Boof Jark: My AI Pledge

A wise man once said that one man’s software is another man’s AI. As such, it’s important we establish some kind of clear, working definition of what’s being referred to when it comes to AI-generated content. For example, the ghosts in Pac-Man are AI. That’s not what we’re talking about. Spellcheck is arguably a kind of AI, but it’s not what we’re talking about, and I’ll even give a pass to predictive text for reasons that will hopefully become clear as we progress. Case in point, I only had to write “prog” and follow it up with the tab key to write the rest of “progress”. Another writing tool I feel I should disclose use of is an oldie called Grammatik. It launched around 1981 by Aspen Software before eventually being absorbed into Corel's WordPerfect, which was how I was introduced to it circa mid 1990’s. Bear in mind, this was not a Large Language Model trained on all the text in the world. I have absolutely no idea how it worked, but it’s not important because outside of obvious things like run-ons caused by a misplaced period, I never relied on it more than I trusted my own two eyes giving my paper a once-over (and that was only the first line of defense). It was also oddly fixated on the idea of passive voice, a grammatical concept that I think I understand and I know I’ve had explained to me countless times, but I couldn’t spot it in the wild or stop myself from writing it if my life depended on it. If anyone knows a really good mnemonic for it, I’d love to hear it. It’s also worth noting that Grammatik couldn’t really learn as you wrote. At best, you could tell it what to ignore, but it wouldn’t remember what you told it to ignore the next time you reopened the document, so it was only useful if you wrote in crazy, uninterrupted marathon sessions a la Jack Kerouac. Most importantly, Grammatik couldn’t offer suggestions for how to revise something beyond “You’ve started every sentence in this paragraph with the same word. Avoid repetition.”, it certainly couldn’t offer suggestions about tone, and it definitely could not fabricate a full essay on my behalf from a briefly descriptive prompt. I was still doing the work, and that’s the key distinction to keep in mind. 

To put it another way: Who is driving the car? The one in the driver’s seat with the wheel in hand, or the one in the passenger seat giving directions? The officer who pulled you over already knows, but he’d really like to hear it from you. 

I don’t know if it was on Medium or Substack where I saw about a half-dozen AI generated images in a row while scrolling and saw red for a moment before closing the tab, toppling a chair, and storming out of the room grumbling about the decline of Western Civilization. That’s a slight exaggeration; I would never do that to a perfectly innocent chair. Besides, the last thing you want is to make a chair mad at you. They won’t stand for it. 

What upsets me most about this trend is the fact that these writers are often the first, loudest, and yet most eloquent at bemoaning the fates and predicaments of artists, creatives, and professionals in general in the face of this ever-changing landscape that AI is slowly consuming. It makes me want to grab them by the shoulders, shake them like they’re the first character to go hysterical in a disaster movie, and scream, “YOU ARE NOT HELPING!” and finish off with a slap across the cheek. For the record, I have the kind of upper body strength that makes Mr. Burns look like Sugar Ray Leonard at the height of his career, so if you’re afraid of this potentially becoming reality for you, rest assured you’ll barely feel a stiff breeze. I’ll also likely collapse from the exertion while breathily asking if you’ve had enough, so the only pain you’re guaranteed to feel in the whole ordeal is the pain in your sides from laughing.

I made a note on Substack (their version of a Tweet) to essentially complain and vent, vowing that if I saw an AI header image to an article, I wasn’t going to read it. I wasn’t addressing anyone in particular; it was not about naming and shaming. As you may have heard from your parents at one point while disciplining you, I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at what happened. Moreover, I'm saying this because I want you to do better, and I know you’re more than capable of it, whatever your self-doubt is saying about you right now. 

As for doing better, these are your options.

1. Learn to draw and/or take photos. 
2. Use a stock image service; you’ll be paying real artists or at least using works volunteered by willing artists. 
3. Commission a human artist directly. 

This is the part where I acknowledge that I am fully aware of the potential pitfall of my pledge in that I may well mistake something genuine for something AI-generated, therefore missing out on something authentic, inspiring, compelling, and any other praise I could throw at it. That said, let’s be real, a lot of what we collectively refer to as AI Slop is pretty samey. I think the best description I ever heard for it is, “Well-rendered but badly-drawn” with tells such as heavily-detailed shading and color gradients while the proper lacing of shoes and/or number of fingers on a hand is spotty at best. Basically, a painterly once-over of a hasty sketch. Even more basically, polished shit. There are other descriptors, but these are the most polite. 

“Well, those AI generators can make some really photorealistic results that are harder to detect, especially if you know how to—“ 

If you’re willing to put that much effort into hiding your use of AI, you have even less of an excuse to not employ any of the alternatives I’ve listed. 

Before I go, I’ll reward you for getting this far with an explanation of just what in Hel’s Realm Boof Jark is. I don’t know where it was posted, maybe Instagram or LinkedIn, but it was an image of two boats on the shore of a deserted island, one filled with fruits and vegetables (along with eggs and a rooster because MidJourney doesn't know how poultry reproduction works), the other filled with all manner of meats, including a package of Boof Jark. I mean, you seriously couldn’t be bothered to take the most basic pen tool and write some block letters on a white box? 

Speaking of handwriting, which I’m notably not using for this, I’ll close with a story about Bob Ross. He once received a letter from a fan saddened that he couldn’t follow along with the painting sessions because his hands shook too much. Bob Ross, being the absolute legend that is Bob Ross, assured this person, “Well, then you can draw trees better than I can, because trees are rarely straight.”

