I've been using CX file explorer on Android I think since day one? I'm sure one of the first things I did when I got my first smartphone was holler "what do you mean there's no file manager??" and search the web to figure out wtf I was supposed to do. CX popped up as a recommendation and I've been happy with it ever since. It seems impossible for this to be true, but AFAICT Google wouldn't start including an official file manager1 with Android until 2017, and CX still beats it into the dirt as far as functionality is concerned.
I recently learned that CX has a not-obvious feature that makes it even more of a killer app, and that's FTP. From the home screen, if you go to the Network tab, then tap New Location, then Remote, you can enter your login information for an FTP or SFTP server.
After that, it'll be saved as a network location and you can navigate to it just like it was any other folder on your phone. Files will take longer to populate and access, obviously, but otherwise you can move files back and forth between your phone and server seamlessly. You can also edit HTML et al. in situ with your editor of choice. I like Xed.
Before I learned about this, trying to edit my website on a phone was very frustrating. I used a bare-bones FTP client I found on the F-droid store and it did the job, but just barely. The built-in editor didn't support UTF-8 encoding, it didn't have a fast way to scroll to the end of the file, and whether it would actually preserve my changes or error out when I tried to save was a coin flip. I wish I had known about CX's FTP functionality a long time ago.2
That's not all, though: it can also run as an FTP server. On the Network tab, if you tap Access From Network, if you're on wifi it'll let you start a server with no setup. It'll automatically populate with your phone's local IP address, a port to connect to and a random password. Connect with a client on the same network and you'll have full wireless access to your phone's file system.
I discovered this because I acquired a good deal of new music after last week's entry and I was looking for a better way to put it on my phone. I hate Android's USB file transfer, I always have, to the extent that the friction has probably discouraged me from getting new music. I think it should be as simple as plugging my phone into the computer and mounting it as a USB hard drive—that's how it worked with all my previous mp3 players—but no, there's special software you need for your computer to communicate with your phone. They can't just talk, they have to do the secret handshake. I need to select a special option on my phone to allow my computer to access the files. On Linux it's especially annoying: it pops up a box asking if I want to view the files on the device I just plugged in, a question for which the answer is "no" because it doesn't work. In fact, if I have a file manager window open on my computer at all, it won't work. I have to make sure no file browser is open, plug my phone in, close the dialogue window, switch to file transfer mode on my phone, scan my fingerprint (?!) and then open a file browser, and finally I have access to my own damn files. Once it works, it's way slower than file transfer over USB should be if done properly.
I've run FTP servers on small devices before—that's how I've been moving files on and off my 3DS since I installed the custom firmware, and it works great—but it always seemed too limited when I tried on Android. There was always some weird file permission snafu, I never had access to the full file system. But for whatever reason, it works with CX. I can start the FTP server, connect with Filezilla3 on my computer, navigate to my music folder, and just drag-and-drop all the new music onto my phone. It's so fast and frictionless. I never need to plug my stupid phone into the computer again.
At least, that's the hope. Google is always threatening to impose new constraints on people wanting to use their pocket computer as a pocket computer and not strictly an ad delivery portal. In fact, I'm surprised CX can still be granted root filesystem access. I thought that was only something you can do if you "root" your phone, a process I've experimented with in the past and hope I don't have to again. Messing with the bootloader and custom firmware always fills me with dread, I'm terrified that I'll sneeze or my cat will jump on the desk and wiggle the USB cable while it's flashing the rom and I'll brick my phone. Or I'll just misread a step and fuck it up myself. But if google continues their push to turn the operating system into iOS Jr., I'll need to bite the bullet sooner or later. Maybe even install one of those—gulp—community forks. But the day that happens may just be the day I trade my glass rectangle in for an mp3 player and a flip phone. I'm so not interested in being a phone hacker. I want it to just work. As long as android keeps letting me run the programs I need, I don't have any issues with it. The more control they strip away, the closer I'll get to jumping ship.
My second comic book movie era
I never got that into the Marvel "cinematic universe". I saw a couple of the early Avengers movies because friends wanted to go, but I never got that deep into the franchise. I have the kind of ADHD where I lose interest in a story if it goes on too long. I need a story to end at some point so I can have closure and move on to another story. I also strongly prefer when a story is written with an ending in mind, rather than being continued indefinitely as long as it's still popular. Whatever conclusion it ends up getting, if any, is rarely good. This is why I generally don't watch TV shows longer than a couple seasons,4 read long-running serials, or play MMOs.
Before I discovered this about myself, there was a stretch of my childhood when I was more into superhero media, and the X-Men stories were always my favorite. Characters suddenly developing powers in their teens and being ostracized by society for it was much more relatable to me than the Great Man school of spandexed vigilantism, and I think the storytelling in X-Men is often more mature than its contemporaries.
