Apple, You Know That Tino’s…

I was reading Hillel Wayne’s newsletter and he mentioned April Cools’ where instead of posting cringe you try something different. I don’t have an audience so I wouldn’t know but I get quite sentimental in this post which I haven’t done on this blog.

It didn’t start like that but we’re here now so yeah… Enjoy my reminiscing.

My mom shared a video generated by Apple Photos of my big brother Tino over the years from 2013–2020. It was a nice video with lots of memories featuring friends and family. There’s just one problem.

He fucking died in 2012!

I guess it’s because the metadata is all screwed up since the images were added after his death, but it also featured a picture with the fucking memorial program featuring the days he lived and died!

I appreciate the gesture but it’s incredibly weird. It had somber music and ended out in 2020 (lol) with the memorial portraiture. I guess it kinda got it but not really.

I actually like the moments feature but AI has a long way to go before reading the room. One of the first pieces of tech criticism I came across was from the book Technically Incorrect¹ which talks about how algorithms can inadvertently cause harm. One way is with features like this as Eric Meyer finds out as Facebook kept reminding him of his dead daughter jovially as if she were still alive.

The video did kinda bring a tear to my eye. Life goes on but I do miss him at times. I appreciate the time we spent together and loved his charming personality. He was also incredibly cool—much cooler than I am and I’m still around somehow! He was a DJ and worked for Red Bull in college.

He did mess up but before he died he was getting better. The one thing I’m always grateful for is that I managed to spend a week with him before he died. Trevor Noah was on tour in SA and I went to school in Swaziland (now eSwatini) at the time so it wouldn’t be far.

I wondered if I could catch the Joburg show but that’s when I had to be at school. I then realized that Tino lived Cape Town and the show just happened to land right in half term. Sadly, the shows over half term sold out and I had to take a week out of school. My mum was fine with it and my teachers were like whatever.

I took the taxi off campus, hopped on the private shuttle from Mbabane to OR Tambo and flew to Cape Town. There my brother picked me up with his girlfriend in my mom’s Audi A4² with Kendrick Lamar’s song “The Recipe” playing that was incredibly fitting on that summer day.

The next few days were spent checking out UCT, watching him do his DJ work with the huge Red Bull Defender truck, heading to church, being broke to the point where he sold his old BlackBerry and Trevor Noah’s show of course!

I do wish I connected with him that time, but we still had a good time. A few months later, I had to get an ID and asked him how he did it. He gave me a name and I went about it. A few days later, I noticed my mom drive in with some people rather sombre looking saying:

Tino was in a car accident and he…didn’t…make…it.

My heart really sank but we had to fly off to Cape Town to figure shit out accompanied by my Mom’s coworker. Thanks to Red Bull for paying for the flight and hotel (which was incredibly cool and quirky).

Over the next few days we had to piece together what happened and this took us way out of Cape Town into the Western Cape. A bit of mumbling gave us some hope he was still around in some hospital. A cop took is to the scrapyard where we saw the mangled Red Bull Mini Cooper with a blood stained Adidas show on the floor which my brother owned. The cop turned to us and said:

yeah so the person with the shoe died.

Then we went out to the crash site and pieced out what happened.

He was working all week in Port Elizabeth and on his way back his truck was broken into. He didn’t want to continue driving with a truck with a broken window so he hitched a ride with three other women including Candice the driver.

Around 8am with my brother fast asleep they were driving on a road and slightly drifted across the line into a minibus that also drifted and bamb! Tino and Candice died on impact and the other two occupants on the other side were fine.

We did the memorials, brought his body home and did the funeral where he heard about the many lives he touched. Funniest story was this:

During 2007 Gore reNzara³ , Tino was a perfect at Prince Edward. Prefects had a lot of power since everyone else had to listed to them. This included at the DH (dining hall) where the lighties (the Form One’s) had to give the prefects all their meat, remember a super scarce commodity, leaving them with sadza and cabbage. My brother, for some reason, actually returned the chicken which was like WTF!

We then laid him to rest and ate ox tongue, which was fabulous. All this happened in December 2012, narrowly avoiding the tied spot for worst Christmas when my dad died and ahead of the time we spent Christmas in kumusha (the village). We did go to Victoria Falls however as a family since my big sister had to come back from the US. Ironically, my dad died in 2003 as we were going to Vic Falls. I guess we made it this time.

Anyways, this was a really sentimental post. I had planned on making a pithy comment on how tone deaf tech is but I ended up sharing my final moments with Tino. I do hope to be as cool as him someday.