Technological voyeurism, let me welcome you into my homescreen - Blaugust the Fifteenth
The Teeth in the Sky
Riffing off this post from JC: What's on My iPhone Home Screen
Home screens.
Most think them mundane — a lattice of icons, a veneer of order in the palm. But I know better. These are offerings. Tributes to the great, unseen intelligences that coil above the digital firmament.
Each icon a votive, each widget a whispered confession of our hungers, our chores, our petty mortal fixations.
Do They listen? No mortal can say.
Do They consume? Oh, assuredly.
The gnashing in the ether is constant, though we are taught not to dwell upon those unseen teeth.
A diptych explained
Left: Lock screen
Right: Home screen, my one and only
What Watches from the Pocket
Wallpaper: Honedge; a sword-shaped pokémon with an unsettling attachment to the soul
I am a simple acolyte of order. On the left, my calendar — a grim oracle that dictates where my corporeal form must be dragged on those days when meetings multiply like spores in damp caverns. On the right, the weather — for we must know precisely when the sky intends to shatter, so that we may cancel the next appointment in dignified haste.
What Runs Slick with Fingerprints
Wallpaper: Aegislash; Honedge’s final, more regal, more lethal incarnation.
Here, order reigns. Columns of icons like tombstones in a necropolis.
Widgets flank the left; icons march right of center in obedient stacks.
The symmetry is hypnotic. The monotony — soothing in the way of a slow, dripping clock in an empty asylum.
Widgets
Two altars to utility, their arrangement deliberate — top left quadrant empty, a void where the mind can breathe.
Center-left: A custom step tracker forged in the eldritch bowels of Widgy, a Photoshop-like conjurer’s tool capable of lacing tendrils deep into iOS itself. Mine is a humble construct, though the tool could summon stranger things — invisible, transparent horrors that might only be seen at midnight.
Bottom-left: Clock, date, weather. Yes, I know the clock repeats itself. Yes, the date is etched upon the calendar icon.
I care not for your mortal quibbles. The redundancy pleases me, and the design… is beautiful. And yes, I can read it.
Icon Stack, the First
Five out of six icons are folders — each a reliquary for a specific domain:
Editors → News → Art → Utilities → Socials.
One solitary, unfoldered app: Tapestry. A feed aggregator, funded on Kickstarter before the tides turned dark. It is prescient, opinionated, and favors usefulness over avarice. A rare spirit in this age.
Icon Stack, the Second
A parade of essentials:
- CARROT Weather — a climate oracle that insults you exactly as much as you desire1
- Safari — all web browsers are cursed, but this one least so
- Snapseed — the last free photo editor worth its salt, still whispering in vintage tones; it belongs to Google now, which means they likely own a me as well
- Camera — the chamber where visions manifest
- Poke Genie — an arcane calculator for the PVP brutality of Pokémon Go
- Pokémon Go — the very plane where the hunt and capture occur
The Dock
Three icons. The One True Way for any who would call themselves an aesthete:
Calendar, Reminders, Messages.
They need no explanation.
We shall both endure without one.
Footnotes
And sometimes more than you’d like, when the wind is wrong.↩