Category: news

Apple News+ initial impressions

After my last post, I did go ahead and upgrade my Apple One subscription to Premier, so I now have Apple News+. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and I have some thoughts. I’m not really sure where to start, so this will be a bit random.

I’ll start with the email newsletters. I subscribed to a few of those. They’re of the “collection of links” variety; there’s nothing to actually read in the newsletter itself. That’s fine, except that they’re links to Apple News stories, which don’t always open in Apple News, depending on where you are and how you open them. On Windows, obviously, they’ll generally get you to the original article on the web, which may or may not be behind a paywall. On Mac, with Firefox as my web browser and the FastMail web client as my mail client, they’ll generally open in Firefox. From there, I can open them in News via the Share menu, but that’s a bit of extra work. If I use Mail.app as my mail client, that’ll cause them to open directly in Apple News.

On the iPhone and iPad, they’ll always open in News. One slight problem on the iPhone: if I look at an Apple News newsletter in the FastMail app, it doesn’t really adjust to the iPhone’s screen size and is not easily readable. It’s better if I open it in Apple’s mail app instead.

So, maybe not a surprise, but the deeper you are in Apple’s ecosystem, the smoother things are with Apple News.

Next, I’ll talk about sharing stuff our from Apple News. I can definitely save an Apple News article to Raindrop.io via the share menu. Depending on the article, that might pull in the text (from the original article on the web), or it might not. It’s the same with Instapaper: if Instapaper can get the article text from the original web page, saving to Instapaper works. If it can’t then it doesn’t work.

Basically, there’s no way to get the text of an Apple News article out of Apple News. I didn’t initially think about this, but the Mac Apple News app has no option for printing articles, so there’s not even a way to save one as a PDF, or print it on paper.

Overall, I don’t really like this decision to make it nearly impossible to get an article out of Apple News. But I won’t spend too much time on that subject right now.

Next subject: the Apple News app itself. We’ll start with the home screen. In theory, it should (over time) learn more about what I like and surface more stuff that’s relevant or interesting to me. Right now, it seems to be pushing some NJ news and a bunch of sports news related to the teams I’ve told it I’m following. So it’s a start, but it’s not doing anything really interesting.

Since it’s difficult/impossible to get stuff out of the app, it’s pretty important that the app is usable and that text is readable there. Overall, it’s simple and easy to use, and the text is readable. You can increase and decrease the text size. You can’t change the font though, and it seems to vary depending on the publication. I haven’t seen a publication yet that uses a really bad font, but I’d much rather have some say in which font I’m getting.

Apple News has a facility for saving stories, but there’s not much to it. You can’t compare it to something like Instapaper. You can’t organize your saved stories at all, with tags or folders or anything. Also, for long stories, I’m not sure if Apple News saves your place. It initially seemed like it didn’t, but then I opened one I’d been reading the previous day, and it seems like it had saved my place. I’m not sure how that works yet. (Maybe it saves your place, but not across devices? I’ll have to experiment.)

Apple News+ also has audio stories. There’s a daily headlines podcast. That’s about 15 minutes long. There are similar podcasts from NPR and the NY Times, and I don’t think the Apple one is particularly better or worse than those. I’ve only listened to it once, and honestly didn’t pay much attention. I should probably listen to it a few more times at least, and get a feel for it. There are also narrated stories. Those are basically magazine stories that are read by a (human) narrator. They seem to do a lot of them, and I think they’re all using human narrators, not AI. I’ve only listened to one so far, but it was well done. (It seems like the audio feature only exists on iPhone, and not on Mac or iPad.)

Overall, I wish there was more ability to customize the app, more ways to get text out of it, and maybe a Windows version of the app (or a way to access it from a web browser instead of the app).

But it does definitely have a lot of content in it. It’s allowing me to access a lot of stuff that would otherwise be behind a paywall, so that’s cool.

I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with it long-term or not. But, for now, I’m going to keep using it.

figuring out how to consume news

Here I am, writing another blog post about media consumption. Well, why not? It’s weird out there, and I’m just trying to keep my head on straight.

