On the current state of my social media

On July 23, 2021July 23, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I don’t know how necessary this post really is, but it’s been knocking around in my head for a week or two now and I haven’t written it yet, so screw it, let’s go. Here’s where I am across the Web and how those accounts are doing:

The blog, infinitefreetime.com itself. I’ve been here almost ten years and I’m going nowhere. Traffic is way down from last year but still getting about 100 hits a day. WordPress also tells me it sends out about 10,000 emails every time I post, but I don’t know if it actually counts if those people read the post in their browsers (I kinda doubt it) and I don’t know how many of those accounts are actually alive; I feel like that should turn into way more than 100 hits per day if they’re real. I will keep yammering into this space until the internet itself shuts down.
Twitter, @nfinitefreetime. 10,597 followers, a number that drops by a few every day for no clear reason but who appear to be actual live accounts. Twitter has all sorts of problems but I love it, and it provides an outlet for Politics Luther, which keeps him away from the blog most of the time and (much more importantly) keeps him from ranting at my wife all the Goddamned time. All of my old tricks for gaining followers stopped working right after I hit 10K on this account and nothing I’ve been able to do since then (and that was a couple of years ago now) has really moved the needle much.
TikTok, @lutherteachesmath. As of this exact second, 7,744 followers, a number that continues to creep upward slowly despite the fact that I’m not posting too often. I keep almost killing this account, because I don’t trust TikTok as an entity at all– I’ve known too many creators who had their accounts suddenly permabanned for no fucking reason at all to be willing to think of this site as anything more than a flash in the pan that’ll be gone in a few years. This is, for those of you who care about such things, the first time I’ve linked to my TikTok from the blog since I took my real name out of it. I figure the issue isn’t people going from here to there isn’t an issue; what I don’t want is people going from there to here, which is why the word “Siler” appears nowhere on the TikTok.
Goodreads, right here. I have 722 “friends” and 110 “followers” on the site, but to be honest I really don’t use Goodreads as a social media site at all; I use it as an online database to keep track of my various reading projects. I approve every friend request I’m sent and don’t interact with other people there at all unless I know them from somewhere else. That said, if you want to see what I’m reading and the other half-dozen ways I have available to do it don’t work for you, I’m probably not going anywhere anytime soon from here either.
YouTube, lutherplaysgames.com. Currently 22 subscribers and also currently absorbing more of my mental energy than any other site I use. I am going to have to dial back how often I’m posting once school starts but I’m having a hell of a lot of fun with it right now. I know I’ve been yammering about it a lot lately but you really should come say hello.
Patreon, right here. Currently sixteen very patient Patrons; this site is all but defunct and I haven’t charged my Patrons in forever. I should probably just shut it down but I feel like everyone who is still supporting me deserves a free book if I ever write another one (Click doesn’t count, because that’s a reward for the $2 level and everyone got one when I made it available anyway) and I’m just trying to remember to cancel billing every month until that actually happens.

I have permanently shut down my Facebook account and haven’t missed it, and along with that I also shut down my Instagram account, which I admit I do kind of miss. If anybody wants to recommend a photo-posting site other than Insta or Snapchat, feel free, especially anything Facebook doesn’t own. I’m pretty sure I haven’t missed anything I currently have an account on, or at least anything I’m paying attention to. Any fun communities out there I should be a part of? Go follow me on everything that exists!

Scam alert update

On December 9, 2020December 9, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

It has been pointed out to me that the suspect checkout interface I pointed out yesterday is apparently the base checkout screen for the Shopify platform, and I had a couple of people show me legit websites that they’ve used repeatedly that use that platform. I’m going to slightly back off and modify my claim from yesterday, from a flat “avoid” to a “back out and do some research.” I’m also going to echo Elisabeth’s comment from yesterday that another thing these shitty sites have in common is Facebook and Instagram ads. You’re probably all familiar with this phenomenon; you click on one ad, sometimes by accident, or sometimes just linger over one too long and suddenly you have ads featuring the exact same pictures from several different sites.

