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.
