Elon Musk Will Step Down As Twitter CEO (and burn it down by proxy)

Oh boy, here we go.

Mr. Musk, who asked his Twitter followers on Sunday if he should step down as head of the service, will remain the company’s owner.
— Read on New York Times Gift Link 

Space Karen Elon Musk
My guess is he’ll pick someone guaranteed to offend everyone and to totally ruin the company. 

Think Jared Kushner, or Steve Bannon, or Alex Jones, or Kellyanne Conway (which would be awkward for George).

Today’s Announcement of a New Twitter Policy May Be Even More Terrifying Than This Week’s Mass Suspension of Journalists Was—Yes, Really / Post.

On Twitter, a new algorithm will allow far-right trolls to band together en masse—something they have already been shown to have done repeatedly and systematically over the last 24 months—to make the tweets of Twitter Blue–verified left-leaning accounts disappear from public visibility permanently simply by muting or blocking them.
— Read on post.news/article/2J3AloOm0Fho4H1A0YFAy9nU3fS

I Begin Blogging Again To Resist The Melon Husk

With Twitter being ruined and hamstrung by well-known rich man-baby Melon Husk, I’ve been considering options and preparing several lifeboats.

This tweet – the whole beginning of the thread, really – encapsulates what I feel is my way forward.

The mention of Google Reader’s much-lamented loss was also the beginning of trying to find a quick, easy way to “microblog” via G+ (also gone) and Twitter (going) for me.

So I finished a draft post about last week’s trip to Salt Lake. Published.

I had Thursday and Friday off, thank God, so I spent it working on the T-shirt quilt which is turning out to be quite heavy, and I had a number of “learning experiences” during construction (okay, “mistakes were made.”) It will be a wall hanging so the ugly back won’t be visible. Next time I make one, will use a normal woven cotton backing! But it has been fun remembering the various trips (and figuring out how to turn the stains and bad seam intersections into fun appliqué bits). I did a lot of anxiety-reducing procrastinating, never fear. And ordered some fabric for my next few projects, too. 

Thanksgiving Day was spent baking a couple of loaves of sourdough/oat bread, cooking sweet potatoes, prepping carrots to steam, and packing them all into crocks and Dutch ovens into this insulated bag thing I bought from Amazon. The bag will eventually be a bread proofer, as I also got a seed warming mat and a thermostat controller, much cheaper than a Brod and Taylor proofer and multitaskers, too. Anyway, dinner was at my in-law’s new place, which is all of 5 minutes’ drive from us. So easy.

Other family members gathered for brunch that morning before dispersing to various other branches of their extended families; for us it was nice to just be the 4 of us plus one guest who is part of the family but didn’t have dinner plans other than going to the earlier brunch to see some of the young ones. 

One of my Illinois nieces seems to be needing to assert independence or something and did her own thing; not sure what’s up with that but drama has always been her M.O. – now  it appears that she’ll also skip an upcoming birthday for a very young lad, and holiday gatherings because “reasons.” We have something for her and her daughter but keep putting off presenting it to her, either because we didn’t want to pull focus in front of her ex-husband’s family, or because she teases her birth family with a possible appearance at a planned event, and then doesn’t show up (again, “reasons”).

One thing for sure, I won’t be making any more elaborate (or amateurish) attempts at sewing projects for her, because she’ll just throw them out.

Meanwhile, Twitter is in the news, and not for good reasons. Supposedly Husk is letting Herr Drumpf and some other horribles back in. Trolls running wild! Spam galore! Advertisers leaving in droves! Hackers shitposting! Oh, the inhumanity!

You may think that I’m grousing unnecessarily about Twitter’s decline under the overshitlordship of the Melon Husk, but events in Iran, China, Ukraine, and everywhere in the world where freedom of the press and of self-expression is not assured show that Twitter has been an invaluable resource. The Husker Duh has been gutting the security and human rights teams, not to mention the “banging on stuff” teams. It’s not good.

I’m exploring footholds on Counter.Social (run by an anonymous hacker dude, so hardly sketchy at all) and Post.social (all the cool newsies are waitlisted) and some instance of Mastodon (where a RL friend, Jette, plus some Resistance crewmates have landed). 
And I’ve been engaging more on Facebook with friends and family. It seems like blogging here, and having IFTTT handle crosspositing, may be my way forward. I like Twitter, but can try to retrain my brain to write long-form instead of short form again. 

Get Ready. Long Blog Post Percolating.

