The Lightning-Speed Waltz

There is apparently an epidemic of protagonists in YA novels assessing their own appearances in mirrors.

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As I did every morning, I intended to assess my appearance in the mirror of my medicine cabinet, but found to my shock that the door with the mirror was missing. With a groan, I dismissed this as roommate shenanigans and left the bathroom in search of another reflective surface.

Actually, things were at their best during the last year of my life when I had no responsibilities.

Check out the bonus panel on the site.

Upcoming book signings this summer.

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SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

Hey everybody if you enjoyed watching me liveblog my slog through Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I wrote down some of my thoughts and you can read them a week in advance for the low low price of one American dollar.

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Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the Age of the Antonines is, in no uncertain terms, the longest book I have ever read. It encompasses the 1st through 16th centuries of the common era, totalling roughly 1.8 million words and requiring approximately six days of my one human life to listen to the entire book on tape. To use one ignoble comparison, it’s more than twice the length of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This terrible fault is not helped by the fact that Gibbon was a most economical writer; every page is packed with detail and every one of the 1.8 million words seems to be in the right place.

Walter Bagehot relates in an anecdote that the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Gibbon’s fellow member of Parliament, once in a session of Parliament compared the British Empire’s deplorable treatment of the Indian subcontinent to the lupine behavior of sundry Roman emperors one might read about in “the luminous pages of Gibbon”; Gibbon, a man of many contradictions, was a staunch supporter of Indian independence, and was moved by Sheridan’s compliment, though Sheridan would later clarify that he’d misspoken, having meant to say voluminous.

Between its size and its scope, any attempt to reflect upon the luminous pages is necessarily a voluminous undertaking, and a comprehensive analysis is utterly out of the question; one might as well try to chronicle the decline and fall of the Roman empire from the age of the Antonines (absurd, I know). . . .

The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.

The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.

Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.