the political process was wrong.

But now? Now we go with what we have. I have never been that positive about the impact of the gender gap, if only because I grew up in a place and culture where the Ladies Against Women could be counted on to be a bulwark against feminism and their own primacy. But if you believe Ann Selzer in Iowa, and extrapolate from there, a whole lot of women – especially those who were alive to see abortion legalized and no-fault divorce granted them and the power to obtain credit in their own names – have seen that the Trumpists can and will take away rights they thought were secure forever. And they have put away everything from their Tabs and Virginia Slims to their TikTok and Stanley mugs to stand in line for hours, to call and text and ballot-cure and doorstep and do what is necessary to defend the radical proposition that women are people.

And on paper, that might be enough. Women vote in higher numbers, and women prefer Harris more than men prefer Trump, and that might be enough to get the job done. Because the more decisive the rejection of Donald John Trump and all his pomps and works and empty promises, the harder we kick this senile bag of racist goo into the swamps from which he crawled, the sooner we can move forward. We can never go back to the way things were. We never should. We go forward. Always.

And that’s the thing: she hasn’t really put a foot wrong. For someone who rode in during July who was only half-expecting this could happen, her campaign has run a tight ship, messaged well, conveyed the signal that you can have life without the main character drama of an egomaniac, that you can have a woman of color in the White House without drama. (Which is not true, through no fault of her own. All the misogyny against Hillary harnessed to all the racism against Obama will combined to form Redneck Voltron for the next four years if she wins. This is not her fault and anyone who employs it should be called on it, not least the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and everyone else who trips over themselves to make Phony Stark and JD Vance seem like they represent a mainstream valid opinion.) She has been capable, competent, empathetic and just plain normal and nice, and if thats not good enough for America, that’s a reflection on America, not her.

I wish I could trust my gut. I wish I could trust the American public. But only a truly mentally defective individual would do either in 2024.

We’re about to find out if God really watches over old drunks, little children and the United States of America.

There are so many ways things can go wrong.

For starters, she has to have the most votes, both in the popular vote and the electoral college (there will be war if Trump wins the popular vote and loses in the EC, and all the arguments about Gore and HRC will be tossed). Then we have to avoid any legal shenanigans that would let the Supreme Court do what it was installed to do and protect a glide path for Trump, by choosing to invalidate or obstruct one vote or another, or just creating enough chaos that the House of Representatives has to decide on a one-state-one-vote basis. And if that can’t be managed, a Republican-controlled House only has to avoid picking a speaker for three days to put us clean through the looking glass, and if you don’t think that will be an opportunity for ratfuckery and extortion you’re too stupid to look at politics. The worst part will be the whole “Democrats could fix this by capitulating to Republicans” bleating from the press, because as always, Republicans are NPCs and Democrats are the only ones who can choose to act or not.

It shouldn’t be like this. The game is rigged and has been ever since the parties sorted by urban and rural, because now Alaska, Wyoming and the Dakotas – with the same population as the Bay Area – have quadruple the Senate representation that the Bay shares with the rest of California, and quadruple the vote the Bay will share with California if it does go to the House. The system does not fail safe – and every budget, every debt ceiling limit, every point of failure is a hostage negotiation with a bad faith opponent. Whatever American government used to be doesn’t work anymore, and arguably hasn’t for the better part of a quarter-century, because one party can hold a nation to ransom with an everlasting No.

And the worst part is that the enemy knows they can’t win fair and square, so they have to ratfuck their way in with spurious lawsuits and tame judges in safe circuits (the Fifth Circuit should be nuked from orbit and reorganized along with the rest of the judiciary, but anyway). And rather than call this out – rather than say what is happening in front of our faces – the catamites of the national press decline to endorse, drop the age issue as soon as Biden’s out, blame Harris for what Trump says about her, you name it. Everything is tied up tight to make it possible for Trump, again, to win without the most votes.

