Opinion/Editorial/Life

People I Follow Online and Social Media

I actually wrote up a private journal entry about the whole Twitter mess, but I’m really really trying not to fuel that drama, so I’m refraining from actually posting anything about it. It’s gotten me thinking some about social media and following people online in general though. I’ve been online for a very long time and I’ve used computers almost my entire 43 years of life, and that is not an exaggeration. I am, and will forever be connected to technology as a core piece of who I am. And as such, I also flock to social websites. But the funny part is how each one sort of manages to slot into it’s own little place in my world. And how irritating it is when they try to change things and be something I don’t want them to be.

Take say, Instagram. I resisted Instagram for a while, and even once I started using it, I honestly have never been super committed to it. But I do like seeing other people’s photos. I have two accounts, one that is almost exclusively toys, and one that is “everything else”. Which is usually bands and musicians I like, family members, cats, food. In that order. Though lately, they keep trying to turn themselves into TikTok, which I hate, because I don’t want dumb video clips, I want photos.

Instagram of course is part of Facebook, though it serves it’s own purpose. Most of my actual contacts on Facebook are people I actually know. Family, all those people from High School I added when FB first launched, and friends, both from real life and online. Though I want to add that in this case, “Online Friends”, for the most part is, “Actual friends.” People I have been online friends for longer than I’ve been friends with anyone else. People I’ve been connected to cross platforms and in quite a few cases, people I have met with face to face at least once. I also use Facebook some for groups, but it’s pretty much limited to a couple of toy based groups and groups related to musicians I like. I tried using Facebook for news, but the comment sections are always cancerous idiocy so I had to drop all of the news sources I was following.

Beyond that, things get a bit more nebulous.

Take, for example, Reddit. I use Reddit a lot, probably more than is healthy, but i don’t have any friends on Reddit. I basically do not ever look at user names. I do follow a couple of accounts, but it’s mostly just people I actually know, and mostly for the sake of, “This is an easy way to remember who they are on Reddit”. I don’t actually look at their Reddit feeds, because I follow them all through other platforms where I will hear about things they want to say in a much more efficient manner. I do follow and check a shitload of subreddits and regularly browse posts on /r/all. My “Reddit Recap” for 2022 says i was in the “Top 1% of all Redditors”. I’m not sure I’m proud of that one. It’s probably the one place that’s great for getting good information from actual people on a wide variety of topics.

Then there are places like Twitter, which I’ve replaced the functionality of with Mastodon. These places, basically boil down to, “If your profile information meets any one of a dozen or so criteria, I will follow you”. Post about Video Games, Toys, Nerdy Tech shit, almost instant follow. Post snarky one liners about life that I emphasize with, that’s a follow. Post memes about cats or something frequently, but not so frequently it pollutes my feed, you bet, I’ll follow that. I treat Micro Blog platforms more like…. RSS for people’s shit takes and hot takes.

Which brings me to another way I follow people, RSS. I love RSS. RSS is so perfect for following and I am still fucking salty about Google Reader being closed and will always be because it basically killed RSS to the world. As of now, I follow around 500 blogs and news sites. I have a ton more bookmarks, waiting in a folder called, “Todo -> Add to RSS”. And i regularly go through this folder. The criteria for following a blog on RSS are similar to the Micro Blog criteria, but probably in a more broad sense.

I think in the end, I just like hearing people’s stories and random thoughts. Even if I don’t always give feed back with a comment or a like or whatever. I want to know what people think. Especially things that seem completely banal and pointless.

On Getting COVID

Technically, I am writing this after the fact, but it needs done. COVID sucks. Omicron seems to not really care about vaccines or masks at all, and while its less lethal, it still is rough.

I don’t know where I got it, most likely while in Chicago, and most likely at the concert. Unlike the CHVRCHES show, there was no mask or Vax requirements. I had worn a mask anyway while inside. I doubt it was the Zoo, that was barely busy due to the weather and mostly outdoors. Where does not super matter. I definitely “got it” first, or at least had symptoms. I had been extra snotty all week, I had assumed allergies. I finally tested Thursday, 6/2, morning with a home test.

It was Positive. I scheduled a test at CVS for that morning and called off work as required.

I also basically camped in the bedroom for the next several days, in hopes that being Vaccinated would help keep my family from getting it. It did not. But their symptoms.basically followed my by a few days.

Things started okish Thursday, but by Friday and Saturday, I had zero motivation at all to do anything. The virus just seemed to make me completely lethargic. I didn’t even have the energy to turn on the bedroom TV and watch anything. I basically just toggled between staring at the wall and sleeping.

By Sunday I was doing better and spent some time downstairs on the computer. Starting Saturday I had developed a killer sore throat that lasted through the next couple of days. Nothing helped it at all, I tried lozenges and sprays and certain foods and nothing helped.

I was technically cleared to come back to work Monday, but I told my boss I would need another day just to be sure. I do not interact with anyone at work at all, and even if I were still mildly contagious, it would be simple enough to go in and shut the door and stay away from anyone else in the building (maybe 1-2 people).

I went back in Tuesday, 6/7. I made some coffee as normal, I was feeling pretty good. I mentioned to my boss over the company messenger I was fine, but my family had it now at home. He checked a bit and well, because they had it, I had to stay away. This was slightly frustrating because I have been working on an important project for work, and already had been off with actual vacation days previously.

So I went back home. I spent a lot of the rest of the week taking care of things around the house. It really didn’t feel like a “vacation” or anything, and while I was not as sick as I had been, I was still a bit miserable. It didn’t help feeling guilty about going on the stupid trip in the first place and bringing it home to everyone.

Blog Consolidation and Feeds

Switching to Mastodon from Twitter has slightly renewed my interest in my blog, and more specifically my blog as a place for all of my stuff, not necessarily a place for “others”. Not that others can’t enjoy it. Maybe that isn’t quite the right way to say what I mean.

Basically, I want this blog to be a bit more of an archive for things I do online. Part of this however, also means making some of it less visible, so things don’t feel cluttered, but the data is still there. It’s probably easier to just give some examples of what I have done recently. Some of which is inspired a bit by things I have seen others do.

Letterboxed Syndication

I have a new category on the side, Feeds, which currently only has one sub category, for Letterboxed. What this does is it creates posts from reviews and ratings and movies I’ve watched, based on my Letterboxed account.

It’s a simple plugin for “RSS to Post”. The trickier part was, the initial import, only pulled the last 51 items. So I had to find a separate plug in that would import an XML export as a WordPress post. This still needs some massaging though, as I don’t think it imported everything. Plus, it did not create the cool Poster images. I may have to manually fix those, if I bother.

Photo Galleries

I’ve also started creating Photo Gallery posts. I had some Photo Gallery software set up but I opted to purge it when I cleaned up the malware on the server, because it was a potential attack vector. The less I have to keep clean the better. Plus for what I’m doing WordPress functions just fine.

I’ll add more older photos over time, but this gives a nice place to just post some of the various photos from over the years.

Micro Blog

There’s something screwy going on with this category, I’m not sure what, but basically, it’s a category, Micro Blog, which is intended to be excluded from the main feed, and often posting more “Twittery” posts.

Currently it’s just a collection of scores from various Wordle style daily games. I hope to use it for a bvit more though in the future. I wouldn’t mind finding a way to syndicate my Duolingo progress or Fitbit stats to the Microblog of Feeds section, for example.