Tweet Back

It's recently been announced that a small startup called Operation Bluebird is trying to relaunch classic Twitter, arguing that the Elongated Muskrat has allowed the name and logo to lapse. I'm no legal expert, but there may be something of a leg to stand on. As a rule, a trademark is only enforceable so long as the company in question keeps using the mark consistently. That is, if a company rebrands, giving itself a new name and logo, they lose all rights to its previous assets. This is intended to encourage competition rather than allowing companies to essentially sit on their rights. There’s a lot more to this sort of move, but those are the broad strokes. 

As for the new Twitter, it’s set to launch in early 2026 and is currently letting people reserve usernames and handles for when it finally launches. As of this writing, it’s at a little over 150,000 applicants. 

I don’t intend to be one of them. 

I can respect the effort on display here, and there’s clearly a love and affection for what Twitter once was, but I don’t think there’s any chance of catching the same lightning in a bottle. Twitter’s acquisition by Musk fractured a big part of the social media landscape, and I think things are all the better for it. 

Once upon a time, I called Twitter my favorite social networking site, warts and all. It’s hard to describe what exactly I loved about it, but if I had to put it into a single coherent thought, it had an immediacy and a conciseness to it that you didn’t really get out of other platforms. It took the status update aspect from the likes of MySpace and Facebook and made that the entire site. It was also very accessible. I’m old enough to remember when you could use text messaging to post Tweets, back in the days of flip phones and T9 predictive text. That may seem rather quaint now with smartphones, but this was kind of a big deal back in the day. You weren’t bound to a swivel chair in front of a desktop, you weren’t lugging a laptop, and you didn’t have to break the bank buying one of those new fangled smart devices that HTC was making. If you had a phone and a good connection, you could submit a small message to a public square. I remember once reading an article about some activist tweeting only one word: Arrested. I don’t know the exact circumstances, but you certainly couldn’t have made such a quick and concise post to such a wide audience while seated at your desktop as the SWAT team kicked your door in. 

Over time, the site evolved to include a few quality of life features, such as the ability to post images, the ability to post links in a way that didn’t count against your character limit, and eventually a doubling of the character limit from around 120 to 240. On a side note, I love the reason this upgrade happened. The story goes that Twitter wasn’t very big in Japan until a massive earthquake hit the nation. Suddenly, people all over Japan were signing up for Twitter to keep in touch during the crisis. That may not seem like a big deal, but you have to consider that the Japanese language is built different from us European/Latin-based types. To a Japanese person, that 120 character limit may as well have been a 120 word limit since a single character in Japanese can be either a letter, a word, or even a short phrase depending on the usage. Microblogging was the chocolate to Kanji’s peanut butter. As word of these longer-than-normal tweets spread, people around the world wanted in. Obviously, you can’t change a language overnight and emojis can only get you so far, so Twitter opted to double the character limit. The platform’s biggest paradigm shift was done out of jealousy for the Japanese language. 

Despite all this, Twitter grew with the times by sticking to a very practical model. This drew in a lot of new users and eventually Twitter became the go-to place for news organizations to seek out statements from famous people who had now graced the platform with their presence. There would be an incident or scandal or some other controversy, the offending parties would release statements to Twitter (as opposed to directly to the press) and you’d see a screenshot of that tweet on the news, be it on the TV or on the website or anywhere else you’d get your news. There was a direct line between a person of importance and the general masses. Of course, this was a bit of an illusion as it was just as easy for a celebrity to post a Tweet themselves as it would be for them to hire a full-time social media manager to post on their behalf. Still, it came with a sense of authenticity. Barring any hacking, there wasn’t anything on that feed that a user wouldn’t want there. 

However, this wasn’t going to last. Nothing does. Something at sometime was going to come along and disrupt the whole operation. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and Twitter was no exception.

