Numbers go up, numbers go down, what does it all mean?

Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter, I’m hearing reports of more popular liberal people on the platform losing hundreds of thousands of followers as people read the handwriting on the wall and abandon Twitter. OK, I can sympathize with that, but most of the people I follow are still there — I think it’s a matter of recognizing that whether it’s Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk, it’s assholes all over the top, and you have to wait and see if they actually do anything to compromise your experience. That is, compromise it more than it already is.

I thought I’d check my follower count, to see if I’d been losing people in droves, but the problem there is that I haven’t paid any attention to it for years. I recall that I looked at it several years ago, and was surprised that it was something around 70,000. I looked this morning, and it was 158,000! Why, I don’t know. I can’t determine whether I’ve had a recent decline, though, with my sloppy sampling. I’ll just peg that number to April 2022, and if I remember, I’ll check back in a few weeks or a month. Maybe I’m losing already. Or maybe I’ll get a surge of Nazis hate-following me!

I do know one thing for sure: starting yesterday, my usual quiet Mastodon account got hundreds of new followers (I have 1,700 followers there). I guess some are checking out the alternatives to Twitter already.

Hot tip: if you’re interested in Mastodon, don’t sign up for mastodon.social, which is the biggest instance and is seeing a huge traffic surge. There are lots of instances, almost all connected to the federation, so pick one that seems to have a high up-time and has been around for a while, so that you have a stable entry point. I’m using octodon.social, but there’s a long list of alternative sites as well.

In case you’re wondering what the difference between Mastodon and Twitter is, on the surface, there isn’t much. The big difference is that Mastodon doesn’t have a centralized server, but a lot of smaller, distributed servers that are independently managed and just share data with one another. Musk was free to buy his own Mastodon server, set it up, and manage it, and it wouldn’t have cost him $44 billion…but it also wouldn’t have allowed him to dictate how every other server is managed.

Oh. I guess that is a big difference.

If you’re sane, you should be afraid

Warning: the video below may induce seizures if you triggered by strobing lights.

That’s a promo for a QAnon conference. It’s utterly insane. It has everything: junk DNA, vaccines, Hitler, Illuminati, Trump, transhumanism, the Jews, prophecy, etc., etc., etc. It’s also got evil in it, but I think that was entirely self-referential.

After watching that hateful bullshit, the one question in my mind is…do I need to buy a gun to protect myself?

Because he’s rich and he wants it

It looks like Elon Musk is about to buy Twitter. It’s not because he’s a productive business manager — he’s not. It’s not because he’s a great human being who will make Twitter better — he’s an abusive petty tyrant. It’s not because he’s really good at social media — he’s an asshole on Twitter already. It’s not because he’s an all-around super-genius — no, he has repeatedly exposed himself as a dumbass who hires people smarter than he is to do the real work.

So what makes him the right person to take over Twitter?

Easy. He’s obscenely rich, and the shareholders want a piece of his money. That’s it. He gets to do what he wants on a whim because capitalism has unjustly given him far more money than he deserves. And the system is set up so there are shareholders who put short term profits above all else — if Musk runs the company into the ground, they don’t care, they’ll have pocketed their money and can move on to mismanage a different company.

Incompetence and greed rise to the top under this system.

Now I get to worry. If you want social media reach, Twitter and Facebook are the two must-haves, and I already killed my Facebook account. Where do I go if/when Musk poisons Twitter (this is a question I’m seeing a lot of people asking today)? I’m already on Mastodon, which has a small fraction of the reach of Twitter, and everyone is talking, tentatively, about Tik Tok, which is a completely different medium, and not one I particularly trust (not that any of the social media giants are trustworthy).

I guess I’m holding tight for now and hoping the rich asshole gets bored and decides to go make a flamethrower or a truck with bulletproof windows or something. Or until an alternative begins to take off.

Here’s a whole Twitter thread about how worthless Musk is.

Maybe he can move to Mars?

For all the 18 year olds anticipating next year

This comment is totally and completely accurate.

