McMinn and Cheese

Echo 3 (Apple TV+) review

November 26th, 2022

What is a woman? What is a woman for? What is the purpose of a woman? The answer to this question for many TV writer-producers is problematic. A woman exists in order to give a man something to emote about. She exists to end up naked on a morgue slab or, um, you know, “missing” in somewhere called “South America”.

I’m afraid Apple TV aren’t doing themselves any favours with their latest drama offering, Echo 3, which has very little appeal off the bat, with even the colour scheme of the app tiles off-putting and grim. As I contemplate cutting back on my subscriptions, the only thing stopping me from cancelling Apple One right now is the forthcoming second season of Slow Horses. But when that’s done, I think I’m out.

The premise of Echo 3 is very unpromising. Let’s break down the first episode description: In the aftermath of a joyous wedding gone awry, the bride goes missing in South America and the military men in her family vow to find her.

There are some key phrase alarm bells here. “Joyous wedding”; “the bride”; “South America”; “military men”; and “vow to find her”.

First, the joyous wedding. I immediately got strong vibes of The Deer Hunter as this played out. The Deer Hunter is a candidate for the most boring film ever made. In Echo 3 there are a bunch of toxic males, a hint of redneckery in the air, a “drug addict” mother, and an inexplicably big fucking house. We’ll come back to this. Given that the scene begins with an argument between the “drug addict” mother and the bride, and ends with the groom being told he has to leave for a hostage rescue in the morning, I dispute the trade description of “joyous”. It’s a wedding. It’s packed full of clichés, and it’s boring to watch. We’ve seen it all before, we know what’s going to happen, so get to the chorus.

So the guy leaves on his rescue mission, and it all goes a bit pear shaped and there’s tension between this guy and his new brother-in-law over the shape of the pear. Is this the time to talk about the inexplicable wealth of the groom? There’s some chatter at the wedding about him running for Congress or something, and his family seem to have money. At which point I question why he, the rich son of a political family, has chosen a career in Special Forces. I also question the awesome modernist house he lives in with his supposedly “redneck” scientist bride. Let’s look at some facts and figures:

With a take-home pay of roughly $4,764/month, and the median 2BR apartment rental price of $2,506/mo**, an Army Special Forces would pay 52.6% of their monthly take-home salary towards rent.
(https://www.comparably.com)

Let’s assume that this Special Forces guy is paying somewhat more than $2506 for his amazing modernist home with infinity pool. There aren’t enough eye roll emojis in the world for this unlikely scenario.

As to the wife, she’s supposed to be from a redneck family (you know this because the family home is on a riverside, so they can go, you know, fishin’), but she’s also supposed to be a “brilliant scientist” who gives Ted talks.

Later “the bride” and “the groom” have a tense argument about her forthcoming trip to Columbia/Venezuela, and you can tell that the scriptwriters have never read David Mamet’s famous rant. There is a lot of “as you knowing”. For example:

Husband to wife: “You’re going to Columbia.”

Wife to husband: “I’ve been all around the world!”

Scientist to wife-scientist: “It’s our last day in the lab.”

Wife-scientist to scientist: ““Everybody else thinks I’m crazy for going to South America to study plants!”

It’s breathtakingly stupid.

Anyway, “the bride”. Just substitute the word “prize” for “bride” and you get the picture.

“South America” of course is the new Dark Continent, because it would be racist to just say, “Africa”, for example. And of course there’s a guerrilla war, because there’s always a guerrilla war down there. So why would the brilliant scientist want to go? Why did anyone ever want to visit the Americas? Drugs.

So then our unlikely “military men”, her rich-for-some-reason husband and her supposedly-redneck brother have to rescue her. Wait, sorry: they have to “vow to find her”. They have to put aside their differences and vow to find her even though (plot twist!) she MIGHT HAVE BEEN A SECRET CIA AGENT ALL ALONG.

Anyway, it’s terrible stuff, and terribly boring, so I wouldn’t bother if I were you.
Thinking through the problem of starting a new social account

November 24th, 2022

Magician hand with magic wand

That sinking feeling that so many Twitter users have, that they’re not sure they can be arsed starting from scratch, is what is keeping so many around—even if the instinct is to leave. And it explains the (not terribly useful) tools that sometimes help you find people you follow on Twitter on Mastodon.

