Just that I’d been thinking for a while that the number of programs I watched on either “live TV” or recorded on the cable PVR just didn’t make sense for the amount of money I was spending monthly. Especially since most of it was available somewhere else, for less. Sometimes for free.
It was convenient, for sure. Turn on the TV, there it is broadcasting, or sitting in my Recorded Programs list. But $25 for the basic channels, plus $5 for some extra channels, plus $5 for the second cable box, every month… When I’m also paying for various streaming services… That’s quite the premium for convenience.
Cutting the cord. Get it? Photo by Yan Krukau on Pexels.com
No way to change Rogers services online, though. Got to make the call! My first attempt to make it through the Rogers voice mail labyrinth on a Sunday afternoon ended with a curt
No one is available to assist you now. Call back during regular business hours.
I was wondering how I might manage to carve out a couple hours during the work day for this task when I remembered I had an upcoming day off. What better way to spend it?
Aging while on hold. Photo by Boris Hamer on Pexels.com
On the holiday weekday, I made it through to a human. Now, Rogers had recently increased the cost of extra cable boxes by $7. So above, where I had quoted $5 for the extra box—that was now $12. This had received some bad publicity, so the person I was talking to was pretty much tripping over himself to make that part of the bill better for me…
OK, so I can reduce the cost of that box to $5 a month, so that your bill will be the same as before. Is that good?
Sure, good, but not really enough! I made the point that even before this particular price increase, I was finding the service too expensive for my amount of my usage. I wondered if any other deals were available, such that I could keep my convenience… For less.
The options were just so baffling! It’s all bundles, so there’s no way to change the pricing of the TV package without also affecting the Internet service. Better deals were available if signing up for a two-year contract, but it wasn’t possible to do that with the same thing I had, only with slower Internet and the same TV channels, or with better internet and more TV channels, but then the price advantage wasn’t that great… And…
Choices, choices… Photo by Antoni Shkraba on Pexels.com
I pondered. But finally went with somewhat better Internet package, bundled with $5 a month streaming-only TV service, on just one cable box. No live channels. No PVR. No cable.
Billing settled, next step for the Rogers people was my updating my modem and cable box with the new services.
… Which took about two hours, during which I was mostly on hold, but with the Rogers person regular checking in:
Are you still with me? Thank you for your patience. We’re still getting errors. We’re continuing to work on it.
But eventually it took. As parting advice, I got:
Call us back in a month. We should have new deals for you!
Hmm.
I tried things out that evening, and they seemed OK. The Internet was working. The TV was now just a portal into Netflix, Prime, Apple TV, YouTube, etc. (I should note, I guess, that all of our television sets are relatively old, so none of them have access to these services built in.)
Albeit not this old
The next morning, though, our Sonos music system failed to deploy the alarm as expected. It should wake us up to the dulcet tones of CBC morning radio. What we got instead was the default backup, the Sonos chimes. Which was annoying.
When I tried to stop the chimes, I found that Sonos app was unusable, and unable to find any speakers. Now, Sonos has had its own troubles of late, with an extremely poor app update back in May that the company and all of its customers are still feeling the effects of. I was able to stop the chimes on the Windows version of the app on my computer, as that hadn’t really been updated.
That Sonos wasn’t exactly happy that my wifi network had been changed wasn’t overly surprising, and not necessarily generally worrying.
However… While we definitely still had Internet, it seemed to have become extremely fussy about what it would let us connect to. All Google services were happy pappy. But Reddit was inaccessible. We could use Amazon, but not Ebay. I could connect to X/Twitter, but not to Bluesky. (This is bad!)
But if I switched off wifi and used phone data, I could connect to everything.
Rebooting the modem wasn’t helping.
I hoped it wouldn’t come to this. Photo by ThisIsEngineering on Pexels.com
It was all extremely distracting, but it was also a work day. I started up the work laptop, and soon discovered that my work VPN was another thing that the new network was simply not going to connect to. Jean’s work VPN: No problem!
