Tag Archives: twitter

On Moving to a New Social Media World, Abridged

31/03
2023

This is the short, tl;dr version of this, for people whose lives are too short, who are living close to the edge of existence and who don’t have time for flowery prose. I’ve stripped out all the funny bits and also the reference to Seán, so that’ll teach you. A wholesome bowl of uncooked oats for your mind. What we’re all doing As so many of us are and very probably you, reading this, I’m on social media. By social media, I mean that I have accounts on all of them but until recently what I really meant was Twitter. You may have naïvely meant any of hundreds of sites, from Facebook to Instagram to WhatsApp, or some other sites that probably exist such as Google+, but I meant Twitter, the system that is the closest that we’ll ever get to experience to telepathy enabled on a global scale, the ability to immediately experience the deepest thoughts and desires of any of our fellow humans and have immediate regret at having done so. So we’re clear about what Twitter is, and also the sheer scale of it. Anyway, Elon Musk bought Twitter. The Elon Musk bit Elon Musk, the billionaire […]

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On Moving to a New Social Media World

13/02
2023

This is a longread which as much for your and my entertainment as for information, and so if you just want the ‘elevator pitch’ on why you should consider moving to to a different social network from the awful tyre fire that you’re currently using, I’ve provided a tl;dr/short version for people with busy important lives who watch YouTube tutorials on 1.5x playback mode and who get impatient at shrews and squirrels here. What we’re all doing As so many of us are and very probably you, reading this, I’m on social media. By social media, I mean that I have accounts on all of them but until recently what I really meant was Twitter. You may have naïvely meant any of hundreds of sites, from Facebook to Instagram to WhatsApp, or some other sites that probably exist such as Google+, but I meant Twitter, the system that is the closest that we’ll ever get to experience to telepathy enabled on a global scale, the ability to immediately experience the deepest thoughts and desires of any of our fellow humans and have immediate regret at having done so. And dogs too. Any of us could just fire our impulses into […]

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22/10
2020

Shortbread is the purity of cake; just flour, butter, sugar, heat and long-term cardiovascular trouble requiring medication and surgical intervention.

I set myself an admittedly silly challenge yesterday as a response to an enormously stressful Tuesday, by applying the sane type of approach that gave the world USA President Donald J. Trump and outsourcing my challenge to Twitter. Anyway, the upshot was to get the divorce process moving and bake a cake of some sort, and somewhat surprisingly keeping my job.

It’s a Jaime Oliver recipe, from his Big Book, so I have no link. He probably has it on his website, or a variation of it. It’s lovely, but heavier than depleted Uranium. A small piece of this could sustain an adult for weeks (and that’s what it was originally supposed to do).

In conclusion, by way of outrageous statement, I’m pretty much an incredible guy. If you met me you would be all “wow, this is pretty much an incredible guy” and I would say ”Well, hey” because I already knew it but enjoyed your realisation of it.

On Dating Apps

02/04
2020

The profiles went live, and then the hits came in. They came, and they kept coming. It was exhilarating and flattering. You can’t see who has matched you, you have to pay for that, so after a couple of weeks of this, where I seemingly racked up somewhere in the region of 80 or so positive swipes across the apps, my nerves got the better of me and I paid up so that I could see who was hitting me up. This is tempting, this is the business model, you pay to see rather than leaving it to chance. It’s actually very freeing once you’re used to it and the subscriptions run out and you’re back to chance. Paying is a mug’s game. I don’t know why I get nervous about it, because I’m a grown man, I have gained and lost so much, the stakes for social failure are by now very low. I should not fear dating as I do. What’s the worst that could happen? (Continued on from On Getting Into Dating) Actually, I might try it, just to see what happens. What’s terrifying is the idea that if someone thought ‘Oh! Ideal! A soft-minded recluse!’ and […]

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On Getting Into Dating

31/03
2020

“Enhance!“, I bark at the screen, having identified a low-resolution image which may contain the critical identifying data that I need to make my decision. The computer swiftly fills in the otherwise missing data using artificial intelligence, neural networks using advanced algorithms turning a grainy, poorly-taken photo into a vast bank of information, by extrapolating missing pixels, refracted light, data about the sensor that took the image, metadata, everything. And there it is. A high resolution image, billions of pixels. The make of the car, the year of the car, the trim level, the likely state of the car and how well it was maintained. I have what I need to know. I swipe left: ‘Butterfly364‘, who is admittedly attractive and likes travel, long walks and ‘the bantz’, has a decent car but doesn’t clean it with the correct agent for soft-touch interior surfaces. Also, she hasn’t upgraded her phone in a while, who even does that? Definitely a ‘No’. My marriage decisively unravelled in October of 2015, in tandem with my increasing unwillingness to spend the last of the savings on expensive but impractical shelving for the house that ‘we’ had bought and moved into not six months earlier, […]

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