An Open Letter to Blue Sky's Chris Wedge

" “> Hey look! It’s you!! Chris Wedge!!! Nice pic. Great movie.

Dear Chris,

I heard the news. I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner. Things have been a tad crazy of late, what with the pandemic and gun violence and political division and illegal wars and whatnot. I started writing this before the war and Uvalde, but I felt it was important to acknowledge these facts of life and death we are facing before I launch into this escapist fever dream. Anyway…

Disney can be quite the pain in the ass these days, what with all the acquisitions and late-stage Capitalism and all. I recently read the Paste piece, An Oral History of Scrat Tales: The Death and Legacy of Blue Sky Studios, and I feel for you and your peeps. For the record, I don’t think it was a mistake to be hopeful that Disney would act to protect contemporaries of the modern animation industry. You know, because Disney is one of the most prolific animation studios ever.

Such presence gives you the impression that they might commiserate. In retrospect, they did end up protecting a legacy, namely their own … by engaging in predatory catch-and-kill just to shut you down and absorb your valuable intellectual property and talent. But hey! Live and learn, right? We just have to process and integrate the setbacks and and keep pushing forward while keeping a sharp eye on our past, as it informs us of potential futures and how to avoid them. (If that’s what “we” want, that is.)

And there’s nothing Disney can do to erase Blue Sky’s legacy as one of the few smaller studios that could offer the big players a challenge at the box office, to be sure alongside Chris Meledandri’s Illumination. Thirty-five years, thirteen theatrical films, more than $5 billion in revenues, and two Oscar nominations, Blue Sky was no joke. Dude! You yourself won a freaking Oscar for Bunny back in 1998 only to release Ice Age two years later. And I don’t care what anyone says, but 2005’s Robots is a just a masterpiece. One of the truly underrated greats, in the same vein as The Road to El Dorado, The Iron Giant (Vin Diesel’s best role by far), or Disney’s own The Emperor’s New Groove, to name a few.

You, sir, are a force in the world of animation.

But, here we are. It’s 2022 and it has become clear that being a force for anything offers no friction to Disney’s ambitions. If they want to take on or end something, they can simply buy it. It’s like Disney went to the park with its ball, had a great time with everyone else while doing their damnedest to ignore you, and when he took his ball to go home, took your tricycle for good measure. And it’s not like the pandemic has been ‘helpful.’ I wouldn’t be shocked in the slightest to learn that aspects of Disney’s decision to close Blue Sky was to let them shunt more cash into their cash strapped amusement park division and fretting over content for their then upcoming Disney+ streaming service.

Looks like someone needs a new tricycle…

So, this is a pitch… of sorts. But it’s not a pitch for me. I’m simply offering the concept. I have no skills aside from stringing some vaguely comprehensible words together in sequence, but I do have an imagination. No, it’s a pitch for you.

Animate books.

Now, I’m not talking about the atrocious adaptations (not ADAPTIONS, people! A-dap-TAY-shuns, for cryin’ out loud) that plague our cinematic past, or even the really good ones, for that matter. Regardless of the quality, or lack thereof, these adaptations necessarily strip out loads of context, interactions and impressions, additional plot lines, and almost everything else to focus on the core story because, you know… two hours.

So, as insane as it sounds, what if you don’t do that. Instead, adapt the book as closely to the written work as possible. Take the dialog wholesale. Design the scenes to appear as described in the pages. In other words, use the book as the script, stage direction and all. Make each page fly out of the book and into a tangible world where the rules make sense because you know the story in static form.

A few more suggestions:

  • Don’t change anything unless you have to for technical reasons. If the book is worthy to adapt, why would you change anything that wasn’t already constrained by the animation process, and we both know that animation offers no constraints. Period. We can do anything in animation.
  • Don’t modify the plot, motivation or conflict so “modern” audiences can “relate” to it better. Again, if we love the tale, what benefit comes from modifying a major part of what made it resonate?
  • Any character description should be taken as canon, everything else is fair game. If the author doesn’t mention any particular aspect or aspects of a character, you can flesh them out how you like, but if something is clearly stated, it needs to be there. Taking a text description into a fully-realized visual world means a lot will need to be filled in. The book, after all, is for the theater of the mind, so some expanded development is almost assuredly required for most any book.
  • Don’t feel stuck making a film. In fact, DON’T make a film. Make a series, and make it as long as it needs to be to fit everything from the book in. Some books will lend themselves well to adapting a chapter to an episode rather neatly, while others might need more creative solutions. Trust the viewers to watch as little or as much as they prefer, much like reading a book!
  • Hire the best voice actors for the cast, not just the “best” celebrity stand-ins. Name one time someone told you that the only reason they went to see a film was because actor X, Y, or Z was in the cast and no other reason. The draw is the tale itself, not whatever A-lister is attached to it. Sure, it’s a force multiplier, but this shouldn’t be about massive, unlimited profits, but the artfulness of the work and how it reflects on our human existence or shows us parts of ourselves that might help us better understand us as living, thinking creatures drifting through space and time just hoping the ride is mostly nice along the way. I don’t doubt, however, that money will be made.

If I, as a complete nobody that brings nothing to the fore, were to opine on a first step, I’d say take it slow. I’d shoot for a few test scenes from a book of your choice. If I were to choose, I’d start with Isaac Asimov, preferably Caves of Steel, the first in his Robot series.


The description of Isaac Asimov’s “The Caves of Steel” taken from GoodReads.com — “A millennium into the future two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work together. Like most people left behind on an over-populated Earth, New York City police detective Elijah Baley had little love for either the arrogant Spacers or their robotic companions. But when a prominent Spacer is murdered under mysterious circumstances, Baley is ordered to the Outer Worlds to help track down the killer. The relationship between [Lije] and his Spacer superiors, who distrusted all Earthmen, was strained from the start. Then he learned that they had assigned him a partner: R. Daneel Olivaw. Worst of all was that the “R” stood for robot — and his positronic partner was made in the image and likeness of the murder victim!” The novel is one of Asimov’s many “proofs” that science fiction can be applied to any genre, not just its own, not that Asimov needed to prove anything to anyone :)

Simply put, and apologies for being a tad brutal here, but nobody has given the idea of a 1:1 adaptation through the artistry and flexibility of animation a go before, and it’s not like you’ve got much else going on… I mean you’re exec’ing on some Puyo Puyo movie and some “Popeye” thing. That can hardly be taxing.

I kid… a little.

With the right property, the correct treatment, with solid massaging by a quality team that groks the rules, I think you’d have one killer app on your hands, and significant demand for more. But like I said before getting excited again, take it even slower.

Whip the first few chapters of Caves of Steel into storyboard form. Try blocking out some solutions for inner monologues and other “unfilmables”. Cobble out a few scenes, see how they work around the dialog. How much runtime can you get out of a chapter?

Of course, for a storied legend in your field, this would be a cake walk.

;P

Sincerely,

Tyler Knows Nothing


The Preamble of The U.S. Constitution | Shallow Thoughts

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How do we define the United States of America? We call it a country, but that just means a plot of land with established borders. Land certainly tells stories, but those tales are woven over millennia, and definitions within that context just don’t scale down for the convenience of our human time-frame.

The first quote I think of in regards to the makeup of our government is that it is formed…

…of the people, by the people, and for the people…

Sounds familiar, right? Well, it’s not from the US Constitution. The quote comes from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and the idea had been discussed by others for centuries. That might disappoint you, if you didn’t know that until now, but we do have an actual Constitution. If you need a refresher, here’s the subject of today’s Shallow Thoughts, the Preamble:

See if you can find the correction in the Preamble. Surprisingly, there are lots of corrections in the Constitution, which raises a question. If this was accepted as the final draft for the establishment of an entire country, how many punctuation errors are there, say, in the 2nd Amendment?
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

You see, Lincoln’s sentiment is squishy and unclear. It’s nice, but it is not a ratified legal document. Just because the president says it, doesn’t make it law, or even true. It’s an aspirational concept. The Preamble, on the other hand, is a lucid, if flowery, 10,000 ft. outline of the idea behind America. At the time the definition of “people” was limited to white folk, but that’s the thing about weasel language being used to establish important institutions. The words you choose could have an unintended outcome at some point in the future.