The fall came in the form of a buyout by a narcissistic billionaire who felt that Twitter wasn’t being as transparent and honest as it should be with what kind of content was and wasn’t allowed on their site. One of the events preceding this takeover was Twitter banning a number of high profile users for violating terms of service, including Alex Jones and Donald Trump. This was viewed by Musk as Twitter not being a platform supporting free speech despite its insistence on being the digital village’s public square. Musk seems to have trouble grasping the fact that free speech does not extend to things like slander and libel or hate speech or calls for violence and harassment. His view seemed to be that people would get to say whatever they want and that the consequences of these actions would just somehow magically work themselves out. Ironically, he’d go back on this promise of totally free speech as he’d start cracking down on satire accounts or impersonations of people and organizations. 

As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. 

So, what’s happened since Twitter imploded? We’ve seen a number of other social sites step up to fill the gap. The centralized source of direct information is now decentralized. It’s no longer “So and so Tweeted yesterday…” but now “The blah blah blah posted on Substack that…” or “What’s his name wrote on Medium...” or “… the company announced on its Threads account.” Among many other new names and faces to the scene. Sure, some of them have been around for some time, but now they’ve found a new purpose serving as a place of refuge for those fleeing the Muskrat. There’s no longer one name in the directory. The monopoly that Twitter built for itself through raw determination crumbled under its own weight and now it’s no longer top dog in the social media scene. 

In the end, people don’t need a new Twitter because they’ve already found one, whether it’s Bluesky or Threads or Substack or Medium or WordPress. While Operation Bluebird is more than welcome to prove me wrong, I don’t think they’re going to achieve what they set out to do because it’s physically impossible to replicate the success of Twitter. Even if they were to, what safeguards do they have against history repeating itself? 

In the interest of full disclosure, I left my Twitter account abandoned on the very day of my 15th anniversary of signing up. I keep it around for a few reasons, partly because it's costing Musk money to keep it up and running, but mostly because there's a number of very talented artists there who have yet to jump ship because they don't want to lose the audience they've built up over the years. 

18 DEC 25 THU Update: Well, this hit a snag earlier than I thought it would. 

Inktober2023: Proactive Procrastination

 OR:

Pick It Up and Phone It In

I've been dealing with some motivation problems of late, evidenced in part by my absence from this blog. I participated in a drawing challenge early last year and I really liked how it went... until I didn't. Inktober of that year was rather anemic. I was only doing a few drawings, mostly leftovers from other projects or miscellaneous challenges that were only Inktober-adjacent. Overall, though, my motivation was shot. I just about got through the winter in terms of making my annual holiday card, but I felt totally spent after that. 

It's not because of the onset of AI-based art programs like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion, though it certainly doesn't help. DeviantART has become a bit of a minefield. I'll think I've discovered a new artist and fervently peruse their catalog only to find they're using AI on basically their entire portfolio. That can be very disheartening. 

Fast forward to the first of September when the Inktober 2023 official prompt list drops. Leading up to the day, I was thinking about how I would explain to everyone that I wasn't going to participate in the event this year, that I really needed some time away to think about things. Seeing the list at first didn't inspire anything in me. Actually, that's a lie. It inspired despair. My motivation issues got put on full blast when I saw that list and felt absolutely no drive of any sort to make anything of it. I'd been making some vector pieces off and on in the months before, mostly text-based pieces, puns and turns of phrase, things like that. About 2 weeks later, I took a look at the list again and focused on a single word from the dead center of the list, halfway through the month. 

I got an idea. 

It was the word "demon." I was looking at the shape of the letters and got an idea to write out the word but with a pitchfork taking the place of the "m." I'd been watching some tutorials for Inkscape and all the various text-based effects one can do with a little pre-planning and some basic tools. So, on a lunch break from work, I opened Inkscape, and made my little bit of word art, Demon with both the "m" and the "n" being replaced by barbed pitchforks. 

3 days later, I had all 31 prompts done. 