Behind the Scenes

Blue Snake Mambo (Zootopia 2 Teaser Analysis)

It was VH1's Pop-Up Video series that made me aware of the fact that there exist people in this modern and connected world who are not convinced NASA got anyone to the moon. It's also where I learned an embarrassingly high number of people do not think our sun is a star. When I started looking into the whole "lunar hoax" phenomenon, something caught my attention. One of the "gotchas" or "tells" that the entire lunar excursion was filmed on a soundstage is the absence of stars from the photos or the live video feed. 

The reason this caught my attention was because, in all my years of seeing these images, I had never noticed there were no stars. Needless to say, it didn't take me very long to figure out why you can't see the stars in these photos (though there seem to be a few points of light in the one pictured above from Apollo 14). Put simply, you can't see the stars because it's not night time on the moon when the photos were taken. It's literally broad daylight. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to see the surface or the astronauts. The sky doesn't look like broad daylight because the moon has no atmosphere to color the sky in the trademark hues of a day on the Earth. The story amongst the hoaxers is that the director (who may or may not be Stanley Kubrick, depending on who you ask) didn't like how the stars looked on set, so opted to turn them off, never mind the suspicion this might cause because surely people would expect to see the stars... and I never said this was a good explanation, just one of their talking points. 

Also, it's not like the Apollo missions are the first time we've seen images taken from the lunar surface. The Surveyor program started years before Apollo 11. The Soviets even took photos with their Lunokhod program. Did they also make the same creative decision on their own sets? Were they afraid people wouldn't believe them if they showed stars in an effort to out the Apollo program as a fraud? 

In the words of Ron White, "I told you that story to tell you this one."

Zootopia 2 dropped a teaser trailer a few days ago. Trailers, as a rule, feature scenes from the final cut of the film. Teasers, by contrast, often play by their own rules, mostly because they're shorter, but also because they're made earlier in production. I think the best example of this is Terminator 2, whose teaser showed an assembly line building an army of endoskeletons. This scene is nowhere in the movie and was made entirely for the teaser. Zootopia 2's trailer seems to have gone above and beyond regarding tailor-made content, almost acting like some kind of vertical slice of the finished film. We see a variety of environments as well as a rapid-fire slideshow of the cast, all framed by a trio of hamsters jumping around on a synthesizer to provide our soundtrack. 

The premise seems to revolve around a blue snake that's found its way to Zootopia and is being pursued by the poli---Wait a damned minute.  
...
...
Hold on. 
...
...
Were there no reptiles in the first Zootopia movie? Wasn't there an alligator or a gecko or something like that, somewhere in the background of the nudist colony or the DMV? 

I'm seriously having a bit of an existential crisis here. 

Turns out, no, there were no reptiles in the entirety of the film. There were also no birds (which may well be our hint at a Zootopia 3). From what I could gather, the first Zootopia film was kept strictly to mammals as a way to make the worldbuilding and story less cluttered, letting us focus on the predator/prey dynamic. 

Now it seems we're putting a new wrinkle in the dynamic by examining the relationship between hot-blooded mammals and cold-blooded reptiles. Of course, there are plenty of herbivorous reptiles, that's not the problem. This new separation (segregation) seems to have much deeper roots than the eaters and the eaten. The only concern I have is whether or not we'll just be retreading the same ground as the first movie, only with new placeholders for real world issues. 

While I like the first Zootopia movie, I'm not the most arduous fan of it. It's well-made, very imaginative, and has a great message, but the best part for me was the dichotomy and tension between Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde. This time around, they're obviously on more friendly terms, especially with them both being police officers. I imagine they'll still have their disagreements, and we'll doubtless have situations of the fox's street smarts and the rabbit's book smarts. I only wonder if they'll have an overall smaller role in the main plot of the movie. 

In any case, this is a good teaser. I like that it's mostly original content as a good teaser should be. It gives us a good sense of what we're in for in terms of scope. It certainly preserves the absurdist humor of the first film. Moreover, it made me want to take a second look at the first movie for context. That's legitimately impressive. 

A Rant (Part 1 of X)

Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, is said to have hailed the internet as the death of the novel. Makes me wonder what he thinks of movies, given I’m sure more people have seen the Trainspotting movie than read the original book, to say nothing of all the people led to his books on the power of the film. Maybe he doesn’t consider that a fair comparison since the internet, despite the rise of short-form audio-visual content like TikTok or Instagram, is still largely a text-based affair. It's been argued that we’re reading less and less as time goes on, but the reality is that people are reading as much as ever, they’re just reading things other than books, magazines, and newspapers.

To build on Mr. Welsh’s assertion, if there’s one singular iota of beef I have with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, it’s that they’ve almost singlehandedly killed blogging. Microblogging offers a conciseness and brevity that’s simply easier to digest in short, controlled bursts of scrolling. I remember an English teacher telling me about how the Industrial Revolution lit a fire under the short fiction market because people were simply too busy to read a full novel, preferring instead a tighter narrative that could be read in a sitting.

This is not me complaining about any shrinking traffic to my own blogs; they were never that high to begin with. Rather, my complaint has to do with the way too many people are using social media to share their thoughts. Essentially, they’re trying to jam the round peg of long-form blogging into the square hole of microblogging, and it’s frustrating that people aren’t more upset about it.