But say by some miracle we do come through this victorious and unscathed. What then? We now have a President who combines all the bullseyes. The GOP and its amen corner in the media will immediately go to war on Hillary Hussein Harris, the full measure of all the misogyny they never got to vent on a sitting woman President and all of the racism that is now just another side to be given equal consideration. If Democrats don’t have complete control of both houses of Congress, she will get nothing, and the last time that was the case…actually, I can’t think of the last time a new Democratic President didn’t have at least nominal control of Congress to go with it. Obviously the filibuster would have to go immediately, and we would as always be at the mercy of the most nervous and unreliable Senator.

But if she wins but the GOP controls the Senate…forget it. Cabinet nominations, ambassador appointments, new judges, anything requiring confirmation…they just simply won’t. And because only Democrats have agency, it will be painted as “why can’t Kamala deliver the bipartisanship she promised” and not “why are we letting actual factual fascists have veto control over American government”.

By all rights this race shouldn’t be close. Trump shouldn’t be able to see Harris with the Webb telescope. Any year before 2016, with both these candidates, should be at least a 66-33 lead for the lady from California, and 72-27 probably closer to where it ought to land. The Madison Square Garden rally ought to be the killing blow for the Trump campaign. Instead, in 2024, we have half of America and most of its political reporters desperately polishing this turd and trying to pick it up from the clean end and insist that somehow the former guy is a normal candidate with normal positions and that this is just what Real America Really Wants – to a point where the LA Times and Washington Post spiked endorsements altogether rather than concede what is obvious to everyone, including their own staffs.

Because the mask is off. What you saw at MSG is what we get. This time, they’re prepared, and they have vetted all the grown-ups and got them off the block. This will be pure racist id all the way down, the United States of Alabama 1961. Christian nationalism enforced by stochastic terrorism, blamed entirely on its victims. And they will get away with it, because the entire notion of accountability has now been declared inherently political. Couldn’t impeach Trump because the law can take care of it. Can’t prosecute Trump because he wasn’t impeached. Can’t put him on trial because it’s too close to an election, because a judge he appointed stalled for months. Can’t enforce the law because it might look partisan, so the lawbreakers have to be let to run wild. Can’t have consequences because we need to look forward and why you bringing up old shit.

We are on defense now. We will be on defense for the rest of our lives. Maybe in fifty years, if we stand and hold, demographics and culture will get us to a point where the children of segregation don’t number enough to shift things and our grandkids can break the systems that shield and sustain the enemy. But today we are on defense. It’s all we can do, because the time to fix this was 2021. And 2009. And 2000. Thirty years of cultural capitulation to religious fascism has dragged us to this point and we will be at least that long unwinding it and making things right.

The work lies before us. The only question is how much. The only answer is to learn to thank God for the work, and then do the work. No one will do it for us, and despite anything I previously posted, no one is going to save the world but us.

It starts now. It continues to the end of our days.

What are you prepared to do?

It took almost a year from when it was initially predicted, and was with a different backbone carrier, and was slightly more expensive than promised, but at long last the deal is done: US Mobile now offers Apple Watch support if you are on their Warp (read: VZW) network, for the sum of $6.50 a month on top of your existing plan. Which in my case is $10 a month (could drop to $8 if I were willing to pay for a year up front) and means a total outlay of $16.50, which is to say, half the cost of porting out to Verizon’s own Visible MVNO which I was previously testing.

So now we’ll see. This actually has my alternate number, and when I go out I will still get all my normal notifications if I leave my phone on at home. I have found tools to let me easily stream radio over it if I want, and I have the drivers license on there (if only it were accepted other than at certain airports and SoCal bars), and honestly, for personal use, the only thing it really lacks for my purposes is Signal. But to the point – this is now fully capable of being my shutdown night phone, the only thing I leave the house with walking down to the local for a couple of pints on a Sunday night or for a walk at lunchtime or a quick trip to the gym. Every fallback phone I’ve tried to revert to in the last 10 years has now been replaced by a thing on my arm.

