It’s Saturday, I’m listening to a “clip show” retrospective version of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” and I’m trying to exercise my atrophied blogging muscles.
I used to be a prolific long-form blogger, until Twitter, real Twitter, remodeled my brain to think in 240-character snippets. I have a desktop computer, and a wheezer of a laptop, that made this easy. And then I got more into wanting to say Something Important via my iPhone or my mini iPad, with their teeny on-screen keyboards. This is a frustrating process and I stopped blogging because it was hard to type and hard to select stuff without a mouse. Andi didn’t want to mess wiith the desktop, or lie on the couch eating Ritz crackers by the sleeve and try to post longform on my smaller, mouseless iOS devices.
So, now Twitter is Xitter, and full of Xits and not many giggles, and I’m aware that it may soon be mining everyone’s content to feed their AI, “Grok.” I hope Robert Heinlein isn’t spinning in his grave over this; as far as I know, he invented the word “grok” for his novel “Stranger in a Strange Land” (Amazon affiliate link)to describe an alien concept of encompassing knowledge in an amoeba-like organic way. So my inactive Xitter accounts will need to be downloaded and permanently deleted before a deadline in mid-November.
And having gone down a frustrating rabbit hole, trying to delete tweets or deactivate a long-dead side account, it’s clear this needs to be done on the desktop, which I’ve been avoiding for a year. Ugh. I’m not sure why my aversion; possibly I associate it with feelings of failure and letting people down from Second Life.
There are some JavaScript options for deleting for free, but they require downloading one’s archive of tweets for each account, and then pasting the script into a developer console, which really requires the fine control of a real mouse. So, that’ll have to wait until I’m ready to sit down at my desktop.
But after listening to that Professional Left podcast that absolutely brought the receipts for burning Joe “Squint” Scarborough to the ground after he tried to redeem himself with an appearance on (ugh) Real Time with Bill Maher, I realized that I’m one of those cheetoh-stained libtard bloggers that he used to sneer at back when he was still a card-carrying New Federalist proto Tea-Bagger Republican congressman.
Except, these days, I’m a “crumb-covered Ritz Cracker with Vegetables and Muenster Cheese Bingeing Childless Cat Lady for Kamala,” thank yew verra much.
We’ve got our Kamala/Walz signs out on the lawn; our Trumpy neighbor is across the street and down a ways and can no doubt see them. We have to look at his Trump flag all year round, and his “Let’s Go Brandon” flag in his man cave garage when he casually leaves the door open and sits in there watching his big screen with a portable firepit on his driveway. We put out signs during election season, and fly a US flag occasionally, and that’s it for letting the neighborhood know where we stand.
I’m still happily tooting away on Mastodon, but the instance I’ve been on for more than a year is showing some signs of burnout by the admin again. The original guy was more science-oriented, but he ran out of time, energy, and funds, and passed it along to a different guy, who already had an instance and struggled to run ours. Search hasn’t been working much at all, and there’ve been some odd “blips” recently where posts aren’t displaying or being propagated (I don’t know the ins-and-outs of hosting an instance).
I’m hoping to stick with this instance and not to have to migrate to another one, but there are a few that my follows seem to like (or are running) so there’s choices. We’ll see.
As of today, you can still find me at @RoLarenRED57@universeodon.com – I’m sticking with the Star Trek identity there, as the cranky rogue lone wolfess that seemed the best fit my personality and attitude during the evil times of the Trump administration.
Now that there’s a fair chance that there may be another Trump administration, it still seems like a good fit. Hope I don’t end up getting yeeted to a MAGA Re-Education Centre in 2025, that would suck.
I have hope and some confidence that turnout will be high during early voting, as it seems to be, and that this high turnout will mostly benefit Democrats up and down the ticket. I really want to see a President Harris taking the oath of office on 20JAN25, and not a doddering bronzed moron being propped up by the religious extremist young dictator-in-waiting.
I’m apprehensive, though, about what will happen between Election Day and January 6.
