Brewchin

No leaning forward in the heat of the moment… 😄

Good lord, I had one of these. By SoundBlaster, IIRC (May still have it in a box somewhere).

For the confused younger folk: They were a neat idea on paper, but awful in practice. Being all rigid plastic without padding on the base, they excelled at transmitting every bump/vibration of the desk, keyboard taps and (roller ball) mouse movement. 😬

Before headsets with mics or decent noise cancellation were a thing, and before online gaming was much of a thing, so most gamers had powered speakers on their desks. Which the mic was also great at picking up…

This is exactly what I came into the comments to say. 😄

I somehow remember the circle algorithm ahem years after learning and using it for anything I could…

Same here. And the reasons you mention are exactly the reason I deleted that account a few years ago when I switched to Fastmail.

A couple of my friends are willing to put up with it, but always mention the volume of spam they deal with.

I’ve had my new email address for 6-odd years and only have one regular spam source - from a hack of an online shop - but as I used a username+shopname email alias for it, it’s easy to detect and automatically handle.

Now I use Fastmail’s “Masked Email” feature for each online account. When (not if) a site gets hacked, I just change the site to use a new masked address and block/delete the old one, and then it’s useless to scammers/spammers.