A recent teaser for the next chapter in the Avengers saga revealed that the X-Men would be making an appearance. My spouse is an MCU fan, she's been watching since the beginning, but she didn't have any experience with the X-Men. She wanted to get their history in preparation for the new movie, so I thought it'd be fun to watch the filmography together.
I was 15 when the first X-Men film was released, which was the perfect age for it. I grew up watching the cartoon (1992-1997) so seeing it on the big screen was a massive deal at the time. I saw the first trilogy of films in the theater on release; by the third one in 2006, I was starting to move on to other interests. I don't remember much about how I felt, but I suspect I was disappointed at the third film's clumsy handling of the Dark Phoenix saga. I never saw any of the standalone Wolverine films but I did watch X-Men First Class in 2011, and although I remember enjoying it, I drifted away from the franchise after that.
But with X-Men suddenly becoming relevant to my spouse's interests, I was happy to revisit the movies I've seen and catch up on the ones I haven't. There are "only" nine of them, which feels much more attainable than the 37 movies (and god knows how many episodes of TV) I'd need to watch to get fully up to speed with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For the folks who can handle this level of investment, I'm glad they're enthusiastic for the new one; I'm happy to remain a casual observer.
I will see Doomsday with Izzy, though. I'm sure a lot will go over my head, but it's a big event for her and I'm excited that she's excited.
As for X-Men, I'm happy to report that the first two films hold up quite well. The second one is my favorite. X-Men 3 was a disappointment. They tried to cram too much into one movie and it was far too "comicbooky" for my liking. Jean deserved better. As I'm writing, we just watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine (did not like, one star, I won't get into it here) and I look forward to revisiting First Class tonight.5
If you really can't get enough of my media logorrhea, you can read my letterboxed diary,6 but I wouldn't suggest reading if you haven't seen them; I freely talk about plot details and spoil things. But people don't read audience reviews for recommendations, right? You don't need me to tell you if the movies are good or bad; you want to either read opinions you agree with and feel validated, or read opinions you hate and feel angry. Either way, I'm happy to be of service.
Signs of a new StumbleUpon
Back in the early 00s there was a service and piece of software called StumbleUpon. It was a browser extension that gave you a toolbar button you could click to be taken to a random cool website. The directory of cool websites was human-curated and allowed user submissions and ratings, so it was an ancestor of social link aggregators like Digg and Reddit. It was pretty cool until 2011, when like everything else about the internet that used to be cool, it was acquired by venture capital and @!#?@!7 into oblivion. User-generated content was erased, the once trustworthy recommendations became tainted with sponsored content, algorithms were employed. It died a slow death and went away for good in 2018.
But yesterday I noticed some strange traffic patterns on my website that made me think I was added to some kind of new StumbleUpon-like service. I noticed referrals from a number of cool Neocities sites I've never seen before. I took a gander and couldn't find a direct link to my website anywhere. It occurred to me that my traffic might look like this if I was added to a new StumbleUpon-like directory: people using the service are clicking the random website button, moving from one page to the next, eventually landing on mine. As the day went on, the list of referrers kept growing, and while it remains mostly Neocities pages (or similar small personal sites on their own domains) it now includes games on itch.io, projects on GitHub, and the venerable homestarrunner.net (it's dot com!) My monthly referrer list usually has about a dozen entries, after yesterday it's up to 173.
(Except, weirdly, the new traffic seems to come in batches. With a plugin like I'm describing, one would expect the traffic to be a slow trickle, right? Like 173, a few minutes later 174, etc... but it was at 173 most of the day until it suddenly jumped to 215. So I could be completely off-base about what's causing this in which case I have no idea what it is. Neo-StumbleUpon is my best theory for now.)
So yeah, if you know of a modern service that fits this description let me know, I'm curious to check it out! Also thank you to whoever added me!
I should probably disable referral logs at some point: the only reason I turned them on was in case someone wanted to respond to one of my blog posts on their blog, kind of a quick 'n dirty webmention, but now that I'm no longer blogging on my own domain it doesn't serve much of a purpose. Although I guess until I find out what service I've been added to, my referral log serves as my own personal StumbleUpon, so that's something.
Mataroa shows me how much traffic I'm getting (a meaningless number that I assume is almost entirely bots) but not who's linking to me, and that's fine. It has a much more sensible comment system, so if someone does reply on their blog they can drop a link pretty easily (and please do.)
