I'm Out

 After something like sixteen years of Twittering, I left it after Elon Musk's arguably hostile takeover of the service. I had long since tapered back from frequent use as Twitter became more a place for political soapbox shouting. The Twitter that worked for me was the one of the early years when the user base was relatively small and mostly likable geeks who were polite to each other. I was never one for "Twitter marketing" either.  I never cared for users who only posted without actually following anyone or interacting. As it grew to enormous size it lost it's small town charm and became something else. Now it's one megalomaniac's oversized sandbox. He can sit there and play without me.

I’ve never been a fan of all-purpose social media websites. For one thing, they always operate in the most clunky manner and, more importantly, they allow one business to dominate the interactions of many niche social groups. Thank goodness there still a few stand-alone forum websites around, though most have been greatly abandoned in favor of totalitarian social giants like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and such. The little forums that appeal to my specific interest areas will continue to have my interest and support. I don’t do Facebook or Instagram, and only have a MeWe account because of one specific group there.

I’ve watched the Internet grow up over the past quarter century and it’s followed the same pattern as much of the physical world, it seems. Small town Main Street was devoured by Wal-Mart, Maggie’s Coffee Shop gave way to a Starbuck’s location then small book shops closed because of Amazon.com. Now independent (non-totalitarian-run) social forums have greatly been eaten by huge social media monsters. It’s like almost anything people do and enjoy is grabbed by some big profit-oriented entity and they start making the rules. I think it’s about time Internet users started to realize the beauty of the small and independent again. Is there a way to create a power-monger-free worldwide electronic network? I don’t know. But it sounds like a good idea to me.

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How To Read Novels Even if You Don’t Have the Time

I didn’t read novels for something like a couple of decades. These days I have stacks of great novels I’ve read in recent times. Here’s how I do it.

I’ve always aimed to be a well read person. Long before the Internet I was an information sponge. I would go to a public library for a couple of hours at a time at least once a week and literally cruise the information there to suit my thirst for knowledge in much the same way people cruise the web now. I often would absorb a non-fiction book in half an hour. But novels have to be read linearly-- from front to back. I like to take the time to visualize and consider a story as I read it, too. The idea of speed reading a novel is not appealing to me at all. With novels I like to savor the words and enjoy the ride.

While I read novels with some frequency when I was in school and during my 20s, busy-ness as an adult sort of led to my putting novel reading aside for long periods. For a very long time pretty much all the fiction I took in came from television and movies, though I’ve always been a big fan of those mediums. Then on TV I caught an interview Whoopie Goldberg did with actress Christina Applegate. Christina admitted that she didn’t do much reading of books because she didn’t have the time. Whoopie said the trick is to put the book in the bathroom. That made sense to me. I’d always been something of a toilet reader. Like many people I kept a magazine or a newspaper or a catalog in the bathroom for those several minute visits. I even dabbled in Saturday morning bath time newspaper reading for a long while. For some reason I rarely read books in the bathroom, though. So I decided to give it a try-- and worked out some methods.

First, the book needs to be stored in the bathroom. You’ll forget to bring it in if you store outside it. I suppose if you must use a public toilet a lot you could keep the book in a handbag or something. This book will be for bathroom reading only. I have a big towel cabinet in my bathroom and things stay perfectly clean and dry in there no matter how steamy the bathroom gets. I keep my books there.

I don’t read in the bathtub-- the steaminess will destroy a book there and I like to use bath time for mental processing, anyway. I only read when sitting on the throne (In fact I’m currently reading Game of Thrones). I have mastered the art of one handed reading. Actually, you can handle the book with both hands until it’s time to-- well, clean up. After that I hold the book only in my left hand and can change pages one-handed if necessary. Some trips I only read a couple of pages. I use my bookmark not only to mark the two page spread I’m on, but the individual page where I stopped. Most bookmarks have a printed side and a blank side. I always face the blank side toward the page I haven’t yet read. I try to almost always stop reading at the end of the paragraph that continues on the next page. When I get up, I use my left hand to put the book away in the cabinet. It’s a simple as that.

By doing this I’ve gone from being a non-novel reader to having read a surprising number of books, though not in any short amount of time. Game of Thrones is over 800 pages. I started it in November and I’m close to the end now in mid-February. An average length novel normally takes me a couple of months to read in the bathroom. That’s plenty for me. I have patience. If the story hits a compelling spot I may linger in there awhile, but I never bring the book out. It stays in the bathroom.

I’ve yet to buy a Kindle reader, but if I do I suspect I’ll have to keep it in the bathroom. Maybe I’ll buy two. So, anyway, you do have time to read novels. You just need find the right place and time.

Ten Years of Twitterism

Yikes! Time flies, as they say. I opened my Twitter account (@wade_watson) in 2007-- almost ten years ago. When I first signed onto Twitter, Leo Laporte (@leolaporte) was the most popular Twitter user with something like 50,000 followers. Donald Trump was years away from even hearing the word "Twitter". At that time Twitter was so small they had a all-feeds page that would show every single tweet as it was posted-- and it didn't roll all that quickly much of the time.

I must say, I miss those early days a bit. Back then, Twitter really was just a cozy little community of pretty friendly geeks. The nearest we had to celebrities were Leo, Kevin Rose and few other web geek heroes. The growth of Twitter as a worldwide communications phenomenon was gradual and I watched every step of it. Here's what happened as I saw it.

