My iPhone 12

I occasionally joke on this blog about Tim Cook being irate at me for not upgrading my iPhone 12. I bought it in January 2021, so it’s now just over four years old and, with Apple’s yearly releases, it’s officially four generations behind the newest, sexiest iPhone 16.

What am I missing by not upgrading?

  • Better battery life
  • Faster processor
  • Better cameras
  • An action button. For action!
  • An overengineered camera button. For accidentally taking photos you didn’t mean to.
  • Some different colours
  • Apple Intelligence (it took a lot of self-control to avoid putting sarcasm quotes around the word “intelligence”)

Excluding the dubious features of Apple Intelligence, the only thing I’d really notice and appreciate in a new phone is the improved camera, and even then, without moving to the pro model with the telephoto lens, the camera in the iPhone 12 is still perfectly cromulent.

The battery health of my phone is 83%, which is edging closer to where Apple suggests getting a new phone battery. But it’s still plenty for me, given how light my phone usage is. I don’t do social media on my phone, I take few calls, snap a few photos and do some texting. I don’t play games or run processor-heavy apps.

And then there’s the whole question of whether I’d stick with Apple or jump over to Android. Sadly, those are really the only options, unless you want to go full dumb phone and party like it’s 2006. Which I sometimes do.

Part of me, the part that still gets that techno lust urge, wants to get a new phone, but really, I can’t justify it in any meaningful way. So I’m sticking with my iPhone 12 for now.

Sorry, Tim.

P.S. Tim, you suck. And not in the good way, in the kissing-the-ring-of-fascists way.

It’s been almost five years since I saw a movie in a theatre

That movie was Pixar’s Onward. It was fine, mid-tier Pixar stuff. At the time–the first week of Marc 2020–I had no idea we were on the verge of movie theatres and nearly all other retail shutting down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Onward ended up on Disney+ before the end of the month, mere weeks after it opened. I could have saved $12 or whatever if we’d waited.

Since then, the movie-going with Nic has been replaced with birding. Birding is better because it gets you outside, you get exercise, you see birds, and going to a movie always seemed like a weird way to socialize, since you don’t actually speak during the length of the film, only before and after.

Do I miss going out to movies? Given that theatres have been open for actual years again, I’d have to say no. I no longer have the urge to see something new ASAP. I’d actually wait for reviews before seeing a new Star Wars movie. Nothing else gets me excited enough that I just can’t wait for streaming, VoD or just skipping it altogether. Sorry, Marvel, I’m just not that into you anymore.

Part of it is likely just getting older and having shifting priorities. I don’t need big and loud now. Quiet and deep works just fine.

I suppose I should eventually get around to watching Inside Out 2, though. I hear it’s quite good. And it’s on Disney+, so no need to go to a theatre!

Book review: How to Sell a Haunted House

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The premise of this novel is simple: The parents of a squabbling adult sister and brother die in a car accident, and the sister, Louise, flies out to their parents’ town, to meet with her obnoxious younger brother, Mark, in order to inspect and prepare their parents’ house for sale.

The house turns out to be full of creepy-ass puppets made by their mother throughout her life. And is also haunted, possibly by all of those puppets…or something else.

The Goyner family has skeletons not only in the closet, but also every other room in the house, not to mention the attic, which Louise and Mark find has been boarded shut for reasons that become horrifyingly clear later

Grady Hendrix applies his usual combo of wit, horror and gory action here as he puts the characters through the dual wringers of dealing with a dark and unresolved past, and a bunch of seemingly murderous puppets, particularly one named Pupkin, who has a very possessive effect on anyone who chooses to don said puppet on their hand.

Hendrix lays on the puppet abuse pretty thick at times, almost but not quite taking me to the point of, “Oh, come on” but in the end, this is a rollicking adventure that makes puppets seem even creepier than dolls. Don’t worry, there are creepy dolls, too.

Recommended for old school horror fans, especially those who like a bit of droll wit to leaven the carnage (even if the carnage is mostly puppets being shredded and ripped apart. Mostly.)

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Once more into the snow prompts

Today we are getting enough rain to prompt a rainfall warning, but the forecast threatens colder temperatures in the days ahead, and the possibility of snow. Boo, snow.

But here are more writing prompts related to snow for you to enjoy!

