Ok, social media is definitely not for me.
Picture it as a broken sewer main of shitty people with a very occasional super nice person.
LinkedIn – For fucks sake has turned into Facebook with a pseudo business bent. I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2019, when much to my dismay I was told I needed to have it so that HR people could reach out to me, as our company was laying us all off.
Since then it’s been completely useless as a vehicle for finding a job and NO, I repeat, NO HR person has reached out to me. For a while it looked like they were turning it into a dating, pro-Palestine, DEI, & god knows what else kind of site. None of which I’m interested in.
X/Twitter – OMG! Talk about a broken sewer pipe! Perhaps it’s that I’m easily bored. But damn! My most recent mistake on that site is that I commented on someone I didn’t realize was a flat Earther about being unsurprised that satellites wouldn’t show up in photos of astronauts working outside the ISS.
Satellites are relatively small, tend not to have running lights and are most likely wouldn’t be seen unless they happened to reflect sunlight.
I went on to say I always missed seeing stars in the NASA photos and it bugged me. I once asked NASA why that was. They told me that often photos of planets would have the backgrounds blacked out to enhance the photo of the planet or object that was the actual subject of the photo.
Okay, that makes sense.
I mentioned that I’d like to see photos of our galaxy.
Then what happened was hundreds of people describing the way cameras work and this, that, and the other thing, including that space wasn’t real, we didn’t have people orbiting the earth, it was all fake etc. In the miasma of following shitposting, one post caught my attention.
This post was from the son of an actual astronaut and very nicely explained that the ISS when on the daylight side of Earth had the same problem as we do. The stars are simply too dim versus the brightness of the sun to see. Then he included some breathtakingly beautiful photos his Dad had taken from the ISS while on the dark side of Earth. When I say breathtaking I mean it. Seeing those photos brought tears to my eyes because of their beauty.
I thanked him for the concise explanation, (even though I felt like, “Duhhhh,” I should have figured that out myself,) and for sharing the beautiful photos has Dad took. We had a pleasant exchange and he directed me to his Father’s account, the NASA website, and a Flickr account that I’d never heard of, where the astronauts posted more personal pictures they’d taken.
Basically it was a super nice adult exchange and I genuinely appreciated the information. I told him so, and thanked he & his Father for sharing. Then, thinking that was the end of it I went to bed.
This morning, my X account was still blowing up. People were still reiterating what had already been discussed and piling on. Then more people, the flat earth folks were denying that the photos were real and just going on & on about that.
I don’t like controversy and really don’t like people piling on without reading the whole thread. Generally, I read all of a thread before opening my mouth and adding my 2 cents. Yes, sometimes I screw up and add something redundant to a thread by I really try to avoid doing that, as it’s a waste of my time and everyone else’s time who may be in the comment thread.
However, in this case, (which is only the most recent in a long line of similar events,) I found myself being very depressed by it all.
Reevaluating my interactions on X I came to the realization that the vast majority of people on the site are… well, terrible people.
I partially remembered a line from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where Marvin the robot had just witnessed another robot destroy itself in a fit of anger and said, something like, “What a depressingly stupid robot.”
That sentiment is what I felt this morning. These people couldn’t just go, “Oh, that’s a lovely respectful conversation. Wow, those photos are really beautiful.” Instead, they had to drag it through absolute shit.
I have a very hard time seeing the good in people. Jerry would often remind me that not all people in the world are shitheads. Since he’s been gone, I’m having a harder time remembering there are some good people.
Between the network news, X, LinkedIn, and just dealing with people in the grocery store it’s easy to have the “shitty people” belief reenforced.
It’s not just this one instance. However, this one seems to have broken the camels back.
Going through the list of things I can’t stand hearing about anymore, I’ve concluded that too much interaction with the world is very depressing.
I don’t care about Palestine, or Trans rights, or the LGBT community, or the Democrats, politics, Republicans, Trump, the failure that is Congress, our broken Judiciary, the price of eggs, people demanding that Trump voters regret their vote, who’s talking about running for President in 2028, the welfare state, DOGE, government employees being laid off, taxes, the next iPhone, Ukraine, or much of anything else.
I realized, I miss looking up at the stars, (which I can’t see anymore because everyone around me is afraid of the dark). I miss simplicity, and beauty. Both of which are easily seen and appreciated, if you turn off the constant bullshit.
That’s what I’m going to do. Turn off the constant bullshit. I want peace & quiet.
I want a little job that brings in enough money but not 100K. I want to be off mailing lists and urgent notifications, and to turn off the firehose of “Information”.
To that end, I’m closing accounts. I’m removing myself from mailing lists and locking down the flow of senseless conflict and controversy. This mechanized abomination we call “modern life” has made me unhappy.
I’m not angry about it, (although It’s going to be a while before I’m not assuming people are all shitty).
I’m looking at this as a mistake and fortunately it’s one I can correct.
I’m trying a hiatus. I’ll let you know how it goes… or not.
The Washington Post reports
So the UK government knows that they’re doing something shady, and they want to do it in complete darkness.
Do you want someone, without your permission, looking at your backup data? How about documents, text messages, photos, movies, or literally anything you’ve stored in the cloud? 
But what they’re really interested in are my mean tweets, or off color Facebook posts, they want to know if I’m twerking on tictok, or have appeared in blackface on instagram. (After all I’m not Justin Trudeau)
Trump said he’s going to be weeding out illegal immigrants from the Social Security system.
chair when he said it directly to someone questioning him about deportations.
The the words of David Lo-Pan from “Big Trouble in Little China” 
Biden is too dementia ridden to stand trial, but not too demential ridden to issue pardons for crimes that have not been proven to have occurred? 
I am astounded that the Biden administration is poking the bear the way they are with the Vladimir Putin. At the moment he is the only one that appears to be sane. That’s saying something completely strange and I didn’t have this on my 2024 bingo card.
Then there’s evidence suggesting there were the biolabs in Ukraine that are reported to have done work for god knows who, in the United States, prior to COVID-19. These labs were a mechanism for Fauci et al, to get around the restrictions on gain of function research, and keep their hands clean.
Yeah, the UK for god knows what reason is allowing their StormShadow missiles to be fired into Russia too. The StormShadows, like our missiles require the assistance of HRH Charles III’s military.
Lest we forget, there are people in Putins government who have been sharpening their teeth since the 60s & 70s. They’re a lot more nationalistic and war mongery than Putin. I would imagine there are some very contentious meetings happening in The Kremlin every day.