niktemadur

Twitter was a great space for breaking news, official alerts like weather, earthquakes and tsunamis, for developing election day tallies.
The “you mean Grimes left the king of SpaceX?” manchild broke all that.

the utter futility of invading an island

An amphibious and paratrooper assault in this day and age, as well as the inevitable international sledgehammer of sanctions, makes it look to me like the expense and risk outweighs the potential benefits.

There is a balance of peace and trade in the region. Who in their right mind would overturn this balance? There has to be an unholy alliance of sense of power-tripping entitlement plus a strong self-loathing inferiority complex. But goddamn it, we’ve seen too many hollow, noisy, vulgar, aggrieved billionaires and orange millionaires in the past decade or so, haven’t we?

I have never, ever posted a picture of my kids online. I’ve sent a handful to family and friends via messaging apps, but only ones that are naturally flattering, and that is as far as it goes.

As it turns out, my overwhelming hunch that this is the only decent, respectful course of action in the mindless social media age, seems to be correct.
I love my kids, and I respect them as people, as individuals with a right to privacy at any age.

Imagine being such a failure as a human being that they drag others down the hole they’ve stubbornly dug for themselves.

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Despite humanitarian concerns

One wonders if the people now throwing the term “humanitarian concerns” around ever bother to look at images of Bucha, Mariupol, Bakhmut, Kherson, etc. Images of destroyed hospitals, schools and parks in Kyiv and elsewhere. Images of the ecological and humanitarian CATASTROPHE that was the Nova Kakhovka dam. The sign on top of that Mariupol theater saying “CHILDREN HERE”.

There is an ongoing EMERGENCY in Ukraine that is superseding any and all other arguments. Clutching pearls after all this makes one a useful idiot for the kremlin.

Madlads material right here.

This reminds me of something…

What are we going to build?
A PAYWALL!
Who’s going to pay for it?
META!

The best people. Just terrific hackers or coders or whatever they’re called. Biggly.

Damaged narcissistic minds, misfiring alike on all goddamned cylinders.

1. Lather

My hearts hurt and my eye is broken.

…or that da ruthless librul snowflakes are coming to take your guns away and turn your masculine christian baby boy into a girl.

Meanwhile, these very same assholes cheer when their orange dictator throws immigrants’ children into cages. Their personal nightmares are just in their minds. Yet the nightmares they create are very real.

He plans to keep it as a private foundation that is using a donation model to keep it going.

I abandoned Whatsapp several years ago and since then have used Signal nearly every day (to keep in touch with a handful of friends), have had a recurring monthly donation set up for a couple of years now.

One on the one hand there’s the privacy, but what clinched it for me originally was the ability to seamlessly switch from my tablet to the cellphone to the desktop, all Apple. Signal was (and probably still is) better at this than Whatsapp.

“I don’t want to give Zuckerberg all my information for free, or ever, at all” - is what I’ve said to people when they ask why I don’t have Whatsapp. For the most part, they shrug as if to say “fair enough”. By and large, it’s become an acceptable reason.

Through the past few years, I’ve been communicating with my five best friends via Signal. They installed the app and started using it just to stay in touch with me. Like I said - best friends, they did that for me.

But their gesture have been rewarded…! …with Twitter-thread-style text walls from Yours Truly! About whatever subject is on my mind that night.

From the 70s films of Robert Altman, to the impact of The Stone Roses on 90s British music, to the difference between Baroque and Rococo, to Major League Baseball rule changes, to Bitcoin miners in Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, to Neutrino Cosmic Background Radiation, to good ol’ fashioned meme shitposting - surreal memes, recursive memes, dank memes, bone hurting juice… you name it, we got it.

So far, they don’t seem to mind it too much. It doesn’t happen every day and I gotta feel inspired, as opposed to bored texting.

Rage bait that could be a direct copy and paste from yesterday’s rage bait.

Also so many “meme” posts romanticizing depression and hopelessness, sometimes my r/all feed was full of these goddamned things, at least one or two per page. Like some bot farm pushing for a particular type of apathy and passive nihilism.

Broken people breaking things.

Throw money around recklessly, regard your broken self as some great lord of a realm, treat people as your slaves, then fiddle with little pet peeves in utter ignorance of how and why they work, watch a cascade effect spiral out of control, blame anyone and everyone but yourself.

This is a right-wing pattern. Look at the orange cock holster and the bullshit he was fixated on while squatting in the White House. The mind of a petulant child.

Reddit looking like Tik Tok, which is looking more like Facebook, which wants to look like Instagram… and what’s that over there? Oh look, it’s Twitter, spooning glue with its’ hand and putting it in its’ mouth.

Meanwhile, here in the Fediverse I’ve been seeing a lot of impressively creative memes. I don’t know if they’re originating here, or if they’re copy-pasted from elsewhere, but I’m comfortable here where memes are concerned.

find a way to make that crappy investment somehow profitable

With this sudden, reckless implementation of shit, alienating more and more of the very user base that gives the business its’ value?

He’s created a cascade effect that didn’t need to turn into an avalanche, at this point he’s just piling one half-baked idea on top of another, and another, and another.
Unless the petty goal is to turn that place into a toxic right-wing playground, which in turn… what does he gain from that, exactly, in case it works out and has a societal/electoral effect? Lower taxes and less oversight, so he can do as he pleases?

Occam’s Razor suggests his mind is broken by stress, willful lack of sleep and social media addiction - the attention of millions of both haters and worshippers - incompetently “getting high on his own supply” like Tony Montana, and went into this convinced his shit doesn’t stink. And now flailing at the lack of success and here comes A.I. with its’ scrapers.

I think he can’t keep proper track of reality at a level where things don’t break. This is one of those “sleep machismo” idiots who hasn’t had a proper, healthy sleep in years and years. With the stresses he has brought on himself, plus being a willful lightning rod addicted to the attention of millions of people - both the haters and worshippers - his mind is in some sort of late-stage erosion.

What a wasted opportunity of a man. What an embarrassment.

Many people relied on Twitter before Dorsey left the company and have been stuck there, out of the blue they became hostages to the idiotic whims of a sick man who hasn’t had a healthy night’s sleep in what seems like decades, a mind eroding into dust.

I prefer to feel empathy for these people. As with Reddit, this whole thing is a grotesque charade with plenty of collateral damage.