  • Write a fun-filled adventure based on the many anagrams you can make from the word “snow”
  • Snow is small and white, just like sugar. What if sugar fell from the sky instead of snow? How sweet would that be? Write a poem about how sweet that would be.
  • The mysterious Yeti is said to live in the snowy reaches of the Himalayas. What if the Yeti got tired of all that snow and wanted to vacation somewhere warm and sunny? Write a travel diary of the Yeti’s zany Bahamas trip. Include at least two scenes of hilarious “fish (or Yeti) out of water” antics.
  • Snow rhymes with blow. Write a romantic comedy about a guy that plows snow, is addicted to cocaine and how he finds love, goes clean and becomes the best snow removal guy ever after a night of cocaine-fulled snow plowing mayhem lands him in the front yard of a lonely heiress, atop a huge bank of snow that is also a clever metaphor. Throw in a few musical numbers, too.
  • Tell me it’s snowing without mentioning snow, or using any description or words that in any way resembles snow or snowfall. Make it a haiku.

January 2025 weight loss report: Up 0.4 pounds

It was close, but in the end, I was up a bit this month–0.4 pounds, thanks to a whole lot of comfort food indulgence as January was a very bad month (see previous post) and I sought refuge in yummy food when I had an actual appetite.

The one concerning stat is body fat, which climbed a full 0.7% over the course of the month–not a good trend.

I make no predictions for February, but barring calamity (and this year, calamity always seems like a possibility), I expect these stats to all start improving as I resume some exercise and eating better, healthier food.

Stats:

January 1, 2025: 166.8 pounds

Current: 167.2 pounds
Year to date: Up 0.4 pounds

January 1: 166.8 pounds
January 31: 167.2 pounds (up 0.4 pounds)

Body fat: 
January 1: 25.3%
January 31: 26.0% (up 0.7%)

Skeletal muscle mass:
January 1: 29.8.0% 
January 31: 29.8% (unchanged)

BMI:
January 1: 23.9
January 31: 23.9 (unchanged)

Historical: January 1, 2022: 182.8 pounds

A farewell to January 2025, with my foot firmly planted in its monthly butt

Sometimes I am glad a particular month is over. Sometimes a month was mostly fun or rewarding.

And then there is January 2025, the start of a new calendar year and a month that was just kind of horrible, mostly due to health issues. Let’s look:

  • I did not run. The month began two days after I mangled the heels of my hands on my last run, due to tripping and falling hard on a sidewalk. Technically, I could still run today, but that is unlikely. Running is something that keeps me centered and focused. Not running does not help me achieve these things.
  • Any month I get blood taken three times is not a good month.
  • One day I logged 190 steps because I was bedridden, feverish and in a kind of delirium thanks to an infection.
  • Said infection plagued me for more than the first half of the month.
  • 11 days of outpatient IV therapy.
  • Having to shower, sleep and exist for those 11 days with an IV in my arm (five days left, six days right).
  • Still awaiting tests, including my first-ever MRI scan, for possible follow-up issues.
  • Speaking of firsts, I had my first CT-scan.
  • And all those IVs? The first one was also my very first.
  • Strata nonsense added greatly to my stress. I still haven’t found an effective way to deal with it. The stress, that is.
  • My camera stopped working, though technically that happened before January.
  • I leaned into comfort food a lot. I had Pop Tarts. Surprisingly, I was only up a modest 0.4 pounds for the month.
  • My sleep scores have been generally terrible–too much stress, generally not enough of everything else. I had one score of 81 (rating: good) shortly after the IV therapy wrapped up. It feels like a dream now.
  • No drawing. My last was at the end of December.
  • Blogging was down and I spent a lot of time staring at a blinking cursor.

On the plus side:

  • I got Jeff red velvet cake for his birthday and it was yummy, the perfect indulgence.
  • It didn’t snow (that may change in early February, sadly).

Will I write 22 posts tomorrow?

This would ensure1I can never remember if I should use “ensure” or “insure” I maintain my average of two blog posts per day (62 for the month of January), an arbitrary metric I settled on a few years ago to keep the ol’ writing juices flowing. Don’t ask what’s in writing juice.

The answer is very likely no. But it would be kind of amazing to see what I’d write over the course of those 22 posts.

