#but i don't have as many backup options as I had previously thought and it's hard to reach for new ones when i'm In A State

[dredshirtroberts]

hey guess what my car trauma includes the *inside* of the car too apparently! :D :| idk i feel like getting made fun of for having to eat fast food in my car between work and school while my catalytic converter shat itself to the point that my back seat footwells were filled completely with various QSR trash maybe gave me some sort of complex. Just a hunch though, who knows.

[loopednetwork]

Canceling Apple One

I posted yesterday about an email I received from Apple letting me know that my Apple One subscription's monthly cost would be increasing from $14.95 USD to $16.95 USD. While an increase in $2 isn't exactly massive, the push to over $15 was enough to give me pause. What exactly am I getting out of this, and is it worthwhile to keep paying?

Apple One is a service that I subscribed to pretty much immediately when it became available just a couple of years ago. At the time I was paying for Apple Music at $10 a month, and I was thinking of bumping my iCloud storage from 5 GB (free) to 50 GB for $1. Apple One seemed like a good deal at just shy of $15 since it also included Apple TV and Apple Arcade. This was also right around when the COVID pandemic started, and Apple offered Apple TV for free for quite a while. Since it was technically included in my subscription, I received a $5 discount on my monthly bill.

When faced with a price hike, though, I realized a few things. First, I haven't so much as thought about opening the Apple TV app on my TV in at least 3 or 4 months. The last thing I watched was Severance. While I've previously enjoyed a few shows on there, many of them seemed to jump the shark pretty early on. For example, both See and For All Mankind managed to go off the deep end in their second seasons. While I think Mythic Quest is hilarious (and the 3rd season literally just released today), I'm not going to lose sleep over not watching it.

I initially had hoped that Apple Arcade would offer a compelling mobile game experience, but basically all of the games on it are, for lack of a better phrase, hot garbage. Rather than spend my time playing any of the nonsense there, if I play a game on my phone or iPad I just play Wild Rift.

That being said, I didn't want to bail on my Apple Services entirely. Apple Music is easily the best music streaming service out there, in my opinion. I use it all the time from my work laptop, my phone, my Echo, and my HomePod Mini. It has playlists I've put together with hundreds of hours of songs; it's not something I'm going to abandon lightly. Similarly, having iCloud storage is handy. While I could scrape by with the default 5 GB (I don't really need device backups since I never restore from them; I treat new devices as a fresh start), I like to keep a handful of apps and other things backed up there and don't want to worry about bumping my head.

After looking at individual pricing, I saw that I could subscribe to Apple Music for $11 USD and still get 50 GB of iCloud storage for $1, putting me at $12 a month instead of $17. It almost seems minor enough not to bother switching, but that's $60 a year I can spend on literally anything else.

Even better, when I went to cancel I was greeted with this screen:

Apple gives the option to subscribe to the individual services that made up the Apple One subscription, AKA the exact thing I was going to do manually. That's a nice touch, at least.

[herding-octokittens]

Don't Turn the Ship Off

I spent way too much time ignoring my homework to write this...

AO3

Chapter One

“Jonny D’Ville,” the stranger said, face running through an obstacle course of emotions. “I can quite honestly say it is a pleasure to finally meet you face to face.” They had long grey hair pulled back in a low ponytail under a dark hat. The general shape of their body was hidden under a dark trench coat, and their shoes were dark and looked like thick leather. The only thing Jonny could really make out was that they were rather tall, especially by his standards, and there was what looked like a knife scar on their forehead. That must’ve hurt.

“Yeah, uh, who the fuck are you?” Jonny slurred back, face flushed with alcohol and slightly splattered with streaks of blood.

The stranger hummed thoughtfully as Jonny ran into one of the Aurora’s door struts. He fumbled to grab on and hold himself up as the stranger spoke again.

“I don’t know why you would recognize me, but I know you. You killed my brother, shot him clean through the skull and stole his ship. I was an unremarkable nobody on an unremarkable planet at the time, but now I am your ending. I have tracked you my whole life, and now that I have found you, you will never escape me again.” They paused, tilting their head. “I do feel obligated to thank you for giving me a reason to get off my homeworld. Doesn’t mean I don’t hate you, of course, but spending fifty years slowly and carefully tracking one’s prey does allow a certain detachment from such strong emotions as rage and anger.”

