kenizl86 dot com

March Update 2023

29 Mar, 2023

It was weird to look back and see the last time I posted was back in September, which was 5 MONTHS AGO?! Crazy. I didn’t think it had been so long!

Well anyway; fear not! This post will not be long and rambly and… long… like the last “update” post (at least I hope not!). I mostly wanted to talk a bit about what’s been going on behind the scenes these past 5 months.

Not much to say

Honestly, that’s been the issue that’s kept me from posting recently: I don’t feel I have much to say. Or rather, I should put it another way because I’m pretty sure I will always have something to say about many things. The correct thing to say is this: I’ve been letting myself become distracted and have been feeding my procrastination with things that don’t matter.

This is a continual battle for me, and I’m sure many others share in it (what with the internet always having something to sink hours and days of your time into). Deep down I’m an artistic person, I just don’t give myself enough space and room to let it pour out of me. Specifically, I need to bore myself until action becomes necessary. Like posting to my website. I’ve been wanting to post for the past 3 months at least, but It’s been so much easier to say these things instead: “I’m tired” or “I’ll just watch Chainsaw Man instead” or “let me playtest this deck in MTG”.

This is, as Steven Pressfield puts it in The War of Art, the force of “Resistance” fighting against my passion to keep me from doing things I want to do. And we all need to find out own ways of fighting RESISTANCE. For me right now, that’s choosing to not watch YouTube. Choosing that “Nah, there’s nothing on there worth watching”, or at least when I’m at home. So right now I’m working on reigning that in. There’s other things too, but that’s the hardest one right now.

Privacy, A Retrospective

So I didn’t realize until I was looking through some of my files for the site that it just so happened that almost a year ago exactly I wrote a post about “Today’s Privacy on the Internet”, and how funny it was that this past week I’ve been pouring over more privacy and security stuff.

I won’t get into the crazy details because I plan on writing a separate post about this topic, but I can do a bit of an update on some of the things I left off with from the last post.

Through the course of this year I’ve been able to (almost) fully purge Google from my life, and have been able to do so for my parents as well. Currently working on getting the rest of my family in on it, but that will probably take more cajoling. Here’s some stuff I’ve been able to accomplish:

Now my phone is actually a funny story. So I was able to get Google Pixels for my parents and De-Google them with an Android Open Source Project (AOSP), because apparently the Pixels are the best phones to De-Google (which is hilarious and so beautifully contradictory). They work fine. But if you’ll remember I said my phone got an update and was no longer supported for the AOSP? Well a few months down the line they did it! They were able to get it working on the new update. So I went through the motions of getting my phone loaded with an AOSP and……… didn’t work. NO LUCK. So I had to reflash the phone with the original image, but then something super funny happened when I went through the setup procedure for the phone.

Turns out, Google makes it super simple to just opt-out of their services.

This BLEW MY MIND. Part of the whole process of getting everything migrated to NextCloud and Joplin and whatever was exporting from Google to import into these other services. During that period I discovered that Google has simple, easy and efficient tools for you to just remove yourself from their services. Crazy! But it seems this also translates to setting up a phone. I didn’t realize that they’ve now made it where adding a Google account, using Play, using the Google engine in the background is all optional now. So after setting up Firefox, Aurora, F-Droid and these other things, I’ve now got an Android phone that, while not 100% Google free, is like 90% free of Google. At least I’ve made it several steps more removed from their snooping.

I can be content with that for now. There is no longer an immediate need to remove myself, I’m quite content with how that all shook out.

YouTube again?

Yeah, turns out I’m at it again. I still have barely posted much to Cardboard Cracking, but I’ve recently revitalized my kenizl86 Channel. I’m not going to be doing anything crazy with it, but I figured it would be fun to branch out from just the written words of this website and do some discussion videos about things I’m interested in, among some other things. As of right now, I’ve got two videos up discussing some Magic: The Gathering topics.

Again, it’s just another creative outlet for me right now. ALL OF EVERYTHING I DO AS KENIZL86 IS A HOBBY. At least for now!

Health

A very important thing that transpired within these past 5 months was that I kickstarted the work on losing weight. I hired a personal trainer for three months (as much as I could afford unfortunately) and was able to get back to a reasonable weight and start rock climbing again, which I hadn’t been able to do in close to 3 years.

Things have still been progressing smoothly. I crossed the 32lb mark the other day (186lbs to 154lbs), which is cool to see. I still can’t seem to tone up, my body takes it’s time believing it has muscles I guess. But one day. One day I’ll look like GigaChad.

gigachad

That’s basically it

Obviously there’s more to my life than just those 4-ish things, but those are some of the things I wanted to briefly talk about. Hopefully now that I’ve got the obligatory “I haven’t posted in months” post out of the way I can feel free to get back to doing some more rambling nonsense. Byyyyyyyeeee!

kenizl86 out!