I must conclude this post with typing cat.

A frosty log

Which my iPhone rotated to portrait mode, as it sometimes does when it doesn’t have a horizon line or something for reference, so I had to decide if I liked it better in portrait or if I wanted to rotate it back to its original landscape.

I left it as is. Enjoy!

Book review: The Fourth Mind

The Fourth Mind by Whitley Strieber

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the latest in the ongoing series of books Strieber started (in)famously with Communion in 1987 and it is, perhaps, the strangest.

The book is divided into two halves, the first is largely based on a series of posts on reddit describing the physiology of the visitors based on an alleged eyewitness report. Strieber expands on these entries with his own experience to extrapolate on various aspects of the visitor’s anatomy, abilities and so on. The entire set of reddit posts is also included in an appendix.

Drawing on what he and others have seen, Strieber speculates on how the visitors can perform seemingly impossible things, like levitation, telepathy and ignoring physics and gravity. He further goes on to explain the visitors may be “out of time” and that they are here to both observe and perhaps join with us, because we are still trapped in a mode where time is linear. A major part of the thesis Strieber elaborates on is how the visitors have evolved to a point where they exist outside conventional time in such a way that they essentially know everything that has happened or will happen–basically, a life where there are no surprises.

If that sounds like a bit of a bummer, Strieber agrees. He seems to feel the visitors are perhaps even envious of us and our more primitive minds and bodies, where life happens and we don’t always know what’s coming.

Strieber also brings up two ongoing threats to humanity–the crisis of climate change, and the still-possible risk of nuclear war, and edges closer to thinking the visitors will intervene in some way if things get too dire for us (this seems especially timely for 2025, given what a dumpster fire the year is already becoming for the world).

The second half of the book is full of weird speculation about…us! Specifically, Strieber tries to draw examples from both ancient and more recent history to put forward the idea that humans had many of the same abilities of the visitors, like levitation and telepathy, but lost the abilities thanks to global cataclysms thousands of years ago (ice ages, along with other calamities, like fires that consumed large swathes of North America, and more) that forced people to prioritize survival over establishing cities and civilization. This shift to basic survival led to a kind of mass amnesia where these abilities were forgotten. He suggests it is possible for us to re-learn these abilities, and may indeed need to if we are to integrate the visitors into our lives without feeling inferior to them (to help with that, Strieber also suggests they are not necessarily all that much more intelligent than we are, which feels a bit like a burn on them).

The evidence presented throughout is circumstantial, though to his credit, Strieber does provide numerous examples of megalithic structures built to a scale and level of precision that would challenge us even with modern technology. For example, Ggantija on the island of Malta, has stones up to 5 meters high and weighing up to 50 tonnes–with no obvious means of how they would have been transported to the site. Strieber suggests it was, quite literally, levitation, which would have been a common ability of people at the time.

I’ve always approached Strieber’s books as being sincere–I don’t think he’s pulling some long con on readers–and that he truly believes everything he writes about. His tone in The Fourth Mind remains calm and sober as he discusses things that are pretty wacky, really. In trying to piece together a “grand vision” for both the visitors and humanity, it feels like he is making greater leaps than before. It’s all certainly food for thought if you have an open mind, and Strieber’s smooth, articulate writing makes reading such speculation effortless.

If you’ve enjoyed his other books, you will likely find this shorter entry worthy of your time as well. If you are disinclined to believe any of this stuff, there’s nothing in this book that will win you over.

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Online stress therapy illustrated, Linux edition

A screenshot1 from Tuba, the Mastodon app I use in Linux Mint, showing my use of filters to make my feed more palatable (highlighted in yellow):

I can always click on the filter to see what I’m missing. Or “missing.” It’s a little thing, but it makes a difference. Mastodon makes adding filters pretty simple, so filter away, I say.

  1. Nerd note: I added the drop shadow and highlight using the program ksnip, self-described as a “Screenshot and Annotation Tool”. ↩︎

A stress haiku

I’ve been thinking about stress a lot lately. Well, maybe not a lot, but more than usual. I usually don’t think about it at all.

So while I contemplate yoga, meditation or becoming a monk, here is a haiku on stress.

Stress

My teeth set on edge
Body tenses, muscles tight
Time for funny cats