/~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~\

I'm sitting here without internet, as intense straight-line winds tore through
my town yesterday. It tore the roof off of a call center, destroyed parts of
other buildings in the area, uprooted my family's prized pecan tree, demolished
a neighbor's shed... It's a mess.

However, it makes me quite happy that I don't rely on the web for damned near
everything, like many people do these days. There's no access to Spotify,
YouTube, Google Drive/Docs, Steam, GitHub, etc...

All my backups are safe on backup drives here at home, and synced across
devices with Syncthing. My music is on my drives, and I have older games that
don't require an internet connection just to run them locally. Oh! And I have
access to all my files. That's important.

That said, it's also making me think back to the days before always on
broadband, and how much better my productivity was. I could sign on, get the
information I needed, *not* have to wait 5-6 seconds for a page to load about
5 MB of JavaScript and 100+ MB of images, then sign off and finish what I was
doing without distraction. These days, people expect you to be "always online",
and will get frustrated when you aren't (Telegram, Discord, social media).

Of course, this means my RPi0W is offline, which means my self-hosted
gopherhole isn't online... Which sucks. But that's the beauty of self-hosting.
Sometimes, shish happens.

Still, given it's 04:20 as I'm writing this part, I'm feeling slightly bored,
though only because I don't have the light I need to pull out "Learn C on the
Mac" to get back to learning a bit of programming. At least I have /Wolfenstein
3D/, /DOOM/, /Diablo II/, /X^3: Reunion/, and /The Sims/ to keep me busy.

\~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~x~/