The state of the stream

Social

I swore off Facebook almost three years ago. I’m pulling back a lot on Twitter nowadays too, using it for what it does best: providing me with a reading list of material on other sites. I do still use Twitter to push the other site, but that’s mainly reposted photos from flickr and pushes from the RSS feed. I use Mastodon for that too, but let’s be real. No one seems to care that much about Mastodon. That said, no one seems to care that much about Twitter anymore either except as argument fodder. Response to my stuff is way down over the past six months since the Muskrat came into power.

I don’t really use social media to forge relationships or (Great Pumpkin forbid) get into arguments. I use it to stay updated on topics of interest and to find other things to read.

I probably won’t be posting much on Twitter going forward, but I will probably keep using it as a reading list as long as it serves that purpose well.

Personal

All in all, things are good. I had my annual physical recently and my fat, sedentary butt remains far more healthy than it has any reason to be.

I’m having, um, a milestone birthday next year and I’m thinking of taking a really huge road trip in celebration thereof. Maybe cross-country even. Or something that would knock out those last three states I’ve never visited (Idaho, Montana, and Alaska). Then again, there’s a reason I’ve never visited them.

Work is good too, though budget cuts, declining university enrollment, and the current political climate in my home state are a little terrifying. I think tenure will protect me for the six or seven more years I need it to. We’ll see on that.

Almost three years in, I’ve managed to keep on maintaining my daily (private) audio journal. My life will be well documented when I die, though I’m not sure anyone would (or should) care that much. But the archivist in me feels like it’s required.

I continue to hate spring.

Writing

I want to write about things, really, but it just ain’t happening.

Last but not least

Does anyone want to buy a slightly used house?

Muskrat, muskrat

I’m not quitting Twitter, at least not for the moment. I am, however, in the process of migrating to other platforms and using Twitter basically as a reposting service for content that’s primarily hosted elsewhere. That means, for now, this website and flickr (the latter for photos, obviously). I’m not sold on Mastodon yet, though I did stake out a territory there today (more when that territory is better occupied).

A little about how I use social media, just for context:

As a publishing platform for brief thoughts, links, and photos.
A way to promote updates on the site.
As a reading list for other content I might want to see more of.

That’s pretty much it. I don’t generally “engage” on social media. I don’t get into long discussions and I avoid arguments entirely for the most part. Who has the time or energy for that? Life is way too short.

Interestingly enough, though, this is why Twitter works well for me. It’s easy to post links, photos, etc. when I’m on the road, and it allows me to pretty well curate what I see (or don’t see). It’s no different than handling toxic politics, white supremacists, homophobes and other bullshit every day walking down the street. My feed is pretty much buildings, retail history, a little music, some random Canadian pop culture, and a couple of friends. That’s it. No drama, no pointless arguments with idiots whose minds will never be changed anyway, and a lot of pointers to good content that’s posted somewhere else (and some that’s actually posted just on Twitter). I tune out the moronic conspiracy theories the same way I tune out the moronic “Let’s go Brandon” bumper stickers. They irritate and horrify me, sure, but they’re not the majority of what’s out there. We have to choose our battles and choosing “all of them” is invariably a losing proposition.

I’m the muskrat’s nightmare user.

I swore off Facebook a few years ago mainly because it was such a “walled garden” and because it no longer seemed like a good use of my time or something I enjoyed. I make no promises right now that I will or won’t be exiting Twitter altogether. There are things I like about it, just like there are things I like about the purple state where I live. Leaving either would be, in many ways, like cutting off my nose to spite my face. The muskrat doesn’t care whether I’m here or not. And there need to be people hanging around to balance out the crazy, in virtual environments just like in “real” ones.

I do think the platform will ultimately implode, which is why I’m also using others. Backups are good.

(Cross-posted from the other site.)

A productive pandemic

When I get overwhelmed or start wondering where the last year went, I remind myself that since March I have:

Co-authored a book that should be published later this year
Migrated one of the largest library digital collections in the state to a new content management platform (link later)
Participated in the salvation of American democracy
Added a bunch of new cities to Groceteria
Eighty-sixed Facebook
Rebuilt a friendship that had been dormant for almost thirty years
Watched at least a hundred vintage episodes of “What’s My Line?”
Become disturbingly conversant in the MODS metadata schema as well as several new XML tools
Supervised three student capstones and independent studies
Managed to avoid getting a COVID-related illness
Done a few pretty good media interviews (radio, national magazine, well-trafficked blog)
Read many good books (and bought way too many more)
Never hoarded toilet paper and also never run out of same
Managed three big grant projects simultaneously and remotely
Only gained about five pounds and actually ended up with better labs than last year
Stayed reasonably sane

Try it yourself. It helps!

