Ending My Edgelord Phase, Confusion, Video Vixens, RSS Club and Apple's Event
Hey, I hope you had a great week! There are my fuzzy thoughts up to the 16th of September 2021.
What I Wrote
I've so many completed drafts yet I'm reluctant to pulish them. Here's one of them on my book review of Confessions of a Video Vixen. Except for a few sections, I didn't enjoy this book since I didn't find it very scandalous and I'm far removed from the context in which this book was written.
Confusion
I really don't know what I'm doing—like at all. Not sure what goals I should be aiming for nor how I want to make my content and all. I'm truly clueless, moving with the motions. For some reason I've deleted som many reasonable blog posts and projects even though they were perfectly fine. I really hope to figure something out soon.
Media I Consumed
Driving 1000 Miles in 3 Cars: Gas vs Electric! by MKBHD. The time gap wasn’t too big (except for Ford’s charging network having issues). The biggest lesson for this is that EV charging infrastructure needs to be built out and synchronized rather than manufacturers trying to do their own thing. Also, this could (and should) easily be a train trip.
500,000 Public Electric Vehicle Chargers Is the Wrong Goal is a corollary to what I just said. Looks Ike range anxiety since people rarely go on trips like Marques’ so charging at home overnight is fine. Also, as MKBHD found, a lot of the public ones are unreliable which really screwed up the Ford and charging at the hotel makes sense since it’s enough time.
Linus from Linus Tech Tips invests in the Framework laptop. This laptop is really promising and as mean as I sound, I hope other manufacturers run with this and adopt this modularity. Linus really believes in Framework's vision and he's trying his best to prevent conflicts of interest given he reviews other products.
small-tech/catts wallpaper It's not the point of the repo, but the wallpaper looks nice. It was drawn by Margo de Weerdt and is under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
How I Stopped Being An Edgelord
Wasn’t overnight but shit changed around 2014 with Gamergate. I bought the bullshit of “ethics in gaming journalism” (even leaving comments on YouTube with my real name fueling the harassment) but I looked a bit closer and it seemed they really didn’t like women. An extension of this was when Ellen Pao became CEO of Reddit. She got a whole lot of shit for it, even on benign comments.
Turns out a part of the hate was from her unsuccessful sexual harassment lawsuit at the VC firm she started at which is validation that men never commit sexual impropriety and the women who accuse them of doing so are lying, opportunistic whores. There was the decision to ban some bad subreddits that was seen as an infringement on the values of free speech from the hacker ethos. Turns out it wasn’t her fault.
These instances made me realize that sexism might just be a problem. There was also the “forced diversity” worry but I heard someone say “why should minorities have to justify their existence when white people don’t?” Eventually,I discovered the proto-breadtube (left-leaning YouTube videos) with the likes of Hbomberguy, Shaun, T1J, Micheal-something and an anarchist called Garret.
Looking now, I'm happy to see how far I've come in my understanding of the world but I still have a lot of room to grow since there are many issues I'm probably not aware of. Because of this, I thinkple should extend grace to those who don't have a full understanding of social issues and understand that it doesn't come overnight. Not saying you should ignore nonesense, but consider that you weren't born with a fully formed understanding of the world.
RSS Club
I'm looking into the idea of an "RSS club" where certain content is made availible only to RSS readers to reward them for keeping the medium alive. Two things holding me back are technical considerations as well as what to write in it.
Technical issues has to do with implementing it. Should I split it into it's own section, let alone make it visible or indexable? How to actually hide it from the site and all that. I don't think it'll be difficult, just tedious.
As for what to put into it, issue is that I already have a Patreon page where I offer some premium content. Not that I have anything to worry about since I have no patrons (plz be one) but I'm having a hard time drawing a line.
Maybe I'll write a post on how to make a post for the RSS club and put it in the RSS club?
Thoughts on the past Apple Event
Apple had their event the other day and I didn't find it very interesting. I don't care much about Apple TV. The Apple Watch has a stronger screen and fast charging which is neat, though I'm shocked how they're still selling the Series 3 for $200 no less even though it's garbage. Tim Cook's inventory management maybe? The Watch SE isn't any cheaper, then again that's what the iPhone SE was like.
The unnumbered iPad (9th generation) gets a processor bump, ultra-wide camera and more base storage. Still has no laminated screen, but it's a pretty good option. There's a new iPad Mini which looks cute but's it's painfully expensive. Worse still, Apple thinks 192GB of storage costs $150.
The main thing are the new iPhones which aren't too interesting. New cameras are nice, so is the extra battery life. Still no gorilla glass at the back which would really help. There's "cinematic mode" which is only 1080p30 and their rack focus demo wasn't very good since it was still hunting. The cameras are also placed differently so yay? I nearly forgot the PRo's have ProMotion (120Hz) which is really slick.
In all, nothing too interesting.
995 Words Later
Thanks for reading! Have a great week and I'll see you some other time.