Since I first learned of Twitter from Leo's TWIT podcast, I followed all the folks who appeared on TWIT-- people like John Dvorak, Jason Calacanis, Tom Merritt, Molly Wood and Veronica Belmont. I haven't heard much from Jason in a while, but I still catch much of what the others do, particularly the wonderful Ms. Belmont. She must have opened her Twitter account it's first week, because she has an account named @Veronica. Anyway, one day back then, Veronica tweets about this actress who was doing something unheard of then-- a fictional web video series. Her name was Felicia Day (@feliciaday). I started following her both on Twitter and through most all that she does and still do. I think Felicia may well be the unsung key element of Twitter's outrageous growth.

Felicia was a struggling Hollywood actress best known for repeated appearances on the last season of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. But she'd been a gamer and online user since her childhood in the '80s. She had both considerable geeky charm and a natural way of fitting into and making use of web media-- and continues to do so today.

I think Felicia may be the single most important factor in the Twitter revolution. Felicia befriended we Twitter geeks, but she also had friends in the Hollywood community. As best as I know, she introduced Twitter to such people as Allyson Hannigan, Neal Patrick Harris and Jimmy Fallon. I'm sure there were others as well, but those three alone would spread the word pretty far. Very soon after that, those guys and others started mentioning Twitter on national American TV talk shows. Twitter use quickly spread around the Hollywood scene, then the New York City media scene and that brought it to the TV news people. That led it to the politicians and reality-TV billionaires. I'm not blaming Felicia Day for Donald Trump (she would be seriously pissed at the idea), but I think she was stepping stone on Twitter's walk to where we are today with it. If it hadn't been Felicia, it might have been somebody else.

In spite of my long Twitter tenure, I really don't (and have never) tweeted that

4 very smart people

much. I mostly use it to follow other people (like Felicia, but not The Donald). I categorize my follows into Twitter Lists now and usually skip directly to a list like "Show Biz Types", "Art", "Pop" and "Smart People". While Twitter isn't the small community it once was, it often surprises me how many people are paying attention to my fairly rare tweets. I may do a separate post with some of those stories sometime. Since Twitter by default sends people emails or posts a notification every time you mention somebody's name, if you talk about someone, they may just reply.

Anyway, this ramble has achieved it's goal of exceeding 141 characters by many times over, so I'll sign off for now. Happy tweeting and remember the old days when it was just us nice people.

Definition of a Twitterist

According to the Urban Dictionary, "twitterism" is a word for "deep insights about life in 140 chars or less". It goes on to say the term was coined on May 7, 2007 in a tweet (appropriately enough). If it requires "deep insights", I'm prone to say there are very few twitterists actually on Twitter. But that wouldn't be fair. There certainly are deep insights, though most tweets fall a bit short of what might be called depth. Still, they are trying to be insightful. Twitter is just a special communication medium. What distinguishes it, perhaps, is that people often seem to feel obligated to try and communicate deep insights through Twitter. For that I think it can be admired. There are so many communication venues where people seem to feel no pressure to be concise or insightful at all.

Naming this blog "twitterist.blogspot.com" seems a bit contradictory, since I created it to allow me to write my thoughts that go beyond 140 characters. Maybe that tweet nine years ago was a bit too abbreviated (as was necessary). I'll propose that a twitterist is one who attempts insights (whether deep or otherwise) about life or anything else and attempts to do so in a short and easily digestible manner. At Twitter.com said twitterist is limited to 140 characters. At twitterist.blogspot.com I am limited only by my own common sense.

I'm Still Using Windows Live Writer, But...

Well, I stuck with Windows XP until Microfuzz stopped supporting it in April of 2014, when I reluctantly moved to Windows 7, which I am still using. One of the few advantages was getting to re-install Windows Live Writer. Well, actually, the Fuzzy ones have abandoned WLW as well, but you can download and use it.

Windows Live Writer is still, in my opinion, great for easy updates to WordPress blogs. I have four Blogger blogs, however, including this one-- and guess what? Google decided to tinker with Blogger funtionality in such a way as to prevent WLW from uploading blog content to Blogger anymore. Gee, thanks, Google. I need to come up with a pet name for you, too, I suppose.

If you're like me and wish to prep your posts offline and outside the often clunky online blog entry pages, you still can even if WLW won't work for you. Download another great but abandoned Microfuzz program, Microsoft Expression Web. It used to be a sold program and was the Fuzz's answer to Dreamweaver. Since they stopped supporting it, the program can be downloaded for free and is, in my opinion currently the best free WYSIWYG HTML editor around. If you don't have it, grab it here at Microsoft before it disappears. While it's possible to create and operate a complete website using it, I just use it for composing pages quickly in the WYSIWYG interface, then copy/paste the HTLM code it creates.

If you use it for Blogger, you should host your images at an independent image host like Photobucket or Imgur. This is the best thing to do, anyway, because that way if you ever decide to transplant your website into a different hosting platform (using your XML backup files), your images will be there as well.

Anyway, I suppose the usability of WLW will gradually deteriorate over time, but for the moment it still has it's place on my desktop.