Let’s All Rant.

TwitterDev on Twitter announced today they started enforcing rules about using their third-party API and they may have broken some of the popular third-party apps. I’m not on Twitter anymore. It’s not an awful company owned by a shitty owner and honestly I don’t know why anyone would continue to work there, but to each their own. So I’m not really invested in what happens with the platform. I’m really sick of hearing about it. I guess I am invested because I would take great glee in watching the whole platform go up in flames after a massive data leak and the personal details of every user on the platform somehow made it to the masses.

Anyways, no one knows what the actual rules are and how they were broken because no one knows the rules. In reality, Elon Musk just pulled the plug because he wasn’t getting revenue or data or something and his ass kissing sycophants (I think that’s redundant) are just covering his ass.

If you’re still on the platform, why? All I see are folks crowing about capitalism being awful and we shouldn’t have billionaires in the world (that’s a different debate) but there you are, still using the platform run by an idiot with way too much money. The guy is all smoke and mirrors. He couldn’t even run the 1939 controls that create The Wizard of Oz.

I really wish an insider still at Twitter would grow some balls and just crash the damn thing, but no one will do that because of the required ass licking. So we’re stuck hearing about Twitter every other damn minute because the news media can’t do anything without and too many people are getting their dopamine hits.

I’m not better than anyone using Twitter. I’m my own brand of ranting idiot and I’ll freely admit that. But please, just shut the damn thing off and delete it from your devices.

I just tried liking a tweet about the CIA on Twitter and this happened.

Coincidence? Big Brother is watching you. Always. Treat anything and everything you say on the Internet as if you just published it on the front page of the New York Times.

This is the best way I can describe my Monday. It can only get better.

I like the bedroom to be as dark as possible when it’s time to go to sleep. This is one of the reasons I’ve held onto the GE Alarm Clock I bought back in 1988; the red LED lights cast absolutely no glow onto my nightstand. Unfortunately, the other functions of the alarm clock are starting to fail.

I tried using one of the Amazon Echo Dots with an LED clock built in. Even at its lowest brightness setting, the clock on the Echo lights up the room enough to distract me while I’m trying to sleep. Aside from the weird maneuvers one has to take to actually turn the alarm off (without barking out commands to Alexa while your husband is sleeping), the brightness of the display ruled out using this little technological miracle on my nightstand.

This is the problem with today’s technology. Everything has some sort of LED light on it. My wireless iPhone charger? White indicator light. Check. Covered with black electrical tape. Check. Sonos speaker? White indicator light indicating its ready to play music. Check. Moved to another room? Check. WiFi repeater? Blue LED light. Check. Turned off in system settings? THANK YOU.

Back in the days when I traveled for work I kept a roll of black electrical tape in my bag to cover all the indicator lamps that are plastered all over technological doo-dads found in your hotel room. And please don’t tell me to sleep with some sort of eye mask to block out light, that’s simply not my jam.

I know LED lamps help control energy cost and are ultimately better for the environment, but we don’t need a status light on every piece of technology released to the masses.

I went ahead and deleted my primary Twitter account today. I have more than one Twitter account, but the one I call the primary account is the one that’s been around since 2007 when I used to tweet by text message on a flip phone. I wasn’t a superstar in anyway; I had only a little over 1200 followers. I had tweeted approximately 46,000 times.

My Twitter feed has become incredibly noisy. A lot of the noise was due to my own actions; when motivated I can belch out some pretty nasty tweets in response to what I perceive to be idiocy. I’m perceiving a lot of idiocy these days, and have been since the election season of 2016, but that’s no excuse for me spewing out some of the stuff I’ve put in tweets since Trump took office.

I started out by deleting my tweets, but that’s not an easy thing to do. Twitter makes it a tedious experience at best. There are third party services that can bulk delete tweets but I’m not shelling out money to a company just to undo my doings so I decided to just go ahead and delete the whole damn account.

It was one of the most liberating experiences I’ve had in a while.

I’ve had my “quiet” account for a little over a year and I intend on keeping it quiet. The focus is extremely narrow. I’m being very selective as to who I’m following. I don’t have Twitter on my phone at all.