I messaged people at work that I was having technical difficulties. And I called Rogers support. Weird problem, I said. We can connect to this, but not to that. He ran tests. He asked questions, like:
He reported that all looked fine for him. He tried to blame the company VPN, but I resisted the attempt.
The only other thing I can do is send someone out.
He said it as if that was a threat, but it sounded good to me.
I can have someone there within two hours.
And you know what? They did!
And that technician quickly diagnosed that the problem was that our modem was nearly as old as our TVs.
Though not this old
So he replaced it with a new one. And instantly everything worked again. (Even Sonos. Sort of. Mostly! But that would be a whole other blog post to get into.)
And the cable-less life has been OK. Even in the week after that election, when I found that I was mostly in the mood for unchallenging network television, rather than the “prestige TV” that is the hallmark of streaming. I figured out that I could watch the latest episode of Abbott Elementary and Elsbeth on the Global TV website and app. And that from the website, it somehow broadcasts them commercial-free, even after I turn the ad blocker off?
(I’m not going to pretend I understand that, but I’m running with it!)
And that the insanely dumb but somehow still so entertaining Doctor Odyssey is available not only the CTV app / website (commercial-free here too, somehow), but also on Crave, which I’m paying for anyway.
And that Shrinking and (especially!) Acapulco on Apple TV are also equally soothing choices.
And when feeling up to it, I can still watch CTV News, Global News, and CBC News.
Of 2023. Meaning, this year I spent most of my time listening to music I already own, rather than discovering new sounds on streaming services or radio. So not that much of it was music released in 2023.
Not sure how much this was cause vs. effect, but I also had trouble settling with any particular music streaming service this year.
Spotify: A service I’ve tried off and on over the years (whenever they offer me a discount, as I don’t like the ad version), but it was mostly off in 2023.
YouTube Music: I did subscribe to this earlier in the year. As a previous Google Play Music user, I’d built up a pretty good music data set in there. But YouTube Music has never been as good as Google Play Music was. On the July long weekend, I tried to find some sort of Canada Day playlist there, and pretty much came up empty. (Maybe because Google was at this point fighting with the federal government over streaming service regulations?) This led me to try out…
Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, and ?
Amazon Music Unlimited which offered me a three-month free trial. I found that they had quite a few fun Canada Day playlists! Of course, in general they had only a fuzzy idea of my music tastes, but it still a decent enough service for when I wanted to listen to something other than “my” music. Still, when this offer ran out, we decided to switch to…
Amazon Prime Music: Because it was included with Prime, which we already had. But I had not realized that with Prime, in most cases, you can only listen to albums or playlists in shuffle mode. And it won’t even show you in what order it’s shuffled songs into. While this was perfectly fine for Jean, it was overly limited for me. Sometimes I want to shuffle; sometimes I do not. Either way, I like to see what’s up next. Hence, I decided to take up another three-month offer to try…
Apple Music: It’s pretty nice. No ads, no limitations, clean interface, good queue, embedded lyrics. Will I pay for it when the free period is done? Tbd.
No Spotify Wrapped for me
I did not use that service enough. I did find it pretty amusing that most every other digital service of any kind that I used tried to offer something similar. My Kobo erReader: What a bookish year it’s been! My Washington Post Newsprint: What’s your reader type? My Starbucks year in review? I’m not even kidding! Look back at your Starbucks routine!
I mean…
YouTube Music had enough data to cobble something together for me. Apparently the song I listened to those most on that service last year was…
This was the second of a two-part series on cognitive dissonance: how you try to convince yourself that a decision you made was the right one, even in light of evidence to the contrary. Pretty much all humans do this, so even if you’re well aware of that tendency, you might still do it. But the awareness can at least help you harness it for good.
Some really interesting examples here of how to harness cognitive dissonance for good, including in the realm of public health. Hmm…
The federal government is killing local news by trying to help local news
Thanks to Michael Geist, I’ve been aware of Bill C-18, the law that (essentially) says that Facebook and Google must pay news organizations for linking to their content, for years. And that it has resulted in Facebook (Meta now, I guess) doing exactly what they clearly said they would do if this bill passed, which is to stop linking to news. With Google now likely to do similarly.
