You may have noticed my writing was pretty much non-existent in 2023. In recent months, I have found a new creative outlet in a rediscovered passion: music. Specifically, collecting physical media – vinyl, CDs, and cassettes – and playing music from my collection on live video streams on Twitch.tv.
I also have been playing musical instruments – Irish whistle, Native American flute, and recorder – live on-stream.
Feel free to check out newfangled.live, my new website for this project. Or you can go directly to my Twitch page and follow me there.
My first stream was in September 2023 (on Labor Day) and I have been streaming several times a week since then. It has been an amazing experience so far, and I plan to continue and evolve this endeavor for the foreseeable future.
I may eventually start a blog related to this new project and will make sure to post about it if and when I do.
I recently wrote about the first smartphone I ever owned. But my very first experience with a cell phone was using an Audiovox CDM-4500 or an Audiovox model very similar to it.
I remember when those “Magic Eye” 3D illusions pictures were really popular back in the day (1990s). I never cared for them, though. Because try as I might, I could never see the 3D images.
As of today, BlackBerry has shut down services for their phones running the BBOS and BB10 operating systems, which means they lose most of the core functionality that has allowed them to be usable phones long past their prime.
There are lots of news articles, blog posts, and social media posts about it, so I will try not to get too wordy here. Suffice it to say that I am and always will be a BlackBerry fan, and I dearly miss my beloved physical phone keyboards.
I go through these phases where I try to acquire things that I once had – or always wanted to have – in the past. Even if I got rid of those things for a good reason, even if I felt like parting with them was the right thing to do, I sometimes regret having let those things go. This is probably why – although I will always aspire to be one – I will probably never truly be a so-called minimalist.
