Last week I talked about dropping YouTube, and before that I discussed dropping social media. This Sunday I’ll talk about dropping certain applications and why I dropped them.

I, along with millions of others, don’t keep track of application subscriptions. Once enabled they renew monthly or yearly until such time as I shut them down. Forgotten subscriptions are a slow drain on your long-term finances. It might not sound like much, but over time it adds up. The next time you look at a monthly subscription, multiply it by 12 and then ask yourself do you really think you’re getting that much benefit from spending that much every year? I’ll bet the answer, with very few exceptions, is a resounding ‘no’.

While I cleaned house of more than the following two, the two most important I shut down were Disney+ and Ulysses Mobile. Here’s why I signed up to them, and why I’ve moved on.

Disney+

I signed up to Disney+ in January 2021 for $6.99/month. I’d already noticed that Disney had pulled all of its properties (movies, TV shows) from Netflix, which was one reason I dropped my Netflix subscription. It was also some number of months into the COVID 19 lockdown, and I wanted to see some of the latter MCU movies I’d missed because they were in a movie theater and there was no way in hell I was going to sit in a crowded room with lots of other people, even with a mask. At first I was thrilled to be able to see not only the recent releases, but a lot of the older releases I hadn’t seen because Disney had put them on their streaming service. For a long time I was happy.

But a funny thing happened the following year in 2022. I began to watch shows from the MCU and Star Wars I didn’t care for. From the MCU side the only shows I sat completely through were Wanda Vision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, and Hawkeye. All the others I dropped after watching about fifteen minutes of the first episode. Probably the worst two of the other shows were She Hulk: Attorney at Law and What If…? She Hulk was just bad writing all around, and What If was bad animation and bad writing. That and the fact that What If just had to have an episode with zombies. I’m sick and tired of that trope.

When it comes to the MCU movies, there are only two out of their entire catalogue I would want to be on a desert island with; Iron Man (2008) and Captain America: The First Avenger. Everything else I can leave on the table. Everything.

Then there are the Star Wars movies and shows. Right off the bat let me say that the only three Star Wars movies I cared for are the 1977 original, Empire, and Rogue One. I appreciated Rogue One in particular because there was nothing mentioned about Luke Skywalker or any of the other characters until right at the very end, when Vader showed up and ruthlessly wiped out everyone (and I mean everyone) who got in his way. This wasn’t the tame Vader of the first movies, this was a Vader who was totally committed to being a total Force badass. What ruined it was the final scene with the very poorly done Princess Lea. I also appreciate Rogue One because it provided a key plot point that explained how a ragged galactic farm boy flying a ragged single person space craft could destroy the most sophisticated machine ever produced to that point, the Death Star. The only shows I cared to watch were The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi (believe it or not), and Andor. In my opinion Andor stood head-and-shoulders above everything else, including the few shows I liked.

Some of you gentle readers might ask why I wouldn’t hang on to see the next seasons of the shows I did like. I don’t believe they’re going to get produced. Disney is losing money and viewers right now, to the tune of billions of dollars and over eight million subscribers. All of those shows are expensive to produce. Don’t kid yourself. With Bob Iger back in the saddle, a lot of blood will be spilled across the corporation, especially in streaming which is Disney+

I am suffering from Marvel fatigue, from Star Wars fatigue, from Pixar fatigue, and from classic Disney movie fatigue. And with Disney+ just pushing my monthly subscription to $10.99/month, I’m here to tell you that Disney+ ain’t worth $132/year.