Here’s what I mean: In the latter years of Twitter, before the Elongated Muskrat came along, there seemed to be an uptick in people posting multi-part tweets to get around the character limit. Specifically, after the death of TotalBiscuit the Cynical Brit from bowel cancer, a certain user made a very long chain of Twitter posts about his axes to grind with the former vlogger (complete with an image of several axes leaning against a wall). I don’t remember if he was a journalist or a game developer, and I don’t care to dignify his display of pettiness with a check, but all I could think when I was scrolling through it to see how many replies to his own Tweet he needed was, “Why doesn’t he just make this a blog post and put the link to it in a Tweet?” People can still reply to what he said below the Tweet; they can just go to the blog, read it, and then come back with their thoughts on it.

Look, I can understand when you need a little more room to say what you want to say. Even the most generous character limits can be frustrating to work within. If I see someone posting a reply to their own post to finish their thought, that honestly doesn’t bother me. If it’s a reply to their own post giving some additional context, or reacting to the general vibe of the other replies they’re getting, I have absolutely no problem with that. Sometimes, we don’t choose the right words and we need to add some qualifiers. It happens.

What does make me angry is when you’ve essentially taken a long form blogpost, chopped it up into sentences, and then posted them one at a time to a microblogging site, just hoping that people will be able to navigate the thread amid all the other replies from people responding to it. Seriously, if you need that much room, get a blog.

The sad reality of why this is happening has many roots, the first of which is that some people simply like to keep their online presence more centralized. They’d rather focus on one site than micromanage a thousand different pages, leading to at least one inevitably being neglected. Secondly, it may simply not be worth it for them to set up a blog just for that one especially long stream of consciousness. Thirdly, and most tragic of all, is that social media users are creatures of habit. Many don’t feel like following a link to an external site, even if the URL clearly shows where they’re going and isn’t potentially some kind of trap.

On that note, remember TinyURL and Bitly? On paper, it sounds like a great way to put web addresses in Tweets so you wouldn’t use up as much of the character limit. In practice, it’s absolutely awful because all you’d have is a string of numbers and letters. You could have been getting sent absolutely anywhere and the internet is a dangerous place. Nowadays, more sites offer shortened versions of their URLs for this very reason. You now know for sure you’re clicking on a link to a YouTube video or a Twitter post or a Wordpress blog. Also, social media platforms have gotten better at integrating URLs without it eating up half of your character limit. You may even get a little preview window of what you’re going to see.

Before I go, I should address another use of social media microblogging, and that’s using it to publish fiction. There’s two approaches this takes. One is a more traditional method that builds on what we’ve talked about with people trying other shoehorn longer form writing into a format that favors succinctness. An example of this is Ratha’s Island by Clare Bell, which was essentially “serialized” to Twitter one sentence at a time, one post per day at roughly the same time. The other form of “Twitter fiction” is a modern take on the literary genre of Epistolary fiction. Epistolary fiction is a subgenre of fiction that presents its story in the form of letters and other documents written directly by the characters in the story. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the go-to example of this that most people are probably familiar with. In the case of Twitter fiction, sometimes called “unfiction” due to the interactive quality of using social media, An account is made “in character” and it is that character relating events in their life as though they were posting to social media as anyone else would. A good example of this is a horror story called The Sun Vanished, about someone waking up in a world where the sun has been inexplicably blocked out, among other odd goings-on. The only problem with this approach is that social media platforms don’t make it very easy to read posts in chronological order from the beginning. Also, unless each post is labeled as part of a greater work of fiction (which is immersion-breaking), it’s more than possible to mislead casual readers into thinking they’re interacting with a real person’s journey, especially if it’s of the less fantastical variety.

The reason why I like the “in character account” better than the piecemeal presentation of a novel is that the former takes advantage of the medium and conforms to its inner workings, whereas the other is an old dinosaur trying in vain to adapt to the new world.

Star Wars Day 2025

In observance of May the 4th, this is my own personal recommended/definitive watch order of the Star Wars films if you're somehow still uninitiated or know someone who is. This is movies only, no TV shows, no videogames, no novels, just theatrical films so you can manage your watch time easier.

Revenge of the Sith
Rogue One
A New Hope
Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
The Force Awakens
The Last Jedi

Honorable Mentions/Qualifiers:
Jury's still out on Rise of Skywalker. I like it a little better every time I see it, but not by very much, and I haven't forgiven it for how angry it made me the first time. I'll leave you to guess the moment when I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from yelling "Bullshit!" at the screen and ruin everyone else's theater outing. The Han Solo film is in a similar standing; The first time I saw it, I was not impressed, but upon a rewatch some time later, I enjoyed it a lot more. Overall, though, while it never made me angry like Rise, I find it a very uneven movie. Basically, all the scenes with Han and Chewie are great. The rest of the film is a rather bland and uninspired heist movie. I've always had mixed feelings about Ron Howard as a director. Visuals aren't his strong suit and I think he trusts his actors a little too much at times, not really pushing the best performances out of them. In the best scenarios, you get someone seasoned like Tom Hanks in front of his camera, and you're in for a good time. In the worst, you put him in charge of some relative unknowns who haven't found their voices, and it's clear he prefers a hands-off approach with little to fall back on. This leads to actors looking a tad lost on screen, which at least is on brand for a young, fish-out-of-water Han Solo.

