Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   cheap and powerful Chinese phone
Tuesday, January 30 2018
Today I took delivery of a relatively powerful new cellphone, a Redmi Note 4 (with 3 gigabytes of RAM, 64 gigabytes of store, and the Mediatek deca-core processor). It was lightly used, so I got it for cheap (a little over $100) on eBay. This particular phone is normally only sold in China, and you could never get one at, say, the Verizon store. But it was compatible with the SIM card from my trusty two-year-old Samsung Core Prime, and it ran some flavor of Android. But most of the apps were strange and presented a view into a world full of mysterious Chinese characters. One could navigate to familiar websites in the browsers (which was called simply "Browser"), and I managed to find Slack in the weird off-brand App Store. But I needed my Google Apps, and there were none to be found. It turns out that this is a requirement of phones sold in China. Google is considered a nefarious foreign company, so all the services it offers are done instead by Chinese ones. This is easily fixed by telling the phone to accept code from unknown sources and then installing the Google Installer APK v. 2.0.
Throughout the day I drank my kratom tea, and, because I was running low on it, I went to buy some more from Kraken Kratom. Unfortunately, I discovered that since the last time I bought kratom (some months ago), all the big credit card companies (except, weirdly, American Express) have stopped allowing kratom purchases with their cards. This is because kratom is a grey-market drug (and also perhaps due to malevolent Trumpian/Sessionian stupidity). So I looked into what it would take to buy a fraction of a Bitcoin to allow me to make such transactions. I did most of the setup of a Coinbase account, but got distracted when they wanted me to tell them about some tiny transactions made to the credit card I'd connected to it. I have a feeling that once I start buying things with Bitcoin, I'll be looking for more interesting stuff than kratom. Real smart, Jess Sessions!


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