What have the Romans ever done for us, eh?

God I fucking hope not.

Whoa whoa whoa. As a proud English man, I can’t sit idly by and let you lay all the blame on the US! England is the reason for at least 80% of the problems, with the US only really coming along after we’d set the ticking time bomb

Get the fuck out with your American exceptionalism!

Relatable content.

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I’ve lost a couple of podcasts to Spotify. Life goes on. I don’t begrudge anyone wanting to earn money, but I won’t support Spotify’s practices.

There’s such a wonderfully low barrier to entry these days that there’ll soon be something else coming down the pipe.

As someone who’s made a number of podcasts on and off over the years since 2007, much of this post resonates.

However, I take solace in thinking that a podcast is just an extension of a broadcast; where a broadcast is, well, broad, a podcast is a self contained…cast. In a pod. Broadcasting covers audio and video, so it figures that podcasting would as well.

With that in mind, my own style of podcasting, and my preferred format is personal stories. I love podcasts that are by people in their bedrooms talking about their lives, or by journalists who talk to regular folk. Regardless of what Spotify do, that style will always be out there, available on an RSS feed.

I don’t use Spotify, I don’t use YouTube. If I can’t get it in my app then I don’t listen to it. And that’s OK.

I really need to get back into it though. I used to love making them.

Fuck you, guy!

I ended up manually downloading my subscriptions using Freetube and yt-dlp and throwing them in my Plex server. I don’t watch a huge amount so I’m happy to spend 20 minutes a couple of times a week doing it. There are ways to automate the process but I’ve never been able to wrap my head around it.

I’ve only been using Apple stuff since '07, but I’ve been through a similar thing lately. My iPhone contract was due, so after a ridiculous amount of consideration and research I ended up getting a Pixel 9, which I’ve put GrapheneOS on. Its a huge learning curve, but I’m glad I did it.

If I have to have a smartphone, I may as well have one that’s as much on my terms as possible.

After 16 years of iPhones I switched to a Pixel 9 two days ago so I could run GrapheneOS. It took me ten minutes to install. Shit’s remakably easy to do. Assuming your phone isn’t carrier locked, of course.

A couple of years back (pretty much when I canned Twitter for Mastodon), I decided to actively be more positive in my online interactions. And you know, it’s been great.

For example, if I see a post on a movie community on here along the lines of “What movie do you hate, even though it’s really popular?” I’ll just sail on by. At most I’ll mark it as hidden so I don’t get tempted to wallow in negativity.

10/10 I can heartily recommend just ignoring things that are framed negatively, and people who try to draw you into a row for their own entertainment.

Oh, that’s a shame. I was on the TestFlight for Mammoth right back at the start, when everyone was looking for a decent app because Twitter had just murdered Tweetbot.

It was a fine app, but Ivory ended up being slightly more fine.

And the other half are lying.

No. The shareholders won’t like this.

Not a single Jonathan who has been through the UK school system in the past forty years has gotten away with being asked “Have you got a rubber, Johnny?”

Not one.

I once tried to say “I don’t fuck about” in Italian to my Italian friend. I ran it through DDG and replied to him with something along the lines of “Non cazzetto”.

He was a little surprised that I’d admitted to him that I don’t fuck, but treated me with sympathy all the same.

$28bn is A Lot Of Fucking Money, my dude. Like…a lot.

At a rate of $20 an hour, it would take a person almost 160,000 years to earn that kind of money.

Exactly that. There’s sex as an intimate act between loving partners, then there’s sex as recreation. The two things aren’t necessarily the same. It’s why swinging is so popular.

This is just gatekeeping seasoning and I won’t stand for it (while getting e-coli from my unwashed dishes).