There’s a lot of careful curation – a lot of work! – that has gone into my Twitter account. For example, while I’ve blocked a fair few accounts (let’s not assume they’re people) over the years, I have also muted around 200. That’s 200 decisions to shush people who I either follow out of politeness (see Face Theory), or more likely because they were so frequently retweeted into my timeline that I took action.

There are also about 80 key words I’ve muted, including phrases like “Farage”, “World Cup”, “Toby Young”, “Thanksgiving” — just because I’m not interested in the conversations people have around those topics. Which is before we get to the 300 or so hashtags I’ve muted, including “#xfactor”, “#wimbledon”, “#TobyYoung”, “#Strictly” — you get the picture. In fact, you’ll be wondering if there’s anything at all in my timeline.

But then in the Great Migration to Mastodon, where do I start?

You have to start the process of curation all over again, but you also want some shortcuts. At the same time, you don’t want to give offence to well-meaning people who are kind enough to follow you by not following them back (Face Theory again).

So here’s the problem. I am politically left; I won’t say liberal because that implies economic liberalism to me, and I am not that. I am progressive, redistribution, tax-the-rich till the pips squeak, hike fuel taxes, pro-renewable, anti-growth, all of that stuff. But I don’t tweet (or toot) about it much, and I don’t really want to be in conversations about it. I don’t believe tweeting (or tooting) about any issue makes a damn bit of difference. You can’t reform the voting system by tweeting (or tooting), or stop Nazis, or end oppression. You can’t even embarrass a politician these days, because we’re post all that. So I don’t want to either be in or out of an echo chamber. No interest in engaging with people who disagree with me (I won’t even cross the road to talk to my flag-waving neighbours), but also no interest in getting riled up by people who do agree. It’s just a waste of words and psychic energy.

There are lots of these people over on Mastodon. I don’t dislike them, but I just don’t want to read their political toots. Content warnings are a boon in this respect.

But what do I like, or want?

I don’t mind pretty pictures. I like following at least one art account, but I wouldn’t want to follow too many. And I like natural light photography. I’ve got not problem boosting a great picture of the night sky. On the other hand, I think the selfie is the death knell of civilisation (which is why I’m not on Instagram), I don’t want to see your tattoo or your piercing, and I don’t want to get into the Flickr-like loop of commenting, “Great shot” every time someone posts a nice photo. And I definitely do not want to look at your illustrations of pixies/vampires/pink haired beauties.

In summary, so far: politics is a no; landscape photography and painting a qualified yes. Star Wars, Pixar and Lego are generally a no.

Then there’s music. Fine, fine. I love The Beatles and The Band, and Brandi Carlile and Tift Merritt etc. But I do not want to follow your band’s account, sorry.

Novelists I’m fine with, as long as it’s not too pluggy and there aren’t too many political things.

As to journalists, in very small doses, yes. I prefer someone like Zoe Williams at the Guardian, who occasionally does write about politics (in an inside baseball kind of way), but also does lifestyle, talks about the funny things her kids put her through, and loves her dog. But some huge ego at the New York Times? No thanks.

The truth is that the people I like following the most (big surprise coming) are people like me. People who occasionally comment on the news—usually to make jokes; but also watch TV; read books; follow recipes; go for nice walks; potter around in the garden; ride bicycles; try to stop their houses from falling down around them. That kind of thing.

Now, if someone would just wave a magic wand.
Watching the Defectives

November 19th, 2022

Apple just raised their prices for their various services. I’m on a Family Apple One plan, paying for Music, TV+, and Arcade. On top of this, I’m paying for Fitness+, but something’s gotta give. Apple One has just gone up to £23 per month, which I wouldn’t mind, but I’m barely using any of the services. If it was just me, I might cancel — especially in response to the just-released Spirited, a Christmas movie that looks so offensive that even the tile in the app smarts my eyeballs. Apple deserve to lose money for commissioning shit like this.

My biggest issue with Apple, Netflix, and Amazon is that there are too many movies. Just cannot be arsed with them.

This is one of the things regarding subscription services that gall you. The sheer quantity of dross. It’s like when Amazon buys in loads of sport you’ll never watch; you realise you’re subsidising bids for content like today’s rugby extravaganza. Mind you, that’s not quite as offensive to the soul as the knowledge that you’re helping to pay for Clarkson’s lifestyle.