It seems like forever since I wrote anything longer than a tweet. Especially since @Twitter went from 140 to 280 characters. And I’ve stayed off of Facebook mostly to avoid seeing propaganda ads (sorry friends and family).

And even “forever” is longer now in the Drumpf era. Today on Twitter, I joked that if dog years are 7 human years, 1 newscycle day is 24 years, and one newscycle year is 14,600 human years. How long ago was it that we thought “One Scaramucchi = 11 days” was funny?

I haven’t even touched my desktop computer in months (ie., several thousand years) because I’ve been avoiding some necessary tasks, so even blogging after a long Drumpf-inspired hiatus is a form of procrastinating.

Events of the last few weeks/experiential years have had me pondering various topics and themes – the #MeToo movement, the current debate in the national press and online communities over the #Kavanaugh nomination, and the insidious influence of the Washington elite old-boy network that seems to secretly run the Kabuki-theater proceedings, at least on the Republican/Theocrat side.

Phew, that last paragraph was exhausting. As is life as a sentient, progressive American these days.

My extreme Twitter addiction can be seen over there in the right column. Gradually, over the last 2 years, I’ve been spending more and more time on the microblogging platform, because of the immediacy of breaking news, crazy fads, and the possibility of interacting with celebrities. As in “ZOMG that one time @Rosie retweeted me!” Or the time @Lawrence “liked” my comment reacting to a recent @TheLastWord commentary.

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My Twitter addiction goes hand in hand with my @maddow dependency. Not long after returning from our 2016 vacation (we were in Hawaii, so we filed absentee ballots), I met new friends at church who were looking for a spiritual home with a side of progressive community. The older lady exclaimed “I can’t get to sleep now unless I watch Rachel to tell me what the hell is going on!”

And I have to agree, except that the last few months, I’ve been staying up later and later watching Rachel and Lawrence on @MSNBC, I’ve been watching former GOP operatives who’re now #NeverTrumpers (and who are responsible for getting people like Roberts, Gorsuch, and McConnell confirmed are re-elected) till all hours. And I keep checking Twitter through the night, hoping for some late-breaking ray of hope.

And aside from such delightful distractions as the #MPRraccoon and #CivilWarPotluck it’s really not good for me or my health.

Bike? I haven’t ridden any of my bikes since July, and very little before that.

Self care? I’ve been eating crap food, and let’s not speak of my love for Payday bars.

Laundry? My husband David does most of it. My clean but unfolded laundry is everywhere.

Much of what I’ve read, commented on, and brooded over has been pinging around in my head, not all of it to do with the travails of women who report being sexually assaulted or raped whenever they damn well decide is the right time to declare it. I don’t have much to report on the #MeToo front, fortunately. I certainly partied and took risks by accepting rides, etc. I never fit the profile of the easy target, so I survived my young womanhood mostly unharmed except for unwanted buttgrabs.

The recent piece on obesity and self-acceptance struck a chord, though. Especially with the photographs of the interview subjects, who got to direct their own photoshoots to show them exactly as they wanted to be portrayed. The images are revelatory.

“My son and I both like to play the hero. There wasn’t necessarily any intentional symbolism in the costumes we chose, but I am definitely a member of the rebellion, and I see my role as an eating disorders researcher as trying to fight for justice and a better world. Also, I like that I’m sweaty, dirty and messy, not done up with makeup or with my hair down in this picture. I like that I’m not hiding my stomach, thighs or arms. Not because I’m comfortable being photographed like that, but because I want to be—and I want others to feel free to be like that, too.”— ERIN HARROP

I love this image. This is Erin Harrop and her son. So much awesome strength.

All of this makes higher-weight patients more likely to avoid doctors. Three separate studies have found that fat women are more likely to die from breast and cervical cancers than non-fat women, a result partially attributed to their reluctance to see doctors and get screenings. Erin Harrop, a researcher at the University of Washington, studies higher-weight women with anorexia, who, contrary to the size-zero stereotype of most media depictions, are twice as likely to report vomiting, using laxatives and abusing diet pills. Thin women, Harrop discovered, take around three years to get into treatment, while her participants spent an average of 13 and a half years waiting for their disorders to be addressed.

Woops, this sounds disturbingly familiar. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment next week that I’ve canceled and rescheduled once already because I’m supposed to be setting up several routine but not particularly pleasant “checklist” health procedures. I haven’t lost weight, I stopped exercising and eating right (in contrast to 2-3 years ago when I was much more motivated and less obsessed with Drumpfian corruption). I don’t want to be lectured by the doc for my “noncompliance.” Maybe I’d better figure out my login for the medical practice website to see her recommendations again.

