2024 was phone upgrade year for me, moving from my iPhone 13 Pro to a 16 Pro. New phone also means new case, and I have become accustomed to having a wallet/folio case. For my 13, I was using the Decoded Leather Wallet case (no affiliate links, and I have received no compensation from any mentioned company), whose primary virtue was that it left the bottom edge of the phone unencumbered. Not unlike at least one of the ATP guys, I really don’t care for interference on my up-swipe. You can see in the product photo that Decoded thinks the case also works as a stand; I had, at best, 10% success when attempting that maneuver.
Okay, so I obviously want whatever they’ve done for the 16 Pro, right? Sadly, no, I do not. Decoded has chosen to introduce not only a bump on the lower edge, but also a strap. They have further chosen to make the wallet “detachable,” which does not appear to add much, if any, value for me (more on that later).
So, what to do? For a start, I turned on AppleCare+ so as not to push my luck carrying around a phone with no protection. Next, because I couldn’t see anything that checked all my boxes (no strap, not detachable, and no swipe interference), I compromised on the last of those and went for the Nomad Goods Modern Leather Folio. Note that this one does have a strap, but that strap is detachable (and the case is shipped with it detached), so is not a negative for the case. And it’s … fine. It did confirm that I really do not like the bottom-edge bump, though, so I kept looking.
Next up, the Geometric Goods Minimalist 1.0. Definitely no issues with swipe or button access on this one, as the phone is attached to the case (such as it is) magnetically. “Let’s give it a shot,” I thought to myself, having recently heard on some podcast or other that modern Popsockets attach magnetically and securely. Aaand first day in the field, as I folded it over to slide a receipt into the wallet, my phone fell on the table. So, no, let’s not do that. (Side note: a cat who lives at my house found the Geometric Goods case to be a very likely chew toy, in a way that he has not found any other case before or since)
Lastly for this phase of the search, I opted to compromise on detachability (at least in this case, the detachable part is still protecting the phone) and went for the Blackbrook Burkley Detachable Wallet case, only to find that I missed/ignored the subtle hints in the imagery that indicate the presence of a strap, which turns out not to be detachable. Furthermore, with my phone in the case, closing the strap and putting it in my pocket activated the camera two out of two times (and I already changed the camera button to require a double-click because I was picking it up wrong so often, so I’m a bit puzzled how it happened). Add that to the fact that the attachment of the inner case to the wallet was disappointingly unstable, and I’m back to the Nomad for now.
If anybody has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
Kaiju Preservation Society Review
The Kaiju Preservation Society, Scalzi. Yes. I’m nominally in the middle of something like three other books (yes, the Culture re-/read is still happening, and there are reviews of two or so of those waiting for me to commit them to the ether), and I burned through this one more quickly than I’ve read a book in probably literal years. I sometimes resent that Scalzi’s writing doesn’t take my breath away the way Le Guin and Zelazny did, but I realized toward the end of this book that I really like his characters and his stories, and that’s definitely enough to keep me coming back. And now that I’m off Twitter and following him on Mastodon, I might actually find out about new releases sooner than eleven months after publication. As (lately) usual, stuff nobody cares about after the jump.
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Consider Phlebas Review
Consider Phlebas, Banks. Yes. What most struck me about this one after having very recently read a much later installment in the Culture series is how much more complex Banks’s narrative style apparently became as the series went on.
Surface Detail Review
Surface Detail, Banks. Yes. I appear to have developed enough time to do more reading, though that time has not been accompanied by enough executive function to look for new things to read, so I landed on the Banks Culture novels, and this one was immediately available. To mix things up a bit, though, I’m now planning to go through them in order, including re-reading the ones I’ve already read. This one was fine.
The Last Emperox Review
The Last Emperox, Scalzi. Yes. I do enjoy these, so was pleased when it occurred to me to wonder whether there was a new Interdependency book and the answer was yes, and pleased me even more that there was no waitlist.
Scalzi does a reasonable job of sliding in the “Previously on…” retro-exposition, which I especially appreciate, having roughly zero memory of the previous installments.
I don’t recall noticing Scalzi getting quite so deep into the nature of consciousness (especially) wrt strong AI. Maybe I’m more sensitized from following Grady Booch on Twitter. More likely I’m just forgetting.
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The City We Became Review
The City We Became, Jemisin. Yes. One of my favorite things about the OverDrive ebook reading application is that it remembers where I was when the book expired, say, a year and a half ago, and puts me back there when I check it out again. I can’t think of a better writer out there right now than Jemisin, and I’m really looking forward to seeing where this trilogy goes.
Galactica 1980
Galactica 1980, Awful. Unlike its predecessor, much of whose charm (it turns out) lay in playing it completely straight, this hot mess wanted to be cute, with the goofy music stings (à la the worst of Star Trek) and the fish-out-of-water hijinks. At least it’s only ten episodes, but it’s going to be quite a slog.
Edited to add: This history of Galactica 1980 is very helpful in explaining a lot of the oddnesses of this incarnation of the show: early timeslot meant compulsory “educational” content (considered best delivered by children, inexplicably); dramatically reduced budget meant all kinds of things (you can see the cost-savings right up on the screen: lots of lingering shots instead of story, so much recycled footage—especially where any remotely special effects are involved, only Lorne Green returning from the earlier cast).
Battlestar Galactica (1978 TV Series)
Battlestar Galactica, Okay. I picked this up in preparation for taking another run at the 2003 series. I don’t know if I didn’t see very much of it or just didn’t remember most of it, but the result is the same: it was almost entirely new. While it was bad, it was not unwatchable; the stories were reasonably good, if the scripts and acting didn’t always measure up.
The Firstest of First-World Problems
While the tuner in my new(er) TV is way better than the tuner in the set-top box I was using for OTA back when my 270lb. TV didn’t have a digital tuner, it is apparently not quite as good as the tuner in the OTA-to-streaming appliance I have (so I can watch my local TV wherever I am), so when the signal for the soccer game was iffy last night, I was reduced to streaming the game over my local network to the TV that couldn’t quite get it with its own tuner. Via yet a different set-top box, of course.
Sports in a Time of No Sports
This could likely be made brief enough for Twitter, but it’s a little off-brand for there, so it’s here.
With all the sports on hold, many teams are re-running their “greatest hits”; I can imagine a number of reasons for this: stations need to do something with the already-scheduled time slots (hoo, boy, the Olympic-sized hole in the TV schedules this Summer will be interesting), the teams have a clear interest in remaining in mind, and people absolutely need all the diversions they can get. A thing about that last one, though, is that it requires that people enjoy watching games again. And while there are some movies and TV shows I’m happy to revisit repeatedly, and there are even some goals—perhaps even highlight packages—I am unlikely to tire of, the notion of watching an entire game over again does not much appeal. Especially on broadcast. I guess this will be an opportunity for broadcasters to learn how much of the audience draw of live sports is the live and how much is the sports; for me, it’s almost exclusively the former.