Tag: social media

Daredevil: Spoiler Free Review

First off, I promise I am not going to just cross post crap from bluesky to this page (assuming I don’t delete this account outright, which I am still seriously thinking about). I might do that once in a while, but twice in one day? Come on, Rob. Don’t be a lazy asshole.

Still, in this case… I just watched the two episodes of Daredevil that Disney+ gave us today (Born Again season one episodes five and six, I think) and I wrote a detailed, in-depth spoiler free review over on the bluesky and thought I’d just cross post it here just this once so that I wouldn’t have to type it all out again and yadda yadda blah.

Anyway… spoiler free review of episodes five and six…….

Holy shit, Daredevil. Woah!

— Rob (@robj1971.bsky.social) 2025-03-26T02:35:49.415Z

Nothing

I have nothing to write about. Nothing.

It’s Tuesday morning. I did my exercise but I haven’t done anything else on the morning schedule. I took the trash to the street, but that’s it. I’m sitting at my desk in the cellar watching some film photography youtube posts and getting jealous of people who live in places where the weather in January isn’t ass and they can go outside and take pictures of stuff. I should be setting up my desk for the work day, but no. I’m sitting here typing this even though I have nothing to write about. Dumbass.

How am I supposed to feel about the near future? We’re going on vacation. Me and my wife and my mother in law and my step daughter. It’s going to be awesome. About a week before we leave though, the usa swears in a fascist as president even though he’s a convicted criminal who publicly stated he wanted to be a dictator. What the fuck? I say again, I don’t live in the united states anymore. I live in Massachusetts. Starting Monday there is a clear difference. I am trying very hard to focus on the upcoming trip and not the upcoming end of our society but the closer we get to January 20th the harder it gets to do that.

In news related to the upcoming end of the world as we know it, I am done with meta. Zuckerberg has dropped to his knees and taken the tiny little donald’s tiny little donald into his mouth and I am done with him and everything he touches. I was just starting to feel okay about using facebook again, and I have been using instagram pretty regularly for a while, and of late I was using the shit out of threads, but now? Now that zuckerberg has shown his true colors (which we all knew about already, let’s be honest with ourselves) I am done with everything he touches. Fuck him and fuck his company. Done. I am done with all of them. Unfortunately, I use a couple of his messenger functions to communicate with some of my friends and with my band and if I stop using them 100% I lose those connections. Fuck. Fuck meta. Fuck zuckerberg. Fuck trump. Fuck musk. Fuck fascism.

This is so depressing.

I am trying to revive my last music re-recording project. Quarantine tunes volume eight. I don’t think I can finish it before the RPM Challenge starts in February, but maybe I can pick off a couple of songs and finish them up. I ordered a couple of small cables and a headstock tuner in order to finish putting together the pedal board i want to use for February. QTunes Vol 8 will be the test bed for that board. The verdict after one test so far is that it sounds really good but it’s noisy. I am choosing to blame the cheap daisy chain power supply for the noise, but who knows.

Note: The music talk is another attempt to distract myself from Monday’s upcoming doom.

So… back to a previous topic. If threads is on the no fly list thanks to zuckerberg being a fucking slime, then I guess Bluesky wins the twitter replacement race by default. Everything I post here cross posts there. That’s nice. Images that I add here do not display. What about links? Does this show? Let’s click publish and find out. Safe money is no.

Until later, my fellow depressed friends. For the moment though, let’s start thinking about what song Massachusetts should use as its national anthem, m’kay? Think about it. We’ll talk later.

Snow on the Way

It’s going to snow tonight. Crap. I was going to see if Jen and Harry wanted to go for a drive to look at xmas lights, but now I just want to pull a blanket over my head and hide until the weather clears. I mean, winter officially starts at like 4:00am tomorrow morning. It’s bound to snow eventually. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I did a couple of goofy things with this little bloggie today. This post will serve as a bit of a test for one of them. I added a couple of new share buttons. Bluesky and Threads (and Mastodon? Did I add that one too?) are new, and Tumblr was re-added after being removed at least once. I removed twitter/x as well because fuck that musk prick. Fuck him right in his fucking eye. I tested the Bluesky and Threads buttons and they work. I also set new posts to automatically post to Bluesky. When I publish this literary tome I will see if it worked.

