Requiem For A Kindle Fire

A trusted companion has passed from this world.

I don’t generally get sentimental about equipment, but this 10” Kindle Fire was kinda special to me, and I’m sad that it has reached the end of the line. This machine saw me through the pandemic, and most importantly it chronicled most of my steady recovery from post Lyme malaise, which began at the start of 2019.

The screen is fine, the shatter marks are a protector. It’s been dropped on every corner, but it shrugged off the damage. What finally finished it was loneliness - I put it away, thinking I’d start playing Euclidea on my iPad, and when I took it out again a week later, it was unresponsive.

This machine arrived in late November of 2019, just a few weeks before I ceased using Modafinil. I knew to watch for signs of tardive dyskinesia and I quit the day my right eyebrow started to twitch. I was using the drug off label - it did nothing for my sleep irregularity, but it was great for controlling digestive discomfort. Simply switching to treble the RDA of L-tyrosine accomplished the same thing for me.

This furry menace arrived the month after the Fire, and she too gets a lot of credit for my improvement.

The reason the Fire was a big deal to me was that I’d been playing Mahjong with it since the day I got kitteh, and I was autistically keeping screen shots of my times. What you see here is that I was a three minute player in the fall of 2021, there was just one three second gain in nine months, then I started my first round of Noopept.

Gaining a second or two would have been notable. Gains of 11 seconds? 15 seconds? 19 seconds? Amazing. And what’s more, most of that happened within the first 72 hours of using the nootropic.

Trimming thirty seconds off a three minute game is like trimming thirty seconds off your time running a mile. This just doesn’t happen for people who have an AARP card. There are informal contests here and there, based on my reading, on a good day I’m nipping at the heels of kids a third of my age.

But I had plateaued on the game; my last improvement was around Christmas. It was time to find something new, and I don’t feel I need to monitor this area in a close fashion any more. I’m just ending another round of Noopept, this time just 10mg sublingual, and I can tell the new things I’m doing are coming much easier.

So I will be spending more time with Euclidea, and I’m looking for an iPad Mahjong that doesn’t act like a pinball machine. The choices all look pretty grim thus far, every one I’ve tried is all tarted up with animation and sound. But I’ll keep searching for the game I’ve loved for the last forty years …

That is, assuming I can retrieve my iPad from Alita, who would prefer I spend more time playing with her.