Actually, it was more like 4 because I took a break after the second day. Some were straightforward, some were a little more elaborate, but all 31 were effectively in the can. I had even thought of going back a few days later and sprucing up a few, but I decided against it. I was pretty damn impressed with myself though I do say so my... self. There was no pre-planning, no juggling of work and play throughout the month of October. My only real responsibility would be posting the illustrations on a schedule. 

In years past, my rule was that I could come up with ideas and sketches the moment the prompt list dropped. I could start actual work on the illustration as soon as the weekend before the 1st, so I'd have something to post that morning at the very least. This year, I threw that workflow completely out the window and more or less by complete accident. I even thought to take it a step further and try to automate the posting process. 

Instagram has an option available to all its users to toggle between a personal account and a professional account. There's no cost or anything, and you can cancel at any time. One of the biggest perks is the ability to schedule posts up to 75 days in advance, descriptions and tags and all. I thought I had it all figured out... until I didn't. When I post to Instagram, I'll also have it post to Facebook, where most of my family spends their social media time. Many of my relatives look forward to my Inktober posts, so I was more than a little disappointed when I found that scheduling an Instagram post did not include the option to mirror the post on Facebook. 

So, I'm still posting the images on the day, though some may end up getting scheduled anyway depending on how busy I may get on a given day, if I have a rushed morning or something like that. Like I said, it's disappointing, but hardly the worst thing in the world. The first full week of Inktober is done as I write this, and the response has been so-so compared to years past. I'm not bothered by this. I expected it in a way; word art doesn't exactly set the world on fire. It may get a good chuckle here and there, but it's just visual metaphors through text, like concrete poetry. 

And that is how I told myself no, and got the job done anyway and with time to spare. 

They're All Coming Out Of The Network

Preface: I'm currently juggling a few different drafts I've left alone for far too long, but this is still based on all currently available information regarding the implementation of new privacy policies in the wake of Facebook's recent troubles. It is being released on the fourth of July as it relates to freedoms and liberties. 

On the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a quote from John Stossel comes to mind, "I want to say, 'give me a break' but I don't know who to say it to." People were placing a lot of blame on Mark Zuckerberg while also feeling for him when he had to explain Social Media basics to legislators. It's virtually the entire situation in a nutshell, getting mad at someone over something everyone openly resolved to take for granted. Facebook costs you literally nothing to use, as do most social media services, the unspoken contract being that you're there on their terms, renting space for the cost of some number crunching and putting up with a few ads that are minimal compared to what you'd get on network television or print media. In 2018, playing dumb over this exchange is beyond naive. 

Speaking of naive, what I'm about to say probably qualifies as such and maybe will put my stance on this issue in perspective. For starters and in regards to campaign interference, I can't think of a time when I ever changed my vote based on an advertisement. If you're inclined to that approach to electing our leaders, you may as well not vote at all. Furthermore, I don't know what most people's advertising experience on Facebook or elsewhere is like, but if gathering my information means that all the banner ads I see on sites are for products and services I already partake in (Amazon, B&H, RedBubble...), then I call that a victory. I only wish ads on television were as relevant to me. I stopped watching television because I was sick of 3-5 minute commercial breaks every 10-15 minutes, and mostly for crap I wasn't the least bit interested in. To be fair, it irks me a little when I see the same movie trailer about a dozen times in a typical night of watching YouTube, but four years of film school have given me the critical mind needed to spot all the little tricks and tropes that make some trailers effective and others misleading or downright bad. I make a game of it, is my point. I may not seek it out, but should it rear its head and roar like a mighty beast, I hold aloft my magic sword and say, "BY THE POWER OF THE GRAY MATTER IN MY SKULL, BRING IT ON!" 

