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. 

A Rant (Part 1 of X)

Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, is said to have hailed the internet as the death of the novel. Makes me wonder what he thinks of movies, given I’m sure more people have seen the Trainspotting movie than read the original book, to say nothing of all the people led to his books on the power of the film. Maybe he doesn’t consider that a fair comparison since the internet, despite the rise of short-form audio-visual content like TikTok or Instagram, is still largely a text-based affair. It's been argued that we’re reading less and less as time goes on, but the reality is that people are reading as much as ever, they’re just reading things other than books, magazines, and newspapers.

To build on Mr. Welsh’s assertion, if there’s one singular iota of beef I have with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, it’s that they’ve almost singlehandedly killed blogging. Microblogging offers a conciseness and brevity that’s simply easier to digest in short, controlled bursts of scrolling. I remember an English teacher telling me about how the Industrial Revolution lit a fire under the short fiction market because people were simply too busy to read a full novel, preferring instead a tighter narrative that could be read in a sitting.

This is not me complaining about any shrinking traffic to my own blogs; they were never that high to begin with. Rather, my complaint has to do with the way too many people are using social media to share their thoughts. Essentially, they’re trying to jam the round peg of long-form blogging into the square hole of microblogging, and it’s frustrating that people aren’t more upset about it.

Here’s what I mean: In the latter years of Twitter, before the Elongated Muskrat came along, there seemed to be an uptick in people posting multi-part tweets to get around the character limit. Specifically, after the death of TotalBiscuit the Cynical Brit from bowel cancer, a certain user made a very long chain of Twitter posts about his axes to grind with the former vlogger (complete with an image of several axes leaning against a wall). I don’t remember if he was a journalist or a game developer, and I don’t care to dignify his display of pettiness with a check, but all I could think when I was scrolling through it to see how many replies to his own Tweet he needed was, “Why doesn’t he just make this a blog post and put the link to it in a Tweet?” People can still reply to what he said below the Tweet; they can just go to the blog, read it, and then come back with their thoughts on it.

Look, I can understand when you need a little more room to say what you want to say. Even the most generous character limits can be frustrating to work within. If I see someone posting a reply to their own post to finish their thought, that honestly doesn’t bother me. If it’s a reply to their own post giving some additional context, or reacting to the general vibe of the other replies they’re getting, I have absolutely no problem with that. Sometimes, we don’t choose the right words and we need to add some qualifiers. It happens.

What does make me angry is when you’ve essentially taken a long form blogpost, chopped it up into sentences, and then posted them one at a time to a microblogging site, just hoping that people will be able to navigate the thread amid all the other replies from people responding to it. Seriously, if you need that much room, get a blog.

The sad reality of why this is happening has many roots, the first of which is that some people simply like to keep their online presence more centralized. They’d rather focus on one site than micromanage a thousand different pages, leading to at least one inevitably being neglected. Secondly, it may simply not be worth it for them to set up a blog just for that one especially long stream of consciousness. Thirdly, and most tragic of all, is that social media users are creatures of habit. Many don’t feel like following a link to an external site, even if the URL clearly shows where they’re going and isn’t potentially some kind of trap.

On that note, remember TinyURL and Bitly? On paper, it sounds like a great way to put web addresses in Tweets so you wouldn’t use up as much of the character limit. In practice, it’s absolutely awful because all you’d have is a string of numbers and letters. You could have been getting sent absolutely anywhere and the internet is a dangerous place. Nowadays, more sites offer shortened versions of their URLs for this very reason. You now know for sure you’re clicking on a link to a YouTube video or a Twitter post or a Wordpress blog. Also, social media platforms have gotten better at integrating URLs without it eating up half of your character limit. You may even get a little preview window of what you’re going to see.

Before I go, I should address another use of social media microblogging, and that’s using it to publish fiction. There’s two approaches this takes. One is a more traditional method that builds on what we’ve talked about with people trying other shoehorn longer form writing into a format that favors succinctness. An example of this is Ratha’s Island by Clare Bell, which was essentially “serialized” to Twitter one sentence at a time, one post per day at roughly the same time. The other form of “Twitter fiction” is a modern take on the literary genre of Epistolary fiction. Epistolary fiction is a subgenre of fiction that presents its story in the form of letters and other documents written directly by the characters in the story. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the go-to example of this that most people are probably familiar with. In the case of Twitter fiction, sometimes called “unfiction” due to the interactive quality of using social media, An account is made “in character” and it is that character relating events in their life as though they were posting to social media as anyone else would. A good example of this is a horror story called The Sun Vanished, about someone waking up in a world where the sun has been inexplicably blocked out, among other odd goings-on. The only problem with this approach is that social media platforms don’t make it very easy to read posts in chronological order from the beginning. Also, unless each post is labeled as part of a greater work of fiction (which is immersion-breaking), it’s more than possible to mislead casual readers into thinking they’re interacting with a real person’s journey, especially if it’s of the less fantastical variety.