That point in time has been here since, at the very least, Reconstruction and “We the people” must now mean all humans. So-called “minorities” have been struggling for inclusion in the privileged caste since their feet first touched the shores of this ancient land, and while we’ve made progress over the course of a few hundred years, we keep getting dragged back by parties who are both inclined towards racial animosity and have amassed the resources necessary to control the direction of government. Those “resources” also include questionably warm bodies like almost the entire Republican party currently in office. Besides, much of the progress seen in minority populations is merely token, a bone if you will, to keep the boat from rocking too much.

Wading the shallows…

It might just be me, lord knows I never finished college (half a dozen times), but when your founding document starts with “We the people” and you use the formalized structure of organized society outlined in said document to exclude actual human people from deriving those benefits or achieving those aspirations while simultaneously granting favored whites free reign to commit crimes against minority bodies, that it specifically means we haven’t achieved the very first, most basic mandate of our Constitution in nearly 250 years?

Kinda feels like we’ve all been getting gaslit for the last 400 years.

Or maybe, just maybe*, we had a Civil War over the enslavement of human beings for purposes of building the nation we stole from the natives who had been establishing societies for thousands upon thousands of years where the slavers lost, but because of government flaccidity on the matter, didn’t bother actually enforcing equality for all those supposedly now free, new Americans and caved on States Rights, so that racist states could continue to oppress its citizens, but now with a veneer of sovereign legitimacy.

Who knew we’d develop such deep, violent rifts between races in a country where non-white humans have been chewed up and spat out, all to appease fragile white egos, but what do I know…

PS: YouTube is something of a cesspool. Despite this, I really love it. Well, I love the creators. Most of my content consumption is on YouTube, as I’ve found many, many creators who love what they do and put in the work. And yet, much of YouTube is filled with crap. Sure, it might be a nice place to keep your family videos of your meals and pets or terribly racist screeds and calls for race wars, but all the extra bandwidth, in storage, over the network, and in your hardware/software solutions, consume a constant flow of electricity to maintain.

PPS: Meanwhile, our Earth-bound resources, which have a limited lifespan, are being burnt to spin the turbines that delivers power to the infrastructure, systems, suppliers, and services that reliably energize global capitalism efforts, but is used as a tool of oppression for the terminally lower class minorities. Don’t pay your bill, you get cut off, so you have to work, but you can only take a job that pays minimum wage, which isn’t a living wage, so you need to take another job or two, just to keep the water and lights on and for trash to get picked up on occasion. Oh, and don’t forget rent…

PPPS: As the non-1% are dragged along with hypercapitalism’s reckless, futile desire to chase the mythological beast of unlimited growth, it seems we must make ourselves content with just waiting to see what happens. Maybe we should rewrite the Preamble:

We the selfish, recognized white People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union in our image, establish Justice for some, insure domestic Tranquility for the few, provide for the common defence of the powerful, promote the general Welfare of private business, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to just us and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America until we think it’s no longer worth maintaining and drop the pretense.

And if that’s what’s going to happen, then the death of planet Earth will come sooner, at least for us, than I think most of us would hope. The wealthy and their sycophants will just build themselves bunkers or whatnot so they’ll live, as will their descendants, and what do you think their parents are going to teach them about the world?

What, indeed.

* There’s no question that the Civil War happened due to disagreements over slavery. I’m just being sarcastic. The enslavement of human beings should never, ever be something that can be disagreed with. It’s criminal. Period.


Outlook Junkmail Arrives Flagged ... By Spammers

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I’ve been having a problem lately. It’s not an enormous issue, but it bothers me. As you have likely already gleaned, I am receiving junk mail in my Outlook.com account which is already flagged, like so:


An example of a pre-flagged spam message.

I don’t think most people have noticed it for a couple reasons:

  • I don’t think a lot of users flag their emails unless they are using the desktop version.
  • Flagging is a visual cue that has only recently started to become a component of organization tools, i.e., Microsoft To Do.

Outlook.com, however, is an interesting beast; at once the best damned email client on the planet while being rather terrible at handling spam… sorta. I’ll get to the best part in a sec, but Google’s Gmail is far better at filtering spam.

The online version of Outlook was originally designed to not only replace HoTMaiL (if you’ve never noticed, the capitalization is deliberate), but to compete with the growing number of players in the nascent Webmail arena. Microsoft had fumbled in the early days of the internet had to catch up to the growth of services like Google’s Gmail, Yahoo!’s RocketMail, and offerings from AOL (“You’ve Got Mail!”) and Compuserve.

In 2012, Microsoft replaced Microsoft Live Hotmail with Outlook.com, and offered the Beta version to the general public to try. I joined that beta, and added an Outlook.com address to my seldom-used Hotmail account. I was immediately impressed with the new interface, and have mostly enjoyed using it over Gmail for years now. The current version of Outlook.com is extremely complete, and I can understand why casual users might find it confusing. If, however, you are experienced with using the Outlook desktop application, you won’t have too steep a learning curve.

But it’s generally never about the features that work when I post. In this case, it’s about spam getting flagged automatically. This is a real problem now, and I’ll explain why, but let’s first take a look at what another Windows user posted to Microsoft’s community support forums:

This is one of the only posts I could find about this issue and the answers were… unhelpful?

As you likely noted in the image at the top of this post, I’ve been having the same problem. Some emails will come set to Urgent and Flagged. Flagging a message in any version of Outlook is a visual indicator that you, as the user, add to show importance or act as a reminder. As I mentioned before, the Flag has traditionally been a user-only function.

That changed after Microsoft acquired Wunderlist from German developer 6Wunderkinder GmbH.

That’s not to suggest that Redmond’s acquisition had a lot to do with the issues I and other(s?) face, but it’s how I discovered the issue in the first place. I used Wunderlist as an all around replacement for Evernote and a checklist app. It was very good at that, but MS decided they needed an app like that, so they bought the company and finally phased out Wunderlist on May 6th of this year. Now we have To Do, a fine app that leans even more into the task management space.

Unfortunately, one of its neat little productivity features is that it has an auto-generated listicle with all of your Flagged messages. This would really be great if it worked as intended, showing the items you flagged so you can be reminded to handle them. Instead, upon initial inspection I was treated to a cavalcade of Coronavirus cures, manhood pills, offers of millions of dollars from some dead prince in Idaho or Saskatchewan or Kazakhstan.

So, that’s about it. There’s no real solution that I’ve sussed out just yet, nor have I seen very many questions posted about it. Like I said, I don’t think a lot of people are going to experience what I believe is an edge case. This just doesn’t yet happen to many users.

We’ll see where things go from here.

PS: This is a repost from my blog, which I’ve been having issues with. I’m now in the process of making a decision about where my bloggings will reside. My options are to restore WordPress on my most atrocious host, go back to PostHaven (which I adore but has posting and formatting limitations), or devote my efforts to Medium (which has an in-built audience.) I have yet to choose.

PPS: Part of the problem, and it’s a large part, is the depression I’ve been “managing” over the years. The pandemic hasn’t helped, as you can well imagine, and the current political climate on Earth is… er, suboptimal, to say the least. Shit like this makes the future unclear for the billions of regular peeps around the world who just want to live a life. And the leadership necessary to guide us out of this dark place we’ve allowed ourselves to get lost in seems to be down at the pub doing lines of coke and kicking hobos for fun, so few peeps have hope for a brighter, less self-destructive future.

PPPS: You don’t have to love everyone, just don’t go around killing them. They randomly appeared on Earth just like everyone else. We don’t get to choose who we are or where or to whom we are born, whether it is the chaotic, unintelligent course of events of a vast unknown cosmos or the will of some god(s). Is it not, then, logical to presume, until evidence to the contrary of course, that none of us are inherently superior to anyone else? Life, for now, is just the luck of the draw, and maybe 3% of peeps win the lottery. The name of the game has always been extraction…

PPPPS: Listen to Dylan, then extrapolate from then until now and what’s happening. Its ugly and we’re in deep, deep trouble if we don’t do something fast. What those fixes are, I have no idea.