Speaking of wielding weapons, let me be clear that none of this in any way exonerates Cambridge Analytica for what they've done. Regardless of what users did or didn't know they were opting into, this is a breach of trust and privacy. They took more information than they were allowed to and misrepresented their own intentions to Facebook. The double-edged sword of having heaps of information about you out there in the ethereal web of clouds is you're not alone, and you're nowhere near as special as you think you are. It's like that "What Happens in Vegas" campaign; it's true that if you're just some desk jockeying yahoo from the mundane midwest, you can briefly lead a double life while cruising The Strip and, barring any serious criminal activity, no one's going to call you on it. Then again, if you're already famous, the city that needs sunglasses at night has no shortage of spotlights to shine up your skirt as you get out of your car. This data breach tried to make everyone famous. 

The silver lining to this shitstorm is that nothing is being left unsaid when it comes to what sites ask of you when you partake in their services, putting the terms of use on more equal footing. People are now more inclined to look into what they're signing up for and the sites now can't simply toss out a wall of legalese and hope nobody digs any deeper than that. It's also caused a very interesting phenomenon in my email's inbox. Sites and social media services I signed up for years ago and virtually forgot about are now reaching out to me to tell me they're going to play nice with my data. It's probably sending them some mixed signals for me to close my account and/or unsubscribe from their mailing lists, like I broke up with someone but didn't say as much until years later when everyone stopped caring and I was already walking down the aisle for the third time. 
"Oh, hey! Yeah, I remember you. Bye now. I'll send for my stuff later." 

A Full 280

Well, it finally happened. Twitter, my favorite social media site of all time, at long last has finally addressed the incessant whining over character limits and literally doubled their SMS-based 140 limit to 280. 

This comes after kicking around a few ideas such as a 10,000-character footnote, which ultimately got put into their Direct Messaging feature. In a way, this kind of came to be already with the way replies were restructured. It used to be when you messaged someone, it was simply (at)username followed by the message. There wasn't an especially good way to follow the dialogue, to say nothing of more voices jumping into the fray. As time went on, Twitter adopted a sort of nesting (ha) format that no longer required the username to take up part of the message. Now, not only could you follow the conversation, but you could expand your own monologue as needed into bite-sized 140-character chunks. Other niceties include the shortening of URLs, the embedding of certain shared content such as photos and videos, and account authentication for other sites. Taken as a whole, the Twitter of yesteryear, when T9 was the new hotness and smartphones looked like glorified graphing calculators, is completely unrecognizable against today. Twitter bears a stronger resemblance to Facebook than its old self, which is somewhat ironic given that Twitter essentially took the status update part of Facebook's layout and said, "This is our entire site."

My point is that while many may see this move to 280 characters as a drastic paradigm shift, it actually isn't when compared to the bigger picture. I still have my reservations about it, but it's not simply because I fear change. Saying that 280 characters goes against the simplicity of Twitter would require me to throw reply threading out the same window. I have problems with that change as well, but from Twitter's perspective, it only makes sense for them to try to be all-encompassing rather than a companion site to one's YouTube or Wordpress or what-have-you. The more versatile your site can be, the longer people will stay. 

Speaking of having more to write...

November always puts me in the mood for writing, which more than likely started with learning about NaNoWriMo from a friend. I've written many an entry about how I've never formally participated, but always admired the spirit of the event. Like Inktober, it's got less to do with the results and more to do with the process and the learning experience it entails. Even if I don't go along with the requisite 6,000-ish words per day to reach the full length goal, I typically have some sort of small-scale writing project in the works. I don't really have anything for this year, apart from some old scraps I haven't touched in some time. I don't feel like picking any of them up, but I also feel rather burned out on drawing from Inktober apart from a few daily doodles and warm-ups. 

Still, between NaNoWriMo and Twitter's new 280 happening within earshot of each other (Coincidence? Probably.) I'd be curious to see more examples of Twitter fiction. While we've had some solid examples from Clare Bell and Matt Stewart, along with some quasi-epistolary works that even take a more multimedia-embellished approach to narrative, I feel there's still a lot of untapped potential to be had on the platform. While I may not partake in the newfound potential of this particular medium's quiet expansion, I'd be curious to see what others make of it, what examples they may set, how much they'll invest in the execution, and what potential it may hold for them in regards to future works. 

