Tag: social media

Station Identification, Nov. 5 2022

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

This used to be a whole thing that I did every week, and I got out of the habit several years ago, when it stopped being as important to me that everyone who follows me here also follows me everywhere else. However, I figure that what with the entire social media universe in complete upheaval at the moment, it’s probably useful to start doing it again at least occasionally.

Note that my Linktree has convenient links to literally every single one of these places if you’d like to just click on that and save yourself trouble, but I’m going to go through everything anyway.

  • The big one is my blog, infinitefreetime.com, and you’re already here unless you’re looking at this through some sort of RSS thing, and I don’t even know if you can do that. The blog turns 10 next year, I own it, and while I go through periods of more and less frequent posting, I’m not going anywhere, and coming here will be the most reliable place to find me for the foreseeable future.
  • Second most-active is my YouTube gaming channel, lutherplaysgames.com. I almost shut this down once and then decided against it, and right now I’m back to having fun with it. It’s also the account that I’m most interested in growing, so if you aren’t subscribed you really should go click on it. You’ve got a YouTube account already even if you’re not using it so you may as well subscribe to me. 🙂
  • I still have ten thousand followers on Twitter and still post there regularly, although that follower count has dropped by a few hundred this week due to Shenanigans. Be aware that my Twitter is considerably more profane and more political than my presence here, if that’s something that might bother you, although I also do a lot of book discovery over there. I will genuinely miss Twitter if it dies.
  • I don’t post on TikTok as often as I used to but I’m still reasonably active over there and it’s still a huge Goddamn time sink.
  • Everyone should follow me on Goodreads even though I don’t use the social features there at all. Just, like, do it. I have 712 friends over there and they all found me. I don’t know anywhere near 712 people.
  • I just started a Discord server today, just for the hell of it. There’s really nothing there at the moment but that link will allow anyone to join if they want, assuming I set it up correctly.
  • OKAY THIS ONE I’M SERIOUS ABOUT: I just started playing with Duolingo recently and while it’s not quite a social media network, if you’re using it I’d love some more friends. Right now I’m doing Spanish, Japanese, Arabic and Welsh simultaneously and I’m enjoying the hell out of myself.
  • I have also started accounts on Mastodon and Tribel, and right now I don’t know a Goddamn thing about either of them and Tribel in particular looks like it’s going to be something I quickly walk away from, but those seem to be the two most common destinations for Twitter refugees at the moment so I’m giving them a shot. If you’re over there, hit me up.

So. Yeah. Follow me! On all the things! And if there are other places I should be checking out, let me know!

On the news

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Politics5 Comments

I don’t know, as I’m typing this, whether this will end up being a thousand-word post or two paragraphs, because I really don’t know how much I want to talk about this and I won’t know until I start typing. So here we go: I do not intend to watch a single second of the hearings about the January 6th insurrection tonight, nor do I plan to watch them in the future, and in fact I’m not even sure how many days of hearings are currently scheduled. There is nothing– nothing— that these hearings can actually teach me about what happened that day; as near as I can tell all the committee has managed to do is confirm stuff that was perfectly fucking obvious from the day it happened. Of course the shitstain knew what was happening. Of course the highest echelons of the Republican Party were involved in planning it. The closest thing to a surprising detail I’ve heard in the last six months was that Pence’s staff knew that he was in danger, and Pence is such an indescribable coward that he has continued to cling to this wretched creature anyway.

Fuck it. Fuck all of it. I spend all day every day angry and I’m not going to deliberately add to it. I’m just not going to do it.

What I will do, of course, is keep an eye on fucking Twitter, which will no doubt keep me appraised of everything happening in the most anger-inducing manner possible. Or maybe I’ll just turn everything off and shoot Nazis all night again. I am a hundred percent not alone in this, but I would love to find a way to balance knowing enough about what is going on in the world to be able to consider myself an informed citizen with shutting off the absolute fucking fire-hose torrent of horror and evil the world has become. I can feel myself becoming Col. Kurtz over here, y’all, and no one needs that. Least of all me.

