You'll have to pardon me for my sort of prose style of like, "scene setting". When I was in undergrad, in creative writing workshops I would always get feedback from the professors that a core part of my writing voice was also a combination crutch+weakness, which is that I feel this incredibly strong urge to put the reader exactly in my brain, and a propensity to like, apologize for doing it. This anecdote is actually a perfect case, because when I started typing I was going to begin with a little screed about how I remember things being when I was younger. "Leah, you have to eventually get on with it", said none other than literally Marilynne Robinson to me once.

Anywho, I sometimes wonder if the tech independence desire I feel is actually a sort of like, miscategorization of nostalgia. Linked within the desire to replace Big Enterprise Tech with open source and/or locally controlled tech is a desire to move away from One Device Which Does Everything and back into individual devices which do the same thing (even if they maybe do it technically worse). So when I say "tech independence" I'm also basically referring to this desire I have to engender a new relationship to the technology I love; I don't want to have one iPhone 17 Pro Max that does every single thing I need it to do. I want to have to choose to take out a camera or a music player or a gaming device or a notepad or whatever. That's the relationship that I want.

But it's not a new relationship, is it? It's a return to what it used to be, isn't it?

I can't claim to know anything about Brian Eno other than his reputation. More than one person I hooked up with in my past had, with an infectious desire to share something that deeply moved them, put on Discreet Music and I did lots of like smiling and nodding through it, so I'm absolutely a Brian Eno poser. But I'm going to quote him here with what I feel like is maybe the most iconoclastic nailing of the way nostalgia and technology intertwine:

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."

Yes, he's talking about music in a lot of specificity here but this same principle applies writ large to like, everything in our pop cultural life, I think. And what I think it is is that we really like friction. Or maybe it's not the friction itself but it's the…like…fiddling and discovery that comes along with that friction. You get to break it in and learn its intricacies and you end up loving it despite some shortcomings. Friction leads to having to choose to continue to overcome it and learn it and use it. Friction, and learning to love something despite those frictions (which then eventually becomes subsumed by that love and becomes a thing you end up actually loving about it) is where this desire of mine for tech independence comes from; it's not that I don't want things to be easy, it's just that I want to lean into the friction.

I encountered this exact situation over this last 3-day weekend with fussing around on my home server setup. The goal was to create a way to have secure tunneled access into the server even when not on the home network, specifically for streaming music from the server. I cracked my knuckles and set to work learning about network security and tunneling and I was expecting to have to trial and error and mess around and encounter setbacks and all of that but in doing my research I discovered a utility that I installed, did some setup and then it just…worked. And I was disappointed. I mean, happy in some grander sense–the like, job-well-done sense–but I wanted the friction. I wanted to troubleshoot.

There's this scene from the last season of Gilmore Girls where a rich character, accompanying another character to a fundraiser knit-a-thon decides he's doing a nice thing and just donates the entire needed amount. Everyone is kinda like, "oh gee that's nice…" and the organizer calls the event off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8miIpdY8BU. The reason everyone's pissed is that while raising the money is ostensibly the goal, the situational equivocation is that everyone wants to just hang out and knit together.

And all of this is how I've ended up wondering if what I actually want is the real friction or if I'm nostalgic for a time when the friction was necessary. Does it actually matter, do we reckon? The ends I'm looking to achieve with my home server and with specific devices is intentionality and a very mild sort of praxis–choosing to be intentional with my tech at the very least feels like making a choice to step outside of the wretched mainstream.

I've been obsessed lately with the EDC ("every day carry") posts on the subreddit r/dumphones. If you've never seen EDC posts anywhere on Reddit, the best I can explain is that they're Wes Anderson style arrangements of the items that one ostensibly carries on them every day as they move about the world. There's lots of signifiers of the communities and community values of the particular subreddit–like the core EDC subreddit has lots of guns and knives and nice watches. The Digital Audio Player subreddit has lots of really cool colorways and DAP wallpapers and fancy audio tech hooked into them and I reckon there's EDC posts on retro gaming subreddits that feature–I'm just guessing here–lots of limited edition or collectible versions of handhelds. It's impossible to imagine that people don't know what they're doing with these posts, but nevertheless, there's an appeal to the ones in r/dumphones that I can't turn away from:

I'm posting this on February 17th, 2026 where this link will bring you to like at least half a dozen EDC posts of the exact nature I'm talking about. But I have a strong suspicion if you visit this link and it's not the month of February 2026 you will still see examples of what I'm talking about. https://www.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/top/?t=month

It would be impossible for me to say I don't feel nostalgic for these images. There's a strong feeling of "rightness" that I feel seeing, for example, a "19f" share an image of her EDC being a flip phone, a cassette player, an original Game Boy and Marlboro Reds. When I was her age (TWENTY YEARS AGO) it would have been a flip phone, a minidisc player, a GBA and Djarum Blacks. It gives me very like, "nature is healing" vibes. "Healing" from what is a big question worth examining, of course, since, after all, modern smart phones are insanely cool pieces of tech. Navigation, wildly good cameras, any app you can dream of and more power than the PC I had in my efficiency apartment those same twenty years ago (I assume? I don't know but I'm just guessing so). So maybe in place of "healing", I'll simply say that it feels good to see people embracing some friction and choosing to be intentional.

