twitter

A king in waiting gives a king’s answer

One day in the pavilion at Karakorum he [Genghis Kahn] asked an officer of the Mongol guard what, in all the world, could bring the greatest happiness.“The open steppe, a clear day, and a swift horse under you,” responded the officer after a little thought, “and a falcon on your wrist to start up hares.”“Nay,” responded the Kahn, “to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet—to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best.”

Source: ‘Do You Want to Live Forever?’—John Milius’ ‘Conan the Barbarian’ • Cinephilia & Beyond

Reading this twitter thread brought me to that Cinephilia article. They used real blood.

Time for a rewatch!

A king in waiting gives a king’s answer Read More »

This is being one hell of a ride

Well, now he’s truly done it. The melon husk bought twitter.

The writings were quick to arrive, particularly after the husk fired the A-levels first thing, and then dissolving the board of directors. Pretty sure all of that will result in lawsuits. Rich people don’t like not getting their golden parachutes.

The Verge posted:

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Welcome to hell, Elon

The Intercept wrote:

This could have been the mission statement of pre-Musk Twitter. But now there’s one big difference: When the content moderation of Twitter remains largely the same, the sense of betrayal among Musk’s super-fans will explode with the force of a supernova. And they will scream at Musk about it nonstop — on Twitter.

By Buying Twitter, Elon Musk Has Created His Own Hilarious Nightmare.

The chaos started immediately, with the husk firing a lot of people willy-nilly all over the company, and the world. Then it started asking people to come back. The company is now also on the hook for breaking California labor laws, with a looming lawsuit and employment attorneys commenting on this.

Nine days on from the purchase, the chaos continues:

Scoop: all of Musk’s companies use MS Teams for comms, where new channels are private by default.

When software engineers from Tesla, Boring and SpaceX came in to Twitter a week ago, they created Slack channels to communicate amongst themselves.

Several channels were public

@GergelyOrosz

Twitter Co also has zero potential advertisement income coming in, due to the husk’s erratic management style and general assholery. Also, someone please tell @Jack to shut the hell up.

Ourselves don’t plan on switching platforms until they shut the servers off… but then again we came from IRC, which has greatly reduced in size and influence; we keep a foothold on a couple networks but we don’t see any kind of substitute for the glorious chaos of an open timeline. But we’ll see.

Dril predicted all this, by the way. A true prophet of our age.

This is being one hell of a ride Read More »

Of pitchforks and torches

When people decide to go Dumb on the web it really shows. Case in point, this tweet by @CanPanicNow:

I did NOT come to law school to do math
@CanPanicNow

Is it a dumb take? Maybe, maybe not. We know many lawyers who complain about math. We also know many software developers who complain about math. We’ve heard mathematicians complain about math.

But like Homer Simpson says, it’s funny because it’s true

This started an entire fucken chain of Internet Stupidity™ on the twitter derp corn, but the one that people really took offense with was this reply from @VampWriterGRRL:

@CanPanicNow I went to college and got a degree in Paralegal Technology. Then I was hired by an attorney who specialized in bankruptcies. I recommend setting the attitude aside because, well, it’s immature, and you don’t know where you’ll end up working right out of law school.
@VampWriterGRRL

My fucken gods you’d have thought she went and personally spit on everyone’s faces. This started an entire weekend of stupidity that just keeps going and going cos some people can’t let it go. It’s a bad take? Dunno, possibly, We’re not able to judge how other people go about their lives, it’s already been hard enough with the pandemic to worry about other people’s lives when your own is already hanging on the balance.

#lawtwitter folk people started dogpiling on her. Whether it’s deserved or not it’s up to the reader to determine. Just go and look at @VampWriterGRRL’s replies to see what people are saying, or not, we’re not the boss of you. Recommend you don’t cos then you’d be reading the comments. We have our own opinions about how she’s bringing work into her own personal life and how her policing of others opinions feels.

In her case, she went on and is still currently defending her position on the matter as of this blargh post. This is where we come in with a few tweets of our own.

@WimminsRea @AKBrews @ResJudiGator @MotiontoLit @AnnaLovesVoting @VampWriterGRRL @subnomnomnom but on that… eh, just let her be. At this point it’s just y’all piling on
@nullrend

The kind of #lawtwitter dogpiling happening right now will probably result in vamp leaving, same as it has happened in the past. I haven’t interacted with @VampWriterGRRL
but I’m sure there will be people who will miss her, just like I miss people driven away over time.
@nullrend

if you don’t like her opinion, that’s fine. Do a tweet or two and leave it at that. Same if you do like her opinion. Y’all in #lawtwitter already devolved into cliques, make your peace with that and let others be.
@nullrend

There is a missing tweet here, which multiple people advised me to delete, in which we used the word “lynching”, given its racial connotations in the US. Quick reminder of the definition:

Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or intimidate. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle (often in the form of hanging) for maximum intimidation. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in every society.

