A while back, as Twitter lay dying and rotting, I went out and staked new accounts in other social media sites, gambling on which one, if any, would eventually succeed. One was Mastodon; I have an account at octodon.social/@pzmyers. The appeal of Mastodon was that it’s a distributed network, one that isn’t strictly controlled by a central authority. Unfortunately, that means it’s made up of thousands of interconnected instances, all your access to the wider federation, is through the instance you choose, and you’re at the mercy of whoever set up your particular instance. Back in August, I learned that the instance I had chosen was shutting down.

this is it. the ship is sinking.
on 2025-04-03, in 8 months, on its 8 years anniversary, the octodon will be permanently shut down.
use this time to slowly migrate your accounts and download your post archives. tell your local friends who might miss the instance announcement.
the first reply will contain a small list of instances to consider; the second a personal note for my followers.

thanks to everyone who supported us, to our crew and members.
i am glad to have built and shared this with you over the years. it was a beautiful horrible adventure. i hope you will remember it as a good place that united so many people for quite a while.

it always had to end eventually. for an impulsive little social website, 8 years is a good run. we have witnessed and remember so many friends who are gone. the octodon, too, gets to live impermanence and have a good end while we still can take care of it.

It was a good run, but this is a huge weakness in the service. The volunteers who run individual instances are allowed to just quit? Of course they are allowed, but there’s no automatic fallback to support individual users? Whoops. That’s not good. Do I need to go instance-shopping now, and figure out how to back up my posts there? Then there’s the personal note by the instance host about Mastodon in general:

i’ve had this moment on my mind for many years. 5 years, 10 years? one more, one less? Eight, of course. of course. i barely remember who created it. everything has an end and everyone needs to move on.

personally, i will soon move to a tiny gotosocial instance, and trim down relationships again. i am tired of asking myself if ppl talk to me as an admin or as a friend, let’s find out.

if you need more Whys, unordered:

• it hasnt been fun for so long. i really do not want to do this for the rest of my life. passing it on has limits and is itself tremendous work and trust.
• it knows too much. this database is huge, which is a technical feat to keep available at all times and fast already; and full of forgotten accounts and things that are long offline and should be let go of. yes it’s haunted
• i do not believe in mastodon. i have been less and less comfortable with the software, its direction, technical choices, and maintenance. even with the federated topology entirely. it was built like a twitter clone and requires the same work and has the same flaws
• it’s such a massive amount of personal data to care for, and concentrated for so many people i know. security patches are applied so fast bc it’s genuinely terrifying. it’s not healthy i can tell you, but i know what we all risk and did everything i could. i don’t want to any more. let’s burn it all
• one must imagine sisyphus letting the boulder roll and just sitting there, content and chilling. today i let eugen’s damned rock go down the hill, and i feel fine

i have so little energy left. such short time to use.
all this mess grew until it became a main occupation and i have so much more to do

hit me up if you want the exported blocklist, or the emoji collection. i might publish them later as well

Well, that just went from an “oops” to a “yikes!” Maybe I’ll just let my Mastodon account whither and die, unless someone wants to suggest a more stable instance. Maybe.

I also have a Threads account. I don’t care for it and have neglected using it. Threads too often feels like one of those subreddits full of people telling long stories about some trivial annoyance that they recently experienced, or worse, that they experienced 11 years ago and have been waiting for the opportunity to tell everyone about it. There are a lot of good people on there who are happy with it, I just feel vaguely uncomfortable with it. Also, it’s by Meta, so it’s got Zuckerberg’s undead cyborg fingers all over it.

Doubly also LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads.

Bluesky is taking off right now, and of course I have an account there. I worry that it could meet the fate of Twitter — some rich weirdo could buy it and use it for their public masturbation sessions — but it’s working out well so far, especially given how they’re dealing with the wingnuts.

So maybe I’ll just commit to Bluesky from now on, until it gets corrupted and wrecked, as happens to so many things nowadays.

You can see a bit of it in this photo.

