20251007

[As usual, three weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]

Tuesday. Didn’t sleep for shit last night, so a lot rough this morning and trying to organize my thoughts. Rambly.

Interesting weekend on Bluesky (social media platform). It is supposed to be decentralized, with different servers serving different communities. The woman who runs the place and most of her team are apparently cryptobros and from the outside it looks like their politics run to Elon Musk in flavor, in spite of the place being fairly left of center generally.

She, however, went all in on transphobia and Trumperism over the last week. It was kinda painful to watch. When a few people (blacksky elders on the blacksky domain instead of hers) called her out on it, she started banning them.

Mind you, these were folks that had migrated to blacksky, which was supposed to mean that they were off her system and not under her control.

It would appear that she forgot to tell everyone that she retains a nuke button and we’re back to X/Twitter or Facebook banning accounts they don’t like for reasons that have nothing to do with anything but challenging them as they race to the right wing.

Pity. I rather enjoyed bluesky because of those same folks that the woman in charge is now punishing and driving away. From her commentary, she wants only Trumpers on her platform, and I’m guessing she’s about 6-9 months from achieving that, because I’ve already mentally stepped back from interacting with that platform. You’ll see me a little on mastadon, but Eugen went full fucking Trumper in the summer of 2024 and I got to be punched in the face online with it, so I don’t trust that fucker as far as I could throw him.

We’ve talked about the era of mass social media inflecting. Looks like we’re on the race to the crash slope at the moment and we’ll be back to search engines and rss feeds (for you olds out there), except that search engines have been fully enshitified now with AI (which is Clippy from MS Office, stoned on mushrooms and speed and guessing what the next word should be).

Dunno if the internet as we know it is about to achieve dystopia. I read Hunter S. Thompson when I was in my twenties, and he talked about that stretch of road beyond Barstow where the Sixties hit their high water before failing, and how that generation was likely to be the peak of American culture, with their kids and their kids worse off.

He wrote those words in the early 70s, some 50-odd years ago. And they were prophetic.

I don’t like living in interesting times, but I at least studied enough political science to see it coming and spend several decades preparing for it.

But yeah, the times they are a’changing.

You ready?

Writing. Writing? Sure.

Past halfway on Scattered Tribes 3. And on Harri the Merchant 1. Corsac 7 comes out in a couple of days and rounds off Block One. Science Officer 15 and 16 right behind that and round off Season Two. Marrakesh 6 in January to extend that series with further adventures. The Heather and Ollie take up most of the year, so I’m writing into 2027-8 at this moment, though I plan to drop a few random things here and there just to get them out of the trunk.

BOLO for more and early releases, because I’m likely to put them up on the store and forget about them for a while, before getting around to pushing them to the distributors.

Hope your Tuesday makes more sense than mine does.

shade and sweet water,

b

West of the Mountains, WA

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