I have a policy now; if I recognize a photo of a piece of merchandise from another ad, I start reporting every single ad where I see that photo as a scam. I have threatened to do this before and not followed through, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been to shutting down both Facebook and Instagram for good. I have here, TikTok and Twitter; that really ought to be enough social media for everyone.

Not much else going on today, but I thought I’d point all that out.

Oh right almost forgot

On November 15, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking6 Comments

I just got an invitation to Ello. Which at the moment I have no real idea how to use. Apparently I get invites for other people, though? Or something? At any rate, I’m @luthersiler over there if there are any of you using it. Accepting friend invites from anyone and everyone at the moment until I decide if I like the service or not. I’ll post impressions after a bit if I think it’s worth talking about.

In which I make a request

On November 3, 2013November 3, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

Today’s Despair for the Human Race moment of the day: discovering, among my search results, the term “math calculator,” implying that 1) someone found it necessary to append the word “math” to the word “calculator,” as if there were some other kind; and 2) that the person doing the appending was not aware that the device they were using to search for a “math calculator” almost certainly already had a calculator on it somewhere, and 3) that the person’s search skills led to them clicking on a result that led to a blog, meaning that they were probably just clicking on everything.(*)

Sigh.

But anyway: Are you reading this? (Dumb question; of course you are! Everyone reads me, for I am both Influential and Popular!) Do you use Instagram? (Yes, it’s dumb. You should anyway!)

If the answer is “yes” to both questions, you should go find my Instagram account (same username, http://www.infinitefreetime.com if they let you search by URL) and friend me or connect with me or whatever verbiage they want to use over there. If the answer is “no” to either question, you should either figure out how you got here (if “no” was the answer to Question #1) or get yourself a damn Instagram account already (if the answer to #2 was “no”.)

The number of people I’m connected to on Instagram has remained stable but people are posting fewer pictures lately for some reason and I want more stuff to look at. The weird thing about Instagram, at least to me, is that looking at pictures turns out to be fun even if I don’t know who the people are in the pictures or even if the pictures, objectively speaking, aren’t actually very good. It doesn’t seem to matter for some reason. So don’t worry about if your pictures Aren’t Good Enough for public consumption; they can’t be worse than mine. I discovered by accident once that I thought the texture of my jeans looked cool through one of the filters, so one of my pictures is literally a picture of my knee. It’s all good.

So, yeah. Go find me. I need more fun stuff to look at.

(*) INTERESTING ADDITIONAL DETAIL: I got two hits from search engines so far today, and while I do usually see the search terms and I see which search angine led to the pageview, I don’t get them combined– in other words, I see that someone used Bing to get to me and that someone used Google, and I see two search terms, but I don’t see which specific term led to a hit through which specific service.

I got curious, and did a search for “math calculator” in both Bing and Google. Nothing in the first ten pages of search results for either service leads to my blog. This isn’t the first time that has happened, either; I’ve often gotten curious about how high I show up on a search results list when I see that something weird has led to a hit and invariably I discover that the person has waded through at least a dozen pages of search results before clicking on my blog.

People use the Internet very differently from how I do.

Anyway, here’s my knee:

On how to quickly and efficiently make me a crazy person

On June 22, 2013June 22, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy1 Comment

I like Instagram more than I ever imagined I would. I’m far from a good photographer and half of my pictures are bullshit that no one would ever have any reason to want to look at, so maybe I’m a terrible Instagrammer– but I like the hell out of this app for some reason. I’ve got a couple of friends who appear to take pictures of every single object they look at and post them to Instagram; I’m not at that level yet (and, for the record, I’m not griping about those who are) but I may be headed that way. I don’t know why this is so much fun but it is.

Anyway.

That’s the moon. It was taken yesterday, at OtherJob. It’s not blurry as hell out of any particular desire to be arty or anything like that; that’s just how the picture came out and I decided I liked it enough to go ahead and use it.

