Quick check-in at Mastodon to marvel at the miraculous evolution of a New Way To Chat -- a quick analysis of the last 20,000 or so tagged entries follows:
#bitchI've got two new accounts over there ready to go, but I haven't bothered to post a single damned thing with either. The entire collection is an astonishingly humorless self-parody driven so far up its own ass by self-reinforcing white suburban cocktail-party revolutionaries that even the Mastodon logo/mascot looks embarrassed. There may be a more cringe-inducing, pointless, low-information, pitiful clusterfuck of useless humans pretending they have a clue somewhere on the planet, but I'm damned if I can think of one at the moment.
#moan
#Bitch_N_Moan
#WokerThanThou
#TwitterSucks
#ElonToo
#AndRepublicans
#FranticVirtueSignals_R_Us
#Dramagasm
#ArmChairActivism
#UselssTwats
#FascismInThePublicInterest
So, about as expected, then.
Also, yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the appearance of the Asbestos Dust persona on the internet (14 Mar 1998). beginning a new online career by slapping Bill Palmer and Gilbert VanBuren Wilkes IV around on UseNet. I'd been online a lot before that under other personas but this is the version that stuck. Seems like a quarter-century of doing anything would feel more important than this does. But in fact, the reason I didn't mention it yesterday is that I didn't notice it till today when I was sorting out some calendar stuff.
Mostly the only thing that is apparently related is that I feel about 100 years older.
Good times.
Happy anniversary! I began in June of that year on the alt Beanie Babies usenet group. What a bunch of crazy, murderous freaks! I was so relieved to find the sanity of AW. Ha. Ha. Ha. HA!
ReplyDeleteThanks for checking out Mastodon so I don't have to waste my time. I plan on keeping my blog and tossing out bits of poetry and prose along with the odd opinion until King Ronald shuts us all down.
I made a Mastodon persona. I don't know what to do with it. How do you find these people you read?
ReplyDeleteI joined MW somewhere around the year 2000. It astonishes me that some of those characters and I are still acquainted. Some of us are even friends of a sort. Meaning what? I will be sad when they die.
Just hit "https://mastodon.social" and wait for it to populate with "trending" subjects. You'll shortly find more snotty, victimized, outraged whackadooery than you can shake a stick at. Fortunately their ANTIFA-level revolutionary fervor is reduced to simple bizarro-world thought experiments by virtue of their utter real-world uselessness and untethered belief that Standing The Barricades on a fucking reinforcing-silo website with a masturbatory daisy-chain clot of other "free thinkers" is actually doing something.
DeleteNot that I have an opinion on the goofballs one way or the other.
I agree with the "friends of a sort". When "Harry Claude Cat" died a few years back, I noticed and was sorry to see it, for all that we didn't have all that much to do with one another, and I wouldn't have known him in meatspace if he'd stepped out of a crowd and bit me on the butt. Not that he seemed likely to do so or anything, but the principle remains.
I just followed that link, was automaticaly logged in as the persona I made late one night, and found a string of posts from Robert Reich. I like Robert Reich. For all my occasional conservative instincts I am a child of 1960s/1970s Berkeley CA after all. I left because the place got even weirder and I couldn't stand it anymore. And if a place is too weird for a guy who went eight times to Burning Man, well, you have something. I like Reich because, well, never mind. His latest includes the term "windfall profits tax." I just shake my head at that one. Can you say "nation-busting precedent"?
DeleteAnyway, there I was. Now I'm not. What a great three minutes that was.
Ah good ol' Robert Reich. You want the perfect embodiment of someone who'd bitch if you hanged him with a new rope, he'd be it. Seems like the feat of being the single whiniest human in both the clusterfucked Carter and Clinton administrations would be associated with some sort of award. Maybe getting tenure at Berkeley was it. Commies and their lackeys do have considerable reach over that way.
DeleteI remember probably 40 years ago when I first read "Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy". The description of Magrathea causing the collapse of the galactic economy by gathering up all the wealth there was to be had and reducing the rest to abject poverty was, and continues to be, suspect but pretty funny satire. This is relevant to Reich because of the quote "...and a long sullen silence settled over a billion hungry worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they labored into the night over smug little treatises on the value of a planned political economy."
Why? Because, I swear as Jesus is my witness, the image that was sparked when I read the line was that sawed-off little twat hunched over a scribes' desk with a quill pen, smirking and scrawling "I told you so" over and over again by candlelight.
Joined up with Usenet in 1996 after having found a mailing list that was echoed from the Usenet froup rec.arts.allmusic or somesuch. After realizing I didn't have to receive my posts in my in-box and could just go see them all at once in a threaded fashion, it wasn't long before I also landed in misc.writing. From there to alt.writing and ... well. History. Nostalgia. Ahh.
ReplyDeleteI adored the first posts from the Asbestos Dust persona! And the Hip-Liz one, omg! And I hated, with a delicious hatred that quickly blossomed into quiet admiration a mean girl named "Ultraviolet". The admiration bit? Don't tell her I said that.
Still haven't tried that Mastodon thing.
Hah! Backatcha Lizard :)
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