I’ve been trying to take it easy on the news front lately. I’ve been super busy at work and don’t have the emotional resiliency to wallow in online misery like I did back in 2016. Plus, the last place I go online for social media, bsky.app, has been struggling all day every day this week as it gets flooded by new users who are either clogging the servers, attempting to remake the existing culture on the website, or blathering on and on about how they’re crushed that they have to rebuild their followings while also spamming the world with new starter packs (groups of users collected by the person who made the starter pack that you can choose to follow in their entirety if, for some reason, you want to just blindly follow a dozen to a couple hundred people). These people need to sit down, take some time to adjust, and get used to the idea that they’re called “skeets,” as gross as that is. I resent anyone showing up after a goddamn year of hanging out in a nazi bar (aka, Twitter) who tries to dictate how the people who BUILT this website into the haven they’re now seeking use that same website. I don’t care what other people call a post to Bluesky, but they don’t get to tell anyone else what they’re called. We settled that in the great posting wars/posting strike of 2023.
Continue readingsocial media
Farewell, Sweet Cohost
Today, the day this blog post is going up, is the last blog post I will be sharing before Cohost goes read-only. I’m sure I’ll have at least a little more to say over there that will be unique to Cohost and written the day-of, but I wanted to carve out a little space on my blog to say a final farewell. After all, as I’ve said in the past (just two weeks ago, actually, though the experience of that time felt much longer than the calendar says it was), Cohost was my new home on the internet and I will sorely miss it. There really aren’t a lot of places on the internet that aren’t focused on the numbers. Even this place has a numerical metric that I can’t help but constantly look at… It was a place to just exist without any kind of ambition or motive. I could go there, read posts, occasionally comment, learn something new, and find something that piqued my interest. I don’t know if I’m ever going to push myself to invest in a website as much as I tried to push myself to invest in Cohost (something that started tapering off over the past year due to work stress and then seeing the writing on the wall with the mid-Spring funding scare that presaged Cohost’s eventual shuttering), but I think I’m done looking for a “home” on the internet. I will probably still look for community, of course, but I think it is time to acknowledge that the current state of the internet is incredibly toxic to most people’s well-being and perhaps mine in particular. Cohost wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was a much nicer place to be than any other website I’ve visited regularly and miles beyond any other social media site. I’ll keep my blog going, of course, since I’m too stubborn to ever given up something valuable that isn’t also harmful to me, but I think I’m going to try to make some spare time and save a little energy for finding a way to make a social home offline.
Continue reading“Just Another Wave In The Ocean… Destined To Disappear”
Much like the post that talks about the video game I’m quoting in this post’s title, today’s post is about grief. After all, today (writing, not posting) is the day that Cohost has announced that it will be closing down at the end of the month. As of the announcement, the active users on Cohost had three weeks (now two) to make our peace, to publicly grieve, to figure out how to stay connected, and to figure out what to do now that our home on the internet is going away. So far, there’s been a mix of starting webrings (collections of personal blogs and websites), people migrating to other social media sites and finding each other with established hashtags, handing out discord usernames so people can still keep some form of contact, and even some people simply deciding that they’re done with social media in its entirety. There’s been so many posts (many of them tagged into the “global feed” which is incredibly rough on the website and something the staff running that site have asked people not to do too much) that the website is failing to load about half the time (this lasted for about eight hours and still struck occasionally after that). It’s a mix of mourning, the aforementioned planning of where people will go next, and shitposting as people swear they’ll keep playing music until the ship sinks. As for myself, I’m following the people I care about, exchanging contact info with the people I’d like to keep talking to, and mourning the end of the one place on the internet that I felt comfortable calling my home.
Continue readingSocial Media In The Year 2024
Using any and all social media feels like crap these days. Very little of it is interesting or particularly engaging. I’ve made little traction with making new friends on places that aren’t Twitter (still not going to call it the new thing) and most of the sites I’m on look like they’re speed-running the whole rise and fall of every social media site from the last two decades. One is struggling to remain afloat as they adhere to their values over what sometimes seems like good sense or reasonable planning (which is a criticism, but I mostly like when they do this so it’s difficult to really fault them for it outside of one or two specific instances where they probably should have seen a problem coming) and another is being filled to the brim with people who will just tell you that you’re wrong, without any evidence, about everything from your own life events, basic facts about the world, and your expressed emotions.
