SecretPancake

The Silmarillon - the yellow pages of middle earth

Starting and abandoning hobbies.

Apparently it doesn’t work in Germany. Physics work differently here. At least that’s what our corrupt politicians want us to think

Why so many people make decisions based on emotion only, willfully disregarding scientific reasoning.

Nothing ever proven. He was weird, he had issues with boundaries and felt like a child himself. He never hid the fact that he slept in the same bed with these children and thought it’s just a very normal thing (he mentioned it in an interview that was also shown in Leaving Neverland I think). Maybe he did some things with them that he also thought was normal like, you know, children discovering themselves, playing doctor and stuff. Not good at all. But from his perspective kinda innocent games. Just a theory about his intent and no excuse of course. If anything happened anyways.

I was always a big fan of his music and general style and still am but I think it is possible some things happened behind the scenes because he was just a very broken person. And later I felt he had this “too good to be true” vibe to him.

There are also rumors he was gay and that fucked him up even more because he had to hide it (like pretty much everyone back then).

A Rockstar Open World Pirate game.

Black Flag was getting there, it had good vibes, but unfortunately they had to make it an Assassins Creed game and Ubisoft doesn't know how to do it right anyways. Rockstar does.

In Germany it’s a trend to park on the road (not just one car, but the whole street) in towns and cities, so one constantly has to wait for upcoming traffic to go on. What was once a temporary spot at most, where you had to turn on warning lights, is now standard. Not sure when this became legal or if it’s just overlooked because there are too many cars in this fucking country and we need to fit them somewhere.

It is certainly a very mild concern compared to other growing trends in Germany but just one that came to my mind that no one is talking about.

My turn signal once was in sync with a car opposite of me.

This is not an introvert problem. You just hate people.

The moderator of a daily web-meeting saying "Who wants to go first?".

Online Multiplayer. I used to love to connect with people, friends and strangers and play games. Now I just want to play alone on my terms and find it super annoying when games introduce online stuff into the single player mode, like raids.

I still enjoy the occasional couch co-op though.

Third result in DDG.

To be honest I don’t see a difference to Reddit other than it having much less users and content and more geeky at the moment.

I have a lot of nostalgia for the late 90s/early 00s when the internet was still exciting. Videos! Games! Flash! Chats! Piracy! Winamp!

So all Podcasts are bad because this one particular example was stupid? Why did you feel the need to bring that up? What you described you can find plenty in books, magazines or everywhere else.

There are all kinds of podcasts for all kinds of interests. And the best thing is that people like you and me can make and publish them. I dislike many podcasts because they are superficial, loud, hectic or whatever but there are many others that just work for me.

I usually listen to them while on a run, in the car or to fall asleep to.

Unfortunately I don’t have recommendations for you because most of my subscribed podcasts are German* and the others are in the „fall asleep to“ category of men talking about tech. But if you’re interested in the latter, start at atp.fm or something on the relay.fm network.

*if you are German speaking, I’ll gladly give recommendations

I kinda understand the appeal but there are just too many other languages that have a real practical use for when I’m traveling and want to speak to regular people instead of a secret society.

Swiss Army Man!

VR headsets with an external battery pack and/or other heavy components on a cable to put in the pocket (as is now a feature of the Apple Vision Pro).

The first time I tried any VR headset I immediately thought why on earth do they not put all the heavy lifting electronics out of this device into my pocket. That would be way more comfortable. But for some reason it was never done and when it was rumored that the Apple headset would do that I noticed people apparently hated the idea. Everyone keeps saying modern headsets are well balanced it’s not a problem, but my experience is different and it’s one of the reasons for me why I don’t like to use it often.

My current headset is the PS VR2 which everyone says is so comfortable and balanced. I just find it annoying after a few minutes.

A bottle opener, if you can't open bottles with anything like apparently everyone else.

inb4 reply guys: Please don't explain it to me and don't send tutorials I am not asking for help.

It seems people are now discovering that they can turn off watch history and think this is a new feature.

Don’t try to eat less meat, try to eat more veggie. I know it’s technically the same but the thought process is different. Before you know it, you had weeks without meat.

It’s not unspeakably excessive but I bought a laser printer just to print out the „manual“ of Shenzhen I/O. Played the game for a week or so.

I do use the printer about once every two months though.

Fossil fuels

I don't know if it's the best (what defines that?) but it's what I do.

I wake up, my dog notices and jumps around in excitement. I greet him, pet him, then take my phone, do the daily NYT Mini Crossword and browse around for a few minutes while he lies down again, waiting patiently. I stand up, go pee, then I take my dog out for a walk. Afterwards I prepare my oatmeal, then prepare my dog's food (it needs to soak a few minutes), go open all windows to get fresh air in, start the work computer and quickly check my mails, then we both eat our breakfast while I check my RSS feeds.