And that is the real magic, honestly. This is not just a phone, this is basically everything I ever carried in DC strapped to my arm with nothing else required. Hell, even more – Maps, Citymapper, vitals tracking, more than just calls and texts and email and music playback. I can do song recognition, bank balance lookups, package tracking, simple Wikipedia lookups, even language translation for all the major languages used in the Bay Area. Plus, of course, Walkie-Talkie – the Dick Tracy vision come to life.

Thirty years ago, when I got that DewBeep pager for $10 and 10 Mountain Dew labels, I looked at the little black plastic box with the Motorola logo and wondered if you could ever have some sort of Mac accessory like that. And now, it reposes on my left wrist. One more thin but satisfying slice of the promised future, for as long as the future lasts.

Of which.

“Fear God and give glory to Him for the hour of His judgement is come.”

-Rev. 14:7

40-35.

Think about that. The last time Vanderbilt football had a sweat like this was probably…1996? Maybe? When a 3rd and 37 pass for a 4th quarter touchdown gave us a lead over Notre Dame 7-6 with minutes left? I am sure everyone in that stadium was just waiting for the hammer to fall on Saturday, and yet…it never did. 60 minutes of SEC football and Alabama, undefeated and ranked #1 in the country, never led once. Not once. If you told me a Vanderbilt football team at any point in human history would give the Crimson Tide a 40-piece in the snotbox, I would have burned you for witchcraft.

And yet…it was not a brick fight, it was not a fluke, it was not a dick-tripping, in Spencer Hall’s words – Vandy just came out and beat that ass at the point of attack for 60 minutes. They played toe to toe with the top ranked team in the country, with THE football power of the last 15 years, a Mount Rushmore program in the history of college football, and the night ended with Vanderbilt fans (including several of my friends) parading the goalposts three miles down Broadway to throw them into the Cumberland River. Where the next day, the Nashville fire department helpfully fished them out and returned them to campus so they could be cut up and sold for souvenirs to defray the conference’s $100,000 fine for rushing the field.

This doesn’t happen. Vanderbilt had never beaten a top-5 ranked opponent ever. The biggest win I can remember like that was when the Dores got over on then-#6 South Carolina in 2007, and didn’t even finish the season with a winning record. Yes, the 2013 team tore ass through Florida, Georgia and Tennessee in the same year, but it was the second of five wins in seven seasons over the Vols, and Florida after Meyer and Georgia before Kirby. And yes, this is Bama after Saban, but it’s a Saban roster and a team that beat #1 last week to be #1 this week.

More to the point, it was the Death Star. It was the game you could write down a L in ink every year. Bama was a permanent opponent in the division days for 20 years, and it was a guaranteed loss, with the only question being “blowout loss, or brick fight loss with a back door cover.” The last time Vanderbilt won, I was 12 years old and on the other side of it, sitting with my dad in his old silver truck in Gardendale in disbelief as Paul Kennedy and Doug Layton called a desultory and lifeless defeat in Ray Perkins’ losing 1984 season while Vandy was still riding the fumes of the McIntyre renaissance. And my dad said “well that doesn’t happen very often,” because I think the last Vandy win had been 1969.

This should not have happened. This should have been inconceivable. A Vanderbilt team that could get handled on the road at Georgia State should never have been in the same ballpark with Bama.

And yet.

Something feels materially different. It isn’t just taking then-#6 Missouri to double OT before losing in heartbreak, or beating Virginia Tech in OT to open the season, or handily defenestrating Alcorn State in a way that doesn’t usually happen (it took miracle stuff to get by Tennessee State a couple years ago, if you want a straight HBCU comp). Not only are the Dores mostly handling business, they aren’t getting blown out and blown away. Hell, you make one field goal in Columbia and pick up the first down one more time in the 4th quarter in Atlanta, and this Vandy team is 5-0 and probably in the conversation about making the 12-team playoff.

But the bigger difference is that it doesn’t feel real – but it does. Vandy had success during the Brigadoon era, but it always felt like smoke and mirrors – we weren’t dragging teams we should beat (well, other than 2012 Tennessee), we were taking advantage of mistakes and still getting destroyed by power foes. The wins were close and the losses were not. This feels like it’s legitimately happening, somehow – we’re not backing into it, we’re not fluking into it, we are somehow going toe-to-toe with top teams and trading blows at equal strength. Diego Pavia doesn’t know it’s a damn show, he thinks it’s a damn fight.

