ROLEY

Tag: Social Media

  • Thursday, January 9th, 2025

    • A small correction to my half-baked meaningless babble about the jack Smith report yesterday: It has been pointed out to me that even if the concerige judge Cannon gets overturned, it will be appealed to SCOTUS, where Concierge Justice Thomas will accommodate them. So, if you’re asking the overall question “Did the insurrection work?’ the answer is yes. Yes, it did.
    • The more I think about it, the more I believe that while we should be afraid of what happens when these people in power have no guardrails, it might be the best thing to happen to our society in the long term. This came to me when I saw a post by Nancy Mace, AI’d to look like a knight in armor in front of a ladies’ room door. She also felt free enough to call people on the left dumbasses, which is usually something left for the rabble to do. Watch this space.
    • Re: Meta. I’m torn about what to do with my Meta accounts. Some people in my life I can only contact through Meta, so I need to keep the account. I rarely use it for posting anymore, so he’s not getting money or clicks from me. I think I can remove the Instagram/Threads accounts on principle. I was concerned about where to post photos to share, Glass (paid) or Pixelfed (Fediverse), but I’m forgetting First Principles here. I have a place to share my photos: MY place.
    • A little PSA from my day job: Here’s a hypothetical: If you call the bank on behalf of your elderly parents or in-laws, and we can’t get permission from them, we can’t talk to you. Also, you can’t DO anything. In most cases like that, the bank would need a Power of Attorney. So, don’t turn around after the bank tells you that and try to make a withdrawal online on, say, a day when you think no one is paying attention. We’re paying attention, and you just got the account frozen. No withdrawal for you. We need the POA. Period. Thanks for playing.

  • Thursday, January 2nd, 2025

    • Watching the events of yesterday, I’m reminded that often the fastest and loudest takes right after some act of violence has taken place is usually made by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, or by people who are paid to be the fastest and loudest and STILL don’t know what they’re talking about. This includes a small but merry band of alleged ‘journalists’ that are more interested in engagement than accuracy.
    • We can boil all social media down to one sentence we’ve all learned: I don’t know who needs to hear this, but… No one needs to hear anything on social media. What we’re doing is attention-seeking. That’s the addiction. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but see it for what it is. Even blogging is a cry for that same attention, but there’s no bigger test of quality. The leap of faith you take with a blog is writing things people want to read. Or, you choose not to care and write it anyway. I’ve chosen the latter. It’s not that I don’t care what you think, it’s more like I don’t care to filter my opinion and I feel it’s more appropriate to do that here.

  • Monday, October 14th, 2024

    • There’s a belief about social media that goes something like this: Person A posts something innocuous like “I like cats.” This brings out all the cat haters, dog lovers, the gatekeepers who want you to name three cat breeds, and so on. I don’t get people sometimes. Anyway, Peace, Love, and Dodger Baseball.
    • Navigating this new world of cardiac care, I have a drug called Brilinta that I have to take twice a day. This drug stops platelets from forming and attacking the stent I had installed. If I don’t have this drug, the stent will clot, there will be another heart attack, and you can roll the dice on whether I come out the other side as still metabolizing. Funny thing: My insurance requires a prior authorization for this drug. So, if you understand all of this in context, my question is, “Prior to what, exactly?” Yout don’t schedule a heart attack. “Right, so we’ll handle the presentation at 9am, I’ve got that one on one at 11:30, and remember I have the massive coronary at 2:15? So get those questions to me by email by Noon. Not sure I’ll be on Teams later.”

  • Wednesday, July 17 2024

    Housekeeping

    A follow-up from yesterday: I’ve added a new page to the blog called LINKS, which will be updated daily(ish) with things I find interesting. You’ll note a hashtag next to the heading, which is an Anchor Tag that I’ll use to link you to the appropriate day when I share it via social. I’ve seen other folks use hashtags for the list items themselves, but I’ve found that those send you to a separate single post as well. I don’t think WP has that functionality, so I’ll just use this for the time being.

    This gets me closer to the vision I had for this blog for a long time, where I’m not using posts, but a list divided daily on a single page. I like this, and I may switch to it overall for daily use. I’ll still keep the blog, but that would be for when I need to bloviate a bit more (ok, more than usual.)

