Waiting for the Gift of Sound and Vision

One of my favorite means of indulging my nostalgic needs of late is to peruse old gaming magazines that I had read in high school and some of college, late 90’s to early 2000’s. This is easy enough thanks to sites like Retromags and the Internet Archive. The scan quality isn’t always great and there’s a few gaps here and there, but the fortunate part about what I was looking for most recently is that advertisements tend to repeat month to month. If you’re very lucky, what gets advertised eventually gets featured in the magazine proper.

I don’t consider myself an audiophile. I don’t know enough about speakers to know my studio monitors from my bookshelves from my ribbons from my… whatever the speakers I was looking for are, but I know enough to know what sounds good to me. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that with the possible exception of the iPhone, the internal speaker on any electronic device is bound to be terrible. If you’re lucky, it’s terrible in a way that makes it good. The speakers in my PSP would crackle a little when sound peaked, such as during an explosion or a crash of some vehicle, but I found something oddly satisfying and reassuring about it. I know charm is an overused term, but I can’t think of a more apt term for this particular flavor of the warm and fuzzies.

Sidenote: we had our N64 hooked up to a TV whose internal speakers weren’t shielded from the cathode ray tube. Before I understood anything I just said, I was convinced the screen flickering during loud parts or bass-heavy sounds was the awesome power of the artificial intelligence written into the game’s code. The system (and specifically Shadows of the Empire) was just too damn powerful for our meager little television set.

Maybe I don’t read enough magazines, but it always felt like the ads in videogame magazines were especially creative. They were bold, edgy, funny, clever, and memorable enough that I found myself looking back through those old issues for a set of Sony speakers I saw advertised in an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly. The ad was two pages, but it wasn’t a spread like you’d expect. The first page was a tall, narrow, black speaker with a few buttons and a green slit of an LCD. Its cord ran out from its back and to the right of the page. A few pages later, the second page showed the speaker’s mate, its own cord running in the opposite direction. The first page asks if you need a reason to get surround sound, advising you to keep flipping the pages. The second page observes that you’ve seen no shortage of reasons. A few more buzzwords about the quality of the speakers and an image of how the speakers are intended to be set up, with one on either side of a modestly-sized television. 

I think I was fascinated by these speakers, blandly branded the SA-VA7’s, because they didn’t fit any conventional models of audio setups I was superficially familiar with. It mentioned surround sound, but in my experience, surround sound required more than two speakers and they all had to be hooked up to a massive receiver under your VCR and/or DVD player. These looked more like the speakers you get for a PC, but they were so much bigger and imposing looking. Too insubstantial for the former and too over-engineered for the latter, I think the reason I didn’t inquire further into them was that I doubtless couldn’t afford them, be they a cheap surround system or an expensive PC speaker. Moreover, I already had a really nice stereo system that I’d gotten unexpectedly for Christmas, so they’d be redundant as well.

Sidenote: It’s worth pointing out here that I can be an exceptionally frugal person. My brother likes to tell this story about the time he asked me, “If you could have any car in the world, any at all, what would it be?” My response was a Geo Storm. He thought for a moment and explained that cost wasn’t an issue, that it could be any vehicle regardless of price. I stuck to my guns. In those decades since, my taste in cars has become more high roller than coupon-clipping, and I’ve also learned to distinguish between purchases and investments.

A few years later, something unexpected happened. The family computer, a Bondi-blue G3 iMac with a DVD drive, became my computer. This meant it wound up in my room on my desk, against the opposite wall of my TV, Playstation, and stereo. Obviously, hooking up my TV and Playstation to the stereo was easy and straightforward. If I wanted to hook my iMac to the stereo, I would have had to run a cord from my desk and across my floor to the entertainment center. Even if I wanted to deal with the tripping hazard, there’s the problem of the speakers being behind me while I’m at the iMac at my desk. In fact, they were behind me and to my left, so it was far from an ideal arrangement.

Along comes another issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly and with it the solution to my problem. If SA-VA7 was a bland name, these had the exact opposite problem. These had at least two names and from a brand that seemed to be in the process of restructuring, so there were two additional names. The full title of these little dynamos was the ScreenBeat Sound Station by SpectraVideo/Logic3. The apparatus consisted of two small speakers wired up to a subwoofer that was meant to sit on the floor (or on your desk if you wanted to the Jurassic Park thing with any cups of liquid you had). This made it what’s known as a “2.1” sound system, with the decimal referring to the subwoofer as that’s generally less something you hear and more something you feel. They retailed for about 70USD (I never found out what the SA-VA7’s cost) and their absolute best feature that stood out to me: they matched my iMac. 

It wasn’t a perfect color match, but close enough that, when I moved into my college dorm, my roommate’s dad asked if I was a computer science major. When I said I wasn’t, he asked about the tower I was setting up under my monitor. I explained that the monitor was the whole computer and the “tower” was just a speaker. That shows you how revolutionary the design of the iMac was; beige boxes were still the industry standard. The elaborate, Windows-based gaming rigs you see today were around, but they were almost rarer to see in the wild than an iMac. Simply put, it seemed like these speakers were made just for me.

A lot of time passed, I graduated college, the iMac was getting a bit long in the tooth in term of technology (and it was already admittedly a little bit underpowered for anything outside of video editing in Quicktime Pro, writing papers, making Powerpoint presentations, and simple 3D modeling in Poser), and Windows XP had fixed pretty much every complaint I ever had about previous offering from the House of Gates. So, the iMac went away and my proper PC tower became my monolith to all things media and productivity. The ScreenBeats had gone away somewhere in this timeframe, either before I graduated or just after, and I mostly stuck to using headphones if I was going to be immersed in whatever I needed the PC for.

A lot more time passed and the most elaborate sound system I had was a speaker bar for my TV and game consoles. If I was using a computer or a phone or a tablet, headphones were my default. They were also the default for when I listened to music as I was in an apartment and I didn’t want to be THAT neighbor blasting music through my speaker bar. Of course, I watched plenty of movies and played plenty of games through that speaker bar, but that just seemed different to me somehow, like it would be more forgivable or bearable than going through the entire Daft Punk discography. Also, my roommate has little to no concept of an indoor voice when she’s gaming on her PC and headphones were the best defense.

