"I was at home watching an animation of the Titanic sinking... in real-time."
I don't know why; I just started watching it and suddenly found it eerie, evocative, addictive and unstoppable. I couldn't put it down. To think that this really happened on that April night in 1912, that that grand old ship slowly cruised to a stop, before finally spluttering beneath the icy waters under the stars.
Now in fairness I was doing other stuff as well, configuring Wordpress and working out some music things, but nonetheless, the RMS Titanic was firing distress flares and listing to the starboard on my iPad while I worked away on my laptop.
Oh, I should say: my phone woke up in the end. I left it plugged in while I was at work and by the time I got home, it had fully recharged. It must have been so low in battery this morning, that it couldn't even display the no battery screen you normally get when it's run out.
One person with a smartphone on board the Titanic could have saved all those lives. Ever think of that? Well, provided there was signal, network, receiving masts and a switched-on coastguard somewhere. Oh and plus, there would have to be satellites otherwise GPS wouldn't work. Oh and if there had been GPS and radar and all the rest of it, they might have used it to pick up that there was a dirty great iceberg off the starboard bow and would have avoided it in the first place.
Funny how technology works. Maybe there are things we can't really imagine now that are life-changing for people in the future. Perhaps they will look back at us battening down the hatches in hurricanes and running from earthquakes and they'll say, 'Aww, if only those people had had a widgery-confibulator!'
You mean a 'whizz-bang seismo-quantisation machine?' Yeah, something like that.
Or maybe, those future sympathisers will just want to know how I spent my evening on the 20th April, 2016? And I will just have to tell them how sad a thing it was to do for two hours and forty minutes on a Wednesday night.
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