Very short update while I continue working on my bigger posts because haha, that'll take a long while. But.

I bought a Nokia flip phone some months ago for funsies, mostly because it looked cool. I still have not installed a SIM card into it so messaging and calling wise it's useless. I didn't (and still don't) harbor any intention to completely switch to dumb phone like so many others are doing in the new age of technology enshittification, because of a variety of reasons that I won't elaborate on for now for brevity's sake. All you need to know is that it's because a smartphone has too many uses and it's not because of my attachment to social media.

For the majority of my time owning this phone I've been using it to take pictures because there's something charming in shitty grainy photos snapped from a flip phone no one uses anymore. More recently, while waiting in a particularly long amusement park line, I played snake xenzia and fiinally understood why people could love this game and not get bored of it. Honestly how is it so fun??? I did not expect myself to like this at all. I got pretty good at it too, if I do say so myself. At time of writing I have a high score of 56, and though I don't know what the average person's snake ability is, I think I'm pretty good especially given the increasingly risky maneuvers I've been able to pull off. Do allow me to wallow in my pride over a pixel game for a second. And even more recently, I have rediscovered the radio after about a decade of forgetting it exists.

By chance I was watching a video on why it feels like technology has been getting worse, and the person talking mentioned the recent movement back to physical media and tech, so I immediately went and grabbed my flip phone to gesture at it. Perfectly normal responsive audience behavior. While I was listening to him talk about people going back to CDs and DVDs I let my mind start thinking about music. Specifically, the main reason I'm reluctant to make the same change: the internet just makes finding new music so much easier. It's much more accessible so there's a lot more small indie artists, you could find songs with a single search or just a few searches, and you could either let the app find random songs for you or listen to playlists others have compiled to find new things. When it comes to music I do get tired of old things pretty easily; not that I'd hate a song after listening to it for a few days, but it's just that if I was stuck with only a few albums to listen to for years on end I think I'd die. So my brain was wallowing on that, and I was hearing things about retro tech and had my flip phone beside me, and in a moment of brilliant thought amalgamation I remembered my phone did indeed have a music app and a radio.

I am not exaggerating when I say I felt the most incredible joy when I opened the radio app and the phone started playing music. I grinned without controlling my facial muscles consciously. I spent some time figuring out how it all worked (tuning, adjusting volume, the fact that I had to plug headphones in for better audio quality) and ended up staying on a channel playing pop songs (is it pop? I still don't understand music genre classifications) for a while. I messed around with the channels and switched one later, and turns out it was playing City Walls by twenty one pilots. Fucking incredible. That song came out this year too. It's probably common sense but I still feel like it's amazing that the radio is still operational now and playing the latest songs, like??? I think technology and the internet or whatever have brainwashed me or something. I guess me and my family abandoning CDs and DVDs and the radio for digital stuff and podcasts made me think the previous forms of media died out entirely but I guess not.

The very energetic person speaking in between songs and the three beeps hit me with such strong nostalgia I remembered I used to listen to a classical station with my dad. (Are radio stations in other countries the same? No idea if what I just described applies) I did go and tune into that station immediately and, lo and behold, it's still there playing Bach.

I guess part of why this feels so amazing to me is just the fact that radios still exist. Not the aforementioned rationale of me thinking everyone switched to the internet (though that's the other part). I mean the fact that it's been here for literal decades and it's still here. Ten years is still so long to me. Or maybe I was conditioned by fast-paced changes and things made to be broken in a short while because I grew up in an age of technological advancement....oop, here I go again. That's a topic for another day. I'll write something about that when I gather my words enough to form a coherent post.

For now though I'll be playing with this for a while I think. Holy shit.