Toward the end of my time in that apartment, I was watching a YouTube video from a games reviewer named Caddicarus. This particular video was sponsored by a company called KOVE and the product on display was a cylindrical Bluetooth speaker that fit nicely into the cupholders of a car, likely hence its name of the Commuter. When I checked out the website, I saw KOVE had a new speaker on offer called the Commuter 2, the sequel to the speaker I’d just seen. If you’re in the market for a Bluetooth speaker, KOVE is a little hard to recommend. I think they’re a drop-shipping operation. That is, KOVE is the branding middleman for a generic speaker you can probably find cheaper elsewhere under a different name. It’s also one of those sites that is running flash sales all the time, so it’s virtually impossible to pay the full advertised price for the speaker. I know there’s a name for this advertising tactic, but I can’t be bothered to look it up. Needless to say, the speaker was cheap despite being advertised on a massive sale, but like those iMac matchers from years ago, they had a little special something to them that intrigued me. I took the chance and got my 200USD speaker for a mere 64 (which is technically less than what I paid for the Sound Station if you consider inflation). 

The intriguing feature was the ability of the speaker to split into a stereo pair. It twisted in the middle with a bayonet-style locking system and this middle seam was actually angled in such a way that the two halves would rest with their drivers aimed slightly upward. 

Did I think this was an absolutely inspired piece of design? Very much so. Did I ever actually use it when I was writing on my iPad with my little keyboard and case that folded into a stand for the iPad? Maybe once. I mean, I wasn’t about to set this up in a coffee shop. An especially clicky mechanical keyboard? Yes, I’m THAT guy. Speakers? No, that’s just plain obnoxious. 

I ended up giving the speaker to my roommate. It wasn’t a hard decision because, despite the intriguingly cool design, the KOVE Commuter 2 had a crippling flaw: latency. If you were simply listening to music or an audiobook or a podcast, there was no issue. If, however, you were watching a video, you’d notice a bit of a gap between the lips flapping on the screen and the sounds hitting your ear. If you were using a music-making app like GarageBand or a digital instrument of some kind, forget it. It was at least a full beat behind, making it practically unusable. I have no idea why it has this problem; I don’t have this issue with Bluetooth headphones. My best guess is it’s something to do with the way the two speakers are tethered together, since you’re still only connecting one speaker to your source. It must simply be too much number crunching to receive the signal from the device and then beam the other channel to its mating half. Maybe this is why I’ve never seen another Bluetooth speaker like this one, why I don’t see this stereo splitting by other companies like SONOS or JBL.

As for replacing my KOVE, I came across a slender little number from Sony, the SRS-XB23. It didn’t split in two, but could still play a stereo signal through its two drivers, requiring you to place the speaker on its side for best results. I paid roughly less than the Commuter 2, it fills the room quite nicely, and there’s no latency when I’m watching something on my phone or making music.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about those old SA-VA7’s from the magazine ad and did a little investigating. I found exactly one YouTube video of someone showing them off, along with some scattered pages in various audiophile databases. Overall, they don’t seem to have sold very well, which may be attributed to Sony marketing them to gamers to use with their Playstations. If gamers are going to hook up their consoles to a sound system, they’re probably just going to do what I did and use the one I had for music anyway. That was when an idea hit me. The SRS-XB23 may not have had the ability to split into two speakers, but there is a feature that plays right into the devious marketing of those bigger audio equipment companies like JBL or Bose: Stereo pairing.

It’s simple enough in principle. If you have two of the same model of Bluetooth speaker, you can pair them together so that one is the right channel and the other is the left channel. This is the “that’s where they get you” of the scheme. Why sell one speaker that does the work of two when you can have two speakers at twice the price? The SRS-XB23 had been out for a few years and was still available as New Old Stock on Amazon. In fact, I got it from the same third-party seller for about the same price.

Although simple enough in principle, actually setting up the stereo pair is a little bit tedious. For starters, I’ve already got one SRS-XB23 saved in my phone’s Bluetooth settings, so now there’s another identical speaker to add to the mix and I can’t just nickname them like some other devices. Secondly, you’ve got to pair the speakers with each other first, which means you have to turn off Bluetooth on the device you’re ultimately going to tether them to. Tedious may be a strong word, but it’s not very intuitive and certainly not discoverable without consulting an online guide. Once you’ve got the stereo pair sorted, each speaker conveniently announces whether it’s the left or right channel. Finally, you turn the Bluetooth back on your device and hope you pick the correct of the two identical speakers and you’re off to the races in stereo and with no noticeable latency.

Am I going to use this setup? No. I don’t do a lot of writing on my iPad anymore since I’ve got a recently upgraded desktop setup that I plan to get as much use out of as humanly possible. As for using them with my desktop (music coming from my iPhone and to the speakers) my monitor is too wide and my desk is too narrow to place them at each side as intended. Did I waste my money? I don’t think so. I’ll still use the stereo pairing on occasion. They sound great in tandem, plus I’ve got one as a backup given the first is almost 5 years old at this point and with semi-regular use. Most importantly, after 30-some years, I finally have (the option for) two tall, narrow Sony speakers on either side of a display.

Reading Update: For The Record

When I was a kid, we had a Fisher Price record player. It was tan and beige and played 45’s, the record format of choice for singles back in the day. In my time, it was the choice medium for storybooks. The idea was that you read along while the record played. There would even be cue sounds to remind you when to turn the page. This usually wasn’t a problem except for the one we had for Star Wars. When it was time to turn the page, R2-D2 would chirp his iconic beeps and boops. Trouble is, they didn’t keep the R2 effects to just the page turns, which got very confusing. We had quite a few of these books, but I don’t remember all of them. The ones that stand out in my mind the most after all these years are Star Wars (both A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back), The Hobbit, and The Black Hole, which was probably my favorite out of all of them. It’s the one I remember reading the most.

After finishing my audiobook of Project Hail Mary, I decided to do something a little different for my next read, which was We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Apple Books has a collection of literary classics available at no cost, including audiobook versions for some of them. Two noteworthy examples of this are The Time Machine read by Kelsey Grammer and A Christmas Carol read by LeVar Burton. As it happens, Zamyatin’s We offers both a text and an audiobook version. So, using my iPhone for the audiobook (since I’ve got it paired with a nice Bluetooth speaker) and my iPad for the text version, I “read along” to We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

The purpose of the experiment was twofold apart from simple curiosity. The cognition behind reading along is rather fascinating to me. When we read books in school, I’m sure we all remember having one person read aloud while the rest of us read along until it was our turn to take over narration duties. Incidentally, history class was when I learned about a rather interesting job from the olden times of the Industrial Revolution. Cigar factories still employed human workers while everyone else was looking to mechanical automation. As such, even a large room full of people rolling cigars doesn’t produce nearly the same level of noise as a typical factory of the time. In order to break up the monotony and do something about the deafening silence, the workers would take turns reading aloud from a book while everyone worked. I just find the science behind reading aloud (and especially reading along) to be an intriguing exploration of our own cognition, how we process this information and retain it. After all, so far as we know, humans are the only animals that have writing at all, so the fact that there are dedicated regions of the brain for these funny symbols we assign either abstract or concrete meanings to is, no pun intended, mind blowing. Amazon offers a feature called “Read & Listen” or “immersion reading” available for Kindle and Audible that not only allows you to play both the audiobook and let you read at the same time, but even has an active cursor to highlight the words as you go along. However, it’s not available for all titles and the highlighting cursor doesn’t always cooperate. Apple Books has nothing like this, but I think that’s okay; the only problem to it was I had to be mindful of stopping the audiobook before closing out of the book on my iPad to help keep my place if I didn’t stop at the end of a chapter. It also inflated the running timer since, as far as the app was concerned, I was reading two books at once. Needless to say, I absolutely smashed my daily reading goal while breezing through We.

My other reason for reading along was to see if, by some objective measure, my reading speed had genuinely improved from when I was in school. As I said in an earlier entry, I never got the hang of speed reading, and the context of reading to study for class (and therefore a grade) didn’t exactly nurture the skill as far as I was concerned. It kind of broke me and that led to me being one of those book-a-year-at-best people, even though I still had a tenacious glimmer of that childhood giddiness about books that kept me coming back to the bookstores every now and again. Sure enough, and to my relief, there were more than a few instances when I got a little bit impatient with the audiobook. It was to the point I considered abandoning the read-along in favor of a kind of flip-flopping: audiobook in the car, text version at home, or some similar arrangement. I stuck with the original plan and simply learned to let the narrator do what narrators do best, and that’s sell you on the drama and believe in these characters. So, I consider the experiment a roaring success. I have found a small and practical spectrum of speeds between my default settings of Audiobook and Violent, Panicked Skimming.

As for We, it was all right. It was written in 1924 and really set the stage for the Dystopian Future genre, with all the typical tropes on tour. Everyone is identified by numbers, all are dressed in the same gray uniforms (leaving our protagonist, D-503, to take note of people’s facial features as abstract shapes to help him remember them), information is strictly controlled by an enigmatic governing body, and all surfaces are glass, the sole exception being for curtains that can be drawn when permission for “Makin’ Whoopee” is granted. The book is presented as a journal, though each entry is labeled as a “record” rather than a specific date, which is more typical of the Epistolary genre. At times, it reminded me a lot of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, in which the narrator blurs the line between reality and the imagination, leaving us to wonder what’s literal and what’s a complex metaphor about processing new information as their respective arcs develop. Ayn Rand’s Anthem, by contrast, is much more direct, even pithy in places, and cranks up the totalitarianism of We to 11, to the point that the very pronoun of “I” is completely unknown to the populace (instead using the collective “We”). Of course, Anthem is notably shorter than We; it almost reads more like an outline for a much longer work. I may have polished off Anthem in a single, casual weekend.

After We’s experiment concluded to victorious fanfare, the next in my queue was Memoirs Found In a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem. The last book by Lem I’d read was Eden, and there’s a common thread between the two of them I find rather funny. For starters, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub is set in the distant future, in which a spacefaring, solar system conquering humanity has suffered a terrible setback in their study of history thanks to a tenacious blight that has destroyed all paper. Lem wrote the book in 1961. At this time, Xerox was experimenting with the technology that would come to be known about 30-plus years later as E-Ink, and would ultimately be popularized by Amazon’s Kindle tablets a decade later. As I write this, word from many publishers is that mass market paperbacks are being phased out as digital sales of books go up (hardcovers, meanwhile, seem to be doing as well as ever). Obviously, prescience is at a premium even among the most studious of sci-fi writers, so I’m not knocking Lem for thinking that humanity would still be relying on paper that far into the future. In Eden, written in 1958 and set at an equally distant future date, the ship that crashes on the titular planet has a very well-stocked library, so well-stocked that the books get repurposed into a makeshift staircase due to the ship settling at an odd angle. If you know anything about space travel, weight carries a hefty cost, so a well-stocked library might come across as a little bit silly given how utilitarian the rest of the ship is. Finally, there’s the irony of me reading both of these books on a digital tablet more 50 years since Lem committed these works to paper from his trusty typewriter.

Lem died of heart failure in 2006, and I can’t find anything as to his opinion on the invention of E-Ink or the budding market of ebooks. Incidentally, Douglas Adams died of a heart attack in 2001 and had a very complex opinion of ebooks. In the posthumously published Salmon of Doubt, he had this to say:

“We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.”

Although Adams never made any mention of Lem as an influence on his work, the two have very similar sensibilities when it comes to the tone of their work. Lem is generally more serious than Adams, but one persistent theme of Lem’s work is the inability of the human mind to fully comprehend both the universe at large and the otherworldly denizens that may inhabit it along with us, something Adams also delved into in his work. Eden focused on our shipwrecked crew and their attempts to make contact with the planet’s odd inhabitants who largely ignore their new neighbors. As it turns out, they’ve got problems of their own. As for Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, Lem goes pure Kafkaesque comedy. Although set in the future (and flashing back to a less distant future via the titular memoirs), the sci-fi elements are at most a framing device and at least a few throwaway lines that blend into the rest of the existential metaphors that make up most of the dialogue. Set in a multilevel bunker in the Colorado mountains (referred to only as The Building and described by future scholars as a kind of back-up Pentagon), the government finds itself mired in paperwork as it tries to sort out its own shady operations of surveillance, code-breaking, and maintaining an illusion of order. Our narrator is an operative charged with a mission of such vital importance and such terrible secrecy that nobody can actually tell him what he’s supposed to be doing. The bulk of the prose has him going from level to level and room to room encountering other operatives who may or may not know more than they are letting on. Discussions with these oddballs range from the nature of decoding information to making triples and quadruples of un/known double agents to just how routine firefights and shootouts are in an effort to maintain the status quo of the facility. I kept picturing The Building as a kind of Cold War Retrofuturism blending of the War Room from Dr. Strangelove and the Wildfire facility from The Andromeda Strain, with deep red carpets, harsh overhead lights, white curving walls, and furniture placed in the middle of each room with lots of empty space around it.