Note a couple of things:

That the moon is full, or is at least nearly enough so as to not matter for this picture.
That the moon is bright. Full moons are bright! That’s kind of the idea!
That the moon is, while large, not larger than you’d expect it to be.

You can cover the moon with a dime held at arm’s length, people. When it’s at the horizon your brain tricks you with the Moon Illusion, which– while really, really cool– does not actually represent a change in the moon’s size. The moon looks small from the Earth’s surface. It should; it’s not very big to begin with (by celestial-object standards, I mean) and it’s, on average, 380,000 kilometers or so away.

I’ll get back to this in a minute.

It is not a secret: people are wrong on the Internet . There are always people who are wildly catastrophically stupidly wrong on the Internet and they will always be out there, on the Internet, being all wrong and shit, and furthermore some of them are wrong on purpose and those people enjoy making you crazy.

For a certain kind of person, how capable they are of ignoring Internet idiocy is a useful measure of their overall mental health. I say “for a certain kind of person” because some people don’t notice Internet idiocy; those are generally the kinds of people making the rest of us insane. The quality I’m talking about is the ability to read something, recognize that you have lost IQ points to its soul-destroying stupidity, and then ignore it and move on with your life.

Anyway. Here’s a guide to how to make me nuts:

1) Be wrong on the Internet. This ain’t hard. And, to make this clear, I’m wrong on the Internet all the time. If I wasn’t in the habit of deleting all my Facebook posts a day or two after they go up I could point to many examples. Some of the people most likely to set me straight when I’m wrong on the Internet may well comment on this.

2) Be someone who should know better than whatever nonsense it is than you just posted. This is critical; I’m actually pretty good at ignoring stupid from people who I already think are stupid. If I think of you as an intelligent person, or you occupy a job that should by rights be held by someone with a brain in their head, and I see you posting stupid shit, I’m much more likely to intervene and point out why you’re being stupid. (2A is “or catch me in the mood to fuck with someone,” which I’ll admit does happen sometimes, but is less common than those who know me well might actually think.)

3) After I correct your stupid, use the phrase “that’s your opinion” or “we’ll agree to disagree.”

No. No we fucking won’t. You’re wrong, or I wouldn’t have wasted the breath on correcting your dumb fucking ass. (Can I tell the difference between fact and my opinion? Yes! I’m about to illustrate the difference.)

Here is the difference: if me correcting you uses math, you’re wrong.

For example, if you’ve used the phrase “supermoon” in the last couple of days. And if you’re posting on something you’re calling an “astronomy blog.” And if you seem to think that the moon is not only going to be several times larger than it usually looks but is going to cause earthquakes and volcanoes due to its incredible proximity to the Earth, and you post this on your astronomy blog, it is entirely possible that I’m going to speak with you about it. And when I use the numbers in your own post to point out that the difference between “average” moon and “super” moon is less than seven percent, and you tell me “that’s your opinion,” I’m going to get a little closer to losing my mind on you. Because that’s not what “opinion” means. And when I further point out that your stupid ass has suggested that something that happens a little bit less than once a year causes earthquakes and floods, and you tell me that “you’re just saying that the idea is out there,” I’m probably going to savage your soul. Because, guess what, jackass? There’s this thing, called observation, that we can use to determine whether the moon causes earthquakes and floods and volcanoes and swarms of locusts every 13.5 months. And someone who calls himself a “scientist” probably ought to acknowledge the fact that there’s a way to determine with objectivity whether this “idea” that’s “out there” is true or not.

And it isn’t.

That’s not my opinion. That’s fucking reality. It is objective fact that the moon is not going to look five times larger in the sky on Sunday than it does today. It will, to the naked eye, look exactly the fucking same. Will it be bright and prominent and light up the night sky? Yes! That’s what the full moon does.

So, yeah. If you want to make me crazy, pose as a scientist, post blatantly nonscientific shit where I can see it, then try and blame me when I call you out on it. The end.

(Seriously, though? Look up on Sunday. The moon is cool, “super” or not.)