Instagroan

I'd avoided Instagram for a time, mostly for the sake of efficiency. Between Twitter and Flickr, my photo sharing platform needs were covered. There's also the hipster part of me who turned up his nose as Instagram's whole "we make vintage/experimental photos easy" modus operandi, presenting themselves as a digital version of Lomography. As someone who owns a Holga 120S and has developed his fair share of film, I felt a little disgusted at the pushbutton setup of Instagram. Over time, this bias cooled down to a tolerable indifference, though I still never bothered signing up.
Recently, though, after downloading Nintendo's Miitomo app, I ended up giving in and expanding my Facebook account into the virtual Lomo service. My impression: yeah, it's all right, I guess.

Going back to the "Lomo App" image, it is somewhat comforting that Instagram has admittedly never tried to offer themselves as a replacement to gimmicky film cameras like Holgas or old Polaroids (that was more the work of some of its fans, for which no one can really be blamed), but rather a tribute to the medium, one that embraces the flaws of vintage/amateur photography and, much like Lomography, markets those flaws as features. Light leaks and poor color and double exposures are considered technical shortcomings that would have been the bane of any pro's career, but to artists and people less discerning of their photos' presentation, it's character. It's rough and unrefined, yet authentic and honest. This nostalgia even extended to their logo, a brown-and-cream-colored box camera complete with rainbow sticker. Right away, from that logo, you knew you weren't getting some high-end "unleash your phone's true potential" sort of app. You were getting a virtual version of that old Polaroid or Instamatic you or your folks had growing up, and that's okay.

So, what the Hell happened?

A few months ago, Instagram changed out the off-white bakelite logo for something that not only looks like the lazy byproduct of someone trying out the gradient tool in a drawing program, but also completely deprives the app of any sort of identity. I think it's a mistake for your app to be partly cut out or translucent in any way. App tiles always look their best when they look like plaques or badges or buttons. The old logo was especially cute because it looked like a physical object. Specifically, it resembled an old instant camera from around the late 60s to early 70s, the kind where you had to wait a few seconds before peeling away a bit of sticky tissue paper away from your photo. The new logo looks like nothing. It doesn't resemble a real camera, and doesn't evoke any particular time period. The magenta and yellow gradient has an early 90s vibe to it, but the die-cut, simplified outline is distinctly of this decade (which, bear in mind, we've only got four years left in). It simply reeks of pandering and compromise. It plays it safe and tries to be liked by everyone at the expense of its personality.
What I suggest is that if we use the original logo as a baseline, why not simply push forward ten years? Sure, some of us might be sick of the 80s retro love heralded by Adam Sandler's Wedding Singer and the more recent Far Cry spin-off Blood Dragon, but maybe Instagram is the one place no one would mind it. Hell, they might even embrace it.

Bring on the chrome, Tron graphics, and neon cursive.