As for the two prequel films I left off the order, I should point out I'm actually something of a Phantom Menace apologist. However, at this point in the franchise's lifespan and with everything else we've been given to spend our time with, I'm okay with saying you can skip that one. Before Rise, Attack of the Clones was the one Star Wars film I actively disliked. Even then, I once made a list of 5 things I liked about it. I don't quite remember what they are anymore (I don't even think I ended up posting it to Tumblr which I originally wrote it for). Also, fun fact about Attack of the Clones: this was the first Star Wars movie to not be filmed on traditional 35mm film. It was shot on high definition digital video... and unfortunately, you could tell. I still remember when I saw it in the theater the first time, there was a fairly dark scene with Obi-Wan and Anakin on opposite sides of the screen talking, and you could see compression artifacts in the dark space between them. It was practically a checkerboard pattern of deep purples and dark grays, with each square as big as the actors' heads. Roger Ebert made a similar observation in his review, so I know my experience was not unique. Fortunately, the technology behind the transition from analog film to digital video, especially in projection, has gotten a lot better. It was certainly no longer an issue by the time we got to Revenge of the Sith.

Speaking of clones, I'm also not bothering to include the animated Clone Wars film, as that was really more like a pilot for the TV series that just happened to get a theatrical run. Thanks to a modest budget of less than 10 million dollars, it was able to make a fair bit of money at the box office, though still stands as the lowest grossing Star Wars movie at just shy of 70 million. For comparison, Solo made a little under 400 million dollars against a budget of 330 million and that was considered enough of a failure to get the Obi-Wan movie scrapped and reworked into a miniseries on Disney+. As a rule, studios tend to take about half of the gross (and budgets don't include expenses like marketing and promotion), so, depending on who you ask, Solo is the first Star Wars movie to lose money. The Mandalorian & Grogu is set to release next year in theaters. It will be interesting to see how it fares.

While this has been primarily a watch order list, I'll touch briefly on ranking the Star Wars films, most favorite to least favorite. I'm not going to give the full rundown; as I've said, jury's out on a few of them and it's sometimes hard to qualify what's a "least liked" and what warrants an "actively disliked". In any case, it would be a tier list, rather than assigning each movie a unique ranking number. For example, I love Last Jedi and Rogue One. I love them equally, and it's for exact opposite reasons. One honors the past, the other looks towards the future, and I simply could never put one above or below the other. It wouldn't be fair. On a similar note, although A New Hope is not my favorite, I'd either have to leave it off the list entirely or put it right at the top purely on principle. Just as I respect Last Jedi for taking risks and Rogue One for sticking to what it knows, I respect A New Hope for taking that first step, walking so the rest could run. If I woke up tomorrow to find all the other Star Wars media apart from A New Hope had been erased from existence, I'd be very sad... for about twenty minutes, and then I'd sit and watch it for the umpteenth time and all would feel right with the world again.

May The Force be with you.

Everything New Is Old Again

 Disclaimer: This post has not been sponsored by 8BitDo. 

I got a new keyboard. It's from the fine folks over at 8BitDo. Not only do they make some awesome controllers for the Nintendo Switch, but they also have some mechanical keyboards on offer. I'd been eyeing one for some time since Logitech, in their wisdom, decided to discontinue the G413 Carbon (and replace it with some pale imitations and alternates) and I was worried about the impending day when it would stop working. I have a backup for my mouse, but the closest thing I had to a backup keyboard was the Nimbleback I use with my iPad. It's a fine keyboard, but I want to keep it available to carry with my iPad rather than be tied down to the Mac mini. 

As for 8BitDo, this came in a few different flavors, the first two themed after the original NES and its Japanese counterpart, the Famicom. When I checked their site a few days ago, I found not only had they expanded the keyboard to include a number pad, but they had two other styles of the original, including a translucent green XBox themed one (which was very tempting with its early 2000's aesthetic) and the one I ended up buying, based on the Commodore 64. 

Put simply, and if you'll forgive the pun, it was love at first byte: The large print on the dark brown concave keycaps, the tan body, and all topped off with a rainbow sticker along the upper edge and a big, red LED indicating that it's on and connected.

For perspective, I was born in 1981 and my first computer in the house was an Apple IIgs circa 1986, which is the equivalent of having a brand new Porsche as your first car. I have no real nostalgia for the Commodore 64; I don't even think I'd heard of it until the 1990's. According to Wikipedia, it was discontinued in 1994. Needless to say, a IIgs and a C64 look nothing alike, and have even less in common under the bonnet. I saw plenty of other computers and typewriters that looked more like the C64 in terms of the color scheme, so maybe that's where my nostalgia lies. 

As for the typing experience, it's phenomenal, though the backspace key is a little difficult to reach as the whole keyboard as a substantial slope (it doesn't even have feet on the underside to prop it up). It is notably louder than my G413, especially the space bar, but that's due to it having tactile keys rather than linear. Linear keys, like those in the G413, have all the advantages of a mechanical keyboard switch, namely not needing to press the key all the way down for it to register the keystroke, with the added benefit of letting you subtly control the volume of the keypresses. If you press softly and deliberately, it's no louder than any other keyboard, including non-mechanical ones. Think of it like slamming a door or closing it slowly depending on your mood. As for the C64 keyboard, there's really no minimum or maximum volume, as each key emits a distinct click for each press. Another notable difference is the lack of a resonance. On the G413, there's a metallic clang with each keypress, especially the space bar. I'm not sure what causes this besides a lack of dampening in the housing. With the C64, no such noise, only the distinct plastic-on-plastic clunk of the keys, and I love it. 

If I ever fall out of love with it, it does give me the option of swapping out the key switches for any other variety of my choosing, which I'm almost tempted to do for the space bar. It just sounds so different from the other keys. Then again, it's technically two keys being pressed down instead of one, so maybe that's why it sounds different. 