Lynching – Wikipedia

Here’s another definition

lynch [/ lɪntʃ /]
verb (used with object)
1. to put to death, especially by hanging, by mob action and without legal authority:
– In the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of southern African Americans were lynched by white mobs.
2. to criticize, condemn, etc., in public:
– He’s been unfairly lynched in the media.

lynch – dictionary.com

As someone who regularly listens to international news, this violent group act happens on an almost daily basis:

We used this word to describe the mobbing around @VampWriterGRRL. Was it the wrong word to use, given the racial history of the audience present? Yes, it was. We apologized for it afterwards. But by that point people wanted blood and when that happens the blood lust will not be denied!

And I thought the worst take I was gonna see all night was a tweet about how lawyers shouldn’t make jokes about math (or at all, I guess) but holy shit has that been topped
@ncurr

To which multiple people started replying. At this point Nick felt the need to actively start QTing my original tweet to others in an effort to… not sure, actually. Have more people get in line for a li’l spanking? Kinky. But that did start a little mob around the tweet to which people actively responding. At the time we felt it particularly ironic we were being taught we were lacking in American historical knowledge by a white man and a white woman.

@wellywiggles @ncurr @Lex_Discipulus @subnomnomnom mmkay, and now you guys are actively trying to get mobbing on me. I did walk it back cos Nick rightfully pointed out it was the wrong word to use given the current context.
@ncurr

Can’t use a word that accurately describes the feeling which is why “mobbing” came into play. Ever seen mob justice? Not a fun thing to be around. It’s the kind of thing that curdles your insides and leaves a mental scar that takes a long, long time to heal.

@nullrend @wellywiggles @Lex_Discipulus @subnomnomnom I am simply trying to educate you about why you should not have made that comparison, then when called out, stood by it
@ncurr

A few people told me in private my tweet was stupid and it should be deleted and that that point their advise was followed. Did they also tell me I was being stupid for tweeting a stupid thing? Damn right they did, and right they were. A few of the people who torched me for that tweet are still actively going after others cos they disapprove of their opinions. In our case we just told them to block us so they wouldn’t have to read our nonsense:

@ncurr @Lex_Discipulus @katmcmemes @subnomnomnom @wellywiggles okay, so now I have walked it back and then apologized multiple times, and yet that is not enough because obviously you’re taking this very, very personally. So… my recommendation then is that you should block me, and people of the same opinion as you should do the same.
@nullrend

A couple of people from back in the land where we were born looked at this entire fucken thing and started LOL’ing at the sheer stupidity of it. American Exceptionalism is a hell of a drug.

How Americans see the world

Did we say the wrong thing at the wrong time? Yes. Did others also try to actively torch us for it? Yes. Did the chain of dumb continue until maximum dumb was achieved? Also yes. Not even trying to learn something for it except for the reminder to mind my own business come hell or high water. Bunch of people are now taking a Twitter Break because people are still finding something to be Mad Online™ about.

xkcd - Duty Calls

We can’t imagine what’ll happen when they see this blargh post? They’ll probably try to nuke me off the Internet with LOICs like we used to in the olden days.

Of pitchforks and torches Read More »

“Love the smell of thermal detonator in the morning”

Biden decided to bomb Syria cos it’s what the US does, after all. Bomb the shit out of brown people.

We’ve got some memes going around (this is but one example) about Democrats continuing the Republican tradition.

If it actually happens IRL many lulz will be had at Biden’s expense and he’ll fucken deserve it.

That and Kamala is probably pissed that pigs en’t getting money to terrorize people of color.

“Love the smell of thermal detonator in the morning” Read More »

You get retweets turned off! And you! And YOU TOO!!!

A modest proposal to improve Twitter—and perhaps the world

Source: The Case Against Retweets – The Atlantic

I went ahead and made the change on tweetdeck, the interface I use on the desktop:

tweetdeck settings

But this doesn’t take any effect on my mobile client of choice, Talon, and it’s a total pain in the ass to go hunting down a tweet that scrolled off the screen.

Meaning I had to rethink my approach. In the next few days I’ll be disabling retweets for pretty much everyone I notice retweeting more than they actually tweet or reply to other’s tweets. Just in the time I wrote up this blog post I disabled RTs for ten people. The threshold seems to be when someone hits the RT button for more than 4 tweets out of every 10.

