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10/8/26

Well, clearly my prediction of more regular updates didn't pan out. One of the problems with ADHD is often huge amounts of difficulty in getting back into a habit (or getting out of one) when it gets disrupted. I've been keeping a pretty comprehensive habit tracker - hard copy on paper of course - and almost all of the things I want to do regularly every day have suffered disasterously since my little holiday.
I'm slowly building it up again, but trying to go at the full speed I was doing 6 weeks ago is like trying to start a car in 3rd gear. All this to say, if anyone reading this is not a bot, it will probably be still some time before I'm actively updating here again.

19/8/26

I've started playing Pokémon for the first time recently. Yeah, I know - I'm very late to the party. I was one of those insufferable kids that automatically hated anything that was popular.
I started with Red on an emulator on my computer, just to see if it clicked with me before buying a copy. I got as far as beating the first gym. Then, while I was away, I visited a secondhand game store and I found a copy of pokémon blue. As you'd expect, it was a bit overpriced, but I bought it anyway. A few things got me across the line: even though expensive, it was on the lower end of what I've seen on eBay, I like supporting brick and mortar stores, I'm suss about getting a repro cart as they can be dicey, and I just wanted something else to play on my Gameboy.
I will say it's got my interest, and I'm engaged. But having played Blue for a bit longer now, I can confidently say it's not going to make it into my top 10 games any time soon, and I've gotten close a few times to getting bored with it. I feel like, if I had grown up with it, I might have loved it, but the formative games I played just seemed to have shaped my tastes in a different direction.

Saw this at the airport on the way back. Reckon I want it.

16/8/26

Hopefully I'll be back to updating a bit more regularly after my week away.
While visiting my Mum, I went through some old books she had on the shelf. One was a German songbook from 1936 that had belonged to my Oma, from the "Bund Deutscher Mädel", or League of German Girls, a wing of the Hitler Youth.
I didn't get a picture of the book. I don't know if that's for better or worse. As you'd expect, there was a lot of Nazi stuff in there - every three or four pages had a picture of an eagle or an elaborately decorated Swastika accompanied by a quote by Hitler or one of those chuds that said a lot of things the nazis love.
Now it's no great revelation that the far right and fascists can't do culture or art. They suck at it. They don't get it. But what strikes me is that modern far right movements like MAGA are worse at it even than the nazis were. Can you even imagine MAGA coming up with a social organization for girls for them to hang out and just sing songs? Bear in mind, these were not all nationalistic propoganda songs (some of them were for sure, but by far not all). A lot of them were just some pleasant dross about how lovely it is to go walking through the forest or whatever. A lot of the songs were old favourites, but many were written for this book.
The 'art' in question in this book was not exactly what you'd call sophisticated, but it's still leagues above the festering garbage produced by the likes of the Daily Wire. It actually seems vaguely familiar with the reasons why people like art and culture and want to engage with it. They actually seemed to know that you can't just make literally everything a didactic pastiche of culture war issues ham fistedly smooshed together. Sometimes you just need some vapid, saccherine tripe as well.
OK, girls choirs are maybe not in fashion now. But try substituting it for anything of a modern equivalent. Can you even imagine 'Turning Point USA' starting up a social club for young people to get together and make cosplay costumes for example?

In lieu of a nazi book, here's a picture of a cuckoo clock I helped my mum fix (the chain had come off).

10/8/26

I'm finding myself with a lot of downtime on my week away. It's really driving home the point you will often hear about digital detoxing, or generally getting rid of your smart phone, that simply even having a smart device accessible should be avoided if possible, even if it is turned off or crippled.
Unfortunately I need to still use a banking app, and occasionally an authenticator or a parking app. I've uninstalled everything else from the phone and put the SIM in my dumb phone, but I need to have the Smartphone with me.
Now I've finished Donkey Kong Land, I only really have my book, the Canterbury Tales, for entertainment, and I can get burned out on that pretty quickly. As a result I've installed a browser on my phone about three times now, only to delete it again shortly afterwards when I came to my senses.
The thing is, while you can train an improve it to some degree, willpower is more like a finite resource than it is like a muscle you can strengthen. If you keep exposing yourself to temptation, it actually gets harder, not easier, to resist.
Currently, instead of letting my phone distract me, I've decided to watch TV the old school way - turn it on, and simply see what is on one of the free to air channels. Currently I'm watching some schlocky 80s movie called Atlantis Inferno. I've never heard of it, and I probably never would have if I hadn't started channel surfing.
I recommend trying it if you're trying to do any kind of digital detox. Instead of letting an algorithm feed you slop or getting overwhelm and decision fatigue from the choice of literally everything that has ever been made, just turn on the TV like its 1993 and see what's on. I was surprised how relaxing and refreshing it was.
Not the movie itself. It's... something. Just the act of watching free to air TV again.

