Well, here we are at the beginning of another week. Mine will start with an early morning bloodletting. Always a fun time. At least I won’t have dentistry interrupting my week, but I dare not express happiness for fear of God punishing me for even the smallest joy.

I’ve been dealing with the grand Twitter Bluesky migration over on social media. People think Bluesky is going to be more ethical than Twitter, but it’s the same people who made the not ethical original version of Twitter, so they’ll play goody two shoes until they get enough users, then go back to being exactly as unethical as they can get away with. Just like every other social media platform.
Elon Musk gives Twitter a human face to hate, which is something that old Twitter didn’t have to deal with since it was run by committee for the most part and the nominal founder wasn’t very talkative. I suspect that the era of Elon Musk is very much like the era of Eddison. A mouthy smartass roving around with the money and power to get away with it, in spite of people having a wide range of opinions on him. Eddison was certainly lauded by some and despised by others. The parallels seem obvious to me.
For me Twitter has been functionally dead for a couple of years anyway, and Bluesky is the same with even fewer users. All activity on either place seems like a waste of time, but I hate to miss out on any potential positive virality since there’s no way left to advertise effectively on the current version of the internet. Video platforms are a skillset I never cultivated, so my attempts to infiltrate them have been pathetic. The social media issue is only compounded by my inability to get along with other artists/creators. I’m not very good at putting on a fake face when I dislike someone. I prefer open hostility to fake friendship almost every time. It doesn’t make for an easy way in to helpful social circles though.
The current version of Bluesky is extremely fake and, at the risk of inviting political talk, wildly left wing. I detest the lack of nuance in that statement, but that’s the modern parlance. The gatekeeping is hilariously hypocritical after years of the very same people denouncing gatekeeping. It turns out if you want a peaceful playground, with no dissenting voices, you need high walls, and a strong gate. Who knew? (Spoiler: I did.)
I certainly don’t love the idea of two social media sites being politically opposed to one another, but that’s what I foresee. At the moment Bluesky is at least mostly quiet since you have to opt in to the annoying sorts of content feeds that cause so much tension usually. I expect that will change when no money is generated by peace. I’ve seen roving bands of users policing the “streets” and kicking out users they’ve decided don’t meet the group standards by way of mass reporting. That certainly doesn’t seem like a good trend… At the same time it’s hard to root for people who are unambiguously racist, or what have you. Not people who get the label applied arbitrarily, but ones who are openly opposed to race mixing, for instance. I mean, it’s difficult to defend. That said, freedom of speech applies to shitty speech too. And again, how much free speech should a platform have to tolerate? When I was young people let racists talk because they did the best job of making themselves sound stupid. Unfortunately it seems like they’ve gotten very persuasive in recent years. And started appearing in lots of diverse groups. I guess even racism can find a place for diversity…
It’s all very complex, and difficult for a simple comics man to grapple with.
The world has changed so much since I started writing this story. If I tried to tell past me some of the insane shit that has actually happened in even the last 5 years he’d call me a maniac. “May you live in interesting times…”
I’d much rather live in the times between.
In the end I guess none of this matters one way or the other. I have to keep on keeping on regardless. There’s very little I can do with the tiny nudges on history my work and life can make. It’s like trying to bump an asteroid of course so that it misses the Earth by 15 minutes. You gotta do what you think will help and cross your fingers that your calculations were correct.

I apologize for bringing the specter of reality into this safe haven. Unfortunately we all have to face reality a little bit sometimes. I will try to refrain from mentioning the outside world as much as possible for another six months or whatever. Unfortunately we live in interesting times. I made the rookie mistake of not becoming too rich and powerful to avoid the consequences of historic events. That was foolish of me. I guess I’ll just have to keep making comics and see how that goes. I don’t have a lot of options anyway. It’s either that or the glue factory.

If nothing else I hope this new page finds you well and you will return for the next one on Wednesday. As always, support links are above the post. Until next time, try to avoid becoming a footnote.

22 Comments

I actually misread that as ‘sphincter of reality’.

Please copyright that.
It would make a good title for a novel, or something.
:)

Apt in the context, just sayin’

Edison actually invented things. Melon just buys things and puts his name on them.

Which is what everyone says about Edison. Musk hasn’t electrocuted any animals to death in a public display, at least.

I think I know what you broadly mean in the last section. If you raise the curtain, the anxiety that comes in through the window from the big-big world is crippling. On the other hand, if you completely lower the curtain, someone will set fire to your house. I mean, even with the curtains up, they will probably try to do so, but at least you will be somewhat prepared for it.
Either way, the current climate does not make for a pleasent day…

I feel like on a long enough timeline, every social media platform/message board/etc ends the same way: overrun by bots and functionally unusable. I figure blue sky is still in its enjoyable phase.