In the end, I found the book overall rather average. It feels slapdash, like Lem didn’t quite know what to do with the memoirs in question and so tacked on this lengthy introduction about the paper plague. Frankly, I think one could just treat the introduction as a standalone short story and forgo the rest of the book and really lose nothing of value. That’s not to say the memoirs are bad, but once you get a feel for the joke of bureaucracy gone awry, it wears out its welcome and the only thing that kept me going was for some potential payoff that tied the introduction to the narrative proper. At the risk of spoilers, no such thing occurs. The memoirs end very abruptly and we’re left wondering if that’s all there is to it and just what it was that we read.

It’s hard to give the book a recommendation beyond my prescribed reading of the introduction and giving the rest a pass. If you’ve never read Lem and have any desire to, the best place to start is Solaris. The next book of his in my queue is A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of book reviews for books that don’t actually exist. It should be fun and I plan on doing a full write-up of its offerings (I've got plenty to say about the premise alone), though that won’t be for some time. Meanwhile, having just finished Memoirs earlier this morning, I am now halfway through C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. My impression thus far is one of not being terribly impressed. It’s another work of Epistolary literature, the letters being from a demon to his nephew as the latter tries to tempt a human patient away from the light. It feels more like the sort of thing Mark Twain would have written and spice up with his signature wit. Lewis, I think, takes himself a little too seriously and isn’t having that much fun with the subject matter. Once I’ve finished with it, I’m not entirely sure what’s next in my queue. Maybe I’ll randomize it, or at least take a break from fiction with some nonfiction I’ve got piled up, like a book about how Xerox effectively invented the personal computer as we know it, only to sit on it until Steve Jobs and Bill Gates saw the potential and pilfered what they could from their sanctioned tour.

Quite the history for a company known mostly for photocopiers. 

A Page-Turner for All Seasons

I have a complicated relationship with reading that I think a number of people can relate to. Simply put, I blame school and I blame movies. The latter is straightforward enough. I grew up in a golden age of cinema: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, The Princess Bride, Big, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ghostbusters, Short Circuit, The Goonies, Labyrinth, and too many others to name. These movies were every bit as deep and thematically complex as any book, and all I had to do was push Play on the VCR. As for school, bear in mind that I’m not mad, only frustrated. The biggest problem is on my end; I never got the hang of speed reading. I figured, if someone wrote all this, the least I can do is read all of this. When you’re reading on your own, who cares? With school, however, not only are you expected to read the book within a timeframe, you’re also going to be quizzed on it. Therein lay the problem, you want to get through the book quickly, but you’ve got to retain as much detail as possible, otherwise you won’t do so well on the assignment. It’s simply a skill I never got to develop properly. Some people got it. I didn’t.

In recent years, I feel I’ve gotten a little better at it, and have been able to polish off some books fairly quickly. There’s a caveat to this, however, that the book is between 200-300 pages or, according to its audiobook counterpart, able to be read in 8-10 hours maximum. Even if I only read on weekends, that’s a book a month at my slowest.

When I was gifted an audiobook of Project Hail Mary, I made an exception (and I'll probably make a few more exceptions that I'll talk about later). It’s 16 hours, but there’s a twist. The book switches between the present day plot and a past flashback. It’s rather like reading two books at the same time, which is a surprisingly good way to stay engaged with a plot that might otherwise drag. That may sound like the problem is with my attention span, and that’s fair. Some stories take more telling than others, and a tighter plot doesn’t necessarily make for a better book. 

Someone on social media (I can’t find where now) was talking about the state of television, specifically streaming shows, how there’s so few episodes per season and we have to wait sometimes several years for the next season. They went on to elaborate that sometimes a show would just have an episode in which nothing happens and that this is becoming a lost art. These are sometimes called Bottle Episodes, depending on who you ask. A more cynical person would call them Filler. Bottle Episodes are designed to be self-contained and usually intended to give audiences a breather between longer or more significant plot points. They’re typically confined to a single location and are often more dialogue-heavy than a standard episode. Reasons for a Bottle Episode will, once again, depend on who you ask. Writers like and will vehemently defend them because it's a chance to flesh out their characters. They're also typically born of necessity, like a show going over budget on an earlier or upcoming episode. 

Here’s the thing about streaming versus traditional television regarding filler: There are no time slots to fill anymore. I was thinking about this when finishing off season two of My Adventures with Superman. I never really got into any of the Superman comics growing up, but when it comes to the Man of Steel’s other media appearances, I’m always curious to see how it works out. With My Adventures with Superman, every episode was an absolute banger, not a single moment wasted, not one episode that could be written off as filler. Between the two seasons, the total number of episodes is 20, the first half in 2023 and the second half in 2024 (as of this writing, the third season is about two weeks away). That got me thinking about that old Lois and Clark series from the 90’s, the one with Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher. That was a show that felt like it was on forever. When I looked it up, I found it was only four seasons spanning 1993 to 1997, but each season was 22 episodes. Do you remember all of them? I sure don’t. Of course, it’s hardly fair to compare a live-action superhero show from the mid-90’s to a modern animated program nearly 30 years apart; animation is expensive and therefore doesn’t have time for filler. Still, when you’re bringing Superman to the small screen, maybe quality should take precedent over quantity. Sure, watching Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, try to balance is his secret identity with his relationship with Lois is part of the mythos, but peppering in a few breakable sets and props isn’t exactly making the most of said mythos.

As for the time between seasons, I can’t help but suggest to these impatient viewers… maybe read some books. You’ve got time. 

Lofty Goals

In the wake of World War 2 and the spread of globalization, New York City found itself with an excess of large, empty lofts meant for manufacturing work. As a result, they had to lease these places for dirt cheap. This attracted a number of artists from painters to sculptors and everything in between to set up shop. The understanding was that these facilities were not to be residences. To that end, anything like air conditioning, running water, and even electricity in some places had to be installed at the renter’s expense. As might be expected, these artists did in fact make homes of these lofts, the landlords simply looking the other way most of the time since they were getting paid and even having utilities installed at no cost to them. Eventually, these landlords started to get tired of being taken advantage of, so they moved to evict these artists from their spaces so they could renovate them into upscale apartments. Some lobbying and political dealings later and the Loft Act was introduced in 1982. Officially called Article 7-C of the New York Multiple Dwelling Law, the long and short of this new lease on life for the artists was that they were allowed to maintain their spaces with rent control in full effect on the condition that they were in fact full-time artists making a living from their art. You were a professional or you were out. That was the deal. Many of these artists are still working to this day in the same space they leased all those decades ago. It’s a charming little piece of history. 

