Author: Stagger Lee

In some ways, 1997 was the last summer. I had finished school in May and had nothing lined up before September at the earliest. I took a job, then lost that job by spending a month and change in Ohio waiting for a different job to happen. It was the last time there was an open-ended period of summer without the daily obligation of doing something.

It was a transitional state, not unlike the summer of 1990, which in a way was even more thoroughly the last summer. I didn’t have a job that summer, because I was content to live off my graduation money (especially once I got my car stereo installed) and I was just killing time until the dream began when I started college. The big difference was that in 1990, I had an open-ended future full of possibility to dream of. In 1997, I was confused and bewildered and clinging to a thin reed of hope that the guy I kinda-sorta knew from the Internet would throw me a lifeline.

In retrospect, it feels like I must have been insane. I was flat broke, twelve hours drive from home, biding my time until I could hear back from my one job application in a completely different career field in a completely different city. I could no more do that now than I could fly to the moon under my own power, for all sorts of reasons – mostly revolving around the requirements of a mortgage and an unwillingness to abandon 26 years of experience to start from scratch in something else. But back then, with the entire past fallen down the chasm behind me and nothing to lose as the ground crumbled under my feet, I was willing to close my eyes and leap.

I guess that’s the problem. Everyone knows I hate my job, but I have reconciled myself to it. Or rather, had. Now they want me in the office again, and have offered no concessions on the prospect of five days a week – not the flexibility of a couple of work from home days that we had prior to the onset of COVID, not the possibility of relocating to an office that actually has people I routinely collaborate with and would profit by proximity to, and no sign whatsoever that my work is even noticed, let alone valued. It’s a one size fits all setting, and I’m the wrong size.

But what are the alternatives? Find a remote job somewhere else? No one in this valley is hiring people to do what I do, as far as I can tell, and the ones that are want to hire remote workers all right – in Seattle, or Atlanta or Dallas or somewhere considerably cheaper. Which means finding a remote job in another part of the world is going to mean a pay cut that I can’t really afford. So either way, stay or go, it means back to an office and a commute.

And then we’re back to my oldest friend, the devil I know — and the fact that right now I still know how to do the job, have institutional knowledge, and still get enough vacation to try to live the life I want outside the office. And maybe I can use the downtime and the slow days stuck in a cube to actually study and pursue other work, instead of distracting myself with the laundry and the dishes and the trash and recycling and the occasional errands.

I don’t know. The dream of wiring remote goes back to the very beginning of my career, on a drive through New England when it occurred to me that the combination of home broadband and UNIX might make it possible to work from home somehow. Work from home was a key desire by ten years later, and last year, it caused me to turn down a contract offer that would have paid more money even though the daily commute was barely ten miles round trip. I’m not fool enough to count on the possibility of retirement, but for the last three years, I’ve been able to get close enough that I can live with it.

So much in this life is open-ended uncertainty. I’m waiting to hear back on the recall of my car. I’m waiting to hear back on the part for the new hot tub we’ve never been able to use. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop on a legal matter that has been in limbo for eight months with no prospect of closing the book. We might not even live in a democracy by this time two years from now. All I want is the basic assurance that I have been doing a good job for the last three and a half years, and will be allowed to continue doing it as I have done on the condition that I keep doing a good job. That doesn’t strike me as an exceptional, outrageous, privileged or extravagant ask.

But that’s not how the world works any more.

I supposed the witch is dead, for what it’s worth. After twenty-five years, Dan Snyder – the boy wonder who took a heritage NFL franchise and reduced a 30-year waiting list for season tickets to dead last in attendance, who never managed to luckbox into 11 wins in a season once in a quarter century of modern NFL parity scheduling, who took the one thing that bound the DMV together and make it into a laughingstock leavened with criminality – that son of a bitch is gone, and $5 billion richer for the investment.

Thieves get rich and saints get shot and God don’t answer prayers a lot, as the saying goes.

I don’t think I’ve done a ridearound since the onset of the pandemic. Sonny Sam and Frank are long gone, and the broadcast team that succeeded Sonny Sam and Frank are all gone now, and the team doesn’t even have the same name – the problem wasn’t that they changed from an old name, it’s that they changed to a stupid XFL-assed name when they had the quiet badassery of just Washington Football Team and the slogan “NO NAME BUT TEAM”. Never mind that the NFL is slick garbage, one giant foaming slop bucket of Narrative and performative jingoism. The only professional football I’ve watched a full quarter of in the last five years is the Birmingham Stallions of the USFL.

