On the side of the road between Angel’s Gate Park and Point Fermin Park. A little ways downhill there was a one-eyed octopus.
Originally posted to Instagram with a slightly different photo taken on my phone, filtered to disguise the fact that the phone camera just wasn’t very good.
Believe it or not, the record player is new. It turns out there’s a whole subset of the toy market for retro toys. It’s a bit different under the hood – I’ve had to fix it once already, and it’s actually chip-driven, not classic music box works. I figure it’s probably cheaper these days to make it with fewer moving parts.
It’s bothered me for a long time that movie studios seem to think the only story worth telling about a superhero is the origin. You get a trilogy if you’re lucky, then back to another origin take. It would be like only ever running the pilot of every TV show even though they’re designed to set things up for an extended run. Or, I don’t know, remaking the prologue of Les Misérables over and over again without ever going further with Jean Valjean.
BoingBoing explains why SMS messages are more likely to get through than phone calls or mobile data during a large emergency. (Short version: They’re async, so the phone or tower can retry later, and they’re momentary, so they don’t tie up a channel like a call would.)
The article doesn’t bring it up, but I’d add the magnifying effect of social media. If that SMS message happens to be a status update to Facebook or Twitter, you can tell a lot of people outside the area that you’re OK (or not) at once, even over congested airwaves or wires.
Update 2024: I wonder how well RCS fares under the same circumstances, and how well it falls back to SMS. Especially since it looks like fallback is an app feature, not a service feature, so I can imagine some third party apps forgetting or not bothering to implement fallback.
Also, the social media aspect no longer applies now that the networks have discontinued post-by-SMS.