It's what I'm trying to do, too. Trying to, anyhow.

Well, it's been a minute since I've done any real updates here, but recently I've had this huge rush of motivation to do lots and lots of fussing. When I use the word "fussing" what I'm talking about to myself is like, tinkering–specifically with like computers and technology. What I've done this morning? Updating the Anilist and Letterboxd configurations in the calendar below so they automatically pull! That's fussing. Planning out how to add out-of-home access to my server? That's fussing.

Oh, my server! In all ways, that's really, really fussing hahaha. I've been on this big tech independence kick lately–it's always been an aspiration of mine to fuss my way into not having to buy into the Big Boy Enterprise Evil Companies stuff, but the current political universe (combined with my wife and I having like, extensive means now) finally gave me motivation enough to buy a mini PC and set it all up.

Wowzers has it been a crash course in learning more about Linux, more about deeper home computing concepts and learning about network configurations and everything. It's been a total blast with shockingly few hiccups. Huge shoutouts to the human resources I've had at my disposal, primarily through the forums I've been a member of since 2003 lmao (that's 23 years for those playing along at home).

Expect to see more fussing and tinkering in here I suspect, I think I can find myself in a mood and workflow where I'm contributing more often in this space. The big trouble with that is I have a personal written journal (shoutouts to the best journal ever the Hobonichi Techo Cousin) which kinda sucks up all of the ranting and like "posting" energy that would otherwise go into a blog. But maybe I can do some longer-form (or shorter-form?) thinking in here too. Who knows!

Okie doke and NOW all of the movies I've watched since like, February are all typed up into a movies Potpourri now as well! Go check it out!

Well! I finally did it, I finally went back through like, the entire summer's worth of games played and dropped them all onto the Games page--check it out in the little sidebar over there.

This recent flurry of activity on my site is more or less coinciding with a desire to like, tidy my own little universe and just tinker with things, which has really only just now come back. I've always been a very big like, peaks-and-valleys kinda gal when it comes to my interests: enormous like non-stop cannot-focus-on-anything-else-in-my-life sorts of obsessions with things followed by deep valleys where things disappear from my map entirely. It's not this way with all (most?) of my other hobbies/interests: I have been an avid and regular like 100+ miles a week road cyclist for years now without any interest waning, and every year of my life I continue to be a fanatical sports fan for several teams. Video games is where I experience it the most, I find.

I had an absolutely obsessive peak erode to zero after finishing Yu-No in the early spring. This valley I may only now be coming out of was powerful insofar as what it took down with it, which was like, any computer-based tinkering at all. I barely even played Tetris or the Vita NPB game I would play passively all the time. It felt...odd...like an emptiness. Literal weeks would go by without my being at this PC for anything other than turning it on for the Plex server. But over the last couple weeks some spark of something re-awoke and I've been trying to nurture it without smothering it.

But why did it happen so strongly this time? I have to assume that because Yu-No was so long and because it made such a huge impact on me that I'm sorta *still* comparing everything to it? I haven't really found anything that can grip my attention in that way. My gaming attention span like, Overton Window has been pulled so far in one direction that--as you can see from the newest spattering of reviews I just posted--not only did I not play very many things by volume but I didn't enjoy them very much either.

Anywho, I've got all of the games I've finished (in some form or another) all typed up and such, and I started playing this brand new game called Dice Gambit just yesterday--and I feel like that one has the juice. I have the sense that I'll finish it. I'm not like, obsessing, but I do feel--for the first time since I finished Yu-No--the desire to sit down and turn on the Steam Deck to actually play a game. That's promising! Maybe my like, drive to play video games isn't dead forever hahaha

(Note: It's funny, after I finished typing all of that I remembered how I DID feel compelled to finish a game, to the degree that I really really marathoned it: Tokimeki Girls Side 1st Love--which I talked about in the Potpourri. I was obsessed, and I had an absolute blast. Who knows? Maybe I've just been playing bad games and so I just haven't been pulled in except for the good ones lmao)