Hello and good morning.

Boy, everything in the world sure seems bad, doesn’t it? This seems like a great time to revisit an old piece of tech.

A PSP with a set of wired earbuds
Were the wired earbuds totally necessary? Yes. Yes they were.

I bought this PSP in, oh, 2007? 2008? Must have scrimped and saved for it with my part time jobs (I worked all through college, and paid for most of it that way, but doesn’t mean I made a lot of extra), and enjoyed it just fine. I seem to recall having way more games than just the two I have now (Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII and Dissidia: Final Fantasy), but I guess Bookman’s must have needed them more.

It’s sat in a box for a while, but since my boys have discovered a love for all things Final Fantasy, thanks to us playing Kingdom Hearts this previous summer, I decided to break it out. It didn’t take long for me to start to wonder: “What if this became THE Device?” Instead of lugging my phone around everywhere, I made this my EDC piece of tech. Load it up with music, buy some retro RPG and Metroidvania games, and use it offline so I’m not tempted to doomscroll in any way, shape, or form, thus protecting my mental stability and making me a better husband, father, and person?!

Turns out, you can buy 128GB micro SD cards for $25 and a $5 SONY memory card adapter on Amazon (my wife and I stopped using Amazon regularly last year, but I had a gift card from a student, so, what can you do?). All the digital music I had on an old hard drive amounts to about 35GB of space. And that’s a few hundred albums.

Oh, and a battery, because it turns out PSP batteries have this bad habit of growing when they sit around too long.

An opened back of a PSP with a new battery installed.

With Spotify increasing its rates and the enshittification of just about everything, and my brain being an insane mess with four kids always asking for things (why do they keep asking for THINGS?!), I think I need to simplify.

I’m gonna start buying music off of Bandcamp whenever I can, pick up used CDs at the aforementioned Bookman’s here in Arizona, and keep an old ACER laptop with a CD drive on standby when it comes time to rip music.

Over on the gaming side, I grabbed a copy of Castlevania; The Dracula X Chronicles and Final Fantasy II to fool around with on writing breaks.

You don’t have to let the corporations win, completely. You can do little things to spite them and not give them your monthly fees. Sometimes all it takes is a couple of bucks and an old piece of tech they thought died a long time ago to teach them a lesson.

(Presently, my phone is on a charger at the back of the room and I’m listening to the Mortal Kombat: Annihilation soundtrack as I write this, in case you were wondering.)

Thanks for reading,

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