I’m going to shoot Nazis to bleed off some stress and then I’m going to watch the first episode of Ms. Marvel, and hopefully I’ll be able to do that without thinking about how fucking awful most of the people who share my hobbies are. We’ll see.

In which I’m not going anywhere yet

On By Luther M. SilerIn life4 Comments

I didn’t mean for this to work this way, but this headline is doubly appropriate: first, because despite Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter, I don’t plan to immediately flee the service. I didn’t like Jack either, and actually I don’t know who the hell runs the place now, so it’s not like I’ve ever personally approved of whoever was at the top of the corporate ladder at the place. Musk’s ownership probably won’t become official for six months or so (and isn’t guaranteed,) and I’m not about to flee a place where I have nearly eleven thousand followers and something like fifteen years of history without a better reason.

Like, for example, “I hate it there.” I might leave Twitter because I hate Twitter. But not because of Musk. Not, at least, until he starts changing things. Then we’ll see.

Also, speaking of things that aren’t happening, I have officially not gotten the only job I have managed to get an interview for since I started applying to jobs a couple of months ago. And … honestly, whatever. I’m not bothered by it. They ended up going with someone with coding experience, which I always knew was a weak spot in my application, and if you’ve been following along lately you know I was lukewarm on the job at best anyway. I still don’t especially want to return to my current school in the fall, but I’m far from convinced that this would have been an improvement.

Are we sure it’s only Tuesday, by the way? Is there any chance that it’s Thursday right now? Because this has been an insanely long two days, and I really don’t like having my worst class at the very end of the day.

Let’s see how long this lasts

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

I have deleted TikTok, Twitter and Tweetbot— yes, I had two different apps just for Twitter– from my phone. My plan is to leave them gone for a week; my hope is that I can make it through my coffee tomorrow morning. My phone rather helpfully asked me if I wanted to cancel my $5.99 yearly subscription to Tweetbot, which I actually declined; it re-ups next week, which kind of entertains me.

I’m trying to cut down on the amount of free-floating dread and hate I have in my life, you see. Twitter is a prime contributor to this, although TikTok definitely has its moments, and although I feel like both services are useful to me in certain ways– Twitter, in particular, is the source of most of my news nowadays– I just need a detox for a while. I need free-floating existential dread to have less of a death-grip on my brain and every time I open Twitter up I am reminded how fucking awful everything is.

Note that I’m not even going cold turkey on the service– I literally have it open on my second monitor as I’m typing this, the second monitor that I have on my desk more or less specifically for Twitter. I’m just keeping it off my phone, to cut down on those moments where I realize I’ve lost an hour to mindless scrolling. I mean, hell, I’ve stopped typing this post three or four times because something shiny scrolled by, so maybe I’ll ditch that too. But baby steps, right? Right.

Nattering about video games

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

First of all: I reviewed Hoa when I first played it– spoiler alert, I really liked it– but I promised to link to the Let’s Play when it was up and I never did. So here it is; all five episodes are live so if you have some time to watch, feel free. Hit that subscribe button, too.

Second, it’s weird how this whole YouTube thing has affected the way I actually play video games. This is not at all surprising, but I find it interesting anyway. To be more specific: a game I did a Let’s Play series for just released some new (free) DLC, and I don’t know how to play it, if that makes any sense. Before, I’d just play it or not. Now, I’m going back and forth between doing regular episodes, a livestream where I just run through the whole thing, or– crazy, I know– possibly just playing it off-camera, y’know, like a normal person.

(Looks it up, discovers it requires a fresh playthrough to be done right, decides not to play at all)

Still, though.

