Month: December 2024

There’s something to be said for one device to rule them all. As nice as it is to have the iPad mini for reading and music, especially in flights or on Sunday nights, it’s very convenient to only need to take one thing when traveling. It’s doubly convenient not to feel like a full day out demands a battery pack. And when you have a 6.3″ display, you’re functionally in Kindle territory.

It’s nice to have the latest of everything for my personal area network: newest Watch Ultra, newest AirPods Pro, and now the newest pro iPhone. It’s great to have the best available camera, and that 5x optical zoom is a difference-maker. The Apple Intelligence stuff is nice to have in theory, even if it’s not yet particularly practical (I am convinced the marching orders for Apple Intelligence were “create the minimum AI product that will get the Street and the tech press to STFU”). I still have my questions about game mode, but they won’t be solved until I can start playing something other than Balatro+ on here (never more than one run at a time, that game is crack). And I have deliberately and specifically set it to only charge to 80% in current use, because if this is going to be a four year phone, it needs its battery protected.

I still need to do the satellite and hearing-aid setup. I don’t know where my hearing is, but I’m keen to have our audiologist friend’s opinion of the AirPods Pro as hearing support. And with Siri supposedly making a big jump in 18.4, the more I can do with voice and earbuds, the less I have to keep grabbing the phone for stuff. Which is probably going to be a resolution for 2025: nothing on the phone that can’t be done as effectively elsewise. Watch, earbuds, voice, iPad on Sunday nights, laptop during the workday – now that the phone can do everything, try not to make it do everything.

This phone’s name is Darksaber. It’s an homage to how my first iPhone was called “Lightsaber” after all my previous phones had the Bluetooth ID “Sidearm”. When I was able to go to a smaller phone, with the SEs or the Minis, I went with “Sgian Dubh” because it was the device I always had on me even if I did my work with something bigger. But this is a full sized phone, black in color, and it’s going to be a year for adhering to the creed, so may as well go in properly.

This is the way. Of which.

Somehow I managed to delete a post from a couple of years ago in which I posited that Apple should introduce Annoucements – a notification-free stream of self-deleting posts from people in your Address Book that you can dip into or out of at will, with the choice whether to receive what someone offers or not and the choice to post to some groups and not others. It seemed like the most obvious possible thing, especially as things like Find My and Journal and the like pointed toward Apple developing all the components of a social network without actually starting one.

And then Signal added Stories, and I realized that was 90% of the way there. You could have group chats with notification turned off, self-deleting after a certain period of time, and using the Stories functionality for media that didn’t make sense to paste into multiple group chats. It made all the sense in the world, especially given that Signal was for people in your contacts already,

Well, two things have happened since. For one, Signal added user names that made it possible to create a chat without having to give out phone numbers. And for another, the world took a twist that made it suddenly much more attractive to have a cross-platform, cryptographically sound means of sharing without relying on the likes of Twitter or Facebook or their fellow subservients. For all the potential that Bluesky has (and which Mastodon may yet have), they haven’t licked a way to do federated social media without making locked or private accounts functionally impossible.

But then, there you have it – the thing I posited all those years ago. Bluesky becomes the RSS follow feed, and Signal the private Twitstagram. It’s to a point that Signal has taken the pride of place on my iPhone dock that once belonged to Twitter, and then to Slack for the better part of a decade. I’ve been trying to will Signal to happen for two years, and we might be on the verge of getting there. If I could get that going in 2025, I would consider it a successful year…assuming we can prevent everything else going to Hell along the way.

The real trick is getting people to use it, though. Outside the US and Asia it’s all about WhatsApp, and good luck prying people off it. The lack of security in RCS might make Signal attractive to people who need cross-platform messaging in the States, but that would take a lot more awareness. So if you’re not it, get on it. And if you’re on it, get your friends onto it. And maybe we can save our bacon from Musk and Zuckerberg yet.

1987 was the beginning of a new era. The previous year was, to date, the worst Christmas of my life: I knew everything I was getting before I got it and the magic was utterly gone, the perfect capper on an absolute shit sandwich of a year.

1987 was different. I had, over the course of a year, found my first girlfriend (and subsequently gone through my first breakup), been added to varsity scholars’ bowl, and begun actually building friendships at my high school for the first time rather than being torn between the old place and the future. For the first time in memory, I was looking ahead. And that was reflected in my Christmas gifts, the only thing I asked for: an MIT sweatshirt and T-shirt, because for the first time, i was thinking about college. And where did I want to go? Somewhere that was smart and where complicated pranks were a way of life.

Welp.