Pardon the rambling. It's the hype of having a new keyboard. I've been in more of a writing mood than a drawing one of late. My art block that's plagued me over most of last year still hasn't left. I also rediscovered a website called Writer (from Big Huge Labs). It's a browser-based word processor/note taking app that offers a minimalist, distraction-free writing experience (which is a little ironic given it's on a browser rather than a standalone app). Its biggest perk is the ability to select the color scheme of your background and text, which I've set to values consistent with an old school amber display. 

It almost makes me wish my monitor were smaller so I could put it on its side like some vintage workstation from Xerox. I've learned recently that you can purchase iMacs without their stands, opting instead for a VESA mount, so you could conceivably orient it sideways. I only wish they came in colors other than their muted rainbow variety. If they made a brown that matched my keyboard, I'd go for that. I could have sworn they had a black one available, but maybe I'm thinking of an older model. There's a light silver one, not even Apple's enigmatically inconsistent Space Grey. 

I can respect Apple and Microsoft not giving users this level of customization in their respective word processing apps, Pages and Word. To be fair, they do have accessibility options to create a high contrast or inverted color version of the display that can kind of sort of recreate the experience of an old school monochrome display. Even the browser based version of Word gives you the option of a dark mode.

It never fails to impress me the evolution of the word processor, from something boutique to something pedestrian. It's like the influence of the Gutenberg press bringing literature to the masses, then mass market paperbacks, and now ebooks and web pages. The craft of writing belongs to everyone, and my goal in life at this point is to grow into an old man hunched over a keyboard, probably driving the neighbors in the retirement village batty with the clickity-clack of my mechanical keyboard some kid probably custom-built for me out of sympathy to the cause. Maybe they were forced to visit the home as some kind of community service or church program and took an interest in my setup. They continued to visit long after the program ended, checking to make sure everything still worked, swapping out key switches and waiting eagerly to see if I approve or not. One day maybe they'll come and get told the bad news that I passed away the previous night, found at my desk slumped over the keyboard mid-documenttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt....

Words That Stay

Since 11 SEP 22 SUN, I've been keeping a journal of my medications. It started with keeping track of when I was taking Ibuprofen to help with some shoulder pain I was having. Later on, it extended to me tracking my symptoms while on my new medications. I went from Zoloft to Prozac and a mood stabilizer called Olanzapine instead of an anxiety medication whose name I don't remember because I rarely took it (it was designated "as needed"). We tried some other medications before settling on the Olanzapine, and the journal was used to track my symptoms and potential side effects. 

Originally, I used Evernote to create and update the journal. After some time, I became frustrated with how Evernote was performing. Frankly, there is no excuse in 2025 for updating a text file to have input lag. The file size wasn't even especially large by Evernote standards, yet updating it was a test of my patience. I could finish a sentence before the first word finished appearing. I wrote to Evernote about this and got absolutely no response. Between that and their price hike, I decided not to renew my subscription, only keeping it around as an archive. I moved the journal to Apple Notes on 01 SEP 24 SUN. I had some reservations about it because it didn't seem to have many of the same features as Evernote. 

When it comes to Apple software, a phrase you may hear time and again is how something will be simple and easy, but rarely if ever obvious or discoverable. For example, in my journal, each entry is headed by the date, and the rest of it is a series of bullet points, each followed by a timestamp. With Evernote, making bullet points is fairly straightforward; the icon for it is right there in plain sight. With Notes, the option to format your text that way is not exactly obvious. I felt silly having to look up how to make them. At this point, it's second nature, and one could argue growing pains come with the territory for any piece of software, even a note taking app. 

Note taking apps kind of baffle me the more I think about it. You'll find no shortage of debates online about what differentiates a note taking app like Evernote or Notion from a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. The closest thing there really is to a consensus is that a word processor is interested in what your text will look like when printed out, be it on physical paper or something more convenient like a PDF or an ePub file. Note taking apps, by contrast, are designed to help you get your thoughts down as quickly and painlessly as possible, making itself as malleable as possible to your stream of consciousness. On top of this, note taking apps add a number of quality of life features to help you organize those thoughts once you've committed them to text. 

This led me to something of a dilemma. There's an old saying that goes, "Never write down what you don't want spoken aloud in public." At the same time, a journal, by its very nature, is a record of your private thoughts, and there's nothing wrong with keeping it that way. Somewhere between these perspectives rests another quality of journals that nobody really likes to talk about, the fact that they have the capacity to survive you. 

Barring chucking it in the fire before you snuff it as the late Virgil requested (and was ultimately ignored), your journal is the very definition of an open book once your time has passed. It's like any other book on a shelf, able to be opened and read at another person's leisure, no real permission required. At worst (maybe best?), you were the sort of meticulous person who encrypted their journals by writing in some indecipherable shorthand or even a simple substitution cipher. Maybe you were one of those legends who developed a full language and your book can join the likes of the Voynich Manuscript. 

Of course, that's all assuming your journal is a physical book. 

Basically, with a physical book, the part about it surviving you is baked in to the medium. A digital file, by contrast, is somewhat more obscure, especially in this era of increased concerns over privacy in the face of large scale data leaks. 

One of the reasons I keep this journal, most entries of which are simply timestamps for when I took my Prozac and mood stabilizer, is for the sake of my doctors and counselor, so I could refer back to any date and time to aid recalling symptoms or changes in my behavior or whatever else may be relevant. In this regard, it's very helpful since I'm right there to scroll through it. However, what happens when I die? I don't expect anyone other than have the foresight to use my face or fingerprint to open the iPhone or iPad (respectively), much less know the PIN for when those means of entry fail. My Mac mini is old school, using a simple password for entry, and nobody knows that. These are all good things for security purposes, but leave much to be desired on the sharing front. The best I can hope for is to have enough time to blurt out a password or text a link to someone before my eyes close for the final time. 