Francis Dunnery’s Let’s Go Do What Happens | Album Stories

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Everyone calls him Frank. Let’s Go Do What Happens was released in 1998.

I’m quite sure that it was early Fall in Vermont; leaf turning season. It drew the leaf peepers and they brought their money. We didn’t turn in those circles, or any circles for that matter. We spent time at home or at school or with the baby or at various jobs. She worked at the Vermont State Department of Corrections for a time. I worked at the nearby IBM plant for a spell. I attempted another go at college. I’d like to think we failed each other.

Have a listen to the album while reading this piece.

The radio station that had to be on in the car at the time was The Point FM, de rigueur for any self-respecting AAA aficionado. Where else was one to catch up with the latest singles from Big Head Todd & The Monsters, R.E.M. or Dave Matthews Band, note the dates for a coming Phish show, or score a tip on hemp floor mats or locally roasted coffee (yes, that Green Mountain Coffee.)

I honestly don’t recall the track from this album I heard on the radio that caused me to suddenly know I had to own it, but it could have been any of them. Normally, I have at the very least, a sense of which track, but not this one. All I know is I got in the car, drove down to the Sam Goody (I think, might have been a Wherehouse) off the 189 at Shelburne, and bought the cassette. I slapped it into the tape deck and listened to it all the way home.

Thank you, Auto Reverse.

Little did I know at the time, but Francis Dunnery was to become a very important figure in my one-person chapter of Tyler’s Music Appreciation Society. In 1998, however, I didn’t place as much importance on music as I would later in life, specifically in regard to my progressive self-education. Hell, at the time I hadn’t yet come to grips with The Blues and still had a stunted understanding of Jazz.

I knew at the time, however, that Dunnery spoke to me with his lyrical content, compositional style, sound, and his distinctive vocal quality. I’ve come to understand this as Storyteller Syndrome; my principle thesis on progressive rock. In a nutshell, that one thing that sets progressive apart from its core genre is story telling. Most people think that “Prog Rock” is epic long tracks with soaring guitars, complex beats, and tales of space ships and wizards. I propose that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Rocks songs are about love and loss. Prog rock songs are about stories. — Tyler Regas, 2020

Even the most epic prog rock band of all time forever and ever, known to mortals as Rush, moved away from 15 minute long tracks and tales about hobbits and dragons to more socially conscious fare packaged into tighter, radio-friendly formats. In 1973, Yes released Tales from Topographic Oceans, four songs stretched over two albums, and completely radio-hostile. Just a decade later, and Yes would have a huge radio hit with Owner of a Lonely Heart. I don’t think anyone would argue that Yes should be disavowed. That would be absurd.

Now, I won’t try to suggest that any song that tells a story is progressive. No. It’s more than that. It has to be something new but retain principle elements of rock music, to take that music in a new direction, and evoke a reaction in the listener, one that provokes new avenues of thought or introspection, through storytelling or other narrative structures. This can even be done instrumentally. Just take a listen to any of Simon Phillips’ Protocol albums, Plini, or Arch Echo.

Tell me that Biplane to Bermuda doesn’t paint an interesting picture…
Lush, hard prog rock instrumental soundscapes.
If you love Animals As Leaders but miss recognizable song structure.

In a way, we get to witness Dunnery’s trajectory through the late stages of the Golden Age of Progressive through his stint as frontman for influential UK band It Bites and into his solo albums. Not well known outside of the UK, It Bites is what I personally recognize as the last of the original progressive rocks bands of the golden era of prog. Most notable of his solo efforts is 2016’s Vampires release on Band Camp where he makes what he had originally intended for certain It Bites tracks quite clear, if you know what I mean. They have since come to terms.

The late 90’s, however, were different for me. Not having the benefit of hindsight, we carried on with whatever priorities we had at the time, and that was taking care of Leah and making sure we could pay the bills. The writing work had started to take off and the local clients we consulted for were stable. We only had the issues facing us at the time and had no idea that, in just a few years the Twin Towers would fall and seven years after that America would experience the biggest financial collapse since The Great Depression.

It seems that time really doesn’t have an impact. We’re still facing disaster, only it’s different and worse and our fault since we let that buffoon Trump get elected in the first place, but that’s beside the point. These days there’s plenty to be concerned about and for. We don’t know what’s going to be coming around the next corner, and it seems like we come to a new one several times a day. Even as we turn into 2021, we’re still exhausted by the chaos of it all, everything a question mark.

Back then, however, I just enjoyed listening to the music. Not that I knew at the time, but I had that luxury. We all did. I think we all can again, at least for a few moments.

Just start up the album. It’s at the top of the page in case you forgot. Sit back in a comfortable chair and just listen.

Think about the chord progression.
Think about the beat.
The rhythm.
Tonality.

Think about the lyrics, the story being told. Don’t worry about understanding it all just yet. Instead, let yourself sink into the music and just enjoy it, and nothing else, for a track or two. Do this once a day for two weeks.

Doctor’s orders.*

* I am not a doctor.


The Nothing | Short Fiction

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The stairwell spirals down into the darkness. Well, not spiral, really, but there is no term that describes a rectangular shaped stairwell in a multi-story building. It didn’t matter, though. There was already a name for it. It was called The Nothing, and it had been named a few generations back, long before I was born. I come to stare into The Nothing quite often. There isn’t much else to do and it wasn’t forbidden. In fact, the Elders encouraged it, likely to instill a sense of dread. People fear the dark. It’s not that it’s darkness, but that you don’t know what could be hiding inside of it. After all, there isn’t anything threatening about an absence of light.

Back in “The Day”, people would venture down into The Nothing to see how far they could get. At some point they decided that it would be smart to remove the doors so that the light could shine into The Nothing, at least until it couldn’t. Few people had been down to the Last Door, but I went at least once or twice a month. There was a thrill that ran through me like a shiver as I would look down at the Last Door and the impenetrable darkness just beyond. Our Elders tell tales of the Doormen who had taken the Last Door off of it’s hinges.

The final pin falls, the Doormen laugh.
Ping, ping, ping, then into The Nothing.
Then it makes no sound. Did it stop?
The Doormen reset their steely resolve.
One step, two. The Nothing remains silent.
Two step, three. Doorman Pellis vanishes.
Doorman Stev reaches out to grab nothing.
The beginning of The Nothing is found.
Do not venture past the Last Door.
The 28th is the End of Our World.

The Elders made it sound ominous and scary, but nobody knew what was beyond The Nothing. There was nothing to indicate what was different. Every once in a while, some idiot would head down there, drunk on Roofberry Wine, and his friends would dare them. A few times it was proven that touching the 3rd step down from the 28th floor caused people to literally vanish. They didn’t fall. They’d just blink out. I wasn’t eager to discover the truth of it, so I stayed on the 29th, looking down. That was satisfaction enough for me.


How to destroy Twitter in 30 days or less

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“The Man Who Can Do No Wrong Even When He Clearly Does”

Step 1. Be Elon Musk.

Step 2. Buy Twitter for $45 billion.

Step 3. Tweet.

Step 4. Never, ever apologize for anything.

Now just sit back, soak in the sun on some private island, sip on your cocktail, check your stocks and bank balances, and wait. Of course, your tweets may or may not have an impact on how long the process takes, so you may not wish to stop or have some unpaid interns handle it for you. Regardless, your mileage may vary. Now, there’s a very strong chance that you are unable to overcome the requirements for Step 1, but I have faith in you!

Once in the “Zone” though, Step 2 is likely even more difficult, but stay strong. You’ll just have to get together about $50 billion and buy Twitter. The rub there is that some other guy also named Elon Musk has recently bought another company called Twitter also for $45 billion, but an extra $5B should square things up in no time! Remember, don’t slouch and smile…

As for Step 3, tweeting has never been a problem for you. My god, if there was a good version of the phrase ‘verbal diarrhea’, that would be my catch phrase for you!