Another change, which is internal and should only be viewable by me, is that I think I hooked up to Google Analytics. I’ve had that option for ages now but I never did it. I am at heart a stats geek, so why didn’t I? It seems like I am too late as my engagement stats (the ones built into wordpress.com) are down something like 70% since they peaked back in February. Allow me to make the same caveat I make every time I mention this page’s stats… I really don’t care about the stats, I am just a numbers nerd and like to mess around with them. Also, and definitely most importantly, being down 70% from a very small, some might say microscopic, number is just another small, microscopic, number, dig it? This is not one of those blogs that sees a gajillion hits an hour. I consider myself lucky when I average one hit an hour and in my experience that would be a lot. In other words, I am in no way interested in drumming up business with insipid brain droppings, dig? Like I said twice before in this post, I just like playing with numbers. I have a Computer Science degree for cripes sake. Numbers are fun. Whatever, I am curious if linking up to Google Analytics a) worked, and b) will show me anything fun. I’ll probably write 100000 posts about it over the next few days (assuming it worked, of course).

All of these changes are internal but they might be a hint that a bloggie shake up is coming, and you know what that means… that means I am probably going to start messing with the theme and the layout. Sometimes Robert just cannot stop himself, you know?

What the hell was I talking about? I can’t remember. Oh yeah, it’s going to snow tonight. Doesn’t that suck? I think that sucks.

Oh well. I am going to click Publish now. Here’s hoping we cross post over to the ol’ Bluesky Social. Wish the bloggie luck……….

Half Day

I just read that The Onion bought Infowars in a bankruptcy auction. I wonder how we’re supposed to tell one service’s stories from the other. They are nearly identical. I guess The Onion is slightly more realistic? Something like that.

I have a half day scheduled today. My work day ends at 1:00pm, which is 14 minutes from now. I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon that is an hour away from my current location, but the check in time is two hours away. Should I go there and just wait? Should I go there and then drive around aimlessly while listening to an audiobook? I finished Black Crouch’s Dark Matter on the drive to work and started something called The Running Man by some guy named Richard Bachman, or something like that.

Following the nightmare that was the election last week, there has been a debate on the social medias. Everyone is leaving twitter because elon musk is slime. Some are going to threads, but mark zuckerberg is also slime. Others are going to bluesky but the guy who owns bluesky is the guy who sold twitter to musk so at best he’s slime adjacent? I am on both. From the user perspective they are not terribly different from each other. Threads has more people I know, and I seem to be able to get into discussions more easily there. Bluesky just seems smarter over all and less scummy. I am not sure which horse I want to back.

Okay. Time to wrap up a couple of work things and head out for my half day. Here’s hoping there isn’t any lunch time traffic to worry about on my hour drive to the doctor’s appointment.

Testing: Do Threads Posts Embed Yet?

I wonder if links to Threads posts will embed into wordpress.com posts yet. They usually code things like this into the editor eventually, but the last time I tried it didn’t work.

https://www.threads.net/@reallytallredhead/post/DBMkfoYSvNh?xmt=AQGzSMifRQz1HEdhLvNV4GCsrugwS21zUDkdnKpQVkLVnA

Nope. Let’s get on this, wordpress.com folks.

Do posts from bluesky work?

I would really like to go see The Pineapple Thief when they come to MA next month but it's the Sunday before Thanksgiving and I'd have to go alone and I don't know if I have it in me. Also, why does it suddenly take me five tries to type the word "thief"? What the hell is wrong with me?

— Rob (@robj1971.bsky.social) 2024-10-16T19:21:45.766Z

Yup. There’s that, at least.

Twitter Alternatives Update

I haven’t tried to embed a post from one of the twitter alternatives I’ve been dicking around with for the last few months. Mastodon, Bluesky, or Threads. Threads is more or less winning the race but I haven’t given up on the other two yet. I wonder if the ability to embed posts into wordpress.com will be the deciding factor? Probably not.

Here’s one from Threads:

https://www.threads.net/@reallytallredhead/post/C5eDKRLvoB7

Here’s one from Bluesky:

https://staging.bsky.app/profile/robj1971.bsky.social/post/3kpkq7324jq2z

Here’s one from Mastodon:

Hey! We have a winner! One out of three ain’t bad, even if it does look like utter and complete shit.

I’m Pissed at Elon

I was fine using twitter. I didn’t use it a lot, but I would bring it up when I watched a Bruins game or a Red Sox game and it was fun to see other people react.

Then Elon Musk… that prick.

Now I am stuck trying to decide which alternative social network I want to use in place of the twitter. Why? Why did that spoiled asshole have to screw everything up?

Bluesky?

Threads?

Mastodon?

Which one should I go with? I have been using Threads a lot but today I had the urge to go back to Bluesky. Why? Why do I care? What does it matter? I should just go back to myspace. Is friendster still a thing?

Flickr Turning 20?

