So… I bought a Chromebook.

I’ve been wanting to get a laptop again for a while. With neighbour issues seeming to want to escalate I’ve wanted to be able to make a lot of what I do online as portable as possible. If I want to go into the bedroom and talk to people, or post on forums and such I should be able to, if only to get away from the problem temporarily. As much as I love having my Bluetooth keyboard and a tablet available, it’s not the same as having a laptop. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a laptop that has too much, but I was also painfully aware, thanks to tablets with keyboard attachments, that not spending enough and not doing enough research was going to hurt my purchasing in the long run.

I had been eyeing up a Chromebook for a while, purely because I spend almost all of the time I am not gaming, or video editing (i.e. things that I wouldn’t attempt on a laptop anyway) in Chrome in some way or another. Even when I’m in Discord it’s a version of Chrome with a few things attached. After doing research, it turned out that the cheapest Chromebook I could find was perfect for my needs; an Acer Chromebook 11 (2016).

I’ve not had a new laptop since mid-2010 when I bought from the first iterations of Dell’s Inspiron 1545, and the low-end version at that. That was six or seven years ago, and frankly I expected similar specs. I know that Linux and by extension ChromeOS would run on a lot of hardware (it was just about usable on my 2007 EeePC 901 with spinning HDD) and as such I expected the specs to be low to match. What I had missed was that with SSDs becoming cheaper to produce and more in demand thanks to the speed differences inherent in the design they remove a significant bottleneck in cheap notebooks at a decent price point. SSDs are no longer a gimmick in laptops; they are the norm.

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Pandemonial Politics.

The last twenty four hours or so have been interesting in the world of politics to say the least. The Conservatives (the party I voted for after a lot of internal struggle) have lost their majority and have now had to form a coalition government with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to get the last few seats needed for a functioning minority government. Theresa May, for all her talk of a ‘strong and stable’ government and the need for the british people to ‘strengthen her hand’ for a hard Brexit, has cost the party it’s mandate.

I’m a pragmatist when it comes to politics. I’ve always either voted for or against ideas, or prevalent qualities in the people at the top. I dislike purely voting party lines because it does a disservice to the electorate. I’m not as involved in it as some in my circle of friends and that is down to a combination of choice and frankly a lack of productive time investment in the matter.

My issue with this election, as I find becoming more and more prevalent in the UK political scene at large, is that we’re having to become more focussed at keeping people out than bringing people in. By this, I mean that we needed to keep Labour from taking power. Supposedly nearly three quarters of 18-24 year olds turned out to vote, and this theory is buttressed by the record turnout of just over 68%, the highest since the 1997 election where Tony Blair’s New Labour essentially destroyed the Conservative party at large.

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#LabourMustLose

#LabourMustLose is the only way to secure our country.

This election has given me the most pause I’ve ever had in voting, because Theresa May has some absolutely barking ideas on the internet and online Crypto.

However, the lofty ideas that she has will take longer than a parliament to work through, and you’re damn right I will be calling my MP at every step if she begins down that path. But Brexit right now is paramount, and as I said before, it’s important that we get a total Hard Brexit; anything else isn’t a compromise, it’s a backpedal, and a backpedal on the desires of the voting majority cannot be accepted in a democracy. Look at how the Liberal Democrats have fared since alienating their voter base during the coalition for proof of that.

My sadistic side wants Labour to sieze power, fuck the country in quick succession and have the Tories bail them out for the second time in as many decades to prove to the voting public that the only major party that can be somewhat trusted is the Conservatives. Think for a moment; they called Brexit as an election promise in 2015, they lost that vote and it cost them their leader in Cameron and now they are doing as the country have bid them.

Call them populist if you want, but one must be popular (for various reasons) to win in a democratic election, popular enough to earn favour with the electorate to make the right decision where it matters.

Three reasons why #LabourMustLose:

Their Shadow Chancellor is a self-confessed Marxist. [src]
Jeremy Corbyn believed in the IRA’s struggle for an “Independent Ireland”, and was happy to “commemmorate all those who died fighting” for it, but would happily see our independence from the EU thwarted thanks to lazy wording in Article 50, irrespective of one’s view of the IRA as a terrorist organisation. [src]
Jess Phllips, the MP for Birmingham Yardle, is more interested in calling anyone that doesn’t agree with third wave feminism a mysoginist, while denying sexual dimorphism despite her being elected from an all women shortlist, and called “I wouldn’t even rape you.” a rape threat, spending more time on twitter than she should be running the country. [src/src]

Our only solution to keep Labour out is to put our support behind a bigger dog. That means the Tories, and we keep an eye on every move they make.

Self-Right the Self-Write

It’s been at least two months since I last posted and I would love to come back and declare that I have been doing so much in terms of career progression and pursuing hobbies that I just haven’t had a spare moment or three to sit down and write about it. That (of course) isn’t the case, and it’s moreso my introversive attitude, and my lack of drive.

I find myself writing more than I should about it; my lack of passion or drive to do things. It must get boring to anyone that actually reads these blog entries to see it constantly referred to. It’s just one of those things that is who I am, and no amount of therapy is going to change that. My passion is in bursts, and if I can’t bury myself in it for long periods of time I don’t progress.

Taking the Youtube video that I made as an example (Patreon Canary), that was a week’s solid work of five or six hours a day, at a time when I should’ve been relaxing. Learning how to use Sony Vegas, scripting, researching, and even capturing footage. I am frankly amazed that people can do that sort of a video in a couple of days, and bow down to their work ethic. I will go back to it eventually, but there are other things on the horizon, which I’ll get back to later.

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