Incessant Chatterings of Yours Truly

Relocating a small Samicle from BigBlueBall over here.

Alright, so looking practically at both of them, the iphone is pretty 'pimptastic', if I may use that phrase. It's fancy, it makes you feel pretty cutting edge, it's all 'jestonesque' because you just tap the screen to move stuff.

That being said, these are some of the gripes that my friends have about their iphones. Since...they /all/ have them.

*Pixeldeath sucks.
*You can't receive picture messages. Until next month when they can download it but it took em long enough!
*Can't run multiple applications at once, so if you switch, it cuts the previously running application off. DONE!
*When you're talking on the phone, the keyboard doesn't lock, so when you're talking to someone, the heat from your cheek sometimes hits buttons, or the mute or something like that.
*There is no zoom on the camera, and the lens is made to get really close stuff, so you gotta hold it away three feet.
*If you try to hand your phone over to someone to text, the phone isn't queued to their motions so you use 'delete' a lot.
*It takes some getting used to to text without feeling buttons so get ready for some awkwardness at first.
*Craplications.
*It's expensive (So for my accident prone friends who, say, drop it in the toilet...)
*Promised updates that never come (LIKE PICTURE TEXTING!)

Now. Given that you don't care about the fact that you can't receive pictures phone-to-phone without another download, you can deal with apple being jackasses and not releasing things on time, you really, really, really want that cool game where you slide a beer down the bar and have to balance it so it doesn't spill, and you have the money to burn, hey, I wont judge.

Keep in mind that I have NO knowledge about the technical aspects. I spent 15 minutes listening to people talking about syncing their iphones and tethering them and I'm sorry Jeff, Doris, Det...I'm sorry but I really had /NO/ idea what that is. But it sounded really /cool/.

And really for the average Joe, that's what it is. The iphone sounds /really cool/.


As far as the blackberry goes, now, I have a blackberry. Given it's a black market blackberry, that means that a lot of the features aren't available to me, which...sucks for me. BUT! That doesn't happen to everyone. Like..if you get a legitimate blackberry.

Some things do suck. Again, more picture texting issues. Personally, I don't get them. My reliable tech support team (Read: my boyfriend's sister) tells me that my blackberry just doesn't do them. Tough luck, me. But I hear that the pearl does.
Also, you don't get the groovy little applications where you can make your phone sound like a light saber.

Now, for me, simplicity is just...awesome. My blackberry can't even go online (Yes, that's how ghetto it is), but my ONLY requirement for phones is that I get enough minutes to do a few calls a month for emergencies, I can text and it has a full qwerty. Anything else, I don't care about. (Though I will admit, checking traffic would be nice...)

Plus, it's cheaper so if you drop it, crack it, throw it at your pet, drop it in the toilet or (as I've been dreaming more and more about) drop it in the sewer (...whatever that means, I need to see my shrink) it's not AS painful to replace.

Your requirements...internet and qwerty.

They both have both.

Now, you do have the cool zoom in/zoom out of the screen feature with iphone ad scrolling by rubbing it up and down and all around.

Personally, that doesn't seem like it's quite worth the difference, but hey! Depends on how often you use the internet on your TELEPHONE. (...okay that might just make me twitch a little. Pet peeve. Calming down.)

You might notice that my opinion is skewed.

Well of course it is. The iphone scares me and I think that slick screen thing (while very star trek and makes me feel a little bit like spock) is just intimidating and it scares me because I don't want to scratch it, dent it, crack it, knick it, drop it, look at it wrong and...for some reason my itty bitty fingers always hit the wrong thing. NO! I said I wanted 'fried DUCK for dinner'! Not 'fried SUCK' or 'fried --' well you get my point.

My suggestion? Go to an AT&T and play with the phones, try them out, put them to the test, see which one YOU find easier to work with and understand. And don't let them hassle you with a bunch of jargon. Seriously, when it comes to being 'user friendly', every 'user' is different. So take your time and try them out.



Yes, I realize how old this thread is. But when has 'sense' ever gotten in the way of me putting in my two cents, guys? Really?

Cotard's Syndrome.

I know that most of the time we're wishing we /don't/ get some horrible, socially crippling disease, but as far as horrible, socially crippling diseases go, I think this one is fun.

I know that Mr. Pocket knows what Cotard's is, or he should, since I told him to read the book that I found it in. Let me drop a clue to the rest of the people around here who may not know what it is.

It's like faux zombism! The thought of running around, feeling generally as if you're hovering somehow outside of the walking, living, waking world, in some dead state just sounds incredibly bizarre to me and would be a mad trip. yes, that's a medical term. You can use it.

Or, in more specific cases, walking about and thinking that somehow, you just...lack blood. How does that happen?? You just wake up one day and say to yourself "Today feels different. I feel groggy and stiff. My blood must have all dried up." Or is it something that lurks about the peripheral of your mind for a long while that, hey, I'm starting to slow down. I'm getting older. I'm drying up. I feel dusty. Then one day WHAM! Oh no, my blood's been drying up for years now, it's fine.

What about people who believe they're missing organs? How does ones mind justify such a loss? It'd be /amazing/ to hear those explanations and hear the backflips that a person's mind does in order to justify a belief.

"Well, I don't have lungs."
"What? How are you breathing?"
"I'm not breathing. It's just a left-over reflex from when I had lungs as a child. I continue to do so because I've been trained to let my diaphragm flex and chest cavity expand. Plus, I need air to talk. Oh hum."
"So, you breathe, but you don't have lungs..."
"Yes."
"What happened to them?"
"They disintegrated the winter of 2002. I was outside ni the dead of winter, I caught frostbite in my lungs, and they disintegrated."
"Uh...huh."

That would be amazing. Walking around, thinking you're some form of walking dead. Either that you're in some shelf between life and death, or you're in heaven/hell/purgatory/limbo/elysium/whatever.

Now I know that Stuart Davis has that song "Practice Dying" but it's just not quite the same thing. They don't have a /fear/ of anything. They don't fear dying or anything like that. They believe they're already dead. Wholeheartedly. It's a kind of bizarre serenity to it all. Here's one case that's shown in Wiki. (And we know that Sami loves her some Wiki):

He just figured some vacation was his mother showing him around hell. It's madness! MADNESS! But it's a pretty cool madness.

I also think that Williams Syndrome would be kind of neat to have, but that's probably for another short winded rant.

For all of you who are interested, I first heard about Cotard's Syndrome in Chuck Klosterman's book Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story. Which is a highly recommended read on my list.



What kind of disease/syndromes/madnesses do you think would be kind of neat to have. If, you know, temporarily?