There's a whole entire part of my life that's gone missing ever since last July that I haven't really acknowledged or even realised had happened until recently. I used to watch Youtube at my studio computer and occasionally fall asleep in my chair. I haven't been able to do this for almost a year now. A few things happened that caused this to stop...
1. Youtube started detecting adblock extensions like uBlock Origin and locking up if one was detected. Obviously, this was a major stumbling block for everyone for a while. While most people have just started to accept advertising and are living with it, a few of us either switched to Youtube frontends like NewPipe and Invidious, or are updating our blocklists to get around the problem on name-brand Youtube. Personally, I switched to Piped, then to Invidious. I also use NewPipe on my phone, but my phone screen is small, my headphones are big, and my arms get tired easily.
2. Mozilla cut support for Windows 7 in Firefox v.116. Now without a secure web browser, I can't risk connecting my studio computer to the internet, even for printing. This also meant I had to stop going on Google Earth roadtrips. While technically there are Firefox forks that are still supporting Windows 7, I don't imagine any of them are going to last into next year, so it's just forestalling the inevitable. People offline have criticised my decision to use the internet on Windows 7 at all after Microsoft ended extended support in 2020, but I was careful about where I went, never downloading anything except from explicitly trustworthy sources. At the time, I also had a computer that ran Windows 10 that I could use for riskier downloads (it runs Linux Mint now).
3. My office chair broke. Remember the Chair Fund? The time i was trying to finance a new office chair on Cohost, Tumblr, and my homepage here? By the time I started to approach the amount I needed, the chair I wanted was discontinued and everything else is now twice as expensive. Like I said once, the Chair Fund got integrated into the Car Repair Fund, which transmogrified into the Used Car Diagnostic Fund. Don't you just love poverty?!
I really miss the days when I could just get onto Youtube and lose myself down an A-Button Challenge rabbithole or watch Jon Burton pick apart Mega Drive source code idiosyncrasies, or even fall asleep watching ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron. Have you ever tried to sleep in a creaky wooden dining room chair? I wouldn't recommend it. Especially these days, with the country getting unbuilt around me like I'm in The Sims watching my house getting taken apart as I stand in the middle of the sitting room, I really could use a mindless distraction every now and then. I don't want to stay there, mind you— it's just that my government is trying to speedrun a return to puritanism and I need to tune out every so often for my own mental health.