NEW BLOG POST: CAT S22 Flip Review
Fascinating case wherein "The Best of Both Worlds" ends up as "Basically Nothing From Either World"
https://joebush.net/2023/05/01/cat-s22-review-it-wont-let-you-have-it-both-ways/
The real lesson here is that, once one comes to the realization that he dislikes smartphones, one must also come to the realization that there is no possible satisfactory smartphone purchase. I’ve come to realize in the past year that “I’ve made a mistake, even though I’ve made it before, and I know that I shouldn’t make it again” is not an interesting genre of story to me, and to a certain extent, that is what my experience with the CAT S22 Flip was. My problem was mostly the psychological detriments of using a smartphone operating system and the monotonous annoyance of the touchscreen, and stapling a barely-used keypad on there could not and did not solve the main problem.
I am now using the Sunbeam F1 Orchid, which is a very stripped-down flip phone made by a company that specializes in stripped-down flip phones, I believe for religious lifestyle purposes, but don’t quote me on that. This phone does calls, texts, weather, some GPS, and a suite of standard little utility applications (a calculator, alarm clock, notepad, etc). It even has a very underpowered camera!
The one major thing I’m missing from having a smartphone in my day-to-day life is Shazam. It’s the one smartphone innovation that I don’t have any real qualms about. I go to Bath and Body Works fairly often, for example, and that store plays exclusively the type of music I like (KORG M1 piano sample-heavy house music) for a reason I don’t really understand. I think that I could work there full-time and be perfectly happy — Partially because of the music and partially because I think I’d find it satisfying to help other men along the journey of personal hygiene. It is a bit unfortunate to hear a song that I like at a Bath and Body Works and be unable to look it up on Shazam, especially as the people who work there probably can’t look it up on any store system themselves.
I had an experience on Tuesday afternoon which highlighted this. I was at a thrift store. While perusing the short-sleeved button downs, I heard a song I’d never heard before, and after about a minute, it went from “this is a nice song” to “I might like this more than most songs, I want to hear this song again.” There was this sort of melancholic chorus, reminded me of Berlin by Adult Mom, trumpet hits that reminded me of In Media Res by Los Campesinos, it pressed many of the buttons that songs that I like press (sans KORG M1 piano, but they can’t all be winners).
In the past, I’d Shazam it, but I can’t do that with my phone. What I did instead was that I recorded about twenty seconds of it with the little sound recorder functionality of my phone in order to cross-check it against an instance of Shazam I’d download to my backup smartphone I keep around for electronic tickets and Hinge later on in the day (which introduced me to the fact that the sound recorder functionality of my little flip phone is inadequate for this purpose), and I tapped out a snippet of the lyrics I could identify into the note-taking functionality. To directly quote from the note:
Something like '“we called on your birthday, we were a week off”
The odds were stacked against me to find this song. I was worried I’d run into the Buffalo Stance problem, that I’d be looking for it for years, like “oh yeah I heard it in a thrift store, trumpet bit, reminds me of other songs I like, woman vocalist,” and I wouldn’t figure it out until I’d be at a party some night and it’d come on and I’d ask “what’s this song, I know I’ve heard it before” to some stranger and she’d tell me the answer and we’d get to talking, you know, that develops, rest of our lives together, et cetera, et cetera. Either that or I hear it again in a different store and I think to ask one of the clerks if they can look up what the name of the song is.
Miraculously, the note, though it’s completely incorrect, every pronoun was wrong, the listed timeframe was missed, did lead me to the name of the song, which is “Kyoto” by the artist Phoebe Bridgers. The fact that the linked performance of it was on Saturday Night Live should indicate that it isn’t an obscure song by any means, that I probably should have known it, but nonetheless, I didn’t. I’ve been recommended her music indirectly but I’d never intentionally listened to any of her songs and never sought it out because I thought that I’d heard some of her work before but that folk-country-pop sort of thing doesn’t really appeal to me, but I’d actually (and I apologize to both of these women about this) just had her and Kacey Musgraves mixed up for something like five years now.
So, there, I guess that I don’t need Shazam, either. Interesting quote from my 2018 Buffalo Stance post, though:
With Shazam, and the fact that I’m almost never discovering purely from a radio station or store speakers with no other visual representation of what’s playing, that needing to chasing down a song like Buffalo Stance likely won’t return in the future. That’s probably good? It’ll save me some work, I guess.
Wrong, dumbass! This makes me wary of any definitive statements about how life will be in the near future. If something so seemingly obvious could be acted out in the exact opposite in only five years, maybe… Hold on.
Okay, so that anecdote from earlier? I meet a woman at a party some night and I ask about a song that’s on and I like it and we get to talking, you know, that develops, rest of our lives together, et cetera, et cetera? Never going to happen, impossible. Absolutely I will not find myself in the absolute inverse situation five years from now. There.
Also I post weekly at now, so check that out if you haven't already. Fascinating season to start writing about Sporting KC!