I’m still thinking about signing up for Apple News+, which I’d likely do by upgrading from Apple One Individual to Premier. So that’s be an increase from $20/month to $38. I also pay $1/month for extra iCloud storage, so I’d be able to cancel that, so the total increase in cost would be $17.

Apple News+ alone would be $13/month, so if I’m going to do it, I might as well go with Apple One Premier and get the 2 TB of iCloud and Apple Fitness+ too.

I made a list of pros & cons for Apple News+. On the “pro” side, it gets me access to a bunch of news sites all under one subscription. There’s lots of variety, and it includes local news from a few NJ sites.

On the “con” side:

  • It doesn’t work on Windows. (Or directly through a web browser.)
  • It doesn’t seem to work with Instapaper. (I’ve read some mixed reports about how it works with read-it-later services, but it generally doesn’t seem to work.)
  • There’s no way to send an article to my Kindle or Kobo to read on an eInk device.
  • The service has ads, and they’re not easily blocked.

I’ve also been considering a “why not both?” option, where I use Apple News+ for some stuff, but continue subscribing to individual publications, where it makes sense to do so.

On a related topic, I’ve been playing around with my RSS tools recently. Right now, I use The Old Reader as my “back-end” service. For a front-end, on Windows, I generally just use The Old Reader web site. On iPhone and iPad, I use Reeder Classic. On my Mac, I sometimes use Reeder and sometimes the web site.

I’ve been trying out NetNewsWire as a replacement for Reeder. I think I may switch over to it. The design works better for me. It’s a pretty vanilla design, but that’s what I want. It’s black text on a white background, easy to read. Reeder is black on a kind of off-white background, which is harder for me.

On the back-end, I’m kind of interested in looking at stuff that does a bit more with the feeds. I might want to try a product that lets me send email newsletters into it, so I can get those out of my email. I’m not really sure if I need or want that though. I also like the idea of being about to do something interesting with the data, like putting together a custom “front page” for me. I haven’t gotten very far with any of that.

Of course, if I start using Apple News+, I might spend less time with my RSS feeds.

One more topic: Unfortunately, it looks like NJ PBS is shutting down next year. (Here’s an article about it from CBS News.) Hopefully, NJ Spotlight News will continue. (They say they will, but who knows?) The way things are going right now, it feels like a lot of good things are going to disappear in the near future. (And, of course, some already have.)

Well, that’s a downer to go out on. I wanted to find a quick positive thing to put at the end here, but I couldn’t come up with anything. Sigh.

more about media consumption

I’ve been blogging recently about how I’m watching football this year, and stuff like that. I’m continuing to think about that, plus going beyond that to more about media consumption in general.

Right now, I’m watching NFL RedZone for my Sunday football fix. Later tonight, I’ll watch the Giants game on Sunday Night Football, via Peacock. That’ll actually be the first Giants game I’ve been able to watch on my TV this season. (I did watch a bit of last week’s game on my iPad, which I can do with my NFL+ subscription.) This is all fine for now. I’m getting my fill of football. Depending on how the Giants do, I may get either more interested or less interested in the weeks to come.

I briefly mentioned the Colbert thing a couple of weeks ago. Now we’ve got the Kimmel thing too. I haven’t canceled my Disney+ subscription, though I support anyone who’s doing that. I’ve been thinking about how I should react to this stuff, and have decided that maybe a positive reaction is a better choice for me.

For instance, I’ve been listening to The Bugle for years. It’s a great podcast, with some great political humor. So I went ahead and signed up for a £50/year subscription/donation. I probably should have done that a few years ago.

I’m also looking at revising the way I consume news a bit, and maybe supporting some publications/sites/podcasts that I haven’t been reading/supporting/whatever. Weirdly, I seem to keep coming back to the idea of signing up for Apple News+. A lot of the publications I’m considering supporting are available on News+. I know that giving Apple that money won’t result in very much of it making its way to whichever publication I’m reading, but it would be convenient. On the other hand, it’s not available on Windows, and I’m not sure it would fit well into my usual workflows for reading and bookmarking stuff.