The reason why I like the “in character account” better than the piecemeal presentation of a novel is that the former takes advantage of the medium and conforms to its inner workings, whereas the other is an old dinosaur trying in vain to adapt to the new world.

Self-Branding

I've been with Blogger since May of 2008, making it the oldest website I've used that's still standing today besides DeviantART (which was December of 2007). Yahoo 360 and Multiply are long gone, as are the message boards from IMDB. I've never bothered with MySpace, and I recently culled much of my Facebook page to keep it to a "friends and family" platform. If there's anyone on Facebook I haven't met in person that I'm not related to, it's because I know them from Yahoo 360. 
I also have a Wordpress page I've used since 2014. Originally it was meant to replace this site as there had been some concerns that Blogger would either be discontinued or otherwise abandoned. On the whole, my only real issue with Wordpress is all the damn paywalls. I get that certain features come with a premium for the site to create revenue, but it's all over the map as to what features come with what plan. To compare, Blogger lets me put my Ko-Fi button in the sidebar of my page without any fuss. Wordpress won't even let me do that with the personal plan I recently splurged on. I have to get their business plan if I want to add any kind of plug-in to the page. I can have a full domain name, but I can't embed a button. I may try and transfer the domain once the 60-day window is up. 
In any case, I don't plan on leaving Blogger any time soon. 

Coffee Got Scooped

Full Disclosure: I love Kurzgesagt, and I never heard of the Coffee Break channel before Phil De Franco brought the controversy to my attention. 

Much like James Gunn's tweets from years ago being brought back by alt-right trolls, Coffee Break had to go pretty far back in the Kurzgesagt archives to find a problematic video. Specifically, the video on addiction was published back in 2015, almost 4 years ago. This fact alone doesn't do Coffee Break any favors in his effort to look like some sort of vox populi. To paraphrase Cenk Uygur, if you need to dig that far back into someone's past and that's the worst you can find, any way but straight back up is digging yourself a deeper hole.

Coffee Break is a modestly-sized YouTube channel; its 315K subscriber account is nothing to sneeze at, but it's dwarfed by Kurzgesagt's 8 million and counting. It's easy to play the jealousy card, but it's just as easy to play the David vs. Goliath one as well, and given how Coffee Break paints himself in this story, I'd say this makes us even. The saving grace of the former is that no one suffers the double whammy of a concussion and a sword in the back should the confrontation go south. 

It's absolutely adorable that Coffee Break thinks Kurzgesagt can pump out a fully-scripted and animated video in the course of roughly a month, as if the team was able to drop everything and start work on getting ahead of this controversy. The reason the deck often seems so stacked against animation on YouTube is that whenever it isn't an expensive venture, it's exceedingly time-consuming. Animation software has done wonders for lone wolves, but it's several decades and some serious AI developments away from being set-and-forget. 

Coffee Break still insists the video is a rush job spurred by his digging, and maybe it is, but the quagmire of conspiratorial accusations he attaches to this claim paints a picture of a salty, embittered nonentity's 15 minutes in the spotlight not being on his own terms. At present, the dis/like ratio on his would-be expose is almost 50/50, though slightly more folks in his favor than the factual flock. Maybe that half-and-half would have persisted regardless of Kurzgesagt's transparency, possibly with a dip in the total number of directional thumbs. Maybe Coffee Break's audience would have ruled the roost while the rest of the site continued to trust Kurzgesagt. 

All I want to know is how his coffee smells without his nose. (18/4/19 UPDATE: He gets it)

This story doesn't simply stick out to me because I'm a fan of the factual flock, but also because Coffee Break's situation hits me a little close to home, and I've been given a glimpse into the other side of a coin toss and all that would have emerged from it. This site has fancied itself on reviews, typically of movies, but also of the occasional bit of kit, and even some software here and there. The pattern is typically that an item is released into the public, the public reacts, voices their opinions, and then that's kind of the end of the story. It's a pattern I've been thinking about a lot lately, and over the past year or so I've come to the revelation that this pattern is not only antiquated for reasons I'll get into, but also needlessly divisive and utterly unhelpful to most involved. 

In this age of social media, production and consumption have gone from being acquaintances to practically full-blown marriage. Feedback is immediate, lines of communication are rarely closed, and the initial purchase of said media-to-be-consumed is not the end of the transaction. Those in the PC gaming master race know full well I'm going to bring up patches, a concept that's only gotten more efficient as internet connections get faster and can handle larger files. Release dates suddenly become sliding scales of quality assurance, and for the most part a lot of people don't really mind. There may be some initial grumblings among the eager few when their brand-new lost-weekend-in-a-box can't even get past its opening title screen before taking a sharp right off the road and into the leafy cudgels of a whomping willow, but few problems are so first world as having to wait a few weeks for a video game to become properly playable. The disappointment rarely lingers, and typically it may only do so as some kind of statement about a larger trend. 