    If The Engagement Lasts More Than Four Hours

    The funny part about writing a post about the sad state of clickbait (for lack of a better term), is that when you title the post “Social Internet has ED“, I’m the schmuck that is so amused by that title I’m going to click on it. The upshot of the post is that the current state of the internet is all about the algorithm and manipulating it to your advantage. When you understand that engagement doesn’t care if you’re positive or negative, just that you engage, then you begin to understand why some people craft the posts they do. The ‘Own the libs’ crowd, for example. Boebert, Greene, Gaetz, and that ilk understand this (or their social media team), and yet we still argue with them online. It’s at the point that I don’t even screenshot them and respond anymore. I’m really beginning to wonder if rediscovering and optimizing the blog rather than contributing to social media is the answer. Social media used to drive traffic to blogs and websites, I wonder if that’s still the case. I know it still drives me nuts, that’s for sure.

  • Cleaning the Social Media Gutter

    I’m noticing that quite a few people that view my stories on Instagram are people that I don’t know, and want nothing to do with. I started to go through my list of followers, and I quickly realized that leaving my account inactive for a long period of time might have been a mistake. A quick note about weeding the garden: Instagram doesn’t really make it easy, especially on the desktop version. It’s just a small scroll box in the center of the page. I really would like a way to bulk remove/block people. That should be a no-brainer.

    Yes, I realize there are 3rd party solutions that may allow you to do this, the point is that IG should allow you to do this. I’m going to look for those solutions so that I don’t have to waste more time in the weeds than necessary.

  • LINK: First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go →

    Ever since the popular platforms got basically weaponized, it’s been a little more like which one is the leper with the most fingers left. I’ve found myself on Threads, which is Zuckerberg. At least he’s not an insane fascist as far as we know. I hardly ever post on Facebook anymore, and I’m warming back up to Instagram since they appear to be appealing to photography again.

    That said, I’m not going to worry too much about it. I have this place, and anything I have to say I can post here.

  • Friday, October 6th, 2023

    I got rid of X(witter). I don’t listen to news or political podcasts anymore. If I want to hear what’s going on in Congress or the White House, C-Span is a primary source. I have plenty to do during a day to doomscrolling social media. I finish what I have to do during the day and I find I have no time to sit on social media.

    I’ve been able to create because I’m taking the time to do that first before I do anything else. I let stuff go. Amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care about anything that doesn’t matter.

  • Thursday, October 5th, 2023

    Social Media Warriors. Keyboard Commandos. People who don’t know how to human.

    Chaos Agents, bomb throwers, soundbite seekers, world burners.

    This is what we’re dealing with if you let it in.

    Do we need to? That’s the question.

  • Wednesday, October 4th, 2023

    Here’s something to think about: Did the anonymous nature of Social Media make it harder for us to let stuff go? Hell, even work from home might play a role. The cocooning we’ve done the past few years may have weakened our ability to human. So we lose our filters and we say what we think without giving a rat’s ass about the effects.

    We all might be an island, but we’re all islands on the same damn planet. We need to remember that.

  • This Used To Be My Playground. Or Drug Of Choice. It’s One Of Those.

    I realize that it might be a bit counterintuitive to talk about overusing social media on social media, but let’s talk about overusing social media on social media.   

    This has been weighing on my mind ever since Elon, who I will from this point forward refer to Incelus Maximus, Sooooper Geeeeeenius, bought Twitter.  It’s clear to me that he wishes to normalize the kind of toxic wasteland you’d find on 4chan or 8chan or worse.  Yes, I’m pretty sure there’s worse even if I’ve never seen it AND WHY WOULD I WANT TO SEE IT?  This rant is about not social media-ing, for crying out loud.  

    Grover Norquist, on an NPR interview in 2001 famously said “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”  That’s what Incelus Maximus is doing to Twitter, or X, or whatever he needs to call it to make himself feel like a man.  He bought the playground we all use, and he’s systematically taking away the swings, the slides, the merry-go-round, and the see-saw, until it’s a bare patch of land that he can pave over. 

    As a result, I’ve been roaming around all the new playgrounds to see what I like, but then I had a thought.  Why am I doing that?  Why do I feel like I have to find a new place?  I’m not sticking around the old one much longer, but who says I have to *go* anywhere?  

    I know, I’m telling you this on a podcast that I also post to TikTok and YouTube.   Not the LEAST bit hypocritical.  Hear me out.  There’s a difference between creating content and consuming it.  One actually puts something out into the universe, the other will take your time and your health if you’re not careful.   I think one of my problems has been the mindless consumption of social media instead of sitting down at my desk and creating something.   You know how this goes, right?  Sit down, pull out your phone, open a soul-stealing app, and then the next thing you know the kids have Masters degrees and you’re in a home needing a wipe and the nurse can’t understand front to back like the rest of the staff.  

    The only solution that makes sense to me is to create before I consume.  I will pick a home for social media, but create my content primarily for my own website instead of giving the techbro of the month the fruits of my labor.  

    On a completely unrelated note, there should be some labor.   Some kind of labor.  

    Any kind of labor.