What I learned from this Paul Wells podcast is how this has specifically hurt an organization that I had never heard of before. Village Media has been very successful at going into markets that have lost their traditional local news outlets. Village Media has filled that void, supplying communities with local news, all online. They have staff journalists, with benefits—not just a bunch of freelancers! They are profitable, and growing, and had been planning to expand into several new markets this year.
I’ve gathered up some bits of wisdom of late that I’d like to share.
First up, how to…
…Figure out what streaming service a particular show is on
Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, Prime, Crave, Tubi, CBC Gem… It’s nuts. So many services! I don’t subscribe to them all, but enough to make it hard to remember what’s where.
It’s even more confusing for Canadians, since US media will tell us a show is on a service we don’t have in this country (Hulu, Peacock, HBO+)—but that doesn’t always mean we can’t get it on a service we do have. Even more confusing, just because it’s on an American version of a service we have (like Netflix or Prime) doesn’t mean it’s also on the Canadian one. Could be on some other service entirely here.
This is why I love the JustWatch app. You select the streaming services you have access to and it serves up what’s on each. You can set up a Watchlist of every TV show or movie you’re currently watching, or plan to watch, and have one-page look of everything you’re currently caring about. You can mark off episodes or movies as you watch them. It will notify you when new episodes or a new season become available. And it has a pretty good recommendation engine if you need more to watch.
Of course, you can also use it to look up some show you’ve heard about, to find out if it is available to you at all, and if so, where.
…Watch Poker Face
Solid as I generally find the JustWatch app to be, one thing it doesn’t quite get is conventional cable. Particularly when it behaves unconventionally.
The companies have made it clear that we need to take the vacation days to which we are entitled this year–and preferably not all in that last quarter of it. We hope to eventually be able to visit family, even if it’s a hug-free and highly hand wash-y affair.
But our initial two-day vacation was strictly home-based, with different goals than a typical vacation. Less about museums, mountains, and fine dining—and more about just keeping busy with something other than work.
Therefore, hiking the local trails was the main excitement. Though it’s somewhat discouraged, we did drive to trail in Cambridge, and to a RIM park trail on the other side of Waterloo. But the best one we did was in the nature area just outside our door.
This guy wasn’t too worried about us
We also enjoyed walking the neighbourhood Columbia Forest that we snowshoe on in winter. Not as much wildlife viewed, but some lovely foliage, along with it just being interesting terrain (for this part of Ontario).
Trillium, Ontario’s flowerLittle purple flower (I’m not good at identifying flowers!)
I’d had the idea of ordering wine from a Beamsville winery and driving to pick it up, but then that seemed… not really that fun. And a lot of wineries offer free shipping.
So while we were not low on wine overall (we just routinely buy bottles way faster than we drink them), we were out of certain styles, such as Ontario Riesling. Not worth standing in an LCBO line up for, but definitely worth ordering from Angel’s Gate Winery: we got both dry and off-dry Riesling styles. And while at it, added a still and a sparkling Sauvignon Blanc, a Gamay Noir, and a Syrah. Though warned that shipping could be delayed, the box arrived in two days. We’ve only tried the dry Riesling so far, but it was excellent (and only $15, despite being a well-aged 2008).
We’d also been mooning over Wine Align‘s offers of wines normally sold only to restaurants, but now available to the public at the price restaurants would have paid. When the latest case included a donation to support local restaurants and food banks, that seemed excuse enough to go ahead. The mixed case of 12, which just arrived, includes an Italian Chianti, Argentian Malbec, New Zealand Sauvignon, French Cote du Rhone red, and a Spanish cava.
For food, of course, it was mostly home cooking. I made a chocolate-peanut butter pie, I roasted a chicken for dinner one day, and on another made “baked” ziti in the Instant Pot, by following this recipe: Instant Pot Baked Ziti—only vegetarian style, as I didn’t have any ground turkey or Italian sausage. It was still really good, and very easy.