9/8/26

I'm on holiday for a week at the moment, and I don't have a good way to upload photos, so just sticking with text for now.
I brought my Gameboy with me as something to do while waiting for trains or whatever. It's been kind of fun and cool to use it as intended - out and about. So far I've really only ever used it at home. I only brought one game with me, thinking it would be enough - Donkey Kong Land. I lost the original copy that Igot with my gameboy, and this is one I bought on ebay a year or two ago.
Anyway, two days in and I've finished the game already. The first and last time I played this was 30 years ago. I have distinct memories of squinting at the blurry screen, illuminated by a crummy third part magnifying attachment with dim inbuilt lights, playing it an night before bed when I was 12. It seemed like a much harder and longer game back then.
I got 100% this time - a feat I thought too tedious and frustrating back in the day, but which felt relatively trivial now (apart from a handful of secrets I had to consult a guide for). In particular, I remember as a kid having a ridiculous amount of trouble with one of the cloud levels in world three - the one where you had to travel via moving platforms that changed direction when you jumped on them. One time, after getting frustrated by dying too often, I started mucking about, and jumped into a pit right at the start of the level deliberately - only to find I immediately won the level! Whether it was a bug or a secret, I don't know, but there was an exit hidden out of sight at the bottom of the screen. At the time I just took that as a win and moved on.
This time I just won the level properly, including all the secrets. It's kind of satisfying to think I've finished something I started all that time ago. I guess I'm just better at games now. Also, the fact I was playing under much better lighting conditions helped tremendously.
It was also interesting to note that I immediately recognised all the music, and was humming along instantly even though I hadn't heard the tracks in three decades. The human mind is a weird thing.

7/8/26

I highly recommend everybody get a dumb phone. I think we all instinctively know - and especially if you're the kind of person to browse 90s style websites on neocities - that smartphones are not good for us. More and more studies are showing this. You only need to search for 'harmful effects of smartphones', and even in today's enshittified world of internet search you'll get pages of results.
Of course, it has been deliberately made as hard as possible to get away from them. Nonetheless, I'm giving it a red-hot go. For the third or fourth time.
I am using the Light Phone II. I bought it some years ago, and switched to it a few times before slowly gravitating back to my Smartphone. The main reasons were for those annoying apps we all need to have these days to live, such as bank apps, authenticators, parking apps, work sign on apps and messenger apps.
The last one is less of an issue for me - I'm allergic to social media anyway, and have generally relied on SMS and email since 2002. But a few of my hobbies and clubs expect me to communicate via whatsapp or some other stupid specialised app, so I'm not entirely immune.
However, despite all these challenges, I seem to be having more success now than in the past. The solution is still kind of dumb and annoying - I just have to keep my old smartphone with me, just connecting to the internet via wi-fi and hotspots. In the past I would pretty soon find myself back on the internet, using my dumbphone as a hotspot, and doomscrolling on my smartphone like always.
This time, however, I've deleted everything I can doomscroll on. I don't even have a browser. Of course I'd like to be able to do away with the smartphone altogether, but until there's legislation to prevent having to run every aspect of your life through an app, I really don't see another way.
And as for the dumbphone itself? Well, on paper it's everything I want. It does phone calls and SMS. It can act as a hotspot, and even as a music and podcast player. It uses an e-ink screen, which I think is a very cool touch, as it's much better on the eyes. But given that the whole point is not to have to look at it all the time, that point might be moot.
In reality though... eh, I dunno. It's very slow and unresponsive, texting is inaccurate, slow and frustrating, bluetooth is dicey, and the ui and tools are all awkward and cumbersome to use. Sure, you might say, but doesn't that further de-incentivise you from constantly using it? Well, I might have said the same thing before trying it for a while. But now my opinion is that a dumbphone should be as frictionless as possible. It's already missing all the toxic, addictive stuff that keeps people glued to phones anyway. I'd prefer it if, when I need to use it, I can get it out, quickly do what I need to, and then put it away and forget about it. But instead I'm spending ages trying to write texts, reconnect bluetooth, navigate menus, find tracks I want to play and generally fight it every step of the way.
That said, I'm going to try to stick with it. As you might guess from my previous post, I'm going to be on the lookout for an mp3 player which will alleviate some of the problems. These annoyances are not enough to make me abandon what I think is a healthy and good thing to do, and I'd rather not buy a different dumbphone, adding to e-waste and possibly getting something with just as many issues.