Lootcrate

As I mentioned on my Twitter feed, I decided to give Lootcrate a shot after seeing it featured on Rev3 Games and more recently on Dr. Ashen's YouTube channel. If you don't know what it is, it's basically a grab bag; you get a box of random stuff each month. Said stuff, if past "crates" are anything to go by, includes a lot of blindbox figures, buttons, decals, and the odd t-shirt, among other things. It's a bit silly, overall, but I can appreciate the niche novelty and, by dammit, that's the kind of bold business venture I want to support... if only briefly. I don't think I'll stick with the service, but we'll see. 
As this is a grab bag, it's likely I'll like some of what's in the crate, and not care much for the rest. To that end, and a big reason I decided to go for it, I'll be passing along whatever I don't want, try to make a few people smile. I'm actually a tad anxious about the first box I'll get as the coupon code they posted to their site was "TITAN" which, given this is geek/gaming related stuff, could mean anything from Titanfall to Attack on Titan. I could honestly care less about the former, and have even written a painfully long essay on how not interested I am in the latter. Admittedly, I have reneged on a few points since I wrote it, but not many (i.e. the skinless titan still looks fricking stupid). 
While I don't think I'll be doing unboxing videos or anything like that (seems a bit pointless, as each box is technically unique), the fact is I'm terrible at guessing what people might like, and would like to avoid simply sending things willy-nilly every which way. So, I will be making the odd post now and again or, if I happen to be on Skype with you or PMing you somewhere like DeviantART, Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, I may ask out of the blue if you want something. For the record, these will be gifts. I don't want any money or shout-outs, and I'm definitely not shilling for Lootcrate (though they did give me a referral link, which I'd appreciate you using if, by chance, your interest is piqued and you want to sign up). However, if you really want to return the favor somehow, I won't stop you. Void where prohibited, no obligation, cancel anyt---DAMMIT! 

Don't Beg For Laughs

This is in response to recent events involving a DeviantART user named "CustomSaga" referring to a character-based interview journal on a roleplaying group as, "The sort of thing autistic people come up with." After being banned from the group for his remark, he proceeded to whine on his own journal about the issue, as well as a few other vaguely-substantiated straw men about the goings-on in the group. I called him out on his choice of words, and he proceeded to defend his right to say whatever he wanted and use whatever terminology he wanted as a point of criticism with no reproach whatsoever. He basically felt that his skepticism of the group's project was so compelling in and of itself, he could phrase it in a totally immature, insensitive, and inarticulate manner and it would not paint him as anything less than a civil critic inviting a mature discussion.  

During the torrent of backpedaling and "context mongering," if that's a term, the word "joke" came up toward the tail end of the discussion, used in such a manner as to imply he may well have had no sense of humor or any understanding of how telling jokes is supposed to work. 

The late George Carlin once said, "Even rape can be funny." and, in principle, I agree with that sentiment completely. If my saying that is making your blood boil or getting your head all-a-shakin' over it, I understand completely and don't blame you for it. However, I'd like you to read that sentence again, emphasizing the words "CAN" and "PRINCIPLE." As an artist, I believe that boundaries and rules are made to be pushed, bent, and even broken. This applies to comedy as well. It's not uncommon to see one comedian met with a standing ovation for the same reason another may get booed off stage for telling a similar joke. I've seen one comedian build an entire routine about the sorts of tactics terrorists should be using instead of bombings and hijackings, the audience eating out of his hand the entire time, while another cannot even get past his opening line of, "You know what I love about terrorists?" without the entire house calling for blood. 

Why one routine got cheers while another got jeers can generally be chalked up to luck and timing. Some crowds are a little more forgiving of having their buttons pushed than others, some subjects are best left to simmer a bit before the roasting can begin, and what separates a good comedian from a bad one is how they handle being dealt that bad hand. Stand-Up Comedy was once described by the late Mitch Hedburg as, "the noble profession of convincing a roomful of strangers that you're funny." going on to mention that you can't please everyone all the time. The fact is, barring any open mic night at a local gig, by the time you see a comedian perform on stage, they've gone through their routine dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of times before to a variety of crowds in a plethora of venues. During this time, jokes are either refined or dropped altogether. 

Sometimes, you tell a joke, and it doesn't go over well. Either people don't get it, or worse, they don't think it's funny. At this point, any good comedian knows that quite possibly the worst course of action to take is to defend the joke and insist on its brilliance and edginess. Sure, sometimes a quick quip or well-worded jab can bring an audience back from the edge of the Great Booing Chasm, but the general rule of thumb is that if the audience doesn't laugh the first time, it's because you didn't tell the joke right. As such, explaining it, defending it, and insisting on its merits will never win back that lost first laugh. Not only do those people get booed off stage, but their future in the profession is non-existent. 