I think maybe the way forward is to support independent media, whether it be news or comedy or whatever. Big business has consistently shown that it’s more interested in being on the government’s “good side” than it is in accuracy, morality, or freedom of expression.

general media consumption thoughts for 2025

I looked at Facebook this morning, which is now something I only do once or twice a week. (I almost always check it on Sundays.) There was a post from an old high school acquaintance announcing his intention to leave Facebook, and essentially all social media. There was a point, I can’t remember exactly when, where a lot of my old high school acquaintances got on Facebook and started sending friend requests to each other. I went from not having any contact with anyone I knew in high school to suddenly being able to chat with 20 or 30 of them, and having a bit of a view into their current lives. It was fun and interesting. It only led to two real-world meetups, I think, but those were both nice, and wouldn’t have happened without Facebook.

Anyway, that friend’s post, and the presidential inauguration tomorrow, got me thinking again about how I’m engaging with social media and consuming general media, and what changes I should make, if any. So this post is going to be a (probably lengthy) rumination on that. I’ll try to make it a bulleted list, and see how that goes.

  • Facebook: I’d like to delete my Facebook account, but there’s still enough useful and fun stuff there that I feel like I shouldn’t. I only check it occasionally, at this point, and I try to stick to the reverse chronological feed, which they’ve made harder to access, but it’s still there. I don’t use the iOS app at all (which is one of the reasons I don’t check it often). I only use it from Firefox, with maximum ad-blocking.
  • Twitter/X: I still have an account there, but I’ve set it to private and don’t post there anymore. I still need to look at stuff there occasionally, if there’s a person or company that still has an account there, and they use it to post product updates or stuff like that.
  • Threads: I was curious about whether or not Threads would become a serious Twitter replacement at one point, and it was an interesting service at the start, but I’m not finding much use for it now. Most of the folks who went from Twitter to Threads, back when Bluesky was invitation-only, have now moved to Bluesky. So I still have an account, but I’m not using it much.
  • Instagram: I’ve had an Instagram account for a long time, but never really used it much. I’m actually checking it more often now, and have followed a bunch of accounts there. But it’s still mostly useless. It’s just that are some people/businesses who only post on Instagram, or primarily there, so I feel like I need to keep an account. And it’s a good place to get some random comics stuff, like the New Yorker cartoons.
  • Meta in general: Zuckerburg is not a good guy, so yeah, I’d like to drop off of Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. But they have just enough utility that I feel like I need to stay on them, to some extent.
  • Bluesky: I wish I could have gotten on Bluesky earlier, but I had to wait for the invitation-only period to end. If I could have gotten on earlier, I (and I suspect a lot of other folks) would have skipped Threads and some of the other niche platforms that were out there, and the mass Twitter exodus would have been bigger and more orderly. Well, anyway, at this point, Bluesky is a pretty OK place to be. I check it daily, I guess, and post there occasionally. I don’t have a lot of “real” friends there, but a lot of the people and companies I used to follow on Twitter are on Bluesky now. I’m a little worried about what the long-term plan is for Bluesky though. Right now, it’s ad-free and the default timeline is reverse chronological, but they’re going to have to find a way to make money, eventually.
  • Mastodon: I really wish more folks had come over to Mastodon. I still love it, and there are some great people there. But there aren’t a lot of mainstream folks or companies that have active accounts there. For an iOS client, I’m still using Toot!, though I feel like it’s probably time to check out some others. At some point, I’m hoping someone will create a good client that aggregates Mastodon, Bluesky, and maybe general RSS. I think there are probably folks working on that, and maybe there’s already a good one out there, but I haven’t found it yet.
  • RSS: Every once in a while, I try to embrace RSS. I stick with it for a while, then drift away. I’m still paying for an account with The Old Reader, and using that as my main RSS back-end. And I use it as the front-end when I’m checking RSS via the web. On iOS, I use Reeder as a front-end. I’m still using the previous version of Reeder. The newest version seems to be trying for that consolidated view that I’d like, if it could include RSS, Mastodon, and Bluesky, at least. But I’d also want it to have web-based view, and not just iOS and macOS apps, so I could use it on PC.

