Invariably, by speaking up, I’ll experience a new round of threats and harassment. The people doing this see themselves as noble warriors, not criminals. I’ll probably get more rape and death threats. I’ll be told I’m being dramatic. For pointing out the game media’s silence, behind closed doors these people will tell themselves what amazing allies to women they feel they are, and nothing will be done.

As a friend recently told me, “It’s a very dangerous time to be a woman with an opinion.”

—I’m Brianna Wu, And I’m Risking My Life Standing Up To Gamergate | Bustle

It’s possible you’ve seen this, already. If not, read it.

All of us men in the technology space, no matter how small our role, are to blame for what’s happening to Brianna Wu, to Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Randi Harper, and thousands of other women who have had their lives upended by horrible men on the Internet, and the tools that enable their abhorrent behavior.

It’s our job to turn the tools back upon them, and stop them. It’s our job to silence the attacks and abuse. It’s our job to make technology a safe space for everyone.

It’s our job, and we’ve been sleeping on it for the past decade-plus.

“I think you’re going to see a lot of failure in 2015,” says Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley, who sits on Uber’s board of directors. “If you’re a public company worth $3 billion and your stock trades down to $1 billion, you can survive it because you can still issue options to hire new employees, etc.  If it happens when you’re private, though, it becomes immediately harder to hire or to get incremental investment.”

— The Age of Unicorns – Fortune

The vast amounts of money piling into the high-risk world of VC should scare the hell out of you. Especially if you have a pension that’s being invested in it. The need for vast returns is inflating company values, and it’s not sustainable. Something has to give.

While iOS 8 rekindled my interest in self-tracking, the bugs in Health.App held me back. If I was going to make any headway in fitness tracking, I’d have to find another solution—a standalone tracker. Unfortunately for me, most of the fitness trackers on the market are wristbands, which is exactly what I don’t want. I keep a watch on my wrist, and wearing both a watch and a tracker—even on different wrists—seemed like too much. Plus, the majority of the better ones are ugly, better suited for the gym than the wrist of a desk jockey. I could have gotten another FitBit One, but after losing two of them, and with FitBit’s unwillingness to support HealthKit, I wanted another option.

While I thought it over, Federico Viticci turned me on to Jawbone’s app ecosystem. I was intrigued by Jawbone, and even used the Jawbone phone tracker app on my iPhone for a time, but issues with HealthKit made it an exercise in frustration, instead of just exercise. Then, Matt Birchler convinced me to try the Jawbone UP Move. At $50, it’s cheaper than a FitBit One, which is great for such an easily losable device. (In fact, I’m on my second UP Move, having lost the first one inside of a day. Something I did with my first FitBit, too.) It tracks steps and sleep, integrates with a host of fitness apps I use, and it actually looks pretty nice for something that stays clipped to the change pocket on my pants.

The Jawbone UP app

I’ve been using the UP Move for a month, and I’m happy with it. The ecosystem is its greatest strength. Unlike FitBit, which is very self-contained, Jawbone’s software connects with a ton of great apps, and with HealthKit. There’s currently an issue keeping it from writing step data to Healt.App, but sleep tracking works. It also works well with myFItnessPal, my food tracking app of choice. The Jawbone app gives you a Food Score based on the healthiness of meals you eat, and it would be easy for them to only provide it for foods you add within the app. Instead, it also provides the score for meals through myFitnessPal, giving me the power of MFP’s vast food database, and Jawbone’s own nutrition tracking. There’s also the great UP Coffee app, which I use to track caffeine consumption and its effects on sleep. UP Coffee is a little buggy, and has no HealthKit support, but it does the job well enough.

Another great part of the Jawbone software is the Smart Coach. Finally, a fitness tracker is using the data you feed it to make suggestions on behavior. Smart Coach offers up reasonable goals for me to meet, based on my previous activity. These range from going to bed at a reasonable time, to eating a certain amount of fiber in a day, or making a step goal. At first, due to the questionable data in Jawbone’s database from HealthKit, Smart Coach set me up with extremely low goals to reach, but it’s improved in the past month. I’m sure it’ll only get better the more I use it.

The best part of the UP Move, though, is the battery. I had to charge my FitBit weekly, using a clumsy USB dongle. The UP Move uses a standard watch battery, which should last six months according to the company. This is huge. Not having to charge my damn tracker means I don’t have to worry about forgetting it on the cradle, or losing data because I was out too long with a low battery warning. It might be a chore to pop the UP Move out of it’s rubber clip to replace the battery, but I won’t have to worry about that until summer.