The last vacation day, we got takeout from White Rabbit.
Fish tacos, cauliflower “wings”, protein power bowl, and more! (Yes, we had leftovers.)
Then, there was the matter of my hair. Going on nine weeks since my last hair appointment, it was both rather long (at least for me) and rather gray-rooty. I decided to tackle the easy part first: dyeing the roots. I was lucky that one of the few remaining colours available from Shoppers was the one I wanted anyway, and also that I don’t have complicated color requirements that (I have learned from Internet reading) are tough to do at home. I just wanted to make the gray more brown. Success!
Hair coloured but not cut
As for the cutting, Jean’s since made a few modest efforts to shorten the longer pieces that were falling into my face.
He hasn’t missed his calling as a hairdresser.
But, it’s also not a total disaster, and with a bit of gel and hairspray, I can now mostly just style that hair off my face, which is fine. I’m a bit daunted about what to do about the overgrown layers behind that… Attempt a trim? Let it all grow out to equal length? Bah. Still pondering that one.
In the most-est fun ever, we also got our taxes done. This year we used a new (to us) “pay what you want” software, SimpleTax. It doesn’t “walk you through” the tax form in the same way as TurboTax does, so it’s good to have an idea what deductions you qualify for (and therefore, to not have a very complicated taxes to file). But, that also gave you more ability to move around the different forms than TurboTax did, and I liked that aspect. (Along with paying less to do my taxes.)
And it’s true (and maybe sad) that doing taxes wasn’t even the least fun thing I did on vacation. That would be spending a lot of Sunday (the one day with crappy weather) trying to figure out what was wrong with my Sonos sound system. It somehow kept losing the Internet, even though our Internet was running fine. This affected our morning alarm (CBC radio), which set up the whole day badly, and continued with streaming music stuttering out on a regular basis all day.
It’s also very strange to have your Google speaker tell you: “I cannot find the Internet.”
MobileSyrup ran an article recently called Are you experiencing platform subscription fatigue?. It focused on the mounting cost of the different services: Netflix, Crave, YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime, and so on. “I just wish there was one subscription service for everything”, the writer noted. Which I found a bit funny. Doesn’t that sound like a plea for the big, fat single cable TV bundle that streaming was supposed to save us from?
Nevertheless, I do sympathize. There are so many services now, with more on the way, and they keep raising their prices. The glory days of cutting the cord and getting by with $8 a month for Netflix are long gone.
Apart from the cost of all this, there is just the challenge of remembering what you’re watching (or want to watch) where, then maybe switching from the cable PVR to grabbing the phone to cast from Netflix, the logging in to your Amazon account to see something on Prime. It’s all rather inconvenient!
What I want, I’ve lamented for some time, is a Sonos for TV shows. Sonos is a wireless speaker system that, apart from allowing you control speakers in various rooms in the house, consolidates most anything you want to listen to in one place. Your own digital music library. Spotify. Google Music. YouTube Music. Podcast apps. Audible audiobooks. Apple music. Radio stations. Where applicable, the subscriptions are up to you to set up, but once have, you can search through it all, you create playlists that mix and match among them—you can have all your “sound” stuff organized in one place. (At least when you’re home.)
Sonos menu of sound options
Rogers Ignite is kind of like that for TV. By “Rogers”, I do mean, yes, the big cable company. Ignite TV is their IPTV (TV over the Internet) offering. Initially available only with expensive, premium packages, they now have cheaper tiers on offer, and we switched to it this summer.
Of course you get the cable channels you subscribe to, which in our case isn’t a lot (just the $25 “starter package”). But we were also offered Crave + HBO free for six months, which we of course accepted. At regular price, Crave + HBO from Rogers cost the same as if you subscribed to them directly, but then you can access them from TV same as any other channel, including on-demand. (You should also have access to them through the Crave app with your Rogers login, but there is some bug there preventing that from working—Crave can’t seem to recognize that you really do have a Rogers cable subscription.)
