Month: February 2026

Gold Checkmark

By

On February 21, 2026

In Farewells, Verification

I don’t even know what the fuck I was trying to do anymore.

A couple of days ago I got invited to a Zoom call / conference with Twitter’s leadership. Or something— lord knows I’m not going to open the e-mail to verify what the fuck it actually said. Oh, hell, let’s avoid libel: it said specifically that ‘the X team’ (whatever the fuck that is) would be headlining the conference.

To my knowledge, there was no audience participation. My read on it was it was a sales call, if I’m using that terminology correctly. The e-mail I received had the salutation of, “Dear Valued Advertiser”. What?

In any case, I went there. They were five minutes late. Shit was boring, so I dipped.

And then, days later, I get an e-mail:

As we mentioned during the session, we’d love your feedback—please send any thoughts to [non-public e-mail].

As a special thank-you for attending, we’ll expedite your application to Premium Business—an exclusive offer just for you.

… Premium Business? That’s the Gold Checkmark.

Huh.

It’s not ‘an exclusive offer’ just for me. That’s bullshit. This is a sales e-mail.

But then I stew in that for a second, and I go, ‘let’s ask if it’s free.’ Because, I know it’s not gonna be free. I also know I’m not going to be ‘accepting’ anything from the Nazi Bar that Twitter has become.

But let’s ask.

I e-mail them.

It bounces.

They fucking forgot to make the e-mail account, the exclusive e-mail account, just for Kuzco, that they sent in this fucking e-mail.

I reply to the message. It’s a no-reply.

Okay.

I check the web form. Can’t ask questions.

Okay.

I have now e-mailed a third e-mail, a fourth method.

I know that there’s nobody at the wheel. I know that Twitter is a thing now that’s wearing something else’s skin. I’m well-aware of what I’m talking to.

And I’m not even seeking closure.

Now, at this point, I’m poking a slime mold with a stick and seeing if it starts spelling ‘fuck you’ back at me in the shapes of its many cells.

What the fuck am I doing?

There was a feeling I had. When I was denied Verification, even though I didn’t want the checkmark (I detest these things), I wanted to win the game. I’m eligible: give it to me. Give me the badge so I can throw it on the floor and break it. That was the original goal.

But then, as the years passed, I started asking myself… am I doing something wrong? Am I not good enough?

And that doesn’t matter to me. not anymore.

Soon, the question became, how does this system work? I want to win it. I win to win at it.

And then.

And now.

It’s not even that anymore.

Twitter is such a broken husk of itself, so dysfunctional, as Claude said, that the game I was playing cannot even be played with it.

Old Twitter is gone. I didn’t respect it, or its ways. I don’t respect Bluesky’s checkmark, and I don’t want to win that one, either. (I would seriously make a separate account if I got that one. Eww.)

But now… there’s no closure. There is no closure to this ‘game’ I’ve been playing.

Because Twitter isn’t even able to play it with me anymore.

They can’t even make a fucking e-mail account.

This feels like trying to play Chess with your grandmother, and she starts sobbing and you have to keep her from eating the pieces.

God damn you, Elon.

Pinterest

By

On February 8, 2026

In Farewells

It’s been 535 days since my mother went into the hospital for sepsis, and I decided to make a change in my life and stop being so online.

Last night, I got another e-mail from Pinterest, in which they stated that they had removed a pin about the Amazing Digital Circus, because it involved self-harm. Given that I hadn’t used Pinterest much since that show came out, I was perplexed; I was puzzled. I was bewildered. What pin?

They wouldn’t show me. They gave me the URL, which resolves to nothing, and has no backups I can find online. My photographic memory tells me one thing: I know which image it was, and I remember saving it, thinking, ‘I wonder if Pinterest’s bullshit A.I. is going to pick this completely harmless image and say that there’s something wrong with it.’

And it did.

Fuck me, Freddy.

A Separation from Pinterest

I’m going to work to remove most of my saved pins from Pinterest. Of course, having comparatively little free time these days (I used to have all day; now I have maybe five hours a day to do goofy shit, which is contemptably small for my purposes), this will take some time. Undoubtedly, I will still get some e-mails from Pinterest’s A.I. measuring its own ballsack and finding something I didn’t even post lacking.

The real reason I’m not going to be using Pinterest anymore is because you don’t have the right to send me e-mails in the middle of the night that scare me. For the longest, I tip-toed through social media services, afraid of what I would feel if I got permanently banned. Then Reddit decided to permaban me for telling people not to commit the crime of posting revenge porn, and I was confused.

A year and some change later, I’ve realized something: I don’t want to be on Reddit anymore, because I cannot fucking trust it.

And I don’t want to be bothered by Pinterest anymore, because they pulled this shit:

Would you like to appeal?

Appeal what, I thought. They showed me nothing; if I hadn’t a photographic memory, it would have been impossible to know what they were talking about. Given that their userbase probably has an average of slightly higher than 200 different pins at any given time, one has to imagine that if you played ‘guess the pin we banned’ with any of them, they’d lose.

But still, I clicked the link to appeal… and it showed me a screen: “Appeal submitted!”, or somesuch nonsense. I expected a form. No form.

What the fuck?

24 hours later, the appeal— for whatever the fuck it could even be— has been denied.

Okay, great! Good chat, team!

What the fuck are you dipshits doing over there?

Whatever it is, I don’t want any part of it.

Stop e-mailing me.

If your A.I. doesn’t manage to kick me out first as it trips over its own dick, I’ll be leaving, thanks.

Idiots.

Powered by Spite & behold the yawning chasm of the void