Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
Woo-hoo! So you could write and try to get Jack to keep Twitter's 3rd-party ecosystem running, which relies on the benevolence of a company that has zero reason to support 3rd-party apps, and in fact has stated outright that they don't want them, because they don't make any ad money.
OR, you could take this as a good opportunity to abandon Twitter and join microblogging.
In grim future world, LA is uninhabitable (is funny joke: LA's been the Hellmouth since the 1960s), and Earth is dying, except for the nice wooded river and pristine forests they keep visiting in this dumpster fire of a movie. Soldier boy Rick is gung ho to be converted into a genetic superman so he can colonize Titan.
Saturn's moon, Titan. Which yes has an atmosphere, but there's 0% Oxygen, not the 5% this dumb movie says. It's so fucking cold -179°C your flesh would crystalize and shatter. There's no Sun or even Saturn itself visible under the atmospheric haze, we know because we dropped the Huygens probe in and saw a muddy haze! No energy for plants, and if there's life it'd be cold, slow, alien microbes or fish. Titan is not a place you can just bioengineer a person for. Mars might be dry and cold, but it's a sunny day in Antarctica in comparison.
Actual Landscape of Titan:
Mystical Wonderland Titan at end of movie:
The military base at the end of the world looks an awful lot like a suburb with a couple nice houses the filmmakers rented, and some industrial ugly office building. Zero set decoration effort.
Everyone walks around spouting short technical phrases learned from Wikipedia, but clearly neither the writers nor the walking meatstick "actors" know what they mean. When anything goes wrong, these supposed mid-21st C scientists & soldiers all turn to prayer. To what god?
The "what went wrong" meetings after the soldiers start going wrong are hilariously bad, unlike any conversation you'd have about a failing project. "Catch up or stop holding me back!" "Nature is unpredictable. Everyone evolves in a different way." ? Evolution works on populations, not individuals, you stupid stupid, STUPID writers.
Then suddenly the soldiers are all freaky Abe Sapien mutants with tentacle fingers and flying squirrel membrane wings, and it turns into a half-assed and joyless slasher flick.
★☆☆☆☆ and I wish I had the chemical lobotomy drug from the movie so I could unsee this.
"You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people."
—Mark Zuckerberg, Vox interview
Of course Facebook cares about you, just like a slaughterhouse cares about the cows driven up to the ramp. If they could reach more cows, they would, even if those cows couldn't pay to drive themselves to the slaughterhouse.
Dealing with my aging iPhone 6 and iOS 10, and even older iPad 3, was getting on my nerves, so I got a new "space gray" iPhone 8+, 256GB.
I considered the iPhone X, but after doing some maintenance on my apps, I loathe coding around the notch, and I loathe the way it looks. Chris Pirillo had some thoughts and followup that echo mine. Chris has since gone to Android, which to me is like eating only Soylent Green because you once got an undercooked meatloaf; overreaction isn't always wrong, though.
I would prefer the SE form factor, but I don't like a years-old hardware platform. And if this is going to be my only iOS device, I should get the biggest one possible so I can use it as a phablet. It's not like I ever hold a phone up to my ear anyway, it's either on speaker or headphones (dual speakers in the iPhone 8+! But USB-C headphone dongles ?).
The device arrives, and I go to set up, and immediately hit a roadblock: I can't access my iTunes backups. I've used them to recover before, but now I have no idea what the password is, and it's not any of my previous device passwords. Well, now I'm boned. Had to upgrade iCloud and backup to iCloud, which doesn't preserve on-device logins or the actual apps. Many hours later (slow asymmetric bandwidth), it's done.
Restoring the phone from that backup wasn't bad, but now I have a blank phone with placeholders for every single app, which I have to tap on, wait for it to spin and decide "keep/delete" if it's not 64-bit, or paradoxically tell me to buy the app if the app is no longer for sale. And then for every app, go in and restore purchases if it has any, login if necessary, etc. I didn't set Downcast to archive all podcasts, so it had to sit there for hours downloading the last 2 eps of dozens of podcasts.
At this point, let me say: Going 64-bit only is the most user-hostile, art-destroying thing Apple has ever done, and it SUCKS. All of Llamasoft's and CAVE's games are gone from the App Store, and were 32-bit. So I can still play them on old dying devices, but that's it. I miss Gridrunner and Deathsmiles. Atari Greatest Hits is still updated, and works perfectly; Activision Anthology is not, so no Pitfall! Midway Arcade is gone. Lost Treasures of Infocom is lost.
Apple's actually fucked up in 3 ways here, by not supporting 32-bit with an optional API download, by not providing legacy download of apps, and by making the App Store a toxic race for the bottom by EA and other literal motherfucking mega-studios, so no independent developer can make money except the 1 in a billion jackpots. I'm not advocating leaving for Google Play, because that's even less profitable, it's just open theft. I'm advocating burning down the entire system and starting over. But for now I'll take my Big Brother-issued gruel and pretend to enjoy it.
