Posts tagged “social networks”

  • This LA Times interactive map of the Southern California wildfires has been very handy. – via @dansinker.com
  • “Just a reminder that the French revolution started with a climate crisis-induced famine, an empire that had overexpanded into too many foreign wars, and parasitic nobility that funneled all the wealth upward while regular citizens suffered.” – via @chris.writes.books
  • Office SpaceIf you want to “follow” me somewhere (other than here, of course), you should use my verified account on bluesky. I adored Twitter when it launched, and for many years after. But I haven’t looked at that social network in months and deleted my account a while ago. I’ve been enjoying Threads, but it looks like it’s time to abandon that platform, too. I’m very, very glad I have my own personal website. (I hardly ever look at Instagram, and doubt I’ll keep my account there for much longer. If I didn’t feel obligated to remain on LinkedIn, I’d quit that site, too.)
  • In China, there are registries of haunted apartments. If you’re willing to live somewhere with a sinister history, you can get a discount of 30%. – via @tomwhitwell
  • I am starting to get concerned about the bird flu, H5N1. Paying attention to updates from Your Local Epidemiologist is a good way to be prepared.
  • A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends. Then, in 2023, a ProPublica reporter received an envelope with no return address. Inside was a flash drive containing tens of thousands of secret files. – via @propublica
  • “In species where males invest in weaponry (antlers, horns, tusks, etc.), female brains are bigger.” – via Kent Hendricks

  • Reminder that Breaking Bad was a TV show about the U.S. healthcare system. – via Melanie D’Arrigo (threads / bluesky)
  • I’m confused by the many complaints I’ve seen online recently about the streaming quality of NFL games on Amazon Prime. I have AT&T Gigabit fiber at home and for regular TV use the DirecTVStream app embedded in my Samsung TV. If I want to watch something on Amazon Prime, I use their app instead, also baked into the TV software. I honestly think the image quality of the Amazon NFL games beats what I see on NBC, CBS, FOX, and ESPN on DirecTVStream most of the time, which seems crazy to me. You’d think AT&T would either boost DirecTVStream bandwidth (since they own them) or somehow hamstring the Prime bandwidth. But that’s not the case at all.
  • A post about berry packagingAnyway. This joke about berry packaging made me laugh out loud. – via Matt Margolis (threads / bluesky)
  • I am a big fan of Wyze and have their front door deadbolt, doorbell camera, several security cameras, two outdoor plugs (for controlling Christmas lights), a bathroom scale, and at least a half dozen WiFi outlets around the house. They’re great.
  • For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website – via Laura Olin (threads / bluesky)
  • Threes is the iOS game I’ve played most frequently over the last decade. According to its lovely Statistics page, I’ve played it 7,838 times and my high score is 90,147.
  • “Learning from other people’s mistakes is a lot less painful than learning from your own.” – via Tim Harford
  • Feel-good story of the day? Giant Spoon Taken From Arizona Dairy Queen Found Thanks To Pokemon Go – via @pourmecoffee
  • I’ve returned to this article a dozen times since he published it. If you’re working with iOS widget development, check out Launching iOS Apps with a Custom URL Scheme

If you want to add a “Share on Bluesky” hyperlink to your WordPress theme, this is the snippet I’m using. Also note that my theme requires FontAwesome for the bluesky icon.

<span class="label label-primary nobreak me-3"><a target="_blank" href="https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=<?php echo urlencode( get_the_title() ); ?>%0A%0A<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Share on Bluesky" rel="noreferrer"><i class="fa-brands fa-bluesky"></i></a></span>

  • Want 33,000 classic sound effects for free? Check out the BBC Sound Effects Archive.
  • I am very much concerned about the many, many, many possible negative consequences of nefarious, incompetent, and/or misguided generative AI. Ruining wikipedia should have been on my bingo card.
  • A University College London demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans won an Ig Nobel prize. I always thought blue zones sounded fishy.
  • Ugh. Scientists are worried that persisting cognitive issues sparked by COVID-19 may signal a coming surge of dementia and other mental conditions.
  • Philip Moscovitch‘s Halifax Examiner article Beyond the Link Tax: Journalism and the Changing Nature of the Internet contains some interesting ideas about potentially taxing megacorporations to subsidize good reporting. But what grabbed me was the line, “Essentially, what we are seeing is the slow death of the hyperlink […]” Sites like Threads, Instagram, Twitter / X, et.al. have a vested interest in keeping you from leaving. They are, in fact, designed to make it more difficult for you to get to the “rest” of the Internet. I have been occasionally combing through old posts here and it is alarming — for someone who’s been blogging regularly for more than a quarter of a century — how many links simply no longer work. And I’m not talking about links from twenty years ago which should work but don’t (because the site’s gone offline or developers didn’t bother to redirect URLs). I’m talking about links from just a year or two ago. The wayback machine has been a fantastic resource to help me find archived content, but it’s not perfect and it’s grossly underfunded for how important it is to anyone who cares. See also: link rot
  • Speaking of being extremely online, you should read Reclaiming Social Media in a Fragmented World. I love the concept of POSSE and it’s been something I’ve really tried to remember the last few years, especially after what’s happened with Twitter.
  • On Ghost Networks: Ravi Coutinho bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after twenty-one phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, no one could find him a therapist.

As a quick follow-up to my note about the lugubrious and lamentable demise of Twitter, I want to point out that I am loving Threads. Yes, I am well aware that it is a Meta product. But so far it has been a fantastic social media replacement for me. It is sorely lacking in sports coverage and the algorithm doesn’t seem to handle breaking news very well, but I’ll counter that it appears to immediately alert me any time anyone anywhere mentions Soapdish. So I call that a win.

Share on Threads

Share on Threads

Here is the code to add a share to threads link on your Wordpress site.

The Death of Twitter

In which he laments the demise of a once-beautiful service

I joined Mastodon five years ago – a full decade after I started using Twitter, by the way – and still have absolutely no idea how it works.

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You can read dozens of essays and articles and find hundreds of links to other sites with stories and information about Ernest Hemingway in The Hemingway Collection.