Social annoyance

Every once in a while Twitter gets more bolshie about serving up ads. This week is one of those times; I do what I always do: block any account that serves up an ad in my feed.

But in Elno’s quest to drive his $8 subscriptions (evidently his plan to make up for the billions in ad revenues he lost by displaying ads next to Nazi, racist & porn content), he’s added one extra step to the process.

You block the ad, and then get this opportunity to do away with ads forever, by renting a blue check. The only way you can make it go away is to click on one of the two options.

In my case, “maybe later” means “on the 12^th day after Armageddon”.

Twat.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Being social

Today I present three guides to social media.

You’re welcome.

 

 

Opinion overload

The need for all manner of people to weigh in on any topic in the world never ceases to amaze me. And God bless SoMe for giving them the platform(s) to do it.

In the past couple of weeks, gobshites who did not let their obvious difficulty with spelling words of more than one syllable interfere with their spouting crackbrained theories of epidemiology for the last year and a half have evidently added doctorates in geopolitics and military science, as they are now inveighing against the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Note: I’ve seen plenty of typo-strewn diatribes. But not one single alternative plan. I'm including politicians on both sides of the aisle in my observation. Not one single plan.

(For the record: IMO the best-case scenario was always that this would be a shitshow, but what we’ve currently got would have to travel up about five floors to attain that status.)

Now that the “mah freedoms” and “Ah ain’t puttin’ no unknown shit in mah body” anti-vax/mask crowd is reaping the entirely expected harvest of Delta variant COVID infections (exacerbated by many of them ingesting industrial agriculture-grade ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine) and flooding hospitals in the Confederate states, they are gobsmacked to find there’s no room for them. So, naturally, they’ve become medical ethicists and are shouting “Hippocratic Oath”.

Yes—the very same people who insist that medical doctors have the right to deny treatment to LBGTQ+ patients (and that pharmacists have the right to not fill prescriptions for birth control) are not down with these same health professionals putting the science-denying, public health-flaunting ignoramuses at the bottom of the triage queue. Perhaps they meant to say Hypocritic Oath?

Well, I have no doubt that in another week the Know Nothing Opinions Brigade (KNOBs) will expand their expertise into other arenas. If they can still tap their devices while on ventilators.

 

 

 

Spellcheck is not your friend

Based on a tweet he posted, I’m guessing that Friday was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day for Sean Penn. How bad, you ask? Here’s the tweet:

Beyond the theologico-legal problem with the Vatican impeaching evangelicals, he was just stating the bleeding obvious.

I mean, tout le monde knows you don’t follow Satin anywhere, much less the bowels of hell.

Taffeta, now—that’s a different weave altogether.

 

 

 

Wrong-wine guys

So, this had me laughing much of the afternoon. 

There’s a thread on Twitter, in response to Ron Johnson, the moron representing Wisconsin in the Senate, going on Fox to claim (evidence-free) that there’s going to be child porn found on the hard drive that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden. His disclaimer to avoid prosecution for libel was, “Well, the voters should know.”

A couple of samples:

But this one prompted me to reply:

“I feel like a La Romanée-Conti is the wrong wine to accompany a face-pizza. Which does tend to add a level of truth to your account. Ron seems like a wrong-wine kind of guy to me.”

But Rogue’s reply was what cracked me up:

 

I mean: yeah.

There's another thread going: which state has the worst Senators (and the best, but, really, no one cares about them)? Kentucky, with McConnell and Paul, was in a dead heat with Florida, with Rubio and Scott. But Florida's governor kind of tips the scales overall.

God bless the Twitters-dot-com.

 

 

Not worth a penny

On the twitters-dot-com, where poseurs go to appear profound, you often see banal tweets with hashtags like #Mondaymotivation or #Tuesdaythoughts.

Here’s one from a guy I must have followed for some reason, but either I stopped or I muted him because so much of his banality was also moronic. Viz:

If you’re going to fake profundity, at least spell the one-syllable words right.

YouTube miracle

A while ago I wrote about how you can learn to repair pretty much anything via YouTube. No matter how arcane your problem, someone’s uploaded a homemade video on how to solve it.

Well, when I got home yesterday afternoon, the house seemed really warm, and when I lowered the thermostat, nothing happened. Believe me, yesterday was a day when you didn’t want your AC non-operational.

