Non-COVID post! Well, mostly. A couple of weeks ago the extended fam (on my wife's side) and I went on vacation, renting a beach house as we usually do. We did it in as circumspect a way as possible, minimizing stops on the way down and back, ordering groceries for curbside pickup, eschewing our usual dinner date nights with grandparent-provided babysitting, and of course wearing masks in public and washing hands and all that. Because COVID. But it was still nice to get away! A week of no work, morning walks to the beach to take a dip in the ocean, afternoons lounging in and around the pool, family board games at night ... good times.
In fact, above and beyond the appealing features listed immediately above, I always look forward to a beach vacation primarily as an opportunity to indulge in two of my great loves: books and beers. And indeed, every single day we were there, I spent some time reading, and enjoyed a variety of cold ones. I could actually cite exactly how many books I read (finished a novel I was in the middle of, read an entire novel, and started a third one, plus two comics trade paperbacks) and how many different beers I sampled (six) because ... I am a giant nerd and I track these things via apps.
I reserved this post for a Social Media Tuesday because it was specifically the involvement of apps that tickled my amusement and made me think "yeah if I were still blogging regularly this would definitely be a post." Because, on the one hand, remember in the olden days of the early 00's, before the supremacy of Facebook, when lots and lots of websites and apps were trying to be "social media for NICHE INTEREST GOES HERE"? I do, because I was very late to Facebook, like 2014 or something, but before that I got into GoodReads and I definitely said, out loud, at some point, that that was "basically the same thing". If people wanted to connect with me and see what I was up to, they could do so on GoodReads! I read all the time (commuting via mass transit) and posted detailed reviews of every book I read, sometimes directly on the site, and sometimes by linking from my GoodReads entries back to this very blog here, where of course I would use book reviews as autobiographical jumping off points for reflections on this crazy modern world we live in (yes, ha ha, 2007-me thought that moment in history was so-o-o-o cra-a-a-a-a-zy). Anyway, obviously Facebook now is what it is, and I got onboard for good or ill (both, most days) and yet I have remained a devoted GoodReads user because I am a completist and once I start something I don't want to stop. I got much more slack about posting reviews but I do enjoy tracking which books I read, and how many I read per year, and so on.
I got into Untapped, the beer-tracking app, much later and not at all as a substitute, close-enough kind of social networking. Again, I just like cataloguing and tracking and measuring things, and Untapped does the job. And, okay, every once in a while I will get a "toast" from one of my friends on the app, and "toast" them back, which is always a nice bit of pleasant, low-stakes, virtual interaction, even moreso now that we're all quarantining and isloating and whatnot (sorry, everything comes back to COVID, dammit).
The other hand I wanted to acknowledge for sheer ridiculousness has to do with the metrics and numbers games, because as it happened I got to see two different ends of the spectrum playing out in the respective apps over the course of the beach week. Within GoodReads, I had set a goal for myself of reading 52 books this year, which seemed moderately achievable and also would have the effect of finally getting the total number of books I had read and tracked in the app up over 1000. Anyone who loves tracking numbers especially loves big round numbers, and I am no exception. Of course I've fallen a bit behind pace this year because I haven't been commuting, and thus haven't been listening to audiobooks as fast (DAMMIT, COVID) so it was nice to get a chance to play catch-up a bit and see the grand total tick up from 971 to 972 to 973 etc. Meanwhile over on Untapped, I've been using the app for three or four years and managed to try a little over 300 different beers. The app itself automatically subdivides things, tracking the individual beer style families (e.g. porters, stouts, brown ales, IPAs, wheat beers, etc.) in a way I probably wouldn't bother to do myself. Although, I have discovered that since I like what I like and tend to drink beers within the same styles, it sometimes gets hard to try new-to-me beers just because the options within my preferences are limited. Beach week, in particular sharing a house with other adults who have different tastes in beer, provides an opportunity for me to freely (in all sense of the word) expose my palate to beers I would never buy for myself.
And thus Beach Week is a real prime time for pumping up my numbers! But it did make me laugh, as I'm working my way towards a thousand recorded books and plowing into my fourth century of beers, that I tried one of the IPAs that my brother-in-law brought to the beach, and dutifully recorded it in Untapped, and got a little notification ding for earning a badge. A completely meaningless but nevertheless unironic electronic attaboy which basically said, "Good for you! You've now tried FIVE different IPAs! If you make it to TEN, you'll get another badge!" A bit of newbie encouragement, delivered to me because I'm just so finicky, apparently. I thought that was hilarious.