6/8/26

In my ongoing attempt to purge smart devices from my life, I got this little mp3 player.
The market for these things is very small, as you mnight expect, because most people just use their phones. The only ones available seem to be ludicrously expensive audiophile quality players, overpriced 20 year old battered devices that probably don't work, an endless parade of iPods, and a handful of cheap nasty chinese made pieces of rubbish.
Being a lifelong PC guy, using an iPod would have the same effect on me as opening the ark of the covenant, so I got one of the chinese made things. It was dirt cheap, and I really just wanted to see if it would work with my lifestyle.
Well, let me say, I'm never getting my $19 back.
For starters the battery life is utterly laughable. Navigating it is unintuitive and frustrating, you can't fast forward or rewind, and it doesn't remember where you were in a track if you turn it off and on. If you listen a lot of podcasts like I do, then the combination of all of these is hair-pullingly aggravating.
To top it off, after about a day of using it, it suddenly started corrupting every track you put on it.
I don't really have much of a point here, just thought I'd share. And maybe serve as a cautionary tale.

5/8/26

I saw these two - hatches? panels? manholes? - today about 20 metres apart. They cover telephone cables. One has the old Australian Telecom logo, the other has the newer Telstra logo. I'm not sure when the precise date was that the old one was completely phased out, but the old one would not be much newer than 1997.
I don't know why, but seeing them is always kind of interesting to me. This slab of concrete has been sitting there, getting walked over, for 30 years or more, representing a publicly owned amenity that no longer exists, while still performing its job.
The street around it has almost certainly changed dramatically in that time, but it somehow survived.
Of course the public lost an important public service, and Telstra is just another slimy, bloated, inefficient, privately owned capitalistic corporation now. But at least John Howard had to make a deal to restrict women's reproductive rights in order to get the privatisation through. Yay.

2/8/26

My better half told me yesterday about a pig on the internet that when you feed it, it makes a funny 'nomnom' face. Obviously she was talking about some tiktok video or youtube short or something like that. But if you had said that to somebody ten years ago, they would have assumed you were talking about some flash game or otherwise similar.
In all the ways the internet has gotten worse, one which is often overlooked is that it has become much less interactive. It's gone from something to participate in to something that shovels you slop for you to mindlessly consume.
A bit hypocritical, I know, given I don't have any kind of guestbook or even traffic counter on my website, but it's a work in progress!

This is a funny little house the previous owners of my property had built for unknown reasons. We raised some ducks in it at one stage, and now it has firewood in it to dry out that is too big for me to carry to the wood shed.

1/8/26

I've been using two cameras for these photos on this feed here. I've recently switched back to a dumbphone, which I may talk about soon, and while I still keep my old smartphone around for authenticator apps and other annoying necessities, I'm trying to use it for as little as possible, and getting dedicated devices for as many things as I can.
As such, I've been using my Sony Cybershot from 2003, which I picked up at an op shop some time ago, and my Canon Ixus 115 HS, which I bought new in 2011.
The Sony is a struggle to use, and clearly inferior to the 8 year younger Canon. But it does lend the kind of y2k lo-fi that suits what I'm going for on this website, which is why I bought it in the first place.
I bought the Canon for using on a holiday to Europe in 2011. I wanted something small that I could just whip out, take a quick snap, and then go back to just enjoying my time. I did a lot of research before buying this one. Once I'd narrowed it down to a price range and set of features I wanted, I remember still being left with a huge field of options. Even though I didn't admit it to myself at the time, I ultimately chose this camera because I thought it looked good.
I actually still think it looks good, and even though it's 15 years old and a bit battered, I still get a little bit of joy just from looking at it. And honestly, its photo quality is still good enough for 2026 use.
I used each camera to take a picture of the other. In sunlight I don't think there's a massive difference between their picture quality, except that the Cybershot wanted a really slow shutter speed and it was hard to hold it steady. In other conditions, the Canon very much shows its superiority.