In 2013, I self-published a novella. At least, I call it a novella. According to some guidelines I read here and there, what I actually produced should be called a novelette. Frankly, I think discussions of book length are the very picture of pedantic. Rendezvous with Rama clocks in at a little less than 260 pages and Atlas Shrugged is over 1200, yet no one bats an eye at calling either of them novels. Fun fact: L. Ron Hubbard's posthumously published Mission Earth was originally a single, million-plus word novel broken up into ten separate volumes between 1985 and 1987. At the end of the day, some stories take more telling than others and the rest is simply publishers making sure they get their money’s worth from your work. Anyway, for my self-publishing, I used a service called Smashwords. They took on the task of formatting my document into an ePub format and then distributing it to all the notable ebook sellers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books, to name a few. Originally I put the book out there with a price tag, but decided to make it free after about two years time. I even posted it to my DeviantART page. The price was more of a statement than anything else; It was to prove that I was serious about my work, even if the book is immensely silly. I mean, the chapter titles are quotes from Return of the Jedi. Despite having no science fiction elements at all beyond the occasional defiance of physics, I was indebted to two figures who helped bring a faraway galaxy to our theaters: George Lucas and Sir Alec Guinness. 

I took writing advice from both of them. Lucas set aside a block of time each day to sit at his desk and write away on his legal pads. The deal was he stayed there for the whole time no matter what, whether he wrote a little or wrote a lot. That was my schedule on the book from November through early the next year. I’d come home from work, and apart from bathroom breaks and dinner, I stayed at that keyboard whether I wrote a sentence, a paragraph, a whole chapter, or nothing at all. As for the late and great Sir Guinness, he once told Don Swaim of BookBeat that the best way to keep yourself motivated in writing is not to get up or stop or otherwise take a break unless you know what the next thing you’re going to put down is. In other words, don’t take a break when you get stuck. This has a few positive effects, but I think the most prominent one is that it helps keep your vision fresh in your mind. It’s like challenging yourself to memorize a long string of numbers. The brain is a muscle and the more you use it, the better you’ll be at keeping thoughts fresh in your mind. 

I may not be a professional writer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t take what I do as seriously as one. 

Then I got an email yesterday. 

A few years earlier, Smashwords had been acquired by another self-publishing/on-demand entity called Draft2Digital. Nothing really changed in that time except the layout of the website. However, with this email, they announced a rather drastic change to what exactly they expected from their writers. 

In short, if your book sales fell below 100USD in a 12-month period, you had to pay a 12USD annual maintenance fee. That is, if your books weren’t selling, and Draft2Digital wasn’t getting their cut of the sales, you had to pay the rent out of pocket for the honor of having your books listed on their site. 

Oh, how I wish my sales had exceeded a full Benjamin at any point. That’s not entirely true; like I said, it was more a matter of principle that I charged for the book at first. Still, you never know what’s going to blow up, so better to hedge your bets. I completely understand why Draft2Digital wants to go this route. Their revenue is made from book sales, and servers aren’t free. There’s a reason they call it a maintenance fee. Digital real estate is still real estate and not every company is Google and can therefore afford to float a few freeloaders. I mean, I haven’t paid for this blog. Google keeps Blogger around more or less out of the goodness of its heart. 

Frankly, I don’t like the idea of paying 12 bucks a year for every year I don’t make 100 or more in selling my silly little stories, so I made a decision. I delisted everything I’d put up there, and I’m in the process of closing my account. There wasn’t actually a way to do that on their site, so I had to email them, which was prefaced with a warning on the web page that there was a massive influx of inquiries and so it may take some time to receive a response. 

I think it’s fair to presume a number of other people aren’t too keen on the maintenance fee. 

Anyway, according to my account, my fee wouldn’t even be charged until March of next year, so I’m not at all flustered about the time it may take to receive a response about closing my account. Who knows, maybe they’ll even walk this back in a few days or weeks given the sheer volume of people jumping ship. 

As I said, I don’t blame them for this move and I do honestly wish them success going forward. I’m clearly not cut out to be on their platform and there’s no point in my taking up their server space. As a result, the only way to read the book now is on my DeviantART page, and that will be the case for at least the next two years. 2028 will make the book 15 years old. On that anniversary, my plan is to re-release it, maybe with an introduction or some additional material. I’ve had a sequel in mind for some time, but I have no timeframe for when that’s going to be made a reality, so you’ll just have to settle for the original. Back when I published the book in 2013, I think I originally wrote it in Evernote and then used some other application to convert it into a Word document. In the years since then, I’ve learned that Apple’s word processor, Pages, has a neat little pipeline baked into it that lets you send your manuscript straight through to Apple Books. One single application and no annual maintenance fees. I can still export to an ePub and have it made available through other stores like Kindle, but I don’t really care so much about reach. As a wise and disembodied voice once said, “If you build it, they will come.” 

New York built lofts, and along came the artists. 

Update: Received a reply from Draft2Digital and they clarified that the maintenance fee will only be charged to accounts with books listed. You do not need to delete your account if you don't want to. In fact, if you do delete your account and decide to open one later, you are charged a one-time activation fee. To review, if you delist your books, you are not charged the maintenance fee. Deactivating your account is not necessary to avoid the fee. 

The Great UnGoogling Side Story: The Optimal Death of Prime

https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/

I've been invested in the Amazon ecosystem for many years. You might even say I was an early adopter, especially when they expanded their offerings from books to DVDs. It was simply the best place to get movies if you had particularly obscure tastes like I do. I mean, if Suncoast didn't have it, it might as well have never existed.

Hopefully, you don't need me to tell you about everything wrong with Amazon. If you do, let's just say their convenience comes at a steep price, and I don't just mean the flow of money. 

Speaking of money, I had a Prime membership for years. It seemed like a no-brainer; 2-day shipping, Prime Video, Music... You were paying for the streaming service but with a boatload of perks. 

As time has gone on, however, the perks have not increased in value. In fact, many features have ducked behind paywalls and has left my membership feeling rather anemic. 

