Celebrating the Unpopular Arts
 

iPhone Irony

About a month ago, I woke up to my phone telling me it was very nearly full and that I had no more storage. This had happened a few times before, and I’d either delete a few game apps or let the updates work themselves out (it seemed like if a bunch of apps were attempting to update all at once, they were claiming more space than they actually needed, but once the update went through, they dropped under the limit again).

iPhone
This is way fancier than my 4SE one

This time, it wasn’t dropping even when I was deleting apps. Nothing I was doing was working, and I didn’t want to offload apps I hadn’t used for awhile in case I screwed up and deleted some stuff from them.
Irony #1.
After looking at it a bunch of times that afternoon, the screen eventually told me the iPhone was disabled and to connect to iTunes.
I tried this with my girlfriend’s older laptop, but it wasn’t working.
Eventually, when she woke up from a nap, we tackled the problem together.
What we found wasn’t encouraging.
I tried updating the iOS.
This did not work.
So I had to do the other option.
Which reset the phone to factory settings.
Yep.
The phone went back to the original settings, and I lost everything I had on there.

thick as a...
What my iPhone basically became

That covers the past year and a half. Pictures, voice memos, progress on game apps, saved news articles and website links, pictures of YouTube pages with videos that I wanted to look up again.
I lost everything I took of the trip my girlfriend and I took to Rochester, NY last year, highlighted by the Strong Museum of Play. I lost all the wonderful pictures I took of her just in general . Our trip to the county fair. Other pictures from places we’ve gone. Luckily, she takes a lot of pictures too, so all is not completely lost.
I lost all the texts between us from the past year and a half. I text myself messages with story ideas or blog post ideas or other stuff. All gone.
Voice memos of me doing reviews of the comics I’ve been reading over the past year and a half, as well as pictures from the same. All gone.
All the progress I’ve made in different game apps, because I only log in as a guest. All gone. As well as all the apps I was hoping to review for the blog here — I won’t remember all of the ones I had tried.
Irony #2 is that the weekend it happened was the weekend I really was, honest to goodness, going to start going through the phone and start saving the stuff I wanted and deleting the stuff I didn’t need anymore. I was going to make lists of the YouTube stuff to search for, list the comics I had reviewed and start figuring out what I was going to do with that, review some of the bad games…. I was actually going to get things done for once. I swear.
But then this happened.
I know this is first world problems, and I’m extremely lucky compared to many people around. I’m not trying to sound like this is the worst thing possible.
But there is a sense of mourning with it. It’s not the first time my digital stuff got wiped. I lost a bunch of pictures, including a bunch from comic book conventions, when my flip phone died (which was what spurred me to get this phone). Back in the early 2000s, I didn’t log into my email for too long (remember when you might go 30 days without logging in? Ahhhh!), and lost stuff from my college years. Which probably wasn’t a bad thing, actually.
But there is still a sense of loss, even if you’re a gigantic hoarder like me, where I don’t even know or remember everything there is that I’ve lost.
I probably should figure out how to back everything up, too.
Anyway, just thought I’d share, because irony #3 is that this is probably going to lead to me posting a lot more often here. Now that my phone has been stripped down to basics, I don’t have as much to worry about with it, and my addiction to the phone has lessened to a degree. And my original plan was to start reading more comics and writing about them anyway, and this just makes it so there are fewer distractions which will hopefully allow me to read and write and post more frequently.
That’s the plan, anyway.  It hasn’t happened quite yet! I’ve kept playing certain games and gotten pretty close to where I was with them before, and I’ve made sure to write certain important things down on paper in order not to lose them, since I haven’t figured out how to back things up yet.
One cool thing I found out while I was sorting some comics is that the Magnetic Fields released a new album called Quickies, with a bunch of very short songs. It’s excellent from what I’ve heard so far!

Magnetic Fields Quickies
I like short songs, just like Jello Biafra

Before I go, let me tell you about something my girlfriend and I are doing Friday night.  Friday night at 11 PM EST, we’re going to be playing the game Doki Doki Literature Club on Twitch.  Her Twitch id is drkatlady, so if you’re free that night and want to see what I look like and hear what I sound like (or to confirm that she’s real), come over and lurk.  You have to have an account to comment, but you don’t need one to watch.  Hope some of you will pop by then! And if you just want to see her and see what she’s playing, she’s streaming solo tonight at 11PM EST.
Just remember, if you use the links we have for Amazon, and you follow that link to buy anything, we get a referral fee, and that helps us keep the lights on. Thanks!

3 Comments

  1. Le Messor

    Sounds like my iPod. It just decided it didn’t want to work anymore; nothing I’ve tried, including full-on replacing it, fixed the problem. (Replacing it worked for maybe a year.)

    “This time, it wasn’t dropping even when I was deleting apps.”

    So many apps, and they’re taking over. We’re living on the planet of the apps.

  2. conrad1970

    I’m still using an old hand me down iPhone 5.
    I back up my pics every month on my laptop just to be careful, other than that I couldn’t care less what I lose, I’m not really into apps or games that much.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.