I have a “world bible” that I created on onenote with all of my characters, locations, lore, etc. As part of that I have my stories plotted out in rough notes, then chapter by chapter in a table, (this often changes when actually writing but it’s a great foundation).

Lots of people use Obsidian or Notion to do the same thing. I already had onenote on all my devices, so it was easy just to add notes to my notes section if an idea came to me on the move that I could return to later.

I’ve tried to move to obsidian or notion a couple of times, but I think I have a certain efficiency now with my crude system, and it just seems to work for me.

Short form content platforms aren’t going anywhere, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts are just a carbon copy of tiktok. No problems with them, of course, because they’re American.

Currently in Tokyo from UK, paid for an Airalo esim before I arrived, and I was pretty impressed with how cheap and easy it’s been- and that’s with 20gbs data, which I’ve barely used.

My service provider O2 would have charged me £7 a day with their O2 travel bolt-on, but would have still been my usual contract of unlimited calls, texts and data, just that the data would have been throttled a fair bit. This is a lot more reasonable than it used to be, but still would have amounted in a large bill compared to the one off $18 esim.

Yeah, I did say someone recently told me this was a feature. I’ll find some time at the weekend to make the switch, it’s really far past time now I think.

I use Chrome, but Firefox on my android phone. I have had ublock origin installed since the beginning. I only really use it because I manage my YouTube and Google accounts through it, and its handy for sending tabs between my macbook and PC, as well as the various other workflow features I’ve come to rely on over the last decade or so.

Though I recently heard this was a feature on Firefox now. I used to use Firefox prior to chrome, about 15 or so years ago. I’ve been intending to switch back recently but haven’t got round to it yet.

I remember reading that thread! Well, kindly asking my half-german wife to translate it for me. It was very helpful!

I just don’t feel comfortable having these big companies profiting from my information. If it’s that valuable to them, then they should be paying me for it.

“We believe in free speech, so you should let us sell your data.”

Music Producer input here. It’s sort of been a general rule of etiquette in production that piracy is fine if you intend to buy the product.

A lot of the better plugins can be very expensive and prior to subscription models, were limited in free trials. It can take some time to know if a particular plugin works with your workflow and gives you the results you like over multiple different projects.

I’ve always stuck with this. If I see something I like the look of, I’ll pirate it, use it over a bunch of projects and if I find myself relying on it then I’ll save up to buy it legitimately. Of course, there’s a fair bit of trust involved there, and a lot of people will be happy enough to keep the pirated version and try to find a new crack every time the DAW or plugin requires an update,

No chance I would have been able to afford half of the software I use in my workflow when I first started out, nobody can. But I eventually found my flow then caught up and paid it back.

I consider that ethical piracy. Or maybe I’m just justifying it to myself. But that’s how it was implied when I first started out in college and it’s a good system where you can still eventually support the small companies that make quality products that work for you.

Yep, that’s confirmed my suspicions then. Thank you!

For everyone suggesting Revanced, I used it for a while and found it to be incredibly slow and breaking up videos to buffer all the time. Was I using a dodgy version or was I missing something? I had it from the app store if I remember right. (Might be thinking of Vanced??)

Edit: Sorry folks, I wasn’t bashing revanced, I was just pretty sure I had a fake app and wanted to make sure. Thanks for the replies putting me on the right track!

Nah, can’t do it on principle. I know they already make money from me for selling my data, I’m not going to also pay them to do that.

I know this is really bad. And I know they need to make money somehow. But on precedent I just refuse to pay for YouTube premium, having been there since the beginning. Before adverts started showing, and everyone predicted they’d plague us with ads until charging you to get rid of them.

Also a part of me refuses to believe Google can’t afford to run YouTube without adverts.