Well, that was an excessively long and rambling list of social media thoughts. Now let’s move on to more general media.

  • Newspapers: I still pay for the New York Times and the Washington Post, though I did the little dance a while ago where I threatened to cancel and they gave me lower rates for a year. So I’ll reevaluate those after those discounts expire. Both papers have their problems, but they’re both still better than most of the alternatives.
  • PBS: I still get my NJ news from our local NJ PBS station and their NJ Spotlight News program. And I support them with a monthly donation, though it’s honestly a small one. The donation gets me access to PBS Passport, which I use frequently to watch various shows, usually in the mystery or police procedural genre, and usually British.
  • NPR: I listen to WNYC in New York and WXPN in Philly. I don’t currently give to either of them, but I’m thinking about it. (I’ve given them both one-time donations in the past, multiple times, but not recently.) The NPR Plus thing might be worth doing. I should consider getting more of my news from NPR, I think.
  • YouTube TV: I’m still paying for YouTube TV, though I’m struggling with that. It’s useful for watching local news, baseball, football, and stuff like that. But I kinda lost interest in football this year, since the Giants did so poorly. At this point, I’m mostly using it to watch TCM, which is great, but maybe not worth $83/month, which is what they just raised the price to. (And of course it bothers me that $1 or $2 of that $83 is going to support Fox News.)

Whew. I could go on, but I’m pretty sure nobody wants me to. The world is full of billionaires who, more and more, exert control and influence on social media, news media, and entertainment media. It’s worth spending some time evaluating how you use this stuff, how you engage with it, and how you pay for it. I want to be an informed and responsible citizen. I want to keep in touch with friends and relatives. And I want to do so without funneling too much money into the pockets of certain billionaires. I hope I’m striking a reasonable balance here, without agonizing too much about it all.

 

perfect Sundays

I feel like I’ve been having a nice run of near-perfect Sundays lately, so I thought I’d blog about that a little. Since at least 2020, I’ve been organizing my weekends so that I generally get all of my chores done on Saturday, and I can spend Sunday relaxing. And I’ve developed some habits that work well for me.

I started reading the Sunday Routine articles in the NY Times around 2020, and enjoyed a lot of those. I haven’t kept up with them, but I think I may have taken some inspiration from them, without really meaning to. A lot of them are easy to make fun of. But many of them are also inspirational and interesting.

Anyway, here’s my Sunday routine: I generally get up at 6, because I’m old and I can’t really sleep late anymore. But Sunday is the one day I don’t need to get up at 6, so sometimes I’ll sleep in until 7, if my body lets me do that. I almost always make a variation on the same breakfast: two eggs, one slice of pork roll, and two slices of toast. And I make coffee with my Moka pot. At some point after breakfast, I go for a walk. Generally for 20-25 minutes, just around the neighborhood. When I come back, I read a few chapters of whichever Wheel of Time book I’m currently reading. At 10 AM, I walk over to the Somerville Farmers Market and buy some stuff. I’ve been going to that consistently enough this year that a lot of the vendors know me now, and I can have some little chats with them. So that’s quite nice. After that, I might go back to reading my Wheel of Time book. For the afternoon, I might make a sandwich and watch a movie on TV, or a football game. There’s usually an afternoon nap in there somewhere.

So there’s not much of a point in writing all of that out, but I like thinking about it. And it’s good to recognize the nice things in your life and be thankful for them.

And all of that is leading me up to thinking about the election results from last week. I have to admit that it all kind of broke me. (I was going to link to a news article about the results here, but browsing through them now is only making me angry again…) I’m trying to think back now to how I felt in 2016. And, because I have a blog, I can check on that! Here’s a post from (coincidentally) today in 2016. It’s kind of funny to see that I embedded a bunch of Twitter posts into that blog entry. I would never do that now; Twitter is worse than useless at this point.

