re-zine-ing

Hi easy speakers

I'm spent. Roughed up, dogged down, and logged out. Having a rough "go of it" as some snooty folks may say, haha. But, via encouragement from the ever-kind ~wholesomedonut on Ctrl-c.club, I decided to re-START (as in, literally get Issue. 1 out the digital door) Ctrl-ZINE.

It was a hair-pulling strain to follow-up with folks on e-mail, and re-mention it again and again via IRC/Iris (the latter a CLI message client), et al, which is likely me being too pushy/impatient. I have to realize that I gave people a MONTH to submit stuff (now, everything is being "aimed for" April 1), but I was always concerned with me pushing ME to get a zine together in usually a weekend when I was doing a per-zine. Most folks don't have the time/energy/desire to "slap something together" - be it a full zine or a long-winded post, in a haphazzard way. As *I* was ok with me just slamming in a bunch of words, photos, etc in a *personal* zine. People like standards - imagine that! ;)

So, now re-invigorating Ctrl-ZINE, which I have a submission of my own, and now an additional poetry submission, and also the submission from our humble hero, m15o :) (thank you, m15o!) Others on Ctrl-c wish to contribute, but I may take another suggestion from ~wholesomedonut, and just stick to 3-4 entries per Issue. Seems more practical.

Anyway, should anyone want to add in, hit up ctrl-c.club/~loghead/ctrl-zine.html, and I hope this isn't too "self-promote-y".

later!

Hm, this might encourage me to finally start on a small little project I’ve wanted to start on for a while, which is turning an old eeepc-esque netbook I’ve had sitting around into a dedicated small-web and writing machine, something to grab when I want to write in a more introspective manner rather than typing away on my workstation with 3000 things open for school and programming.

In a similar vein, I feel like a fun addition if at all possible could be a small gallery of interesting ways folks access the smolweb, especially with how much more forgiving these sites are to older browsers and hardware compared to most of the normal internet. It’s so interesting seeing the fun ways people are able to use odd tech for useful tasks (to throw my hat in the ring, while I’ve been traveling the past day and a half I’ve been accessing the Midnight and the Speakeasy from my old Motorola Droid Pro, which handles these sites flawlessly despite it’s ancient browser. The physical keyboard on it also makes for a more tactile typing experience as opposed to my modern smartphone)

SS, a bold choice, for sure ;) very reminiscent of the BlackBerry Bold.

I had a friend who had a Motorola Charm in 2009/10, and he used that phone and ONLY that phone for all computing in those years. I always loved it's keyboard and quirky take on Android. It's also the first time I heard of someone torrenting movies and paying their TAXES on a mobile device. The future had arrived at that point, I decided.

And yea, the "Browser" (just called Browser, pre-Chrome, for either mobile or Desktop) was very capable and also very low maitenance. Any simple site could load on it. Unlike Safari mobile in those years, which was mostly still beholden to m.mobile.site versions of mobile Websites.

I would like to get into the QWERTY keyboard game via mobile, but have limited options these days. Also, I write very little. On mobile or desktop.

Absolutely, the droid handles the modern internet far better than the legacy iOS devices that I use. I also managed to install the ISRG Root X1 certificate on it, allowing it to error out on certificates much less frequently, and allow an old version of Firefox to work correctly (I try not to use Google search when unnecessary, and the default browser wouldn’t allow me to add DuckDuckGo). Unfortunately, when I went to recharge it, it seems to have issues taking more than 5%, which seems to be a common issue among old droid phones and seems to be something software related. Given how short the battery seems to last even when plugged in though, I’m loathe to try resetting the phone to see if that’ll help at all. It was fun while it lasted :/

It wasn’t actually too expensive to get into this phone though, I bought it from my city’s surplus auction site just last week for 5 dollars. These surplus auctions often have surprising items available, and if they sit around long enough, as this item did, the starting bid decreases to a very reasonable amount, and the auction organizers are often willing to negotiate on various aspects to get things off their hands (in this instance, I called them and had them move the auction end time to 4 days before it would have otherwise ended, allowing me to purchase and pick up the item before I was to leave the city for a couple weeks). You never know what you’ll find sometimes!