Maybe I could leave some kind of puzzle-like paper trail for someone to figure out if they felt like going on an adventure, an adventure to discover when and why I stopped drinking coffee. Spoiler alert, it didn't play nice with my medications. 

Refresh Rate: A State of the Scroll

If you're new here, hello. If you're not new here... I'm sorry. Anyway, for those new here, my blog gets its name from one of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories, In the Walls of Eryx. It's not an especially well-liked story by Lovecraft fans, partly for being one of his few full-blooded sci-fi stories (broadly speaking, he was a horror writer), but also for its own premise creating a plot hole big enough for a spaceship to barrel through while twirling a cane. Without getting into a full synopsis of the story, it's about a guy trapped in an invisible maze. He makes several good attempts at trying to map his way through, but the maze is in a muddy swamp, making footprints impossible to follow as they get filled in almost immediately. He even tries using the mud to mark the walls of the maze only for it to slide down and leave the surface completely immaculate. 

If you've already spotted the plot hole, give yourself 3 points. If you're having a little trouble, don't feel bad; I didn't spot it until someone pointed it out to me, long after I'd written fan fiction for it. Here's a hint, at one point our hero tries digging under the walls to no avail. So, the wall goes down into the mud. Isn't it going to leave an impression? It's invisible, not incorporeal. At any point, our hero can literally see the entirety of the maze's outline in the mud. 

Ironically, making the floor mud instead of something solid like stone was probably meant to cover up a potential plot hole of our protagonist being able to properly mark his path on the floor. The mud, however, only really kicks a can down the road. That said, this doesn't seem to spoil anyone's fun. It certainly doesn't spoil mine. 

The story is told in a first-person narrative, the events being recorded on what is called a Decay-Proof Record Scroll. 

Said scroll is never described in any great detail beyond it being metallic and also "revolving" implying it might be cylindrical. It is called a "scroll" after all. On that note, isn't the idea of Amazon calling an electronic book a "kindle" a little weird? Granted, they don't mean "kindle" in the literal sense of starting a fire, more in the sense of inspiring awe and wonder. Nonetheless, I can't help but think of an episode of Red Dwarf wherein the leads contemplate the ethics of burning books in order to keep warm while marooned on a frozen celestial body. 

I've had my Mobiscribes for about two weeks now, and my impression of them remains positive. As of this writing, I have two of the black and white models, one to keep at home, the other for work (brought home on the weekends to charge, if necessary), and I actually have a third one on the way. It's the color model, and I'm curious to see how it looks. I should point out that the reason I've gone on this little shopping spree is that the tablets are steeply discounted on the Mobiscribe website for the holiday season. Even at their full prices, they're still the most affordable e-note option compared to the ReMarkable or the anything from Onyx Boox. 

Much like In the Walls of Eryx, the Mobiscribe isn't a particularly well-liked e-note offering, with tech blog Good E Reader calling the color version the worst eReader of 2023. To be completely fair to them, they are exceptionally thorough in their reviews and, as much of a cliche as it sounds, truly have their finger on the pulse of the electronic paper space. Onyx Boox's offerings in particular are no slouches when it comes to specifications and performance. They're essentially Android tablets that just so happen to have an electronic paper display instead of LCD or OLED. Of course, just because you can run YouTube on it, doesn't make it watchable. The refresh rate of an e-paper display is glacially slow compared to the 60 or 120 hertz of an iPad screen. As for the Mobiscribe, while its specs are definitely not on the level of an Onyx Boox, they don't need to be. 

When it comes to e-paper devices, the guiding philosophy behind them is digital minimalism. They're not as full-featured as an iPad, but that's the whole point. All you're supposed to do on an Amazon Kindle is read books. Even the ability to stream audiobooks through them is practically an afterthought. I can run Android apps on my Mobiscribe, but the results have been borderline laughable. Even something low key like Google Keep (a sticky note app) is unusable beyond reading the notes I've already posted there. Of course, why would I need Google Keep when the Mobiscribe has a note taking experience baked in that's optimized for the hardware? Sure, having my notes immediately available in the Google ecosystem is great, but is it always necessary? Even getting Google's Play Store up and running on the Mobiscribe is an obstacle course. It even comes pre-loaded with an instructional PDF on how to do it, complete with a "cheat code" for speeding it up. The best way I can describe the process is: when you think you've messed up, that means you did it right. 

It's certainly been refreshing, and made me realize how absolutely spoiled I am on Apple and even Amazon products that simply work right out of the box with little to no input on my part. 

Early E-Paper Exposure, OR: Adoption Atrocities

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. -- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

I can't find my copy of Salmon of Doubt, so I paid a penny shy of two dollars for the electronic version on Apple Books. I didn't bother looking up the Kindle version because buying books through Kindle on an iPad is a pain. Besides, I've read Salmon of Doubt cover to cover and at this point I'm only referencing it more than reading it. This highlights an advantage of ebooks over their paper predecessors: the ability to search the text with keywords. 

Sadly, another resource of Douglas Adams' wisdom and insight appears to have become lost media. His BBC Radio 4 series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future, which has an episode devoted to eBooks, cannot be listened to because it uses RealPlayer and nothing uses that anymore. At least, nothing I have uses RealPlayer anymore; according to their site, they've gone Windows only. 