There was a lot of reaction to the election on the social networks I now follow (Mastodon and Bluesky, mostly), but nothing I feel like I need to share. In fact, I avoided social media for the day after the election, except for a couple of quick check-ins to see if there was anything I needed to know about. I’m starting to rethink my media diet again. I’ve found that I’m not ready for stuff like Colbert or other typical last-night humor again. So I might lay off all of that for the rest of the year. I will probably keep watching NJ Spotlight News, but I might be fast-forwarding through parts of it now. (That’s what I was doing last week. I just couldn’t bear to watch anything related to the election results.)

One thing I did see on social media today was a post from Michiko Kakutani on Instagram quoting W. H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, which I’ve mentioned on this blog before. I was going to stick a quote from it in here, but you’re better off reading the whole thing. (It’s not long.)

And there have been a lot of blog posts and essays and think pieces written about these election results. (Of course.) I’ve looked at a few of them, but haven’t read many, past the first paragraph or two. (That’s probably healthy. Reading too much of this stuff would only make my state of mind worse, and probably wouldn’t result in any useful action on my part.) I’ll like to one piece though: And Yet It Moves, by Ken White.

OK, that’s it for now. Back to relaxing.

disarrayed thoughts

My head has been a bit muddy lately. There’s probably a bunch of reasons for that, but I think a lot of it comes down to lack of sleep, which I think is mostly due to allergies. So this post might be a little dizzy.

First, here’s the latest on the fire. Main St is now open to traffic again, though the sidewalk in front of Mike’s and King Tut is still roped off. I’m guessing that Mike’s isn’t coming back any time soon, if at all. That’s a bummer for me, since I got food from there at least once a week. (And, yes, I know it’s a bigger bummer for the guy who owns Mike’s, and the people who lived above it, and so on…)

And here’s a couple of fire-adjacent topics: First, looking for news on the fire has reminded me of how broken local news coverage is. I’ve gotten info on the fire from a combination of sources: TapInto, Patch, MyCentralJersey, and NJ.com for “regular” news. All of those sources are, shall we say, flawed, though. And I’ve picked up bits and pieces from the Somerville town Instagram and Facebook accounts, and other Somerville-related social media accounts. But it’s hard to piece all that together, and there’s so much cruft to wade through. I guess what I’m saying here is that, if somebody wants to start a good local newspaper or news site, that would be nice.

And the second fire-adjacent topic: My renter’s insurance just came up for renewal. I’ve been with the same company (Liberty Mutual) for all 30 years that I’ve been in this apartment. I’ve never had a problem, but then again, I’ve never had to file a claim. The cost of the policy, 30 years ago, was fine, but it’s crept up, and this year, the renewal price was almost $400. So, for the first time in 30 years, I decided to shop around. It turns out that a Hartford Life policy, with AARP discount, would be about half what I was paying Liberty Mutual. So I called LM to cancel. And, of course, they offered to “rerun my quote” and see if they could get the price down. Well, they did that, and (with no change in coverage) they got the price down to $117. So, the lesson there is: maybe review your insurance more often than once every 30 years.

The fire isn’t stopping the Friday night classic car thing on Main St, but they did cancel the street fair this weekend. (If I had to choose one to cancel, I would have gone with the car thing, but that’s just me. It’s too noisy, and I’m old.)

Oh, and my last, totally unrelated, topic is this: We’re moving out of our temp space at work and back to our old (now remodeled) space. We moved into the temp space in March. We packed up yesterday; the movers should be moving our stuff over the weekend; and we’ll start working in the new space on Tuesday.

I’m not fond of the cubicles in the temp space, but I’m even less excited about the cubicles in the new space. The cubicle walls are a bit higher than the temp space, but not as high as our old cubicles. And the cubicles are smaller, with less desk space and less drawer space. (And no bookshelf.) The desks are sit/stand, with the monitors mounted on arms, so that might be cool. And we’re getting new monitors, so that’s nice. (Assuming they’re better than the old monitors.) I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to give it a shot and see how it all works out. I need to figure out if I can thrive in a more minimalist environment than I’m used to.