I once stood poised to give a company endless grief over a discount code they gave me not working. The week before I was ready to post the review, the app went free. Suddenly, I didn't have a leg to stand on. Was I mad? No, maybe a little frustrated for all of about 30 seconds because those outlining paragraphs I'd spent time filling out being rendered wholly inaccurate. At the end of the day, I got what I truly wanted. I wanted the damn app to work. It's one matter to expose obvious fraud and deception, it's quite another to strongarm someone into a situation where their only recourse towards making the situation right is to lie. 

Flickr: The Candle In The Wind

Flickr announced recently that they're changing free accounts from having up to a full terabyte of data (along with some upload restrictions on file size and frequency) to a total limit of 1,000 photos. I've barely used Flickr in years and have 937 photos, which I could easily cull down to 900 if I felt especially picky. Maybe if I did more photography, I could justify the 50 per year for Pro. As subscriptions to web services go, I consider 50/year set-and-forget. That said, I have enough sets and forgets as is between Patreon and Playstation Plus, much less the handful of streaming services and storage apps I pay upkeep to. Flickr would just be one more on top of that pile. While the changes to Pro and Free accounts are essentially not going to affect me, I am a tad bummed that maybe some of my Favs will get axed. 
Typically when these kinds of throttles get rolled out for sites, there's a kind of grandfathering system. Your total number of uploads stays the same, but you can't add more until you get below the threshold. A free account could have 2,000 photos, and they will all stay up, but if one gets deleted, it's not going back in the photostream. 

While starting with the oldest makes sense (why would you cut new uploads?) I have to wonder how many people are going to go through their 1,000-plus and leave the first handful of uploads untouched. I also wonder how many people are going to be too late and find their early stuff gone. Hopefully they have it backed up somewhere. You can never have too many backups. As we all know, there's two kinds of backups: those that fail, and those that haven't failed yet. 

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. 

Don't Patreon-ize Me (totes not begging)

Thank you for your Patreon-age.

Patreon made a big change to their platform, and it's getting a less-than favorable reaction. Their menu for both their desktop site and mobile app looks chunkier and geometrically harsher. Most notably, though, is their logo, which one Twitter user felt made it unrecognizable when compared to the original. 

Tip for the staff at @patreon: When thousands of vendors depend on your branding, don't mutilate it. #newpatreonlogo pic.twitter.com/eBbbpRsSuD

— Jon Perry - SC (@StatedClearly) June 14, 2017

I can understand his point of view, especially considering the logo looks less like a "P" and more like a lower-case "r". If I didn't know any better, I would have thought it was a new logo for ReasonTV. Then again, even before the rebranding, the Patreon logo tended to have trouble standing out, blending right in with the Google+ tile or even Blogger's icon. They're both reddish-orange squares with white lines in them. There would be times when I would click on a social link for what I thought was Patreon and found it to be a Blogger page. 

Besides, let's face it, more people have heard of Patreon than Reason (and I say that as a fan of ReasonTV). 

As for the new logo, it's certainly striking. White backgrounds tend to be a bit of a no-no in logos unless the line-work is strong (read: dark) so it can be used as a watermark or stamped onto simple stationary. Despite that, I like how the logo looks a little like crate paper with its muted, seemingly-translucent color scheme, especially that muted red-orange dot. It may not quite pop from the white the way a deeper red would (i.e., Japan's flag), but it's not lost in the great pale sea, either. The washed-out navy blue of the P's back also helps ground the whole design and helps center your eyes. Also, the more I look at it, the less I see that lower-case "r" and the more I see a stylized "P". That's the odd thing about rebranding; you can get used to almost anything. 
Many graphic designers will tell you about brand images that simply shouldn't work; Google, eBay, Yahoo, Apple's old rainbow logo, and MTV to name a few, yet with a handful of exceptions, they persist and endure. They don't necessarily rewrite any typography or design rules, but they earn their place and show that sometimes breaking the rules is how you stand out and get an edge (the iconoclast). DeviantART decided to forego having its initials in its icon and instead went a more abstract route, like if Matisse made traffic signs. It caused a stir, but down the road, it's as if it never happened, and I certainly haven't heard of anyone missing the "DA" hemisphere of old. ---Actually, I just now had the logo explained to me as the "mid-section" of a "d" sidling up to an "A" and now I feel a bit silly. 

