Just after New Year’s some sort of underground cable screw-up resulted in our home, along with an irregular swath of our neighborhood, losing electricity for 26 hours. We don’t lose power often, and when we do, the outages are usually brief, but 26 hours felt pretty long — especially with the outside temperature below freezing and daylight hours near their calendric nadir. The icing on this particular outage’s frustration cake was that our power company, PECO¹, seemingly had no idea what exactly was wrong or how long it might take to fix.

The power went out around 10:30 am on January 2, and soon thereafter PECO was estimating that power would be restored by 2 pm. Then it was 4 pm, then it was briefly 2 pm again (despite the actual time then being after 2 pm — which is when I got the sinking feeling I should get the flashlights out), then they were claiming there were no known outages in our area, until eventually they just stopped providing any estimates at all of when our power might return. I’d have given PECO some credit for honesty if they’d simply replaced the estimated time for power restoration with the shrug emoji.

I was following along with these updates and checking the outage map from my iPhone, on PECO’s website. Which website I wasn’t at all familiar with, because our power really doesn’t go out very often, and my wife takes care of the bill. PECO’s is one of the worst websites I’ve ever had the misfortune to need to use. Among its faults:

• It is incredibly slow to load. (This slowness couldn’t be explained by overwhelming demand — the power outage was not widespread.)
• Pages often finished loading incompletely. Just some page header chrome at the top and nothing but white underneath. In fact I just tried right now, today, and got this.
• Navigation is confusing, and even once I figured it out, it took multiple taps and page loads to get to the pages I wanted to return to. And those page loads were all slow to load.
• Worst of all, most tasks you might want to do, including just checking on the status of an outage, seemingly require you to be signed in as a customer, but the website signs you out automatically after a few minutes. So each time I returned, I had to start by signing in again. Which, you’ll be surprised to hear, was slow and sometimes wouldn’t take on the first try, despite my credentials being auto-filled.

Basically, PECO’s mobile website feels like it was developed using and exported from Microsoft Excel. You might say, “Well that makes no sense, because you’ve never been able to build or export websites using Excel.” To which I’d respond, “Yes, exactly.”

So, every time I wanted to see if there was an updated estimate on our power being restored, it took at least a minute or two of waiting for pages to load, signing back in (which was always slow), and poking around their inscrutable site navigation. The website did prompt me, occasionally, to install their mobile app, but I was like “Fuck that, it’s probably just their website in a wrapper.”

It was a cold and dark night, but our power was restored the next day just after noon,² and it stayed restored, so I metaphorically dusted my hands and thought to myself, “I hope I never need to use that fucking website ever again.”

Last night, our power went out again. This time, thankfully, it was only out for about 80 minutes. When the outage hit, before even once trying PECO’s cursed website, I went to the App Store and installed their iPhone app. It was a revelation. PECO’s iOS app is everything their website is not: fast, well-organized, and, blessedly, keeps you signed in.³

I’d go so far as to describe PECO’s website, at least as experienced from a phone, as utterly incompetent. I’d describe their native iOS app as — I can’t believe I’m going to use this word — good. It’s hard to believe the website and app are from the same company.

This makes no sense to me. A utility company is the sort of thing where I’d expect most people would use them via the web, even from their phones. Who’d think to install an app from their electric company on their phone? But it’s a night and day difference. I feel like a chump for having suffered through the previous 26-hour outage obsessively checking their terrible, slow-loading (I just can’t emphasize how fucking slow it is), broken website when this app was available.

There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around. I suspect that my instinctive belief that a service company or utility should focus its customer service efforts on the web first, and native apps second, is every bit as outdated as my stubborn belief that invite ought not be used as a noun. (Invitation is sitting right there.)

I won’t hold up this one experience as a sign that the web is dying, but it sure seems to be languishing, especially for mobile devices.⁴ And the notion that mobile web apps are closing the gap with native apps is laughable. The gulf between them is widening, not narrowing.

A few weeks ago, in a post primarily complaining about Google’s disingenuous claims about their Messages app’s support for encryption (they suggest, heavily, that it encrypts every message or most messages, but in fact only supports encryption for RCS message sent between users of Google Messages on Android devices), I also complained about the fact that Google’s own Google Voice doesn’t support RCS at all.

Turns out Google Fi doesn’t support RCS fully either. Google Fi is Google’s cellular phone service. I actually use it to provide service to my Android burner phone. The prices are excellent and the service is fine for my minimal needs for a phone I barely use. But Google Fi offers something called “call and voicemail sync” that lets Fi users make and answer voice calls through the web. If you enable this, you lose RCS. See Reddit threads here and here with Fi fans complaining about it.