Work-life balance

From the NYT (2022):
Why Wall Street Is Suddenly Bullish on Work-Life Balance

Some fun quotes in here:

In this second pandemic year, bonuses would reach the highest point “since the Great Recession,” the business press repeatedly exulted, overlooking the incongruities of a system that so reliably converted the hardships of the many into gains for the very few.

And:

In his 1931 essay, “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes speculated that by 2030 we might have achieved a standard of living high enough that people would work no more than 15 hours a week, devoting themselves to relaxation, culture, enjoyment, “meaning.”

And finally:

But are we perfecting “the art of life itself” in the meantime? It would have been hard to draw that conclusion on Wednesday in Central Park when the German pop artist Niclas Castello displayed his hollow 400-pound gold cube opposite the Naumburg Bandshell, where people in parkas stood in slush to take selfies with it. The gold, worth about $10 million, had been procured by the artist from a Swiss bank after which he paid a fabricator to turn it into a box. His plan is to sell the exercise as an NFT.

Yes, I know this is an old article, but I’m only now getting around to reading it. (As usual, my “read/review” email folder backlog is daunting, and has me in Feb 2022 right now…)

Going down a NY Times rabbit hole

I have an old friend who subscribes to the print edition of the NY Times. She saw an article in the Book Review last week that she thought I’d be interested in. Her initial impulse was to cut it out and “snail mail” it to me. She’s done this occasionally in the past, and it’s always nice to get an unexpected letter in the mail with an article clipped out of a newspaper. That’s not something people do much these days, but it’s kind of cool.

She’s gotten a little more familiar with modern technology over the last few years, though, so instead she texted me and asked if I still subscribed to the Times. I told her I had a digital subscription. So she then gave me the page number and title of the article, so I could look it up and read it. The article in question was this review of the new book from Gabriel García Márquez. I’d already heard about it, and that it was being published against his wishes, and that it probably wasn’t very good. The review was interesting, and basically confirmed my belief that I really don’t want to read it.

My friend also told me that there was a little sidebar article under the heading “From Our Archives” that I would find interesting. And here’s where I went down a rabbit hole. You can find most of the articles from the print version of the Times by going to the Today’s Paper link. From there, I got to the Book Review section from March 31. But I guess the “From Our Archives” thing was just a filler sidebar that they didn’t bother putting online. So them I remembered that there was a way of accessing a facsimile of the printed edition. That led me to the replica edition that’s available via PressReader. It seems that you need a print subscription to access that though; you can’t get to it with just a digital subscription. I remembered too that I can get some stuff from PressReader with my library card, but I logged in that way, and found that it doesn’t include NY Times access.

Then, later, I remembered TimesMachine. That does work for digital subscribers, but it only goes as far as 2002. In the end, I decided to stop by the library today and browse their print copy of last week’s Sunday paper. In it, I found that the sidebar in question was basically a summary of the 1988 Thomas Pynchon review of Love in the Time of Cholera. I can find that review a few ways. A web search led me to this archived page. A slightly different search led me to this page, which includes a link to the TimesMachine version. (And now I realize that I can print out that archive version and snail mail it to my friend, so she can see it too! Back to the old ways…)

And all that searching also led me to The Essential Gabriel García Márquez, an article from almost exactly a year ago, which serves as a summary of his life and a guide to his books. I should make a point of coming back to that, at some point. I’ve only read One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

So that’s my NY Times rabbit hole for today. This also got me reminiscing about my college years and early post-college years, which are, now, more than 25 years ago! I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude for a contemporary literature class, and Love in the Time of Cholera on my own, probably over the summer between my junior and senior years. (It was published in April 1988, apparently, and I remember buying it as a “new release” in hardcover, so that makes sense.)