For that matter, the last college football game I watched all the way through was probably Army-Navy the year Army broke the streak, and that was on DVR delay. Football is starting to seem like the problem – basketball is quicker, baseball is more relaxing, soccer is at least different. George Will’s slur about “violence interrupted by committee meetings” has never been more apt. But that’s not the thing that grates on me the worst.

It’s that it used to be a tie to the old days, a common thread to that old Saturn cruising down Old Georgetown Pike with two large Dr Peppers and a double bacon Whopper, windows down, cigar between my fingers and good ol’ Sonny Sam and Frank calling the action. The days when everything on autumn Mondays depended on the results of the day before, and the homeless guy was high-fiving the 2-star general who was high-fiving the GWU co-ed on the Orange line because we beat Philly or Dallas. It was enough to get me out the door at 9 AM on a Sunday on the bus to Dan Brown’s Lounge, where I’d repose under a painting of Sonny Jurgensen and drink with Bobby Mitchell’s son and despair of whether Jim Zorn was any kind of replacement for Gibbs 2.0. It was that happy moment of being parked on the street with the game on the radio, furiously Tweeting and texting everyone as RG3 completed the last truly exciting season and made us feel like there was a future.

It’s been a long, long time since it felt like there was a better future coming. I am finding more and more than after 50, it’s mostly about figuring out how to keep most of what you have, minimizing the steady loss and just learning to live without what you lost. Getting rid of that Shetland asshole is less about making “Commanders” football something I can live with again and more about settling accounts, about proving that there’s some kind of judgement for wrongdoing – even if it’s the kind of wrongdoing that lets you walk away to live in London with $5 billion in the bank. They punished the little bastard by giving him all I ever wanted. Which I guess is just how America is, now.

Our gal in Oslo came through for me this morning, and I entered and successfully created a Bluesky account. It’s been months since I first added my name to the wait list, and I suspect there’s a real chance a code got eaten by the spam trap, but we’re going to overlook how long it took me to get onboard and celebrate that I arrived.

It feels like a throwback – not least because I immediately connected with the various denizens of the EDSBS Cinematic Universe, most of whom I have had very little contact with since 2016 and the dissolution of my main public Twitter account in the aftermath of the election. It’s not lost on me that I may be letting myself in for a rough year next year, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. Not only did I see a bunch of those folks again, I found a surprising number of people have already made the jump.

On paper, this is a step in the right direction, because it is being what Mastodon cannot and Threads won’t: a drop-in replacement for Twitter. No algorithmic timeline, no ads, no auto populated firehose of influencer and celeb accounts. It has some interesting features: self-verification via a domain name as account handle, customizable algorithmic feeds to make sure you surface material relevant to you without forcing it into your chrono timeline, and the prospect of federation and account migration in future.

Unfortunately, it also seems to have failed to go to school on some of the simplest practices of moderation and safety. The fact that they hadn’t established deny-listing of racial slurs in user names suggests a fairly privileged group of developers who failed to ask the first question for any new product in 2023: “how will Nazis abuse this?” I got the impression they may be speed-running the steps to get to a better solution, but they don’t have Instagram’s existing moderation apparatus. Of course, neither does Mastodon, and until this morning everything I heard suggested Bluesky has been a superior experience for nonwhite users. So who knows. It may be that you just have to pick the level of unpleasantness you can live with.

And right now, Bluesky has some obvious advantages. Unlike Threads, it is not “what if Twitter but Instagram” and I am not being force-fed a diet of influencer bullshit and journalistic self-importance. Unlike Mastodon, it has people I know on it and they are willing to use it. And unlike Twitter, it’s not owned by a ham-faced racist yarpie who should be ground into meatloaf for the homeless and his assets liquidated as a down payment on reparations. These are all nontrivial advantages.

Not to mention…Twitter is kind of dying. There are maybe half a dozen people there for whom I have no other way of following them. Brands and teams can be had via Threads, and hopefully followed from my private Mastodon account before long, which would complete the realignment. Threads accounts for reading, Bluesky for socializing, Signal for private chat and personal contact, with special use cases for Slack and iMessage.

Of such things is our new social world built. But tonight, I have a functional social media outlet that isn’t in hock to Phony Stark or the Zuckbot 3000, and that is a blessing I have long looked forward to.