Some of the other peoples’ quotes about being bullied for being bigger resonated with me. I’m bigger than an average-sized woman; taller and heavier, with an appearance best described as “unconventionally not too horrible.” I was bullied as a kid for being bigger than most, looking different than almost everyone, and not going to the right church in order to fit in. Still, I had it easy, compared to some.

Not fitting in seems to be the common thread for young (and older) women who speak out about being abused or raped. Dr Christina Blasey Ford is currently in hiding, getting death threats and more for going public with her allegation of sexual assault against Judge Kavanaugh dating back to the early 80’s. She was popular then, but she’s sure getting the outcast treatment now.

Compare that to Amber Wyatt, a young woman who was raped in high school in Arlington, Texas (rather horribly). Back then, she didn’t fit in socially with the well-to-do kids whose parents enabled them to throw massive drunken parties, although she was a cheerleader and was about to move up in the social strata. After the awful event, she became a pariah, was eventually forced to transfer to another school, spiraled down into drugs and self-destruction, and eventually recovered.

More than a decade later, a very thoughtful piece by a reporter who happened to go to the same high school has resulted in Amber receiving an outpouring of support, compassion, and even apologies from some of the people who tormented her AFTER her assault, because she reported it immediately.

Apparently, in America, if you speak out against your attackers, it’s almost a worse crime than being violated….if you’re female and they’re male.

So all this has been on my mind, and has been the big narrative of the last couple of week-centuries. Thinking about the bullying now happening to Dr Ford (by the US Senate, various patriarchal/theocratic astroturf groups, and the Idiot in Chief) led me to think on my own experiences as a bullied or ostracized kid.

It could have been a lot, lot worse. It was bad enough at the time. But thanks to Google, I just stumbled across the current name of my worst old childhood nemesis, the person who made grade school and junior high a daily gauntlet of taunts, physical abuse, humiliation, and desperate attempts to escape any way I could.

But that’s for the ACTUAL long blog post. This was just a foreword; I’m just happy to have survived yet another Infrastructure Week.

Tweetdeck May Save My Sanity

Spent past 2 days manually excluding retweets, to cut down on duplicate posts. Tweetdeck can do it with one click in a column. Wish I had tried it FIRST.

One of our favorite Twitter clients is so good that Twitter itself bought it in 2011. With real-time scrolling, advanced filtering options, and a host of useful features, TweetDeck is the obvious choice for anyone who wants to take Twitter seriously. Here’s how to make sure you’re getting the most out of it.

Source: TweetDeck Tips and Tricks To Master All Things Twitter

Years ago – I mean 7 or 8 years ago now, when I first signed on to Twitter and started playing around with it, I tried out various Twitter clients. This was pre-iPhone, the gateway drug of my current Internetcontin addiction. Tweetdeck was clearly the best on the desktop, and I set up columns based on topic, had multiple accounts handy, et cetera.

Then I started using the iPhone and a mini-iPad to access the internet, almost exclusively. I rarely sit down at my desktop anymore, because my desk isn’t very ergonomic and I came to dislike spending more than a few minutes of required maintenance sitting at my desk. I spend enough time at my work desk in my home office (which is pretty ergo).

I forgot about Tweetdeck, but on a whim looked it up and wham! Remembered that Twitter actually bought it a while back and it’s now accessed as a sub domain from their main site:

http://tweetdeck.twitter.com

It came up on the iPhone, but it’s not that useful on a small screen. On an iPad, it’s pretty decent and it remembered my settings from the last time I used it on my desktop machine. All was familiar, and thanks to the old article I linked, I discovered the powerful filters and settings for reducing the amount of chaff.

WHY DID I FORGET THEE, O TWEETDECK?

Now I’ve got retweets excluded on several columns – not just people I already follow, but on everyone using any hashtag I choose. I need to add one or two newer single-topic accounts that I’ve never used with Tweetdeck; now I can set them up to filter things down to a reasonable volume, too. Also, there’s the ability to schedule tweets, plus the ability to monitor lists, hashtags, and DMs alongside the main timeline. No constant popping back and forth.

This may save my sanity. I spent so much time lately trying to keep up with events, I felt compelled to try to muscle down the volume by brute force. I was up until 3 am last night doing it the hard way, and when I finally did get to sleep, I had two nightmares (very unusual).

Thank you, Tweetdeck. This will help me get a handle on all things Twitter.

Tweetly Weeks

Tweetly Weeks

Tweetly Weeks

Tweetly Weeks