J. Martin

November 6, 2022

Social Networks Aren‘t

Temperatures around where I live dropped from the low-70s to the mid-50s °F last week, but the world hasn’t exactly improved. Also, Twitter is about to implode thanks to Lord Elno von Bullshit, and I left Duolingo because they found a whole new world underneath the bottom of the barrel they’ve been scraping for years to dig themselves into. (They also shuttered the comments under the lessons, which are usually packed because errors flagged for literally years are rarely if ever corrected.) Then there’s Facebook, which is completely useless as a “social network”—all its algorithms ever do is show me updates from the same five people and fill my stream to the brim with trash. And, as its latest hit job, Facebook now refuses to display featured images or even tag lines from my own blog posts, published on my own private blogs on my own domains, because of “EU regulations.” This is both collateral damage of, and a vicious retaliation for, the German Reichsleistungsschutzgesetz, as I call it, or Leistungsschutzgeld, as others call it, established during the linking wars between Google/Facebook and German publishers Burda/Springer—your classical Aliens vs. Predator situation of “whoever wins, we lose.” So I have to place my posts from the U.S. via VPN, which of course works fine. Facebook esse delendam.*

Last week, I published a blog post on “Some Light Rules” concerning my RPG project; a new album on Flickr with 20 images from the City Walls in Pingyao, China; a re-edited shot from Beimadao Street, also Pingyao; and one post each at my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse.

For the Sunday funnies, here’s a collection of three short YouTube clips I ripped straight from a post by Jason Kottke; none of them is particularly recent, but each of them cracks me up. Enjoy a shovel that sounds like “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; a parking garage door that sounds like Miles Davis; and a nightstand door that sounds like Chewbacca.

J. 

*I know, both Catos were really terrible people. But still.