I almost forgot that I started a blog last week. Hmm. Well, let's see if this email thing works!
Some themes & thoughts from this week so far:
I've been enjoying music again. Sometimes I go several weeks without listening to it much or actively, and without fail, going back to it makes me wonder why I let that happen. Some of the tracks and albums I've been listening to:
- BIRDBRAIN - Jamie Paige ft. Kasane Teto and OK Glass
- strobo (album) - Vaundy
- any albums by PASSEPIED, of course (they are my favorite band)
- Malibu (album) - Anderson .Paak
- Pleaser - Wilby
- Straight Line Was A Lie (album) - The Beths (just released this week!)
Some things I did this week:
- Got ready to buy a car. I have financing and stuff in order, just need to find one.
- Went to a drawing meetup. Everybody just drew and chatted in this little cafe; I didn't know any of the people there, but it was still pretty nice.
- Went to work and stuff, I dunno.
Things I've been thinking about or posting about:
- Moving. I want to leave my state (USA), and it sounds hard and overwhelming and I don't want to do it, but I need to anyway.
- The Hobonichi yearly lineup (planners and notebooks, for the unaware) was revealed the other day. There's some cool stuff, cause there always is, but nothing leapt out at me as new and different. A couple of the products look surprisingly cheap. But if the Tragen weren't 80+ USD, and if I didn't already have a perfectly good Hobonichi cover, I'd be snapping up that mustard-colored one for sure.
- Loneliness...I spent an afternoon and evening just suffering and feeling my feelings about how badly I want to have a partner. Maybe I'll talk more about it another time.
- People were wrong on the internet, again! The absolute nerve.
What else...? There's an announcement from Google that they're going to start preventing "sideloading apps" (read: installing software outside of their proprietary app store) on Android if the app developers have not verified their ID with Google. Yikes. This is bad news for anyone who wants, you know, privacy, which is one of the purposes of downloading apps outside Google Play. What does this mean for F-Droid and the FOSS Android app developers? God forbid a college student wants to make an app and give it to some friends to test.
I haven't dug into it a ton, but places like Android Central seem to wholly accept Google's framing about "stopping bad actors" and "malware". I will add no comment on how many apps on the Google Play Store are nothing but spyware and adware.
But yeah, this has no relation at all to the wave of legislation requiring ID for internet content. Nope, this is surely a good-faith effort by Google to stop "shady" apps. I mean, when have they acted against consumers' best interests in the past? ... :-)
It's frustrating, though entirely unsurprising given the increasingly audacious and invasive surveillance that tech corporations are imposing on their users. It's frustrating in part because a big draw for Android was exactly this ability to download whatever apps you want without being limited to one or two choices for each function like you were on iPhones. For a long time, you couldn't change your keyboard app on iPhone, among other basic things like that. When I chose my first or second smartphone, I liked the idea of choices and tinkering with customization, which is why I went for Android. And (again, unsurprising, but still disappointing) now they're wanting to take that away. Like, do you think this is the last privacy incursion they're planning? There's no way.
I'd already been thinking about moving to /e/OS, a de-Google'd operating system. You can find the website for it here. It has a terrible name, because searching "eos" pulls up all sorts of other stuff, like that lip balm company. It's supposed to be good, though, so I'd like to try it. Quitting Google Maps is maybe my only real concern by now...
Antyways. This weekend is Labor Day here in the US, so I have Monday off. Of course, I have to work half a day Saturday, because it's also the close of the month for accounting. Luckily, my job isn't hard, because I'm basically a peon, plus I'll be remote on the overtime day. I'd like my Saturday, but there's nothing to be done about it. And hey, the extra money will be nice.
Edited 2025/9/4 because it turns out Markdown links don't work via email like I expected.