Sometime overnight, Threads broke one hundred million users. This was always going to be a possibility – the advantage of an existing login and friends list is so overwhelming that Threads hasn’t even launched in the EU because those advantages open it to stupefyingly huge fines for anticompetitive behavior – but the fact that it has hit 50% of Twitter’s MAU in under a week is significant.

How it is? Well, Threads shows you exactly why I only log into Instagram through a browser rather than using the app: it’s optimized for the same endless streams of meme-tastic shitposting that originally made Facebook unusable, and if your friends don’t post enough, you’re going to just end up in an endless scroll of algorithmic garbage. But that said, being in the gunsights for their misconduct over the last seven years has made them sufficiently gun-shy that the kind of alt-right garbage for which Twitter is currently optimized has not got traction.

Algorithmic pink slime firehose notwithstanding, Threads does have some things that make it less of a hassle than Twitter. No trending topics prevents giving a megaphone to bad stuff, no DMs cuts down on a major vector of harassment, and there seems to be a conscious effort among the user base that it’s going to be different this time. Of course, that means the same sort of middle-of-the-road Minion-inspirational NBC prime time mediocre bullshit in carload lots, but it’s better than outright fascists, racists, and tech bros just riding Elon’s nuts.

And nuts is apparently just what Elon is going, which is a delight to watch. This fool literally proposed a dick-measuring contest with Zuckerberg. I sure hope for her own sake that Linda Yaccorino got paid up front and in cash, and if she didn’t, well, that’s her own goddamn fault. Facebook, currently trading as Meta, is not your friend and is not to be trusted and has no future for me – but as someone wisely said on Threads, “you may not like Godzilla but you need him to fight Mechagodzilla.” Threads only has to be out there long enough to torch Twitter, and then it’s off to Mastodon or Bluesky or wherever.

Because to all accounts, I may be only ten days or so away from possibly getting a Bluesky invite. Despite their slow-crawl invitation system, they’ve still built out a user base comparable to Mastodon’s, and the buzz elsewhere is that non-white and non-tech folk are having a better time there than on the ‘Don (which is not surprising; as I’ve said before, Mastodon was never meant to be a drop-in replacement for Twitter and what it does is not exactly suitable for people who are not running a specialized community of interest). I’m following about a hundred people on Twitter, but only a dozen or so post routinely. Similarly, I’m following 67 on Threads, but only 28 follow me and it’s too soon to see how many people are posting routinely. I don’t have a problem following three times as many people as follow me, as long as those people are putting up stuff I want to read. I actually have just over 200 followed and followers alike on my main Mastodon account, but fewer than half a dozen are people I actually know, and none are sports teams with updates or the fistful of celebs I actually want to keep track of.

The dream scenario at this point, honestly, is a Tapbots app that can feed both federation protocols, and being able to follow the SJ Giants or Greenock Morton on Threads via ActivityPub in a Mastodon account while keeping my friends on Bluesky and still seeing the ones who just settle on Threads and call it a day. It might take a while for all this to come together – I genuinely don’t know that Threads will ever adopt ActivityPub, especially if it can grow to nine figures in a week all by itself and has no obvious way to monetize federation (and the Fediverse does not want them there, plainly) – but after three or four years of “the hottest new social network of the afternoon,” we finally have something exciting happening in the space, and not a moment too soon. Now that ham-faced yarpie son of a bitch climbed up there, it’s a Hell of a lot higher than he thought, ain’t it?

Three days later, we’re live. Threads officially launched for public consumption about five hours ago, give or take, and already has over two million users. Clearly it’s easier to get people to sign up for something new when they already have an account and a friends list.

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

* The default timeline when you first sign on is an avalanche of shitposters, clout chasers, and the sort of algorithmic garbage you get when you use the Instagram app. Which is hardly surprising, but the Instagram app has the option to flip to a list of the people you follow. THIS DOES NOT EXIST IN THREADS. There is no way to confine your view to just the people you asked to see, and if you have the misfortune of refreshing your timeline while looking at a post from a friend, it will vanish and be replaced with more pink slime content.

* That, coupled with the fact that you can mute or block someone and still see more of their posts, gives the distinct impression that Threads didn’t ship because it was ready, it shipped because Twitter had a really bad weekend and Bluesky has hit an inflection point on mindshare in the last seven to ten days. It’s not available in the EU, because they can’t clear GDPR, and it’s missing some fairly rudimentary functionality, which suggests that the last six months have basically been “how do we fit the Insta authentication system into the Mastodon code?”