31/7/26

I hate philosophy.
Well, let's soften and clarify that a bit. I tend to find most things that people refer to as 'philosophy' tedious and exhasperating. And to be clear, I studied philosophy at university level for 3 years. When I was younger I had oh so deep, meaningful adolescent thoughts and I solved all the world's problems, and I thought studying philosophy would be right up my alley. I have very much changed my mind on that.
Everybody philosophises. We have a dozens of philosophical thoughts every day. Every opinion or thought experiment that wafts through our heads is a kind of philosophy, fundamentally no different than the ideas of Kant, Descartes or Socrates. We just don't bother to call it philosophy. I just have a problem when some old white guy who takes himself too seriously has a brain fart into a 1000 page book, and because it's dense, abstract and hard to apply to real life we elevate it from simple idea or opinion to 'philosophy', and we have to refer to the big boy thinker in hushed reverential tones every time we feel like mulling over the idea.

I think these flowers are called 'Spring Snowflake'. Yet another slightly early flower in my ~~wilderness~~ garden that reminds me we're on the downward slope of winter.

30/7/26

I'm going to try something new for dealing with my issues. It seems laughably obvious, but I'm actually going to try processing them instead of avoiding them. Somebody on some podcast or video essay I listened to mentioned this recently, and it's almost embarassing that I've made it to 42 without this occurring to me. Basically, my rejection sensitive dysphoria makes any mildly uncomfortable intereaction with another human being feel like I'm being burned with fire. No doubt if I had been sitting with the discomfort and coming to terms with it my whole life instead of making a stupid noise to distract myself from it and immediately try to think of something else I would not have as much social anxiety as I do.
The only problem is: how? The only alternative I know to avoidance is rumination, which I'm told by reliable sources is not healthy either.

Anyway, here's a picture of some clouds reflected in a building near where I work. Didn't realise until I got home that the camera focussed on the plants in the foreground!

29/7/26

I wrote a little while ago in the writings section of this site about how computers seem to be like dogs, in that they just seem to like some people and dislike others for no discernable reason.
Well, I don't know what animal networks are like, but they have a very weird attitude to me.
I have a little LAN set up in my vintage computer room, which also supplies internet to the various computers that can handle it with the help of a wireless AP/client router. It's a bit of a hodge-podge setup which could definitely be simplified, but I like it the way it is. If I leave it alone, it's stable and reliable and works just how I want it to. But the moment I change anything, it sulks and refuses to work until I've unplugged and replugged every cable, reset and rebooted the client router, set up the network software on each computer, and done each of these steps multiple times. Most of the time the final setup is functionally identical to before I made the change. Recently for example I had to go through this whole rigamarole because of the new 4G router I got for my house - not even part of this network. It was just feeding internet to the client router. I also had to do all this when I swapped my network switch for a different one.
I've had similar problems with services like dropbox and syncthing, the bluetooth between my phone and my car, screen casting, and of course back in the day with dial up internet.
The occasional motherboard does this to me too - when first testing it, or after making a minor hardware change, it refuses to boot until I've unplugged, replugged and switched sockets for every stick of ram, storage device, expansion card and peripheral, yet still end up with the same configuration I started with but now it somehow works.

Recently there was a jazz festival near where I work. The musicians still haven't come to retrieve their music stands.