And that’s another thing. This was achieved by basically opening the checkbook and purchasing the entire New Mexico State offense, players and coaches and all, and it is working. It’s not sustainable, and the question will always be, what happens next year when hipster CFB’s favorite quarterback is not around. But that’s not a now problem. Instead, Vanderbilt is America’s darling, other SEC programs are openly cheering for us to beat their hated rival, people are happy for us in a way that I never felt from anywhere under Franklin. Hell, there will probably be 49 and a half states rooting for us to do the same thing to Auburn in a month.

But it also feels uncomfortable. Ominous. You stack it up against things like finding the perfect Nerf blasters after all these years, or USMobile finally announcing Apple Watch support, or American Giant finally bringing back the fleece in the size I need, or stumbling across three 12-packs of Baja Blast Zero Sugar at the grocery store, and it’s hard not to feel like God is trying to throw me a bone and give me some last fleeting moments of joy before the end of the world arrives. Like we’re settling all family business before the onset of the darkness. I do not like this feeling, I wish I didn’t have it, but the Cubs finally winning in 2016 is my precedent. Joy may cometh in the morning, but it gets to be night fast in the autumn.

So the lesson, such as it is, is this: embrace the now, live now, enjoy today, don’t defer happiness. And worrying means you suffer twice.

More details are creeping out about the notional SE4, and they are not encouraging. Looks like the iPhone 14 form factor and display with a single iPhone 15 camera module. Which is consistent with previous SE versions, honestly. But the thing is – they will all be too big for what I want. And if you have to take the size, you may as well take the best possible battery and display, and if you’re gonna pay for that you may as well get the best camera. So it’s going to be the iPhone 16 Pro when the time comes.

But when does the time come? Not for a while. I’ve been doing an absurd amount of travel in the last 13 months, but barring one drive to Yosemite, it’s over – the whole Seattle – Austin – Denver – NYC – Tahoe – Prague – Dublin – London – Amsterdam – Pensacola – Disneyland – Sonoma – Minneapolis whirl. I don’t know how we did it back in the old days, but for now, things have settled down. One trip on the list for next year, possibly two, but it’s all on the other side of the wall for now.

And with no serious travel plans, the iPhone 13 mini – especially with the fresh battery installed – is still perfect in every respect. Sure, a full day on the run will take 130% of the battery, but I’m not on the run that much and I have the booster pack ready to go if needed. And I have a one-handed phone that belongs to me, not my employer, and has my work and personal lines alike. I fully intend to ride this phone into the ground, and there’s no reason I can’t get another year out of it. And I can let somebody else go first with the nonsense of Apple’s 5G modem or Apple Intelligence or the like.

Honestly, the next phone will probably be a pivot point back to “one device for everything.” And that’s fine. But if I’m not trying to do serious work on it – and I’m not, especially now – there’s no reason to give up my favorite iPhone ever. In fact, I don’t even own another phone at the moment, which I think is a first in…20 years? More? Certainly in the GSM era. Now all I need is for USMobile to support the Apple Watch so I can leave the phone at home on pub night, and we’ll call it square.

It’s the age old search for just the right thing: I’ve begun paring down anything that’s not a keepsake in hopes of reducing the amount of stuff I’ve accumulated. We’ll see how it goes.

I guess it began with Ken Burns’ Country Music. Seeing that in autumn of 2019, visiting Asheville almost immediately after, and then being limited to home for a year gave me plenty of time to resonate with the old-timey music. Which in turn reminded me of cold nights driving around Nashville listening to WSM, the thing that led to me riding around the DMV listening to Eddie Stubbs on WAMU. And then I started listening to Bluegrass Country again, and watching Country Music again in the autumn in times of stress.

