O, Lord, sometimes a fella feels like he’s barefoot navigating a carpet spotted with hairballs in the dark.
Warner-Discovery bollixed its big switch from HBO Max to Max, forcing subscribers like Your Humble Narrator to dash hither and yon across the Internets, trying to figure out how we could enjoy “content” we were paying for but suddenly not receiving. Handy Household Hint to W-D execs: As error messages go, “Something went wrong” is just a wee bit vague.
E. Lawn Mulch stepped on his own dingus (yet again) with a rapid unscheduled disassembly of Ronald DeSadist’s pestilential campaign on Twatter Spaces. I expect various minions, varlets, and knaves (if any remain) were promptly laid off and escorted from the Twatter offices (for which rent is not being paid). Look for DeSadist to ban Twatter in Florida.
At Verizon, which is shedding customers, employees in “customer experience, loyalty, and technology positions” have been advised to prepare for “transition to the next stage of your career journey.” Your call is important to us. Or not.
Meanwhile, in the vast retail/services landscape, there is at least one happy customer. Miss Mia Sopaipilla got an A++ in her most recent visit to the vet and gives the chef’s kiss — muah! — to her bedcave.
Is there a Meow as well as a Yelp? I’m looking forward to a glowing review.
The Duck! City is something of an aviary all of a sudden.
I’ve heard a couple hummingbirds buzzing around (haven’t actually seen one yet). Quail I have seen, and heard. Finches are hitting our feeders like the working press swarming an open bar.
And we have the usual dove nesting beneath the overhang by the front door.
Speaking of our feathered friends, it seems E. Lawn Mulch must’ve gotten lonely in those Twitter offices he’s worked so diligently to empty. His latest attention-getting ploy is to do a flyby on newsletter platform Substack, which has announced plans to launch the latest Next Twitter Thingie, called Notes.
Captain Free Speech — who croaked his own newsletter platform — has apparently gone all Twitter Über Alles on Substack, forbidding embedded tweets in Substack posts, links in tweets to Substack articles, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.
According to Taylor Lorenz at The Washington Post:
On Thursday, Substack writers discovered that they were no longer able to embed tweets in their Substack posts. Writers who tried were met with the message, “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts.”
On Friday morning, Twitter began blocking users from retweeting, liking or engaging with posts that contained links to Substack articles. Users also could not pin posts containing links to Substack to the top of their profiles. On Friday evening, Twitter began marking links to Substack as “unsafe.”
Even Substack’s corporate Twitter account was restricted, with users reporting that they were unable to retweet or quote-tweet the handle’s posts.
A number of Substack writers are very much not amused, among them Matt Taibbi, who announced that “beginning early next week I’ll be using the new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of Twitter. …”
Judd Legum, Matt Swider, and Laura Jedeed were likewise critical, with Jedeed telling The Verge that she sees subscription bumps “every time Musk does something stupid.”
“I think people realize Twitter is dying and they want to keep hearing from me after it falls apart,” she says. “He’s driving traffic my way by being stupid but, like everything he does, it’s killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”
Hey, dude’s still laying eggs. The smelly brown ones. Anyone promoting an online presence anywhere other than Twitter should probably invest in umbrellas and air fresheners.
Brooding is one of those many useful parts of life that you cannot admit to anymore. People will jump all over you, try to get you committed, drop you off at a yoga retreat. —Ken Layne, “Encounters with Coyote-Man,” on Desert Oracle Radio
I wasn’t brooding, exactly. But I had seen something like the 89,261,254th story on how E. Lawn Mulch has beshat Twatter. Or maybe it was the 63,294,204th “hot take” on how Orange Hitler skirted Buttface’s Maginot line.
Whatever the cause, the effect was my consultation via Apple Messages with colleagues Steve Frothingham and Hal Walter about undertaking a little urban renewal on the virtual town square.
Start sinking today!
“How about ‘TarPit™?'” I pitched to Steve. “‘Stumble into TarPit™ and start sinking today!'”
Instead of a page, users would get a Morass. Instead of tweets or posts, Bubbles:
“Dumbo’s going down for the third time!”
“Hey, I gotta reBubble that … whoops, too late, he’s a goner.”
“I think you are on to something,” replied Steve, who has a magazine and a website to put out and probably included that “to” out of professional courtesy.
As Steve seemed busy for some reason, I took the proposal to Hal, fronting him a couple of Bubbles I thought might be representative of the TarPit™ community.
“Help, help, I’m sinking!”
“Good! ’Bout time, you libtard cuck! Die! Die! Die!”
Hal found the concept interesting but, as is his practice, gave it a redneck spin.
“I’ma launch one called ‘Skillet,’ he announced. “Posts will be referred to as ‘Farts,’ as in, ‘I just Farted about ——.’ And they will be Farts in a Skillet.”
Well sir, I don’t mind telling you we got right on down to some cowboy cooking.
“Instead of ‘Friending,’ people will ‘Sniff’ each other,” Hal declared. “As in, ‘She sent me a Sniff request so I Sniffed her.'”
“ReFarting will be called ‘Lighting,” I added. “‘Hey, I just Lit your Fart!'”
Some unresolved discussion followed about whether direct messages (DMs) should be rebranded “Silent But Deadly” (SBDs) or “Pull My Finger” (PMFs).
As regards a logo, I was thinking — since we’re talking social media here and probably poaching more than a few red hats from Twatter — that we needed something monstrously racist, like a cartoon of a grinning pinto bean sporting a garish sombrero, a huge mustache, and a prominent gold tooth. Good draw for the NextDoor-OffMyLawn shutins, too.
Nope, said Hal. “The logo is just a frying pan: ‘SKILLET.'”
“That would be simpler,” I agreed. “Avoid the DOJ. Also, the Brown Berets.”
“Fucking A,” said Hal. “They don’t play.”
In the end nothing came of all this spitballing, which is probably just as well. It starts with a noble quest — help people heap abuse upon each other without getting punched (and while making bank for yourself) — and next thing you know you’re going off-piste into virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and space travel to places that make Ash Fork, Arizona, look like Maui.
Pretty soon you’re wearing a goggled helmet for real because you can’t breathe what Nuevo Arizona (the planet formerly known as Mars) has for an atmosphere. Orange Hitler’s Meata avatar runs your HOA. And E. Lawn Mulch is doing donuts outside your pod in his AWD Testo with an AI Sex-O-Bot 9000™ working his lap like a Sherwin-Williams paint shaker.
“There goes the neighborhood,” you grumble on NextPod-OffMySand. And then Mark Schmuckerberg Farts at you, and Jeff Bozos Lights it, and your pod explodes before you can create a GoFundMe to underwrite your return trip to Earth.
Mad Blog Media 