I actually wish Amazon hadn’t wasted all that money on the Lord of the Rings thing. When you think of the alternative intellectual property they could have acquired with that money (even within the same genre), your heart sinks. I guess we’re living through an era when a very small number of people with terrible taste and terrible personalities have too much power.

It has always been the case, of course, when it comes to the BBC licence fee, that most of what you pay for is rubbish. But it’s shocking when you add up all your various subscriptions and look at the bottom line and then look at the absolute gubbins it’s all paying for. Netflix is full of algorithmically commissioned mediocrity. I don’t know what my kids are watching, but I’m (re)watching 50 year old Star Trek, 30 year old Seinfeld, and six year old Travelers. I mean, I have seen some other stuff, but it was immediately forgotten.

I’m holding on to Apple One for the forthcoming second run of Slow Horses, and after that I might cancel at least the TV and the Arcade. To be honest, I’m not using the Music service either, but I’m sure my kids are. Unlimited streaming music doesn’t suit my temperament. It’s all just one big wash. I can listen to anything, so I listen to nothing. Turns out, I prefer scarcity. The end of scarcity is scary. I’m not mad (or rich) enough to turn to vinyl, of course, but I understand why some people do.

There’s likely to be a dearth of things to watch during the forthcoming unpleasantness in Qatar, so I’m girding my loins. Audiobooks?
The Northern Dough Co. Beer Crust Pizza Dough

November 16th, 2022

It’s been a rough week down at the old Pizza Home. On Saturday, I forgot to put yeast in my dough, and then blamed the lack of a rise on the temperature in the house until it was too late. It was only when I pulled the first pizza from the oven and bit into the comatose crust that I realised what I’d done.

Fortunately, I’d been curious enough about the Northern Dough Company’s frozen offering that I’d bought a pack. So, come whiskey wednesday, I gave it a try. I’d left it in the fridge to defrost overnight, and then I left it at room temperature, or at least near the woodburner, for a couple of hours.

The appearance of the dough balls was uninspiring. Inert lumps the colour of plasticine when you’ve blended all the colours together. They’d not appreciably changed shape or size since coming out of the fridge. It was déja vu all over again.

Hand stretching was a non-starter. The texture was also more like plasticine than not. So I used a rolling pin and made a 30cm round. It didn’t even liven up in the hot oven, instead catching on the edges, and emerging from the oven with a texture not unlike the dough I’d forgotten to put yeast into. It reminded me a bit of those pancake-like tarte flambée crusts you can buy in French supermarkets.

All in all, the worst week for pizza since the local Domino’s opened.
Mammals and The English

November 15th, 2022

Why is James Corden so popular? was a question I kept asking myself throughout Mammals (Amazon). On the one hand, mercifully short episodes and only six of them. On the other, James Corden has the wit and charisma of a white van man down the pub. I dunno. Was it at least an interesting premise? No. Was it a good story? Also no. Any minute now, and he’ll be talking about the footie.

Reviewers have been coy about the content, so spoilers ahoy, but basically the idea that Corden discovers his French-for-some-reason wife’s infidelity and obsessively stalks her. We get flashbacks (because of course we do) that fill in some of the improbable background (which is all somewhat reminiscent of those Woody Allen films in which the balding nerd writes scripts for himself in which beautiful women fall for him. Corden didn’t write this, but still). There’s some kind of nonsense about whales and Tom Jones, but it doesn’t add up to anything. And then it ends, or doesn’t, with a Big Reveal that totally doesn’t play fair with the audience, and a smell of desperation (please commission a second series, Amazon, please).

Talking of flashbacks brings me to The English (BBC) a six-part Western definitely not in the vein of Lonesome Dove and more like your revisionist-revisionist (or even, fittingly, spaghetti) Westerns. Unlike Unforgiven, this isn’t all rain and mud but instead the eye-popping colours of the (Spanish) prairie, beautifully photographed throughout. Still, there’s horrible brutality, lawlessness and disease. There are also a great number of British and Irish actors, along with a strong native American cast. There are slight hints of White Man’s Indian in the portrayal of the main character, Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer). His, um, nobility and stoicism, for example.