* I mean, maybe? God knows that until Phony Stark rolled up, Mastodon was famous mostly for furries and for having its codebase used to bootstrap far-right websites. What else would you call Facebook? Not to mention…

* By adding a text update posting service to an Instagram app which contains everything else they’ve ripped off in the last decade, the Facebook machine has now produced a laundered New Facebook which is just two or three apps in a trench coat and doesn’t have the stink of your Trump aunt’s racist Minions memes on it. It took forever, but they finally have all the bits in place.

* Here’s the thing: all I want, all I *ever* wanted, was Twitter from 2012 and maybe Instagram from the same time. No Snapchat, no TikTok, no ripping off YouTube, none of that. Right now, based on what I’m hearing, the best shot I have of that is Bluesky. There are already lots of people there I would follow, it doesn’t have a firehouse of algorithmic shit to all accounts, and while it does have that hipster dumb fuck Dorsey on the board, it’s not in hock to a Big Five Or Six tech company and it’s produced at least as viable a product as Mastodon or Threads.

* Is it harsh to be judging a product on its first five hours? Not this product. They’ve had six months and all the resources of Facebook to make this pop off, and it’s being held up as the great challenge to Twitter. So no, it’s not unfair in the least, and miss me with that lil-ol-Clemson bullshit, when you add two million users in the first four hours you better be ready to play in the big leagues.

* As of the end of last year, Twitter had somewhere under 400 million users, and Instagram had three times that. Insta’s MAU is quadruple Twitter’s, and that was before the assorted shenanigans by which Donald Frunk has chosen to sandbag his investment over the past six months (capped by this weekend’s rate limiting). It will not take very much at all for Threads to be a viable alternative to Twitter for a whole lot of people, because if your friends go, there’s no reason not to.

* There is a scenario whereby Threads replaces Twitter, but thanks to ActivityPub, I can base myself in my Mastodon account and still follow the people I want to follow (and the entities like the SJ Giants or Greenock Morton who are statistically unlikely to ever show up on Mastodon). That would be a very agreeable state of affairs for me personally, but it would require Facebook to commit to building out ActivityPub support in Threads, which (surprise surprise) did not make the 1.0 release. I guess we’ll see what happens.

* Musk is Trump, but Zuckerberg is George W. Bush: it’s his damn fault we got to this point in the first place. I have no problem leveraging the lesser of two evils, but I thrill to the prospect of being able to kick them both to the curb for good.

Eight months into the Muskening, Twitter has finally started to break down in a meaningful way. Apparently, there is a need to move off Google’s cloud services, either for non-payment or god knows why, and and in the course of either not paying or trying to circumvent the need to pay, Twitter implemented a log-in-only approach and then broke the ability to load in such a way that it became necessary to rate-limit accounts in order to prevent DDOS-ing themselves.

Twitter is experiencing bankruptcy Hemingway-style: slowly, then quickly. The technical debt has accrued to the point where the failures are becoming more frequent, more obvious, and harder to remediate. More to the point, though, an alternative seems to be emerging: Bluesky, which began as a spitball project at Twitter trying to somehow crossbreed blockchain with distributed federation. It was supposed to be some kind of Web3 gimmick from the defective mind of Jack Dorsey. While he remains on the board (and has naturally gravitated to an even more crypto-moron product called nostr), Bluesky seems to be having a moment – signups have reached a point where they had to shut down new enrollments because of the traffic load.

This is even more significant because Bluesky is in beta and requires an invitation to get on. Which creates artificial scarcity, that thing that humans covet more than any other: let me in the exclusive place. And yet, for whatever reason, if you look at the people I most wanted to be on Twitter to follow because I like their content and don’t have another easy way to do it: they’re going toward Bluesky. Not Mastodon, not whatever else is on offer.

Which is not surprising. I stand by what I said about Mastodon not being a drop-in Twitter replacement, because it’s not meant to be. But it’s also suffering from the curse of desktop Linux: “this is free and open source and you can use it however you want NOT LIKE THAT.” Setting aside the fact that the biggest pre-Elon uptake of the Mastodon codebase was as a way for far-right freeze-peach Twitter alternatives like Gab or Truth to bootstrap themselves, the fact of the matter is: when you put something out in the wild for free, you can’t really govern what people will do with it. And as currently constituted, Mastodon is not a good replacement for Twitter, for the same reason Linux never took over the desktop and no one actually compiles their own Android for their device: Ed Earl Brown just wants to do the thing he wants to do, not build his own tools to do that thing, and fuck you Andy Rubin, nobody cares if it’s “open.”

