Mimmy
Mimmy is an OPPO A57 2016 that belonged to my mom, stored away in her room until December 2025 when I asked to have it. Around this time I was contemplating getting a new phone since the experience with my previous one Merlin isn't satisfactory. I was also struggling again with the dopamine addiction and wanted a reset (anything to avoid going through the file dump that is Merlin), but I didn't want to spend the money. I ended up getting two "new" phones in one day, totalling to three phones: my current beat up one, my brother's old phone which I use as a school/work only phone, and Mimmy.
I initially ought to turn Mimmy into a dummy phone. I was looking into custom ROMs hoping that I could refresh Merlin with one. Although it seemed that there were no readily supported and available ROMs for Merlin, and I would have to experiment with a generic system image (GSI) on my own. I have no idea how to do that and have zero experience, and I didn't want to accidentally brick Merlin while messing around. And thus, Mimmy. But I hesitated once I had looked through it to backup any data that could be important and accidentally rediscovered what a phone is meant to be.
Holy crap. This Android 6 system is way better than literally both of my two other phones right now. Literally nothing gets in my way of using it and it does what I want in the plainest most sensible way possible. My other newer phones (a Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 and itel S23) are so full of bullshit. At least on Mimmy there are no "AI cameras" and freaking pop-ups asking me to accept the terms-and-condition to use the goddamn system music player app. And why is there an endless scroll feed built into the fucking system video player.
It's been half a year with Mimmy now and I've found it very enjoyable. Though most of the time I still bring my school/work phone everywhere with me, Mimmy has allowed me to be more intentional with what I use my gadgets for and what I pass the time with.
Setup & Rules
Mimmy has 32 GBs of storage with an SD card that I don't trust. It only has 3 GBs of RAM which is too little for big data-eating apps but enough for little things like emulating old Nintendo handheld games. Mimmy doesn't have any SIM cards in it so I couldn't call or text (I don't ever do this anyway) but more importantly it means it can only connect to the internet through WiFi. This phone doesn't have the scan to connect to WiFi thing like newer phones so it's either know the password or bust, which gives me lots of reason to download my entertainment onto the phone for offline use.
Another thing I appreciate about Mimmy is how easy file transfer is via USB. My newer phones struggle when plugged into sunflower. I have no idea what they're trying to do, what bullshit features I don't need that they're preparing in the hours long it takes to mount the phone or whatever. I just plug Mimmy in and mass transfer files to and fro. Gone are the days of transfering photos via Discord or other wireless means.
Aside from Mimmy mainly being an offline device, I have a rule for what I put on it: Avoid excess files. No hoarding game ROMs, e-books, images, music, videos—anything that isn't for the now can wait in the cloud or elsewhere. That means no starting new Pokémon saves in the middle of another, no downloading books with the previous one unfinished. As much as possible, no "to watch/read/play for later" lists.
Music
There isn't anything remarkable about the music player aside from the fact that it works and doesn't ask you to accept some kind of ToS to use it, and it doesn't randomly decide a "morning song" for me that automatically plays and keeps the screen on for hours if paused (Miui is so weird.)
I download music illegally on my laptop and transfer the files onto Mimmy. This way I'm not bothered by ads and algorithms don't get to decide that I listen to the same three songs over and over—I do.
- Mitski - Nothing's About To Happen To Me
- Pavement - Wowee Zowie, Terror Twilight
- Eminem - The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show
I'm a new Mitski fan and this is the first time I was up to date with Mitski activity. I'm not sure if it's the recency bias but this is my favorite Mitski album. My favorites are Cats, If I Leave, Instead of Here, That White Cat and Lightning. Dead Women is also really good.
I found Harness Your Hopes on a Takumi Sumino playlist on YouTube one week after The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy came out and the lyrics piqued my interest. So the question was "does this band deserve to be associated with this character" which is a weird question in the first place but the answer is ehh maybe. I like Wowee Zowie. The rhythms are cool and chill unlike Takumi though. My most replayed song is AT&T because it sounds he's going nyanyanyanya or something I don't know. I haven't given Terror Twilight thorough listenings. They sound very American.
I remembered seeing Eminem in my high school acquaintance's music library and got curious. Then later I saw a tweet talking about how the OP thought this cute animation by a Korean artist was of a beautiful butch woman only to realize it was Eminem.
I'm new to rap and the only other "old school" rapper I listen to is Sir Mix-a-Lot. I went into this blind, not really knowing much about Eminem's social relevance. My question is "is he just an irresponsible edgelord or an actual misogynist?" (Eminem fans get off my ass.) I haven't downloaded more albums but I want to discover the Eminem lore myself, so no spoilers.
Camera
I've gotten over my hangup with cameras so I find the low quality charming. Mimmy is small and cute, so I can pretend this is my digicam when I get bored. I go through the gallery often to pick out which images I'd like to keep and delete—another collection to curate.
A plain and simple camera that's somehow elevated to being "better" just because Merlin takes two whole seconds or more to snap a photo. Like for what reason.
Video
Sometimes I do use Mimmy to watch videos which I think isn't very ideal for what Mimmy is supposed to be. Mimmy has a small screen and a really old battery so it shouldn't really be used for watching videos, but in practice it isn't so bad. Especially because of the system I have in place: PipePipe (a NewPipe derivative) is installed from which I am able to download videos and audio from. For some reason my PipePipe crashes whenever I try to play a video, so I'm forced to download videos to watch them. It isn't so annoying since PipePipe doesn't have an algorithm either, and I have to actually search for the videos I want to watch anyway. As a plus, I get to watch videos offline, which is the main point of Mimmy anyway. The videos are a bit of a storage burden but that just means I have to be really intentional with what I download. Videos I have watched or lost interest in watching get deleted so I don't run out of space. Videos I do like get saved and/or bookmarked in PipePipe.
E-Reader
I never really liked reading very long texts on screens but I've found it in a flavor of coziness on Mimmy. The e-book library is yet another curation project.
Emulator
My emulators of choice are RetroArch for GameBoy and SNES and DraStic DS for DS games. The rule is only one game of each franchise at a time. Initially I was planning to limit Mimmy to emulate games for handheld consoles only but I wanted to see if playing Earthbound on my phone would be better than it being a computer only thing (as though I were playing the game on a stationary device like the original console.)
Internet
Mimmy connects to the internet via the browser when I need to look up something about my games, troubleshooting apps and files on Android 6, downloading videos, songs or very important pictures of naked anime boys, accessing Bluesky and occasionally Archive of Our Own. The last two are rare occurences that Mimmy isn't suited for but it's inconvenient enough that I don't get sucked in completely and I stay focused on the thing I mean to do on them.