In related news, I’m playing Far Cry 6 right now, and that’s set in the “real” world, so to speak, and so features licensed music whenever you enter a vehicle. I uploaded a bunch of new episodes yesterday and immediately got hit with a ton of more-or-less bullshit copyright claims, but the way YouTube arbitrates copyright claims puts all the power in the hands of the people claiming that you’re violating your copyright. Now, granted, I’m hundreds and hundreds of followers away from monetizing the channel and will probably lose interest well before it gets that big, but it annoys me that there could be a 13-second clip of a song that was licensed to the game in my video because I jumped into a car for a few seconds and because of that these folks feel like they’re entitled to all of the revenue that video might generate, as if those thirteen seconds are the fucking reason people are watching the half-hour video. It’s horseshit. I’ve turned off the radio option for any further episodes I record so this won’t be happening again, but I’m thinking about re-editing the videos that have claims on them just to pre-empt any future bullshit. The way I record preserves my commentary and the game audio in separate files, so it would take some time to do but in terms of the actual work involved it would be pretty trivial to snip the songs out. We’ll see if my appeals go through or not.

Bathroom work is proceeding apace. Not as exciting today as yesterday, but I’ll post pictures later anyway.

Two quick things

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

One, my run of Blasphemous starts today on the channel. I’ve been having a lot of fun with this and just recorded Episode 20, so jump in now so you can watch from the beginning, especially if you’re one of the dwindling number of religious studies folks who follow me:

Second, it is good to know that Twitter is willing to stand up against people bullying Kyle fucking Rittenhouse, who is not, for the record, tagged or even mentioned by name in this post:

I assume this is a “delete the Tweet and we’ll forget all about this” type of situation; we’ll see how long it takes me to miss Twitter enough to do it.

On the continuing contraction of my social media

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life4 Comments

My Facebook and Instagram accounts have been closed for some time now, and while I occasionally miss Instagram a little bit, I find I haven’t missed Facebook at all, and I think at this point it’s probably fair to say that I’m not going to be reactivating that account ever again. And I find myself looking around at the rest of my accounts and trying to figure out what could go next.

I gotta be honest; I’m starting to think about losing Twitter and TikTok. I’ve pretty much stopped posting on TikTok; maybe a video a week at most, and the site mostly exists as a time sink for me now. I could, I suppose, completely rework how I use it– the good thing about TikTok is the way the site celebrates enthusiasm of all kinds, so if I went through and made sure I was just following the woodworking and bookmaking and cooking and BookTok and other maker types of accounts, I could probably keep it up for longer, but right now it’s not really doing anything for me other than giving me something to stare at, and the way the site’s moderation works even without any regular posting it’s only a matter of time before they decide to ban me for no fucking reason at all.

And Twitter … man, I’m really split on Twitter. On the one hand, it’s my main source of news, and one of the really big ways I discover new books nowadays. On the other hand, it’s my main source of news, and the news is constantly horrible all the time and evil has won. I have a number of people I interact with over there who I really like, but they’re all parasocial relationships with people who probably wouldn’t actually miss me much if I disappeared from the site and a fair number of them show up here or on YouTube anyway. (YouTube is not currently in danger, for the record.)

But … God, I need to get the despair under control lately, and I really am starting to think that Twitter is an overall drag on my mental health. But it has some utility to me beyond just being a time sink, and for that reason I’m not nearly as likely to decide to get rid of it. I just need to find a way to get the horror aspects of the site under control, as it’s become perfectly clear lately that I am never going to be able to block my way out of the bullshit. My blocklist is in the mid-five-figures right now and there’s still just an endless torrent of bullshit every single day. Just today alone I found out that Joyce Carol Oates, Letitia Wright, and Tim Burton were massive assholes, and, like, I don’t need this shit.

(Also up for debate: is Twitter what’s causing a decline in my mental health, or is it the state of the fucking world, and it’s just Twitter taking the brunt of that? Or both? There’s no reason it can’t be both.)

(Like, it’s not Twitter’s fault that the Republicans are literally going to tank the world economy less than a month after I decided to take retirement investments seriously. But Twitter is how I’m hearing about all this shit so it’s taking the blame.)

I dunno. I’m not doing anything anytime soon, but I’m starting to think about it in a more serious fashion than I have in the past.

On the current state of my social media

On 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!