Flickr, the photography site that I have been an avid user of since 2009, even though it’s been sort of overlooked and forgotten by most of the social media and photography universe, is going to celebrate it’s 20th birthday next month. The big day is a few days after my wife’s birthday, and a week-ish after my step son’s birthday, which is also my nephew’s birthday.

https://www.threads.net/@flickr/post/C2f3EUUyu8R

I guess Threads embeds still don’t work with wordpress.com. Hmmm…

This might work better… friggin’ zuckerberg…

Anyway, they have a bunch of things planned including some photowalks. I don’t see anything scheduled for Boston and even if they do schedule something it’s 99.9999% guaranteed that I would not join in, even from a social distance. Still… it would be nice, right? Granted, not nice enough for me to try to get something started. No way in hell would Mr Introvert do something crazy like that. No thank you.

Anyway, Flickr’s birthday is February 10th. Take some pictures to celebrate.

Thread

I feel gross using the facebook/instagram owned twitter alternative app, Threads. Really gross. 

That isn’t quite enough to stop me right now though. I am such a social media hypocrite/whore.

Anyway, someone asked, “what are your guitar goals for 2024” or something along those lines. I responded with a few. I figured I would port the response over to this post and maybe add a thing or two because I ran out of characters on the app. First, does the embed code work? I tried just sharing a link the other day to see if that pulled anything in, but it didn’t. I found that each post includes some embedding HTML code. Betcha a dollar it doesn’t work…

Post by @reallytallredhead
View on Threads

https://www.threads.net/embed.js

Based on the preview function in the editor, it didn’t work. Oh well. Here’s the text I wrote:

I want my cover band to finally get back together after a covid-hiatus and an exiting singer.

I want to write a shit ton of songs, record listenable demoes of all of them, and maybe have one or two that don’t objectively suck.

I want to play a bar gig for the first time since Feb 1, 2020.

After getting my 1978 Les Paul refretted a couple of months ago, I want to do the same with my 1979 ES-335 along with maybe getting a new wiring harness so that all four of my guitars will be in gig shape.

Me: https://www.threads.net/@reallytallredhead/post/C1ch8b9LyTx

Yes, kids… I just quoted myself. I dun did that.

Anyway, there are a couple of things to add.

I want to replace all of my guitar straps with heavy, leather straps like the one I have on my 50th birthday present Les Paul Standard. I have amazon shipping one for my Les Paul Custom and it should arrive tomorrow.

I want to buy either a Gibson Les Paul Junior, a Gibson Firebird, a Gibson Les Paul Standard with P-90 pickups instead of humbuckers, or a Gibson Les Paul Deluxe. The order I wrote them is from most wanted to least most wanted. The chances of me buying any of these is about 0.0000001%… so there’s a chance.

With all of these goals in mind, mostly I would just settle for playing more. That’s what I really want to do.

Two Thoughts

Two brief topics for this more-or-less lunch time post.

First:

I screwed up. As often happens, three hours after I finished breakfast my stomach was starting to ache because it was too empty to deal with itself. I had a snack. Peanuts. Lovely. I then… had another snack. Some sugar free cookies. That was a mistake. Not because I had a bad reaction, but because I was stuffed and only about 90 minutes away from lunch time. Now here we are, 10 minutes into my planned lunch break, and I am still stuffed and can’t see myself having a real lunch. Dumb ass. You’d think after a year and seven months I would know what I can and cannot handle in terms of between meal snacks. Nope. I screwed up. 

Maybe I’ll try to eat a lunch-esque something or other about an hour from now. I don’t have any meetings so I won’t have any problems with work scheduling, but I also don’t want to ruin dinner. We’re planning on having some gnocchi tonight and I want that to go really well. I wonder… do we have any meatballs in the freezer? Hmmmm… we’ll see.

Second:

Social media. Shit. Why can’t I just stop with the social media stuff? I mean, I post to this blog 123612764 times a day, why can’t that be enough? What the hell is wrong with me?

I need a twitter alternative. There are a lot of decent platforms, but none of them are quite good enough. I should just back one of them and post there 2496723457 times a day and fool myself into thinking I’m having fun with it. It will be a bald faced lie, but I don’t mind.

So which should I go with? There are three that I am kind of using a little bit. 

  • Mastodon
  • Threads (which makes me sick because it’s a facebook product and facebook is just as slimy as twitter)
  • BlueSky

Mastodon is good because this blog cross posts there. Threads is good (even though zuck is fucking evil) because there are a lot of people that I followed on other platforms that I am following there. BlueSky is good but… I really don’t know why. Probably just because I sort of use it, I guess.