“the lonesome sound of departure”

Over at MMA Fighting, Chuck Mindenhall recaps Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell’s fight against Tito Ortiz this past Saturday:

Golden Boy’s foray into MMA was a set-up for some kind of morose outcome, it just boiled down to which one. Sadly it turned out to be the latter. “The Iceman” waited over eight years to have his delusions re-realized, and his last attempt for a happy ending to get trampled by his old rival. Ortiz knocked Chuck out, and then went into his gravedigger dance, burying the iconic Mohawk for good. Ortiz wanted it to be a redemption of sorts after losing to Liddell twice in the mid-aughts. He got it. Nothing about it felt right. Ortiz merely flushed out the last birds from the orchard. It was a shotgun burst, and the lonesome sound of departure.

Mindenhall is right.

There’s nothing exciting about watching a once-great fighter, who’s nearing 50 years old, get knocked out cold in the first round.

Categories:

Sports

Da Notch

Over at The Verge (from last month), Nick Slatt thinks Google failed to justify the Pixel 3 XL’s massive notch:

You may hate notches, and I may be preaching to the choir here by complaining about Google’s. But I don’t hate them. In fact, I’m a fan if the trade-off is for some features I enjoy, and I’m completely ambivalent to the existence of screen cutouts from an aesthetic standpoint, up until a certain point. I’ve used an iPhone X since it first came out; I never noticed or really cared about the notch when I first switched, and I still don’t today. I’m using an iPhone XS as I write this. But a notch should, at the very least, serve some purpose. It should have a good reason to be there, and Google didn’t really have a strong one to offer yesterday.

This is really simple. The iPhone X immediately made all pocket computers without edge-to-edge displays look outdated.

That’s all the reason any company needs to make a device with a notch and an edge-to-edge display. After I bought my iPhone X last year, I remember going back to my iPhone 6 Plus and being shocked how weird and outdated the old, rectangular screen looked.

In fact, let’s give credit where it’s due to the first device with a notch and an edge-to-edge display: The Essential Phone. It was announced 4 months before the iPhone X dropped in 2017.

Although the Essential Phone was first-to-market with a notch, it’s unlikely its existence would have put much pressure on Apple if they had released a rectangular-screened iPhone X given the Essential Phone’s shitty sales and subsequent folding.

I don’t think many people outside the geek community even knew of the Essential Phone’s existence.