At the time, I was checking the usual sites irregularly, as I’d switched to a bedtime routine of reading actual books. Since then, irregularly has become rarely. I just haven’t missed Instagram and Facebook, so this has been a kind of unintentional culling.
The reasons for why I haven’t missed them are summed up pretty much in the post linked above: Once I broke the routine of checking in every night, I found the content was just not interesting enough for me to tolerate the endless piles of “reels” and ads. Instead, I have been spending a bit more time on Mastodon, which has no ads (by design) and no algorithm (also by design). I only see what I want to see. I follow people, then unfollow if they don’t make my socks roll up and down. That is my bar now–you must magically animate my socks or off with you.
It’s worked out decently so far.
Part of me does kind of miss posting my photos regularly, but they were only seen by a handful of people anyway, and now I can focus on posting billions of photos to my blog instead! I think in some small way this may have slightly improved my mental health, too (not visiting FB and IG much, not the posting billions of photos to my blog part, though who can say for sure!)
I never used Twitter much and was kind of annoyed years ago when I had to use it for Nike tech support. For the most part, it was always just there, popular among journalists and some celebrities, and used as a quick ‘n easy way for people to make announcements, because on a microblog, you don’t have room for much else. People defeated this by posting tweets with images that would contain 2,000 words, but still, it stayed pretty much a place to link and post blurbs/memes.
In 2022 Elon “Galaxy Brain” Musk decided he wanted to be on Twitter’s board, then no, he wanted the whole thing! He waived due diligence, offered an outrageously good offer to buy the company ($$4 billion, vastly more than it was worth) and, following their fiduciary responsibility, the company’s executives presented it to the board, which promptly voted to accept and cash out.
Someone or something got through to Musk, and he realized he’d overpaid on a colossal scale, then tried to back out of the deal. Twitter sued and just before the case went to court–which Musk was all but guaranteed to lose–he agreed to have the deal go through and became owner/CEO of Twitter in October.
To say it has been all downhill since then is to insult hills that go down.
I’m not sure what exactly is going on in his mind, but whatever it is has seemingly steered him to make about the worst possible decision at every turn, chipping away at every positive aspect of Twitter. As a result, users are leaving, advertisers are fleeing, hate speech is on the rise, actual Nazis post their actual Nazi thoughts, the site is glitchy and breaks down occasionally, thanks in part to its gutted workforce unable to keep things running smoothly as most institutional knowledge has left (quit or been fired). Attempts to gain subscription revenue have generated peanuts. Basically, nothing has improved and a lot of things have gotten much worse.
The Twitter brand has been permanently tarnished in the eyes of many.
But wait! That brings us to the title of this post. A few days ago, Musk decided it was time to rebrand Twitter itself as X, his most favourite letter. Tweets would become X’s. And so on. To a 15-year-old boy this would be very cool, perhaps even rad, and since that’s where Musk’s apparent mental age seems to have stopped, it has come to pass.
There are too many articles, opinions and hot takes to link even a tiny percent of them here. Let me just say that I think it’s a dumb idea to spend $44 billion on a company whose value is in its user community and brand identity, then actively drive away the former and completely abandon the latter. It actually goes beyond dumb, but there is no word in English I can think of to adequately describe it.
However, changing Twitter to X frees Musk (at least in his own mind) from having the site/company “be” Twitter anymore. He can literally do whatever he wants with it–it’s X now!
This isn’t the first time a social media site has stumbled and (probably) died. Let’s not forget Friendster! But it is probably the biggest and, culturally, the most significant. This is all a good illustration of why allowing individuals to have access to absurd amounts of power and money is a bad thing. Musk is an idiot, and he has destroyed Twitter because our system gives him the power to do it.
(As a side note, the rebranding has been as chaotic, dumb and ill-planned as literally everything else Musk has done at Twitter.)
Here’s one link on the rebranding and the whole thing that I found worth reading, where author John Scalzi explains why he is (mostly) leaving Twitter after its turn to X: Preparing my X-it
Last fall, I got a Garmin Forerunner 255 to better track my running and sleeping vs. the Apple Watch (Series 5) I had previously. Generally, I quite like it. It’s not as “smart” as an Apple Watch, but it’s smart enough for me, and the battery life is insanely better. I charge it when I jump in the shower and never have to think about it otherwise.