It’s just wild to me that Google would spend years waging a campaign urging Apple to support RCS, yet Google itself doesn’t support RCS in its own products.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple has introduced Share Item Location, a new iOS feature that helps users locate and recover misplaced items by easily and securely sharing the location of an AirTag or Find My network accessory with third parties such as airlines. Share Item Location is available now in most regions worldwide as part of the public beta of iOS 18.2, which will soon be available to all users as a free software update for iPhone Xs and later. Find My is built with privacy and safety at its core. The shared location will be disabled as soon as a user is reunited with their item, can be stopped by the owner at any time, and will automatically expire after seven days. [...]

Users can generate a Share Item Location link in the Find My app on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Recipients of a link will be able to view a website that shows a location of the item on an interactive map. The website will automatically update when a new location is available and will show a timestamp of the most recent update.

In the coming months, more than 15 airlines serving millions of people globally — including Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, United, Virgin Atlantic, and Vueling — will begin accepting Find My item locations as part of their customer service process for locating mishandled or delayed bags. More airlines will be added over time.

What a cool feature. Feels closer and closer to a no-brainer to keep an AirTag in each of your checked bags now.

Hello. Hi. It’s me. Hey. Howya doing?

Yeah, ME, TOO. (Sobs turn into maniacal laughing.) (Slowly transforms into The Joker.)

It was a tough year before this past Tuesday, to be honest. If someone had asked me, I would have easily marked it one of the most difficult ones of my personal and professional life.

My aunt died earlier this year. Her death was shocking in that particular way of those who have spent decades cheating their mortality. In her constant illness she seemed somehow interminable. Her husband, my uncle, often joked that she’d outlive us all.

Instead we buried her in early March.

This woman, who yelled at her neighbors when they tried to tell her homosexuality was a sin, who watched Fox News because she “wanted to know what her enemies were thinking,” was a wisp when she died.

“She’d wrung every ounce of life out of her body,” my cousin had said. It had nothing left to give. And so, stubbornly fighting death every step of the way, she went.

I still love her so much. That’s the part that gets me. She’s gone, and I love her, and it just keeps piling up in my chest, like that episode of I Love Lucy at the chocolate factory, until it finally overflows, and I find myself in the middle of someplace extremely public and inconvenient, sobbing under fluorescent lights. (A naked display of grief and devotion that, honestly, she would have loved.)

By the end of the month, Rand’s father would be gone as well, so suddenly that I find myself terrified anyone could go at any moment. My father-in-law died on Easter Sunday.

“He might come back,” Rand jokes. “There’s a precedent for Jews doing that.”

In the middle of all of this, my mother broke her back, my book came out, and The New York Times decapitated me. (No, really.) This was the image they used, alongside my author picture, which they seem to have modeled it after:

The author of the piece (a woman and a fellow blogger, apparently, which feels like a particular kind of betrayal) called me “loud and irrational”, criticized my reasons for not having children, and questioned why Rand loved me. (What this has to do with the quality of my writing, I am still unclear.)

In the summer, I went to Toronto for an author event, and met up with my friend Sarah. She’d had her own hell of a year, and we commiserated over dumplings. She has been, by her own admission, in something she described as “cockroach mode.”

“Just trying to survive,” she explained, “by whatever means possible.”

To be unkillable. Like the noble trash lobster.

The first time Trump was elected, my father was gravely ill. He died not long after, and I spent the next few weeks, months, hell, maybe it was several years (who, really, was counting, aside from Rand?) staring at my computer and doing … nothing. I just remember staring at the void of Twitter and cannot recall a single other thing I did. I know that other things happened. Life chugged on, in ways big and small. My youngest nephew was born during those strange, sad years; a chaotic cannonball of a human who jettisons himself off of furniture and straight into your heart. I met people who would become some of my closest friends. Also, I probably showered at least twice. Mostly, I was just trying to get through it.

But the beauty was there, even when I couldn’t see it. It’s so pervasive, so stubborn. Even after the biggest catastrophes, the sun still rises. We just don’t notice right away, because we are too tired to lift our heads.

Now Trump is going to be President again, something which is so absurd it would be laughable if it wasn’t so awful. An actual rapist whose own Chief of Staff warned that he lionized Hitler. A man who hates women, and people with disabilities, and the LGBTQIA+ community, and People of Color, who has no respect for the rule of law, and who is about to be the most powerful man on the planet. It is truly a terrifying thing.

In the wake of all of that, and in anticipation of what is to come, it is okay to be tired and terrified and utterly ruined right now. If you need to go back to bed with an entire deep dish pizza, I will not judge you.

I simply have one request of all of you: survive.