I’d had an issue some months ago when the thermostat just went blank, and YouTube showed me how to replace the batteries. I didn’t even know thermostats needed batteries—I don’t recall ever having to replace them before. So that was my starting point. But still nothing happened. And the actual temperature actually went up a degree while I was doing it.

Ulp. Off to YouTube.

I was watching some guy walk through the steps of determining why the blower might not be going on. After checking the circuit breaker (not tripped), he lost me when he hauled out some kind of electricometer and read out how many volts were dancing on the head of a pin, and then more dancing in the thermostat. I despaired: “Dude—I don’t want to take a course in being an electrician; I just want AC.”

And at that very moment, I heard the electronic click come from the thermostat. I ran to the front door, and hallelujah, the unit was working. I set the temp for four degrees lower than usual, just to make up for the panic.

God bless YouTube.

Online help

Back in May, when I met up with a Twitter friend in the National Gallery in Dublin, she kept her two kids amused by letting them watch YouTube videos. I commented, “How did we ever live before YouTube.”

Her reply: “We packed bags of coloring books and crayons.”

But we got onto the topic of YouTube as a source of tutorials, and I remarked that one of my colleagues does all kinds of car repairs by looking up symptoms and watching videos on how to fix them. Even I was reassured when I first started making pizza dough when I checked and, yes, dough crawling up the dough hook is totally within normal parameters.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, the arm to the handle of one of my toilets broke, and I finally got round to trawling Google for how to replace it. Sure enough, there were plenty of videos. Looked pretty easy. So, I dropped by the Home Depot and perused the plumbing aisle. One of their staff members asked if I needed help, and I said I needed to replace a toilet handle assembly. He asked where the handle was located; the side. Then, what brand toilet it was.

Well, naturally I had no clue. But he pointed to a Koehler product and said that one works for most. I picked it up and he asked one more question.

“Do you know which way it turns?”

I totally was ready. “It’s reverse-threaded.”

His face lit up and he patted me on the arm. “Very good!”

“YouTube!”

So I went home and followed the video instructions, et voilà:

Turns out it is a Koehler, so totally hardware compatible.

Behind the scenes

The video that should have been all over TV in the Bible Belt during the 2016 elections has been uncovered and is making the rounds on the Interwebs. You know—the 2015 Bloomberg Politics interview in which Cadet Bonespurs is completely stumped when asked what his favorite verses are. He can’t even choose between the Old and New Testaments; apparently he didn’t know there were two of them.

Like the two Corinthians.

Well, that video is hilarious in its own right, and levels yet another charge of hypocrisy against all the evangelicals who believe their god personally sent a lying, greedy, thieving, cruel, blaspheming, gluttonous, fornicating kleptocrat to run the United States. Because your average atheist could have answered more questions about the Bible than the self-proclaimed Chosen One.

Well, but it turns out there’s a guy in the UK named Michael Spicer, who does a kind of Randy Rainbow mashup (without the music and flamingo pink glasses), and now it all becomes clear:

I am never going to be able to listen to this buffoon stumble his way through congratulating Poland on the 80^th anniversary of the Nazi invasion or bragging about our “great relationship” with Colombia and FARC without looking for his earpiece and imagining Spicer somewhere at the other end of the com line.

Pop quiz

You know those “quizzes” that Facebook serves up? The ones allegedly meant to test your smarts in history or literature or pop culture? (In fact, taking them—or answering any of those “how many of these things have you done?” lists—just feed the platform and its real customers data for marketing to you.)

I don’t take them, but sometimes they’re really funny. Pretty sure whoever put together this one didn’t quite understand the notion of giving too many clues:

Gojira returns

Someone on Twitter posted that adding Godzilla to any movie would make it a better movie. Now, maybe it’s because the tweet had footage from an Avengers film, but the entire thread was extremely shortsighted, IMO, because everyone was focused on Marvel-related stuff. But I expanded my horizons into rom-coms, viz:

When Harry Met Sally and Godzilla

Sixteen Candles for Godzilla

Godzilla’s Best Friend’s Wedding

Godzilla Jones’s Diary

You’ve Got Mail, Godzilla

And one I’d possibly even pay to see in a theatre: Godzilla Swallows Love, Actually

Seriously—this idea has legs. Scaly ones, but legs.

