I had a thought along the same lines. I was thinking we should coin the term “immunition,” and tell people it was a way to arm your immune system to defend itself. It’s not even all that misleading.

Tell me you use an ad blocker without telling me.

A bit of a weird one because it never actually came out, but I was really excited about the news that Michel Gondry was set to direct a film adaptation of Rudy Rucker’s novel The Master of Space and Time. I really like both Gondry and Rucker, and their sensibilities would have worked really well together. The story is kind of a sci-fi three wishes fable. It’s not my favorite of his–that’s gotta be White Light–but it’s really light-hearted and fun. And Gondry is terrific at getting bizarre, dream-like ideas onto film. I’m still bummed out that they cancelled that.

For something that actually did come out but then got cancelled, I enjoyed Disney’s adaptation of The Mysterious Benedict Society. Then they threw that one down the memory hole for tax reasons, so there’s no way to watch it anymore short of piracy. I feel like that shouldn’t be allowed. Seems like they should add least have to provide the Library of Congress with a copy. It’s weird that our cultural history can just be yanked away like that now.

I really don’t think it’s that stupid. Your particular machine has a lot of ports, yeah. But there are plenty of machines out there, like the 12-inch non-pro macbook, that have ONE USB-C PORT and absolutely no other ports. That’s clearly limiting. Like, you can connect it to ethernet, if you buy an additional USB-C ethernet adapter, but if you want to be able to ethernet and have it connected to power at the same time, you need to buy a special power brick that combines the two functions, because they didn’t include any other ports.

Plus, there are a bunch of things that still use USB-A. I’ve got a bunch of old thumb drives that work like that, especially for transferring video files to my TV, which only supports USB-A itself. Wireless dongles for mice and game controllers, which still offer a latency advantage over bluetooth, tend to be USB-A as well. I’ve also got a wearable pulse oximeter that requires a special cable to load data, and the other end of that cable is USB-A only. Again, you can get an adapter dongle, but that’s never as convenient as just having the right port in the first place.

I went a bit out of my way to get a laptop with a decent collection of ports (and it’s a bit of a less portable laptop as a result, maybe more like a desktop replacement), but even it has for some reason dropped the SD card reader, which I would have used a lot. I had to get a dongle for that. And I had to get one that used USB-C in particular, because my USB-A ports are usually both filled.

Basically the selection of ports used to be something that laptops used as a point of differentiation and pride in a crowded market; but Apple managed to invert this, making the prestige marker having a slimmer laptop with as few ports as possible, and that was a dumb change. I do think the pendulum is swinging back, as with your Pro macbook, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be frustrated with the way this element of the market went in such a consumer-hostile direction for a while.