Lorindól

My right foot is almost one size wider than my left foot. Finding a good pair of shoes is hard.

And I can’t remember what kind of clothes people are wearing. Colours, sometimes, but it’s like my visual cortex dedicates zero processing power for clothes.

Now this is a good list.

I’ve had my Amazfit Bip (the original) for 6 or 7 years and the only complaint I have is the shitty original non-breathing silicon strap. After I replaced it with nylon strap, it was pretty much perfect.

The battery still lasts over three weeks. The display glass only has a few tiny scratches on it, despite that I’ve worn the watch basically 24/7 all these years.

It has all the basic functionalities I need built in and the not-so-important-but-nice ones I can get via Tasker.

And it was really cheap, I originally bought it just to see what the fuss about smartwatches was all about. But it’s been so damn useful and trustworthy that I won’t even consider upgrading until it fails someday.

Many of my friends really love Coldplay, so I’ve heard several of their albums played at parties. Many times. But I cannot remember a single song from Coldplay and most likely wouldn’t recognize them if one was playing on the radio.

And I have a decent ear for music, I can play a few instruments and can even find the right chords for a song after hearing it once or twice. But not Coldplay. There is nothing wrong with their music, but it doesn’t make me feel anything. It’s just so generic to my taste, I guess.

I have a battery operated tube radio from mid to late 1940’s. It even works, but the battery it uses is getting rare and quite expensive. And my country doesn’t really use AM radio broadcasts anymore, so it’s more of a curiosity nowadays.

I also have a lot of working stuff from the 1950’s, mostly radios and amplifiers. Great gear, and much easier to service than their modern counterparts.

My eyes are very sensitive to light, so I’ve been using “Men in Black” - style wraparound sunglasses since the late 90’s.

I am a dad, but pretty much as far from conservative one can be. Where I live conservative dads do not tend to use these at all.

My old Xperia Z5 Compact was the only phone I’ve ever owned that had decent speakers. You could actually listen music with them without getting pissed off. It was small and had amazing audio capabilities and great camera, easily the best phone I’ve ever owned.

But listening music / watching videos in public with your phone speakers on is an abomination. It should be made illegal everywhere.

Yes. I was almost three years old. I don’t remember much, but I do remember that I started to sing during the wedding ceremony when my parents knelt at the altar. Of course no one else sung.

I also remember that the priest scared the shit out of me and that my godfather “fell asleep” in the toilet and had to be carried to a car. I learned years later that he had severe social anxiety which he treated with liquor.

I did this with my friends when we went to Thailand. We were enjoying the delicious taste on a beach, two Australian guys were wanted to try it. They both spat it out instantly and the other one got so mad we thought he’s actually going to attack us.

After he calmed down a bit he demanded to see us drink it to be sure we hadn’t tricked him to drink poison. So we downed the entire 1 litre bottle to appease him. It was the start of a great day that lasted for few days.

I tried American chocolate once. It tasted like vomit aftertaste.

Never again.

I’d hug my mom. Then I’d go ask the pretty next door girl for a date; I lesrned later in life that she also had a crush on me at the time, but since I was plain looking and slightly overweight nerd I never thought I’d hsve any chance with her.

After getting that out of my system I’d do the obligatory investing.

Lemmy only. I quit Reddit when the third party apps fell.

I do miss some of the niche hobby subreddits, but fuck Spez. If I need to find some info, I can access it via search engines.

Otherwise I’m perfectly happy with Lemmy, people are generally much nicer and there’s more than enough content. Reddit was so overbloated that this smaller universe is quite enough for me.

I assume it was a generalization, just few weeks ago I installed 32-bit Linux Mint to two laptops from 2007 or 2008, now my kids have their very own and fully functional computers. They do lag a bit sometimes, but learning patience is just good for the kids.

It would not hurt to try. Using your phone to record your singing may not be the best idea, the microphone is so small that singing even with normal volume gets the recording easily distorted.

USB-connected microphones are pretty cheap and will perform much better, just hook one to a laptop and use any simple recording software.

And I recommend starting small with children’s songs. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with it’s straightforward ascending and descending melody is a great starter, or at least for me it was.

That is the reason I practiced the first two years in my room at lullaby volume.

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Practice. A lot.

In my teens I wasn’t able to carry a tune at all. Our music teacher marked me as “hopeless” after hearing a me singing a few lines.

This pissed me off royally. I had no desire or illusions of becoming a great singer, but I would not accept being “hopeless”. So I started practicing with simple children’s song melodies and recorded my singing with an old cassette recorder. It was indeed pretty awful at first, but I slowly got better. Then I got my driver’s license and could sing along the songs from the radio and my cassettes while driving alone, it was a big step up from singing quietly in my room.

I also started playing the guitar to get a better understanding of musical theory, which was helpful. After I had learned the basics of playing rhythm guitar firmly I learned to play the piano. I believe that singing the melodies while playing them on the piano was essential to my development, since I could instantly hear if I did not hit the correct note.

By my mid-twenties I could already carry tunes easily and even got a complements about my singing voice. Key changes and modulations were still pretty challenging, but I kept on practising whenever I found the time.

Now in my forties I can repeat a melody correctly after hearing it once or twice and I consider myself a decent singer. I don’t sing karaoke or any solo performances, but I do love singing backup or as part of a group.

If my music teacher hadn’t embarrassed me publicly all those years ago, I most likely would have never put any effort in getting better at singing or learning to play instruments. I started this lifelong project purely out of spite, but it became a major and very dear part of my life. I even owe my marriage to music, while we were still dating my wife confessed to me that she most likely wouldn’t have even noticed me if I hadn’t been playing the guitar at that one summer party. Thankfully I wasn’t too hammered at that time ;)

I had this before my hearing was damaged in my mid-thirties. I could hear if any electrical device with large filter capasitors was turned on, even from another room. I discovered by accident that the high pitch noise was emitted by the capasitors when I was fixing old audio gear, I guess they vibrate while doing their job or something like that.

I talked about this with my friend who was specializing to be an ear/hearing doctor, his theory was that my upper hearing range was a bit higher than average. He also talked about how brains filter sensory data and it could just be that my filters weren’t blocking these frequencies.

It was also impossible for me to sleep in a room if there were any mosquitoes. The whining of their wings even in the far side of a room was maddening, so I had to kill them all every night before hitting the bed. The one good thing that came out of the damage to my hearing was that the mosquitoes bother me no more, unless they fly right in front of my ears.

Yeah, “Time Enough For Love” ended up on that list mostly because it’s so different. That made an impression on me when I read it in high school, in the way of “Huh, I guess it’s actually possible to write a book like this”. It had a lot of interesting ideas but the narrative sprawls around pretty wildly.

Riftwar Saga basically takes Tolkien’s Middle-earth setting and mixes it with our own world’s Middle age cultures, plus magical stargates and an invasion from an another world. It’s not a ripoff in any way, it carries it own story proudly but the similarities with names from Tolkien’s works was a bit distracting at first. These were the first books I was able to read entirely in original English in my early teens.

There are so many, but here are a few from the top of my head:

The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Time Enough For Love, Robert A. Heinlein.

Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein.

Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes.

Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri.

Dune, Frank Herbert.

Paradise Lost, John Milton.

Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke.

The Riftwar Saga, Raymond E. Feist.