The need to write

I’ve now been off all social media for about 18 months. My last post was on May 8th 2020:

I’m only embedding that because …WordPress…

Do I dip into it? No. I never, ever do. I mean, I never was one of those people (weirdos) who log into their Twitter account and look back over the last X hours of postings while they were gone – this just seemed to me to be a weird misuse of the media. IMO, Twitter isn’t an in-box, it’s a transitory BANG in your face and if you miss it, it’s gone. But maybe that was just me.

I haven’t been on Facebook for a gazillion years. I ditched WhatsApp last year. Zuckerbot can fucking do one. Meta. What a cock.

Literally my only vice now is HackerNews, which I love mainly for the incredible variety of posts, discussion and intelligence. About 90% of it is so, so far beyond me that if I wasn’t such an old, self-assured SOB would make me feel tiny in my insignificance. But that remaining 10% is just incredible. I mean this for example (which is responding to Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness article from 1932) is just brilliant. I’ve read and bookmarked and returned to the original article many times before, but the conversation around it here is new, and dynamic, and wonderful.

What’s interesting about HN as a network is that it is very tightly moderated – not “tightly” as in “no opposing views here” but just wonderfully kept on track by the famous Dang – (there’s a good article here about all of that). There is variety of opinion, and difference, but it doesn’t lapse into the kind of bullshit you see on Twitter. There are no silos, just interesting and varied conversation.

Anyway, none of that is what I came here to post. What I did come here to post is that I like writing – and although for the last two years I have been keeping a private journal (of sorts, it’s all about meditation and so is a bit one-sided and minimal…), I realise that I miss putting [public] words down. So – and I know I said this before, haven’t we all – I think I’ll try punting some much shorter posts into this blog, categorised transients – and do it more frequently. A kind of Twitter but without any of that social bullshit that goes with it… 🙂

I did make the RANTIMATOR to do this, but I’ll leave that for those ranty moment…