Captain Aggravated

The People have more guns than the police and the wealthy.

My previous cat Harry had shockingly good English comprehension skills. As I was walking out to the car to go get some fried chicken, Harry was milling around near the front door. Fried chicken was his favorite food. I said to him, “Harry, I’m gonna go get some chicken. If you’re here when I get back I’ll give you some.” He sat his fluffy ass down on the spot and when I got back there he sat.

Another day he was on the far side of the yard. I stuck my head out the door and said “Harry, come here.” And he stood up and started ambling in my direction. I said “Come here quicker.” And he broke into a trot.

I’m looking forward to Matt Groenig’s new show.

Exactly this.

If we used Thomas Edison, we could hook him up to an AC generator and it would be a perpetual motion machine.

if you used someone like MLK Jr. the power would turn off the second we started being nice to black people. But hook Edison up to a Westinghouse AC Generator and the situation itself will light the world for all eternity.

I was born in the late 80’s by the time Betamax had died out so VHS was the de facto only video tape format in wide use, Hi-8 existed but was only used in the airlines despite being smaller and better. So movie previews would talk about “Coming soon to own on video” or people would say “I’ve got it on tape.” It would feel weirdly early 80’s to specify…until late in the DVD era and into blu-ray when VHS was a truly dead format and people started calling it that again.

Similarly, I never heard anyone pronounce “SNES” as a one letter word until at least the Gamecube era; it was the Super Nintendo at the time.

Well fuck LG, just build a tank into the washer that I can fill with a gallon of detergent at a time and do your own metering.

An action I’m in favor of is canceling policies. “Since your company is in such a habit of denying customers the service they have paid for, I’m no longer paying for your service.” Get a few million of us to do that and maybe something will get done. Money talks louder than ballots especially when the ballot box is just piped to /dev/null the way it is for so many Americans.

I was right, you’re a troll. Eat sand.

I remember reading about someone who listened to Popcorn for 24 hours and it had an effect on them.

15 different renditions of Popcorn.

Nope. My argument is not absurd because not using any of them is an option. You realize that’s a thing you can do, right? Give none of them your attention?

Okay, you have issues. Or are a troll. Or are a troll with issues.

I consider Twitter a dead platform because it is a nazi hellhole and I strongly recommend everyone just stop using it.

At this point though I do genuinely believe Facebook is worse because they’ve had a direct hand in at least one ethnic cleansing during my lifetime. Elon may quack like a duck but Zuckerberg swims, flies and waddles like a duck. I strongly recommend everyone just stops using Facebook and Instagram as well.

BUT ANYWAY, let me ask this: What’s stopping Elon Musk from buying Bluesky, badging it as X2 and doing the whole thing over again? Bluesky is currently a private for-profit company operating mainly on venture capital, just like Twitter was when it was a startup. It’s never going to support itself on its own revenue, that venture capital will eventually run out, there will be an IPO, it will suddenly be open to the whims of shareholders who will demand dark patterns and engagement at all costs and everything that has made the rest of the internet suck and they won’t care if their algorithms boost genocidal messages that erupt in widespread violence as long as their dividends come in.

It’s just a nope from me, and everything you will ever say will further convince me.

How many ethnic cleansings has Facebook been instrumental in? I can think of at least one in Myanmar.

Large commercial platforms being absolutely evil is NOT unique to Twitter. Again I challenge you to name me a large social media platform that didn’t either rot into a wasteland of scam bots or start committing atrocities.

Very bad people own almost everything and their solution to any rising star is to buy and ruin it.

Hell, I don’t want to adopt a platform that’s doomed to get as bad as Youtube let alone Facebook or Twitter. You’ve got to show me some low level structure that says “Here is why it can’t fall the way the last ones did.”

I don’t give a shit about the Bluesky stock you bought. Bluesky is doomed, don’t adopt it.

“Less nazi than Twitter for the next few months” isn’t good enough for me to adopt it. I’m not going to board a doomed ship.

Let me be perfectly clear here: Fuck Elon Musk right in the aorta. I am NOT endorsing Twitter here. What I’m mostly doing is endorsing abandoning both microblogging and commercial for-profit social media as concepts.

Bluesky is gonna get worse. They’re in attract mode right now just like any tech startup; they’re burning venture capital money operating at a loss in too good to be true mode to gather users and when they hit a certain adoption rate or simultaneous active user base all the shit Twitter and Threads do is gonna get turned on.

“It’s got moderation.” It’s got thought police in potentia. Either they’re going to start using their moderation systems as a political cudgel or they’re going to start letting scammers and shit through because they profit from the traffic whatever that traffic is. You won’t be able to say the word “poop” but commercials for anorexia pills will make it through to teenagers. Can you name a commercial platform that didn’t eventually do one or both of those? The only one I can think of that didn’t just die young was MySpace, which continued to exist into its irrelevancy.

I foresee a cycle of instability that goes something like “New platform just dropped, it’s like Facebook but it isn’t Facebook. It’s like Facebook used to be before algorithms fucked it up.” Early adopters join it, there’s a period where you still have to have Facebook because three of your friends whose ability to understand things doesn’t work won’t make the switch, eventually people leave those friends, everyone is standardized on the new thing, new thing does exactly what Facebook did, it fucks the world up again, “New platform just dropped, it’s like Screechbox but isn’t Screechbox, it’s like Screechbox before algorithms fucked it up.”

I’m kicking that in the head right now.

Yet.

It’s a commercial platform, it’s going to enshittify because that’s what commercial platforms do.

The problem I see with BlueSky is, what’s the difference between Bluesky and Twitter?

Did any learning take place? “Okay, clean sheet design, let’s do it again but better this time” what did they do to keep Bluesky from going the exact same direction Twitter did?