Elon Musk would saunter by and I’d say, “There goes Mr. [GOOD VERSION OF VERBAL DIARRHEA]” and people would know I’m talking about you.

Which brings me to the final step, Step 4: Never, ever apologize for anything. And why should you!? I mean you are one of the wealthiest humans on the planet (I’m not sure where you’re at on the rich people’s Bank Balance Olympics® after going into the hole for $45B, but I’m sure it’s still quite high) and you didn’t get there by doing little more than nothing, did you!

NO!

You, sir, are an ALPHA!! They need to be shown who’s really, truly the boss and who’s gonna be callin’ the shots from here on out. Better yet, just do whatever you want! Like with all those Twitter employees you’ve fired violating FTC rules on advanced notice requirements for companies the size of Twitter. But that’s just dumb poor people stuff that doesn’t apply to you, Mr. GVoVD! Wow!! That would make a fantastic bumpersticker for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon!!!

That’d look fantastic in space!

But I digress. Once you’ve fulfilled all of these requirements, you should be all set. I truly hope that we’ve met, nay, exceeded your huge, multi-national corporation dismantling and irresponsible currency disposal services today.


Can we please end the stupid "Natural" vs. "Reverse" scrolling debacle?

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I am quite well versed in the extensive history of the operating system wars. Apple effectively created the home computer industry, and Microsoft has been doggedly chasing after ever since. This is not a new story in the slightest.

Historical documents tell us that Steve Jobs managed to arrange a tour at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, frequently called Xerox PARC, which had been tasked by their parent company with developing a wide range of modern computing technologies for the future. The PARC teams were responsible for laster printers, Ethernet, the desktop paradigm for graphical user interfaces, e-paper, Very Large-Scale Integration or VLSI, the process which made all of the computer chips we use today even possible, and the Alto, among other things.

A Xerox Alto II on display… somewhere. Unfortunately, the contributor didn’t note where they had taken the picture, so it’s anyone’s guess, though likely a computer museum… again, somewhere.

The Alto II was an amalgam of all of the technologies developed at PARC and was effectively a “desktop” computer. The idea might seem insane when you look at the literal behemoth above, but this where we were back then. The Alto II was never released as a product for the general public and only 2,000 were built, mostly deployed inside PARC with some distributed to universities. Many believe that the Mac team’s exposure to the work on the GUI at PARC helped them break through some of their final stumbling blocks before the release of the Macintosh in 1984. I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen the Super Bowl commercial…

The truth about Steve Jobs and Xerox PARC
or are there many "truths"? One of the foundation myths of Apple was that Steve Jobs and a team of developers working…latimesblogs.latimes.com

There was, however, one more piece of radically new hardware that had been invented a decade earlier by a bloke named Douglas Englebart at the Stanford Research Center which brought it all together, a device that would become known worldwide as…

…The Computer Mouse.
The inventor of the computer mouse, Douglas Englebart, never profited from his invention. During an interview, he said “SRI patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple Computer for something like $40,000.” Not a great deal, peeps…

Avoiding the rabbit hole…

So as to avoid a long(er) narrative about the history of the mouse, let’s leave it there and move to this piece’s raison d’être; the mind bogglingly silly problem of computer mouse scroll wheel scrolling directions.

You try to use fewer words to describe it whilst insuring all readers know what you’re talking about! I’m open to suggestions.

I’m quite sure most casual users who have always used a Mac or a Windows machine likely haven’t given a single thought to which direction the document in the display scrolls when you roll the scroll wheel up or down or drag two fingers across a trackpad. It’s kind of a thing that most people get. Kids learn all this stuff before they can string words together, for crying out loud!

But for users like myself who use both macOS and Windows operating systems, it’s a pain. (For the record, I’m also a Linux power user. Mint, Pop, and Fedora, in that order.) Here’s why:

Take a look at Kunal Rathore’s excellent article on the Mac’s natural scrolling versus Windows’ established reverse scrolling implementation, including a lovely animated illustration to, uh… illustrate the difference for those who have withstood the awesome attraction of “the other side”.

As you can plainly see, they just do the opposite. It’s not like you can iterate on a linear motion control. It goes up. It goes down. There’s not a lot of room for creativity. If you take a look at the Mouse settings in macOS and Windows you’ll start to see where the problem lies. Let’s look at macOS 12.4 “Monterey” and how it handles scrolling options:

WHAT? The Mac makes this an OPTION???!!! I sense the Windows user inside me starting to get nervous…

Well, how does Windows handle this, then? Let’s take a look at my HP EliteBook running Windows 10 and it’s scroll wheel options:

I like Dark Mode. Sue me.

As you can see, the only options for controlling the scroll wheel in Windows are to tweak how quickly and how far it scrolls when you twiddle the control, but not direction.

Grrr.

Yes. All this is the fault of Microsoft…

So, I think we can all agree that this is rather silly, has no place as an issue on computers made since 2010 (so, we’re 12 years late), and is just dirt easy to fix. And no, I don’t want any registry hacks or 3rd party utilities. It’s built into everything else, so yeah. Clearly, everyone else seems to have cracked the code, as it were.

I’m not a coder on any level, but if programmers can make mistake that lose people hundreds of millions of dollars and fix that epic screwup, I’m quite sure Microsoft can add a scrolling direction option toggle to a Windows update coming sometime this year, and that’s being generous.

I’d be willing to wager a farthing and a nice six-pack of gluten-free beer that a couple of their superstar hackers could whip up a fix in an afternoon. Tell “Up” and “Down” to do the opposite.

Ooooooooooo! Rocket Science!!!

I’d be interested in hearing how or why this would not be a feasible endeavor. Both pragmatic and loony answers are welcome. I only have two rules; have fun. be nice.

The Conclusion…

It’s time. Get it done, Microsoft.

PS: The violence in America is intensifying. There are reports of mass shootings coming in daily now. The Laguna Woods shooting was just a few miles from our home. There are very clear signs that America is heading towards some kind of event or series of events that will likely change life in this country forever. I’d much rather it be a march on the Capitol for a protest of epic proportions than another mass shooting.

PPS: One way we can look at this is via representation, one of the core tenets of the foundations of American society. Most Americans are represented, at least the ones who aren’t homeless, an illegal immigrant, or Black. Those should be easy red flags. Then divide them into Democratic, Independent, and Republican silos. There’s more red flags. They’re everywhere you look. We keep divvying ourselves up into little groups of people who should get more than everyone else. And we know very well that the big group with the most rabid desire is the white supremacy movement. Another is the National Rifle Association. I get it. It’s easy to get them mixed up.

PPPS: When reflecting on the tragedy of these terrible times when some of our “representatives” choose to dissemble in the face of the slaughter of nineteen 9–11 year olds in the name of their god, the gun, remember that the NRA membership is less than 2 million… in a country of 330 million.

PPPPS: How’s that for representation!


How to sacrifice children for a thriving weapons industry | 2022 Q2 Update

" “>

Welcome one and all! Is your weapons industry suffering in the markets when there’s little direct war action to feed the coffers for your “investors”? Our simple program allows you to generate almost unlimited “excitement” for weapon, accessory, and ammunition sales.

2022 has been a year of explosive growth for the gun industry, and we see nothing but profits for the ongoing future. Take a look at some of the successful results from our non-stop “marketing” campaign for “freedom”.

NOTE: The continued performance of gun “enthusiasm” despite the “unintended restructuring” of the National Rifle Association and their extensive messaging platform is a huge cost savings since we no longer funnel funds into their Ackerman McQueen-led AgitProp strike team. We applaud the NRA’s continued efforts to remain relevant, however.

Without further ado here are examples of “successful results” from our industry’s non-stop “marketing campaigns”…

May 24th 2022: Uvalde, TX. — Robb Elementary School — 21 murdered

February 14th, 2018: Parkland, TX. — Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — 17 murdered

December 14th, 2012: Newtown, CT. — Sandy Hook Elementary School — 27 murdered

This is how. You do everything in your power to get gun laws relaxed, if not stricken entirely, so that more and more guns reach more and more true, red-blooded Americans. That, however, only reaches a certain saturation point. It’s not enough that one person own one gun. They need to need more guns. In order for your profit margins to soar in the short term, you need a catalyst.