The only way Mastodon beats out a dying Twitter is if there is no alternative, and if the anarchy of roll-your-own can be made easier than just hanging in there with a ham-faced yarpie bigot having your social media by the nuts. Bluesky is, on paper, what most of us wanted: Twitter from 2012 with someone else in charge. The old EDSBS commentariat is rapturing itself to the best of their ability. Random friends and people I only really know online are announcing their migration. For whatever reason, Bluesky might have cracked the secret sauce to be the next thing – because that’s where everyone’s going. That’s what they finally settled on as an acceptable alternative.

This doesn’t account for Threads, the product of the P92/Barcelona project over at Facebook, which will basically be “Twitter but using your existing Instagram ID”. At long last, you gotta make Facebook’s need to rip off everything else and cram in into Instagram work for you. It’s entirely possible that making a new Twitter off the back of something everyone already has an account for using will be the glide path, because there’s nothing new to sign up for: you have a user name and a friends list and an existing relationship, and the fact that Insta was the only safe social media for me in 2017 is not lost on me.

Two possibilities, two options that promise to have some substantial uptake (one already has), and the possibility of departing Twitter and keeping some of what I had, and the important bits at that? Let’s fly away into the breathtaking blue. Of which.

The Supreme [sic] Court ended its term today with the capper on two days of predictable rulings. Affirmative action in college admissions (for people who aren’t donors or legacies or athletes): gone. The Biden administration’s attempt to make it easier on people who had to take out loans to get through college: gone. The right to discriminate against someone just because you say it’s your religion: enshrined, based on what turned out to be a fictional scenario.

After decades of decrying the Warren Court as some sort of unelected superlegislature for daring to enforce the law as it was written, the Roberts Court – which is really the Alioto/Thomas Court – is merrily shredding the entire concept of stare decisis and wiping their ass with the fragments. The Warren Court established over and over that the power of government cannot be used to shit on people who are different than you, and the R/A/T court has established that the government has no power to prevent private institutions from shitting on people who are different than them. Soft secession again: the Confederacy re-established without giving up the federal sugar tit, and California and New York will foot the bill for Tennessee and Florida to maintain white supremacy in perpetuity. That’s the plan.

But then, that’s the legacy of having handed over the reins to a racist criminal because the people were too stupid and indifferent to prevent it. Utter shamelessness is no longer disqualifying. Criminality is not disqualifying. Demonstrated fraud and falsehood is no longer disqualifying. Outright racism is no longer disqualifying. And the fact that none of those things is disqualifying means that the value system of this country is broken beyond repair, and broken by the people who cried crocodile tears longest and loudest over “values.” In the end, the only thing they valued was keeping power from anyone unlike them. And it shows. Because now the goal isn’t to get more people to vote for you, it’s to disenfranchise and disempower anyone who won’t.

Every election is now about containment. Hold the boomers at bay until they die, and re-write the world without them. And then, take the power from the rednecks and the car dealers and the venture capitalists until they accept that everyone has to pay the freight and everyone has to be allowed in.

We might not get away with this one.

So there is a research firm out there that was willing to pay me $400 for four and a half hours of opinions on electric vehicles. These people are fools, because I have opinions for a lot longer than that for no charge whatsoever (as the almost 17 years of this very blog will confirm…and the notion I’ve recorded a third of my life here is a whole lot of “Of Which More Later”), but it took very little time for me to turn around and hand that cash over to American Giant for a fleece zip-up and three of their new Everest T-shirts.

The fleece has been on my list for a while since it was announced. My employer has given me damn near half a dozen fleeces in the last four years, and I have given them all away to the homeless wherever possible. But this one is American made and does not come with any branding from an employer with whom my relationship is charitably described as “troubled”. I did enjoy the North Face fleece that was my first garment from them, and the last one I disposed of, and I think that’s why I took the plunge to buy this one. Good extra layer, goes under the M-65 or can be stashed in the trunk, whatever. That’s not the big thing.

