2022-12-20

homepage/blah/index.html

@@ -16,6 +16,112 @@ ideas' witlessness;
 ideas' witnesses;
 ideas-
 
+2022-12-20
+
+	I started studying Japanese again because WSJ and others from /g/bpg/
+are doing it. Went though ~300 JLPT N5 Anki cards today to refresh the stuff I
+hadn't touched in a while.
+	I caved and have started (ab)using caffeine again as of last Saturday
+(today is Tuesday. Do the math). Sigh...
+
+	Here's a blog post I wrote for tebibyte.media/blog:
+2022-12-15
+
++++
+title = "i hate smart phone"
+date = "2022-12-15"
+description = "some thoughts regarding the twenty first century"
+license = "[UNLICENSE](https://unlicense.org/)"
+
+[taxonomies]
+author = ["DTB"]
+tags = ["opinion", "philosophy"]
++++
+
+	I hate smart phones with a burning passion that has caused my weak
+willed hands to give up three to various bodies of water including a puddle
+outside a mechanic's and a pond to which I walked through the forest. I don't
+regret my actions except that I haven't killed more digital beasts.
+	My own current phone (until it too meets the fate of its brethren) is a
+PINE64 PinePhone running postmarketOS, a Linux distribution intended to keep
+good-enough smart phones running well past the expiration date on the box (or
+on the manufacturer's website). Technically, though I bet most people don't
+care, it's a security hazard to have an out-of-date smart phone; your banking,
+personal, medical information is on there and it doesn't take too long to get
+it out. Look at NSO Group and other wretched sub-scum that have evolved out of
+leech law enforcement's taxpayer-funded searches of people's smart devices,
+that made money because their product was good, because they could take the
+data out of your cell phone like the mind flayer sucks at your brain, like Coca
+Cola through a straw. Who even needs a crime scene indexed when you've Googled
+"How do I kill my rapist?", when GPS and cell tower logs show you were the only
+one at the scene of the crime, and when your slow descent into hell is
+chronicled in your Camera Roll, and when Samsung stopped updating your phone a
+year ago so all the police need to do is plug the black mirror into their
+stylish plastic suitcase? The journalist documenting the dictatorship is
+booking an airplane trip into a death trap if they forgot to make sure the
+little version number in a menu in a menu in an app in the bottom right corner
+of their home screen is high enough. I'm happy with postmarketOS's very regular
+updates which are for now preventing my pocket gizmo's eternal submersion.
+	Why the hell are we keeping all our shit on a piece of glass? I
+wouldn't trust my best friend with my nudes, why am I dumping them into a
+device someone else made that I don't understand? What happened to paper? What
+happened to Polaroids, to CDs, to e-mail and hard copies and for the love of
+Allah what happened to cash? The PinePhone is slightly better for this. I can
+call a dude that works on my phone's operating system ("Who are you? How did
+you get this number?") and ask any questions I want ("It's 3:00 AM. I'm turning
+my phone off.") or post in a forum and usually get an answer about what's safe
+and what features will turn me into a gecko (usually Find My, sometimes
+Auto Rotate). I don't even know how normal people deal with bugs in the system
+or ghosts in the machine. I asked a friend. "Usually I just ask you." When you
+run the "normal" phone operating systems, Android or iOS, you can't run your
+own apps, which doesn't matter if all you do is TikTok and Instagram but I like
+to solve my own problems which I'm forbidden to do unless I spend $2000 on a
+MacBook and $100 on an Xcode license. That's iOS. Android development is free
+but so godawfully slow and painful that I would probably rather be waterboarded
+by someone in a clown costume, and even though you can run your own apps on
+there you still can't take control of your phone by becoming system
+administrator like on a normal Linux or Windows installation. You have to
+"jailbreak" (iOS) or "root" (Android) your phone to have full control over it.
+Why am I paying for a jail? Why am I storing all my stuff in a prison? Again,
+postmarketOS is yours to control from the outset, not hiding any functionality
+behind a subscription or preventing you from using your device however you want
+(for better or for worse). postmarketOS supports full disk encryption with
+Linux Unified Key Setup, the cutting edge of the file security field. It's very
+nice.
+	But phones still suck, even my PinePhone, which is the best one I've
+found. "There's an app for that" but it isn't available for my phone and no I
+cannot fucking download your app, Dunkin' Donuts, to get that free coffee every
+Thursday or whatever. God forbid I have to take money out of my savings account
+like I do every once in a while because my shit job has miserable pay. I can
+either use the app my bank publishes (only for Android and iOS, of course) or
+go to an ATM, pay for the privilege, and hope I only have to use it two more
+times that day because my bank limits ATM transactions because they were
+targeted by hackers probably because their phones weren't updated. At this
+point I just keep cash with me which is great except for the places that don't
+take cash and instead take poker chips, ahem, numbers on a piece of plastic.
+In this day and age having no social media means having no friends, which I
+honestly do enjoy after the lengthy withdrawal because it's serene not having
+to check everyone's Instagram story (else miss out on the Next New Thing) or
+Facebook wall (else miss out on the Next New Gathering) or what have you. It is
+for me worth having nothing to miss in exchange for never having that gnawing
+fear of missing. I still have my phone number and on paper I have plenty of
+friends in person who never call, never e-mail, never stop by, because they've
+forgotten what life is like outside the app. Which I can live with, which is
+unreasonable for any non-crazy person. But forgoing this rotten post-Capitalist
+world of ad-soaked shitware takes a financial toll. How do you live on minimum
+wage? Discounts. Download the Dunkin' Donuts app. Download the Starbucks app.
+Even a god damn Home Depot app. I'm a Luddite for rejecting the last ten years
+of technology? They say not having Android or iOS is self-torture but even
+spending a little more of the little I have and taking a little more time of my
+little left to engage with the analog pleasures of the world is in my mind much
+more tolerable than the endless thoughtless suffering of the digital era and
+casino-floor news cattle feed and disintegration of person from world. So I
+suppose if I'm broke, I'm broke by choice, but it's a choice I never felt
+comfortable making.
+	Better the screen in the puddle than my head under the water. Reason
+died with the atom bomb.
+
+
 2022-11-29
 
 	I think around the time of the last blah post I quit caffeine. I abused