Great app, though!

I’ve been following this phone for a while, it’s nice to see there is a market out there for this kind of thing. The BlackBerry-esque design does look quite cool, although if I were to use a minimalist smartphone myself I’d probably go for the Mudita Kompakt instead. It’s just a bit more practical for my lifestyle, with the much smaller body, normal on-screen keyboard and de-Googled OS. There’s also another newish one called the Bigme Hibreak Pro which is the most “normal” overall.

can this phone handle those situations too?

It can, the Minimal Phone is not a dumbphone, privacy-focused or even minimalist and that was a conscious choice by the company. It’s just a normal Android smartphone with an e-ink display and a physical keyboard (and a headphone jack). The “Minimal” in the name is referring more to minimalising the phone’s influence on your life, because the e-ink screen is a barrier to so many addictive activities like doom-scrolling and video playback. It is not minimal in features at all and is designed to be able to do all of the important real-world task stuff, should you need it to.

For YouTube I use grayjay for without an account, it works fine for me, and I really like it.

OP is switching to iPhone. Grayjay isn’t available on iOS.

I guess part of the reason I think about it quite a bit these days is because almost all of my friends who are my age and older have mostly stopped. The guys who haven’t are the ones who are still single, living by themselves with no responsibilities to anyone beyond their employer.

One guy I know has vlogged and blogged quite a lot about his experiences “quitting” video games. The realisation he came to was that gaming was holding him back in many other areas of his life, and that he had been reluctant to acknowledge this earlier in his life because he was scared about what that said about all the time he had sunk into video games instead of solving his problems. It’s not that severe for me, but I do wonder whether it’s a hobby I maintain out of laziness/fear of trying something new, rather than because I still love it.

people are talking about having to pick between privacy (GrapheneOS) and ethical manufacturing (Fairphone)

GrapheneOS is far from the only ROM that can improve the user’s privacy. Many other projects support Fairphone, and whilst they may not pass the Lemmy purity tests, they are objectively better in many ways than the default operating system. It frustrates me that people in the privacy space constantly frame decisions as binary trade-offs when in reality you can always take smaller steps to improve your privacy without giving up everything else you care about.

Also, I can’t remember if I mentioned this previously, but I bought a secondhand 2DS a couple of months ago so I’ve finally got around to starting Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask. The DS Layton games were some of my favourites but because I never owned a 2DS/3DS, or a portable device that could emulate them well, I have held off on playing them until now. Layton games are best played in a cosy space, like in bed or an armchair with a rug, with headphones on and the weather has been colder and wetter here recently which is perfect for this type of game!

Other than that, I haven’t had too much free time for gaming lately, and to be honest I haven’t really had the drive for it either. I am approaching my mid-30s now and sometimes wonder if I’m going to “grow out of” gaming as a main hobby at some point in the near future.

I’ll be interested to read your future updates about AI: The Somnium Files. I really like Kotaro Uchikoshi’s work, he has written some of my favourite visual novels previously including Ever 17 and 999. I’ll wait until you’re further in before I talk about The Somnium Files (I don’t want to spoil or influence anything for you).

Everything gets canceled eventually.

This isn’t even remotely close to being true. There are plenty of series that complete their planned runs and have the time to tell an entire story.

This episode basically commented on that phenomenon. Cartman loses the joy of living because there are no more “woke” people left for him to laugh at. I wish more people on the left understood that by constantly trying to control what everyone else is doing they are just creating things for the right to “resist” against. If people want to use a word in a context completely divorced from its original intent, just let them do it.

when it actually mattered

It never mattered. It’s a comedy show, no one was going to change their vote based on it. How can you still not get it after two election wins and political influence spanning a decade?

You’re obviously a big fan of the books so I guess that makes a difference as well (I have only read the first one). To me, this was just another generic 6/10 fantasy show with nothing particularly special or exciting about it so without a complete story and the promise of a potential big payoff the third season has nothing to offer. I will, of course, miss Rosamund Pike!

They had the chance to show how ridiculous trump was back then

???

Trump has always been obviously ridiculous. You guys need to get over this idea that the people voting for him are going to have some magical come-to-Jesus moment and join the rest of us in reality after watching an episode of South Park or reading a non-“sanewashed” news article.

Retard is a “slur” that should definitely be normalised, and indeed it was until a group of virtual-signalling losers decided it was very offensive again and tried to cancel anyone who used it. It stopped being used in relation to the intellectually disabled a long, long time ago and was just another generic insult for decades. Ironically, it is the people who complain about it today who are actually the ones giving the word power - if they had just shut the fuck up it would have continued to fade into irrelevance.

I started the second season of ‘Gannibal’ but the drop in quality from the first season has been so significant that I’m questioning whether I want to continue. It went from small town thriller to this comically violent shlock thing where the point of every scene and conversation seems to be to create yet another confrontation so yet another fight can be shoehorned in. It’s an adaptation of a manga and it really shows in this second season.

I like to see things through to the end.

That’s my issue - I don’t get to see things through to the end because they literally do not have an ending.

That quote you pulled is exactly what I’m talking about. Lots of pearl clutching about low-hanging fruit like violent imagery and drugs, no mention of the longer-term impacts of being exposed to services that are literally designed to be addictive or the way our privacy has been eroded by companies like Meta and Google monopolising our lives. No one wants to go beyond the most absolutely basic, surface level examination. Of course these people fucked the solution when they never fully understood the problem in the first place.

Just that they went and decided on this nebulous age verification instead of actual privacy protection we’re sorely lacking in this country (online)

As much as I do support the basic premise of a social media ban for children, this was always my big concern about the way the debate unfolded in Australia. Everyone was so preoccupied with these hysterical child safety arguments around sex predators and violent imagery. The much larger and more important issues around privacy and childhood development (i.e. influence of addictive technology on developing brains and broader impacts on society of these problems becoming normalised and resolved within our culture) were often just background noise.

Google says the “Expanded” dark mode is intended to improve accessibility, but you may experience appearance issues when using it as some apps won’t play nicely with it. If that happens, then it’s recommended you enable the “Standard” dark mode instead, as it won’t force a dark theme on apps that don’t support it.

I haven’t watched the third season. I watched the previous two, so I was considering it (this show was never a priority for me), but I am very thankful that you made this post because now that I know it has been cancelled I won’t waste my time on it.