Fasinating how draining Twitter is…

At first it’s interesting. There’s a stream of “new” data and ideas.

You interact because some people are funny, and if you’re lonely you’re reaching out to other humans, trying to connect.

There are positive connections but generally they’re temporary. When they go away as they inevitably do, it hurts in a way. It’s not a major hurt but suddenly you’re unimportant in someone else’s life and you wonder if / what you did wrong that made them go away. What changed between this week and last week? Are they just busy, or did they find someone more interesting? With the possibility of thousands of followers all interacting or attempting to interact daily or hourly if you fall of the edge of the map it usually goes unnoticed.

This has the potential to make any loneliness a person may feel, much sharper. 

Some people will move on without paying much attention, after all, there are literally thousands of other people. Some people won’t notice, and others, those with few followers may be devastated.

Everyone is clamoring for attention “Pick Me, See Me, Talk to me”, and yet the satisfaction provided is not sustaining.

In my observations of the “Twitterverse” I’ve started to understand this and noticed a few other things too. 

Twitter has a lot of really shitty, stupid, and narcissistic people. I can only imagine what TikTok or other platforms are like.

For someone like me, seeing that level of stupid or meanness is super depressing. This is especially true when the Twitter Stream is like a broken sewer pipe of shit. It wouldn’t take me long based on a raw Twitter feed to decide that humanity needed to be nuked.

Even if Twitter represented only a fractional part of humanity, it’s pretty clear the species is doomed. Dropping nukes might be a mercy.

The fact that it’s monetized and you can apparently make reasonable money using Twitter, in some cases brings out the absolute worst in people.

The parody accounts are sometimes funny but in other cases are even more depressing because sometimes you’re transfixed by the sheer insanity. You’d never normally watch some of the shit, but it’s like watching an accident, you can’t look away. Then you have to try to unsee what you saw and are depressed about being pulled into it in the first place.

The “Free Energy” Twitter accounts are really depressing for someone like me. Time and time again, the “free energy” person has “figured out” how to make an electric motor.  Something that’s been known for 200 years or so. However, because apparently Science isn’t being taught in school anymore, these people think they’ve got something new. 

All the free energy people succeed in demonstrating is that a rather substantial part of humanity isn’t more than two steps away from seeking out an old crone to “cast the bones” about next years harvest.

That’s really depressing!

So much potential wasted, so many petty people, so much ignorance.

Much of which could be addressed and improved if sites like Twitter and the internet in general weren’t intellectual wastelands.

How many African American fights do I need to see happen in a fast food joint? How many weaves need to be snatched off a fat chicks head before any shame is felt?

Twitter and sites like it pander to the lowest common denominator. In doing so, they drag the rest of us down into the gutter.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Twitter is not healthy, not even a little bit.

I rather think that cigarette smoking is a healthier pursuit. 

I’m speaking of Twitter because I long ago gave up on FaceBook and all the rest. I have a twitter account and I’m considering deleting it. This is actually the second twitter account I’ve had. I’d forgotten why I deleted the first one. Now that I remember, do I delete this one too, or should I simply stop using it then check in only when someone sends me something from Twitter.

Yes, I know Twitter is called X now, but typing “X” in sentences play hell with auto correct and spelling subroutines.

After Years (more than a decade) T-Mobile & I end the relationship in a shitty way

T-Mobile logo pink.I transferred my number to another carrier.

T-Mobile acts these days lot more like the shitshow formerly known as SPRINT.

The relationship came to an end when one of TMobile’s representatives said, “The Plan is the plan” 

She was explaining to me that TMobile was still going to bill me $75, a full month of service, which also included service for my phone line, (cancelled on 5/31) when I was pulling the plug on the first of the month.

What’s really annoying is that I was just auto-billed my monthly $75, 3 days ago. I’d have thought that any services would be prorated.

I asked the representative if the billing was pre or post paid.

The little foreign girl didn’t seem to understand what I was asking and just repeated 

“The Plan is the Plan”

As if that answered my question or concern about their billing practices.

WOW!!!!

Sprint Corp 742392705.This by the way is exactly how I felt when I finally terminated my relationship with SPRINT long distance years ago. I remember the same sort of billing bullshit and that is exactly why I avoided SPRINT as a mobile phone provider.

It’s just bad business practices and the corporate heads simply expect you to swallow it.

My new carrier is based in Georgia and their customer service folks are all American. T-Mobile’s customer service is at least partially out outside the country.

Worst case scenario I’m being billed the equivalent of Alimony for breaking up with T-Mobile. Thankfully it’s only one month.

Depending on what they do, I may or may not report their behavior to the FCC and Better Business bureau.

At this point, I could see putting T-Mobile on the “Avoid at all Costs” list. 

Recently, I’ve been wondering, am I the only person noticing that customer service is getting worse and worse?

