Running a marathon, participating in a fighting competition or climbing a mountain is the reward for months or years of grinding, which isn’t necessarily fun. If you want to go with your analogy, compare running a marathon with getting paid, and training for a marathon with working.

Finally a good reason to brush up on my Irish.

1492: Conquest of Paradise. Very few people remember the movie (I still do and rewatch it regularly), but the soundtrack by Vangelis is an absolute banger.

In general, his soundtracks tend to be better than the movies. Alexander is another great example. Chariots of Fire and Bounty are fine movies, but still greatly enhanced by his soundtracks. Perhaps the only movie that stood on its own against a soundtrack by Vangelis was Blade Runner.

You can still run Win 3.11 in DOSBox in that Ubuntu instance. I did it once for fun (from a Mint VM), but couldn’t get anywhere online.

Yesterday, I visited new Reddit. No VPN, Chrome in incognito mode, so no extensions, clickedon a link directly from Google search. Got a message that my access was blocked for security reasons. Copied the link to Firefox (with uBO and a few privacy-centric extensions), changed it to old reddit (where I was already logged in), and it worked just fine. I found out that when Reddit kills old reddit, I won’t even have the choice to switch to the new one (not that I ever would) because I’d be blocked anyway.

My headphones beep 10 minutes before they die. Which is especially frustrating when they do that a few minutes into a 2-hour run.

I just thought about my old phone. Got a new one in May, andjust before I left for a long trip a few weeks ago I loaded it with a few movies. During the trip I realised that the new phone didn’t have a headphone jack anymore, so I couldn’t watch anything. It made me irrationally angry.

Don’t worry; I don’t know any spoilers. I’m playing the 1995 DOS game from Microprose, and I didn’t come across a commander yet. All characters are soldiers, and 80% of them are cannon fodder that locates the aliens, which then I snipe with my few trained survivors from the distance.

X-Com: Terror from the Deep. Life expectancy of a Russian soldier in Ukraine.

Nothing, other than the joke that England is responsible for more independence days than any other country.

At my age, wrinkles.

1. Political activism. Voting and canvassing. I live in a country where it usually takes fewer than 10,000 first preference votes to elect someone to the Dail (parliament), so each of my votes, and each person I convince, counts.
2. Retirement savings. In order to enjoy your retirement savings, you need a safe place to enjoy them. So, I match my contributions to my retirement savings plan with donations to groups that in my opinion are trying to make the world a better place.
3. Self-sufficiency. I’m not cutting myself out, but I am improving my independence on the rest of the economy: renewable power sources, vegetable garden, picking up skills to fix my stuff instead of replacing it, etc.
4. Hobbies. Mainly running and art, two hobbies where I can turn off my brain.
5. Data blocks. Removal of most of the social media from my life, filtering news sources.
6. Leading by example. Teaching my kids to be decent human beings with strong moral compass, who think for themselves. Wish me luck with that one.

I saw this quote on the desk of a proctologist I once visited.

I can’t think of any food or drink (save for alcohol, but I cut down to one drink per week) that I’d buy because of the brand. The majority of what I’m buying is from store private labels. Living in Europe, however, I do pay close attention to country of origin, and try to buy as close to home as possible.

So, sort of like Washington D.C. urbanities and tourists vs. much of the overflight country.

I think about getting this contraption once my balls start poking out of my shorts.

Two of my favourite game franchises are Civilization and The Elder Scrolls. I played them since the first game, and I still play them. The original Civ and Daggerfall are always with me on a USB stick, in case I feel like playing them, even when the computer doesn’t have them installed.

The last games from the franchises I played were Civ IV and Oblivion. The next games required a download, and to this day I refuse to pay for a digital copy only. I have a huge backlog of older games on discs, so I don’t mind that my recent game purchases are largely limited to collector editions on Kickstarter.

Are webcams that ubiquitous nowadays? My monitors never had one, and I could never be arsed to buy an external one, but perhaps I’m the weird outlier here.

I wouldn’t mind that. I’m already finding it difficult to find a common topic to talk about with the twentysomethings.

I hear you. A few wrinkles around my eyes and daily cardio, and I haven’t gotten so much young mom attention since I was taking my kids to the playground. 10 more years, and I may do the same with potential grandkids. That will be a deadly combo.