There was a post on Facebook some time ago that illustrates this perfectly. It was a panel from a comic wherein iconic supersonic crime-fighter The Flash exposits the extent of his exceptional acceleration by describing occurrences that can only be observed in the space of an attosecond. The rest of the post explained exactly what an attosecond is. Informal definition: there are more attoseconds in the time it takes to say the word "attosecond" than there are grains of sand on all the earth's beaches. One of the comments to this post was, "Dude could rape a b---- and she wouldn't even know it!" 

As you might imagine, quite a few people were offended by this remark. I wasn't offended by it personally, per se, but that's not to knock everyone else who called him out on what he said as sexist and insensitive. They'd every right to be offended, though it seemed more people simply didn't find the joke funny. I thought, "Dude went for the low-hanging fruit. Whatever. Swing and a miss." and that could have been the end of it. Some people got mad, some people didn't laugh, a few clever folks satirically pointed out the logistics of such an event occurring (friction, combustion, and all that), and the joke was generally received as being in poor taste. 

Except that wasn't the end of it, because the idiot who laid that egg felt he was entitled to a laugh, and damned if he wasn't going to leave the discussion without changing at least one mind that his joke was the funniest thing in existence. The point is, him apologizing for the joke may have been unnecessary (courteous, but unnecessary), yet defending it and insisting himself beyond criticism for it puts him well beyond what even the sincerest apology would make amends for. I shouldn't have to explain the limitations of freedom of speech any more than I should have to explain how unrealistic and downright naive it is to insist every joke told receive the same equally positive reaction. 

You bombed. 

Move on. 

419, And It Stands for a "Person"

Recap: Sold something on eBay. Buyer used "buy it now" option. 2 days, no payment, and two ignored messages asking if everything's all right. Buyer's eBay profile on the mobile site gives a New York street address:



Then, I go to the main site, and see this:





Notice the "unpaid" feedback? Notice that Nigeria is not New York?

I find his Twitter, and come across this Tweet:





I thought he was referring to my sale, but the dates are wrong. Still, there's that New York address. The most recent business attached to it is a cargo company called Allworld International. I find their Facebook page, the last update is August 2012:





Hmmm, if they're a freight company that regularly goes to Nigeria, why would someone need DHL to do a pickup to the same place? Google Maps Street View may have the answer in this image dated September 2012, one month later:





That hardly looks like a bustling business. Also, if Bing is reliable, Allworld was only there for about a year, replacing a brokerage. Their phone number gets me a machine, but that can mean anything. Like I said, if it's a shipping firm, why would they need DHL to take something to where they already go?


Emmanuel, my sale was not for international shipping. Your actions speak louder than your words, your inactions even louder. Of course, feel free to explain to me why I should believe a single thing you say. 

This Is Not Sharing

Based on recent events on DeviantART. 
Look, whatever side of the copyright/piracy/sharing issue you're on, no one respects a plagiarist, especially when that plagiarist defends their actions when confronted by the original artists. 

A Fabricated Encounter (from Facebook)

The Facebook status message that started this:
PAY VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THESE INSTRUCTIONS: I would like my Facebook friends to comment on this status, sharing how you met me. But I want you to LIE. That's right, just make it up. After you comment, copy this to your status, so I can do the same. I bet HALF of you won't read the instructions.

to which I replied:
I was sabotaging a cruise ship with the intention of stranding the passengers to die a slow and painful death of starvation as a sacrifice to the ancient god Dagan. I was setting the detonator in the boiler room when you walked in on me, mistaking the room for the sauna. I thought you were going to try and stop me, but while I was explaining my evil plan (as all bombastic villains do) before silencing you, it turned out we actually worshiped the same evil deity and you'd even poisoned the entire food supply and were simply sticking around for a celebratory sauna. So, we fired up the jet skis and left that band of wayward travelers to their doom.