As to the story, it’s largely incoherent, the kind of thing you can’t second-screen along to (oops). There’s a kind of fog-of-war thing going on, and there’s another Big Reveal that doesn’t exactly play fair with the audience because we’ve traded plot development for non-linearity. This is not a Stranger Rides into Town narrative, it’s the other one. It’s the go-somewhere-do-something narrative. Except the filmmakers are so in love with a particular location, its horizontal light and its rocks and its colours, that they don’t really go anywhere much.

If the story is a deck of cards, they shuffle it a lot. A lot of confusion for me between the end of Episode 2 and Episode 3, where I’ve completely missed the point of the end of 2, so I’ve spent 3 wondering what that point was. Back and forth we go in time: there are (sometimes?) titles on the screen, which I guess provide this information, though if you’re me you are only occasionally looking up. It would help if you could hear what the actors are saying, but there is a lot of mumbling in heavy accents. And then sometimes the screen is nearly black with fashionable darkness.

So, good photography, apart from the dark bits, good cast, apart from the mumbling, interesting musical choices, brutality, criminality, disease, all that. It implies a lot more than it shows in terms of brutality and violence, which is a relief for the most part. There are some horror elements, however, and some disturbing visuals. Maybe more than I noticed because I only occasionally look at the TV? Anyway, there are some look-away moments you might want to look away from.

Watchable enough, and obviously interested in this very brief period of history between the anarchic opening up of ungoverned territory and the mythologising of it in wild west shows and early films. Bread and circuses.
digital havenots

November 13th, 2022

I’ve been using the latest Mac OS (Ventura) for a couple of weeks now, mostly with regret, bitterness, and frustration. Safari became very annoying — to the point where I was forced to use Chrome for some work-related sites (fingers crossed the 13.0.1 update improves things). And I hate using Chrome.

Obviously, the new System Settings is horrible, and new features in Mail are neither here nor there, because who gives a damn about email. One wrinkle this week was that I couldn’t print at work for several days, and this and other minor frustrations added up to a general thumbs-down to Ventura.

As to Stage Manager, which is Apple’s latest (of many) attempts to do something to shift the computing paradigm and make multitasking on the Mac “easier”, it doesn’t enhance anything for me. I’m not saying it wouldn’t work for someone who is completely new to the Mac, but it seems harder, less intuitive, and clunkier than the ways I’ve been using the system for decades now. And it eats into your small laptop screen space really intrusively. There are better ways. Switching between applications, for example, is straightforwardly achieved with a simple ⌘-Tab, whereas switching between open windows is ⌘-~ (tilde). Anything Apple has added to the system over the years to manage multiple apps/windows has been completely superfluous to requirements if you know those two basic moves.

But then features like Stage Manager aren’t aimed at the likes of me. They’re aimed at hypothetical new Mac users who have come to the Mac because they enjoy using an iPhone or an iPad. They’re designed to create paradigms that work across these platforms. But I’m sceptical. First of all, I doubt many of these hypothetical users exist; second of all, these features just don’t work very well.

For example, in Stage Manager, the default position is that the apps you’re not immediately using are shrunk down to thumbnails. But, say you want to drag a file from a Finder window to a browser window. You want both windows in your work space, and you have to fiddle around with Stage Manager to make that happen. And it’s not necessarily that obvious to someone who wasn’t born and bred in the briar patch of Mac drag-and-drop.

There has always been this problem/phenomenon with computers and software that 90% of users only need/use 10% of the features. Over my years in education I have seen this first hand, as both colleagues and students alike seem completely at sea with more advanced features or basic shortcuts like those outlined above. Watching people try to achieve something on a Windows PC is painful enough; but watching people use Macs ineptly is soul destroying. The shock of someone using a drop-down menu to copy and then paste is something you never get over. And when I tell my students to change their margins or line spacing before submitting work, well. Ha!

As computers get more and more ubiquitous, the designers of software have to cater for more and more users who haven’t got a clue. And the more this general ignorance is pandered to, the more it grows, tiddly-pom. Forty years of ICT education in schools seems to have done nothing to improve the experience of huge numbers of people. They still don’t know how to change line spacing or edit a template. And the fact is that even the most basic smartphone is completely beyond the ken of some people. I have in-laws in France, for example, who not only don’t have WiFi (and never will) but still drive several kilometres to the petrol station that lets them pay with a cheque. Trying to explain how to do things on an iPhone to these people is impossible. They’ll get the basics like tap-to-open, but the special swipe to switch between apps? Never in a million years.
The boiled frogs of Instagram

November 12th, 2022

When I picture instagram, in my mind’s eye I see beautifully composed landscape shots, eye-popping food photography, and tasteful, impossible interiors.