Mainly, though, this is a picture of my wife’s swarm of bird feeders, which were also swarmed with birds this morning, which all fled the instant I stepped outside. There is a squirrel hiding in the photo, you might not be able to see it. They’re kind of sneaky.

You will either be amused or horrified by my discovery of the documents leading to the original sale of my mother’s house. My mom & dad bought this place in 1976, the first and only home they would own, for this amazing price:

That’s right $28,990, and they bought it with a $500 down payment. My father’s income at that time was, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of $10K, so it was a bit of a stretch for them.

This is the same house I’m selling for $435K now.

The housing market is stark raving nuts. Boomers had it relatively easy.

Matt Gaetz.

I think that’s a fake tweet — it comes off Twitter, which is a pretty unreliable source. But still, it’s a funny jab at the horrible Gaetz, who, if he actually used that formula would think it acceptable for him to date 14 year olds, and “almost never” anyone younger.

The joke did make me wonder about where that “general wisdom” comes from. Do people actually do simple algebra to figure out who they should date? Is there actually a formula floating about?

I found a source. To put it in perspective, the first thing on that page is a calculator to figure out the age difference between two people: you type in your age, and your date’s age, and it subtracts one from the other to get the difference.

The universal formula for calculating an age difference is:

Age Difference = |Age 1 – Age 2|

Now that we know how smart the audience for this calculator is, they explain the “rule of seven,” which is not a rule, but only a tool for rationalizing kiddie-chasing.

A common rule for the maximum and minimum age one is supposed to date is the so-called “rule of seven”. It sets boundaries based on the age of one of the partners, and can be applied both ways. It goes as such: to define the minimum age of a partner, half your age and add seven. E.g. if you are thirty years old, calculate 30 / 2 + 7 = 15 + 7 = 22, or an age gap of 8 years would be acceptable in this direction).

To find the maximum socially acceptable age for a partner, subtract seven from your own age, then multiply it by two. For example, if you are 30 years of age, calculate (30 – 7) * 2 = 23 * 2 = 46 years or an age difference of 16 years would be acceptable in this direction.

OK, Matt Gaetz (or whoever posted that tweet) got the formula wrong, unsurprisingly.

“would be acceptable”…there are so many assumptions built into that phrase. Acceptable to who? Shouldn’t the important thing be acceptable to each other, with a recognition that a large age difference opens the door to power imbalances, and that children do not have the judgment of adults? This is a complex issue that doesn’t lend itself to simplistic formulae.

The one useful thing on that page is that they have a table of actual age differences between American couples. About 35% of all married couples have birthdays within a year of each other — which makes me totally average, since my wife and I have a 6 month age difference. Over 60% of American married couples have an age difference of less than 3 years! That tracks, since most of us form relationships with people with whom we have a lot in common, and those relationships develop organically from common associations. Do I need a calculator to figure out who I’m comfortable talking to?

The Guardian has announced that they will no longer cite Twitter.

We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.

This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.

Exactly right. Musk has destroyed the utility of the social media site he spent so much money on. You should flee the hellhole, too.

Now we just have to get the Guardian to quit putting up with transphobes…

You may recall that InfoWars’ stuff was going to be auctioned off. The auction is over! Guess who won?

The satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’s Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion US in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax, the families announced Thursday.

That’s, ummm, interesting. But what are they going to do with it all? I mean, old videos of Alex Jones raving about gay frogs are intrinsically comedic, but how do you use it on a satire site? I’d also be concerned that a lot of it is ugly and horrifying — children died at Sandy Hook — and I don’t see how to use it for humorous effect.

OK, the Onion does have one amusing article about their purchase. They’re going to need a lot more jokes, though.

I have changed my routine lately. I no longer read the news. There were a few blogs I read regularly, a couple of political YouTube channels I frequented, a podcast or two I’d listen to on walks. No more. I just can’t bear current events. I’m looking for distraction, and oh, what’s this? A movie review?

