Rose

Games, mostly.

Also, I wrote the 2024 NaNoWriMo novel with it (and did the same in 2017). Can easily fit a daily sprint’s worth of text in memory at once, heh.

I use a few modern add-ons: an SD2IEC drive (lets you use floppy images straight off an SD card) and EasyFlash3 (lets you use cartridge images, including the ability to pack random programs into utility carts).

Everyday tools? Scissors and knives I’ve had at least since 2000. (Fiskars stuff is indestructible)

Computer stuff? My Commodore 64. (Don’t use it daily but pretty regularly, sits in a box in my living room for easy access)

People also don’t type in proper punctuation because our keyboards are stuck in the olden times and most online forum and social media platforms are same old garbage what comes to typography.

I’m an amateur writer, I love it when word processors replace straight quotes (") with proper double quotes based on the language (“like this”, ”kuten näin”, «comme ça») and instead of minus (-) you get actual real dashes—as one does. But good luck implementing this on social media. Even blogware handles this pretty badly, the only way to get proper punctuation is to write the post in a word processor.

I like to solve everyday problems through programming. My primary way of doing it is just Python on Windows right now, but Linux does make programming languages a bit easier to access. (And most of the stuff I write would easily run on Linux too.)

Every time I go “damn, this is more complicated/boring than it needs to be and the manual handling is so unnecessary, I wish I could automate this”, I start making a script.

For example, I’m an amateur photographer, so I have scripts for dealing with photos. One is a photo importer/backup tool, because I didn’t trust the importers in the apps to do it right (Adobe trauma). I’m writing scripts for report purposes. One script I wrote puts all of the photos I have on the map.

I’ve seen Americans start explaining how the geography in Spaghetti Westerns doesn’t make sense, so we in Europe have to go “oh, but you see, the film doesn’t take place in real America, it takes place in America of myth and legend.”

The technology side of generative AI is fine. It’s interesting and promising technology.

The business side sucks and the AI companies just the latest continuation of the tech grift. Trying to squeeze as much money from latest hyped tech, laws or social or environmental impact be damned.

We need legislation to catch up. We also need society to be able to catch up. We can’t let the AI bros continue to foist more “helpful tools” on us, grab the money, and then just watch as it turns out to be damaging in unpredictable ways.

I’m in Finland, in my 40s. I don’t remember much. I think in the early teens we did have lessons in school about sex and reproductive biology. What I do remember is the “real” sex education stuff around 15-16 years of age, that was part of the health education classes, because, well, I think it got inadvertently weird. The physical education / health education teacher we had was retiring that year. To no one’s surprise, the stuff in the textbook was left for us to read on our own. Because “ummm I don’t think I need to cover this, uhhh heh heh, ummm, you kids probably already know about this”. And everyone was, like, thank God we were spared of that.

Next biz bro bestseller: “Leverage the power of your bowels to produce fertiliser that promotes growth”

Heh. When I was a kid, I wanted proper development tools. Turbo Pascal. A relative said they knew where to get a “good deal.” …imagine my surprise when there were no manuals and suspiciously hand-marked floppies. Didn’t have the heart to tell them “you paid money for this?”

(I did later save up money to buy Turbo Pascal 7.0 for DOS. Still proudly displayed on my shelf.)

Ooh! Remember what was the original premise of Google’s PageRank? A site was classified as more valuable if other sites linked to it. …I have no idea exactly what they do nowadays, because clearly search engines have every reason to be suspicious of people linking to other sites.

At least in Finland we had USB cellular data adapters (I belive that’s the full term) back in the 3G/maybe early 4G days. I haven’t checked if they’re still a thing.

(Never had one myself. Got a WiFi dongle instead because the city had a decent municipal WiFi coverage.)

“We” didn’t stop using Firefox. Open source boycotts are complicated because the software is separate from the developers. You can keep using the software even if you disagree with the development organisation.

Mozilla organisation is getting problematic for a whole lot of reasons. My issue with them is that they seem to be in the “more money than they know what to do with it” phase. They’re flush with cash, but it’s not reflecting to the product. If they buy an ad company and plan AI stuff, maybe things aren’t going well.

Problem is, there’s no viable competing organisation. Protest forks of software don’t really work that well unless you can actually guarantee the development support. Compare this to what happened when OpenOfficeOrg successfully moved to LibreOffice - developers saw the old organisation didn’t work, so they made a new one that did.

I remember it so clearly. “Ooh, multiple desktops. It’ll take forever until Windows gets this.” (It was 1996. Newbies should try messing with fvwm. Now that was configurable.)