Taking my time
I don't want to jinx it, but I'm trying to get the blogging gears turning again, and I'm feeling a lot of relief having given myself permission to update only once a week. If I have a big subject that I want to spend a lot of words on, I can do so, or if I have a few smaller subjects I want to talk about, I can do that too. I can spend all week revising and polishing what I write without the pressure of meeting some kind of implicit quota. I'm a lot happier with the quality of my work, and hopefully that comes across to the readers, too. Any sub-section of this post could've been its own entry, and I could've posted five times this week instead of just one, but I think the extra care I can give my words is worth the wait.
For example, I had a big section in my post about cable TV regarding piracy, and I realized it brought nothing to the table in terms of bolstering my point or providing context, so I cut it. I like talking about piracy, that's why I wrote it in the first place, but if I didn't give myself time to reflect, I might not have realized that topic didn't belong in that particular post. Removing that section made the final product much stronger. The writing being stronger makes me happier, makes the work feel worth it, even if no one else necessarily notices.
This is an important thing to learn about myself. If I'm going to be a creative person, and I would like to be, I need to learn how to find intrinsic motivation. Posting five times as much might get me 5x as many likes on social media, 5x as many responses, 5x as many spikes in the meaningless bar graph, and those things all might give me a temporary rush of brain chemicals, but none of it actually fulfills me. Writing something I'm proud of—even if it is "just" a blog post—makes me happy.
This might mean a post takes me longer than a week. It might mean I work on a post for a week and realize it's going nowhere, I started from an incorrect premise and the whole thing needs to be scrapped. I'll try to let you know if this happens. If I take another long hiatus, I want it to be because good work takes time and not because I fell into another depression hole.
Coming Soon
There should be another Game Badges update on the way: I've finished four games since the last update and I think I'm nearing the end of Ever Oasis for the 3DS. (I update in batches of 5 to keep the display grid tidy.) I suspect I'll have a lot to say about Ever Oasis, so that might constitute a blog post in itself.
In light of my revelation about weird mid-90s alt rock in the previous entry, I've added music to my weird 1996 youtube playlist. 1995 was still a big year for grunge (with huge hits like Possum Kingdom and Tomorrow) but there was still enough weirdness that I made a playlist for that year too. 1997 hopefully forthcoming.
I've been drafting a post about what trying to form healthy habits is like with ADHD (spoiler: it sucks.) I'm also working through some thoughts about why I think having a pet has led to me adopting some quasi-religious beliefs about the relationships between humans and animals, and why I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't know if either idea will coalesce into a finished post, but I'm starting to have ideas again and that's an improvement 🦝
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Your phone manufacturer (such as Samsung) may have included a file browsing application, which makes this no less insane, because managing files should be the #1 core function of an operating system. Imagine if you bought a new Windows computer and said to Microsoft "I would like to look at my files please", and they threw their hands up in the air and said "sorry, not our department, you need to talk to Dell." Trebuchet moment. ↩
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It's not a fully-featured FTP client though, so it won't help if I need to change a file's permission or run a command. But this is super rare and can usually wait until I'm at my computer. ↩
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The linux version of Filezilla still seems fine, but as far as I know all the windows binaries you'll be able to find are still severely compromised. If you're on windows I recommend WinSCP instead. ↩
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Shows where every episode is a self-contained story like The Simpsons can hold my interest for longer, but I'm still typically done before the show comes to an end. Also, shows that go on long enough often evolve into serials. See Steven Universe, The Venture Brothers, The Office, etc. ↩
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Update: I've now rewatched First Class and it rules. Five stars, my favorite of the franchise so far. Peak dumb entertainment. ↩
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My letterboxd "collection" is pretty small and random compared to my game badges page because I'm not as much of a movie nerd, so I've only added the movies I've watched since signing up for the account. I promise I've seen more than 30 movies though. ↩
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"Enshittifi(ed|cation)" is an apt neologism, but I think people are starting to get sick of it through overuse. I need to find some snappy alternatives ↩
I always compare my relationship with a brand to that with a person. Maybe StumbleUpon started as a community, then sold the brand to those looking for money. As the community became the lesser priority for the new StumbleUpon it became worse. Maybe not full on abusive, but onesided, until it made sense to break up with someone only concerned with money. Like Scrooge's ex in A Christmas Carol. (or maybe those ads were full on abusive)
But it also works with the classic case for that expletive neologism. In the honeymoon phase of an abusive relationship, everything is great as the abuser love bombs their target into needing them. Get the girl, or the customer, whatever. Then, things get worse gradually: the target is isolated from others that threaten the abuser's hold, be it humans or other software. You know I really don't feel like continuing to describe abuse. Captain Awkward is a blogger/advice column writer who does it pretty well. But right now, nope! Not me!