So Amazon had its first ever "Prime Day" this week, on the 15th, and I fell for it completely. Set an alarm for 6am, made coffee, sat down with the laptop like I was about to snag concert tickets. Twenty years of Amazon, they said. More deals than Black Friday, they said. I refreshed that deals page probably forty times before 7am.
Here's what I actually saw scroll past: a 24-pack of Duracell batteries. A weirdly specific discount on a Rachael Ray cookware set. Bluetooth speakers from brands I'd never heard of and have already forgotten. At one point there was a "lightning deal" on a garden hose. A garden hose! I don't even have a garden. I don't think I have ever wanted a garden hose so badly in my life as I did for the four minutes that countdown timer was ticking, and then it sold out and the feeling evaporated instantly, which tells you everything about how that whole day worked on your brain.
To be fair I did buy something. A $30 pair of headphones I'd been half-meaning to replace anyway, and a phone case. That's it. That's my haul from the twentieth anniversary of one of the biggest companies on earth. Twitter was merciless about the whole thing by mid-afternoon, and honestly it deserved it a little. If you're going to build up "biggest sale ever" energy for weeks, the actual deals need to be better than stuff you'd find in a Walgreens end-cap. A few people online were calling it Prime Day but writing it like "Prime Day (lol)" and that felt about right.
What I think actually happened is Amazon wanted a July sales spike that isn't Black Friday, and the mechanism for getting there was to just flood the page with SO many deals that a few good ones would get lost in the noise and you'd buy stuff out of momentum rather than because it was genuinely a good price. Which, judging by my headphones purchase, worked on me exactly as designed. I'm annoyed about it and also I already ordered them, so.
Somewhere in the middle of all that scrolling I also got distracted checking on the Pluto pictures, because Tuesday was the New Horizons flyby and by Wednesday morning the first real close-up images were starting to come back down. That heart-shaped patch on the surface (they're calling it Tombaugh Regio, after the guy who discovered Pluto back in 1930) is honestly one of the most striking things I've seen come out of NASA in years, and it's a little bit funny that a spacecraft that left Earth in January 2006, back when Pluto was still officially a planet, is the thing finally showing it to us in any detail at all, nine and a half years and three billion miles later. I had four tabs open comparing the pictures at different resolutions instead of doing actual work that afternoon. No regrets there, unlike the headphones.
Also, three weeks into Apple Music now and I'm still not sold. The For You tab keeps recommending me things I already own, which feels like a pretty basic thing to get right for a company that also runs iTunes and therefore knows exactly what's already in my library. Connect, the weird artist-social-feed part nobody asked for, I have opened exactly once. The actual streaming and For You recommendations that are new discoveries have been fine, better than fine even, but the app itself still feels like three different products stapled together, because it kind of is. I've got until the end of September before the free trial runs out and they start taking $9.99 a month, and right now I'd put my odds of keeping it at maybe 60/40.
Anyway. Between the garden hose almost-purchase and staring at a dwarf planet for an hour, it's been a stranger week than usual around here. Back to normal posting soon, probably about something with actual code in it, because I know that's what half of you are actually here for.