here are some pictures of taiwanese people hiding from the rain
So, the typhoon never hit us. We didn't even really get much of a rain band when it passed.
Or maybe we did get a dangling rain band, because last Sunday we got a fuck off giant rainstorm, despite the weather report saying "some rain around midday, otherwise meh".
Of course my stupid ass thought that would be a good day to go for a bike ride. I wasn't the only one.
One thing that make Taiwan more like Japan than China - they love baseball. And they will play even when it is pissing down.
This field had a nearby guy selling sausages and tea.
I stuck to my aspirationally vegan guns and just got a wintermelon tea. Which i would regret later, because this brief respite from the rain turned into an utter fucking shitshow of a storm about half an hour later and having a misery sausage would have been grand.
What you cannot see in that photo is that the other side of the road was practically a river. Which i did not find out till i decided to turn around and go back (i was over an hour from home at this point). I am so very glad i had worn flip-flops instead of covered shoes for this bike ride, because stopping to put my foot down at the traffic light, the water was almost up to my knee. And then downhill, the water was flowing faster than my bike. It was insane. No photo for obvious reasons.
I took a break under a bridge on the way home, although by this point i was absolutely 淋濕了 sodden.
I could not believe my luck when there was a guy close to my house hiding under an umbrella with his smoker/oven thing selling 烤地瓜 roast sweet potato. I got one, parked the bike and walked the last few blocks home. Stripped all my clothes off. Made huge puddle in my apartment. Ate sweet potato.
And then i realized i did not have my wallet. Fuuuck!
I put clothes back on again and walked back to the bike, and the gods must have been smiling on me that day, because my wallet was sitting in the basket of the bike, soaked to the core, but still with money, ID and everything else inside. Not even a petty thief would be interested to go out in that rain.
But the drama wasn't over, because Monday i went to work and it seems my phone was destroyed. There were water bubbles visible inside the camera lens, and i couldn't get a clear selfie. More problematically, the phone would no longer charge, and within about a minute of it turning on, it would turn itself off again. That fucking sucks, big-time, when you work at a company that mandates two-factor authentication for half the shit you need to do each day.
I kept hoping all week that my phone would dry out and fix itself, but it did not. It just got progressively worse, and the battery progressively dwindled. Keeping it plugged in stopped it from draining (but not from randomly rebooting), but charge did not happen.
Finally today after work i decided to buy a new phone. As y'all know if you've read my journal for a while, the last few years i have developed an extremely minimal lifestyle, and the only things i spend money on are food and travel. I do not buy Stuff. Even if my old Stuff is falling apart. So it was a big deal for me to decide to get a new phone.
But i had an ace up my sleeve! A week or two back, one of our European colleagues somehow managed to funnel a bonus to our entire department as a thank you for keeping the scumbags at bay. (I work on the anti-abuse team, so every day we are catching, banning and reporting distributors of CSAM, terrorists, spammers, scammers, harassers, trolls and other fuckheads working for authoritarian governments who create thousands of bot accounts to push divisive and offensive fake narratives on social media.) Unfortunately in Taiwan the bonus appeared as a 紅包 (red envelope) with pseudo-money/coupons that you can only spend at the kind of snazzy department store i would never visit voluntarily.
Well, now i had a reason to visit the snazzy department store. Or, i thought i did. Because when i went there, they only had Apple phones which fuck Apple and their walled garden. No one who care about freedom should use an Apple. Option B: Samsung. Which, okay, at least they're not Chinese, but their cheapest phone in stock was 13000元 (US$450) and about as heavy as a brick. Even with my 紅包 i'd be paying over 10k. Fuck all of that shit.
So. I went to a stall in the underground market, the kind of place where they still sell Nokias and other tiny flip phones, where they have 37 models but only one of each, and it probably all fell off the back of a truck. And i sucked it up and bought a goddamn China phone. I got a last-gen Xiaomi for about 6500元 (US$200). Xi Jinping will be reading all my texts, yet again. But what can you do? Apple is basically just a rebranded, overpriced China phone anyway, set up in a walled garden owned by the richest fucking company in all of Silicon Valley. Samsung at least do their own thing but they are so expensive it's bananas. Xiaomi is most popular phone for people who install custom ROMs because at least there is an officially-supported process to root it. And i don't even want to root my phone, but it's the principle. People should own the devices they paid for. My phone. My shit.
Well, mine and Xi's.
For fuck's sake.
Anyway, i managed to copy most of my shit over. I think/hope it's doing an Android 12 update right now, which will be nice because the swipe gestures i've gotten used to over the past few years should come back.
Of course, what didn't copy over was the fucking 2FA app, which is exactly the thing that was such a pain in the ass to work with on my old phone which keeps rebooting itself. So Monday is going to suck, when i can't log into anything at work.
Le sigh. I hate phone-based 2FA.
Anywho, also this week i somehow managed to keep my phone alive for just long enough to meet up with a random train-ridin', hitch-hikin' hobo who was passing through Taiwan on the way to Japan. It was cool to talk to her, and to remember that there are people out there who are traveling around on a shoestring and just working seasonal jobs and that's a lifestyle that's actually possible. I did it for a year. I have the money banked. I could do it again. I have to not forget about that.
I also wanted to write about our company trip and the hilarious European politics that resulted in a dramatic change of location two days after it was announced, but i'll do that later. Because this post is about rain and phones. I hate rain. I got rained on. So did my phone. Now i have a new one. Happy Friday.