28/7/26

A kid in my primary school called James told me that saved games on gameboys were stored on the battery. This was in the original Gameboy Classic era, when flash memory or other kinds of permanent storage were prohobitively expensive, and many games didn't have any way to save - you just had to start from scratch every time you turned it on. A handful though, such as Link's Awakening, Pokemon and Donkey Kong Land, had some magical way of keeping your progress even when you turned the console off.
I didn't believe James - it sounded stupid, and he was a famous liar. But he was closer to the truth than I suspected. I assume someone had told him that batteries were involved in save games, and he kind of mangled the explanation.
Probably my best layman's way of explaining it - the explanation I would give to my 12 year old self if I went back in time (because that's definitely the kind of information I would prioritise in such a situataion) - is that the cartridge itself has a little battery in it. But rather than the save information being somehow magically stored on the battery itself, it's just there to give the game a tiny bit of power when the console is off to keep your game from being wiped. It's almost like it keeps playing while it's turned off.
Here is a picture of my portable memory pack for my Gameboy that I bought off eBay recently, clipped cool 90s style to my belt. Imagine all the games you could save on this thing!

27/7/26

In our modern capitalist dystopia, paying more for basic kitchen appliances is a total grift. More money does not seem to equate for better quality or reliability, just more useless gimmicks. We payed what seemed like premium prices for this toaster and kettle combo. The toaster toasts unevenly and inconsistently, but has a bunch of pointless buttons for features I don't need. The kettle is ok I guess, except I suspect it's cutting off a couple of degrees shy of 100 degrees, despite the slider I've never had the need to move away from maximum. And when it's done it makes a ding that sounds exactly like the 'fasten your seatbelt' chime on an aeroplane.
They both feel like they'll unexpectedly die any day.
My advice, just get the cheapest toaster or kettle you can find, preferably secondhand - the older the better. They'll probably be more reliable than anything that's supposedly 'premium'.

26/7/26

Why are adults so weird about those stupid Gen Alpha sayings like 6-7? They're literally stupid nonsense in-jokes like kids have all had forever. In my friend group it was 'gedup 'n doop'n' and 'dyeah, caution!'. The only difference I can see is that these new ones are global and spread by the internet rather than being hyper specific to just a handful of kids. And maybe there's something in that that should be bothering us, rather than focussing on the fact that kids are saying stupid mindless things like they always have.
Here's a photo of one my chickens.

25/7/26

1. Discovery
2. Tron Legacy
3. Homework
4. Alive 2007
5. Human after all
6. Musique vol 1
7. Alive 1997
8. Random Access Memories

Fight me.

24/7/26

Internet at my house is abysmal. I live in a semi-rural area. My rubbish is collected, but mail is not delivered here. I get town water, but I need a septic tank. I get electricity, but need to order gas bottles.
As far as that concerns the internet, I live like a peasant. The latest iteration of the internet here in Australia is the NBN, short for National Broadband Network. I don't get wired broadband to my house, but I'm covered by wireless broadband.
Technically.
I live on a slope, and my house is right in the middle of an approximately 50 metre wide band of shadow where wireless broadband doesn't reach. Naturally I'm not going to get Starlink because screw Elon Musk, so the only option for me is 4G wireless internet.
The router that came with our plan just wasn't cutting the mustard - spotty reception in some parts of our house, and slowdowns if god forbid I wanted to download something while my partner was watching something. So I recently ordered a fancier, more expensive 4G router that was supposed to fix these problems.
Well, it came today and disappointingly the slowdowns are still happening, even though we're using different bands. We seem to be getting better signal though, so I guess that's an improvement.

I took the photos below from a penguin observation spot near where I live, where I stopped in between doing errands like picking up our disappointing router.

23/7/26

It didn't take me long to realise the way I was updating this site is stupid. My little essays I was putting here just felt badly written, because I wasn't putting enough time into them. So I'm going to try to write one a week instead, and put them in the writings section of this site.
I will still try to update this 'feed' section daily, but with much shorter posts about smaller, everyday thoughts. I'm going to aim to post a photo every day as well, which for the time being will be taken with my Sony Cybershot from the mid 2000s because I have it and it works well with my older computers.
Today's picture is not a good start, but maybe it is because the point is not to put up professional quality beautifully artistic photos, but just random spur-of-the moment pics of just what I happened to think is cool.
So yeah, I've basically just reinvented Twitter and Instagram.
Anyway, this picture is of some of the first Wattle blooms of the season. They are a couple of weeks early this year. I always love when the wattles come out, because they remind me that I am over the worst of winter, and it gives some beautiful pops of colour to what has been pretty grey and dreary.
The irony here is that today is about as bitterly cold and windy as it has been all winter, hence the inability of my ancient camera to catch a clear pic of these flowers blowing about.