If you have a Netflix subscription, you can access that through your Ignite box as well. Also, YouTube. And apparently coming soon: Amazon Prime.
The Ignite box itself is this tiny little thing, compared with the large, power-hungry PVRs of the past. You get a ton of cloud storage with it, so you can record shows to your heart’s content. And it’s much smarter about recording those: if the same show plays three times in a week, it’s only going to record it once for you.
The Ignite TV box is smaller than a Blu-ray case
The basic Ignite package comes with only one box; you can add others for $5/month each. We have two. All the same information (recordings, viewing history) is available on both. If wanting to move one to a different TV in the house, temporarily or permanently, that’s quite easy to do.
There’s also a lovely, seamless integration with anything available on demand. Previously I almost never looked at Rogers On Demand stuff; it was off in its own universe, on those special, hard-to-navigate channels. I often forgot it was even there. Now you can find and watch that on-demand content as easily as anything you’ve recorded.
To find things, as their ads point out, you can just talk to the remote. Wherever it is—on demand, available to record, online—it will show you and give you watch options. It remembers what you’ve already watched and makes logical assumptions based on that. It’s all pretty slick.
Oh, and you can also watch on your phone, tablet, or PC, through the Ignite TV app—live TV, recordings, and on demand content. In many cases, you can download your recordings for off-line viewing. One thing not available? Chromecast, as I guess that would kind be competition. But since your Chromecast is typically on your TV, and you can already watch all the stuff on your TV, I don’t see that as a huge issue. (Just if wanting to watch on someone else’s Chromecast while away, I guess.)
Ignite TV app
So that does bring much TV content together, saving mental energy, though not money. I have no idea what we do about the ballooning cost. For now, I’ll just try to resist the pending Disney service and YouTube Premium.
I was on vacation in Seattle, and awake before Jean was, for some reason, when I got an email about a pre-sale for a Who concert in Toronto nearly a year later. Buying a concert ticket on a tablet while on vacation isn’t the ideal scenario, but I had the time, so I figured I might as well see what I could get.
As anyone who’s tried it knows, buying tickets from Ticketmaster is a roll of the dice. Who knows what seats it will cough up for your consideration, and at what price, at any given time?
But this time the dice landed landed on: Floor seats! In the front centre section! And at the normal price, no VIP / resale nonsense!
Stunned, I started the checkout process…
Only to lose the connection partway as the flaky hotel wifi conked out.
Cue the swearing. (Quiet swearing, as Jean was still sleeping.)
Monday, October 22 was the municipal election day in Ontario. Much as I rely on electronic calendars like anyone else, I still like to rock it old-school with the paper calendar, on which I note items such when garbage day (that is, the biweekly date on which the region picks up trash along with the recycling and compost they pick up weekly) and municipal elections occur. Those fell on the same day this year, so the calendar read: Garbage Election day.
Our municipal elections, of course, were far less consequential, and featured the usual poor voter turnout: 34% for the City of Waterloo (though 48% in the uptown Waterloo ward, so kudos to them). I don’t see this ever changing much unless we bring political parties into municipal politics, allowing people to forget about the individuals running and just focus on party platforms. Which I don’t want, as the partisanship would be a terrible side effect that we get enough of at every other level of government.
Municipalities try to increase voter turnout. This year, several cities and townships in Waterloo Region—not including the City of Waterloo—offered electronic voting from home. Though this greatly increased the days on which you could vote, a lot of people left it til election day. And then the system crashed under the load. Forcing extensions to the voting time, in some cases by an extra day.
Hence we didn’t get all the results—including who the new Regional Chair would be—until a full day later. Whereas cities who used the old paper ballots had results counted in a few hours.
Also, it didn’t really increase voter turnout.
Apart from the potential computer snafus, the most compelling argument against electronic voting is that some dominant person in the household could do the voting for everyone else. I’m sure that would be a very small problem, but there’s no way to eliminate it. Whereas when you have to go vote in person, everybody gets a chance to mark their own x’s in private.
