Why I Chose... an iPhone

My first iPhone was an iPhone 3GS, which I'd bought at the Dadeland Mall Apple Store in the late summer of 2009 after work.

It was a somewhat impulsive purchase, my having gone through a few phones (the one I'd liked most being the Trēo 800w, RIP) and not liking how the application ecosystem just wasn't being friendly to anything but an iPhone. I was a heavy Yahoo! user, and they were really hyping and promoting their iPhone(-exclusive) app; I wanted it.

So, I went and got it, porting my phone number over to it and a very helpful, nerdish, attractive guy helped me to activate it. This was back when one had to go to a store to do so or it would take forever. Another reason I'd wanted to go that route was Sprint, at the time, as considering Wimax as their 4G upgrade and everyone else was going LTE. AT&T, as well, was the only game in town for the iPhone, so more incentive.

My boss, especially, was envious for weeks at my phone. He'd kept saying he wanted an iPhone, but ended up getting a Samsung Instinct and porting it to Metro PCS like one of my other co-workers.

I still have AT&T and their grandfathered-in unlimited data package.

I'd adored my 3GS, which I'd called Mars. When I moved to Georgia, I remember watching the end-of-days movie 2012 on it, streaming it via an Israeli video aggregation site (and, I think, having a multi-ten gigabyte data usage metric that month, too).

In 2011, I got my 4S, ordering it the same day they were having online sales. I'd gotten it by Fed-Ex several weeks later, and that became my favorite. Even though I love my 6 Plus now, I think I loved most that the 4S had the solidity and heft of my Trēo 800w. I think I'd enjoyed it most with iOS 6, with its inbuilt Twitter and Facebook widgets on the notifications slider.

And now I have an iPhone 6 Plus, which I've enjoyed for almost three years now.

We'll see what comes next.

Harlots...

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Harlots 1 Episode, 4 Clips Margaret Wells struggles to reconcile her roles as brothel owner and mother to daughters Charlotte and Lucy. When her business comes under attack from Lydia Quigley, a rival madam with a ... Check out videos from this show on Hulu

This premiere was a romp… So, I'd seen teasers of it while watching other shows on Hulu, and added it to my Watchlist for when it should come out.

So, starting out, I had concerns it would leave me feeling not-so-good about it like that Jeffery Donovan show Shut Eye did. With that show, I'd only watched the premiere and didn't continue. This one, with all the sex to begin with, I don't know if it was to get it out of their systems or to try and entice people into their world.

Granted, if this were a bunch of good-looking men having relations with each other, I'd probably be feeling another way.

It took them about 15 minutes to really get it out of their system, and I'm glad they'd brought in more of the clever humor they'd more lightly interspersed with the sex scenes. Still, I suppose it is rather historically telling: these things more than likely were what this side 18th-century London had to offer. Including the not-so-aesthetic men.

I found myself trying to learn their names, which is a good sign. I can't help wondering what a gay black dude in this time would've had to resort to, though.

Let's see what next week brings (and I hope there's a gay guy to add something else to this menagerie).

Germ Warfare

Angela Merkel Asked President Trump to Shake Hands. He Appeared to Ignore Her

From Germany, a Flipboard magazine by TIME

At a photo op with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Donald Trump said little and appeared to refuse a handshake…

Read it on Flipboard

Read it on time.com

Okay, they concentrate on a lot of things Donald Trump lately, but history has shown he's not keen on doing this the way his predecessors have done.

I'm glad they've achknowledged a few possibilities why he might have not taken her hand, and then there's he might have been so entranced in the media presence.

Still, the more important thing would be about what they've spoken and what it means.

Shake hands after.

Taking in The Foreign Content

This half-season of two shows I like, Teen Wolf and Supernatural, decided to take different tacks than what I've known them to do: they've taken elements of foreign mythologies and made plot points out of them.

And for some reason, while I'd enjoyed that fact, it felt a little weird at first. Thinking about that underlying reaction, I had to reflect about that because I also happen to be a somewhat-passionate anime fan. Anime, the animated Japanese-originate phenomenon, often borrows elements from non-Japanese and Japanese mythology and history (often the former) to drive their stories, and it's never felt odd.

One of my favorite anime series is Digimon, and there are thousands of digimon that have names coming from all kinds of sources. For example, you have Sakuyamon, coming from Japan, Wolfmon (pronounced 'vollfmon'), from Germany, and Shinduramon, from India. Another favorite series, The Big O, borrows highly in style and feel from the American cartoon Batman: The Animated Series. Yet with Teen Wolf, bringing in kitsune, oni masks, and demon warriors into the werewolf and coyote spirit mix, and Supernatural having in its most recent episode a Peruvian/Andean beast called a pishtaco, it felt weird for the first couple seconds hearing it.

Might it have been because Teen Wolf and Supernatural, for the majority of their histories, have used United States-based (more or less) creatures, beasts, and myths? That's more than likely probable. Bringing in other bits so late into the game might have been a little jarring, though the anthropology major in me jumps for joy at the chance to learn different aspects of other culture's artefacts and how American writers use them in their creations as much as learning that one of the Pokémon, Ooper, looks like the Mexican amphibian the axolotl.

It might be as well that one's imagination can accept animated series bringing in other myths more easily than a series with human actors. I suppose I should stay tuned to see what other shows I like start importing things, especially the live action ones. 

Exciting stuff!