Then again, let's face it, Seattle's Best Coffee still looks like it's advertising a blood drive, and SyFy is as stupid a name now as it was when it was announced, I don't care how good The Expanse is supposed to be. 

The point is that for all the testing and research and time invested into creating a new identity for a corporate entity, no one can afford a sharp turn or backpedal to begin with, and there is truly no good way of discerning how well a new logo will go over with audiences. People generally don't like change, and while some criticisms are more valid than others, events reveal that people can get used to an idea they were once opposed to. In the end, most of us likely weren't involved in the decision and it's not going to affect how we spend our money, so we'll either get on with our lives and carry on or we'll decide this new direction, however superficial, isn't worth our business.

Speaking of money and business....

I've debated setting up a creator's Patreon for myself. I once talked at great length about why I don't take commissions, and while I'm not motivated by money in my artwork (no artist is, it's just enthusiasm can't pay bills), I am grateful that people out there enjoy and appreciate what I do. As such, it's only fair that I offer people as many means of "supporting the cause" as possible, whether that's the share buttons on my journal pages or my DevaintART gallery or my Thingiverse profile, to more, er, direct means such as the Ko-Fi links both here and on my Twitter, the "tip designer" button on Thingiverse, my Paypal links I scatter in a few different places, and my Amazon wishlist (located in the sidebar). I've gotten a few tips here and there, and I even get asked about commissions (I'm not above making exceptions, especially to "support a cause" as it were). I've also gotten comments and other feedback such as dis/likes, up/down votes, hearts, stars, clovers and blue moons, pots of gold and rainbows, and me red ba--sorry. I'm grateful for it all and never want anyone to be shy about what they have to say about what I say and do (provided the freedom goes both ways, that's only fair). 
Going back to Patreon, what I do doesn't quite lend itself to much of a consistent output, and I don't feel like comparing the time and effort spent writing a journal entry or movie review with a painting or a comic. Thirty movie reviews in a month versus 10 digital paintings in the same month is not a quantification I feel like justifying to an audience, and I don't think you should have to entertain that concept either. As much as I like the "set and forget" nature of Patreon, even a small reward tier would simply feel like too much of an onus for me to place on someone. Maybe if I ever get to working on a regular webcomic I can commit to or I start doing livestreaming of my painting (which may happen as soon as Inktober of this year), then I'll consider it. 

Until then, thank you for visiting my page. 

No Like Pinterest

For it is always "likes"

Recently, in a move akin to Twitter trading stars for hearts, Pinterest has decided to remove the "like" option from their service. It should be said that I truly appreciate how Pinterest went about this phase-out, much as it surprised me when I logged in a few days ago. There are items I find on Pinterest that I... well, like, but don't fall into any categories I've made boards for, as vague as some of them may be. I used "likes" as a kind of miscellaneous catch-all for this. It was also a nice option for giving feedback, especially on crafts; certain crafts may not be my bag, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the workmanship and dedication that goes into some of these creations. 
Look at it this way, imagine if YouTube only let you create playlists for things. You'd inevitably have a playlist called "favorites" or "likes" or some other miscellaneous term. These are videos that you like, but not enough to add to a playlist you run in the background while cooking dinner or working out. 
A food sculpture can be very impressive, but does it belong on a board devoted to recipes? Does a button-sewing tutorial belong on a board devoted to full outfits and fashion trends? Better question, how many more boards should I have to make before eventually I simply give up and make a "miscellaneous" board that serves the same purpose as "like"? 
In fact, that's exactly what Pinterest did. They took all my "likes" and made a whole new board for them. I can go through and move a few to more appropriate boards, or merely leave it as is, though I can't add any new pins to it since that would defeat the purpose of the move. It's a fun idea, this kind of "legacy" feature. 
As of right now, I've got something like 2,000 pins in this "like" board. I went through a handful today just to see how smooth the editing options were, and was fairly impressed. However, I won't be conducting any sort of mass exodus to close out the board, and I'm glad Pinterest isn't forcing my hand to do so. That puts them leagues above Digg when they royally dropped the ball on a server malfunction a few years back. They essentially lost my account, said they were trying to get it back, suggested I make a new one, then said if I made a new one there'd be no way to recover the old one or at least merge it with the new one. If that sounds ridiculous, I'm doing them a favor with that description, because I didn't learn about those parts in that order and from one person. 

Take this as free advice to anyone out there crazy enough to create a new social media platform: Don't be Digg, be Pinterest. People may only be renting space on your servers, but remember that you WANT them to stay and continue to rent space on your servers. I'm still with Pinterest. I will never go back to Digg. 

AFTERWORD:
Funnily enough, I'm surprised there don't appear to be any memes devoted to Pinterest's recently-added "tried it" button being ticked on things that no one could possibly have tried. I suppose there's some low-hanging fruit no one is that bored to humor.