Overall, he had a fairly complicated opinion about ePublishing. Many possibilities, but all depend on the execution. Adams left us in May of 2001, long before Amazon became the powerhouse we know it as today. At that time, eReaders were very niche devices only made by a handful of companies, the biggest of which was Sony. Strangely, though, none of the other electronics giants seemed at all interested in competing with Sony on this front. For all intents and purposes, it was them and Rocketbook. 

Sometime between 1997 and 2002, when I was working at a local Target's electronics counter, someone asked if we had any eReaders. His had packed up and, the way he made it sound, left his library completely inaccessible. I felt really bad for him. There was nothing we could do; I don't even think we had our PDA's stocked at that point, and no one was using any of those to read eBooks. I think about that guy every now and again, especially when Amazon releases a new Kindle or I see a review of some other eReader on YouTube. He was an early adopter, and unfortunately paid the worst possible price for it. Looking back, I would have assumed he could at least read the files on his desktop or laptop. Otherwise, how would he have gotten the books onto the reader? Nonetheless, it had to be frustrating. I hope the frustration is long behind him and he's happy with whatever eReader he's gotten for himself now. 

09 JUL 25 WED UPDATE: While writing a newer entry about Audible, I happened upon The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future there, presented in full and with an addendum from 2015 entitled Did Douglas Get It Right?. 

Mac mini-er

OR:

Pint-Sized Port Problems 

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t think I ever have been. Something I did learn recently from YouTuber and podcaster CGPGrey was that instead of a specific goal, try having a theme for the year. For this year, I decided it would be the year of upgrades. It sounds like an excuse to spend money, but bear in mind I make a very strong distinciton between a purchase and an investment. After all, the keyword is “upgrade.” For starters, I upgraded my iPad because I wanted more storage. I bought a new bed. I got some furniture. The biggest investment has been a water softener. I also had to get a new toilet, but that was more spur of the moment, though nonetheless qualifies as an investment. 
Now, I’m debating how much farther to take my upgrades. Specifically, I’m looking down from the monitor and right above my keyboard to the very device I’m using to write this. I have a 2018 Intel-based Mac mini that I bought as a housewarming gift to myself in April of 2020. It only began showing its age this year while I was working on Inktober. I decided to work entirely in SketchUp for this year, work on my shot composition and 3D modeling skills rather than ink and paper. During that time, I realized just how slow and cumbersome a task as simple as rotating the camera can be for the little gray box. Simply put, six years is a lifetime for a desktop in this climate, especially considering the massive paradigm shift Apple took by abandoning Intel processors in favor of something homegrown. That homegrown solution is now on its 4th iteration with the M4 processor. 

My first Apple Silicon device was my new iPad Air, which features an M1 processor. Even though it’s an Air and not a Pro, it runs circles around my old 10.5-inch Pro’s A10X Fusion chip, so I’m very interested to see what it’s like on a desktop. 
I wasn’t expecting Apple to announce a new Mac mini anytime soon. I’d already scoped out a new mini and even a Studio in case I was really dead-set on future-proofing myself. It’s about a thousand dollar difference between the two and double the RAM (the mini caps out at 32GB while the Studio has 64). 

As for the new M4-based Mac mini, I find myself rather ambivalent. For perspective, I’ve been an unapologetic fanboy of the mini ever since its debut in 2005. The only reason I didn’t get one is because I had it in my head that I wanted to play some PC games, so I settled for a Compaq Presario. Comparing the two, the mini looked positively space-aged. It was hard to believe a full desktop was in that little 7.7”x7.7” chassis. Sure, small form factor PC’s weren’t especially rare, but they were typically marketed towards business applications, not general consumers. It’s puzzling to me how much criticism the mini would get in later iterations for not making very many drastic hardware changes. On the whole, before the M1-based minis, the biggest shift in hardware specs came with the removal of the optical disc drive. Even with the Apple Silicon upgrade, it was still the same 7.7 inch square. For my money, I was still impressed. 

Speaking of removing hardware, I should get to what’s got me so ambivalent about the newest M4 Mac mini. In reducing the chassis size from 7.7 inches to 5, a few notable compromises had to be made. Key among these is the complete and utter absence of USB-A ports. The classic, bulky rectangle that had exploded onto the scene in the early 2000’s has now been completely replaced by USB-C. I’m bothered by this because my keyboard and mouse setup is still firmly in camp USB-A. Technically, Apple has only gotten rid of one port, as the M4 mini has 3 USB-C ports in the back and 2 in the front. Previous models had 4 USB-C ports and 2 USB-A ports in the back. 

Some of you may be saying, “but they make adapters” and that’s where I have to give Apple a lot of credit for how they implemented the new ports. They're vertical instead of horizontal. On my current mini, virtually every port is occupied, including all four USB-C ports. The last USB-C port, though, is a bit of an odd duck because of a convoluted workaround needed to let me use one of my favorite peripherals. My 3D mouse that I use to move the camera in SketchUp has a wireless dongle. It’s USB-A. As there are only 2 USB-A ports on the mini and both are occupied by a keyboard and mouse, I had to get an adapter to let me plug it into a USB-C port. You’d think, “Okay, problem solved. What’s wrong?” What’s wrong is that the adapter is too wide to actually fit on the back of the mini thanks to the other devices plugged into them. This led me to kill two birds with one stone. I bought a hub that rests under my mini, plugs into that last USB-C port, and gives me 4 USB-A ports, 1 USB-C port, and two memory card slots. The 3D mouse’s dongle is plugged into the adapter and into that one USB-C port.