Autobiography

This week someone on Twitter posted this challenge: Describe yourself but don’t use words—only four fictional characters. 

Here’s my response:

Gratitude Monday: playing to win

Short one today: I posted my employment status on both Twitter and Facebook last week. And I was humbled by the number of people who reached out to me with job leads and encouragement.

I’m also somewhat astonished at myself, because in talking with recruiters I not only was forthright about my capabilities (what I might have called boasting a year ago), I stuck to my guns when one of them said her client’s budget for a position tops out at $15K less than the lowest part of my range. In fact I immediately (but professionally) pointed out that they’re asking for a shedload of high-end capabilities, and the salary they’re thinking of (even with equity) doesn’t match their expectations.

A friend of mine—also job hunting—quoted from Crazy Rich Asians, and it’s quite the eye opener. There are two kinds of mahjongg players: those who play to win, and those who play not to lose. All my life I’ve been in the latter category, and especially in the last year and a half. It’s time to play to win. Ergo: stating confidently what I can do and what I’m worth.

Dunno how long it’ll last, but I’m giving it a good go. And that’s my gratitude for today.

Chasing your customers

Poor, poor JPMorgan Chase. For all their squillions in assets, and the billions they pay their senior executive team, they just do not get this whole social media thing.

It’s been five and a half years since someone thought it would be a good idea to have an Ask Me Anything Twitter session with the investment banking side’s vice chairman Jimmy Lee. Before he even got into his corner office that week, Twitter had dumped so thoroughly on the concept that JPMorgan cancelled the session.

I’m proud to say that I joined the squadrons of trolls and did my part, my first experience ever with drawing even a tiny prick of blood.

It was a classic misstep—a total fiasco—and they don’t appear to have learned from it. Because on Monday, the consumer side of the megalith tweeted something that someone thought was clever advice for their struggling customers—under the hashtag #MondayMotivation—and the response was so [predictably] overwhelmingly negative, that they took down the tweet in less than three hours.

But of course, the evil that tweets do live long after their bones are interrèd. Twitterati continued to pile on to screen caps of the tweet, and here are some of the examples:

Two members of Congress who have been forthright in their criticism of Big Banks (both, coincidentally, women and Democrats) had a few thoughts to tweet. First up, Representative Katie Porter, who only a couple of weeks ago dragged JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in a House committee hearing by running him through the parlous financial situation of one of his actual employees in her Southern California district. She repeatedly asked the guy who received a compensation package of $31M last year what advice he’d give this bank teller on how to make ends meet. And he repeatedly replied, “I’ll have to think about that.”

Presumably he’s thought about it and would now advise his employees to eat the food already in their fridges and stop taking taxis for three-block rides.

And then Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who famously told WellsFargo’s then-CEO to his face that he should resign over the bank’s massive and systemic fraudulent practices, had something to say:

At some point during the day, a somewhat chastened @Chase posted this non-apology:

But here’s the tweet that pretty much sums up the world’s reaction:

As for JPMorgan’s social media woes: womp, womp.

Creationism

A friend sent me the link to this frisnic on Bored Panda—people’s take on what God was thinking while creating life on Earth. They’re pretty good. I’ll give you a couple of fer-instances and leave you to click through to all 49 of them.

I dunno who this Dad guy is, but he’s very, very funny.

And here’s the cold water of truth:

User research

Because I used to work for an enterprise feedback technology company, I’m always curious when a company puts out what it’s pleased to call a survey. When Facebook does it, well…

This popped up in my feed last week, so I followed it to see what exercise in pretend-voice-of-the-customer research they were on about.

And, sure enough—here’s how they started out:

I mean—seriously?

That’s the kind of self-congratulatory piffle you’d expect to come out of the current occupant of the White House.

They followed it up by asking for “my own words”, as though they give a toss.

And then prompted me with their own words.

Note that that’s a radio-button response. Meaning you can only choose one. Yes, they say “most important”, but how can you pick just one way Facebook sucks?

Then they spent a lot of their own words reminding me of why I should have said they're fine, upstanding citizens of the world.

And that’s all, folks.

So—as I expected—they didn’t really want to know what I (or any of their users) think of them or their platform; it’s just an exercise in faux concern.

Just exactly like their response to every revelation of their amoral douchebaggery over the years.