First, there was Amazon Music. Instead of giving you unlimited plays of certain songs, everything went to a Spotify-like shuffle mode. The entire catalog was available, but you'd have to wait for it to randomly show up. The biggest problem with this was that it affected any singles or albums that you purchased. This was resolved eventually, but that it happened in the first place showed how much of a rushed solution this was to a cashflow problem. 

After that, they started putting ads on Prime Video. Here I was paying about 140 dollars a year, and they were still going to have me sit through ads while watching movies and shows. Rather than make a new, ad-supported tier to draw in new users (like HBOMax and Netflix), they changed the tier I was already in to the ad-supported one. Simply put, this is not what I signed up for, and I wasn't alone in feeling this way. Ironically, I wouldn't have minded if they simply upped the price of Prime as they've done in the past. I pay it annually because that is much more convenient than juggling monthly charges. However, getting rid of the ads on Prime Video requires a monthly charge of 3 dollars. There's no option for me to pay more annually. Bear in mind, I also pay for Kindle Unlimited and Audible, so this was turning into a mess. I can understand making those a separate charge, but now they're going to nickel and dime me on a service I already paid for in advance. 

Another service I'd paid for annually was Disney+. However, after that business with Jimmy Kimmel, an increase in their annual price, and now their current deal with OpenAI to flood Plus with slop, not only did I not renew my Disney+ subscription, but I'm not giving them any money for the next year at least, including going to their movies. I'm not paying for slop. If they want in bed with OpenAI, they can have each other.

Speaking of AI, Amazon made their own AI deal that served as the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I have an array of smart speakers around the house. They're very handy. I use them for kitchen timers while cooking, controlling lights, making grocery lists, playing music (if I don't mind the shuffle mode), and sometimes as an intercom with my roommate, among other things. Again, very handy. Alexa Plus, meanwhile, is only handy in the sense I want to put my hands around its neck and squeeze its damned life out of it. At first, it was offered as a beta program and an update to the Alexa app. In addition to the hassle of dealing with how everything was rearranged in the app, using the new Alexa Plus was equally tedious and even counterproductive. Without getting into the weeds of how virtual assistants work, they replaced Alexa's hard-coded routines with a chatbot that turns nearly everything you ask it to do into a big production. I almost wouldn't mind it except everything took slightly longer than it normally did. I swear the first time I tried adding something to the grocery list in the new app with Alexa Plus, it took about five minutes. Full disclosure, I've used AI chatbots before, and I hate them. I hate everything about them. It gets under my skin because chatbots are essentially what customer service jobs want you to sound like in a call center scenario. It's that mode of speech which tries to sound casual and friendly but is so forced as to be legitimately insulting. There's an uncanny valley aspect to it as well; it's trying to sound so human that it backfires. 

I tried to back out of the Beta program, and was successful, but only until the app update forced Alexa Plus onto me. If I kept my Prime membership, I was getting Alexa Plus whether I wanted it or not. 

This led me to look into my Prime membership and see just what exactly I was (and wasn't) getting for my money. One of my favorite aspects of Amazon is something called Subscribe and Save. At the risk of sounding like a sales pitch, you lump so many items together in a single shipment and set them to be dropped off at regular intervals, and this not only comes with free shipping, but discounts on the goods in question compared to one-time purchases. This is how I get my cat food, kitty litter, paper towels, bath tissue, and even my protein bars. Having boxes of paper towels and toilet paper dropped off on my front step instead of dealing with it during a Target trip is so convenient. It's pretty much like having a bulk store membership only you get everything delivered. I'm even using it for my roommate's colostomy supplies. I was convinced that all this was part of the Prime membership; it seemed like the next logical step from the 2-day free shipping that Prime offers. Looking into it, though, it turns out this is not tied to Prime. It's a completely separate service that anyone can sign up for. 

That was my a-ha moment. The only thing that my Prime membership was offering besides 2-day shipping on some items with no minimum total in the cart was Prime Video, and that was really not worth having the ads on it for what I was paying. If I really want to see something, it's easy enough to just wait for the whole series to drop, pay for a month (maybe even shell out the extra 2 or 3 dollars to watch without ads), and then binge the whole thing before the time goes up. My roommate's a little disappointed as she's a big Critical Role fan. Even though this membership won't lapse until June, that means future seasons of both Vox Machina and Mighty Nein will have to be consumed via the binge and run model.

I wonder how long before Amazon enacts an "x-months minimum" stipulation to their Prime Video memberships. 

The Correct Resolution of Paper

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions, typically; I prefer CGPGrey’s idea of having themes. However, in 2025, almost as an afterthought, I vowed to go paperless for the year. This was partly spurred by having gotten some Mobiscribe e-ink tablets, one to use at work instead of notepads or composition books and one at home for reading (and a color one because it was a good deal and I was curious about the tech). I was planning on using them for Inktober, but decided against it as getting notes and drawings off of the devices is more than a little tedious for something I’m supposed to do daily 31 times in a row. In the end, with only about a half-dozen Post-It notes at work as the exception, I stuck to the resolution well beyond the 365 days. 

Reflecting on this, I had another thought of something I could do as a resolution for the year 2026. It occurred to me while playing a typing game called Glyphica. In the game, you occupy a central turret and fire at invaders coming at you from all sides. You select your target by typing the word that appears above them. The game is a lot of fun; reminds me of the quality time I spent with Typing of the Dead on Dreamcast, an  edutainment title that doubled my typing speed in the course of a few weeks. Though the games are very different in terms of presentation, the biggest difference is one of quality of life. In the decades between the two titles, we’ve gone from spellcheck being a luxury to the software going the extra step of not only correcting your errors without you asking, but even predicting what it is you’re trying to say in the first place. If I start typing a word like constitution, I only need to get about as far as “const” before the autocomplete shows me the rest of the word, at which point I need only press the tab key to finish what I started and move on to the next word. A hundred keystrokes can drop down to as low as sixty-five in this way. So, what, you may ask, is the problem? 

Between Glphyica and an online typing speed test called Monkeytype, it's occurred to me that I've amassed a sizable number of bad typing habits because autocorrect swoops in and fixes them, sometimes before I even notice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s convenient when it’s not trying to forcefully make me say an incorrect word, but I feel like this is offloading vital aspects of a skill I happen to be very proud of. Between that and autocomplete, the software is doing too much heavy lifting for my liking. 

