Happy New Year 2024 From Korea.

Why do you need your earbuds to have a wire so badly?

I am assuming this is about a post I reblogged like six months ago when I went off on forced technological enshitification and the slow erosion of consumer options. But sure, I'll bite.

Why do I "need" my earbuds to have a wire? I dunno, Anon, maybe I:

Don't want to have to worry about recharging my earbuds.

Don't want my earbuds to be even easier to lose.

Don't want my earbuds to need separate accessories that are as easy to lose as the earbuds.

Prefer to have bluetooth turned off on my devices for security and safety reasons.

Like being able to seamlessly plug my earbuds into my computer, my MP3 player, or any other device with a headphone jack.

Don't want to spend 50 dollars on decent wireless earbuds when I can do all the above things with a pair of solid earbuds that cost me like $12 during the Obama administration.

Don't care about what kinds of headphones or earbuds people wear but don't like what it says about our society when other people apparently care what kind of earbuds I'm wearing so much they have send an Anonymous ask to interrogate me about it.

And I guess, more abstractly, because fuck Apple. That's why.

Jenny Holzer, Arno 1999

Terminator Style Military Robots

Peter McFarlane: ‘Circuit Board Fossil Series’ (2012)

To be fair, a lot of goofy-sounding rocketry/aerospace terminology has a legitimate nomenclatural role beyond just being silly euphemisms.

"Unplanned rapid disassembly", for example, exists as the necessary counterpart to planned rapid disassembly: sometimes a rocket is legitimately supposed to fall apart or blow up, so you need a specific term to emphasise that it wasn't supposed to do that.

Similarly, "lithobraking" was coined by analogy with aerobraking (shedding velocity via atmospheric friction) and hydrobraking (shedding velocity by landing in water), and it does have some intentional applications; the Mars Pathfinder probe, for example, was deliberately crashed into the Martian surface while surrounded by giant airbags, and reportedly bounced at least 15 times before coming to rest.

(That said, aerospace engineers absolutely do use these terms humorously as well, because engineers are just Like That.)