and things went downhill from there

The title of this post is inspired by the song that just came up in my Tidal queue.

When somebody posted their Mastodon ID on Twitter today, it reminded me that I have an account over there. As I hopped over there to add them, it occurred to me that I have my fingers in a lot of different social media platforms, but I'm really only active on a couple of them.

I'm on Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Livejournal, Dreamwidth, and even Pillowfort.

Having said that, the only ones that I'm actually active on are Facebook and Twitter -- and to a lesser extent Dreamwidth (which I mirror to Livejournal).

I am aware that Facebook and Twitter are utterly wretched platforms, but I'm still on them and active for many of the reasons that Cory Doctorow touched on when they had him on CBC earlier today. That's where all of my friends and family are, and until those platforms fail and implode, there is little likelihood that any of them will follow me to other platforms. When those spaces are your touch points for people whom, quite honestly, you are impressed had the technical prowess to even figure out those simple sites, it makes it hard to move wholesale to a different platform.

What also doesn't help is when the alternate platforms are clunky, awkward to use, and counter-intuitive. Mastodon feels like something developed by Linux geeks who don't get out much, where robustness and up-time trump intuitiveness and usability. I mean, Mastodon isn't terrible, but in some ways it kinda is. Its a fractured platform, with people getting into small, exclusive, invite-only servers that they wear like the blue check-marks in Twitter.

I'll probably migrate there entirely once Twitter implodes (or becomes pay-to-use), but for now I'm only keeping it around as a fall-back.

I want to like Pillowfort, but the only way to access it is through its web page, and the tiny handful of people whom I know on the service aren't active there anyway.

So I find myself being active on the bad sites (Facebook and Twitter) for the same reason that other people are. Like me, some of them have moved to the good sites, and like me, none of them are active on the good sites because nobody else is either.

This showed up in my Facebook feed, posted by an old friend of the family who managed to track me down there a few years back. I friended her back because I had fond memories of taking the ferry over to visit them on their farm when I was very young. It occurred to me later that these were friends who Mom & Dad had made during their earlier, more cultish church days.

What gets me about this one is that people hare sharing it unironically. Poor muscular American Jesus is sad because people don't want to share his posts on Facebook and Instagram. Do people not get how insulting and degrading this is to their deity? Do they really think that Jesus would shed tears over likes and shares on social media?


On another note, we managed to get out of the house early today and went for some diner-style breakfast. I don't know if I have posted about breakfast perogies here before, but I just want to say for the record that they exist, and I am okay with that.

As I get older, and my acquaintances on Facebook get older, I see more and more old person memes. While I am not specifically referring to pictures of old people (though many of them are memes of "gosh, like and share if you are old like me and have these issues"), I am specifically referring to the right-wing memes shared by old people.

Back in my day we didn't need taxes or welfare.

Like and share if you think we should de-fund schools and welfare to hire more police.

I remember when vinyl records were a thing and there were only two genders.

Check out this sad-looking old woman in this stock photo who overcame unbelievable odds. Read about her and understand how much you suck.

I've distilled a few of them down to a single image.


I guess the only thing I need to add is the passive-aggressive bit at the end: "Like and Share if you agree. I guess I'll know who my real friends are when I see who shares this."

Edit: after (rightly) getting called out for a post I made on FB, I've decided to just suspend my account there for awhile. I can't (and shouldn't) try to tell others what to post there, but I can control what I read. I'm tired of wanting to punch my monitor 2-3 times a day because of the toxicity there.

---

The only reason I am staying on that platform is because it is my only real contact with a fair number of folk, but COVID19 is really bringing out some of the more disgusting Facebook memes lately. If I stay, I may have to start purging my friends list, or at least begin blocking people to keep my blood pressure down.

Rather than reposting the memes here, I'll just boil them down to their essences.

Like and share if you are smart like me and didn't buy a bunch of toilet paper.
(Wow, you're smarter than frightened people. You're so special.)

Why should we trust the government to battle this virus when the same government says they can stop global warming if we let them raise our taxes enough?
(You're so much smarter than those folks with education and degrees an' shit.)

I mean, the other memes are pretty bad too. The same people will unironically post back-to back memes calling on the government to a) stop taxing seniors, while b) spending more money on seniors.

Also, I get it folks - you don't like Trump. I understand. I don't like him either. But please come up with some new memes.

To put it in polite terms: Facebook people, please fuck off.

When I confronted the person about her corona virus/climate change meme, she admitted that she hadn't actually read and thought about it before sharing.

On the coffee front (how can you tell that I am retired?), I made a couple of minor discoveries.

Last weekend I picked up an interesting coffee from a local roaster. It's a very light roast coffee, made from beans that were dried without being de-meated. What I mean by that is that they removed the skins from the berries, but left the meat on them for the drying process. As a result, some fermentation took place during the process.

The resulting coffee had a very complex and interesting flavour, but it was very acidic. I don't mind a bit of acidity in my coffee, but I may as well have just added vinegar to this one. On a hunch, I added a pinch of baking soda to the brewing water and the change was just shy of miraculous. I experimented with the amount of baking soda from cup to cup and discovered that it took very little to be effective. If I added too much, it removed some of the other flavours as well.

The acidity of some lighter roasts is one of my main complaints about them, so knowing that I can throw the bad/good toggle with a tiny pinch of baking soda may change my buying habits going forward - especially in light of...

I stocked up on coffee from a (different) local roaster last week, and the other day I posed it all for a picture (I'm still on track with my 2020 picture-a-day project).



I have been favouring dark roasts lately, so it came as a surprise when I was processing the picture to post and noticed that my current favourite of the lot is a medium-light roast.

Well then! I guess that shows how little I actually know about me.