Or maybe we did get a dangling rain band, because last Sunday we got a fuck off giant rainstorm, despite the weather report saying "some rain around midday, otherwise meh".
Of course my stupid ass thought that would be a good day to go for a bike ride. I wasn't the only one.
One thing that make Taiwan more like Japan than China - they love baseball. And they will play even when it is pissing down.
This field had a nearby guy selling sausages and tea.
I stuck to my aspirationally vegan guns and just got a wintermelon tea. Which i would regret later, because this brief respite from the rain turned into an utter fucking shitshow of a storm about half an hour later and having a misery sausage would have been grand.
What you cannot see in that photo is that the other side of the road was practically a river. Which i did not find out till i decided to turn around and go back (i was over an hour from home at this point). I am so very glad i had worn flip-flops instead of covered shoes for this bike ride, because stopping to put my foot down at the traffic light, the water was almost up to my knee. And then downhill, the water was flowing faster than my bike. It was insane. No photo for obvious reasons.
I took a break under a bridge on the way home, although by this point i was absolutely 淋濕了 sodden.
I could not believe my luck when there was a guy close to my house hiding under an umbrella with his smoker/oven thing selling 烤地瓜 roast sweet potato. I got one, parked the bike and walked the last few blocks home. Stripped all my clothes off. Made huge puddle in my apartment. Ate sweet potato.
And then i realized i did not have my wallet. Fuuuck!
I put clothes back on again and walked back to the bike, and the gods must have been smiling on me that day, because my wallet was sitting in the basket of the bike, soaked to the core, but still with money, ID and everything else inside. Not even a petty thief would be interested to go out in that rain.
But the drama wasn't over, because Monday i went to work and it seems my phone was destroyed. There were water bubbles visible inside the camera lens, and i couldn't get a clear selfie. More problematically, the phone would no longer charge, and within about a minute of it turning on, it would turn itself off again. That fucking sucks, big-time, when you work at a company that mandates two-factor authentication for half the shit you need to do each day.
I kept hoping all week that my phone would dry out and fix itself, but it did not. It just got progressively worse, and the battery progressively dwindled. Keeping it plugged in stopped it from draining (but not from randomly rebooting), but charge did not happen.
Finally today after work i decided to buy a new phone. As y'all know if you've read my journal for a while, the last few years i have developed an extremely minimal lifestyle, and the only things i spend money on are food and travel. I do not buy Stuff. Even if my old Stuff is falling apart. So it was a big deal for me to decide to get a new phone.
But i had an ace up my sleeve! A week or two back, one of our European colleagues somehow managed to funnel a bonus to our entire department as a thank you for keeping the scumbags at bay. (I work on the anti-abuse team, so every day we are catching, banning and reporting distributors of CSAM, terrorists, spammers, scammers, harassers, trolls and other fuckheads working for authoritarian governments who create thousands of bot accounts to push divisive and offensive fake narratives on social media.) Unfortunately in Taiwan the bonus appeared as a 紅包 (red envelope) with pseudo-money/coupons that you can only spend at the kind of snazzy department store i would never visit voluntarily.
Well, now i had a reason to visit the snazzy department store. Or, i thought i did. Because when i went there, they only had Apple phones which fuck Apple and their walled garden. No one who care about freedom should use an Apple. Option B: Samsung. Which, okay, at least they're not Chinese, but their cheapest phone in stock was 13000元 (US$450) and about as heavy as a brick. Even with my 紅包 i'd be paying over 10k. Fuck all of that shit.
So. I went to a stall in the underground market, the kind of place where they still sell Nokias and other tiny flip phones, where they have 37 models but only one of each, and it probably all fell off the back of a truck. And i sucked it up and bought a goddamn China phone. I got a last-gen Xiaomi for about 6500元 (US$200). Xi Jinping will be reading all my texts, yet again. But what can you do? Apple is basically just a rebranded, overpriced China phone anyway, set up in a walled garden owned by the richest fucking company in all of Silicon Valley. Samsung at least do their own thing but they are so expensive it's bananas. Xiaomi is most popular phone for people who install custom ROMs because at least there is an officially-supported process to root it. And i don't even want to root my phone, but it's the principle. People should own the devices they paid for. My phone. My shit.
Well, mine and Xi's.
For fuck's sake.
Anyway, i managed to copy most of my shit over. I think/hope it's doing an Android 12 update right now, which will be nice because the swipe gestures i've gotten used to over the past few years should come back.
Of course, what didn't copy over was the fucking 2FA app, which is exactly the thing that was such a pain in the ass to work with on my old phone which keeps rebooting itself. So Monday is going to suck, when i can't log into anything at work.
Le sigh. I hate phone-based 2FA.
Anywho, also this week i somehow managed to keep my phone alive for just long enough to meet up with a random train-ridin', hitch-hikin' hobo who was passing through Taiwan on the way to Japan. It was cool to talk to her, and to remember that there are people out there who are traveling around on a shoestring and just working seasonal jobs and that's a lifestyle that's actually possible. I did it for a year. I have the money banked. I could do it again. I have to not forget about that.
I also wanted to write about our company trip and the hilarious European politics that resulted in a dramatic change of location two days after it was announced, but i'll do that later. Because this post is about rain and phones. I hate rain. I got rained on. So did my phone. Now i have a new one. Happy Friday.