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Book forty-five of 2019: Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1962 Hugo Best Novel

Good story, and this was very likely one of my earliest introductions to any sort of consensual non-monogamy ideas, but gender role and sexuality issues bother me.

Me: 1, Apple Support: 0 (So far…)

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Today’s morning entertainment: Stumping Apple support.

Long story short (if I can manage that…(spoiler: I can’t)):

Sometime in the early 2000s, I signed up for Apple’s then-new iTools service (later rebranded as .Mac, and then MobileMe), and was issued an @mac.com account and email address.

Over time, that service became what is now AppleID, and while I at some unremembered point stopped using my original @mac.com email address, it carried on as my AppleID account name.

I’ve noticed on and off for quite some time now (as in, years) that I haven’t been getting receipts from iTunes (or the iOS or Mac App Stores), and had a vague idea in my head that it might be because they were getting sent to the old @mac.com address instead of an actual active email address, but it was never important enough for me to be concerned about. Every so often I’d get curious and poke around in the settings on my hardware or the online tools, fail to find a way to fix it, and then get bored or distracted and decide to figure it out “later”.

Well, “later” apparently ended up being this morning (as I’m suspecting that there may be more communications from Apple that I’m not receiving), so I ended up on the phone with an Apple support tech for close to an hour as I explained what I was sure of and what I suspected, and as they dug around in their tools to see what they could figure out. End result: I’m probably right in my guess, but they’re stumped as to why they couldn’t find any way to fix it, or even be entirely sure that that was what was actually going on, in large part because all the @mac.com servers and systems have been offline for years.

So they’re going to write my case notes up, bump them up to the next level and the backend engineering team, and hope to be able to get back to me next week. Best case scenario, they’ll be able to make sure that all communications get sent to an active email address as they should. The more probable (and hopefully worst-case) scenario is that I’ll have to change my AppleID — which they think will fix the issue, because that old @mac.com address won’t be in the system even as an account name anymore, but would be a bit of a shame, since I’ve had that account name for close to two decades now, and it would be kind of a shame to lose it. But still, if it’s breaking things, I’d rather lose that than continue not receiving information I should be getting out of silly nostalgia.

All in all, it’s an entertaining situation, the tech was friendly and competent (and entertainingly confused), and this obviously isn’t a high-priority issue for me, so I’m content to wait to see what information they come up with.

Plus, the way I look at it, I bought my first personal Mac in 1991, and after almost three decades of Mac geeking, if I’m going to get to the point of calling Apple support, it’s going to be for a damn good reason. :)

Aquaman

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Aquaman: ⭐️⭐️

Completely ridiculous, and in the constant-eye-rolling sense, rather than the this-is-fun sense. Admittedly, it was nice to see a DC film that wasn’t as dark (thematically and literally) as most have been, there were occasional gorgeous images, and I did get an occasional laugh. But there were just so many things that didn’t work for me, from the weird underwater effects to the soundtrack — the first time a character gave a dire pronouncement and it was immediately followed by a literal “bom-bom-bommmmmm”, I laughed, but when it became a recurring theme, it went from a sly wink at the audience to simply annoying — that this just ended up continuing DC’s nearly uninterrupted streak of uninteresting and unsatisfying superhero films.

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I love this remembrance of an old newspaper summary of Top Gun.

★★ TOP GUN
(Drama, 1986) Trivializes war by turning it into a music video. Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer. (1 hr. 50 min.)

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Book forty-four of 2019: The Enterprise War, by John Jackson Miller. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Filling in the blanks of Pike’s Enterprise up to the start of season two of ST: DIS. Not a bad romp, and helps to flesh out some of the secondary characters we see in Pike’s crew.

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Book forty-three of 2019: Maus, Vol. II, by Art Spiegelman. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The second half of the story, from Auschwitz to America. This really is a powerful piece of work. I really don’t understand how we as a nation are coming so close to letting this happen again.

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Book forty-two of 2019: Maus, Vol. I, by Art Spiegelman. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The first part of a graphic novel memoir of one man’s relationship with his father, and his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew during WWII. So many of the early events are sadly topical right now.

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Book forty-one of 2019: White Trash Zombie Unchained, by Diana Rowland. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Finished off the WTZ series in fine form, wrapping up various plot threads, dealing with villains, and even introducing psychic zombie alligators into the mix. All in all, a very fun series.