Saw this Venn Diagram on Twitter

I don’t know who created this diagram but I’d like to tip my hat to them.

It accurately explains how I’ve been feeling lately.

I’ve been trying to write but have experienced severe writers block.

On the plus side I’ve been making progress cleaning out the house, so there’s that.

It seems lately that every time I turn around there is some fresh stupid hell created by humanity because collectively humans are bored.

I find that I’m looking forward to some extinction level event, for a change of pace.

I strongly suspect this sort of boredom happens all over the universe in every sentient species. It’s probably why we’ve not detected conclusive signs of other life.

I’m betting that all species get to a certain technological level, things get too easy, they get bored and start making shit up to terrorize each other. It’s not out of cruelty, it’s so they feel something, anything…

Species probably need a hit of adrenalin that they get from pursuing or being pursued in a forest. They need to have real danger, real life & death consequences, and real mysteries to confront.

Had we made it into space, we might have had a decent substitute. Death being less than an inch away in the cold vacuum of space, may have provided the stimulation to drive our creativity and invention forward. We all know we’re not going to make it into space in any realistic way.

The 1960s & 1970s was our window.

We had loads of men who were tough enough, for whom hardship and discomfort wasn’t a big deal. We had role models and heroes that every child wanted to emulate. Big men, doing big things, not for clicks, but because they believed in the potential and dreams of humanity.

The window has closed. 

All we have left is a long descent into barbarism. The herd will be thinned out due to disease, war, and stupidity. The surviving humans will forget, except in legends about all we accomplished. Maybe we’ll have another ice age and the glaciers will scour most of our cities and infrastructure from the land.

Ancient aliens meme.15 – 20 thousand years later when odd looking bits & pieces of our civilization and technology pop up they’ll be completely unknown and unremembered. So… those future humans will think of us as Ancient Aliens.

That’s more than we’ll deserve. The reality will be that we were a bunch of morons who contemplated our navels too much, demanded to be accepted while not accepting others with differing opinions, who lost the ability to think our way out of a wet paper bag, then turned our maintenance over to artificial intelligence, while eating bon bons on our overstuffed couches, waiting for our rudimentary service droid to come rub our feet or give us an orgasm that we were too lazy to work toward ourselves.

When the end came, most of us will have denied the obvious truth, instead of getting our fat asses off the couch and actually doing something useful.

This line of thinking has made me wonder how many times before this kind of thing has happened on this planet. Likewise, I wonder if it’s actually commonplace throughout the universe, and a function of technology. 

I’ve thought that perhaps there’s a very narrow window where a civilization reaches apogee. The only way a civilization survives is if they reach a point in technology & science that they realize their planet is about to undergo some cataclysmic change and this knowledge galvanizes the sentient species to focus on creating a solution to the problem.

If they fail, then they fall back into the muck, after some period of time they rise again with half remembered legends spurring them forward again.

To be clear I’m not even thinking about “Climate Change” as our moronic people think about it.

I’m talking a meteor impact like the one that may have snuffed the dinosaurs.

Consider this, the meteor needn’t actually hit Earth. Suppose something big came in at a fraction of the speed of light and hit the dark side of the moon? Say it splits the moon into pieces. Those pieces needn’t rain down on Earth. Just them spreading around in the moon’s orbit dissipating the gravitational effect on our tides and weather would be disastrous. There’s impressive climate change!

Or let’s say it was a large enough object that it changed the mass or orbit of the moon? What then? Destructive tides becoming the norm. Earthquakes and volcanoes restructuring continents over a thousand years instead of millions of years. Imagine that. What about the moon ending up in a decaying orbit?

Now imagine that scientists figure out the impact will happen in 300 years. Do people keep squabbling, or do they turn all their abilities, resources, and effort toward preparing and saving themselves? Ideally, if a civilization was at the right point in it’s development they’d figure out how to advance their technology to save their species.

The way we are today, we’d argue about what color the paint on a starship should be before we built the starship. We’d be arguing if there would be an appropriate amount of transgender representation on board the ark ship, completely ignoring that puberty blockers 10 years before rendered those folks incapable of reproducing.

Douglas Adams might have been more right than he ever imagined in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We might really be the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.

Thinking along these lines is why I think we’ve missed the window.

We’re so caught up in irrational trivial matters that we’d squabble for 300 years and be squabbling / assigning blame right up to the impact.

Looking at our colleges today, it’s painfully obvious our youth don’t compare to the builders, dreamers, creators, and makers of just 40 years ago.

I suppose that’s why I’m not writing as much. It’s too easy to think, “People might be able to read the words that I write, but they’re not going to understand the meaning.”

Thinking like that makes walking the dog, & tossing stuff out of my life, far more productive activities. I need to get small, agile and light.

Then I’ll be ready for what comes next.