Not all of them. I’ve been on GameFAQs for over 2 decades and it’s still pretty good. Frankly, I think the problem is, ironically, the very tools and methods that are supposed to safeguard these spaces–when you start overusing the banhammer, moderating excessively, creating all sorts of vague rules, letting mobs take down the unpopular voices, allow block lists, and so on, that’s when you start fragmenting your userbase and creating spaces for bots and trolls and meaningless groupthink. Old message boards didn’t have this problem too much because they didn’t have all that junk; ignoring someone meant actually having to ignore them. No one got brownie points via “up-voting” and contrary voices weren’t booted out. Ironically, not gatekeeping was a way of gatekeeping–the people who can’t function in anything but an echochamber stay away, so normal people can use the site and argue with each other in relatively good faith.

The one difference between Thomas and Reggie here is that playing music is pleasurable in itself even at the level I do it (and I figure Reggie too).

I don’t write fiction. Writing is satisfying, but doesn’t do the same thing for my brain’s pleasure center.

As for drawing, I have nothing.

I hear Bluesky these days is positively laden with anti-Trump death threats. Which is…disturbing in and of itself.

And it really DOES feel like they’re building to a we-made-this movie, doesn’t it? Reggie scoring, Thomas writing, Brooksie directing, so on, so forth.

I feel that the best musicians are the ones that put their heart and soul into their playing and truly believe in their playing. Of course, that doesn’t amount to anything if you can’t actually play.

Jack Dorsey left Bluesky a while back and doesn’t even have a financial interest in it anymore. Apparently it wasn’t shaping up to be a rancid Twitter clone, so he flounced off.

There *are* potential issues, but those apply wherever venture capital is involved.

As a “devil’s non-advocate,” so to speak, I think the manner in which Twitter was unethical before Elon bought it was very, very different from the manner in which it’s unethical now, especially given how many racists and Nazis he’s re-platformed since then. I’m perfectly happy not using Twitter for the foreseeable future.

At least he’s allowing all the different kinds of racists on, instead of allowing certain kinds of racists free reign while silencing anyone for disagreeing with them.

I don’t agree with you that that happened, nor do I think the current situation would be preferable to your view.

Bluesky was the side experiment to have a decentralized platform with a Twitter-like interface, and the main guy left already. Less like crypto, and more like torrents.

To be fair, “Freedom of Speech” means “you have a right to say things”, not “you are entitled to everyone having to listen to you.” The Right-wing grifters and trolls that thrive on Xhitter don’t understand this and thus cry “CeNsOrShIp!!!” when people rightfully shut them out of a conversation where their contributions are worthless. Bluesky’s “nuclear block” is the right move to shut out shit-stirrers trying to climb in through the window with such “enlightened” questions as “Do a Trans = a Person? [] No [] Also No”.
That, and artists looking to peddle their wares don’t have to tiptoe around algorithmic suppression designed to prevent traffic to other sites.

No, the censorship was when people were outright banned…but only if you had the wrong opinion, and it applied to left-wingers too, if they deviated from the orthodoxy.

Reggie, babe, take up viola. Orchestral musicians may scoff, but violinists are a dime a dozen and competition is fierce, even though you need dozens of the things to get any sort of full sound at all. There aren’t as many violas in orchestra, but I know several violists who have made a life for themselves in regional orchestras, or at least have fun in hobbyist orchestras, when they didn’t get a look-in in school orchestras on violin. (Would Reggie settle like that? Not likely.)

Good idea. :D

Maybe it has been mentioned, but-(I paraphrase)-

Leonard “Mr. Spock” Nimoy said in an interview:

(Maybe when he was in high school?), he said to his family that he wanted to be an actor.
After saying that, his uncle said to him: “Learn to play the accordion! Accordion players can always get work.”

On the comics front, it’s nice to see Reggie letting his guard down like this, and Thomas, for all his ribbing, is one of the safest people to do so with. I’d love to see various characters’ reactions to Mr Boothe playing – Alex, Jo, and Thomas chief among them, and with how closely Jo & Jess tend to stick together when able, it’d be interesting to see if music recolored the latter’s opinion of him.
On the social media front, I can’t say it’s exactly nice to have my vague suspicions of BlueSky confirmed, but it at least spares me the trouble of checking for myself. It took years before I was willing to make a Twitter account to keep tabs on artists, and I still have to keep pruning my feed to keep it to art & fandom stuff. I won’t begrudge people their scorn for the guy who insisted on renaming it and inverting the advertising bias, but I’ve carved out a comfortable nook there and I’m not inclined to cast that aside lightly.

I gave up Twitter because of the overwhelming number of bots and foreign agents pretending to be Americans and taking right-wing positions on the pretense of good faith. Musk had gone in with the boast of “saving” free speech hut has changed algorithms to push things he agrees with.

I will give up any atform that’s overrun like that.

2753 Doomsman.

22 Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply