Are my eyes really blue?

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.

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?