“Okay…” You’re starting to ask, “If it’s got four USB-A ports, why not plug the dongle into one of those?” And that’s a good question. I tried doing that at first, but my 3D mouse has a problem. Sometimes, the mini forgets that it’s plugged in and if I start up SketchUp, it doesn’t wake up and give me a leg up on my 3D modeling game. So, I have to unplug the dongle and plug it back in berfore I can use it. Unfortunately, Satechi, the company that made the USB hub, made the USB-A ports really, really tight, so un/plugging it requires a very firm commitment from the user. Meanwhile, un/plugging the USB-C port is super easy. 

Speaking of Satechi, I guess I’m waiting to see how they handle the new mini’s design. If they make a hub that works like my current one, I may go for the new mini after all. They’ve got their work cut out for them. For one, on the old Mac minis, the only vent is on the back. The new mini has a vent on the bottom, so any hub would have to work around them. Additionally, instead of the power button being on the back right corner of the chassis, it’s on the bottom left rear corner. 

Without a hub, I'll just have to take stock of exactly what I need to keep plugged in. Maybe that can be part of next year's theme. 

Amp Up Your Dental Game

I got a new toothbrush, and I really like it, but it has a design choice I feel very conflicted about. It’s rechargeable, which is a step up from my previous one that used a AAA battery (though you easily got more than 6 months of life out of it), but it charges through USB. Not only that, they didn’t bother including a wall adapter.

Here’s what you need to understand about USB: the only consistent standard across all USB ports is that they deliver 5 volts of power. If you know anything about electricity, you know that’s only a third of the equation. Amperage is another third and arguably the most important. You’ll see it on your wall adapters, in that really small print that’s only one shade lighter or darker than the rest of the housing. How they list it may be a little hard to decipher, but you’ll generally see something along the lines of “5V/1.0A.”

Before we move on to explain amperage, let me give you a more real world scenario involving batteries. You’ve probably only had to replace the batteries in your TV remote every few years, and chances are you’re using something like Rayovac, a brand that’s not exactly known for high use applications compared to the Coke and Pepsi of the battery world, Energizer and Duracell. If you’re old enough to remember portable CD players, you know those things went through AA batteries before the end of the week. Obviously, a portable CD player is a very different device than a TV remote, which is practically an overengineered flashlight. It’s not constantly running while you’re watching TV. Both devices can run on a pair of AA batteries, but the CD player uses more amps than the remote.

Needless to say, an electric toothbrush is not a portable CD player. It’s not power hungry, hence a AAA battery lasting several months in my old toothbrush. Even the rechargeable cell in the new one isn’t exactly a hog. In the case of rechargeables, amperage is an indicator of how quickly something can be charged. You might be thinking, “What’s the big deal? It charges faster, so get a wall adapter with a higher amperage.” However, as an old fable once told us, slow and steady wins the race. The race, in this case, is the overall life and longevity of the battery. Without getting into the chemistry of Lithium-Ion celled batteries like those in your smartphone, the first 80% or so of your battery being charged seems to happen pretty fast, even with a fairly slow charger like one rated to 1A. That last 20% though is often going to be a bit slow by comparison and that’s also when you’re probably going to notice your phone getting a little hot. When you pour water out into an empty glass, you slow down and ease off the pour as you get near the top of the glass in order to avoid spilling. That’s more or less what’s happening in that battery when it’s charging.

Now, here’s the problem, the faster you charge your battery, the more strain you put on the whole system because you’re more likely to “spill”. For a time, I was using a wireless charging pad for my iPhone 12 mini. Wireless charging pads, in my view and with the benefit of hindsight, are terrible devices that nobody should ever use ever and you’re an awful person for insisting otherwise. It takes a lot of energy to transmit the electricity wirelessly than through a simple cable, and a lot of that energy is wasted in the process. Despite this inefficiency, this particular wireless charging pad was charging my phone really quickly. Between this and an issue with an app running in the background when it wasn’t supposed to, my battery’s health began declining and my phone wasn’t lasting through the day. It would literally drain in about 4-5 hours of moderate use. Even setting it down on a table overnight would leave it dead by morning. I hadn’t had the phone for very long, so upgrading through my cell carrier was out of the question. I was outside my warranty window as well, so I couldn’t rely on that. I had to pay out of pocket and take my phone to an Apple Store (because mailing it in would have taken weeks) to have the battery replaced. Really, taking it there was the bigger hassle than the 40 dollar cost for the procedure. Since then, the battery health is declining again from routine use, and all despite charging it the old fashioned way with a 5V/1A charger, the little white cube that came with one of my older iPhones. Apple doesn’t make this little cube anymore, and now all of their chargers list the wattage, leaving you to figure out the amperage. To be fair, newer iPhones have more sophisticated charging circuitry in them and can handle faster charging operations if one so desires.

Put simply, if you’re the sort of power user who upgrades their phones every 18 months or whatever your carrier offers, the life and longevity of your battery probably isn’t going to crop up until you’re in the market for a new one anyway. So, for these people, faster charging methods may be more practical. If, however, you’re a moderate user and/or the kind who likes to hold onto their phones until the duct tape holding the glass back together rots away, the two most important numbers you need to know are 5 and 1, which are voltage and amperage, respectively.

So, back to my toothbrush*. It’s using the slowest charger I have, which is going to be fine for it. As for my iPhone 12 mini, I’m just going to start charging it by plugging it into my Mac.

*I should mention in the interest of full disclosure that this toothbrush utilizes wireless charging. That is to say, wireless charging isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but coupling it with fast charging is an utter waste of energy on a phone or comparable device. It’s certainly a waste on an electric toothbrush, hence going the slow and steady route.