I have a shower as warm as I can to open all my pores and clean them out.

Then I slam the water all the way to the coldest possible and force myself to stay under it for two minutes.

That’s a huge wake-up call.

I’d reward you with an elephant ear sandwich for this joke, but I’m fresh out of those giant buns.

That’s the one!

I found an '80s show that I somehow completely missed: “Sledge Hammer!” I don’t know how I missed this show, but I’ve binged it now.

I genuinely did not know that! 😵

This reminds me of a similar factoid.

Did you know that if you took the entire Pacific salmon catch and laid it out nose to tail across the Sahara desert…

…the stench would be overpowering!

A bit of Korean and Chinese punk. A smattering of Chinese grunge. Some Malaysian Buddhist music. Some Taiwanese Buddhist death metal (no, really!).

No. Hot dogs are repulsive.

… how is a free service supposed to be sustained?

That seems to me to be a powerful argument against “free” services. Because there’s no such thing. Not even:

Free only works if it’s offline/self-hosted and open source IMO.

“Self-hosted” isn’t free. You have to pay for the hosting site one way or another, even if it’s on your property. (Those bandwidth fees? That’s payment.)

I’ll bring an example of a subscription service that still hasn’t enshittified: Mullvad VPN. It’s still a fiver a month and you can’t pay extra for extra functionality. It just always costs the same.

What are the trade-offs associated with it? It was made in 2009. Fifteen years later it hasn’t changed its prices, even as everything around it (including its network fees) has increased? Colour me a little … dubious.

Have you considered, then, the possibility that you should be on something?

Today. I rolled a beer can on the first try onto the highest-payback patch on a mat. I won a six-pack.

OK, not really impressive, but I did surprise a few people around me who never landed on any payback patches after three tries each.

Subscription models are the thin end of the wedge of enshittification.

This you know: the years travel fast, and time after time I done the tell. But this ain’t onebody’s tell. It’s the tell of us all, and you’ve got to listen it and to 'member, 'cause what you hears today you got to tell the newborn tomorrow. I’s looking behind us now into history back.

Imagine a world of television. No streaming, mind. Broadcast television. You had to orient your day around what you wanted to watch, if it was even possible. Or you had to buy expensive equipment to use terrible UIs to try and make an inferior copy of what you wanted to watch at a given time.

We weren’t animals of course. We had this spiffy thing called “cable”. With a cable package you could get a dozen channels clearly instead of maybe two clear ones and a half-dozen more fuzzy ones via the antennae. Life was great! But … it was about to get better. Because the cable companies had cooked up…

PREMIUM CABLE!

And the centrepiece of premium cable was specialty channels, the most popular of which were the movie ones! Just think! You could get movies in their entirety, not hacked and slashed for television audiences. Not torn apart limb from limb by commercial inserts. You’d watch a movie from beginning to end, non-stop, and could do this 24 hours a day, if you liked, all for the price of seeing two movies in theatres per month. (And back then theatres were dirt cheap by comparison to today!)

O frabjous joy!

No commercials. You paid a subscription for these channels, so no commercials.

And then the commercials started.

It started off sanely enough. A scattering of “hand-selected” commercials between movies/episodes/whatever. (And, weirdly, despite the cable companies having opened a new stream of revenue, prices edged up a bit for the premium channels.) Then it was 10-15 minutes of solid commercials between movies/episodes/whatever and they didn’t seem too discriminating in what they advertised. Almost as if it was “anybody who paid” instead of “hand-selected”.

Then, in the more traditionally TV-oriented fare, with episodes, rather than full movies. the specialty channels started putting commercials during the episodes.

Salami tactics. Slice by slice. Prices edged up. Services got worse. And ads infested everything. Until today you can’t even check out what’s showing without being flooded with ads.

Subscription models are not a bulwark against ads.

Same here. I’ve rolled back hard on most software. I use only the stuff I need for work, plus my web browser at home (and even that I carefully choose which web sites I go to because web software is terrible) plus a small handful of apps on my phone (document readers and a shopping app, mainly). Where most people do, say, solo RP with “wikis” and “structured editors” and whatnot, I patiently write with a fountain pen in a physical book.

And ever since I started this detechification of my life, I’ve found that I enjoy my life more. There just seems to be something in me that is in intrinsic opposition to computers.

Nah, it’s been reliability at the core of my distaste for it. Since the '80s.

My life could in general be improved by the removal of software, not by the addition of more.

I’ve seen people doing it with the vertical brush. They have to meticulously move one character at a time, but for calligraphy this is normal anyway.

I’ll see what I can find.

(And yes, brush pens are awesome.)

Is there no such thing as “General Delivery” any longer?

I gave a muskrat pelt that I smuggled into China from Canada to my personal trainer last week.

A friend helps you move. A true friend helps you move the body.

I’m not sure where that data point fits in your model.

You might want to give brush calligraphy a try. It’s done with the brush held vertically so it doesn’t really matter if left- or right-handed in use. You’ll need practice to get nice-looking English writing with brushes, but once done it looks rather spiffy.