One of my first purchases when I came to Wisconsin in 2018 was a microwave oven. My apartment didn’t come with a microwave, and while I don’t really like microwaving food, sometimes the convenience of fixing hot food quickly (especially in the winter months) can’t be ignored. In a lot of ways, that purchase drove home to me that I was living on my own in ways that not even the long move from Colorado did, and I still sometimes catch myself looking at my…
PointCast was one of those Internet services that was far ahead of its time. At its root, it was a lot like the news readers we use on our smartphones and tablets today, pushing information to computers during off-peak Internet usage, and its screensaver was far more useful and engaging than those shipping with Windows 98 at the time (or those shipping with Windows 10 today). In an age where 56k dial-up modems were the height of speed for most Internet users, though, PointCast was…
Becoming a vegetarian in your teenage years can leave you with complicated memories of previous Thanksgivings. I was never much of a fan of turkey meat when I was an omnivore, but I’ve always been big on mashed potatoes, and given Mom’s predilection for sneaking some of our favourite foods into every holiday dinner, I was still able to enjoy a lot of the food at Thanksgiving dinners after I went vegetarian. (Dealing with family members outside of Mom, though, was another matter entirely.) Even…
I am not a big fan of the “Hey, remember when this happened X years ago today?” messages that various social media services and other Internet platforms send to me. On top of not always being accurate (like photo services that send me messages about the stock photos that came preloaded on my tablet), those memories often end up being things I’d rather not remember. Sometimes the memories are welcome, or the bad memories come with some kind of silver lining (like seeing the support…
It’s been a month since I made affiliate status on my Twitch channel, i.e. got enough people watching that I can now make money on there through commercials and subscriptions and donations and such. I know that I’ll never make much money on there, and I’m okay with that because I want streaming to remain a hobby for me. My daily video game time is primarily for self-care, to give my mind a break from all the other things I’m working on, so for my…