Me blathering like I do about social media, which I think Truman Capote predicted in “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (Can’t be sure, haven’t read it yet). I continue to use and love mastodon, despite it’s foibles, but I have a better idea of why I love it so much: It is because I am a…
So, I am continuing to tinker with the spiffy new wordpress plugin that basically sets up your wordpress site to be follow-able by a bunch of different activitypub protocols (namely mastodon). Thus, it will be easy for folks to subscribe-to and I think even interact with my blog this way. If it works, Neat! This…
In which I woke up with a BIT too much serotonin and blather a few things that remind everyone that I can be a problem precisely because I am probably too smart and listen too well for my own good sometimes. Health, Wealth and Success: Seems to be pretty good. I have aged into my…
The short answer is: I’m part of the control group. The long answer is: I am currently a 40-something and grew up with a lot of television and have spent enough of my life in a “TV Show Hype Cycle” and nearly every show I was ever excited over or held dear is either problematic…
So, way back in my formative youth, I remember the great saga of Calvin and Hobbes’ Battery Operated Fan Beanie. In the comic, Calvin sees that he can turn in Cereal Box Tops for a plastic, child-sized beanie with a fan on top that would be spun by battery power. Bill Watterson perfectly captured the…
As an almost 42 year old who remembers logging into university servers before AOL to chat with friends/relatives to get around Long Distance telephone charges… I have been on the Internet a Long Damn Time. Also, my entire career seems to be “You have been saddled with this anxiety that will make you spend your…
So, over the last week, we had a tectonic shift in how The Internet manages to reach our house. The changes were technological, material, and locational. It also changed pricing structures and service availability that had a cascading effect with how we get the smorgasbord of television channels we have access-to. To wit, we moved…
I have been on Mastodon since mid-November 2022 and I have thoughts. BREAK OUT THE LISTS! For what it’s worth, I just really like Mastodon for now and one of the main reasons is the ability to follow a Hashtag. I follow #Knitting and see a lot of different knitting posts. And when I post…
First, read this: The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok | WIRED. It’s Cory Doctorow demonstrating precisely why TikTok (and Meta and Twitter and Google and Amazon GrubHub/Postmates and Uber/Lyft and AirBNB/ENVO and Tesla) and pretty much 93% of every other hyped awesome Internet thing feel so lousy and expensive despite starting out so strong in the 2010’s….
While the best explanation of what Mastodon is and how to use it is here… and the funniest condemnation of the inherent complexity of mastodon precisely because companies that would seek to make the sign-up and login experience smooth for everyone are gatekept away from mastodon is here (“You think someone is successfully explaining this…