Obviously, compared to the US wait, one day longer wasn’t a big deal, but it was odd and I was curious about the results. If you are going to vote in these local elections semi-responsibly, you do have to do a fair amount of reading and research. And at least in these parts, there’s no polling to give you any idea who might win!
There were some pleasing and somewhat surprising results.
In the absence of parties, incumbents always have a big advantage, with many getting re-elected for years. But in Cambridge, long-time mayor Doug Craig lost out to Kathryn McGarry (who had her own name recognition due to having recently been the city’s MPP). To me, Doug Craig’s political philosophy could be summed up as Cambridge First, characterized as an unwillingness to compromise and a large propensity to complain. I was happy that the people of Cambridge were also getting tired of that approach. (And now Craig is planning to run for the federal Conservatives.)
And Michael Harris, who had been unfairly (in my opinion) cast out of provincial politics by Doug Ford shenanigans, won a seat on regional council. He always seemed one of the brighter lights in the Progressive Conservative party, so I was glad to see him get another chance to serve (in a less partisan environment).
In general (and as in the US), a lot more women got elected. The new regional chair is Karen Redman; Kitchener City Council and two of the townships achieved gender parity. On both Waterloo and Kitchener City Councils, women candidates managed to defeat incumbents.
She defeated these three guys
She defeated this guy (the incumbent)
On the other hand, the two women I voted for (there are two seats) as Waterloo regional councilors both lost to men. But, at least the two men in question weren’t unqualified, boorish, populists, so one can take some comfort in that.
In my city ward, the incumbent chose not to run again. One candidate captured the support of most of my immediate neighbours by expressing dismay about the planned residential high-rise building nearby. I considered joining that bandwagon, but ultimately voted for Royce Bodaly, who seemed to have a really good grasp of the local issues and a real online presence, and who made an effort to visit every household in the ward during the campaign. I must have talked to him for 20 minutes myself! He ended up winning the seat… By a margin of 11 votes. (And yet, there was no recount.)
By the way, I am not critiquing how long the US results take—or that they have recounts. Those are elections on a much bigger scale, of course, and conducted very differently (in ways I won’t pretend to understand). Giving people various ways to vote and taking the time to count all the votes is good, even though that means you can’t trust the narrative on voting day. It’s not a blue wave! Unless, wait for it, wait for it, yes it is…
One of the challenges raised in the US midterms (in Maine) was over the use of ranked ballots, as the leader after the first round of ranked ballot voting lost his lead in the second. (The results were upheld.) Ranked ballots were also tried in one Ontario city this year: London. They had to do something like 14 rounds of counting, but in the end, the same person who was in the lead after the first round became mayor. People said that demonstrated that ranked ballots are pointless, but I’m not so sure. There were a lot of people running (hence the number of rounds of counting), and at least the winner now knows he’s not a polarizing figure, and that the majority who voted are basically OK with him being their mayor.
I think it might be worth trying elsewhere. (Cambridge and Kingston voted to do so in the next election, though the results aren’t binding in Cambridge.) When you do this local election research, you do generally end up with not only your #1 choice, but an idea of the other people you think would also be OK, and those you really don’t want elected under any circumstances. So marking your ballot accordingly wouldn’t really be so much more work.
Finally, municipally there was a period after the election where the previous council continued to sit and govern, til the new crew were oriented and took over about a month. There was no drama or scandal surrounding this that I know of—except perhaps Cambridge council voting themselves a raise without accepting the offsetting reduction in benefits. But they did that for selfish reasons that they wanted their cake and eat it too (many were re-elected), and not to hamstrung the newbies.
The US has a longer “lame duck” period during which some states, like Wisconsin, well:
I do think that, in these times, it’s important to support the newspaper industry financially, if you can afford to. This might seem crazy, when so much news is available for free online—and there’s certainly an argument that news companies haven’t been that smart in making so much of it available free online. But, we need to support real journalists. Those who hold politicians to account. Who spend months on investigative stories. Who fact check. Who provide the background details on that “click-bait” headline. Someone needs to help pay for all that—or we’ll lose it.
