X (formerly known as Twitter) & Bluesky

Once again, it's been a while since my previous blog post, and this one is a bit of an administrative note. 

 

Since Sunday (4th October 2026), X (formerly known as Twitter) would like me to prove that I am human by opening the X app on my non-existent smartphone. Sure, I could borrow someone else's smartphone for that, update my profile on X to say that, for now, I will share updates on Bluesky rather than on both platforms simultaneously et cetera - but some quick research revealed that biometric data might be required for this verification. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise, considering how things have developed on X lately. So: For now, I will share updates on Bluesky only, rather than on both platforms simultaneously, as I have done since January 2025. Feel free to follow me on Bluesky.  

 

Happy New Year 2026!

Happy New Year 2026, everyone! ♥ ♥ ♥  

 

Unlike the past two years, 2025 did not include attending a concert just a few days before Christmas. Instead, there was a live album release - Priest's "Live In Hollywood" on 19th December 2025 - and I wrote an album review of it.

   

 

After kicking off the autumn concert season 2025 with Priest in Sweden's capital Stockholm and then attending the Haunt Fest Halloween Party with DJ Jonas "Skinny Disco" Kangur (Deathstars / The Heard) in the same city, things stayed surprisingly quiet on the concert and party front for the rest of the year. Instead, I was kept busy with a lot of technical stuff. First, I had to get a new laptop with updated software, and then I needed a new phone - and even a new mobile subscription. While the laptop situation had been anticipated for a long time (Windows 10 support ended in mid-October 2025), the phone issue came completely out of the blue, thanks to Sweden's decision to shut down its 2G and 3G networks as early as 1st December 2025. I only found out about it by pure chance, around the time of the Priest concert. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with modernising technology, I thought that the three months' notice was pretty short. And, as mentioned before, I only found out about the whole thing by chance. So the first step was to find the perfect phone, and once I knew what I wanted, it wasn't that easy to get my hands on it. I still haven't taken the plunge into smartphones (and I don't plan to do so until user-replaceable batteries for smartphones are back in 2027, thanks to a new EU law), and feature phones have really become a niche product here in the Nordic countries. Shortly before my new Nokia phone finally arrived, I realised that my mobile subscription was outdated as well, since it didn't support 4G, just like my previous Nokia phone. Changing a mobile subscription in Finland turned out to be a surprisingly time-consuming process, even though the whole system is designed around the idea that one should ideally switch operators every 1-2 years to get the best financial deal. That was something I hadn't had to do at all over the past 8-9 years, since the basic monthly fee for my non-smartphone subscription was already very low. So now I basically have a smartphone subscription with unlimited internet - for a feature phone. Oh well.

 

 

Just like the autumn concert season 2025, the spring concert season 2026 got off to an early start, with one of the wildest and best weekends of this year already taking place a week ago: Two concerts, two hotels and veeery little sleep in Stockholm. Soon, you can read all about it on this blog... Stay tuned!