You see, I’m sick. I’m afraid it’s mortal but I don’t know–I mean, every second is a second I will never see again, so isn’t everything mortal? I have, for over a year now, watched Israel gleefully, defiantly wage genocide on the Palestinian people and consumed images of the human body in various states of dismemberment, violation, and humiliation that before this I had only glimpsed with horror in grainy photographs smuggled out of Nanking during WWII–that I had only imagined while reading war stories written by men destroyed largely by just the act of bearing witness. This is the shape of my astonishing privilege. If I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t have to. Something changed.

And I have noticed, from the first day to the 370th, that I can look at decapitated children now, held in the arms of parents maddened by grief and the tacit complicity of the United States and most of Europe, without looking away. I am a shell. I don’t sleep well anymore. I am hollowed-out and empty. I understand T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, his warning about the apocalypse, for the very first time. “Our dried voices, when/We whisper together/Are quiet and meaningless/As wind in dry grass/Or rats’ feet over broken glass/In our dry cellar” and “Paralysed force, gesture without motion,” and “Remember us–if at all–not as lost/Violent souls, but only/As the hollow men/The stuffed men.” I understand who the “eyes I dare not meet in dreams” belong to now; I know where the “twilight kingdom” is, where the dead land “[u]nder the twinkle of a fading star” is, because I live there now. We live there together. The noise of us together sounds like the noise you make when you try not to make a noise. The dry rustle you hear is all our voices mouthing prayers to broken stones.

I understand Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp character, with his too-small hat and too-large shoes, the immigrant and eternal outsider who good-naturedly demonstrated the inhumanity of others through his interest in the weak and championing of the powerless. I understand why The Tramp appeared in the space between the mechanized mass slaughter and dismemberment of WWI and the rise of fascism and murder camps of WWII and fast became the most famous personality on the planet. Chaplin would play little tricks on despots and middle-managers, sly kicks and sleights-of-hand, and smile and wave if caught in the act. “You got me,” his grin says, which maybe has a dash of Bugs Bunny’s “Ain’t I a stinker?” as well. And I know why, at the end of his film The Great Dictator, Chaplin breaks character and the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly to plead with them to care again about the suffering of others. He spoke of a world rapidly tilting into totalitarianism: the best filled with despair and the worst locating that seam in the sheer rockface of our sense of righteous morality that allows them to find purchase, take root, spore. He begged us to remember who we were when we could still weep, when we had to look away.

How long has it been for you? How far has it progressed? I know. I’m sorry.

That’s from a review of Terrifier 3. I’d seen a bit of the first Terrifier movie, didn’t like at all, and didn’t even know they were already making sequels of the thing, but of course they are. Maybe if I gazed into the abyss a little harder, I’d be desensitized enough to witness more of the fascist state of America, but I’m not. If anything, I’ve become hypersensitized. I find refuge in science and work and my day-to-day routine, I’m afraid to look up and see the catastrophe coming.

That article gives me hope — more than hope, a sense that it is inevitable that someday my privilege will be bled away, that I will stop caring and can look on the horror without feeling battered and eviscerated, because my heart will have been burned out and meaning will have been murdered. Join me in the twilight kingdom, where the darkness waits for us all.

Isn’t that a happy thought? Don’t you want to chitter and murmur and rustle in the decaying attic of our dreams, together?

The last time I was in Washington, we had cleaned out a lot of my parent’s old stuff, and I was leaving after having booked a real estate agent to sell off the property. There were boxes and bags of miscellaneous papers that were going to be thrown out or destroyed, and I scooped up a luggage bag full of it without looking closely at it — I just didn’t want to abandon some piece of family history. I haven’t dug into it yet, but I had a moment free and plucked out a few random bits to see what treasures I had rescued.

Here are my parents, sometime in the late 1980s/early 90s.

Here’s Mom’s 5th grade report card (my grandmother also saved everything.)

That’s pretty good, young lady, but we’re going to have to have a little talk about that C in writing. Also, what’s the difference between writing and English?

I didn’t get any further in sorting through the collection because then I discovered she had saved all the mother’s day cards we had sent to her. Aww, Mom. You cared? Now I feel bad for not sending one this year. I am a terrible son.