And I’m pretty sure this friend is familiar with Márquez because I gave her a copy of one or the other of those books, or at least had a conversation with her about them. Which is why she thought of me when she saw the review last weekend. So that was all fun and a nice reminder of old friends and old books.

Meanwhile, in our current timeline, I’m still shamelessly hip-deep in The Path of Daggers, the eighth Wheel of Time book. All this Times browsing got me wondering if the Times ever reviewed Path of Daggers. A little searching reveals that it did! Here’s the article on TimesMachine, and here’s the full text.  It’s interesting to see a mainstream review of this book from back when it was published, in 1998. It’s less snarky than I would have expected from the Times. I liked the summary of the internet fandom around the series at the time: “There is an Internet Usenet group devoted to speculations about its plot lines and its puzzles…” Usenet! I hadn’t thought about Usenet in years! There are, of course, Tolkien comparisons. That’s inevitable. And there are some observations about the book (and the series as a whole) that are pretty interesting. (And no spoilers, which I appreciate.)

I’m a baseball person now, I guess.

I’ve been watching some MLB baseball this year, off and on. Not much, though, until fairly recently. I think that a combination of the writers/actors strikes killing the late night shows, plus just a need to watch something kinda slow and calm and with (for me) low stakes has led me to watching more and more baseball. Until a couple of weeks ago, I could only watch what was on ESPN+ or one of the other streaming services I subscribe to. But I’ve now gone all-in and subscribed to MLB.TV.

Since the season is half-over, the price was half-off, around $50. For that, I can watch basically every MLB game except for Mets and Yankees games, which are blacked out. I think that, for a normal fan in NJ, not getting the Mets and Yankees games might be a pain, but I don’t really care. I’ll watch whichever game has the most calming announcers.

I’ve been watching a lot of Phillies games, since they’re almost local, and at least in the same time zone as me. I also like to watch San Diego Padres games, but since they’re on the west coast, a lot of their games are on after my bedtime. (And of course my reason for liking the Padres is mostly about their proximity to the San Diego convention center, and hence to SDCC.)

In theory, I can watch Somerset Patriots games with the subscription too, but I haven’t figured that out yet. I haven’t been to a Patriots game since before the pandemic. I’d like to start going to them again, but it never seems to work out. Either it’s too hot, or it’s raining, or I’m not feeling up to it, or whatever.

I’ve also been enjoying tennis, which is even better than baseball for calming my nerves, but there’s not much of it on TV. I enjoyed watching a lot of Wimbledon on ESPN+, and I’m looking forward to the US Open, which should start at the end of this month.

In the past, I think I would have been embarrassed to admit any of this, but I’m an old man now, and if I want to sit in front of the TV watching baseball until I nod off, that’s a perfectly respectable thing to do, right?

Outwitted by The New Yorker

In a moment of weakness, I signed up for a one year subscription to The New Yorker, just about a year ago. I really don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve read maybe the first two issues of the subscription, and the rest are piled up on a chair. I guess I’ve used the subscription to read some online articles too, but I don’t think I’ve read that many, to be honest.

I expected the subscription to end on its own, since I used a virtual credit card number for it. But I’ve been outwitted. Apparently, the automatic updater service that’s used by companies to keep your normal credit card details up to date also works on virtual card numbers now. So my old trick of creating a virtual card number that expires in a month doesn’t work anymore. It just kind of rolls over to my regular card when the virtual one expires, apparently. I guess I need to go back to paying for subscriptions by hard-copy check. (Though maybe they have a way around that too.)

I probably would have caught this anyway, if I’d seen the renewal notice they sent me back in April. But all of my New Yorker emails are automatically routed to my “read/review” folder, and I’m just about two years behind in reading those emails. (Which is another reason why I probably don’t need a subscription to The New Yorker right now…)

Well, anyway, I’ve now paid $130 for another year, and I have a reminder set up in Evernote to ping me in April of 2024, so hopefully I can remember to double-check it then. I’ve already gone into my account screen and set it to not auto-renew, but they might try some shenanigans when it gets closer to the renewal date.