Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

A Muskrat in winter

December 19, 2022

Is that a well-digger’s ass flying south for the winter?

The furnace grumbles to life at 5:33 and requires exactly five minutes to trudge uphill to its planet-friendly yet unimpressive thermostatic peak of 65 degrees.

Still, this is more than twice as warm as it is outside, so I should be thankful. I have a furnace — actually, two of them, one for each side of the house! — and a great big bed with lots and lots of covers. Also, a house to keep them in. It has been the better part of some time since I begged a kip on a couch or in a pew, or shivered in a greasy fartsack under the topper of a pickup truck.

This momentary lapse into gratitude doesn’t stop me from thinking it might be time to consider sleeping in pajamas, or at least a T-shirt and shorts. Maybe a cap. Sweatpants. And wool socks. Sixty-five degrees is one thing on a white sandy beach and another in a dark bedroom at the foot of the Sandias, squinting through the blinds at the banana moon night-lighting the back yard.

Over coffee I note that E. Long Muskrat has yet to quit shitting in his newest sandbox, though his own survey — “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.” — went strongly against him.

While giving him the thumbs down last night Herself asked innocently, “Can we vote more than once?” She has not been locked out of her account. Yet. Me, I maintained radio silence.

It doesn’t matter, not really. CEO or no, the Muskrat would still own the Twithole and would have to hire some poor sap to run it for him.

That would be a dream job, hey? About like being handed a push broom and being told to sweep up the debris in the Monfort lane through the Big I at drunk-thirty on Black Friday.

Or maybe it’s more like being assigned to clean the hyena cage while the hyena is still in it. Before feeding time.

I don’t know why I find this penny-dreadful drama amusing. I haven’t used the service in five years. In fact, I’ve croaked nearly all my social-media accounts, save for LinkedIn, which I keep around like an ugly sweater I’m never going to wear, no matter how cold it gets.

There’s just something fascinating about watching the gods behaving badly. They always do. Gods have the morals and manners of spoiled children pitching a bitch in the Wholeazon Amafoods while mom tries to find the sell-by date on a plastic tub of organic baby arugula.

It’s not enough that the gods are omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent — no, they have to have our undivided attention, too.

It’s sad. But also amusing. For a while, anyway.

“Wow, this is an adult human being. Second richest in the world — No. 1 until the shitposting trouser stain started dicking around with a new toy without reading the owner’s manual — and he’s acting out like a hormonal teenager with a marble-sized nose zit and two left feet fuming at all the cool kids dancing on TikTok.”

Just wait until Orange Julius Caesar softshoes into the multimedia spotlight again today. His Lardship Musk Mellon Esq. will probably try to buy the Internets and shut them down.

I don’t know who’d loan him the money for that indulgence. Not Orange J, that’s for sure. Fool needs a new pair of size-7 dancing shoes.

Dine and dash

December 18, 2022

I’d rather eat than tweet.

This was my last tweet, almost five years ago.

Looks like I was ahead of the curve for a change when I flew the coop back in 2017. Someone should tell Elon to quit shitting in his birdcage and go to Mars already.

For a minute there I was all aTwitter

September 4, 2021

This is not a buzzworm. It is, however, his office.

Touting this week’s installment of Desert Oracle Radio, Ken Layne notes:

Portents and signs, everywhere we look. But signs of what? Oh, the usual: plague, disaster, but at least we have social media to make it all worse.

On my hike this morning I saw two snakes, a buzzworm at the beginning and a bull at the turnaround point.

Surely this must have been a sign of something? Probably that I had seen two snakes in the actual grass instead of on Twitter.

Technology Tuesday

January 16, 2018

When I was a copy boy in the mid-’70s this was one of my babies.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Photo liberated from UPI

I’ve embraced antisocial media in 2018.

Facebook? Don’t care how it rejiggers itself, my account stays croaked. Ditto for Instagram and Snapchat, the latter of which I never did figure out, because apparently as a senile old goat I’m not supposed to.

And a couple weeks into the new year I can’t say I miss Twitter, either. That account remains open, but unused as of Jan. 1.

I enjoyed the service once. At 140 characters it reminded me of headline writing, which was always one of my favorite parts about deskwork.

Even at twice that its immediacy reminded me of the wire services. Man, you’d hear those bells ring in the teletype room — Ding ding ding ding ding! — and you knew instantly that some shit was hitting the fan somewhere.

But there were those long stretches of not much going on, too, just the machinery mindlessly punching out dreck from drones that nobody was ever going to read, not even the copy boy, and that’s what Twitter has become for me. More characters and fewer characters, all at the same time.

Now if I crave to inspect the latest outrage from Sir Orange of Golf, I have to go looking for it, which mostly I don’t.

And yes, the reverse QWERTY dent in my forehead is healing nicely. Thanks for asking.

Movie Monday

November 13, 2017

In which we learn that an hour on the patio listening to birdsong beats a day wasted reading tweets from twatwaffles.

 

The days grow short

September 27, 2017

Leaves are turning, and so is the sky.

Some evildoer swiped my beautiful desert climate while I was on the road. A fella can’t leave nothin’ unlocked and unguarded in these parts.

I should be out and about, logging miles on the Marin Nicasio. But instead here I am, in the office, catching up on correspondence and expense reports, brokering real-estate deals, and drinking green tea.

Why, I may even put on pants. That’s how dire the situation has become.