The Everest T was advertised in the paper catalog months before it became available to order. It is a loosely-cut crewneck T, optimized as a main shirt rather than undergarment later. But the unique selling point of the Everest T is that it is 15.2 oz cotton. By comparison, a typical “heavyweight” T is about 8 ounces per square foot. The super-hardcore manly-man “cotton armor iron wear” sort of work T generally tops out at 10 or 11 ounces. Fifteen ounce cotton is usually associated with terms like “canvas”. It is, hands down, the heaviest T-shirt I have ever owned and arguably the heaviest shirt by fabric weight I have ever owned.

And it is magnificent. The white one – which I bought when I thought no other colors were on offer – looks like something off the cover of a Springsteen album. I only need the one; the other two in a sage green and a light rye color are far more suitable for daily use. They wear like a weighted blanket for the torso. It feels like the T-shirt that’s been missing my entire life, the final replacement for those couple of American Apparel Vermont Army T’s bought back in the Apple days and jealously guarded ever since. It sounds insane to pay $60 for a t-shirt, but when it feels like a T-shirt you can genuinely wear and have for the rest of your life…there you go.

And that’s been the metric for quite some time. I don’t have any problem spending money on something I plan to have and use for the rest of my days. It’s what makes me antsy about buying the Nokia 2780, no matter how tempting it is to have a modern LTE flip phone – because it can’t possibly last more than four or five years until LTE frequencies start getting replaced with 5G, and it’s a random gimmick. It would make more sense to save that $90 and put it on an Apple Watch Ultra, which would have a bigger screen, a bigger battery and the kind of cellular connectivity to use it as the shutdown-night phone…which would itself only be good for what, five years? Tops? My Apple Watch Series 6 is not particularly long in the tooth, and a battery replacement would see it working well for the foreseeable future, so how can I justify dropping that kind of cash? Against that, $500 for a custom lightsaber seems less frivolous than $800 for a five-year watch.

And this is what made me think about Star Wars, and how Star Wars is basically a scarcity economy. Things get repaired, get mended, get used for decades or centuries. They have advanced technology, but they don’t have plenty, and it shows. Rey is using a lightsaber her mentor’s father built fifty years earlier. Han and Leia are honeymooning on a three hundred year old starship. I can’t buy a damn phone without being required to replace it in five years because I either can’t get the frequency coverage I need or can’t plug it into the new laptop or because it’s not getting operating system updates any longer.

Now if someone wants to give me a flip phone with a removable battery and a replaceable cellular module to keep up with 5G, 6G, whatever it takes, and it could be made up-to-date for shutdown night for ten, fifteen, twenty years as the phone of last resort? Then we could talk. But for now, that’s money that could go on another Everest T that will last me the rest of my life.

Go back to 1999, the era of the Golden Convergence, when everyone was convinced that the PC on your desktop and the TV in your living room were going to combine into one big push-stream information furnace. Tell them there that in 25 years, the PC and the TV will converge into a headset that weighs a pound, fits over your eyes, and gives you utterly realistic windows hanging in space with your work in them or screens that can be as big as a house to watch movies on. It would seem like the most natural evolution of things in the world and the obvious next step.

This is why that 2007 rollout of the iPhone is up there with Doug Englebart’s 1968 “Mother Of All Demos” – Steve Jobs and Apple shifted the paradigm and moved the epicenter of the computing experience to the palm of your hand, and made the smartphone the default computing experience for the whole world. The only things we don’t use the phone for are for actual productivity work, or for kicking back and looking at TV and movies on a big display.

Hm.

It’s a mistake to think that the Vision Pro, publicly unveiled yesterday in an event Apple clearly intended to be in lineal descent from the Mac and the iPhone, is supposed to do everything. It is not. They did not show it being used for anything you’d routinely do with a phone other than maybe taking pics of the kids and looking at them. All of the things the Vision Pro does are things that you don’t want to have to do on a 6 inch screen. In so many ways, the Vision Pro is an attempt to take a desktop computer with you.

I mean, think about it. Most of us plug our laptop into a larger display for actual work work. More than one, sometimes. I hate having to have a laptop bigger than 13”, but that’s simply not enough screen at my age when you need to have Zoom and Slack and a browser open with the Jamf console and maybe CodeRunner and Terminal, never mind Outlook or (spits) Teams. Put this thing on, and all of a sudden, you are surrounded by the vision of computing that really began with Minority Report and tool full form in every Marvel movie: multiple virtual screens hanging in mid-air with everything you want surrounding you on top of your normal environment.

