I would be absolutely terrine as an intelligence agent. I love telling people about obscure things I know. It probably a blessing nobody wants to ask me about the intricacies of VA mortgages in comparison to Conventional ones. If I had state secrets, I would spill them at the drop of a hat. A thing in my possession: A bunch of different cat food At her latest checkup, felicity, the cat you often se at the end of this newsletter, had lost a couple pounds. Since she's not a huge cat to begin with this was a little concerning. She hasn't been eating as much lately, but it wasn't something we really noticed until after the visit. She's always been a bit of a picky eater, and a grazer, eating not on a set schedule (despite waking me up every morning at an unreasonable hour to put food in her bowl) but rather whenever she feels like it.
But it seems like she feels like eating less lately. To see if it was her food that was the problem, we have now bought 6 different types of cat kibble and set them up in little ramekins next to her original food bowl, each with a different sample she can try. Our hope was that she would gravitate towards one more than the others, and we could transition her to that one. But she has sampled all of them, and non with any particular regularity and not at the level she ate previously. So now i have way too many bags of cat food an no better understanding of what she wants to eat or why she is eating less. Cats are bad at communication.
The good news is that per personality hasn't changed at all. She's still the annoying butthead she always has been (affectionate.) She sits on our laps while we watch TV and yells at us if we're gone for too long.
Oh! A programming note: There will be scant newsletter next week, as I will be in a different part of The Woods on vacation. I might throw something together from my phone, but don't panic if it's late, or not there, or very short. Poorly Organized Thoughts on: The Passage of Time Two things happened this week that made me aware of the passage of time. The first was I picked up an iPhone 4s. I don’t mean picked up metaphorically, but rather I Simply had the opportunity to hold one in my hand. For the first time in probably eight or nine years. What I immediately noticed was how small it was. It felt like a miniature in my hand. Despite the fact that I used a similar sized phone for years, the sense memory of a phone being that shape and size had been completely overwritten in my brain by what a phone feels like now. But putting the size of it aside, I was also really impressed by the design.
This was a good looking phone. The front and back glass panels felt cool in my hand and the metal band around the outside edge is probably still apple’s best design choice on a phone ever. Sure the glass was fragile, and prone to shattering (I saw plenty of those when I worked at the store) and the metal band was the source of antenna-gate (remember when Steve Jobs said “stop holding your phone like that”?) but even though the physical realities of using a phone like this day to day were more complicated, I cannot argue that this phone had rizz (I don’t know if people still say rizz, usually by the time I hear slang it is already pretty outdated.)
I thought about what it would take to try using this phone today, and I immediately hit the biggest stumbling block: the 30-pin charging cable. In 2012, when apple released the iPhone 5, and introduced the lightning port replacing the 30-pin connector people were angry. There was an entire sub-ecosystem of devices and docs and chargers built up around this plug that had been in use since the earliest days of the iPod, back when apple was a computer company that also made an mp3 player. 30 pin chargers were ubiquitous once, but with a wave of a magic wand (and time) you now stumble on them about as often as you stumble across an audio cassette. I briefly considered spending seven bucks ot have one shipped to me overnight from amazon, and I might still, but also I became weirdly nostalgic for when the cable was everywhere and I could find one by reaching betwen the couch cushions.
Of course, we're just past the precipice of another seismic shift in phone charging cables. With the iphone 15 that came out last year, apple switched to USB type C ports on their phones. But unlike the switch from 30-pin to lightning, this change was met with cheers rather than boos. This is in no small part because USBc cables are already ubiquitous, or at least close too it. They were the cable the EU decided to regulate apple towards. Many people are excited to only need one cable for their devices now. I am as well, the next phone I buy (maybe within the next year?) will have a USBc charger and that's cool. Maybe time marching forward can be a good thing.
I expected that section of these poorly organized thoughts to be a little smaller. I wanted to balance it against my re-watch of the show Warehouse 13. Warehouse 13 was a sci-fi show that started in 2009 and followed the adventures of secret service agents whose job was to track down, collect and neutralize the harms of, dangerous artifacts that existed across the country. I watched it in the original run, but in rewatching it 15 years after its premier, I have been struck by how 2009 every thing looks. Sure there's the fashion, but less obvious are the film making choices, It's shot on digital, but that kind of digital that has a certain terroir placing it firmly in a particular time. It's a combination of the lighting, the special effects quality (which aren't bad, just particular) and even the fact that they communicate using a handheld video chatting device called a Farnsworth, that could easily be replaced in the next few years with a commercial available device (like the iphone 4s). That's one risk of predicting futuristic technology, sometimes it comes true.
Stuff I'm playing I picked up Immortality in a recent Humble Bundle and I have really enjoyed playing it. It's a game by the same designer that made Her Story and Telling Lies. In those games, you used a unique search engine to sift through dozens of hours of video clips to piece together a mystery. The cool thing about both of those games was that the video was all of actual people. It was an evolution of what used to be called Full Motion Video games, like the TEx Murphy adventure series(starting in the late 80s), or the 11th Guest (1995). FMV games were very cool, because what's more realistic than reality, but they were hard to make within the limitations of video game technology of their time. They fell out of fashion for a while, but have come back as the software has improved alongside computer storage. Immortality changes the format a little of the previous two games by this designer. INstead of using a text search to find clips, you click on different objects in a given scen and get taken to a similar object in a different clip. This "match cut" feature aligns very nicely with the content of the game. It presents the player with the raw footage from three different incomplete films, all staring the same woman, made over three different decades. The introduction to the game tells us the actor at the center of these movies has disappeared, and the movies were never finished, but they creators are presenting it here for anyone to explore. There's a puzzle here, but it feels different from Her Story or Telling Lies. In those, you were working with incomplete knowledge, only seeing a single interrogation room for example, and having to piece together what the mystery even is, or being limited to only seeing one side of a video chat at a time, so you had to piece together whole conversations in Telling Lies. But Immortality is more of a jigsaw puzzle or building a moasic than a mystery. You will probably figure everything out and where the puzzle pieces go, but the joy is in the discovery of the next piece rather than a solution to the mystery itself. I'm really enjoying it.