By the numbers

Things insomnia made me count. In my life I have:

Owned 3 houses and rented 5 apartments.
Lived in 3 states (4 if you count a vacation home).
Had 2 roommates (not counting a few temporary situations of less than a month).
Had 1 (common law) husband.
Owned 9 cars.
Had 6 traffic accidents, 2 of which were ruled my fault.
Spent time in 3 countries, including 45 U.S. states and 6 Canadian provinces.
Had sex in at least 24 states.
Had phone numbers with 5 area codes.
No brothers or sisters, but 14 first cousins (approximately 12 of whom are still alive).
Spent 2 nights in a hospital (not counting when I was born).
Been to 0 high school class reunions (with plans to attend 0 more).
Had 5 primary home computers (all Macs, which is why I had each one for so long).
Had 3 full-time employers (though I had multiple positions in multiple locations for the first two, plus a ton of part-time and freelance employers).
Had 4 medical procedures for which I was put completely under.

Random thoughts (mostly) unrelated to April Fool’s Day

Yesterday had more texture. Today is a bright, sunny spring day in North Carolina, which means, of course, that I do not particularly wish to leave the house because of the bright (and the pollen). So I’m taking care of things at home. And creating bullet points:

A month or so in, I ask again why I never used Plex before. It’s pretty wonderful, especially with my new router. Having everything I own from porn to film noir to home video on every device in the house rocks.
Credit Karma Tax. Love it. It was quick and painless, helped along by the fact that I no longer have itemized deductions since I no longer have a mortgage. If I hadn’t had a few thousand dollars in one-time freelance income for a consulting project I did, my taxes would have taken all of five minutes. And no fucking TurboTax fees and add-ons.
Anyone have a good commercial VPN provider recommendation? I’d been thinking of going with one for quite a while and in light of recent events I’m pretty sure I will.
For the record, it’s kind of discouraging realizing that your home state is more concerned with college basketball than with your basic civil rights.
Lovely. North by Northwest is having one of those TCM limited screening things, and i’ll be crammed into an airplane for both dates.
Best April Fool gag this year from NPR.
I’ll be in Albuquerque next week. That’s just not something one gets to say all that often.

Social mediation

It was a very productive weekend. I got a lot done around the house, took care of a lot of nagging paperwork related to my mom, took bundles and bundled to Goodwill, and still managed to have dinner with a friend on Saturday and to make a quite lovely pot of soup today.

I’ve given Facebook the heave-ho except for the work-related posts that are sort of part of my job. I’m sure this did not cause the flurry of activity this weekend, but it was certainly a contributing factor. I’ve been eliminating a lot of time-sucks lately, starting with the cable TV about six months ago. More recently, I have pruned my social media feeds to largely eliminate posts from people whose only contributions are memes and links to clickbait “news” sites. It helped a lot, but I’ve still been finding the signal-to-noise ration a little bit low. And I’m really growing weary of reading other people’s arguments.

As it happens, Twitter makes it a lot easier to control what you see. I use Twitter mainly the same way I used to use RSS feeds (I actually still subscribe to a few) and that’s to keep me up to date on news and interests. I follow a couple of news-related feeds and many urban- and history-based ones. And I follow friends too, but I find I’m spared most of the arguments and flame wars (or that I at least have to seek them out more actively rather than constantly being spoon-fed comments and likes). The environment is a lot nicer.

It’s exhausting being in a constant state of outrage, which seems to be the goal of much social media today. Mind you, I’m already plenty outraged about plenty of things, but I really no longer see the benefit of walking around looking at my phone every five minutes and seeing just how much more clinched my teeth can get.

Maybe it will get better after the election. Or maybe I’ll no longer care by then…

Sling has slung

Yeah, that title was pretty bad. Sorry.

I have terminated the great Sling TV experiment, for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, I realized that even though the cost was much lower, I was still paying more money than I wanted every month for maybe two channels that I ever really watched. And I also realized that I wasn’t even watching those two channels all that often.

Second, the on-demand functionality is really a mess. The big issue (and it’s very much a known issue) is that on-demand streams have a tendency to freeze. When they do, the Sling TV app does not remember when the break occurred. That would be a little annoying, but it’s made even more annoying by the fact that the fast-foward function does not really work. At all. Or at least not on Roku, OS X, or iOS. That means you have to basically start over every time it happens. And it happens a lot.

So I’m sticking with my over-the-air channels (getTV kinda rocks) and my Netflix. I may invest in a Hulu subscription. I have a shelf full of DVDs and a hard drive full of downloads and home-recorded material as well.

And if all else fails, I could read the occasional book…

Otherstream at 20: 2015

It’s kind of hard to curate posts that are less than a year old, but I tried. This is the final year to be covered in my “twenty years” retrospective. I may talk about the actual anniversary tomorrow and try to draw some broad conclusions. Or I may not. You’ll have to check back by to see which it is.

January

February

March