In case anyone thought I was normal, allow me to disabuse you of that notion today.

Recently I’ve been watching all of the Digimon series in chronological order, mostly as a time killer while I continue to work from home. This turns out to probably be the right choice as it looks increasingly likely that we are going to go back into lockdown, but I digress.

Today I finished Digimon Adventure 02. This is the second season of the original Digimon Adventure, which made its breakout debut in August 1999 on American TV, almost to the anniversary of this post. If you’re only nominally acquainted with the show, the basic premise is: Young children (the “digi-destined”) get sucked up into a fantastical and mysterious world known as the Digital World wherein they meet, befriend and work with fantastic creatures called Digimon. These creatures are fragments and outputs of the data in this digital world but seem to have consciousness. They can be manipulated to do evil or sometimes they are innately evil. Digimon may also evolve, but not in the linear way of Pokemon, but with a series of branching outcomes catalyzed by their specific circumstances.

After I announced my move to the dark side I promised that I’d come back and offer up some thoughts. I’ve had my phone since April 22 and have some opportunities to put it through its paces. Below, I’ll summarize some good and bad points I’ve found in my personal use case.

GOOD: Device runs very smooth on long uptime. After 30 days without a reboot, the phone runs as it did on day one. I brought a reboot to update to the next version of iOS and updates as well are very smooth.

It’s always an outstanding question to me about what cloud provider to use if any. If you’ve read my previous post, you know that I’ve recently migrated to an Apple device. Thus the temptation exists to move all of my files to iCloud. The prices are cheap, I don’t have to own the servers, what’s not to like? Still, that’s no guarantee of anything. Apple, like anyone else, has to answer to legal inquiries and they still have the decryption keys.

Well folks, after eleven years of Android usage which began auspiciously with the much hyped Motorola DROID line of phones, I finally did it; I switched to iOS. My Android user friends and Windows/Linux/Android fellow devs (colloquially called ‘Windroid’) gasp in horror as I pay the famed Apple tax for access to their much lauded (or maligned) walled garden.

Why did I make this change? In short, its nothing sinister nor is it a given to be permanent. For starters, Apple’s recent move to crack down on spying applications over Google’s supreme disinterest in reigning in even the worst offenders was a major motivator. The comparatively closed ecosystem allows Apple to say “my way or the highway’ and it frustrates Zuck so much that he took out full page ads in the New York Times to come and complain about it.

Over the years it seems that once in awhile we get something a little unique in our somewhat secular culture: the accusation that pop culture has secret, underlying metaphysical principles that exist to drive god fearing people away from Christianity. The Satanic Panic is archetypal of this fear but its remained extant into the modern day.

In future blog posts I am going take a look at a few of the sporadic claims attacking mostly things I personally like such as Pokemon, Dungeons and Dragons and video games writ large but I am curious to see if there are metaphysical threads that emerge between all of them. I find this question interesting because as society secularizes, we aren’t necessarily hard atheists but rather a sort of vague irreligious but spiritual category. One that is defined by capitalism, globalism, democratized access to information and content creation. I’ve been reading a few books on the subject and I have become profoundly interested in it.

What happens if a service you lean on for a key, everyday piece of your life suddenly is wiped away? You don’t need to wonder, that happened to the Terraria developer. Quoting the linked Ars Technica article:

Three weeks ago, the official Terraria Twitter account publicly pleaded with YouTube for some kind of resolution to a recent Google account ban. The Terraria account explained, “We have not added anything new to our only YT channel (RelogicGames) in several months. However, we randomly received an email saying there was a TOS violation but that it was likely accidental and as such, the account would receive no strikes.” The Terraria Twitter account continued, “Three days later, the entire Google account (YT, Gmail, all Google apps, even every purchase made over 15 years on Google Play Store) was disabled with no warning or recourse. This account links into many business functions and as such the impact to us is quite substantial.”