Paid full price for Avatar 2

I was stressed out at the grocery checkout because the scanned items were coming in too fast. While packing my stuff I managed to throw an onion high in the air, ricocheting on some stand and hitting the cashier on the shoulder.

I was impressed when my shepherd-mix carried a trashcan with chicken leftovers to me, because he couldn’t open it but I could. He didn’t get his wish though.

I looked in the mirror.

Kinda kidding, I have not found anyone for longterm but I learned to be ok with it and stop hating myself.

It exists in a very simple way https://framesynthesis.com/drivingsimulator/maps/

With „code“ very often just being HTML source of some random site the effects people found.

Had the opportunity to fly in a small vintage airplane (not sure what kind). It was awesome but the following day we got information that the next flight crashed and all passengers died.

OS Updates have been free since 2013 and pretty much all software as well, except for services and pro stuff like Logic. So you got something wrong there.

Support for older hardware goes pretty far back, compared to Android (though that is getting better from what I read). At some point they just gotta let it go or it will hold back development. I don’t see why that’s such a big problem. You can still use everything and get security updates just not the latest features.

Bloatware, I don’t know what you’re comparing it with. Windows laptops are often filled with crap from the manufacturers and I hear Windows 11 even drowns you in it on a fresh install. Apple products come with all the basics and all of it is at least pretty good. They have a lot of extra software available to download but it won’t preinstall that or even nag you about it. And most of the time you can just delete even the main apps.

I’m all in on Apple hardware. I’ve got a Macbook Pro, iPad Air, iPhone, Watch, Homepod Mini and Apple TV. I started with Apple in 2010.

I used Windows before and until about 5 years ago for work. The later Windows versions became more and more confusing to me. For my work it is a horrible experience since you always have to go many extra steps to do anything (reason is that web development is mostly unix based). For gaming it is of course the best option but I lost interest in PC gaming and even back in XP times I used to customize Windows to look like OS X. But it was fine back then. I tinkered with it a lot and had fun times. But now I just want to be productive.

Why not Linux? Because I don’t want to tinker anymore for my main computers and I’m happy with what I have. I used it a few times on a Raspberry Pi and it’s not my thing.

Why not Android? For testing stuff at work I have an Android device and I hate everything about it. Also I would miss the ecosystem of iOS and interoperability with my other Apple devices.

The good:

I like the build quality and focus on details. Apple had a rough phase after Jobs passed and Jony Ive had too much power over the design. In that time it was very much true that Apple was all about form over function. That is not true anymore since he left.

Their main apps and services are kept fresh and improved so much that a lot of them even became my apps of choice for the category. I use Notes, Mail, Music, Podcasts (but I’m unsure about that one), Calendar and Safari. In other categories I prefer third party apps, like Things, 1Password.

You can feel pretty safe from malware or spyware because everything is sandboxed and access to user data is kept behind bars until explicitly allowed.

Resell value is pretty high even for older devices.

The bad:

Apple sometimes introduces some new service and then basically stops improving it. Siri is the best example here and it has become a laughing stock even inside the Apple fanbase. Homekit is another. It gets a few very tiny updates here and there but the only big ones were a visual overhaul of the Home app and the introduction to Matter, which so far had only little impact or even made it worse for some users (luckily not me).

Fancy names, yes it’s a bit weird, they want to brand everything.

Their presentations feel very cult-like and have lost their charm since Jobs is gone.

Repairs are expensive. I’m lucky so far that I never needed that .

I hate Apple Stores. They are crowded, boring and have less and less third party products available. Staff there is annoying but that’s true for any store these days.

To conclude, I like it, I don’t see the appeal in current alternatives.

I like going for a walk around the city or to the Rhine river and watch the ships go by.

If you’re the social kind, go to the park and ask someone who plays frisbee or other activity to join in.

Running is a great sport that’s relatively cheap and also helps against depression.

Geocaching is fun alone and with other people, but not in the city (in my opinion).

Check your local newspaper and see what events are going on. Sometimes events are cheap or even free.

Fellow humans

A danish dough whisk. Somehow it’s easier to mix dough and it won’t have so much gunk sticking between the wires like in the balloon shaped whisks. It can be cleaned easy by hand. It’s pretty large though.

You can easily train a dog to use litter boxes. There are actually indoor grass mats you can buy. It’s mostly a way to deal with very old dogs who have trouble keeping it in.

But please don’t do that with young and healthy dogs. They need outside time. If you don’t want to do that, just don’t get a dog.

Salary.

(and the work got more meaningful, not some marketing bullshit anymore)

Don’t use Spotify and it took me a while to even find the mentioned buttons in the screenshot. Looks like either volume controls or add/remove from playlist. Better would be thumbs up/down.

I’m using it much less than Reddit for that reason but less social media is a good thing in my book, so not complaining.

If it’s in realtime, not even for unlimited money.