Damp, gray weather like this is why the Mid-Willamette Valley and I proved such a poor fit back in the early Eighties. It makes me want to eat everything, with a side of everything else, and wash it all down with buckets of brain-eraser. Cost me my girlish laughter it did, along with a few buttons on the old 501s.

And now Twitter is testing a 280-character tweet, doubling the previous limit we’ve all come to know and love. Good Gawd Awmighty. Has the world gone mad? Zombie Russian novelists must be running that op’ these days. Tolstoy needed more than 140 characters just to clear his throat.

What Twitter really needs is an editing function. But if we had that, I expect more of us might come to realize that we only have 140 characters’ worth of wisdom in us on a good day.

Black, white and red

October 29, 2015
Sure, the thermometer shows a temp in the upper 50s. You gonna believe me or your lyin' eyes?

Sure, the thermometer shows a temp in the upper 50s. You gonna believe me or your lyin’ eyes?

As the dark days of winter loom I’ve been tormenting people on Facebook and Twitter with photos of a sunny, warm Albuquerque, so it’s only fair that last night Herself and I both felt a tad chilly under just a sheet and lightweight bedspread, and this morning it was sprinkling as I backed the Forester out of the garage for its date with the Subaru wizards at Reincarnation.

Cycling home from the shop in a chilly breeze I had to stop to beef up my kit, pulling on a light jacket, long-fingered gloves and tuque. Happily, the rain cut me some slack and I got home without a soaking. Also without photos. I’m not good enough with Photoshop to turn today’s gray skies blue.

There’s a bit of red in the old fiscal picture, though. Subie wants a new driveshaft. Owie. I guess I’m lucky to have avoided a long walk home from this last trip to Bibleburg, the only one in recent memory in which a bicycle didn’t come along for the ride.

Meanwhile, how refreshing to find out that a Bush really doesn’t want the job before we give it to him: “Contributors detected little urgency in his voice, and some were taken aback when Mr. Bush announced that he had an hour free on his schedule and was going to go work out.”

Remember, this is the smart one.

Time Machine Tuesday

January 21, 2014

Over at Teh Twitters yesterday a gent praised a non-rant I’d written way back in 2002, saying it was one of his “all-time favorites.”

I had forgotten about it — these things vanish from my consciousness about a nanosecond after I hit the “Send” button — so I looked it up, and y’know, I kinda liked it myself. Even an old blind dog finds a tasty Milk-Bone now and then, it seems.

Written when we still lived in Weirdcliffe, it was prompted by a reader’s complaint (one of many, actually) that my stuff was too negative, which it can be. That my VeloNews.com column was christened “Friday’s Foaming Rant” didn’t help. A label like that tends to set a certain tone, and when I wandered off the Rantinista reservation other critics would jeer, “Call that a rant?” You can’t win.

But if two of us liked it, it must not be entirely lame, so here it is, reprinted in all its faded glory for your entertainment.

(more…)

Ass, grass or gas: Nobody rides for free

November 9, 2013

It’s that time of year again, when I start ringing up editors to inquire whether come the new year they will keep flinging good money after bad by continuing to accept contributions from Your Humble Narrator.

This process always involves a bit of give and take — the editor explains what s/he wishes to take from me, and I tell the editor where and how I plan to give it. A good old time is had by all, often at the top of our lungs, and before long the spreadsheets, knuckle-dusters and restraining orders are set aside and we all go back to earning our meager livings.

bite-meAnd meager is all I ask. My needs are simple, not unlike myself, and I retain no illusions about the freelance rumormonger’s position on our long list of must-have items in the 21st century. (Hint: It’s more than a couple of folds down from the top of the page.)

Today, there is no more writing, illustration or photography — it’s all “content,” and a smart fella can get that anywhere.

Just ask Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and Innertubez gazillionaire. Now one of the guiding lights behind a newish venture, Medium, Williams has moved beyond the 140-character limit in search of “thoughtful, longer-form writing,” says Matt Richtel of The New York Times.

Well, not all that far, perhaps. To be sure, Williams wants more characters for his new enterprise, but he’s offering the same level of compensation — to wit, nothing. Writes Richtel, 745 words into this paean to long-form work: “A few writers are paid, with their work solicited by a small editing team, but most are not.”

Do tell.

Medium employs some 40 folks; I assume that they are taking home paychecks, though being an Innertubez gazillionaire, Williams — whose personal fortune recently ballooned by nearly $2.5 billion, thanks to his 10.5 percent share of Twitter — may not require anything so mundane as compensation for whatever it is that he does.

Well, I do, and thus you should not expect to see my byline over at Medium anytime soon.

I don’t object to writing for free. In fact, I’ve done and continue to do plenty of it.  I kept a journal for a decade or so; covered cycling for free at The New Mexican (where I was paid for editing) just to get it in the paper; and have been blogging gratis for longer than I can prove (the archives back at the old home place date to 1992).

But it seems Williams is after something a little deeper than the product of a guy who is interested primarily in keeping the old editorial muscles loose by jotting down whatever comes to mind, just for the hell of it, without interference from editors, publishers or advertisers. Though precisely what that something is, the story never quite says.

There is chin music aplenty, however. Long form. Rationality. Nourishment. Holistic. The one thing that seems certain is that whatever it is that Williams wants to sell, he is not willing to buy.

Sounds irrational to me, even assholistic. Hey, yo, Williams! I got your long-form nourishment right here, pal.