I had lots of time to play games, but not a lot of money to buy games.

Now it’s the other way round.

If I could bring back anything from back then, it’s boxed PC games that can be resold and traded. Covered a lot of my gaming needs from second hand shops.

Over two hundred phones have been ported to postmarketOS and every person giving it a shot will improve it.

It’s not that cut and dried.

A look at the postmarketOS devices page reveals:

• “the most supported devices, maintained by at least 2 people and have the functions you expect from the device running its normal OS, such as calling on a phone, working audio, and a functional UI” (aka what you need a phone to be); Device count: 5, not a single one of them the kind I can go into a regular phone shop and buy

• "Devices that have had a lot of work put into them, where regressions are actively fixed, and the port is overall in a pretty good shape (read: your experience will likely be bumpy and not overly smooth); Device count: 28, largely older devices (pre-2018, so again not something I can just go and buy, and exotics like above; There is a lot of orange in the features table)

The rest is under “Testing”, and the best summary of that status I can find is “All the devices in this table can at least boot postmarketOS. To monitor boot progress, you must be able to receive output from the screen, a network adapter, or a serial port”. So there is a total of 33 devices right now, largely exotics and older devices, that you could reasonably use with postmarketOS for any purpose other than testing and tinkering.

I am what you’d call ‘tech interested’. I tinker with Arduinos and solder electronics as part of my hobby. I do a smidgen of self-hosting and similar, though I am not nearly as far into the weeds as many people, and it’s not my key interest or activity. The thing about a phone is, I need it to work, because I need it for work. I don’t have time or compunction to go through the process of installing an OS the manufacturer doesn’t want me to install. I don’t have time to deal with a non-polished UX or capricious apps that need workarounds to install on a ‘non-standard’ OS (for lack of a better term). I know that’s not the fault of the OS, but a choice made by phone manufacturers and app developers, but that doesn’t make it any less real or an issue for me.

I can get the battery replaced on my phone for a fraction of the money it would cost me to buy a new phone. So I have to take it in to the shop for an hour. Big deal. I can do that once every few years. And I can still use wired headphones with my phone even though it doesn’t have a headphone jack. Sheesh, I wonder how that works.

The biggest anti-consumer practice to make your device lifespan as short as possible is whatever software update practices the manufacturer has. Annual major versions increase hardware requirements - I can tell every day how my 5 year old phone is getting long in the tooth. Lack of long-term software support is another way to make sure the average user buys a new device well before the old device has reached end of life.

No country exists in isolation. Why wouldn’t it be fine to discuss events in another country even if you don’t have a direct stake in it?

sew

Pronounced exactly the same as sow, if you mean the right sow and not the other sow, which is spelled the same but pronounced differently.

More recently, probably a wireless handheld controller for my model railway.

Model railway is a hobby for people with lots of time, space, and money. I generally fall short on two of those, although lately there is a bit more disposable income to go around. Last year I was able to splurge on the control setup that I always wanted, which is a stationary controller - basically you sit at a table and control the trains with two rotary controllers and a touchscreen for a number of other things. Looks a bit like this.

But since it’s stationary and my layout is fairly big, sometimes it can be a bit cumbersome to test something that’s five metres away. So I decided to also splurge on the matching wireless handheld controller, an Android-based device with another rotary controller and the ability to control almost all aspects of the stationary device.

Did I need it? Hell no. If I had waited a few more months, a perfectly suitable free smartphone app would have been available that I could have used for the purposes intended. But am I loving it? Fuck yes. Irresponsible to boot, but no regrets, not for one second.

Railway and train modellers, of all scales. To their credit, a fair fee people are becoming more open, but especially modelling clubs are often run by old white men with questionable politics and problematic behaviours. They will sneer at anything that’s not steam, or at people who run modern instead of vintage trains, or who don’t get a train model exactly right the way the original ran that one time in the mid 50s from Bumfuck, Idaho to the middle of nowhere. They have little patience for newbies who might not have internalised all the lingo, or who might need something explained in simple English. If you build something that is not an exact replica of a real world location, they’ll say you’re not doing model railway, but merely toy trains. And then these same people go and wonder why they can’t attract new people to the hobby.

I don’t have a lot of comparisons to dubs in other languages, but most german dubs I know are average at best. The biggest problem is that they often pick voice actors who just don’t suit the character or the original actor. The stilted reading/talking is another issue, which is also often present in original German productions.

