My initial numbers on the home unit were almost frighteningly low, but soon I was getting the best lung function numbers I’d ever seen. Shockingly, impossibly high numbers. I actually wrote about it here. This machine evolved my technique from a normal breath to a kind of death metal growl to more of a haunted house whine. After all these years, I had finally bested my enemy, the PFT machine.

Turns out the machine had swindled me.

I could never replicate the numbers I was getting in a clinical setting. There are going to be discrepancies between a professional machine and a handheld one that links to an app that no one can really nail UI scaling on, but the gulf was too wide to write off as manufacturing discrepancies. The handheld machine sabotaged me by rewarding behaviors that the professional machine hates.

The handheld home version loves it when you take a deep breath, stop to collect your thoughts and then make a noise similar to the library ghost from Ghostbusters. The hospital machine and the people that run it are less enthused by this. After three years of piss poor numbers, I finally figured out the thing the hospital machine wants: big breath in and an immediate exhale, no pause. Which is probably how I used to do it before the home version got into my head, I don’t remember. You’re also not supposed to make an actual noise, as that gets your throat in the way of your breath, but I still think I can find a way to make it work, just to say I did. We’ll find out in three months!

The home machine “works” in that you have to understand it’s numbers are a lie but they can be compared to each other in order to tell if my lung function is going up or down. But right now I think it’s too dangerous for me to use because I treat it like setting a Donkey Kong score and I’ll do whatever it takes to make the number go up.

Machine vs Man 2: Now It’s Trying to Piss Me Off

What’s the maddest you’ve ever been at an inanimate object? I suppose I should start by asking if you’ve ever actually been mad at an inanimate object, but it’s so thoroughly ingrained in my dna that I can’t imagine anyone saying “no, an object has never made me mad” and I’m unwilling to reckon with the fact that anyone could say such a thing.

Analog technology always seemed to break in a way that felt “haunted” to me, like there was literally a ghost in the machine. This probably comes down to the age at which I was dealing with these things and my lack of basic mechanical knowledge at the time. We used to have a VCR who’s diet consisted mostly of my favorite video cassettes. Chewed them up by the goddamn truckload. But it never did it while I had it opened up. And for some reason taking a cotton swap and some alcohol to the top of the drum seemed to fix it for a bit, even though that has roughly as much effect as blowing into a Nintendo cartridge. Maybe the thing really was haunted and the ghost liked alcohol.

Digital technology feels like it breaks in a willful way, like it’s trying to test you. Again, I’m projecting here, but when a VCR ate a tape, you could see the tape crumble and kind of understand how this could happen. When a computer won’t run a program it’s run every day for it’s entire fucking life, it feels personal.

I bought a Steam Deck and love it, but not enough to keep me from buying a competing device last week so that they can battle for my affection with the loser being sentenced to a 7 day auction on eBay. The Asus ROG Ally is a tremendously powerful handheld PC that also holds the title for “Inanimate object that made me the most angry.”

As an early adopter, I expected some trials and the Steam Deck had some issues when it first came out too. But the Ally uses Windows 11 and sometimes it feels like a cruel joke. The whole selling point is that you can use it to play Microsoft Game Pass games, but I couldn’t even install them for a full day. It just kept telling me I needed to install Gaming Services, even though I’d done it 5 fucking times. I did some digging on the internet–tough since this was during the Reddit blackout–and ran some command line business. Nothing. Came real close to writing “Credit my account” on the back of my receipt, taping it to the Ally and whipping it through the Best Buy window at 3am.

Instead, I went to bed, which was probably smarter, but not as satisfying.

The next day, I came at it again, determined to figure out how to download at least one game before I brought this thing back. So I turned it on and…it worked. I didn’t have to do anything. Even the fingerprint scanner worked now, which I didn’t expect. There hadn’t been any updates or anything, it just worked. This was somehow more infuriating than if it was still broken, but not enough that I’ve returned it…yet.

Things I Like

I’d like to take a moment here to talk about Katatonia’s “Last Fair Deal Gone Down”, one of the greatest albums released in my lifetime. It came out in 2001 and even though it was the first Katatonia album I heard, I specifically bought it because there was a big uproar about how they changed their sound and I love it when bands change their sound. 22 years later, I am not joking when I say the songwriting team of guitarist Anders Nystrom and vocalist Jonas Renske are the Lennon/McCartney of my generation.

I have listened to this album hundreds if not thousands of times over the last few decades and I still find myself going “listen to that fucking chord! Who does that?!” multiple times. I celebrate the whole catalog but they were cooking with that special shit on this one. If you’ve never heard it, just check out “Teargas”