My worst habit is something I like to call chording. It happens with especially short words such as "the", "to", and... well, "and." The problem is I hit all the keys at once and I end up with "teh", "ot", and "adn." I can't help but wonder if stenographers have this problem outside of the courtroom. Although chording has technically been with me since I first learned to type, autocorrect and autocomplete have made it substantially worse. Rather than typewriter keys jamming or the timing of my keystrokes being measured in imperceptible milliseconds, the software is able to work out that I'm writing "the" and not "teh" as "teh" isn't a word as far as I know, at least not one in English. 

If you've ever seen that brain teaser where the words in a paragraph all have their respective letters out of order (yet it's still readable because your brain unscrambles it from context clues), that's more or less what my typing feels like to me at this point. It's like I know words as clusters of letters rather than sequences of them. My muscle memory has contracted to the point where it's folded in on itself. My speed has been relatively consistent, but my accuracy has taken a massive hit, and that's no good to anybody ecepxt vrey wreid poelpe who lkie tshoe arfoneemtoiend barin tseaers. 

This has led me to the decision to disable autocorrect and autocomplete on my Mac. Spellcheck gets to stay, inadvertent brain teaser construction be damned. A red line appearing under a word I just typed doesn't bother me. That's instant feedback on a mistake I made and it's on me to fix it. It's gently saving me time, not doing the work for me. It's what The Oatmeal would call an administrative task and not a creative one. When I give what I've written a once-over, it's highlighted the areas that need my attention first. It's working ex post facto rather than trying to get ahead of me like far too many "smart features." Those assume what you're going to do next. Sometimes they're right, but other times I want to write construction or constriction or consternation or even constituent rather than constitution. 

As for my iPhone, predictive text (which is essentially autocomplete) remains enabled on my keyboard of choice, Microslop's SwiftKey, the only Microslop product I use willingly and with any consistency. The reason for keeping this feature enabled is simple. It's a small and cramped keyboard and I need all the help I can get. It's like Lewis Carroll's Nyctograph, a specific tool for a specific job. In his case, it was writing in the dark and without getting out of bed. In my case, it's when I need to write something and either can't get to one of my full-sized mechanical keyboards when I want to or, like Mr. Carroll, I can't be bothered to get out of bed or off the couch at the moment. 

The jury had been out on the iPad since it's a notable difference in screen real estate, but I don't always have one of my Bluetooth keyboards along with me and the on-screen keyboard still has all the same problems as the iPhone. 

As for the paper resolution, that has stuck around as far as taking notes at work goes, though Post-It notes will no longer give me pangs of guilt on the rare occasions I have to use them. For everything else, I do want to start doing more traditional art instead of my usual vector works. I'm even going to try using a fountain pen after either losing or breaking the first one I tried. I don't remember which fate befell it, which is why I'm happy to have discovered that disposable fountain pens exist. In fact, some artists recommend them over their more expensive brethren. 

Welcome to 2026, everybody. 

Last One Out, Hit The Lights

 I mentioned before that I'd been having issues with posting to Blogger due to an OS update that made WebKit not work so well on the desktop environment. The biggest problem was that when I would try to post an image using the menu bar, I got an error message that my Google account couldn't be accessed, albeit I'm here now writing this. 

This problem affected both Safari and DuckDuckGo. Other browsers don't seem to have this problem, but it's also confined to the desktop experience because I have no issue with my iPad. 

This was very frustrating as I haven't had to rely on workarounds for a very long time when it comes to updating Blogger. There have been several OS updates since this problem started, but none of them have fixed the issue... or have they? 

When I made my previous entry, I wrote it on my Mac with the intention that I would finish it using my iPad to add all the images. On a whim, though, I decided to try the old drag and drop method. I resized the window, clicked on the image file on my desktop, and dragged it over the body of the text. 

Success. 

It's a small victory and rather cumbersome, but it's better than trying to use the
version of Safari to fill this out. This interface is really best suited for desktops and notebooks. Sadly, there's no more Blogger app like there is for WordPress, which perfectly adapts the blogging experience for tablets. 

See you all next year. 

Bleep You, Got Mine (and I'm sorry)

Probably the biggest mistake you can make when it comes to building a PC is believing it will save you money. Of course, there’s the obvious time sink of researching just what it is you’ll be doing in the first place, learning why some parts will or will not go together, sourcing all the parts in the first place, and the omnipresent possibility of something going horribly, horribly wrong and there being no recourse beyond opening your wallet again. What you might save in money, you’ll lose in time… and possibly a little sleep. 

I’ve built PCs, and I don’t miss it. At this point in my life, I’d rather pay for the peace of mind via professional assemblies than the satisfaction of building something with my own two hands (and having to be my own technical support). It was certainly a learning experience, and I’ll always be grateful for that. In terms of cost, I didn’t really pay as much attention as I should have, but I know at least once or twice I had to basically start over and source a new part because something was amiss, including swapping out an entire motherboard because I plugged something in wrong. To be fair, when I was assembling PCs, it was circa 2010-2015, which meant I had it easy. There’s no shortage of tutorials on PC assembly, and the way PCs are built in this era to begin with is a much different animal than it would have been 20 or even 10 years ago. To put it in perspective, I didn’t learn to solder until 2016 for my job. None of the PCs I built required any soldering, but this was most certainly not the case 20 or 30 years earlier. 

In food terms, you’re assembling a sandwich. The bread is the case, the lettuce is the motherboard, the pickles are the RAM, the meat is the CPU, the mayo is the thermal paste… it’s not a perfect metaphor, but you get the idea. You’ve got individual components that just snap together to eventually form a fully working personal computer workstation. In other words, in terms of time, I actually had it pretty easy. 

Now, about those pickles…

Without getting into a long-winded rundown of just what RAM (Random Access Memory) is, think of it this way: The hard drive is your long term memory. It’s your name, your family’s faces, the streets you grew up on, and anything else you don’t want to forget. The more of it you have, the more you can remember without having to forget something first. RAM is your short term memory plus your ability to multitask. The more of it you have, the more you can do at once. It’s also probably the simplest and most straightforward upgrade you can perform on your computer. I like to tell people that if you can change a diaper, you are overqualified to swap out the RAM in a computer. Even if you need someone to talk you through it the first time, after your first go, you’ll be showing it off at parties.