This faboo battery life means I use it to track my sleep and while I’ve heard that smartwatches in general are only about 80-85% effective in terms of accuracy when it comes to sleep-tracking, I feel my watch knows me, almost too well.
This morning it told me my sleep suffered due to stress, and I was indeed stressed out last night. If I start stressing out about something in the moment, the watch will jump in and suggest a breathing exercise. If I get super-stressed out (this has only happened once) and my heart rate gets above a certain threshold, my watch blares an alarm at me in warning (which is somewhat ironic), so I can maybe try to calm down a bit.
Anyway, thanks, Garmin watch, for staying vigilant and reminding me to chill the heck out. I promise to do better!
Bonus points if you recognize what cartoon this is from
Very slightly more seriously, Jetpack offered me these stats for the past month:
320 visitors 375 views
Sure, it may not seem like a lot, but it’s 100% organic! Just like the ingredients in the imaginary beer I’m offering.
Jetpack shows I’ve barely hit double digits this week, though:
That’s actually better than what the site has done historically, where it’s usually been in the single digits. The only thing I can think is a couple of LLMs are now scraping the site and hoping I don’t sue them like Twitter did.
If none of this makes sense in the future, welcome to the world of 2023.
UPDATE: I have turned radical and am now using the serif typeface Bitter for headings. Anarchy!
I’ve been thinking about my blog redesign, as I do periodically, and have read several articles arguing in favour of using serif fonts for body text on websites. The old belief was that text on screen evolved to be mainly sans serif because low resolution screens made serifs harder to read, as they couldn’t be rendered well. Now with fancy™ screen technology and higher resolutions, that’s not a problem, so it’s time to return to serifs for body text, following the lead of virtually all novels and most books in general.
And yet I cannot find a serif I like. They all look too thin or too fat, or too fancy. Part of it is laziness, because the theme I use, the excellent GeneratePress, offers a list of dozens of Google fonts, but it isn’t trivially easy to deviate from the list. And I am lazy, so trivially easy is important. But I will keep poking at it.
For now, I am using Heebo for body text again, because it’s a clean-looking sans serif font, plus the name is adorable.
Also, I’ve tried going through some “best fonts” lists and as you might imagine, a lot of them are SEO-driven junk. But there’s a few out there! I will expand on this post later.
(And yes, I know the difference between a typeface and font, but that battle is long since lost for the pedants.)
At the time I read Elizabeth Lopatto’s Summer of spam piece on The Verge, there were 37 comments. After a bunch of people commiserating with their tales of spam, or offering suggestions on how to fight it, I came to what was then the last comment:
Yes, spam. I’m curious what the spammer had to edit. Maybe they got the link (which I have redacted) wrong? It’s also cute that they have deliberately altered “job” in the hope of bypassing automatic spam filtering. (I am the one who reported the message as part of my internet civic duty.)
As for the article, go read it and likewise commiserate. I’ve noticed an uptick this week in both spam phone calls and spam in my Outlook account (which still gets mercifully little junk). Fighting spam is not an easy j0b!
Related: Alex Leonard has an article on LLMs and how they are generating spam, using vast amounts of energy and generally making the web a terrible place. Worth reading: On the weird plague of LLM (aka AI)
When Amazon started its “Prime Day” deal a few hundred internet years ago, it was obvious what would happen if it became a success:
Amazon would expand it to be more than just a single day to better milk it. (Done. It’s now spread over two days.)
Other stores/sites would shamelessly copy it and cleverly call their versions something different (“48-Hour Sales Event”, “Black Friday in July”) but you totally know it’s their version of “Prime Day.” (Done. Two-day sales are everywhere now during Amazon’s event.)
Amazon would start to make the deals worse because now they have the inertia and know people are going to look and buy, anyway. They’d also start making it harder to get good deals by making them time-limited (even within the two days of the sale) or require you to reserve a spot to qualify to give them your money. (Done and done.)