Continue readingSlowly Stepping Away From Social Media
Over my little break from work (which I say a little tongue-in-cheek because 12 consecutive days away from work is the longest break I’ve taken in years other than my trip to Spain which I’m excluding since that was fun but definitely not a break and also because 12 days isn’t really that much of a break considering a third of those days where weekend days and a third of those days were holidays), I stopped using most social media. I pushed myself to log on at least once a day to share my blog posts and would occasionally find myself browising Cohost to see what was going on, but I think I spent maybe a total of an hour on Bluesky, Facebook, and Cohost combined over that period. I’m not saying that I miraculously found my lost ability to focus or that I somehow managed to break free of the grip that social media has on my brain, just that I didn’t really wind up in a position where I felt like checking out social media. The times I did feel like checking it made it abundantly clear to me that social media is only for when I’m bored and tired. If I’m just tired, I’ll usually just keep doing whatever I’m doing since I rarely let being tired stop me from doing things (which, honestly, is probably not super healthy for me given the way it impacts my bedtime). If I was bored, I usually just pushed myself away from wherever I was sitting and found something new to do (since I’ve liberally sprinkled my apartment with various forms of entertainment). Only the two combined could push me to check social media since I didn’t have the willpower to push myself to move on to a new thing and I was too bored with what I was already doing to continue doing it.
Continue readingTwitter Continues Circling The Digital Drain
Amidst everything else going on in the world, I’ve been watching Twitter continue to circle the drain. It’s nothing new, for the most part, but it’s still depressing to see it happening. More bills left unpaid, the slow degredation of basic features, the shifts in company policy that aren’t really shifts so much as the company’s owner desperately trying anything to keep people worshipping him, and then, mostly recently, the restriction of accounts to viewing a set number of tweets each day. The latest of these, the 600-tweets-viewable-per-day thing, caused a big stir and the biggest drop in Twitter activity I’ve seen. Now, thanks to the number of people using the site less (myself included), there’s fewer posts, less activity on those posts, and a growing desperation to find something new. A lot of people seem to be moving to bluesky, but the recent release of “Threads: an Instagram App” seems to have complicated matters. By which I mean that it seems to have claimed pretty much everyone looking to move with some notable exceptions, though I suppose we’ll see if they stay or move on the next time something new comes out.
Continue readingHappy Independence Day
I’ve always loved the idea of Independence Day. The entire world caught unprepared by the sudden and hostile invasion of an alien species who just completely kicks the world’s collective asses until the (of course) scrappy USA-based resistance force finds the weak spot and saves the world by valiantly sacrificing of itself in order to do so. US exceptionalism at its best. Such a great movie. In the few years I had the money and autonomy to do so before I left the state for college, I’d buy myself some Chicago deep dish pizza and watch it every 4th of July. It was my tradition that I’ve only had the opportunity to reproduce once in the 7 years since then.
This year, however, I was given the wonderful gift of celebrating US independence by watching the sequel. If you’re curious, it’s basically the same movie except the rest of the world is pretty much destroyed, the US government is killed, and the US exceptionalism is a bit more subtle. Just a bit. Oh, and they totally set the stage for more sequels. I’d kind of be okay with a few dozen of those movies, if I’m being honest. I’m not going to see them because I think they’re going to be wonderful examples of cinematography. I watch them because they’re decent action flicks with good pacing, funny bits, and not enough narcissism to take themselves seriously.
That last element is key. Not taking itself too seriously. I’m a big fan of that idea. I enjoy anything that can take a step back and laugh at itself. A lot of the better meta humor is a pretty good example of this. Shows like Community, comics like Order of the Stick, writers like Terry Pratchett. They’re all very good at poking fun at themselves.
I feel like any attempt to do that with a national US holiday is met with some resistance. There are the inevitable trolls of course, but a lot of people can’t seem to understand that making jokes about something isn’t necessarily disrespect. If you think about it, the general rule for humor is that it’s not considered bad taste to make fun of a particular group so long as you’re a part of that group. Since I’m a citizen of the USA, I should be able to make fun of my own country. People should just chuckle and crack a few jokes of their own. I’m pretty laid back as well, so I wouldn’t even care if citizens of other countries made a fun jokes as well. Humor unites us and all that.
Unfortunately, there is inevitably at least one person who just wants to rain on everyone’s parade because they think their country is the best and deserves nothing but “respect.” Otherwise known as unquestioning loyalty. I will admit to being inspired to write this post by the series of grumps I’ve seen across social media CAPS-LOCKing at people about being disrespectful.
Thanks to this holiday, though, they’re free to do as they wish and I’m not going to do more about it than make a rambling, critical blog post. That’s what today is about, you know. Independence. Freedom. Eagles, fireworks, and charred meats. Oily pasta salad and potato salad with enough mayonnaise and eggs in it to clog all the arteries of the original signers of the declaration of independence. Public intoxication and drunk driving. What a day.
As always, the biggest consolation is I can log off and go about my day without thinking about them or carrying their negativity with me. They, however, are stuck with their insipid self constantly.
One final thought before I go scare some pets and consume processed meat tubes: If you’re a member of the political tea party, can I call you a Tea Bag? I’d call you a wet blanket, but… Well, it’s not as funny.