I’m feeling a strong kinship with Emily Litella these days.
“What’s all this stuff I keep hearing about DikDok and ChapSnat? I remember when you paid money to the telephone company! The telephone company never paid money to you! And you watched TV on the TV! Not on the telephone!”
I know, I know … since the first proto-influencer sketched a warthog on the cave wall while his elders looked on disapprovingly (“Fuckin’ kids today, amirite, Ogg? Minding the fire isn’t good enough for ’em anymore.”) some entertainment-delivery system has been poised to bring society crashing down around us.
Cave paintings. Comic books. Radio. TV. The Innertubes.
But damme if I don’t think the smartphone will be the tombstone of civilization, such as it is.
Fuckin’ kids today. Hey! Influencers! That’s my goddamn lawn you’re dancing on up there, y’know! The last one I’ll ever have! Get the hell off of it!
Didn’t need the rooftop laser cannon for this one. Five minutes with the pushbroom and our north-facing driveway is open for business.
It’d be a fine day for running if I still did that sort of thing. Instead I burned a little frosty daylight puzzling out the Apple TV HD Herself and I gave each other for solstice.
It’s been “improved” since our third-generation model, which means a remote that’s less intuitive and a box devoid of apps. We’re not big TV consumers, but still, I had to download and do the who-are-you/prove-it tango with the few apps we use, fencing with iTunes and the App Store and keeping one eye on Apple’s support site for tips on how to make that remote hunt.
You can use Siri, of course, but with my predilection for coarse language she’d probably be downloading porn 24/7.
“Siri, I was speaking rhetorically. I didn’t actually want videos about motherf … oh, just forget about it.”
I should have contracted the kids next door to handle the job. Their brains are all fresh, not clogged like a bus-station toilet with old usernames and passwords. They’d have had us up and running in no time.
When I was a greedy and impatient young pup my parents granted the opening of one present each on Christmas Eve.
Now I’m a grizzled old mutt and there is just one present under the tree, period. And it’s for the both of us, Your Humble Narrator and Herself.
Opening it this evening seems silly, especially since we already know what’s inside: an Apple TV HD. It is to replace our Apple TV (3rd generation), which no longer pulls down HBO Now, Now having been rechristened Max, as in Mad, which I am.
We generally enjoy an hour of TV with our dinner. But should there be anything worth watching on HBO Max, which lately seems as unlikely as finding a sense of honor and duty in government, we have to bypass our old Apple TV — though, oddly, it seems to work just fine with everything save HBO Max (happy holidays, AT&T, you miserable pricks).
Dig that crazy midget Xmas tree, daddy-o. And the cool wrapping on the lone gift.
The workaround involves booting up the even older Mac Mini, lighting a candle to the shade of Steve Jobs, chanting our Video Mantra (“TV Input, HDMI-1, Receiver Input, AV-1”), switching inputs on both TV and receiver, launching a browser (Which one? I never remember), and finally shrieking, “Goddamnit all to hell anyway!” and running right back to the loving tentacles of Netflix, sister of Cthulhu.
Tomorrow we will have the new Apple TV, so, yay, etc. Herself’s gift will be watching it. Mine will be setting it up.
This is less enthralling than it might have been long ago, in the Before Time. After 30 years of providing my own tech support for personal and professional gadgetry I’m having trouble working up any enthusiasm for wrangling a new comosellama just in case HBO, against all odds, comes up with another “The Sopranos,” “High Maintenance,” or “The Wire.”
I’m for sure not holding my breath while waiting for a new George Carlin special. Neither is George.
Who might ask: Is newer always better?
When it comes to bicycles I’m much more interested in friction shifting, rim brakes, and the nine-speed drivetrain than I am in the latest shiny object making the registers ring, when customers and product can be found in the same place at the same time.
I have an Apple Pencil for my iPad Pro, but when I sat down yesterday to draw a holiday card for the neighbors, I used my old analog A.W. Faber 3H pencil, a fistful of Sakura Pigma Micron pens, and a sheet of Strathmore 300 Series Bristol paper. And yes, the card was in good old black and white. (I thought of making a quick trip to the art-supply store for colored pencils, and then I thought again.)
Speaking of iPads, there’s a metric shit-ton of e-books on mine, but I notice I’m mostly reading real books lately. The kind you don’t have to plug into the wall.
This is just the yelping of an old dog who’s tired of learning new tricks, pining for a day when he not only didn’t have to keep stuff running, he didn’t even have to buy the stuff. It just sorta, like, grew there, under the tree.
But time passes and things change.
“Nothing endures but change,” as Heraclitus observed.
Izzat so? Well, spare me the change, you one-scroll wonder. And gimme some George, goddamnit. I already got too much stuff.
The UCI Cycling Esports World Championships sponsored by Zwift are to be held today, and mirabile dictu, the virtual cops will be on the lookout for the actual outlaws.
This dude is ready for his comeback.
It seems that digital “doping,” like actual doping, is a thing in these dark days. The same miscreants who will hitch a ride on a team car, hide tiny motors in their bicycles, and hotrod themselves with the drug du jour will manipulate the data like cadet James T. Kirk queering the Kobayashi Maru test at Starfleet Academy.
Tech blogger Ray Maker, speaking to The New York Times, suggested that Zwift is rife with the sort of shameless corner-cutting one used to see when bike races were still held outdoors, in the real world, where there are actual corners to cut.
“There’s so much cheating in Zwift that I think a lot of people would like to see more accountability,” said Maker, who writes the endurance sports technology blog DC Rainmaker.
A spokesman for Zwift, meanwhile, expressed confidence in the company’s ability “to catch cheaters and to police the races.”
Ho, ho, etc. Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.
Mad Blog Media 