Sisyphe

Are you still on military grade stuff? Laaaaaaame, my bike is made out of space age materials.

The only Apple product I ever had was a 5th gen iPod. I remember having to "sync" it to my iTunes library. The concept of syncing was alien to me at the time, it seemed unnecessarily complicated (and it was!). Of course, I didn't put up with that crap for long so I installed Rockbox on it. That let me copy files directly. It supported .flac and a whole lot of other formats and it ran DOOM and a Gameboy emulator.

This fits my experience as well. Lately I've been listening to music as a main activity, not as background noise. I use my laptop, an external DAC and a pair or nice open back headphones. The whole setup keeps me tied to my couch, I can't go wandering around and doing other stuff, I don't keep my phone in reach, I just lay and listen. I'd say good music deserves the foreground.

You either get it or you don't. Using a dedicated music player feels like treating yourself, whereas using your do-it-all smartphone feels austere. It doesn't matter if you've got a nice phone, or if your music player is an old iPod or an old garbage mp3 player or one of those modern DAPs (which are basically android phones with fancy DACs and huge batteries).

I regret selling my old iPod, I would be modding the shit out of it if I'd still had it right now. But alas, it became "obsolete" the moment I got a smartphone with internet connectivity and YouTube and streaming apps.

...And one last thing™: the click wheel was awesome and it was probably the best input solution for a portable music player ever. It was truly special.

This. Degoogling and using FOSS alternatives can only take you so far. We should drastically reduce smartphone usage. I got a dumbphone so I can be reachable. Outside of work, my smartphone is mostly powered off. I can't realistically get rid of it, as I need a bunch of banking apps, authenticators, Google Maps at times (and no, there's no real alternative to this, everything else sucks). But I only use it when I absolutely need it. It's gathering a lot less data than it used to. I'm striving to be as low value to big tech as possible. Reducing smartphone use has also done wonders for my wellbeing. I read more, I've regained my attention span, I have more time to do stuff I like. Stop scrolling, there's nothing but bullshit on the next screen, you're not missing out on anything. Stop trying to replace one app or site with another. Just let it go, it was never worth it.

Europe is not a single country.

Workin' on it

Wait, so the Festivus pole thing is for real? Do you also do the airing of grievances?

At first it felt wrong to look, but on second thought they're asking for it. Chirping and peacocking around in their colourful plumage and then getting offended when they catch me staring, get outta here!

You owe me a new pair of eyes.

As always I'm fashionably late to the party, tastefully indulging in canned beans and trying not to shit for half a week.

So that cute little lock icon in my WhatsApp my convos meant nothing? :(

Is this the episode where he gets sentenced to 20 years of jumanji alamaraine hopscotch prison?