Every tech (and many other) sites would report on “Prime Day” as if it were legitimate news. It is not legitimate news. (Done x1 billion.)
A lot of those same tech (and other sites) would be filled with articles on the “best deals” for the entire two days, crowding out more interesting content. Or just any content. (Done. My favourite punching bag, engadget, has 17 hits for “prime day” on its main page–which actually seems on the low side!) EDIT: Just for fun, The Verge has 10 hits, Ars Technica has 2.
I would complain about “Prime Day” in a blog post and refuse to write it without surrounding it with quotation marks, implying I’m saying it with sarcasm. (Boy howdy, done!)
Here is an image of a prime cat for your viewing pleasure:
I’d kind of forgotten how I used OneNote for a few years as my note-taking app1Skip to the last paragraph to find out why I am randomly discussing OneNote. It’s multiplatform–basically everything but Linux2Unless you use the web version–and while the UI is a bit odd, it makes sense once you realize it apes real world use: a series of notebooks (sections), each with their own pages (sets of notes).
Unlike something like Obsidian (which I use currently) it’s all in a proprietary format and your notes are saved to a folder somewhere on OneDrive, so exporting your notes to another program is not exactly a straightforward task (I only see an option to export pages as PDFs). Which also explains why none of my OneNote notes are in Obsidian.
On the plus side, this is a full WYSIWYG app, so you can easily add audio, video, images and other files, mess around with different fonts and styles and basically go crazy doing things that are impossible in a plain text file. That has definite appeal to a visually-minded dope like me.
I’m…somewhat tempted to try it again. I shouldn’t. Having text-only notes keeps me focused or sane or something. I don’t need to be able to dictate my notes using a microphone.
Do I3No, I do not. Yet I want to do so now. Badly. I am bad and should feel bad.?
Look, I’m sticking to Obsidian and there’s nothing I can do to convince me otherwise. Probably almost for sure.
As seen in the top-right corner of the standalone Outlook app:
Toggling this on switches you from the incredibly dense and old original Outlook UI to a new one that is intended to ultimately become the replacement for all versions of Outlook and the mail app on Windows 11. It’s vastly simpler and streamlined, and will probably make old time Outlook grognards from 1997 crazy.
I decided to try it because a) I like trying new things, and b) I’m kind of dumb when it comes to being sensible and sticking to things that just work on computers.
It turned out to be a very slight change from the web-based version of Outlook I normally use. At a glance, it appears to be the exact same interface, just wrapped up as a separate app. The only real difference I’ve found is using it means you miss a few amenities you might get from your normal browser that would automatically kick in (blocking trackers, etc.) but in exchange New Outlook allows me to actually add and maintain my Gmail account, so I can keep tabs on the few messages I still get there without having to log in to another mail service.
It also tidies up my browser a bit, possibly freeing up a few more resources that I would probably never really notice being freed up, anyway.
Overall, it’s not bad, but it’s pretty much identical to what I’ve been using for the past few years. The Dark Mode still looks off, somehow. I think it’s a combination of the way it mixes the darker shades with the standard Office/Windows colours, along with new email (normally bolded) being harder to scan at a glance.
Overall, I am left mildly pleased (by being able to add my Gmail account), but otherwise :shrugemoji:
On a scale of 1 to 10 actual physical envelopes used for mail you can touch and sometimes smell, New Outlook rates a 7.
Hooray for threads. Photo by Wendy van Zyl on Pexels.com
Meta (née Facebook) launched its Instagram-adjacent Twitter-like social media platform Threads this week and at the moment it has proven very popular, picking up 70 million or so users in its first day. That’s nearly twice the population of Canada.
I don’t have any thoughts on it, actually. That makes the title of this post clickbait, probably. Sorry1OK, a thought: I logged in and spent a few moments getting a firehose of random stuff from random people. I failed to see the appeal and logged out. This is one of those “not for me” things. I’m good with that.!
Actual physical threads can be nice, though, if you’re talking about clothes or the string-like stuff clothes are often made from.
