When Elon Musk bought Twitter it was the beginning of the end of the platform because there's no such thing as free speech when one capricious sack of dicks is the arbiter of what can and can't be said and he's a bit of a Nazi-loving freak (just a bit). Aside from all of that, he's a greedy weirdo that can't ever be satisfied by the billions he already has.
It took a while but I got away from Twitter, I'd had three active-ish accounts there and the last to go was my baseball one.
But I moved to BlueSky and made the best of starting over again, going from a couple thousand followers to a couple hundred and engagement dropping by 70-90%. And it isn't like BlueSky's an ideal new haven, its got some serious flaws that are being ignored, its got a reporting problem, its got a labeling problem, its got a shitty milquetoast centrist problem.
To that end, I had an abrasive weekend dealing with Zionists and other genocidal scumbags and pushed back hard enough on them that BlueSky has applied a label of Rude to my account which severely limits its reach, exposure and engagement, effectively killing the account without actually banning me. Which means I am once again looking for a social media home.
Looking at supposed alternatives and keep hitting the same problems. Threads is owned by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, that's a non-starter. Other platforms suffer from other issues including size and access and being owned by greedy fuckbags like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg. Mastodon has some promise but is fractured and very empty. Reddit is another rich asshole's playground so its out. Discord is just a big fucking mess and makes zero sense to me
Of course, if there WERE a digital public square it would be dominated by the bombastic sack of ignorance, hubris and self-absorption that is Donald Trump because this stupid, stupid country handed him the keys again.
Unfortunately, for the present time being, we're fucked and there's nobody coming to save us.
Just a quick howdy and hey and maybe I'll circle back to add more as time permits.
We're still kicking, I wouldn't exactly say thriving but we're still surviving and that's something. Knocking on wood, we have remained a Covid free house since the outbreak of the pandemic..
The world is an absolute hellscape of rising fascism but also rising worker strikes and increasing solidarity among the lower classes (which bodes ill for the very fat and very rich cats at the top).
That's all for now, its hard to not feel the psychic burden of knowing our government is extremely super complicit in committing genocide. It will definitely make Thanksgiving next week a very, very different feeling for me.
There was another horrific gun massacre in the only country on earth where this happens regularly and literally nothing is ever done to stop them because the gun nut lobby has some deep ass pockets and they own enough elected types to stop any efforts to reign in America's rampant gun massacre epidemic.
The American people want and demand changes but the leaders of America don't march to our orders, they march to the orders of the Military Industrial Complex that requires billions spent on tools of death rather than the fraction of that money on building a sustainable, just and humane world for everyone.
I've said it in the past but what if America's nearly $800 BILLION for so-called defense was spent on humanitarian aid, building housing and working together to solve what are increasingly looking like doomsday scenarios for the human race? Think about how different the world would be if capitalism wasn't the overarching (and toxic) mindset.
Capitalism is economic cancer, it requires constant expansion or it implodes upon itself. It requires constant improvement or it falls apart, capitalism is a giant pyramid scheme built on the exploitation, subjugation and desperation of the lower and working classes.
Anyway, the noise and furor of the latest tragedy will fuel alot of anxiety driven tweets and speeches and then it will all die back down again and nothing will change. Because the powers that be love their profit margins more than slaughtered children and innocent people.
They aren't quite the best potatoes I've ever had or made but they are damned close and waaaaaay easier.
Along the way there have been some attempted upgrades and then some real upgrades and I've got at least one more planned. I got a "better" vacuum sealer off Ebay and it has a ton more features and does work well in almost every way with the fatal exception of a dead spot on the sealer, no matter how much air got sucked out, it would never stay sealed. And that also meant water infiltration.
Eventually I got a really good vacuum sealer that I kind of love, its a Nesco VS-12 and part of why I love it is because its big and powerful and has a locking handle instead of clips and a built in place to hold bags to cut to size and seal. And it can be used on dry and moist things, not quite wet but moist.
A couple of weeks ago, my kid and I were at Target and happened to remember to check out the appliances aisle and came across a larger air fryer on a good deal and got it. And have been having a delicious time making fries, hash browns, fish sticks, chicken nuggets/tenders and roasted potatoes in it! I wish it weren't quite so big and that it had some with a second rack to double cooking space but this thing has been freaking awesome!
Going straight from sous vide into the air fryer is resulting in outstanding potatoes! And they are as easy as it gets. My previous easy method was to wash and then slice the potatoes with a mandoline but sliced potatoes are space hogs, cubed and partially cubed are much better uses of cooking space.