In which you aren’t supposed to suck

I am a fanboy, I admit it: I am typing this post on the most advanced iMac that was available when I bought it; my last several phones have been iPhones, my watch is an Apple Watch, there are at least two if not three iPads in the house (I’ve lost track of one, and we may have recycled it) along with at least two Apple TVs and, if I had brought my work laptop home, which I never do, there would be two MacBooks in the house as well, even though my non-work one needs replacing.

I am so stuck in Apple’s ecosystem that it would require wholesale overhauling of a number of significant aspects of my life in order to properly escape from it. And I mostly don’t want to. But, y’all … this weekend my people got in my damn nerves, and I haven’t quite escaped from Minor Inconvenience Tech Hell just yet and I’m still peeved about it.

To start (and I mean “minor inconvenience” when I say it) Apple Maps decided that it was going to choose a different route to get to my brother’s house than the one I picked. He lives in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and your options are basically “through the city” or “not through the city,” both of which take about the same amount of time because one is long but fast and the other is shorter but, well, takes you through the city, which means you’re guaranteed to encounter some bumper-to-bumper bullshit on 90/94 somewhere. I haven’t lived in Chicago for going on fifteen years, and there are still some things about living in the city (which I loved, and still do) that I miss damn near every day.

Traffic is not one of them.

Anyway, I realized too late that not only was my phone trying to direct me through the city but it was trying to send me to Lakeshore Drive for some reason, which if you know the city will cause you to raise an eyebrow and if you don’t, well, that’s wrong no matter what route you’re trying to get north with, trust me. At that point I decided that, fuck it, I was going to go rogue, only it turned out that 1) my memory of the city’s highways wasn’t as great as I thought it was and 2) even if I wasn’t heading to LSD just yet I was beyond the point of no return to stay on the Dan Ryan, which meant we got a fun little detour through Chinatown.

I mean, it cost 15-20 minutes, maybe, while I got back on the highway I wanted to be on, so again: minor inconvenience, but I didn’t want to be driving through the West Loop yesterday one way or another, and if my phone had taken me though the route I chose rather than the route it thought was a good idea, this wouldn’t have happened.

The second thing was an ongoing sync issue with Apple Music and iTunes, and if you’ve ever had to deal with that particular slice of bullshit you can probably understand the vast aggravation and high dudgeon I’ve spent most of the last two days in whenever I had a moment where fuck with my phone became a possibility; ie, any time I was not covered in flour or sleeping. I think I’ve solved that problem finally as of about 20 minutes ago, but we’ll see if it shows up again tomorrow where the only tracks I can listen to from this album are the three preorder tracks. (This happens every time I preorder an album, which I’m done doing. It’s digital files. You can’t run out. No more preordering.)

Anyway.

There’s some more Elden Ring live-streaming coming tonight, from 10:00 until 1:00 AM or until I have the sense to go the fuck to bed, whichever comes first, with a full post of my thoughts coming probably tomorrow. The short version: Don’t expect to talk to me in March. I have shit to do.