I don’t know why I see this. I wonder if it used to look like that, back in the early days. Or maybe it’s actually Flickr I’m remembering. *sigh*

Mindful that we might need an alternative, and soon, and aware that Mastodon probably won’t be it, I downloaded the Instagram app and went through the account creation process (my original account is long gone). I don’t want to have anything to do with Meta or any of its branches, so I was holding my nose as I did this.

But the first five minutes of onboarding was so utterly repellent that I immediately deleted everything. It seems to have evolved into the scrapings of shit off the shoes of culture. I knew it would be bad: my daughter has been keeping me updated with how bad it is. But I suppose people who have been on there are like the proverbial frog in a saucepan. They were long ago boiled to death, and when I opened the app what I saw was the aftermath. A big saucepan full of roiling pink water and eviscerated frogs.

It put me in mind of a couple of other things that I’ve found repellent over the years. There was an article in the Guardian the other day about The Word (not the magazine), the TV show that was a staple of Channel 4 post-pub entertainment in the early 90s. I was in my late 20s when it started, and I found it unwatchable. You’ll say that maybe I was just that little bit too old for it, in the same way I was that little bit too old for Star Wars. But then I’d also hated Channel 4’s The Tube, which was 10 years earlier. There’s just something about these trashy pop culture shows with talentless presenters that repels me. And these feelings never go away. I’ve absolutely hated Jonathan Ross and his style since he first appeared on The Last Resort. I absolutely refuse to watch or listen to him. I can’t watch YouTubers for the same reason. If I wanted to look at a talentless twat I’d look in the mirror.

And talking of talentless presenters and The Tube, another show being celebrated this week is Later… with Jools Holland, which I’ve never been able to watch, even when someone I liked was on. I cannot stand that man! That it’s been going for 30 years is everything that’s wrong with the media industry in a nutshell. Every time I even think about it, I say to myself, bring back Whistle Test. Bring back Rock Goes to College.

Eurotrash, The Word, The Last Resort, The Tube… whatever Channel 4’s secret sauce is, I’m allergic to it.

And looking at Instagram the other day, at the twitching video loops, the plumped out lips, the sticking out arses, the attention seekers drowning in their own narcissism, I was nauseated. It’s all the trashy gilt and glitter of our times in one place, a new gilded age. A long way from Beatles Twitter.

So I turn back to the hopelessly wet and fragile Mastodon, and I think, is this it?
fit and proper robots

November 11th, 2022

It ought not to shock me, because I’ve been alive for nearly 60 years, but it does. It seems extraordinary that it is apparently legal to buy a company with money you do not have…. Actually, I was going to continue that sentence, but let’s stop there. Racking up massive debts just to buy a company at way above its market value seems incredible and irrational to me. And then it turns out to also be legal to then transfer that irrational debt onto the company you just bought. So you borrow $billions, but then make it a problem for other people—in this case, the company’s employees.

So now you’ve saddled the company with massive debts, you start whining that the company isn’t making enough money to service the interest payments on those debts. These are crocodile tears, because you didn’t want to do the deal in the first place. So you’re in a hurry to destroy the company, file for bankruptcy, and stroll away. You start laying people off, because your accountant’s brain sees that the greatest expenditure is on salaries. Save money save money. But you end up laying off the people who were keeping your advertisers (and various other stakeholders, including governments) happy. So now your future potential earnings are slashed and there seems to be zero chance of servicing the debt that you saddled the company with, even after laying off an enormous number of employees.

A death spiral. Chapter 11 the next step, no doubt. So the mugs who loaned you the money to buy the now worthless company don’t get their interest payments.

There isn’t just one person to blame for all this, of course. I mean, the above seems criminal to me, but let’s not forget that the company itself, its board and shareholders, forced the idiot to go through with the purchase when he tried to back out. They knew that the company was over-valued, and the deal on the table was too good to let it go. So they forced it through, knowing it would lead to disaster because the debt would ruin the company.

So these were rats in lifejackets, taking a hefty profit and walking away like fucking Bruce Willis as the company exploded behind them.

