Author: abcrisp

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The Decline and Fall of Twitter?

Much to the displeasure of everyone, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter went through over a week ago, and since then everything has been terrible on the site. From Musk firing over half of the company to Twitter Verification becoming a subscription service (though not just yet; the latest report suggests Twitter will be holding off on that change until after the U.S. Midterm elections this week) to advertisers backing away ( for example, the Canadian Federal Government has “issued guidance” to its departments to pause any current or future ad campaigns on the site), to Elon apparently begging for the people he fired to come back. The mood on Twitter can be summed up by the phrase “The End is Nigh.”

I’m not exactly happy at this turn of events. My social media use and presence has never been big to begin with, and both with my own changes in creative ambitions and changes to the services themselves, I’ve backed away from a number of social media options. Apart from this website, Twitter and Discord are practically my only social media presences now, and my presence on the latter is somewhat niche, to put it mildly. Twitter is hardly perfect, but it remained the one place I could buzz about and keep up with various news sources I might not find elsewhere as well as funny, heartfelt, and/or thoughtful tidbits. That Twitter might become unusable or toxic in a matter of weeks (and that’s being optimistic) is not a nice thought.

To be fair, I don’t have all that much to lose, as I don’t have much of a brand and certainly no real income depending on Twitter. I have 48 followers, of which I might actually interact with about three, and those because I know them personally. What few tweets that seem to get attention in the wider world do so only by riding the coattails of some more popular tweet I chose to reply to or retweet with my own commentary. With the new algorithms set to go into effect once the new Twitter Subscription/Blue Check system goes online, I can expect any tweets I make to essentially be buried, never to be seen outside of my followers and probably not even then.

I don’t plan to leave – I don’t see how my leaving Twitter will help things – but I am doing a serious rethink on my reasons for being there, and what my goals are Re: Social Media in this new era. If things do indeed become toxic over the next few days or weeks, I will certainly leave for my own mental and emotional safety, but I suspect I will still have a presence when the servers go dark.

But if and when my Twitter presence dies, will I go elsewhere? I have been hearing good things about Mastodon, though it seems on the surface to be more complicated to set up and maintain than other social media sites have been. But ultimately, it will boil down to what my new goals for social media will be once I’ve re-examined them, and it is not impossible that my final decision might be to stay away from social media entirely.

Whether or not Twitter survives the coming days, and whether or not I set up a new social media presence elsewhere, this website will still remain my home on the internet. It at least is not subject to the whims of narcissistic billionaires.

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Revisions Complete

At the end of the day, we’re back to more or less where we started, absent a few colour changes. Other themes may be flashier, but this still serves my purposes best. If there are any broken links left over, please let me know below!

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Revisions Incoming!

I’ll be making some alterations to the site over the coming days, so things might look strange or have a broken link or two for a while. I’ll let you know when things are settled. Sorry for any inconvenience!

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Mutant 59, Where Are You?

We have a plastic problem; it’s harmful to life, lasts practically forever, and there’s too much of it. Of all the substances our civilization uses, plastic is the hardest to recycle. So much so, that a CBC investigation a few years back found that most recycling companies didn’t recycle the plastic, but either burned it (producing an even more toxic residue), or just sent it to the landfill. A fair chunk of Canada’s plastic has been shipped (illegally) to other countries for disposal, much to those countries’ displeasure. We’re finding plastic everywhere, from the oceans to the ice caps to even inside our bodies.

While some governments (including Canada) have begun to ban the use of single-use plastics like bags and packaging, there’s still enough plastic floating around to cause real harm to Earthly life. Is there some way we can deal with it all and get a cleaner world?

Well, if you can’t recycle the plastic conventionally, we may have to turn to unconventional means… like eating it. Science fiction’s toyed with this idea a few times since the 1970s, starting (to my knowledge at least) with the 1971 novel Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedlar. In the novel, a well-meaning scientist tries to create a bacterium that can consume plastic. Now scientists at the University of Queensland have found something similar: a worm capable of eating plastic.

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Old Science-Fiction Films: Cyborg 2087

When I was a teenager, there was a broadcast TV station called MITV (Maritime Independent TV), which opened as an option to the other broadcast options of CBC and CTV (this was in the late 80s, and while cable was certainly available then, in rural places like where I grew up it wasn’t cheap). MITV needed content, and one thing it did to fill the content gap was to pick up old science fiction films from the 50s through to the 80s.

So I saw a bit of old and some decidedly odd science fiction films in my teen years. Most of those films would not merit a second look (the less said of Firebird 2015 AD or Final Eye, the better) there were some I remember fondly. One of those films was Cyborg 2087.

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