That was most of day 1 before I could do anything with the phone at all.
iBooks is a special level of Hell. It's the shittiest-written app Apple's ever released, syncing barely works at all, downloading is flaky and eats the main UI thread. So I'd go Purchased > Books > Not on this iPhone > All Books, which actually shows maybe 20 books and then stops listing them, then click the download arrow for the 5-6 items visible, then the UI would lock up and I'd have to wait for 5-15 minutes for it to finish. Then once I had all my books, they weren't organized correctly anymore, which is I guess my fault for having slightly different setups on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. So I went full-on librarian. Protip: Disable 3D touch in Settings, because the 3D touch in iBooks is useless and makes it impossible to move books. I spent a good 15 minutes struggling with this before I learned. So here goes most of day 2.
Taking those screenshots reveals a new screenshot UI, which PISSES ME OFF: iPhone demands that I triage or edit every screenshot immediately, sitting in the corner of the screen like a Jony Ive dog turd. I don't see any way to turn this bullshit feature off.
Additional stress comes from my entertainments: The ESO Jester's Festival was all weekend, which I grind for items worth a lot of gold, but had to spend most of a day tapping thru my phone and then looking back to the game.
And at the same time, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has two events running, a Mario anniversary crafting thing, and a gardening event. Happily I can still clear these in bed, in the bathroom, or while out, but having my phone be busy downloading books interferes with that.
I know, "do something useful, Mark", but really, games are supposed to be what recharge me, not extra stress.
I still haven't loaded my music onto the phone. I have enough space now for a good portion of my music library, instead of only the highest-rated curated lists. Yes, I still have a music library, so when I'm away from wifi, I can listen to music without burning thru my data cap. Ha ha suck it streaming-only kiddies. But I could also just take my iPod classic out, which has everything, but Apple doesn't want you to have nice things like that anymore.
As for the hardware:
The size is preposterous. 158.4mm x 78.1mm x 7.5mm, 202g. The old Palm III was 119mm x 81mm x 18mm, 160g, and the LifeDrive aka iPod touch 5 years before the iPod touch, was 121mm x 73mm x 19mm, 190g. I thought the Palm devices were almost too big for a pocket, but this is a big goddamned thing.
The screen's nice, bright, and rectangular. No fucking around with maybe-unusable areas at the bottom and top, just a big canvas for software to draw on. I can see the time, battery, AND phone signal at once. I can't really use it one-handed all the time. If I cradle it at the base of my fingers in my left hand, I can barely reach the other side of the screen with my thumb. I treat it more like the iPad already, set it down on a table or my leg and work on it.
The glossy case is irresponsible vanity. It should have a matte, grippable back, not be a perfectly-smooth, sliding-onto-concrete frictionless surface. FUCK Jony Ive and his obsession with things that look like nothing, and suck to actually use. I guess I need to find a new sticker-backing or very thin case for this. I don't want to add bulk.
Home button has a VERY satisfying haptic click, it really feels like the entire front of the device is pivoting down about 1mm, even tho it's solid glass. I do use TouchID when I'm somewhere safe, tho I'd disable that if I was travelling; I don't want the pigs to force me to unlock my device.
I haven't done any real photography with this phone yet, but the giant 2-camera hunchback is supposed to be quite nice.
Current setup, which will probably change again soon. Elric covers were just convenient, but the text under the icons doesn't look good, so I have to change that soon. You know what I want? Custom wallpaper per desktop, like we have on Mac OS X.
I obviously don't celebrate the one who died and was risen again, Osiris and his detachable penis, nor Ostara the goddess of the dawn, any more than I do christian syncretic myths (super NSFW, but you're not working now so go read all of Ghastly for the weekend).
It's a pseudo-random weekend in spring, because an obsolete lunar calendar doesn't match up with modern calendars. Hoboes dressing up as bunnies handing out eggs and candy aren't a holy celebration, just training kids to be furries (not that there's anything wrong with that). A fairy-tale rabbi (not rabbit) not attested to by contemporary historians didn't come back from lawful execution by magic, and won't be coming back again to take you to rock candy mountain while us sinners burn. Cocoa is a New World plant, so chocolate bunnies or penises or whatever are obviously heretical new additions to any mythology. Tasty, tasty heresy.
Also, merry pranksmas.
Anyway, I was raised from the dead too early, going back to bed. Try not to form any religions about me while I'm out.
Oh, sure, I have backups. Secure backups. How secure? This secure
It's not listed in my 1password, and it's not any current or recent device password. SO… boned.
Drink a lot. Working on that.
The Last Starfighter: CGI 34 years ago was low-poly and glossy or phong shaded, but honestly no worse for storytelling, as long as they didn't try to show living things. And the aliens in latex look FANTASTIC, so much better than the CGI chars in RP1.
The orchestral soundtrack by Craig Safan is really quite good, it carries the film as much as the CGI does. Like Christopher Franke's Babylon 5 soundtracks, the mood swings from ominous to war to comedy can be a little abrupt.
Far more character development is given to each of Alex Rogan, Maggie, Centauri, Grig, and even mad, traitorous Xur. I'm not especially a fan of the Beta unit's dating comedy. Short shrift is given to all the dead, maybe interstellar society is just that callous but we're not. But the fate of the Beta unit, the war, and the ending, are much more emotional.
★★★★½