“Y’know what else lets you detach your emotions?” Jonny asked far too loudly, reaching towards a flask hooked onto one of his many belts. After a few seconds struggling to unclip the damn thing, he raised it up and downed the mostly-full container in seconds. With a burp, he answered his own question. “This shit. This expensive shit right here. And I’m no lightweight, so that’s a real big tab I just racked up. And I gotta tell you,” he leaned in towards the stranger. “I didn’t pay a single bit of it! S’not the first time I did that either. You’d think they’d stop letting me into the place. I probably owe them a whole ship by now,” he whispered conspiratorially, and burped.

The stranger glared, lips curling into the beginning of a snarl. Whatever emotions they claimed to have detached themself from appeared to be returning in full force. Jonny tried to smile. He loved when he had that effect on people. Unfortunately, he couldn’t figure out how to make his face muscles do the thing and so just ended up looking more drunk than he thought was fair. 

“Follow me,” the stranger ground out between clenched teeth. Turning on their heels, they disappeared into the dark of the Aurora’s loading bay. Jonny stumbled after, vaguely aware that the lights normally weren’t off this time of day. Or night. Whenever he was, the lights should have been on.

“Why’re lights off?” He tried to ask, tongue blundering around the question.

“I thought it better for everyone’s sake if I kept the loading bay in darkness,” the stranger replied crisply. Evidently they had re-detached their emotions now. Jonny frowned. That wouldn’t do.

“Aurora!” He shouted, spinning in a circle and almost throwing up. That also wouldn’t do. “Can you turn the lights on down here? Ashes hasn’t cleaned up their new shit and I’m too drunk to deal with this place in the dark!”

There was a brief, painful whirring sound, one Jonny had only heard three times before. The first two times had been when Nastya had been trying to figure out how to power Aurora back on again after Brian had accidentally shut her off completely and almost wiped her memory. The third had been when Raphaella and Tim had gotten into a good old fashioned fistfight and had actually managed to wipe the Aurora’s memory and rebooted the whole ship. Nastya had been very close to launching the two of them into the nearest singularity, and Ivy had only barely managed to talk her down, having just made a backup copy of the ship’s memory two days earlier for the archives. In short, it was not a good whirring sound.

“You turned my ship off!” Jonny shouted, making his own ears ring. “Tha’s not very nice,” he mumbled at a much lower volume.

“Yes, I did.” The stranger began to climb a series of ladders up out of the loading bay. Jonny, not really seeing any other options, followed them up. He fell off the bottom rung three times before he remembered he needed to actually place his foot on the rung to be able to go anywhere.

“Gravity is fucking stupid,” he muttered. Slightly louder, he called up to the figure who had disappeared into the gloom above. “So… why'd’ya turn my ship off?”

“It was necessary.”

“Yeah, but why? Ships don’t work unless they’re on. And as much as Aurora isn’t a normal ship, she still needs to be on.”

Jonny emerged from the ladders into the corridor leading down to one of the engine rooms. He couldn’t say for certain, but there were definitely other engine rooms that Nastya had hidden from the rest of the crew. This was the only one he had access to (and also the only one he knew for sure existed, but that was beside the point).

“The engine room? Ugh! Nastya’s gonna kill me if I make a mess in there.”

“Make a mess?”

Jonny smiled and ran into the wall. He really needed to watch where he was walking. “Yeah. See, I’m gonna have to kill you in a minute here. I’m just a little drunk right now, and I really don’t want to shoot the wrong thing.”

“The way I hear it, you couldn’t shoot the right thing if your life depended on it,” the stranger almost snorted.

“That’s rude! I can totally shoot well if I need to!”

“Hmm,” the stranger hummed noncommittally. 

“Now can you just answer the damn question? Why’d you turn my ship off?”

The stranger heaved open the door into the engine room and turned back towards Jonny for the first time since entering the Aurora. The light from the emergency panels did little to give Jonny any indication of what they were doing with their face, but if he had to guess, they were probably channeling those unhelpful emotions they had previously detached. A sneer, maybe. Perhaps even a snarl, but he didn’t think he’d been that annoying. Not that he wasn’t trying.

“It was the only way to get your engineer to comply with my, well, let’s call them my requests.” Jonny was stone cold sober in an instant, not that the stranger needed to know. “She’s very protective of this old piece of junk, isn’t she?” They disappeared into the heart of the Aurora.