However, there is really no need to subscribe to as many newspapers as I do. Most of these subscriptions, I acquired at some great deal, but these deals gradually expire, I have to start rethinking some of these relationships.
But you don’t have to think of your subscription as a charity donation; it is actually a source of useful information—who’s running for office in your town; local perspectives and comments on national and international stories (example: Greg Mercer’s great investigative work on Doug Ford’s shoddy treatment of former Kitchener MPP Michael Harris, later picked up by The Toronto Star); upcoming and ongoing constructions projects; festivals and other events; stores and restaurants opening, closing, moving, and expanding; and updates on when the heck those Ion trains are going to get here. The New YorkTimes is great, but it ain’t going to cover any of that stuff.
Wondering where this lovely neighbourhood trail is? Your local paper might tell you.
Plus, an e-subscription to my local paper, the Waterloo Region Record, is pretty cheap. For just under $8 a month, you get unlimited access to the website and a full replica of the print edition in a handy Android or IOs app. It’s also a nice, I think, that The Record is not a Postmedia publication, meaning it doesn’t run obligatory corporate editorials (that just happen to have a right-wing slant). The Record is owned by the TorStar, who allow the local staff to set their own editorial direction.
Cheap date: The Washington Post
So, this is how they lured me in: They said subscribe to our newsletter, and we’ll give you full website and Washington Post app access for six month. And I said, OK. And it turned out their newsletter was kind of interesting, and I was reading a bunch of their articles (Trump era! You can’t look away!), and when the six months was up they said, how about you give us $20 (US) and then you can keep getting the newsletter and having full website / app access for a year. And I said, OK.
Then the year was up, and I was like, oh my God, what is my price going to jump to now? But it didn’t jump at all (except to the extent that the Canadian dollar fell); it was still just $20 US for another year. Or about $2 Cnd. a month. Which, I can totally afford, so I’m keeping it, because—you can’t look away!
Weekly gentleman caller: The Toronto Star
Though this is soon to change, the Toronto Star doesn’t currently have a online paywall, so my subscription is an old-timey one, to the paper version, but on Sundays only. And at this point, I’m still getting it at half price.
It is kind of nice to get a paper copy (in limited quantities), and I do usually get it read (though not necessarily all on Sunday). I’m also wondering if this small subscription will provide some access once the paywall does go up. So I’ll hang on to this for now to see what happens.
Yes, this is the prestige paper, but the thing that stands out to me about The New York Times is that its online experience is just head and shoulders above everybody else’s. Their long-form stories are interactive and gorgeous. For example, though it broke my heart: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.
“Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario…”
You can seamlessly link to the responsive and attractive New York Times app from browsers and social media. As a subscriber, you can “set aside” any story for safe-keeping or later reading, something I’m now constantly expecting from all other papers! But alas, no one else has it. (Thanks goodness for Pocket.)
And if you like cooking? A vast collection of recipes is available, auto-organized, to which you can add external sources. And even get it all printed up (for a small extra fee). If you want the “full paper replica” experiences, that’s available, too. And though it’s not my thing, the crossword experience is apparently incredible as well.
The lovely (and far less depressing) cooking section of the New York Times
I had this subscription for a year at 60% off, and the full monthly price ($22; they let you pay in Canadian) is now a bit of a shock. Cheaper subscription are available—and even freeloaders aren’t completely cut off. So I’ll have to do some research on how much glamour I really need in my life.
Dysfunctional relationship: The Globe and Mail
If you think The New York Times is a bit pricey… Meet the Globe and Mail. I have the cheapest possible subscription, but now that this 60% off discount has expired, we’re talking $27 a month. That’s just to read stuff on the website—no amazing app, no replica of the full paper, no home delivery, nothing much extra other than… Report on Business magazine.
