I ran slackware in college with fluxbox. I thought I was pretty darn cool.

Congratulations on keeping up with it so far!

Get a burner. Browse some boring content with it: few business websites, maybe some sports scores, maybe snap some photos of landscapes and dogs on the camera roll.

Then you have a functional phone and piece of mind. Making the phone feel “lived in” probably isn’t all that important, but I think it’d be easier to explain than a factory stock pay as you go phone.

I’ve been playing my steam backlog and recently have been working on Darksiders. This stupid boss killed me dozens of times yesterday, but I got her today!!

https://www.ign.com/wikis/darksiders/Twilight_Cathedral,_Tiamat

That holds true by the transitive property. It’s just good math.

I killed Instagram and Whatsapp recently when Mark started buddying up to Trump.

Deleted Twitter shortly after Elon took over, which bummed me out since it was a good place for software development information.

Quit reddit after the API ordeal when I didn’t want to use the official client.

I was a long time user of each platform, and I was bummed when I had to leave each.

Now I have bluesky, lemmy, mastodon, and some occasional discord servers I hangout on. I miss Instagram as a time waster, but I’ll survive without funny dog videos and fitness models.