Ulysses Mobile

Ulysses Mobile used to be a one-time purchase. I bought it with the idea that I’d turn my 12.9″ iPad Pro, along with a keyboard, into my primary writing tool. I tried, I really did. I wrote a number of posts back in the mid-2010s using Ulysses and they got pushed up to my blog. The problem is that Ulysses at that time wouldn’t allow me to embed images within the text. I’d do the majority of my writing with Ulysses, push it up to WordPress, then go into the WordPress editor and add in the images. Over time my use of Ulysses, along with writing with the iPad, tapered off. When Ulysses went with a yearly subscription to keep a steady income coming in to pay for developers, I understood that. At $30/year it wasn’t that much, all told. But when I went looking to see what to drop, I was shocked to note that the last writing I did with Ulysses was six year ago. I’d been paying $30/year all that time, thinking I’d get back to using it Real Soon Now. Many will point out how much better Apple-based applications are, especially on iOS and macOS. And they’re right; productive applications on the Mac platforms, when done right, are beautiful. The problem with Ulysses is that it didn’t fit within my way of working (my “workflow”). I don’t care how beautiful it is, if it doesn’t help make my job easier, then it’s useless to me.

These days (and all other days) I use the WordPress web editor. WordPress apparently relented on their plans to remove the “classic” editor. These days you can create a post either with their block-based editor or using the “classic” editor. I wish there was a way to select classic for everything via a toggle. Right now I have to click a drop down and then select classic, a mild annoyance but an action that I now do without thinking. Because the editor is web based, I can edit on any computer that has a modern web browser. For example part of this post was written in Chrome on a Lenovo Chrome Book. The best experience if you can afford it is using a MacBook Air with either Vivaldi or Brave. For the same amount of money you’d spend on an iPad Pro with a keyboard, you can purchase an up-to-date MacBook Air with the same processor, more memory, and more storage. And because the MacBook is a notebook form factor with the keyboard properly attached to the screen, you can use your MacBook (or Chrome Book or Windows notebook or Linux notebook) anywhere you can sit or stand, especially in your lap. The only downside to not using an iPad is the lack of touch screen functionality. Unless you purchase a Chrome Book like my Lenovo, which does have touch screen functionality that I never use.

Finis

That’s basically it. I’m sure I’m going to find other little bits and pieces that need to be trimmed because they provide little or no value with the money being spent to use them.

I’m posting on a Monday what I did yesterday. It’s a set of actions I usually perform on a Sunday.

What is a Shedding Sunday? It’s a day where I drop, or shed, habits and applications that fed those habits. I’ve already written about how I’ve dropped the use of many/most social media applications, the latest being Bluesky and Mastodon. This Sunday I took to dropping many channels on YouTube as well as several recurring Apple subscriptions. Let’s start with the YouTube channels.

I am a liberal, definitely left of center. There is no longer anyway I can meet my conservative counterparts in the middle. The chasm between liberal and conservative has been widening since Obama won in 2007, and the Tea Party fully infected the Republican party. The roots of this can be traced back to Newt Gingrich and his Contract On America, but it’s full hideous flowering came about in the 2010 mid-terms. The Republican party has been totally insane ever since.

And the primary vector of that infection has been the right wing media, primarily Fox News. Having recognized that I’ve devoted considerable effort to avoid anything with a right wing smell. That hasn’t helped me to avoid controversy. I started following a number of left-of-center and just left YouTube channels because I thought I might find solace in those channels. For about a month I subscribed to a number of non-right-wing channels, watching every episode that came out on those channels. YouTube helpfully surfaced more leftish content, so that soon I was awash in left-leaning content. The only problem with all that left-leaning content was the penchant for all of them to publish oh-ain’t-it-awful content about all the right-wing excesses and sins, in particular about Donald Trump. While pointing out these sins I’d hear a clip played back of Trump speaking, which raised my hackles. After a while of this constant bombardment I came to realize that the liberal news channels were carrying water for Trump by playing back his clips. I don’t care how much you were criticizing what he said, the fact you played him back was enough to continue to spread his vile and hate filled message. He’s living for free on your channel and if I allow it, in my head. I found this depressing to the point where I finally stopped searching for and listening, and I unsubscribed from them all. The YouTube algorithms being what they are, it’s going to take me a while to “not recommend channel[s]” when YouTube peppers my feed with similar content.

After less than 24 hours I can feel the stress leaving me. The feeling that I’m uncontrollably falling into a depressive state has stopped. I’m calmer and I can think more clearly.