Well, here we are. I haven’t pulled on the show itself yet, but what started off as a subset of the soundtrack to help me doze off to sleep has become a three hour playlist. Because that static scratch like a 78 RPM record rebroadcast over AM hundreds of miles away sounds like a black and white prairie night that could be almost any night of the last century.

It’s another species of escape. It’s a ticket out of the world, out of time, permission to forget about a world falling apart and a job I’m trapped in and wondering if there’s any way to get out of half my remaining life expectancy being stuck in a bad situation. It’s a species of meditation, like the series that inspired it or the drives I took twenty and twenty-five and thirty years ago or the pub nights I play it on now – the mantra, the vision, the focal point that lets me shut out everything else.

So the Great Mentioner has ramped up talk of the iPhone SE4 again, with a predicted date of next spring. It would be three years since the SE3, which was only a couple of years after the SE2 but was necessary because of the coming of 5G. Similarly, the notional SE4 is necessary because of Apple Intelligence and the need for 8 GB of RAM and a chipset to match, and the repurposing of the iPhone 14 body style recapitulates the use of the 5 form factor for the original SE and the 8 for the SE 2 and 3.

The thing is, I have been thinking for a while that next year might have to be the year. Four years is a good run for a phone, and I don’t regret replacing the battery and pushing on through, but at some point you need to get new hardware just to stay ahead of the OS, and there’s only so much you can get out of a physically smaller battery without counting on a battery pack. In fact, that’s probably the main inducement of four in considering the 16 series at all:

1. Sufficient battery life to make a full day possible without ever resorting to low power mode, similar to the Apple Watch Ultra 2.
2. Larger size means a larger battery, but it also means a bigger display for aging eyes. And there are some advantages to the new always-on wide-brightness-range high-framerate displays, assuming the battery can keep pace. Of course, it also means it’s not really a one-handed device, but it also means it’s capable of the kind of gaming and reading and viewing I normally rely on the iPad for on the road.
3. The physical camera button is a nice thing to have, especially when traveling and looking at things that pop up quickly without warning. It’s a nice-to-have.
4. The satellite SOS and texting function – because after seeing the aftermath of Helene, it seems that it would be useful to be able to contact someone after the Big One so they can spread the word we’re all right.

So what of these are you likely to get from the iPhone 14?

1 is almost a given because of 2. The 6.1” size means bigger battery than before, and if it’s using the same 3nm processors as the iPhone 16 series for Apple Intelligence, the battery life should be similarly improved. But will it be a 120hz display, or an always-on, or have the ability to dim down to 1 nit at night? Unlikely, one would think. It won’t have the camera button, for sure, and may not even have multiple cameras. And while the satellite SOS was present on the 14, is it something that could get dumped to save cost?

The whole point of the SE is to use last generation’s body type and less impressive cameras to put current processing power in a phone that’s cheaper enough to bring down the threshold of iPhone ownership. It’s meant to be perfectly good, or good enough. And it was, originally, and might be again depending. But I don’t want to give up night mode on the camera. Absolute dealbreaker, especially to get less in a larger package.

But the 16, and the 16 Pro, mean no compromises that way, and a guaranteed 35% or 50% battery bump depending on which. Plus the likelihood of another four year device. The only question, at this point, is whether the prospect of Apple Intelligence is something worth buying into or something worth avoiding even if it means squeezing a fifth year out of a one-handed phone.

The other noteworthy thing is that when I was using the work-provided iPhone X from 2017-2020, my use of the iPad mini dropped to practically nothing. I suspect something similar would happen for travel, although the iPad at home would still be the ideal reading device on pub nights and shutdown times when I wanted to lose myself without the temptation of social media or input from the wider world. There’s a certain appeal to one device to rule them all, but there’s also a certain appeal to horses for courses.

The only loophole would be if the iPhone SE4, so-called, comes with the elimination of the older non-16 phones, in which case the SE4 is the cheapest thing going – and then might be possible to swindle out of an employer that hasn’t updated my work-provided phone in seven years and counting. You gotta make your own bonus in this life. Otherwise, I guess we’ll wait and see.