Facebook’s approach to VR has been to ship a minimum viable product and rely on hype that someday it will be useful for more than avatar chat with legless torsos. Their plan is to create a Yugo, sell it cheap, and hope people will snap it up on the promise it’ll get better. Apple is selling the Cadillac experience, something you can actually look at and say “ooh, that’s kind of cool” and “wow, that would be neat” and then implying that the price will come down to Ford Escort levels sooner than later (did I just date myself again? Woof) – and on current form, if you look at the iPad and Apple Watch experiences, it stands to reason that you should be able to get the equivalent of today’s Vision Pro for a price closer to $2000 by Christmas 2026 at the very latest.

And the thing is: everyone who looks at the thing in person and uses it says the same thing – it’s a demo, yes, but an exceptional one that quite frankly kicks the shit out of everything else in the AR/VR space. Yes it’s too expensive now for mass market, yes we don’t have an obvious killer app that makes this a must-have in the spirit of Pagemaker or Uber or Instagram, but even the most hardened cynics in the industry with the highest expectations have conceded that Apple has not gone frog-sticking without a light. There’s something there, even if we won’t know exactly what for a few years.

And quite frankly, they need the next thing. The smartphone crossed the finish line a decade ago, and while so many of the tweaks and gimcracks added to iOS in 17 are genuinely welcome and useful, they’re tweaks and gimcracks. If it weren’t slow as balls and riddled with bug vulnerabilities, I could pull out my old first-gen Moto X and have a satisfactory phone experience using Slack and Instagram and Reeder (okay maybe not Reeder) and play back music and podcasts and never be bothered. There’s nothing I need from my iPhone 13 mini, other than compact size, that I can’t get from the five year old iPhone X that is being sawn off by iOS 17. The only existing Apple product that intrigues me is the Apple Watch Ultra, and that’s mainly because it’s bigger and has a huge battery (cellular would be Very Nice To Have but until one of my phone carriers can support it, there’s no point).

Which brings us back to the other problem: my AirPods Pro were bought in October 2019, replaced under warranty in March 2022 (probably with refurbs, let’s be honest) and don’t have the battery life they had. My Series 6 Apple Watch was bought in September 2020 and benefits nontrivially from the addition of low-power mode. I’ve had the iPhone 13 mini a year (bought six months after release) and am already contemplating a battery replacement – and although I still intend to ride it into the ground, I suspect that by 2026 I’m going to need a bigger phone just for ease of reading, never mind battery life. If you have to replenish the ecosystem every five years, there will be a certain urgency to try to bring the price down on all of it if you can (which is a big part of how people end up buying a new $200 Android phone every 18 months). At some point, you’re going to look at the ecosystem and say “is there a piece of this I can drop” – for me, it was the original Series 0 Apple Watch, and I got by fine with a Fitbit for two years instead. If I were to wind up on a Vision Pro, that would probably be the death knell for the iPad, and the next iPhone would just have to be bigger. Apple was more than wiling and able to cannibalize its own products when it was just a question of migrating from iPod mini to iPod Nano, but will they be able to convince people to add that much to their every-X-years Apple rent?

I mean right now, the goal is to get at least three years out of every device and four out of everything with a touchscreen. By rights, there shouldn’t be a new watch on the horizon until next fall, there shouldn’t be a new phone on the horizon before fall 2026 and there shouldn’t be a new iPad in the mix…well, maybe ever at this rate, but definitely not before 2029 or so. We’ll see if Apple can make the Vision Pro indispensable…and if so, at whose expense.

I have way too many Yeti drinking vessels. I started with a 20 oz tumbler, which was appealing because it was insulated and dishwasher-safe (unlike many if not most insulated tumblers). One thing led to another, and sometime lately I realized I had eight different Yetis, including one I bought by accident and one I forgot I had. So this is just a Keltner list in inverse order of utility.

10 OZ TUMBLER: this is the one I bought my work teammates as a gift when we successfully deployed Jamf during the pandemic, aka “how we caught the snipe”. It’s endlessly versatile: cocktails, coffee, cold drink, an overflow cup, a go cup, fits in a pocket or the car cup holder. The only real disadvantage is that size: even though it’s actually 11 ounces, I’ve done shots that size. It is in fact ideally suited for travel, whether for morning coffee or “I’m going to discretely empty the rest of my pint into this before I walk back to the lodge.” For all that flexibility, though, it’s not the best thing for home, because you have to constantly keep refilling it. Still, if you keep refilling, you don’t have to wash.