Right now, I’m mainly anticipating wrapping up this year, but I’m also advising first year students, and have visited with prospective students. They fall into two general categories: 1) the absolutely certain who know exactly where they’re going (lots of pre-meds in this group), and 2) the ones who have no idea, and are worried that they’re supposed to have their whole life planned out by now. I tell (1) to embrace change, find what you love, and do that. I tell (2) that nobody knows what they’re doing, we all wing it as we go along, and have fun finding out where life is going to take you.

It’s not as if I ever knew what I was doing. I’m 65 and still looking forward to surprises.

In recovery mode, bring more spiders

Yesterday was a lost day. After my booster shot, I experienced the usual phenomena accompanying a challenge to the immune system: aching eyeballs, aching bones, fever, muscle weakness, etc. Man, my immune system was angry and spoiling for a fight, so SARS-CoV-2, I’m warning you, don’t come around here or you’re going to get a whuppin’.

I’m feeling a little less battered today, so here’s something to cheer everyone up: a whole page of charming and cute spider pics. As you might guess from the adjectives, these are all “cute”, which means they’re almost all jumping spiders. Everyone likes jumping spiders. Appreciation of the terrible beauty of, say, Latrodectus is something that has to be learned.

Did anyone get the license number of that bus?

It somehow ran over me in bed. It might have something to do with whatever was in that needle yesterday. I think the problem is compounded by the fact that Mary cheerfully offered up her left deltoid for the shot, and I unthinkingly did the same…forgetting that I sleep on my left side. I was waking up sporadically all night long as I rolled on that painful shoulder.

Today I’m booked up with appointments until 7pm.

Stupid bus.

Boosted again

Mary & I got our second booster shot this afternoon, a Moderna chaser to our previous Pfizer shots. We better be safe against COVID now! I also think that if we get one more, making 5 injections, we ought to either get a free coffee refill, or we should start to transform.

OK, which of you guys requested Second Winter?

It’s not funny. One day the snow was mostly melted, the sky was clear and blue, I could walk to work in my shirtsleeves, and then…this weekend we’re hit with screaming winds, deeply chilly temperatures, and more snow.

Sure, you thought it was hilarious to sacrifice a goat to the Northern Gods, but did you give a thought to all the little baby spiders who felt the first touch of the sun’s warmth and hopefully launched themselves skyward on silken threads, and then abruptly got hit with a gale that froze them solid and carried them off to Ohio? These cruel pranks have consequences.

May righteous wrath consume all tainted by InfoWars

Alex Jones offered each of the families of the Sandy Hook children he defamed $120,000 to settle their lawsuits against him. They turned him down.

Each of the plaintiffs turned down the settlement offer in court documents, saying, “The so-called offer is a transparent and desperate attempt by Alex Jones to escape a public reckoning under oath with his deceitful, profit-driven campaign against the plaintiffs and the memory of their loved ones lost at Sandy Hook.”

Jones treated those murdered children as things, things he could use to jack up right-wing hysteria and fuel profitable traffic to his site. They are not things. Jones was so unconscionably exploitive and abusive that I can entirely sympathize with those parents. They aren’t looking for money, something else Jones can’t understand. They are out to destroy a locus of hatred, one that grew on the bodies of dead children.

InfoWars has now declared bankruptcy, saying they only have assets of between $0-$50,000. That’s a lie. They have a heavily-trafficked website that brings in at least that much every week; they get ad revenue from Breitbart, so at least one other right-wing site is propping them up; they’ve got a quack store and must have a storage facility filled with crap like Ultra Brain Force (although, I’ll give them this: if their supply was valued for their effectiveness, it would be worth $0) and stupid hats; just the video gear that they use to record and edit all the lies they pump out has got to be worth more than that. Jones has a house and cars and a studio.

Take them all and put Jones in an institution for the criminally insane. Cut off all the “reporters” he supports — Ian Miles Cheong, Owen Shroyer, Millie Weaver, Margaret Howell, Savannah Hernandez, etc. — and let them get jobs serving fast food somewhere, if they’re qualified for that. Burn it all down. Scatter salt on the careers of all the people affiliated with it.