It’d be nice if twitter enabled an option to disable RTs globally and then you decide if you want to turn them on for someone… but this does not favor their advertising model since you’re purposely limiting the amount of viral content making it to your timeline regardless of the client you’re using.

This is probably a good thing, all in all.

You get retweets turned off! And you! And YOU TOO!!! Read More »

Part of the problem is that my current depression not being tied to any particular trauma
Not that I would ever wish something bad on myself or anyone But boy howdy is it easier to figure out when you can point and be like THAT IS WHY SAD

— GhostEsq via twitter

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Thinking Tools: September 2016

Gordondoes them every now and then, so I’m going to start doing them too:

  • This site, which I am meaning to most more often to (and not just pictures like I did before). I guess proof is what looks to become a series of posts on my laptop being my router. I’ve posted about how I feel, so it’s progress.
  • Twitter, via Hotot+ on Chrome for the desktop, and Fenix on Android. The problem is that with Twitter Co. being assholes to their devs, Hotot+ has had its API key suspended a few times and Fenix is not really in active development any more after running out of app tokens. Given the current news about Twitter Co. looking to sell itself I wonder what will replace it for me. It’s basically become my social life on the internet, since I’m not really active on IRC anymore. I am on facebook mostly for family.
  • Notepad++: Jot down pretty much anything that pops into my mind. Sometimes I do use it to edit blog posts for usually the text mode WordPress editor suffices. I’ve tried to do a diary of sorts in it but it’s harder than I thought it’d be.
  • Franz I was using the Common Hangouts Chrome extension but Google went and fucked around with Hangouts again, so it stopped working. Pidgin is basically AWOL. Trillian is crap. So after much consideration I gave in and installed it. It looks like crap on my 4k display and Hangouts still has the stupid new interface, but at least it lets me have a single window for what little messaging I do these days.
  • KeePass Been using it for years now. Probably won’t stop ever. Everything wants/needs its own password now.

The most pressing need that I have for myself is a replacement for Tiddlywiki that I can run from this server; it’d probably require me to configure HTTPS but that’s another project worth learning. The main issue then becomes choosing an appropriate wiki that is about as flexible as tiddlywiki without requiring the use of any extensions on the browser. Running this from the server would also allow me to update it from any mobile devices. Tiddlywiki is decidedly desktop software; the clients available for on Android all suck. This is why it’s so pressing for me. I need something that lets me document my life so I can offload stuff from wetware onto software. I’ll keep trying using simple text for now… but I think my mind simply works better using a wiki paradigm. I really do wonder what Twitter will turn into once it doesn’t belong to itself, though.

Thinking Tools: September 2016 Read More »

Unhappiness on the twitter dot com

I got into an argument with someone, but the very end of it came down to this:

August 27, 2016 31057 AM CDT

This person actually said that I do not deserve a happy relationship.

So… does he wish for me to be in an abusive relationship? No relationships at all for the rest of my life? No friendships (since you can be happy with friends) then?

Still. It all arose from something that he was offended by. We argued a bit but once we saw we couldn’t make up for the differences we parted ways. And then he said that.

You do do, my good sir. I hope you don’t get your businesses bankrupted, that your significant others don’t do you wrong, that your children (if you have any, that is) don’t regret having you as their parent.

I don’t believe I’ll have a relationship that I will be feel happy and content with. But that’s for me to find out and to strive the opposite. It is not for you to declare.

I wish you the best in life simply because you wished me the worst. I have seen some of the worst and I would not wish that upon you.

Unhappiness on the twitter dot com Read More »

@AmericasBarbie: @nullrend …

You have a problem.

@AmericasBarbie

She may be right though. I have four screens attached to my computer right now, plus a laptop and an unused screen that I could put to use:

Lots of monitors
Lots of monitors ftw

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We all need someone to tell us this at least once.

A twitter friend is having problems. We’ve had long conversations about the current status quo and how it cannot be maintained much longer without detrimental effects on her health. This is just a bit of what I told her:

When you move out, you’ll feel sad and alone. But you know what? You’ll actually be able to listen to yourself think, and to let yourself feel for yourself.

You’ll miss what you had before because it was what you knew for the longest time. But you’ll slowly adapt to the new circumstances and will allow yourself to relax, and your body will recover.

Then you’ll one day you’ll realize that you’re feeling okay. And that it’s good to be okay.

It’s one thing to feel alone, and another one to feel lonely. Right now you’re not alone since you’re with your mother but you are lonely because she won’t share herself with you. You only get her anger.

When you’re alone and get comfortable with yourself, that’s when you stop being lonely.

I wish someone had told me this when I was younger. I learned it the hard way.

We all need someone to tell us this at least once. Read More »