16 OZ TUMBLER: this is my daily driver, the one I have worn to a frazzle. Like the 20 oz tumbler that preceded it, it actually holds 18 ounces, a comfortable half-liter, which is the perfect balance of size: good for a beer, good for morning coffee, good for iced tea or soda in human portions (learn, Euros). And the tapered stackable profile means it fits any cup holder, which the 20 oz version didn’t (at least in the Malibu). Ironically, being the one I can’t do without means it gets surpassed by more specialized other ones in regular use, especially in warm weather…

35 OZ MUG: Also known as “Veronica II” or “the Redneck Guzzler.” This replaced the 30 oz “Veronica” that I bought when I first tested positive for COVID-19 and needed to minimize my trips inside. I’m not being funny: 35 ounces is a lot. (It’s closer to 34, a comfortable bang-on one liter). The post-COVID role for Veronica was meant to be as a travel mug for long hauls in the car, and this does the job well: you need that handle and straw to make it easier to handle something of this size. When not traveling, it’s just the right size to throw in one family-size tea bag before bed and let cold brew overnight in the fridge, and with the coming of summer, it has become the principle iced tea vessel. The gaping maw makes it easy to hand-wash as well.

10 OUNCE ROCKS: actually holds 12, which makes it perfect as a rocks glass or as a serving size for a brewery growler or coffee cup. I forgot I had it because it was in with the camping supplies for a couple of years, but it is better suited for home use than its counterpart above. For one thing, it’s easier to scrub out, which is important with coffee residue. For another, it doesn’t fit in a cup holder, and you’d probably want more than that anyway. But its greatest utility to me is as a bedside cup of something (usually iced tea) to gulp in the morning when I’m too parched to work my mouth. It’s also the chosen instrument when you need to pour out the tailings of another Yeti to repurpose it as during the morning coffee-to-iced-tea transition.

18 OUNCE BOTTLE: this was bought when I wanted a water bottle to go back and forth to work. It’s good for that, and for other things besides; as long as you leave the cap off, you can use it for most anything you’d use the 16 ounce tumbler for. it’s basically uncleanable by hand, though, so you’d better make sure you don’t crud it up with stuff the dishwasher can’t handle. And while its screw top makes it the only thing that can go in a backpack, it also means you shouldn’t try to put carbonated beverage in it (as I learned, to my cost. Hercules couldn’t have got that lid off.) Even though it’s less concealable than the 10 ounce tumbler, I feel like it would make a very good keep cup for travel in its own right, and I would probably go on a road trip with it and the 35 as my only drinking utensils. It may wind up on my next Disney trip, whenever that is, especially since I do have a belt holster for it.

24 OUNCE MUG: Now we get to the limited utility stuff. This was my late mother-in-law’s, and I am loath to get rid of it for just that reason, but it’s mostly been used as the thing where I brew two family teabags into enough concentrate for a 64-ounce pitcher. It doesn’t fit a cup holder, and I won’t put alcohol in it, but it’s a nice bonus size for coffee in the morning if necessity requires (and means it could be part of substituting for the 16oz daily driver, although I find it significant that it would take three or four things on this list to replace the 16.)

14 OUNCE MUG. This was bought in a moment of mental abstraction during the pandemic, when I thought I might someday be back in the office. It’s meant for office coffee use: too wide to take a standard V60 dripper, it’s meant to be poured into from pot or dispenser and then wide-mouthed enough to cool quickly, while still having a lid that can be popped on to take down the hall to meetings without spills. I would probably have given it away by now except that it has the old star-V Vanderbilt logo on it, and they don’t make those anymore. So now it reposes with the camping gear, where it can be useful for coffee or whiskey or oatmeal alike.

10 OUNCE WINE TUMBLER: the least useful of them all, this one actually holds only 9 ounces of liquid. Great for wine, but as the husband of a teetotal wife who myself gets heartburn for red wine, this is unlikely to ever see a lot of use. It was ordered as the maquette for the 25th anniversary EUS commemorative markings, though (which appear on the Redneck Guzzler), so to give it away would feel a bit awkward especially in the wrong hands. Still, i don’t need EIGHT Yetis, so I suspect it may wind up re-homed at some point.

Phew. That’s a lot. That’s actually too much. I could almost certainly survive with just the 16 oz tumbler, then maybe the rocks glass. Still, it’s nice to have options, especially with Veronica II. But the fact that I could give away three tomorrow were it not for sentimental attachment seems like a significant data point.