Of course, there are a few issues, some of which I touched on above. Like all clip-on wearables, it’s easily losable. I’m already on my second, and I nearly lost its replacement a few days in while leaving home on a weekend walk. For sleep tracking, Jawbone offers an overpriced rubber wristband, which at fifteen dollars, is 30% of the cost of the tracker on its own. As a workaround, I clip it to my watch wristband when I go to sleep. So far, it seems pretty accurate. There’s also some annoying software bugs, including the aforementioned Health.App integration, and issues with displaying graphs. I’m sure these will be ironed out in time. There’s no issues I have with the hardware, except that the lights are awful bright if you trigger them in a dark room.

I’m glad I’ve opted for a dedicated device for fitness tracking over using my phone. It reduces the number of failure points: battery drain, app issues with HealthKit, leaving my phone at my desk. It also does just one thing: tracking my activity. The UP Move doesn’t try to be a smartwatch, vibrating when I get a phone alert, or other nonsense. I can be sure that as long as my UP Move is clipped to my pocket, I’ll never have to worry about Health.App flaking out and losing my data. That alone is worth $50, if I’m dedicated to tracking my health. I’ve already dropped the 10 pounds I gained over the holidays, which is a good start.

Regular readers will know my strong skepticism about wearables. For those who are unaware, here are just a few examples. I remain a skeptic, despite being in the target market for these devices, especially smartwatches. I’m one of the few in my generation of late 20-/early 30-somethings who wears a watch regularly: typically a cheap Casio F91-W, switching to a quartz analog Swiss Army watch on dressier occasions. I should be all over wearable tech, but everything I’ve seen—including the upcoming Apple Watch—has left me cold.

Actually, I’m more lukewarm on Apple Watch, but I can’t afford one.

What I can afford is the most basic, $99 Pebble smartwatch. After spending some time thinking about my skepticism on wearables, especially having never tried one, I thought I should see if my stance is justified. It’s possible that only by using a smartwatch can I find a place for it in my life. So, on my lunch break this past Friday, I walked to the Best Buy near my workplace, and walked out with a Black, base model Pebble.

I didn’t go in blind. I’ve read Stephen Hackett’s thoughts on the Pebble, and while he ultimately decided that “It’s not that wrist notifications aren’t useful… the device itself just isn’t for me.” That’s a risk I’m taking with the Pebble as well. I might discover that it’s right for me functionally, but the product itself isn’t. In just a couple of days of use, I’ve already run into annoying issues that are related to using the Pebble with iOS. They’re not deal breakers, at least not yet.

Right now, I’m just adapting to having a smartwatch. I’ve already had to turn off some (more) notifications, and adjust how my phone handles notifications in the interim. When I first set up the Pebble, I had vibration alerts on my phone, and I would feel it buzz in my pocket before the Pebble buzzed on my wrist. I also was surprised at the strength of the Pebble’s vibrating motor—if the Apple Watch promises to be a “gentle tap on the wrist,” the Pebble is more “involuntary muscle spasm.” Cursory Googling and checking /r/pebble suggests that the vibration strength is partially a function of novelty and the silicon strap.

I have more first impressions of the Pebble as a device, and I’ll share those in a separate piece. As for whether having a smartwatch will change my opinion on their utility? That remains to be seen. There have been moments, even in the first days of use, that reveal the potential of the form factor. I’ve also had moments that reflect the exact frustrations that have worried me and informed my general skepticism of wearables. I’m not making any judgments yet. When I do, I’ll share them here.

““Nobody is expecting to become rich from making odd music,” Herndon concedes. “But when we don’t compensate artists for the work they produce, they are forced to find other means to make a living – which will have consequences for the amount of people making work, the amount of time they have available to experiment, and ultimately, the risks they are prepared to take.””

— Bandwidth: streaming might be the future, but is it an unfair economy that exploits artists? – FACT Magazine: Music News, New Music.

I’ve long maintained that music streaming services are great for everyone except the people who make the music. Every interview on streaming music with musicians confirms this. Holly Herndon makes a great point that I’ve missed: the sort of music that succeeds on streaming services is the sort that can reach critical mass, and that is music which, by nature, is low-risk pop.

If you care about music, read this.