Periodically, I check out my bills and decide whether to end the subscriptions for certain online and physical services.
For instance, I loved reading the print version of The New Yorker magazine. The problem was that it was so packed with items that interested me that it would quickly pile up. Every month or so, I’d toss the ones more than a half-year-old. Finally, I allowed the subscription to lapse.
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The IDEA of Audible really appealed to me. I’m not reading enough books. Maybe if I could LISTEN to them, it would be more efficient. The problem is that I can’t really do anything else when I’m listening to dialogue. My wife listened to parts of How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi while washing the dishes, e.g. She also listens to discussions on NPR.
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I cannot. Instead, I stop what I’m doing to absorb the information. Conversely, I can clean while listening to music, even songs with lyrics. It’s challenging to do any tedious tasks or even write blog posts without music. (At the time of my writing, I’m listening to Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock.)
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Audible didn’t work for me. Besides, I have enough paper books unread in this room to keep me busy for a decade or two.
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When I was working at the NY SBDC, we paid to access specific databases. Some we almost HAD to have because our usage was high. We would discontinue others, which may not have been all that expensive because they weren’t helpful enough.
Netflix
Part of the reason I have never had a Netflix streaming subscription service is that I fear that I wouldn’t have time to use it sufficiently. Now, I did have Netflix when they used to mail me DVDs to watch and then send back. I wasn’t that good with that iteration, either. As I mentioned, I received the disc for the well-regarded movie The Hurt Locker. I returned it four months later because I couldn’t find a two-hour block to watch it.
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Could I have watched it in two sixty-minute chunks? Well, yes and no. I had an hour here and an hour there, but I don’t think I would have done the film justice. I try not to watch movies like I watch TV. It might take me three days to get through the 90 minutes on CBS Sunday Morning, including ads.
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It’s also true that Netflix bugs me. They put out movies that I CAN’T see at the cinema. Maestro was in theaters for less than two weeks before it reverted to the platform. Rustin may have played in New York City and Los Angeles, but I never had the opportunity to see it at the cinema.
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To my mind, it’s akin to the Justice Department’s complaint against Apple’s smartphone. “Apple undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability…” (Indeed, when my sister Leslie had her bicycle accident in 2018, I COULD NOT open the photos. I now have an iPhone, but I resent the necessity.)