Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Day 230: Thankfully, feeling much better today. Still a little more tired than usual, and I was glad it was a work from home day, but not feeling the body ache or complete lack of energy I did yesterday. Vaccinated is far better than not, but I’m glad it’ll be a few months before I have to do this again, and that the shingles series is a one-time thing, not annual!
70/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
This one surprised me in good ways. I wasn’t optimistic at first, with its focus on Ferengi, who can be annoying (especially in the pre-Quark days), and with it bringing back an (intentionally) annoying character from the show. But it handled both of these elements surprisingly well; the primary Ferengi antagonist is a little more thoughtful than most of the era, and the returning character is actually given some depth and is able to use his traits and quirks in ways that advance the story. Add in some amusing Worf/Riker bits and Wesley actually being treated like a worthwhile character as he forms a friendship with an alien ensign, and this (notwithstanding some confusion over how the Federation handles money and an “offscreen” sexual assault that wasn’t really necessary) is definitely an above average entry in the series.
Day 229: Shingles vaccine effects update: Oh, damn. Ow.
So, normally I’m what my wife has termed an “insensitive mutant”. When it’s time to get my annual flu or (now) Covid shot, I show up, get poked, and go along with life. I rarely even have much arm soreness to deal with.
This time, though? Uff. I got the vaccines yesterday at about 3 p.m. (both Covid and shingles), and though I definitely felt the shingles shot going in and got the arm soreness, other than that, I felt fine through the rest of the day until bedtime.
This morning we woke up about 6 a.m., and I still felt fine. I commented to my wife that I didn’t trust that, though, given what I’d heard from other people…and I’m glad I went that route instead of crowing about my insensitive mutant status.
We went through our morning and headed off for our grocery shopping rounds, and by 9 a.m. I was definitely feeling some generalized all-over body ache. Nothing too severe, just a general sense of discomfort — I compared it to the Monday after convention weekend and feeling the effects of barely stopping moving for four days. Uncomfortable, but bearable.
But by the time we got home, put the groceries away, noon rolled around and we had lunch, the aches had just kept going, and suddenly all energy just disappeared. Since my wife was also feeling the effects of her vaccinations (flu and Covid), we decided it was nap time, crawled into bed, and promptly passed out for a couple hours.
Post-nap, we’re both still achy and exhausted, so initial dinner plans, which actually involved cooking, have been put on hold in favor of ordering good Indian delivery.
And I can no longer claim to be an insensitive mutant. (At least, not all the time.) Harrumph.
69/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to read military SF about a Scotch/Irish former fighter pilot who turned spaceship engineer after being wounded and losing a hand, written by a former soldier and pilot turned actor who played a Scotch spaceship engineer after being wounded and losing a finger, then this is definitely the book for you! Aside from the rather amusing list of similarities between Doohan and his protagonist, and the curiosity of reading SF co-authored by Doohan, it’s fairly standard military SF, combining interstellar war with a “who’s the saboteur” mystery.
Day 228: It’s vaccination day! One updated COVID shot and my first shingles shot (I got the flu shot at my annual checkup in October). I generally don’t have much reaction to the COVID vaccine, but I’ve heard that nobody escapes some reaction to the shingles shot. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow….
Day 227: Well, this is a first. In the midst of troubleshooting some ongoing network issues at home, I realized that this lil’ five-port Ethernet switch was failing. I don’t know how long I’ve had it, but while I didn’t know these things could fail (I mean, sure, entropy happens, and there is the eventual heat death of the universe to consider, but they’re just so plug-and-play, set-it-and-forget-it that they seem eternal), it seems this one’s time has come. Its new seven-port replacement is in place and doing just fine.
Day 226: It’s not huge, just a postcard size, but I got a Norwescon 46 flyer up on my office door at work today. Spreading the word!
Day 225: I got to spend part of the afternoon wandering around with my wife and handing out holiday candy to whomever we passed. It was a fun way to spread some holiday cheer!
(I’m not terribly happy with this photo, but it’s the one I got. Apparently I’m just having a blurry week.)
Day 224: I can’t quite pinpoint why, but I’ve been feeling a little spacey today…. ;)
(That’s both “the Apple Music service” and “using Apple devices to listen to music”, to be clear.)
For all the things Apple does well that I like and appreciate, and that keep me as a customer, some things absolutely drive me up the wall.
I have a big music collection, so I’m particular about how I keep things arranged on my computers and my iPhone. I have a bunch of custom smart playlists, keep my phone set to only sync certain playlists, and do not automatically sync my entire library. I simply have too much music to do that, and I don’t want to have to scroll through every playlist to find one of the few that I use on my phone.
Because of this, for a long time, I avoided Apple Music. (For other reasons too, including that I am particular about my metadata and have spent ridiculous numbers of hours making sure it’s correct, and Apple has a particularly annoying habit of overwriting user-defined metadata if you give it full access to the on-device library.) I finally signed up a few years back when the Apple One collection of services hit a good cost/usefulness ratio. It has come in handy (particularly for my wife), but I make sure to keep the “sync library” setting turned off, so that I know that I’m the only one managing the music on my phone.
For a long time, this worked fine. 95% of my phone-based listening was from my on-device library; the 5% of the time that I actually used Apple Music (I like their “Get Up!” playlist when I’m making breakfast in the morning, and will sometimes pop on their “Chill Mix” or a downtempo or trip-hop station as background music when I’m reading or relaxing before bed) was a nice way to get a mix of stuff I knew and stuff I was unfamiliar with. I’ve found some good new (or new to me) tunes that way as well, so even when it’s only a small part of my listening, Apple Music has been helping with music discovery as well.
So this was working. When I listened to Apple Music and heard something I liked, I’d “favorite” it. This would both help to train Apple Music so it would find more stuff I liked, and allowed me to go back and find the things I liked so that I could then go back and actually buy the full tracks or albums from the iTunes Store. As someone who doesn’t trust streaming services and regularly purchases the media that I enjoy so that I know I have a copy and don’t have to worry about it magically disappearing when licensing agreements change (I want to own my media, not rent it while being told I’m buying it), this seems like exactly the kind of use that Apple and the studios and artists would want. Streaming, like radio, is a way to find new things that I then go and spend more money to own (and send a more reasonable number of pennies back to the artists).
Unfortunately, for some reason, they’ve made an obnoxious change with iOS 17. Now, every time I try to “favorite” a song, I’m told that I have to turn on the “sync library” setting. Apparently, Apple no longer really considers your Apple Music library and your on-device library to be separate things. The first time this happened, not realizing what would happen, I made the mistake of turning on the “sync library” setting, and while I could then favorite tracks in Apple Music, it also completely screwed up what was on my phone. I had every playlist that I have on my computer on my phone instead of just the ones that I manually select, but for some reason, they were all empty, and therefore useless. There was still a lot of music on the phone in the “Downloaded” list, but the playlists didn’t show anything, and it was incredibly difficult to figure out what was actually on my phone and what was in the cloud somewhere without digging through that “Downloads” list. That got disabled again after a couple days of trying to figure out a way to make it work.
I really don’t understand this change, and why Apple Music can no longer learn about my tastes without completely screwing up the systems I’ve had working for years for keeping just the music I want on my phone. But the end result is that Apple Music is now far less useful to me than it has been, and I’m less likely to use it (but, of course, Apple’s unlikely to care, because I’m just going to keep paying for it as part of the Apple One subscription…).
Apple does a lot well. But I really wish they’d put a little (well…a lot) more thought behind the entire music experience, especially for people like me with large libraries that we’ve put a lot of effort into sorting, tweaking metadata, and generally futzing with to make sure they’re set up just as we like.