and in return:
The obelisk stood dusty in the dunes as I brush at them... frustrated at my situation. "Oh Lord DAGAN. Why must I unearth this damned monument?!" I yelled to nothing in particular. "Because he wishes it so," a voice from behind me called out startling me causing me to drop my brush. I looked back and spotted you setting down your backpack and breaking out a brush of your own. "The name's Matthew Joseph of the Great Dark Deepness, yourself?" I picked up my brush and returned to the delicate dusting of what looks like Dagan sitting atop a massive throne with men and women weeping at his feet and replied without looking at you, "Desiree of the Deep Weeping." The conversation went from Dagan to darker topics as the sun sank behind the larger dunes of the endless desert. The chittering of the hellflies dying on our buzz zapper makes us laugh as we continue our dark duty in the light of our new friendship.

This is seriously my new favorite thing right now. Thanks, Desi :)

QuikTek

I mentioned Twitter last time, and writing about how I appreciated its versatility made me remember something. The first weblog I ever had was on Yahoo!360. I knew well of (and hated) MySpace, but hadn't heard of Facebook. I always preferred 360 to MySpace because it seemed that 360, by virtue of being a Yahoo! service, attracted a wider and more eclectic audience, whereas MySpace was almost exclusively a teen phenomenon. Call it ageism or technophobia, but it's probably safe to assume that more people have an e-mail address than a MySpace account, therefore that older and/or less tech-savvy generation still "ooh"-ing and "ah"-ing over Electronic Mail will be more likely to start up a weblog if that service is offered as part of the "packaged deal" that came with their e-mail account as opposed to seeking out an external, self-contained site that requires separate registration. In other words, on Y!360, you got more people who would probably not have otherwise started a weblog because they wouldn't want to leave their comfort zone.

Yahoo!360 is gone now, crushed underfoot by practically every other social networking site in existence, the key problem being a few unresolved technical issues (which led to my friend Vanessa tragically losing her entire account), the others being a deliberate dismantling by Yahoo! in light of a proposed buy-out of Facebook and an attempt by Yahoo! to make the networking tools of 360 a more integrated part of one's Yahoo! profile. I've archived those entries to a site called Multiply, a rather shameless MySpace knock-off. I won't link them here; they're not much to look at. Most of them recount my obsessions over my own personal pet peeve about 360 in light of other weblog sites like Multiply or Blogger, which was mobile-friendliness. I prided myself on "breaking the system" by using my PSP's built-in web-browser and wi-fi to write entries in clear defiance of desktops. It probably went a little too far; every time I got a new device, my readers would know it, evidenced by my "Hey, guess what I'm writing this on!" style of entry.

There was something I don't think I ever said on 360 and I think I never said it because I wasn't actually sure how well it would translate to text, so here goes:

The very best thing about 360 is that WE'RE ALL DIFFERENT, COMING FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE, ALL OVER THE WORLD, and yet, at the end of the day, we're all just sitting at home in front of our computers, talking to one another.

the very worst thing about 360 is that we're all different, coming from all walks of life, all over the world, and yet, at the end of the day, WE'RE ALL JUST SITTING AT HOME IN FRONT OF OUR COMPUTERS TALKING TO ONE ANOTHER.

The point is, while I may have been seemingly singing the praises of Twitter last entry, my adoration is almost entirely conceptual; the first social networking site made with mobile networks distinctly in mind. By its very nature, it encourages people to go out into the world and not feel tethered to their undoubtedly uncomfortable desk chairs in front of their undoubtedly cluttered and cumbersome desks upon which rest their undoubtedly ghastly laptops and monolithic desktops.

To crib a saying by filmmaker Jean Cocteau: Weblogs will never truly achieve anything until they can be taken to all the same places ordinary notebooks and pens can go.

Twitter was a good start.

Tumblr appears to be the next step.

Evernote is the long stride between them.