You need the “Secret Sauce”; fear, uncertainty, and doubt, also known by its acronym, FUD.

As silly as FUD sounds, it is a devastating weapon that can strike without provocation or warning, and at scale, and all without specific instruction. It’s not enough that they feel unsafe in their homes, they need to feel existential dread. One of the most proven methods of instilling deep, unwavering dread is to see their children slaughtered like fish in a barrel, repeatedly. Preferably with some breathing room in between events so we can hone our messaging. We’d also like to thank Alex Jones who has been an indispensable asset in our efforts. We wish him well in his future endeavors.

One side benefit, as well, is that with so many excess guns and ammunition, a lot gets stolen, which must be replaced, which means insurance claims, and so on and so forth, providing a solid foundation for “gravy” profit margins in the peripheral markets and for suppliers. That also puts a load of guns into the “grey” and “black” markets, some of which generate more profits for us at gun shows, while illegal arms feed into the suburban, urban, crime, and minority fear secondary markets. And “Ghost Guns” are fine for now, but as they start to make headway, we’ll need to kick-off a “Vuse Maneuver” so we can leverage their work into our profit with minimal capital outlay.

As you can see here, the data is clear. Sales were distressingly low from the mid-90’s to the mid-00’s, but through our continued efforts on multiple fronts, we’ve been able to “eliminate” roadblocks to unlimited growth potential. A strong domestic weapons industry is critical. If we fail to protect this precious resource, hundreds of “Job creators” WILL continue to suffer, and we simply cannot allow that to happen.

You can’t leave it at that, however, you’ve got to dig deeper. You need help from the community, even if you have to manufacture consent. People are sheep. They don’t know what they need. But we, the wealthy and powerful, the ones manipulating things behind the curtains and maintaining a carefully curated veil of legitimacy, we do. Well, we know what we need, and in the end, that’s the only important thing we care to know. Knowing more is exhausting.

At the end of the day, however, we applaud this young man for his crowning achievement as 2nd Place Master Provocateur in our fight to return America to it’s “Roots”; a “colored folk” shooting range dotted with murderous, little fiefdoms teeming with happy, little aryans, bristling with their powerful, little assault rifles. Our Manifest Destiny is at hand, my fellow Americans!

Won’t it be wonderful?

In case it’s not clear, this is satire. I’m upset about Uvalde, TX. How can I not? These little babies were murdered, slaughtered like so many pigs in an abattoir, just like Parkland and Sandy Hook and thousands of others mass shootings year after year after year before, and if things don’t change, many more in the coming years. And we pretend this is a “mental health” issue, claim the time after tragedy is exclusively for grieving and discourse of any kind dishonors the recently deceased, then make deals behind closed doors and in exchange for “contributions” to give the gun industry its fucking money’s worth.

A lot more than our children pay the price, as well. Just look up how many have been killed by gun violence in America in 2022 alone, and the humanists among us are traumatized because we feel emotions; the closer we are, the exponential growth in heartache. We’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again unless the people act, and that means getting out into the streets, which is what I hope we finally do.

Why outrage doesn’t matter anymore
Here’s the thing. We, as Americans, have lost the ability to lash indignant hellfire at those who violate our…tylerknowsnothing.medium.com

I wrote the above piece back in 2017. I wrote another on my blog, the one that was destroyed by The-Host-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, and no, it’s not Blue Host. I dislike them openly. I may repost it at some point. It takes a lot of work to convert from WordPress Gutenberg post formatting, so probably not.

I hope we get some of this shit figured out before someone does something so stupid we can’t come back from it.

I really do.

PS: Depression is a deeply misunderstood ailment that often doesn’t feel real, either to people who suffer from it and don’t know or to those lucky few who’ve never been depressed, though I’m not sure the latter is possible. I’ve suffered from depression for decades now and I doubt it will ever go away, but I’ve still managed to write… at least until Covid-19 came along…

PPS: My wife, daughter, and I had Covid very early, like in February 2020. Fortunately for us, our primary symptom was body-wide pain and we had none of the other, potential fatal problems. I’ll just gloss over the fact that I happened to get Shingles at the same time, but for those of you who know, you know. What came after, however, has been the most catastrophic symptom of my Covid infection; Long Covid brain fog. If it was already hard enough to write while depressed, Shingles kicked it up a few thousand levels of distressing.

PPPS: I’ve made countless commitments to restart my writing efforts, but I’ve only managed a few spurts of activity over the last few years. I don’t know if I can change that, but I’ll damn well try. I can’t sit idly by, randomly opining on the internet while atrocities are committed on a near daily basis. I need to start being a more active participant in this great experiment gone wrong, a sentiment I hope many more Americans like myself, humanist, open-minded, pragmatic, for forward-thinking, will choose to adopt. I’ll do my best and all I can do is thank you for reading my words.


I've gone (back to) Mac & why you should, too.

" “> An overview of Apple’s technologically significant M1 chip architecture. Neato torpedo…

Back in 2009, I needed to have the CPU repasted in my MacBook Pro as it was running hot. Ill-advised in retrospect, I poked around Craig’s List until I settled on someone offering repair services that I felt I could trust. I spoke to him on the phone a few times, and we arranged to meet. I dropped off the laptop, we chatted jovially for about ten minutes, and then I went home.

I never saw that machine again.

I had been a contented Apple user since the (very) late 1970’s, but as the 2000’s wore on, my satisfaction had been whittled away by a range of issues like Apple’s pricing, the rise of the walled garden, and limitations preventing me from using non-Apple gear, of which I have a lot. As a working writer, the most pressing issue of the time, however, was that I had $600 to get a replacement machine so I could get back to work. It took me four years to save up the $2,400 for it in the first place and a used machine wasn’t going to cut it. I had no choice. I had to buy a Windows machine.

I started with an HP ProBook I picked up open box at Microcenter for $600. It was okay. After a couple of years it became nigh unusable for my Team Fortress 2 gaming, so I got another $600 open box deal at Microcenter, this time a Lenovo Flex 3 with discreet graphics. To its credit, my wife still uses it to this day. It’s slow as hell, but she won’t give it up. Not blowing a ton of cash on these machines, however, allowed me to save up another chunk of cash and, happy with Windows 10 at the time, I dropped $1,800 on my first gaming laptop, an Alienware 15 R3 with an 8GB GTX1060 graphics card. Despite all my research, it turned out to be something of a shitbox and now sits in a drawer with a dead battery that’s really hard to replace. So, early on in the Pandemic, I bought an open box HP Elitebook 840 G6 for way less than it’s street value. And yes, it was also $600. If you’re curious, I don’t have any particular affinity for the number 600, just hilarious coincidence.

Just don’t buy Dell. Period. They’re crap and only care about their enterprise & their hot XPS laptop, which they recently sabotaged with a hideous new industrial design. Typical Dell, am I right?

Now, more than a decade later, I have a new M1 Mac Mini on my desk, an iPhone 12 Mini in my pocket, and a 2013 MacBook Pro I got from a friend. Yes, I still have the HP EliteBook 840 (running the thoroughly disappointing Windows 11 which I’m planning to downgrade back to Windows 10), but I’ve barely used it since I got the Mac Mini, aside from taking the time to charge it up and make sure it has all updates. And it was an easy switch, as most of my tools are online, run from my web host or on my NAS, and/or have long been cross-platform. With a little practice I was back in the groove.

So, what prompted this sudden turn-around?

The first thing that caught my eye was the then new iPhone 12 Mini. I’d been an avid Blackberry user for years before migrating to the iPhone 4s, but when I lost my MacBook Pro to stupidity, I started trying out Android devices as they integrated better with Windows. Those early days were harsh, and after working through a range of Android devices, I eventually circled back to Blackberrys with BBOS 10 which had Android app support. I’m pretty sure you already know how that ended, which is when I bought my first truly great Android device, the OnePlus 2. Following that was an LG v30, then a Samsung A70, and saw that these things were getting too damn big. That iPhone 12 Mini spoke to me, so I bought one.

