Social, Antisocial

[xyzzysqrl]

It's increasingly tempting to move my spur-of-the-moment banal gaming reactions over to either Mastodon, in which case I would need to learn for example what Mastodon is and how it works, or just dump all of them here. The downside with dumping them here is that this journal would balloon to eighteen thousand posts a day of single screenshots with a one-line reaction, and I can't imagine why anyone should be subjected to that.

I've been putting them all on Twitter but Twitter is increasingly not a place I want to frequent. I feel kind of tired and Done With This Already.

Lately I've been keeping up more with Telegram (where I am @XyzzySqrl ) and Discord (where I am XyzzySqrl#0080 ) and there's something to be said for forcing people to come to you if they actually want to talk to you. It's not like I'm gonna go out and find people on my own, I guess. I've always been really bad about socializing, and with AIM shutting down that's another entire branch of people I know who I guess get trimmed off if I can't come up with a way to stay in touch.

It is nice to have a place I can offhandedly dump thoughts so they don't make me crazy though. I should really stop using people's IM windows for that and get a social media outlet.

One that isn't a giant heap of ass.

Which brings me back to dropping Twitter.

Sigh.

--

Aside from that, I've been all right. I am supposed to schedule a doctor checkup but I have been full-bore nocturnal, sleeping through the morning and awake at night. That's not really useful to anyone. I've also been fairly depressed which I am honestly bored with now? I've been depressed for 30-some years, I'm tired of it and I can't understand how I keep falling for this.

My nervous system goes into a state of "oh no the sad thing, remember the sad thing? remember all the sad terrible things you did when you were young?" and I'm just like -I KNOW- I'VE SEEN IT BEFORE SHUT UP AND LET ME WATCH GIANT ROBOT CARTOONS IN PEACE.

Most of my play prospects right now, stuff I'm actually doing and will blog about later, are either super long or MMOs or endless games or just aren't gonna be done any time soon, but that's okay. I have some kind of ridiculous stupid games-complete record this year, I can take time away from that and just dick around and do other stuff. Maybe I ought to read a dang book for a while, if I can focus on anything over the "oh no sad!" whine of neurological thistle-browsing.

Comments

[kjorteo]

Early on in my treatment when I was getting actual therapy for actual anxiety issues up to and including outright panic attacks, like the first thing they told me was stay the fuck off Twitter. It was killing me, I knew that, real doctors knew that, and I can definitely confirm that I've been doing a lot better after following that advice (and dumping Tumblr while I'm at it, too.)

I can't speak for everyone else, but I for one have always loved your random thoughts on things, and I absolutely would sign up for a Twitter-like feed of constant screenshots and one-liners from you. You could do a Let's Play of reading a phone book and make the writeup interesting and entertaining, I've said this before and I stand by it.

It can be a bit of a security blanket to use your friends as a private idea-dumping scratch pad rather than facing the big scary prospect of putting your thoughts out there like that, but, uh... well, let's just say I don't regret starting my SoulSilver LP after I couldn't just PM the whole thing at you as I'd originally planned. Considering how much it exploded (geez everyone in our friend circles likes Pokemon, huh) I'd say that was for the best. A+ would recommend, in hindsight.

So, uh, my personal totally-ulterior-motive-filled vote is to dump your blogmoggery here so I don't have to figure out what a Mastadon is to go see it. But shh.

[xyzzysqrl]

As far as I have been able to make out, Mastodon is like what if social blogging met top-sanctioned social exclusion, so you could join a cluster and keep anyone not in your cluster out with gates and fences, and if you want to follow someone else your cluster leader has to whitelist it.

This keeps getting presented as a feature to me and I have no idea why, except I can kind of see the appeal of shutting out entire groups forever when I think about it, I guess.

Anyway I suppose I could spam the living hell out of DW, instead. I suspect the actual effect will be I get a lot quieter though.

[chalcedony_starlings]

The vast majority of instances are more open than that, though I'm not completely clear on the admin feature-set myself. (Our main problem with it so far is that it's still the Twitter model of interaction wrt things like replies and “boosts”, and so it seems likely to us that similar social vortices will form anyway.)

(Amending that, though: there are noticeable improvements over Twitter proper, as far as we can tell. They just don't hit the key things, from our perspective. Many people are lauding the difference in community, but…)

[rowyn]

I'm on tootplanet.space and if you want to follow someone on another server you just ... follow them. Literally the only difference is that if you're on Xyzzysqrl on tootplanet then I see "Xyzzysqrl" as your username, whereas if you're on mastodon.social then your username shows up as Xyzzysqrl@mastodon.social.

In my experience, it's similar to the way email works. If you have an email on gmail you can email people using hotmail or yahoo or roadrunner or whatever. If people with emails at russian-bots.net starts spamming Gmail customers with crap, then Gmail will block russian-bots.net for having spammers. Normal instances are not going to block everyone by default because that defeats the purpose. And if it turns out you don't like your email provider, you can dump them and email people from a different provider. You don't have to decide between "support this company run by jerks" and "never use email again".

Switching instances in Mastodon is even easier than switching email addresses, actually, because you can export your entire mastodon account and then re-import it on a different instance.

Anyway, if you decide to give it a try, you can get a tootplanet account here: https://tootplanet.space/auth/sign_up

I'm Rowyn@tootplanet.space.

I am not terribly active there or, in fact, anywhere. -_-