So I keep breaking up with The Globe andMail. Which is always painful—because it requires a phone call, of course, no handy Cancel button. And the cancellation request is never immediately accepted. No, they first try to lure or guilt you into staying, but if you succumb, you know you’re just putting off the pain to a later date.
But even when I succeed in ending the relationship, I often find myself lured back. Because for all the frustrations with this publication:
They do have some very good columnists, and they do invest in long-form investigative pieces more so than any other Canadian newspaper. A prime examples is the Unfounded series that Robin Doolittle worked on for 20 months, revealing that an incredible percentage of reported sexual assaults were being dismissed as “unfounded”, or without merit. It’s a rare case of a newspaper story leading to nation-wide changes in policing.
There’s also the simple fact that a lot of Globe andMail stories are “subscriber-only”, period. While there are ways around this (you can get the Globe digital replica free from the library, for example), they are not as convenient as just clicking and reading the story. But what price convenience? That’s what I have to decide.
We’d boarded, so I set my phone and tablet to airplane mode, and kept myself entertained with a novel. On the drive home from the airport, I decided: No more Twitter.
Going cold turkey
I made no announcements (who would care?), did not delete my account, didn’t even uninstall the app or turn off the notifications. I just… stopped going to Twitter.
What struck me at first was that… I felt like I had so much time. To read other stuff. To get chores done. To talk to people (in person). To arrive places on time. Woah.
What surprised me next was that, I didn’t miss reading Twitter at all. But I did miss tweeting out links to interesting stuff.
A few times, I just broke down and did that, the tweeting. (Alysha Brilla liked one of them. That was cool.) But I stayed away from the reading of the timeline.
The reason was nothing so dramatic as online harassment, thank God. It was just the stress of it, the anxiety.
Twitter was just Freaking Me Out.
Ontario was about to elect an incompetent populist as Premier. Canada was getting into a trade war with the US. Immigrant children were being separated from their parents. And reading about this (and more!) on Twitter, I worried about all of it.
Yet, it’s not like a took a news break here. While not on Twitter, I was still reading and hearing about all of this (and other bad stuff going on). It just seemed so much easier to manage the information in the form of news articles, editorials, and TV reports than in the hot takes, inflammatory opinions, alarming speculation, and emotional responses on Twitter.
Twitter never warns you. (Source: Pearls Before Swine)
Twitter is a social media, and there can be some comfort in knowing that others are worried about the same things you are. But only to a point. The point where you start out seeking validation about one issue only to find yourself, an hour later, in a tizzy about ten other issues, three of which might just be inventions or misunderstandings.
So, I stopped. The generalized anxiety didn’t immediately disappear. Initially, it transferred onto other targets (Inner monologue: “Is the cats’ ear infection back?” “How do you get a skunk out from under the deck?” “Wait, is this just a mosquito bite, or…?”), like the angst needed somewhere else to go now that it didn’t have Twitter to feed it. But with time that diminished also.
On election day, I was able to view the bad (but expected) results without getting overly emotional, and I managed have a decent night’s sleep afterward. Sure, it was mostly an infuriating result, but my candidate won (easily), and she’s a qualified, experienced women. And Ontario did elect its first Green MPP, a just reward for the party that had the best platform on offer.
Tonight, we made history. We showed Ontario what can happen when you vote for what you believe in.
Today, after about a week off, I dipped a toe back into the Twitter. For all its flaws, it is a good way for me to find out about things that I care about, that simply don’t make the headline news. (Queen and Adam Lambert have done a live version of “Lucy”! Rainbow Rowell is writing a sequel to Carry On!)
And all that G7 crazy-ness was pretty interesting. Until… I found myself getting kind of anxious about it.
Then the year was up, and I was like, oh my God, what is my price going to jump to now? But it didn’t jump at all (except to the extent that the Canadian dollar fell); it was still just $20 US for another year. Or about $2 Cnd. a month. Which, I can totally afford, so I’m keeping it, because—you can’t look away!
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