As an older metalhead, this makes me a bit sad, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. The metal scene I joined in the early 90s did have its tolerance problems specifically against other music genres, but I never knew it as particularly gatekeepy, at least the circles I socialised with and the concerts and festivals I went to. There were some people who though you weren’t a real metal fan if you didn’t exclusively listen to metal, but they were a minority. Nobody had a problem with me not particularly liking Slayer or Motörhead, and there was no requirement to have long hair and be covered in leather and/or band patches.

You need some salsa for that chip on your shoulder, or is there another reason why you’re getting so personal?

Don’t answer. I don’t actually care.

This is a way in which you can discredit any attempt at proposing correct or logical language use. Yes, language changes. Your assertions are still debatable. English is ambiguous enough as is. It’s not ‘showing ads’ to propose some form of consistent or logical usage of words. I’m happy to count that as a petty hill I’m willing to die on.

And since we’re being petty, it’s either ‘grammatical rule’, or ‘Grammar rule’.

It’s simple though. If you can count it, it’s fewer. If not, it’s less.

Fewer people. Less noise.

Here’s my thing about ‘Ten’.

I love the first half of this album. It’s some of the best music I know in the genre. High energy, catchy, passionate. But somehow, the second half feels to me like the band ran out of ideas and gas. After ‘Jeremy’ it’s all pretty average, low-energy stuff, with the exception of ‘Garden’.

Dream Theater “Awake” (1994). Extraordinary from the first to the last note. 75 minutes of phenomenal prog metal. They’ve made good and great albums before and after, but they never excelled the pure class and artistry displayed on this album.

Bruce Dickinson “The Chemical Wedding”. I never liked Iron Maiden much, but Dickinson’s solo stuff is a different class. Fresh, creative, varied, energetic. Most of his solo albums are well worth the listen, but “Chemical Wedding” stands out for its high variety and creativity.

Many people suffer from impostor syndrome to a degree. Many people make mistakes even when it comes to subject matters they are very familiar with. Everyone has technical problems every now and then - that’s outside of your control. Technology is finicky and increasingly shit.

You’ll always get people who think they know better than you, or could do something better than you. But they aren’t. You are. You got where you are through your work and experience. As long you feel that you’re prepared to the best of your ability and knowledge, I think your conscience can be clear.

You will never have everyone you meet like you. Some people are just basic shitheads, and some of them will write reviews like that precisely to gaslight you into doubting yourself and your abilities. They do it for kicks. If 95% of your reviews are positive, you’re in a good place.

These people never walk back their bullshit. When called out on it, they will double down. When proven wrong, they will change the topic. But they need to be seen as strong, and right. Admitting that you’re wrong or even apologising is neither - it’s weak, and it can create doubt. If they were wrong about this, then what else are they wrong about?

They radicalise their followers with lies and falsehoods, and they can only keep that up if they are not seen as being wrong about what they say. They spread their lies with confidence and zeal, and if reality disagrees, then reality is wrong.

Is there anything else you’d like to insinuate I said that I didn’t actually say?

But do you have to?

For me, knowing that the artist is a terrible person ruins the art for me, or at least compromises it to the point where I don’t feel comfortable in my skin continuing to peruse it. And that even if I wouldn’t be buying anything new or otherwise be giving the artist money.

Take as an example Jon Schaffer, head of metal bad Iced Earth, which I liked quite a bit in the past. Later it became clear that he is at least problematic, and once he was identified as having participated in the January 6 riots, that was the end of it. I still own older Iced Earth CDs, but I can’t listen to them any more.

Or Joss Whedon, whose work I used to love, and I own a lot of DVDs of his stuff. But watching it now knowing what he’s done particularly to many women he worked with just seriously hinders my enjoyment of what I once really liked.

The count of women accusing Neil Gaiman of sexual assault is now up to five.

Books:

Wool/Shift/Dust by Hugh Howey. A well written, immersive post apocalyptic fiction that has a satisfying conclusion.

The Passage/The Twelve/The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin. Pretty much the same as above.

The Century Trilogy by Ken Follett. A huge read that spans almost a century (from just prior WW1 to the late 20th century), accompanying the same families from several different countries and embedding them into significant world events of the 20th century. Really well written and enjoyable.