The bespoke software that runs most of the business world is actually way simpler than a lot of people think.

If you’re a university student and some company hires you on the first year to work on a business analysis system to be used by a major regional retailer, you might be thinking you must be some kind of a wunderkid, but it also just might be because this system really isn’t that complicated, and you had no idea about the average salaries on this field, so they hired you on the cheap.

Native here. I think this is pretty accurate. Politeness is usually tied to other phrasings or modes of speaking, and as an ESL speaker I just think “please” is just a word that gets sprinkled in. In everyday conversations like buying something, it’s kinda more polite to get the thing over with as fast as possible. If you just want a coffee, you don’t need more than “hey” and “thanks” to be nice, right?

That said, it’s definitely not impossible to be explicitly polite: “Ole hyvä”/“Olkaa hyvä” (“[You] (2p. sg./pl.) be kind”) is basically “please” as in “could you do…” or “here you go, have this” or “go ahead and do that” depending on context. “Ole kiltti” (“[You] (2p.sg.) be nice”) is “please” as in “would you be especially kind to do…” But as you can see, these are basically direct orders, it’s “be kind”, not “please be kind”.

Content advisory: boneheaded discussion of suicidal ideation by an armchair psychologist

About a decade ago I was friends with a fellow weird unemployed video game nerd lady who liked books and stuff. Had lots in common. Had fun talking over Xbox games and stuff. Was pretty patient with my depressed stuff. Usually.

But I noticed she was pretty often in open conflict with other people. I’m thinking the reason she didn’t get mad at me because I was following her “rules”. I guess we just agreed to disagree sometimes. Later, I realised I was just doing what I usually did in most social situations, walking on eggshells to not annoy people.

I couldn’t keep up with her even if I had bothered to. She went through like 3 email addresses and 3 blogs and 3 gamertags due to getting hacked and due to the drama. Don’t know, don’t care. Not nominal people numbers.

Dumb story, wasn’t it?

Let me be perfectly honest: If you like AntennaPod, just stick with it, OK? You’ll save a lot of frustrations and headaches.

I used to use AntennaPod and listened to lots of podcasts.

Then one podcast host mentioned some other app, I tried it, and liked its Web interface, even when it didn’t have all of the AntennaPod features. I think it didn’t have “stop playing a podcast at the end of the episode, even if it’s queued”. (I like to queue stuff and listen to them at no particular order. I’m a whimsical girl like that.) Then I think this app got discontinued/went pay only, I can’t remember.

Went with Google Podcasts. It was a pretty limited and janky experience (also no ability to stop at the end of the queued episode), but it did its job and I hoped it’d get better over years. It didn’t. It got discontinued. Google sometimes can’t do a good thing.

I manually migrated my subscriptions to some other app. (As one last hurrah Google then implemented OPML takeout.) Wasn’t happy with this app. Couldn’t help but notice my podcast listening habits were drying up due to all these minor snags. ADHD thing I’m sure.

Then I remembered AntennaPod and how perfect it was and how happy I was using it. I wanted to export OPML from this other app. It had OPML import but no export of any kind. Shit.

So I imported my subs manually again. And screw me if I ever have to do that again. But I’m happy again and that’s what matters. I don’t think I’ll need to migrate again, I’m glad AntennaPod has nice backup features. (Which I already used to move the app from my tablet to my phone.)

First of all, it’s only horizontal tango on very special occasions. Mamba, salsa, go-go, even jitterbug. But tango is special.

Secondly, music during sex is overrated I don’t get why some people do it but whatever you do you I guess

You should research regional and local options! This may not help you specifically, but fun thing about Finland and the other Nordic countries is that we seem to have pretty decent local chains selling stuff. I think the last physical book I ordered from Amazon was a mildly obscure out of print one I couldn’t find elsewhere, about 10 years ago. I think the local used book web store situation has gotten better since. All of my recent new physical book purchases have been via AdLibris (a Swedish store). For ebooks it’s been harder, I think Google Play is the most feasible place nowadays when the Finnish ebook store I used to use recently shut down (luckily they were DRM free). We have a couple of good options for stuff like electronics. Even the hypermarket chains have good web stores if I can’t be bothered to visit them in person.

The fact that the larger the subreddits get more picky they are about posts isn’t a new problem, but it has apparently gotten a lot worse in last few years. Apparently a lot of subreddits now have automoderator rules that just nuke posts based on karma or “contributor quality”, whatever the hell that means.