In my personal experience, RAM has always been very costly. I’ve easily spent more on RAM than I have on motherboards (spontaneous failures notwithstanding). There have been many reasons for this. Games tend to be a bit RAM hungry, especially considering online games in which you’re often running at least two or three other applications at the same time, one of which is doubtless a web browser with two-dozen tabs open. During the pandemic, when we were all stuck at home and relying on our computers to check in at work, start that live-streaming channel, or virtually send our kids to school, RAM prices went up. That old desktop you bought a few years earlier wasn’t going to cut it, but you couldn’t afford to replace the whole thing, so you swapped out a few parts. 

I’m sorry to tell you, but you were over a barrel. We all were. 

There was a demand, so the cost of the supply went up. It’s simple economics. Ironically, something that should have been the cheapest upgrade (sticks of RAM don’t nearly have nearly as much meat on their bones as a motherboard, a CPU, or a hard drive) became a hot commodity. 

One company has understood this better than anybody: Apple. Actually, that’s a slight lie; Apple understands the economics, but ultimately plays by its own rules. As a rule, once you’ve purchased an Apple product like a MacBook or an iMac, you cannot swap out or upgrade the RAM, no matter how many diapers you’ve changed nor how much sleep you're willing to lose. When you make that purchase, you’d better be thinking of how it will impact the next seven generations. Otherwise, you’re going to be left wanting down the road. So, do you splurge now and hopefully be content for the next few years, or do you settle and upgrade more often? Apple technically wins in either case. 

I talked before about the pandemic driving up the price of RAM. Well, now the newest plague to befall mankind is artificial intelligence. 

Without getting into a long-winded rundown of Generative AI and Large Language Models, the important thing to understand is that these chatbots and image generators need a lot of processing power and a lot of short term memory. The tech companies behind these AI tools are building more and larger data centers all over the country and even around the world. The demand for RAM is so out of control that Micron, one of the largest manufacturers of RAM decided to no longer sell to consumers and focus on its corporate clients, the ones building the datacenters.

What this means for consumers is that if you thought the RAM prices during the pandemic were bad (and possibly before that) then you haven’t seen anything yet, and the only thing that’s going to stop it is this whole AI bubble finally collapsing on itself because no amount of Sam Altman saying, “Trust me, Bro!” Is going to make this so-called business model sustainable.

This is the part where I humbly brag. As an actor friend of mine once said, “Save your rotten fruit for the parking lot. I’ll have more places to hide.” 

Back in 2020, shortly after I bought my house at the start of the lockdowns, I purchased a Mac mini as a housewarming gift to myself. I’d wanted one since they debuted back around 2005, but the planets never quite aligned just right for me to make the decision. 15 years later, the alignment netted me a 2018 Intel-based model with 8 Gigabytes of RAM. I could have sworn I opted for 16, but I think I talked myself down since I was going to use it mostly for writing, drawing, and at most some 3D modeling in SketchUp. Anyway, despite the low hardware specs, the little gray box I nicknamed Gray Rock served me very well for the next five years. Even after Apple changed their processors from Intel to a homegrown lineup known as Apple Silicon, the little Gray Rock that could was holding up just fine and dandy. 

I knew I couldn’t keep this up forever, though. While the hardware would probably last many more years, software is another problem. With the change in processors, applications were leaving the old processing architecture behind and were being optimized for the new kid on the block. This sort of hardware upgrade/software optimization leap frog happens regardless of paradigm shifts in processor types, but Apple’s new in-house strategy lit a fire under developers to get with the times. 

There was, of course, a new version of the Mac mini, but I have to say I wasn’t too impressed with it. I mean, sure, it’s nice and compact, but it presented a problem for me. While I like Apple’s hardware offerings such as the Mac mini and the iPads, I’m less keen on Apple’s accessories. I don’t like their keyboards, I don’t like their mice, and while their monitors are nice, you can do a lot better for a lot less. As for the mice and keyboards, Apple cares more about form than function in this regard, and that means favoring wireless over having cables crisscrossing what’s supposed to be a sleek, minimalist setup. In other words, my mouse and keyboard needed to be plugged in, and the new Mac mini would have required me to use an adapter. This is a pain, so I searched other options. I guess I’d simply turned into too much of a Prosumer for the Mac mini’s casual demographic. This led me to the Mac Studio, a higher-end desktop with a similar-ish form factor to Gray Rock, the notable difference being the Studio’s doubled height to accommodate a massive heatsink and cooling fan. Needless to say, it had a lot more horses under the bonnet than my model that rolled off the assembly line 7 years ago. It also had more RAM out of the gate, with the minimum being 36 gigabytes. This was starting to look like the perfect upgrade; it had over 4 times the RAM, a new processor, and I could plug in all my favorite accessories without some clumsy adapter. Throw in a special discount that doubled the hard drive space for the same price, and I took it as a sign.

In the first week of August of this year, my new Mac Studio arrived and Gray Rock was shipped back to be recycled. In its honor, the new Studio was given a similar nickname Grimlock (after a Transformer), and it’s been a great upgrade for only taking up so much more room than its predecessor. I may not be pushing its specs with my typical workload, but I’m going for a slow burn rather than anything fast and furious. Even when I’m using a 3D modeling program like Blender, I’m only really using it to make perspective and shadow reference models for drawing. 

I’ve been thinking about the timing of my purchase in relation to the spikes in RAM prices. I was under the impression, since Apple’s processors were being made in-house and their RAM works a little differently from the Intel-based models, that Apple was safe from the increased demand. After all, they already charge a premium for RAM when you’re configuring your initial purchase, so I was kind of ahead of the game in that regard. At least, I thought that was the case. Turns out Apple does still rely on these RAM manufacturers for their own machines, and it’s only a matter of time before the price spikes affect Apple’s own price tags (which already have a reputation). 

For whatever it’s worth to you out there thinking of buying a new PC or taking on the risk of building one, I absolutely hate that this is happening. There is no smug look on my face as I sit at my Studio typing this out. I hate the reason for it happening most of all. I hate this far off pipe dream of promise of some kind of computer generated hive mind and all we need for it is to build more power- and water-hungry data centers and for you to keep asking Gemini to make you images of Mickey Mouse cleaning an assault rifle while writing your college term papers for you. 

Apple Intelligence is available on both Grimlock and Sapphire (my iPad). It has not been enabled. I have no desire to enable it. Few things in this universe would please me more than for the parts of their processors dedicated to AI features to be used for something else.