Another reason for my nuking my account was because of recent actions of Twitter around censorship. Trump can spout out the craziest things, many of them damaging and/or simply completely untrue, but Trump is the gravy train for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and friends, so they’ll never treat Trump like the other users on the platform. It’s a burning bin of hypocrisy that’s pretty much destroying democracy, but hey, Jack and friends have enough money to travel the world ten times over while enjoying a bath in a bucket of ice.

There are such better ways to do eccentricity.

So don’t go looking for me on Twitter. I’m not there in a meaningful way anymore.

And that’s what I call progress.

Here we are getting ready for the weekend and we have absolutely no plans. They’re predicting severe storms for Illinois but I feel like it would be irresponsible for us to go chasing storms, what with this COVID-19 and the like going on. Illinoisans should be limiting their activity to essential travel only and with the my idle knowledge of weather, chasing storms seems like it falls in the non-essential category.

I suppose I’ll just watch the storms from the balcony. That is if the storms make it to the north side of Chicago to begin with.

I’m finding my motivation to be lower than normal, even though working from home is the normal mode of operation for me. Nothing has really changed in our lives except that we’re not going out as much as we usually do and the streets are much more quiet than usual. Still, knowing what’s happening in the outside world, and the Federal government’s reaction to it, is yanking down my energy. Thank the universe for leadership like that what’s being displayed by Governor Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot. I trust them. I absolutely do not trust anything coming out of the Trump administration.

In that way, nothing has changed.

There were such better candidates for the GOP ticket back in 2016. It still boggles my mind that someone as corrupt and morally bankrupt as Trump ended up representing the party that touts itself as the “party of law and order”. There’s nothing resembling any sort of moral compass in his administration.

Rosie O’Donnell had it right 13 years ago.

Nevertheless, here we are in the middle of one of the biggest crises to his the country in a very long time and we are ill prepared for it. We will get through it, but we will not get through it unscathed.

I hope whatever voters are left standing come November are able to make smarter choices.

Yesterday I went for a walk through the neighborhoods and ended up at a Starbucks I had never been to before. On the edge of Boystown, this location was rather small with only a couple of tables and some stools along a counter, which was up against the window. At the time the window was all fogged up with moisture, making it difficult to see inside or outside, depending on where you were.

I picked up my order at the counter and found one seat at the counter available if one was playing by the “every other seat” rule so typical these days. I got situated with my iPad and I started perusing through some blog entries and the like. I was getting in the mindset to write a blog entry.

I realized I didn’t have a napkin so I turned from the window and stepped toward where these things were stored and a woman locked eyes with me. She was middle aged, rather disheveled looking but had a gigantic laptop in tow. She started walking toward me with an engaging look on her face. I knew she was going to talk to me. Her t-shirt proclaimed in very large letter, “You Need Jesus”.

I maintained the locked gaze, raised my hand in a signal of “wait”, and simply said, “Nope”. I maintained gaze for a second or two and she returned to her seat in the corner.

Settled back at my seat in front of the fogged up window, a large man sat down to my right. He was accompanied by a smaller man and they began talking loudly. There were lots of sounds of complaint, exasperation, and resignation coming from the both of them. Determined to settle in my space, I focused on whatever I was doing at the time.

It was then the man started receiving text messages.

I knew he was receiving text messages. Everyone in the shop knew he was receiving text messages because his phone would make a startling and very loud screeching noise each time someone sent him a message. There was no vibration. There was no ping or ding. It was a loud, clacking, banging, screeching sound.

What I would have done for silent mode. I would have even welcomed the comforting ring of a Western Electric telephone. But this noise was too much and I had already put the brakes on one person in the store, I didn’t need to bring down the rest of the population so I did the reasonable thing.

I picked his phone up and smashed it down on the counter. It was so easy to just reach out, pick up the phone, and using all the rage I was feeling at the moment, just slam the phone down so hard that it broke. The cheap Android phone shattered and I felt vindicated.

I didn’t actually do that, but I fantasized about it and I’m fantasizing about it again right now as I think back on the experience. What I actually did was pack up my stuff, put on my jacket, recycled my cup, and headed out the door.

I glared at him on the way out. He was too busy listening to his shrieking phone.