Just one month later in 2020, Apple shocked the world with the announcement of the first M1-powered systems. For the second time in years, I was excited for something from Apple. After ingesting an unhealthy number of YouTube videos issuing test after test illustrating the M1's astounding superiority and efficiency after having been held in thrall by the iPhone 12 Mini for six months, I felt it was time to dip my toes back into Apple’s newly inviting waters.

I pulled the trigger in early 2021.

There was more to my decision-making, though. I’d been monitoring the battle between Epic Games and Apple in hopes that the Cupertino behemoth would start opening up more of iOS. I’d also acquired the aforementioned 2013 MacBook Pro from a friend and was pleasantly surprised to find that it ran the then current macOS just fine, which reminded me of Apple’s legendary reliability and long life.

Microsoft had just rolled out Windows 10 to “correct” the Windows 8/8.1 Start Menu debacle and were doing all kinds of amazing new stuff. I’d come to believe that Apple and Microsoft had switched places, something like a Silicon Valley version of Freaky Friday (Phreaky Phriday would be an apropos title for the film). Microsoft’s efforts were exciting and full of promise, while Apple was building ludicrously expensive cheese graters, spending five years apologizing for the atrocious “Butterfly” keyboard, ignoring their other keyboard “innovation,” the TouchBar, figuring out more important things to remove, and not much else of interest.

Apple’s moneymaker was the iPhone and from the outside looking into Apple’s legendarily opaque operations, their mobile Golden Goose appeared to receive all of Apple’s focus. The Mac had been left to Apple’s chief designer Jony Ive and his bizarre, experimentally unnecessary proclivities, which are exemplified more by the removal of features that forced the creation of new revenue streams (i.e., AirPods, removing the wall charger from iPhone boxes, etc…) than the work-a-day aspects of technological evolution. When Steve Jobs called for the removal of the floppy drive from the original iMac, it was because he predicted that the CD-ROM drive would replace the older, slower, less capacious storage medium.

Steve Jobs was right…

Why did Jony Ive, Apple’s design chief, remove the headphone jack. Were people not using headphones anymore? Were headphone jack modules too big for their thin, innovative industrial designs? Were Apple’s customers demanding true wireless earbuds? No. None of these things were true. They did it because it meant they could sell far more over-priced AirPods and make a load more money over including a cheap pair in the box. And with the removal of the charging adapter, they outright claimed it would contribute to saving the planet, when it’s just another accessory being monetized and whose packaging adds even more waste to our overflowing landfills.

So, you might be asking yourself why, amid all this chaos, would I jump ship… again? I mean, if Apple is doing all this shady crap with their walled garden and taking a 30% cut of sales from the App Store and everything else, why would I again immerse myself into Apple’s “flawed” ecosystem after swimming in the warm seas of Windows for a decade? Well, for one, that ecosystem isn’t as flawed as it was in 2009. Two, it’s complicated for a raft of personal reasons I’ve already touched on. It hasn’t helped that, after a few years of reliable innovation, Microsoft itself has been sending mixed signals about their future plans, and those signals are confusing. They were doing phones, then not. They were doing ARM-based Surface tablets, then those shriveled up when their performance failed to meet expectations. They were going to bring augmented reality to the masses with the HoloLens. Where the hell’s that thing?

In my opinion, I believe that Cook and Ive had a disagreement on the ultimate direction of Apple after the six long years of the Butterfly Keyboard debacle, rising thermals from Intel parts as well as their inability to get past 10nm processes, and languishing sales that were at odds with Ive’s industrial design desires. All new systems essentially roll-back Apple’s design ethos to pre-2016 forms with the iPhone 12 cloning the wildly popular iPhone 5 and the new Late-2021 MacBook Pro’s sporting the new M1 Pro and Max chips recalling the look and, more importantly, most of the ports from the pre-Butterfly designs and ditching the TouchBar for full-size function keys.

I’ve long understood that corporations do what they do for themselves and their shareholders. Many of them recognize that being somewhat responsive to the needs of their customers and producing products that people actually want to buy is easier than… doing the opposite (ahem, Dell.) I’ve also come to understand that it’s all just noise. The industry is what it is, and until consumers actually speak with their wallets, something we most decidedly do not do, Apple and Microsoft and every other gigantic corporation will continue to do as they please. So, until we put our money where our collective mouths are, we have to base our purchasing decisions on something.

Instead, we must focus on who is making the most compelling technological innovations, the chip design that takes years and years and thousands of super smart people who know math and physics and science and programming, to offer the features and forward-thinking I consider when deciding which path I’ll follow. After Microsoft has effectively abandoned any semblance of a desire to innovate to focus on reliable, consistent revenue generation, the tea leaves say that Apple’s silicon will be the one to watch for the coming decade.

My desktop as of today, Feb. 20th, 2022, with labels. Kinda looks like a cockpit, no?

I mean, come on! I’ve got a $1,500 Mac Mini on my desk that can reportedly often match or exceed the performance of a Mac Pro “Cheese Grater” costing ten thousand dollars or more! The guys over at Max Tech on YouTube haven’t been able to sell their $15K Mac Pro while performing most of their editing on a 24" M1 iMac. It’s insane the leap in power and efficiency Apple has brought to the table, and they’ve only just started.

I’d be an idiot not to ride that wave…

Of course, I’m not everyone. I’m a writer with casual gaming tendencies. I don’t push my hardware that much anymore. Back in the early 00’s I was running a Citrix MetaFrame server in the garage office we had at the time. I’d tired of Windows and was running Caldera OpenLinux on my desktop, but still needed Windows apps to write Windows books and had $30k of Citrix’s enterprise software sitting around from a previous book, so I put it to work. Prior to that, I was using Macs exclusively, and worked on Windows material using Connectix’s Virtual PC. I’d say that at least 25% of my Windows-based work was done using systems other than Windows. Clever girl.

It’s hilarious that my wife found this as I am writing this article. This is an actual Beta 2 disc I used for my work on some of the books of the time. The server was running Windows 2000 Server, which was running the Citrix MetaFrame software serving Microsoft Office apps to my Caldera OpenLinux desktop system while I ran XP in Virtual PC on my PowerMac 7300/200. So very meta when meta wasn’t even meta yet…

Times, for better or worse, have changed, and so has technology. Whilst I remain an avid humanist and decry corporate efforts to commodify the planet and its contents for the lascivious pleasure and seemingly bottomless enrichment of the 1%, I do love me some sweet, sweet computer hardware and high-quality software. As previously mentioned, even after being separated for nigh a decade, I eased back into using macOS like putting on an old pair of comfortable shoes. All of the basics hadn’t left me, and I only needed to retrain myself on the lesser used functions involving shortcuts and modifiers. Windows did a number on me in that regard, but it’s all about getting stuff done and how little your OS gets in your way.

To that end, macOS is aces. Windows has gone through many significant changes in the last twenty years. Windows 7 was the penultimate exemplar of the classic Windows UI. Windows 8, however, decided to rip off its clothes and run through City Hall with a picket sign reading “Mission Accomplished” before getting tackled by cops and made to put on pants before Windows 10 came to bail it out. But even Windows 10 couldn’t commit to Microsoft’s own legacy, and now Windows 11 is breaking everything in order to be more Apple-like. Had you not use a Mac lately, you might think that this means Windows is ultra-modern and macOS is languishing in the past, but that’s simply not the case.

Using a Mac may retain the familiarity of classic System 7’s form coupled with the modern sensibilities of Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” but it also contains a dizzying array of functionality improvements and new features. Apple simply didn’t see the need to change the basic conceit of the macOS user interface and user experience of its venerable OS. The Mac is both of the future while paying deep homage to the past. I’m inclined to think that anyone familiar with macOS of a decade or more ago should have a similar experience to mine. Microsoft, on the other hand, can’t even figure out what to do with their control panel items.

Today’s application climate does, however, play a significant role. I don’t think my switch back to the Mac would have been possible without the internet’s comprehensive shift towards web-enabled and web-powered apps. As Apple has been able to maintain a 15% share of the desktop market (which includes laptops) and a large percentage of Mac users are creatives, lots of apps are cross-platform. It also doesn’t hurt that the iPhone and iPad are both juggernauts of their respective markets.

All this exposition, for what again?

When all is said and done, what is it that I now derive from the new M1 Mac Mini mounted vertically on my desk that I couldn’t have gotten from my three year old 8th Gen HP business laptop running Windows 11? Peace of mind for one. Windows 11 is a mess. Just search for “Windows 11 problems” and you’ll find an endless slew of examples. Here’s one that Forbes just posted about the other day:

Cool, man… Click to read the article. NOTE: You get four free reads if you don’t already subscribe.

This might even sound familiar since it seems like the vast majority of Windows updates offer some kind of flag on the field that even Microsoft can’t predict before it ushers the baby code into the dark world of uncontrolled component drivers. Is it any wonder the Redmond giant wants to clamp down on hardware diversity? Apple has been doing it for decades, and their reliability numbers are significantly better than Microsoft’s.

That’s not to say Macs don’t have issues. They do, just far less frequently, at least in my experience. I generally go weeks without restarting my Macs. Windows 10 was good for a few days, but Windows 11 has been a near daily reboot cycle on the EliteBook (which has good driver support), mostly because of stupid errors, app errors, and persistent UI faults that won’t go away until you IT Crowd the damn thing. The worst I’ve seen on the M1 Mac Mini is easily fixed with restarting the faulty app itself.

I’ve got about fifty tabs open in seven tab groups on Safari, am running eight to ten applications, have a range of support apps running in the background, and it’s just peachy. It doesn’t get loud, like, at all. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the fan. It also never slows down, no matter how much I load up the system. Everything remains perfectly responsive and if there are any faults, they’re typically from an app’s services, poor coding practices, and/or lagging online content.

I’ve also not had to worry about legacy apps. Rosetta 2, the translation system that converts x86 code to ARM and back again (there’s a Bilbo joke in there somewhere) is seamless. Literally seamless. I honestly don’t know if I have any non-native apps installed. I might, and they just run. No popups, alerts, weird icon flags, or anything. I also haven’t had the need to use Windows virtualized. Sure, I had it installed in Parallels, but just to goof around in the ARM version of Windows 11. I haven’t fired it up in months.

(For the record, I just did so I could update it and I’m having to wait for Parallels and Windows to perform all their updates before I can start using it. The entire process took half an hour, not for lack of performance, but because Windows takes forever to get anything done. Even in 2022, Windows Update chokes on its own dependencies where updates fail on the first try because something else didn’t get updated first, and this isn’t limited to Beta versions. Super fun.)

What do you tell people about upgrading to Apple Silicon?

Just do it. Unless you use one or more tools that work only on Windows in an x86 hardware environment or are a PC gamer, just do it. You don’t need to spend $1,500 like I did, either. I got 16GBs of RAM and 1TB of storage space, but I always over buy as I generally get more years of use out of the expenditure rather than getting what I need in the moment. It’s also important to understand that with Apple’s new chip architecture you are stuck with whatever RAM and storage space you select at the time of purchase as those components are now integrated into the processor.

The vast majority of users will do fine with the baseline 8GBs of RAM and 256GBs of local storage. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back ensure that large, high-quality external drives are fast, and they’re way cheaper than buying more storage from Apple. Here are some additional pointers about getting (back) into the Mac in the 20’s:

  • There’s a rumored Apple Event coming on March 8th. Wait until then to see what they roll out. Any new M-series chips will be incrementally better than last gen parts, but it’s always best to get the latest hardware if you can. You will derive performance, efficiency, and feature benefits from the changes Apple makes to the previous iteration. Then again, it’s not always about the performance, but the value.
  • Regularly check MacPrices.net for updates on sales. It’s best to keep a tab open to the Latest Deals page. Base model M1 Mac Minis can get down to $650, which is a steal for a machine that will get official support for seven years and actually last longer. Seriously. Also, get AppleCare. It’s worth it because Apple makes it worth it. Be patient, and you can get open box deals for as low as $550. My Late-2013 15" MacBook Pro is officially supported to the previous major version of macOS. That’s NINE YEARS, of support. Windows 8 and 8.1 was out for only four years, three if you count the fact that Windows 10 was released one year before Microsoft ended support for 8.1 in 2016. Windows 11 was released six years later in 2021. As of yet, we don’t know how Microsoft will arrange support for Windows 10, which works on all PCs, and Windows 11, which is only supported on PCs with TPM 2.0 modules and a few other requirements. That’s not a good look, Mr. Nadella.
  • Do NOT buy any MacBook with a TouchBar. They were made from 2015 to 2019 and have the atrocious Butterfly keyboards which fail if you cough lightly or dust anything within ten feet (fifteen feet if the lid is closed.) The only exception is the 13" M1 MacBook, and if you’re looking at that, just get a MacBook Air. Apple replaced the function keys with a touch display, and then ignored it, so its effectively useless. So, unless you plan on using it as a laptop with an external keyboard or like replacing parts frequently, just avoid them. The article below gives you a rundown of which models to avoid when shopping for used deals.
Which MacBooks have the Butterfly Keyboard?
After introducing the Butterfly keyboard in 2015, Apple persisted with it for 4 years until mounting customer…macsx.com
  • Reflect on what Microsoft has done for you lately, or to you if you’re in a particularly salty mood, and recognize that these are all just computers that perform tasks for you. They aren’t pantheons or ideological camps, despite appearances. They’re machines and you likely need one to perform tasks. I suggest the Mac because of their qualities and benefits over buying Windows. With a Mac you know what you’re getting. With a Windows box, god knows what they slapped into that box, or how poorly. There are plenty of pre-built PC horror stories. Laptops aren’t spared, either, as manufacturers use a wide range of parts they could get deals on, even in the same model, often making driver management a maddening crap shoot.

I recently posted a piece discussing the lowly, but highly functional keyboard shortcut and the idea that keeping your hands on the keyboard is the key to efficiency, but it also serves to illustrate yet another core advantage Apple’s macOS has over Windows.

Are keyboard shortcuts really more efficient than a mouse?
As a Mac user, there is one very specific admonition from Windows and Linux users I hear frequently; too much mouse…tylerknowsnothing.medium.com

This is clearly my personal opinion, but I’ve found the Mac to be a solid, all-around, thoughtful computing ecosystem that has remained consistent for decades and reliable to a refreshing fault. While we may pay a premium, something that rankles to this day and I will complain about until Apple addresses it, you get a system that will last for many years longer than the competition. And if you care about such things, Apple products have excellent resale value, making upgrades far less onerous for your wallet. Then again, I’ve found it difficult to give up my old gear when the time comes for said upgrades. That could be why I still have a MacBook Pro from 2013 in active use and a load of my old Mac stuff in storage, including my PowerBook 145b, the machine on which I started my writing career

Apple Silicon is an evolutionary revolution…

Marketing and PR types like to sling the word “Revolutionary” around a lot when describing their marginally improved products. In many cases it’s pure hyperbole, but Apple’s ARM-based systems, starting with the M1 with it’s base, Pro, and Max variants are more than the sum of their parts. Under the hood it may be an ARMv8.4 architecture part derived from their iPhone processors, but Apple’s chip engineers have built a new architecture that leapfrogs all of the current work being done in CPUs.

Intel’s 12th generation Core processors are damned fast, but to achieve that performance they suck up a ton of power to get there and fall flat when unplugged. Meanwhile, Apple’s M1’s sip 30 watts of power and perform exactly the same plugged in or on battery power and can last a day on one charge. It’s not magic and they didn’t create new technologies the likes of which we have never seen before, but they did learn from their experiences designing and improving the iPhone. And all this after Steve Jobs had vocally denied having a phone in the works at all before gleefully announcing it on stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center in January of 2007.

Those first iPhones used more standard ARM designs, but by 2010 Apple would roll out their 45nm (“thicc” in nerd parlance) A4 chip with a single 32-bit core that had been designed in-house. One decade later, the 64-bit A14 Bionic sports six performance and four efficiency cores built on a 5nm process with a quad-core GPU and a 16-core AI processor as well as a small constellation of support cores. The M1, derived from the A14 chips, can run for up to 18-hours in a $999 MacBook Air while still offering desktop-grade professional video editing functionality. If they can do that, I’m pretty sure they can handle YouTube videos and writing emails.

Some people would call these innovations a “sea change,” myself included. I think if Steve were alive he would be blasé about it, having planned for it years in advance. He was prescient about so many things, removed older technologies at the right time to push the industry towards adoption of incoming technologies, and kept everything he could as close to his chest as possible to limit tipping off the competition. When Cook and Ive took on his role jointly it became clear they didn’t share Steve’s deep insight, likely born of his relentless research into coming innovations. In other words, Jobs was playing 4D chess while Cook and Ive were still trying to figure out checkers, at least until Ive left Apple to start his own design firm.

Apple Executives Discuss How Apple Silicon Achieves Steve Jobs' Goal of 'Making the Whole Widget'
In a new interview with Om Malik, Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi, marketing chief Greg Joswiak, and…www.macrumors.com
“Steve used to say that we make the whole widget. We’ve been making the whole widget for all of our products, from the iPhone, to the iPads, to the watch. This was the final element to making the whole widget on the Mac.” — Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple CMO

It’s clear that one thing survived Jobs passing, though; the plans laid to make the “whole widget.” Apple ditched the PowerPC because IBM was incapable of fabbing a part that could run cool enough for a PowerBook, and the move to Intel parts was just a stopgap along the way to said widget. As I spoke of earlier, the removal of the headphone jack to replace it with egregiously overpriced Bluetooth earbuds was an entirely cynical, capitalistic thing to do in the same vein as taking the charger out of the iPhone box and packaging it separately while claiming to be saving the planet, but really just creating nearly twice the landfill entrée per device sold through. (Pro Tip: You are allowed to change the box design, Apple.)

Apple’s secrecy strikes again. Microsoft suddenly flounders?

Back in the mid-2010’s, as Apple was spinning further and further away from the path Jobs had set them on, Microsoft was having a kind of renaissance with new CEO Satya Nadella who, with CPO Panos Panay’s emotionally engaging presentation style, sold us on a new age of innovation that would be issuing forth from Redmond. Windows 10 had a whole new Agile-based release process, they were working on the HoloLens Augmented Reality glasses, and talking about bringing a new (not) phone to market. They showed off hot new gear in September 2020 like the (not a phone, per se) Surface Duo and the never-shipped Surface Neo tablet while the HoloLens moved upmarket as a consumer-unfriendly enterprise device priced at nearly $5,000.

Then in a November 2020 event, Apple drops a bomb; the all-new, didn’t-see-it-coming M1 chip slotted into the fanless MacBook Air and the fanned MacBook Pro 13" and Mac Mini. The surprise event seemed sufficient to push Microsoft off course, and they didn’t correct well. With their ARM-based hardware and software initiative struggling to keep its head above the water in the ankle-deep shallows of a calm lake, Apple’s successes with their shift to Apple Silicon effectively bullied their competition into handing over their floaties. But I don’t think this indicates that Apple has any real power over Microsoft, only that Microsoft’s efforts weren’t as thought out as we’d hoped. This is nothing new, however, as Microsoft has had issues keeping the lumbering juggernaut on its tracks for many, many years.

Apple Event
Watch the latest Apple keynote stream, and check out the archive of special event announcements for our products and…www.apple.com

As a consumer, the take away here should be that Apple is offering a well-supported, stable, secure, and capable platform that meshes extremely well with the tens of millions of iPhones and iPads that reside in the hands of Windows users, and Microsoft has not seemed capable of correcting course in a timely manner. I don’t think these factors will cause a mass exodus from Windows, but it certainly won’t help Microsoft maintain their massive lead over Apple in the installed user base.

I know this is a lot to think about.

I think the two most important things you should take away from this are that the Internet has had a profound effect on cross-platform compatibility and that Apple is doing some amazing things. Whether they will pan out in the future is only for the future to know, but from what I see, the best bet most of us have for a real value in computing gear has started to shift from the WinTel (Windows on Intel) industry towards the Mac.

Apple’s traditional marketshare has been 14%. It’s now 16% while Windows has been steadily declining, something that’s easier to see with a larger data set. [SOURCE: statcounter]

Of course, Apple’s not going to jump from 16% marketshare to overtake Microsoft’s 76% anytime soon, but the Cupertino company has laid the foundation.

From my perspective, that foundation’s far beefier than Microsoft’s for the foreseeable future. Let’s agree to meet up in 2032 to discuss.

PS: Let’s keep Ukraine in our thoughts. That sovereign country is being attacked by a thug who knows nothing but violence. I normally try to be positive and constructive in these postscripts, but this time is different. The Russian Kleptocracy needs to come to an end and the Russian people and the peoples of the former Soviet states must be freed from Putin’s mob-inspired tyranny of lies, murder, and police violence. Even the Russian citizenry know this is wrong. They’re out there protesting when they know they face violent arrest. Nearly 2,000 have been arrested already.

PPS: Be kind to each other. We can do it if we just try. So, try harder, for all our sakes.


America's most underrated musical genius | Bruce Hornsby

" “> Bruce Hornsby with The Grateful Dead performing at Soldier Field on July 4, 2015 in Chicago. Jay Blakesberg/Invision for the Grateful Dead/AP Images

I’m not going to go into a long, winding diatribe about how and why and when Bruce became a humble god living among us mortals. He’d just deny it. Instead, I’ll show you.

Hell, this is from 1999. There’s another 20 years of new stuff to take in from there, and he’s still going. Not now, of course. Pandemic, anyone?

You certainly know him from the title track from his debut album, The Way It Is, but that was back in 1986. What did he do from 1986 to 1999? Hmm…

  • The Way It Is (1986)
  • Scenes From The Southside (1988)
  • A Night On The Town (1990)
  • Harbor Lights (1993)
  • Hot House (1995, a personal favorite… fantastic album)
  • Spirit Trail (1998)

Not to mention countless live shows, playing with the Grateful Dead (a lot.)

So, after this show, what more can you expect to find? Take a look…

  • Here Come The Noisemakes (2000, a collection of live recordings from 1998 to 2000 as the Noisemakers would become his new band)
  • Big Swing Face (2002)
  • Halcyon Days (2004)
  • Intersections (2006, an essential box-set of loads of unreleased material, live and studio)
  • Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby (2007, some freaking amazing bluegrass)
  • Camp Meeting (2007, an album of jazz tracks!, very lovely)
  • Levitate (2009)
  • Bride of The Noisemakers (2011, another live collection I can listen to all day long)
  • Rehab Reunion (2016, where Bruce spends more time playing the dulcimer, and it’s amazing)
  • Absolute Zero (2019)

For a more complete listing of almost everything Bruce has done, check out his discography on Wikipedia.

Bruce is a freaking space wizard. He’s a master at two-handed piano, and incorporates that skill into many tracks, like Spider Fingers from the Hot House album, and he loves to improvise when playing live, as you can see here…

Here’s the album version. See if you can pick out how each hand is playing…

Then, there’s all those times Bruce played with The Grateful Dead, and The Dead were always great with bootlegging, so here’s a show from 1990… with Bruce on the keys…

Grateful Dead Live at Madison Square Garden on 1990-09-20 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet…
Set 1 Feel Like A Stranger, Althea, It's All Over Now, Ramble On Rose, El Paso, Brown Eyed Women, Greatest Story Ever…archive.org

All in all, Bruce makes fantastic music and I think you’ll love it all as much as I do, considering there’s tons to choose from. And if you love live shows as much as I do, then check out Nugs.net where you can purchase official “bootlegs” that are simply wonderful. There are numerous free shows to pick from, and they offer a lot of FLAC versions for most shows, all recorded from the board and sounding FABULOUS!!

If, when you look up from a five hour binging session are surprised that so much time has passed, I’ll happily take the blame ;)


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