The other big thing that holiday season was the New Years’ Eve party, at the colossal Mountain Brook home of one of my newer classmates. There must have been fifty people at least at this party, from all different schools, and at one point I was actually knocking out tunes on the piano while some gal I’d never met was grabbing Dr Pepper to keep me fortified (which in turn would lead to one of the few memorable moments of senior year two years on).

Oh, and another thing I got: the boom box with a CD player that would carry me through until my senior year of college. For the first time, I had laser-crisp digital music and the ability to borrow a CD from anywhere and turn it into a better quality tape than I could have bought. That was very nearly the end of taping songs off the radio, because a month or two later I would buy the first of what would become over two hundred cassette singles.

You could make a good case that 1987 was my first adult Christmas – when it stopped being about what you could get and became about who you could be with. And as we piece together what it looks like in a world where we’re older than our parents were then, that’s an important thing to remember.

Lot of disappointment this year. Well, that’s not entirely true – lot of disappointment the last two months of this year. A few deaths thrown on at the end just to drive home the point, including a dear friend’s parent and my own aunt who in her own fashion lit my way to California almost from the beginning.

The vast majority of Americans didn’t object to returning to the stupidest era of American political life. Including the entire Washington press corps (press corpse, more like), which as always focused on the odds rather than the stakes. Now matters are worse, and a country that works like Alabama is exactly what we’re in for with no higher authority to appeal to than God. And God, in all likelihood, will be away on business.

“First as tragedy, then as farce.” The thing is, laws are made up. Rules are made up. Apparently all you have to do is say no. You’re already seeing the beginning of this. The reason people are bricking it at how much people are celebrating the death of the UHC CEO is because there were finally consequences for something bad. We tried to fix health care at the ballot box, but it never gets any better, because someone’s always there to kick the slats out from under it. If you can’t rely on the soapbox, the jury box or the ballot box, that only leaves one box. And people whose lives are free from consequences will provoke celebration when they finally face some.

That’s the great disappointment of 2024. No consequences. You can be convicted of a crime, you can be found liable for felonies, you can be doddering and deranged, and the press will cover for you and the judiciary will shield you and the stupidest people on earth will sing your praises as if you are Jesus’s big brother. The worst people in the world continue to get away with being the worst, and no one lifts a finger to stop them, and then someone finally does and we were inundated with how bad this is without stopping to think about how it got to that point.

Protect my found family. Stay alive. That’s pretty much all that’s on the horizon at this point and that might be doable, with God’s help and a little more self-awareness on the part of the public. Don’t count on things getting better, don’t even count on keeping what you have, just throttle the loss as much as possible for as long as possible.

It’s called life. Best just to get on with it.

It’s pretty obvious where this is headed. An entire government of billionaires, sex pests, and vindictive ideologues. I know exactly how this works, because it’s where I grew up. Bigotry defending wealth is exactly how the Big Mules ran Alabama for…well, ever.

So what does that look like? Well, for starters, you’re in trouble if you’re wrong. The constant bashing of trans people is an easy hook for them, because there are so few trans people and they don’t have the legal protections or allies that helped fight the civil rights battles of the 50s and 60s. But that’s the easy target. Other people and institutions on the hit list include gay people, especially ones who got married or want to. Women, especially ones who want control of their own bodies. Anyone who relies on Social Security or Medicare. The whole point is: the rich get richer and no one thwarts them.

So if you’re rich, it will be easy. Especially if you’re white and male. If you’re a racial minority, if you’re any sort of minority that isn’t white, if you’re a woman, if you are in any way different, it’s going to be varying degrees of bad. The problem is, in Alabama, in my lifetime, there was always at least the possibility of the Feds stepping in when things became excessive. But that’s been torched too – the Supreme Court has basically seen to that, and the incoming administration is content to act with impunity because there is no one to judge them. God’s away on business.

So how shall we then live? Well, look at Birmingham. Black folk made it. They endured. They protected their culture as best they could. They suffered and had to look over their shoulders, and they took blows on multiple fronts, but they also supported each other and their culture and communities. And those who had – like AG Gaston, who became a Black millionaire in Birmingham during the Great Depression – used their money and power on behalf of those who had neither. We need to remember this: it’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to be pleasant, and a lot of people are going to hurt. We just have to protect everyone we can, never give an inch of ground, and always be on the lookout for opportunities to fight back.

This is our new normal. The kind of society I ran from for thirty years has caught up to me, at least until there’s a good plan for affordable foreign retirement in a more committed democracy. California may be Birmingham, the Bay Area the Southside, and San Francisco the Five Points South, but those are all still in Alabama. We’re all in Alabama now. I know what it’s like to live in this, and I don’t want to, but I have some sense of how. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to be constantly thinking about the alternatives.