It is time to be in cockroach mode. To keep going, by whatever means possible. When someone tries to stamp you out, avoid them with a swiftness and a scurry that will haunt their dreams. They think your existence is a scourge? Then the best way to spite them is to keep existing. People will tell you “You just need to get through four more years.” This is laughable, and incorrect. Fascism doesn’t last four years. But also: cockroaches have existed for 300 million years. They do not put a time limit on how long they need to survive, nor should you. If asked, the answer should be “As long as possible” and “Up to two weeks without my head.”

For some of us, survival may be easier. If you fall into that privileged group, consider using your energy to remind others that they are precious, and beautiful, and so, so loved. That if they left the earth, grief would drown those of us left scurrying across the wreckage without them.

Stay whole. Protect yourself, however you can. I do not care what you do. If you need to avoid the news and live in a cave, have at it. Be selfish. Be angry. Buy yourself things. Stop shaving. Eat a doughnut on the toilet. Scream in to the void. Stay hydrated. Take up yoga. Give up yoga. Watch videos of animals who are up for adoption. Go adopt all of those animals. I cannot say what it will take you get through. I don’t even know what it will take to get me through. But I know that you being here, you, whole and beautiful and alive and angry, helps. Get up everyday, feed yourself, tenderly care for the vessel that carries the inexplicable combination of biology and magic that makes you you. You do not need to be happy about it, but if you can find happiness in this absolute shit timeline, fucking revel in it.

This is no small task. It is an enormous thing to stay alive when your very government is actively trying to kill you. There will be days when you will feel like it is an impossible thing. When so much will be out of your control. It will feel insurmountable. We live in a world where simply being a different race, or being trans or queer or having a non-viable pregnancy means you could die. For a lot of people, surviving in this timeline is becoming increasingly difficult.

Truthfully, not everyone will.

In light of all of this, you are completely entitled to scream “FUCK EVERYTHING,” to throw your hands up in sheer exasperation because how the fuck are we here again, but worse. The person I love most in the world just told me he’s done with hope. You can’t be mired in grief unless you loved in the first place. This is the price we’re all paying. It absolutely sucks. Get angry. Be miserable. Roam around under a dumpster. Disappear into the floorboards when someone turns on a light. Maybe try Pilates.

I’m fairly certain cockroaches have seen some shit in the 300 megaanna they’ve existed. And they keep going, as interminable as time. They’ve outlasted kingdoms and empires. They will witness the heat death of the universe (now scheduled for sometime next spring). My request is a selfish one, and I guess that’s what I’m doing to get by: telling you how badly I need you here, with me. That I need you to survive, by any means possible because I would be so, so fucking lost without you. That you make the world better by your presence. That your mere existence is an act of defiance. That you, my sweet beautiful, broken-hearted weirdo, are a goddamn triumph.

It is time, my loves, to be in cockroach mode.

The post It is Time For Our Cockroach Era appeared first on The Everywhereist.

Taegan Goddard, Political Wire:

After last night, it became clear it was a mistake to dismiss Trump’s true political strength. He will win the 2024 election with at least 51% of the popular vote.

His win will not be the result of a constitutional quirk. It was not even the result of a bad campaign by Kamala Harris. His victory was so broad based I’m not sure any Democrat could have beaten him last night.

There’s a brutal clarity in this result.

The majority of Americans are not concerned with Trump’s blatant racism or sexism. They are not concerned with his vows of retribution on his political enemies. They are not concerned with warnings of “fascism” by his former top aides. They are not concerned with his extensive criminal and fraudulent behavior.

If there’s a takeaway from this election, it’s that this is who we are.

Not all of us, to be sure. But it makes clear what the rest of us are up against.

I take some small solace at the moment in Trump’s victory being the clear democratic result. Republicans just fucking won. No mistakes on Harris’s side. There’s no Comey letter. No hanging chads. No margin within the range of woulda-coulda-shoulda recriminations. Just a clear electoral result.

I realized this year — or perhaps over the last four years — that for me, belief in the merits of democracy is quasi-religious. It’s more than a philosophy. It’s a fundamental belief. I have faith in democracy, and part of that is accepting the results of any fair and free election as the will of the electorate — similar, I think, to how actually religious people have faith that unspeakable tragedies can somehow be the will of a just and righteous deity. Through that prism, and with the genuine shock of 2016 giving me a brace, I can accept this. But because of that prism, I will never forgive or forget Trump’s shameful desecration of our democratic ideals in 2020. His winning in 2016 and again now are awful events. But his attempt to overturn the 2020 election — ham-fisted, idiotic, and failed though it thankfully was — was and will always be worse.