Ultimately, I blame Ayn Rand. Because its that insidious ‘philosophy’ that so many undeservedly wealthy people have that lies behind the trashing of peoples’ lives. And in Emo’s case, there’s a fundamental belief that he doesn’t need people because they can be replaced by robots. He thinks robots can drive cars. He thinks twitter is all about the bots. And like a lot of billionaires prepping for the ‘pocalypse, he knows that he’ll need robot servants because pesky people would murder him.

I’ve been reading The Murderbot Diaries again, which is a comforting thought.
Lonely Hearts Clubhouse – Episode 9: Fred Astaire

November 9th, 2022

And so we come to the end of Season 1 of the Lonely Hearts Clubhouse, and we finish with a fun episode about musician, actor and dancer – and Hollywood legend – Fred Astaire. He’s the ninth personage along in the back row of the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. It’s hard to say which of the Beatles (or which of the artists involved) picked him, but he’s a very interesting subject. We opted for possibly Lennon in the end, but it could equally have been McCartney. Like Mae West and W C Fields, Astaire was an unconventional movie star. Not gifted with the good looks normally required to be a leading man, he nevertheless headlined movies because of his extraordinary talent for dancing.

More than that, Astaire was a versatile musician. You’ll see him at the piano in Roberta, and you’ll see him playing his drums in one of his TV specials. Macca-like in that respect. There’s even an extraordinary dance/drum sequence in Damsel in Distress in which Astaire plays drums with his hands and his feet, and tap dances, all shot in one continuous take with a single camera.

It’s this extraordinary talent that made him an inspiration for Frank Sinatra, 16 years his junior, but who always loved to sing songs made famous by his hero.

This is the season 1 finale of Clubhouse. Elodie is away in New Mexico for now, so season 2 will wait a while.
It’s not free speech we hate, it’s you

November 5th, 2022

Look away now if you think Mastodon is in any way a viable alternative to Twitter.

There’s a certain level of millennial hysteria in the air about Twitter at the moment, and a number of people are trying out Mastodon, the distributed social network that is so nerdy and complex that there’s simply too much friction involved in getting on it. As to the chances of ever finding the nice people you follow on Twitter, and managing to follow them all again, good luck. You’ll need it.

I tried it out before, during the last bout of millennial hysteria, before Twitter came to its senses and started banning evil people. What I found then was a strong sense that people had gone there to get away from the likes of me (middle aged white male), and fair enough. Given that after 32 years on Twitter I still only have 285 followers, there doesn’t seem to be enough lifetime left to me to build it up from zero again. Mastodon is for the young.

And I’m going to sound unkind, that nothing I’ve seen over there makes me believe I’m missing out. I’m afraid the discourse just seems utterly wet to me. If people aren’t just talking about Mastodon itself, which most of them are. And, Jesus Christ, the patronising tone of those who have been on there for a while in offering advice to normies and newbies.

As to Twitter, is it doomed? This time, it might be. Musk is a dick, and nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is. His one-dimensional understanding of free speech (and freedom in general), his inability to empathise with others, his ridiculous binary thinking, his false dichotomies and his impulsive behaviour all mean that the company is not in safe hands.

More than this, Twitter itself has always been a failure. Apart from its initial (weird) concept of 140 character posts, nothing the service has added since has improved it. Sure, we all post photos and videos, but they wouldn’t be missed. A doubling of the character count didn’t improve things. Threads and quote tweets made things worse. Its advertising model is annoying and has never made it enough money. And as to the algorithm: trends, topics, recommendations, the non-chronological timeline — it results in a user-hostile experience that leads to red mists and rage.

Talking of rage and outrage: the absolute worst aspect of Twitter has always been people screaming into their own echo chambers. Beatles Twitter is actually really nice, and I’m sure you can create a nice experience for yourself with careful curation. But it takes time. And you have to be ruthless. Perhaps the most disappointing thing is when people you really like and support start retweeting the arseholes into your timeline and commenting about them. Or, worse, amplifying arseholes/bots who have, like, three followers.

It’s the lack of common sense in the end. If people hadn’t piled into the outrage cycle over Trump, if people now just left Musk to his followers, we’d all be happier. There’s no point in engaging with these people, as we have known since time immemorial. Don’t Feed The Trolls was first painted on a cave wall somewhere in the South of France 17,000 years ago.

So, no Mastodon for me. And if Twitter dies, it dies. We’ll all have to start blogging again.