More Fleeting Thoughts
consciousness ga-ga, consciousness goo-goo
week 2 in Florida w/ my parents, avoiding NYC’s turning seasons…
“I got it on video,” used to inspire joy, laughter, and relief. Now the words just hang in the air with pure dread.
Everything you do is now potentially captured forever.
Lol your picture is “taken.” Your image is “captured.” You get “shot” by a photographer. Lots of violations on your personhood there, yes?
A whole generation of folks will now never want to leave the lanai, and I don’t blame them.
Yesterday, my X feed fed me a vertical video crop of Queen at Live Aid. Freddie Mercury was the sole person visible in most of the 9x16 vertical-cropped frame, from any direction. Mercury was the focal point of all the original shots, and commanded the center of the cinematography, so the 9x16 crop almost appeared like original footage.
The video was true, in the sense that what you saw actually happened. It was not, however, the truth, rather, just a shadow of the entire performance that day by the band. The 9x16 framing relegated the rest of Queen to Mercury’s backing band.
Live Aid, of all concerts, and like all grand scale perspectives on the human experience, was a landscape, not a portrait. Vertical video is a singular scourge on visual discourse. It’s a rolled-up fractal of laziness, solipsism, and narrowed POV - a crystalline representation of the bullshit aesthetics that underpin today’s “democratization” of photography.
In the end, though, I don’t know what’s worse - some shiftless artist’s not rotating their phone to shoot video in landscape, or (like in the Queen vid on X) cropping iconic footage to 9x16 to accommodate viewers too lazy to turn their phone to watch a landscape video.
Oof. This world, I tell ya.
Here’s Queen at Live Aid in the original glorious 4:3 NTSC, the most democratic of all video formats:
So strange, fleeting thoughts.
Is a fleeting thought still fleeting if written down?
Last week my Apple Watch auto-updated from WatchOS-9 to WatchOS-10. In the process, Apple took away the ability to swipe between watch faces in WatchOS-10, a feature they had only introduced in WatchOS-9, and one that has became integral to how I use my watch.
As always, yet another dysfunctional corporate decision now cattle-prods me to see everything wrong with everything.
Sometimes I feel tech companies tweak their UI’s in the worst, most irrational ways, just to get people to notice and talk about the company. Then again, at the same time, anything with a user interface is in the attention whoring business, and form always follows function.
Upstream, technology companies (like tax codes) are in the behavior business. Part of value propositions to tech shareholders relies on changing the habits of core customers with regularity, whether their users want to or not. Capturing attention and keeping folks “inside an ecosystem” is often at the expense of advancing underlying technology or innovating a UI in meaningful ways.
Like, seriously, does it really matter if iOS17 can “better organize your digital stickers?” Who on Earth was desperate to do that? Apple could spend its resources on any-effing-thing it wants, including, but not limited to, giving everyone in the world free Pickleball racquets and one free lesson.
In any event, from the consumer POV, nothing makes you feel more like a sheep than having to complicate your life to get the same result on the same device with an “updated” UI, as happened with the swipe between watch faces in WatchOS-10. Sometimes, what works just works. I mean, no one’s had to innovate the clay court tennis shoe cleaner in a long time.
Btw, trust me, if you’re going from a clay tennis court to a hardcourt Pickleball game, rinse the shit out of your shoes. I learned that the hard way back in 2022.
Comparison is never effective motivation.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
— Thoreau
Autocomplete 20231125a:
Nothing gives you confidence more than being able to make the right decisions
Autocomplete 20231125b:
Nothing gives you confidence to be happy with yourself and be able to do what you love to do and not worry about what others think
Autocomplete 20231127a:
Nothing gives you confidence
The autocomplete’s correct, of course. Confidence isn’t given to you. It comes from within, and you only notice it if it lacks.
The fallacy of youth is also its source of power. When you feel invincible, it’s not that you don’t see danger, it’s that you don't see risks - either to yourself or to others.
Danger is an adrenaline rush. Risk, otoh, sucks the fun out of anything.
The downside of maturity, in a way, is an erosion of fearlessness, not innocence. Once you start seeing the ripple effects of your decisions over time, it’s no longer possible to take any risk you want. As you age, how you manage fear is what keeps danger (to yourself and to others) to a minimum.
No matter what age you are, however, you can still be everything you want to be. So long as you’re breathing, you still have potential.