So I finally figured out what Verification was/is, and how it works.

And, sadly, I figured something out.

I was born wrong, so I will never get it.

Verification does not account for being trans.

My entire public persona is based on my chosen trans name. Honestly, you would think, that at this point in time, people would just have put trans people into the same Verification pipeline as, say, people with stage names; people with pen names. I’m really open with this: Margaret is my chosen name. I have, in fact, been using it most of my life. I’m not shy about the fact that my legal name differs, and practically every social media platform’s governance actually knows, and has proof, of my legal name. Even Steam knows who I am: they’ve got my social security number, for example. (By the way: I don’t even really consider it my ‘dead name’— my mom, my family, even my step-family, and my wife call me by my birth name— though my wife occasionally calls me “Margaret”, given certain situations. I just don’t want to be called anything but ‘Margaret’ by weird Internet people.)

When I was trying to get Verified on Facebook, I kept getting it kicked back instantly— “the names don’t match.” Okay, that’s weird. How do celebrities get verified?

Well, the answer is, they have someone submit for them through backroom mechanisms that normal people don’t have access to. So it’s never a problem.

Verification doesn’t have any sort of mechanism— or does not want to create any sort of mechanism— wherein trans people are accommodated. And I get that the whole thing is a unique situation. But I’m not parading around with my legal name on the Internet. I’ve had enough of people trying to take harassing me from online to offline, and I’m not giving them any ammunition (esp. given that, at one point, someone tried to kill my parents by SWATting them).

The emotional reason behind why I wanted this is simple: I qualified, and I felt left out. I didn’t like the checkmark; I didn’t want it next to my name. But I wanted to see why I kept getting denied. I wanted to make them give me what I actually was eligible for.

It’s not going to happen. Or, at the very least, I don’t feel like taking it past this point.

Because I’ve understood it, and I think that will have to be the end to that story.

The Secrets of Verification

We’ve been workshopping this over the past few weeks. Probably a month’s worth of time. Here’s the secret to getting Verified on every platform:

Bluesky
It’s too young to tell. The teams are too small. It seems to be a combination of luck, but you should be able to do it if you’re a government official, a company with supporting documentation (even small companies have gotten verified), or, you are a warlock.

I’m not fucking around with that last part. That one worked for that person.

Twitter
2,000 verified followers or subscribers, or pay for it. It is useless now.

Instagram (and Meta in general)
Pay for it, or, be a musician with press (2-3 news articles). Instagram’s got no fucking clue what’s actually a good music press site, so you can just ask some dipshit to rate your beats. It does not matter to them. It’s assumed that your name has to match: they might go easier on you because musicians don’t usually publish things under their own names, but it seems to be an easy pipeline.

Facebook
Name has to match; be a journalist or a writer. This is the simplest pipeline. They have (had?) a special journalist pipeline that’s publicly accessible, where you just submit bylines. (‘Bylines’ are slang for ‘articles you wrote’.) They don’t accept every single publication, so you’ll have to check that and get a job there if that’s the route you want to go.

TikTok
I succeeded but failed here.

Your name has to match your ID. It would seem that every single person who isn’t using their real name— or isn’t proudly displaying it— is gonna be jolly well fucked here.

I submitted with an interview I did in a major news outlet, my book on Barnes and Noble, articles where I was listed alongside legendary musicians and actors (I was also quoted); and then, I added my verified(?) Official Artist Channel account on YouTube. The creme de la creme was showing them my Google Knowledge Panel, which is, hysterically, the fucking hardest ‘checkmark’ to get.

Google Knowledge Panel
I’m not gonna tell you.

I researched this heavily. However, throughout my 40 year existence, I’ve been getting nothing but fucked for helping others.

I raised $5 million USD for other people, to help them in their time of need. And when my mother got cancer and needed their help, nobody came.

You, the reader, have nothing to do with that. But I’m not going to tell anyone how I got it. I got it fair and square; I figured it out.

The hardest checkmark.

If you’d like to know how to get an official artist channel, please Google “how to get an official artist channel”. There are steps. You can do it! c(◕ᴗ◕✿)

For additional help

Ask an A.I.

I’m serious. Present the A.I. with the things you have that you think are verifiable, or ask it what you will need. It will help you in real time, something that I cannot do.

The End of an Era

I bet my Dad that I could get Verified on Twitter.

He told me that it wasn’t worth it. That it didn’t mean anything.

And that was true.

But I still wish that I could’ve done it.

The fact of the matter is, though, while I absolutely was eligible for it . . .

. . . if the name on your driver’s license doesn’t match, it seems you won’t get it.

Which is strange. I’ve seen trans people get Verified on Old Twitter; get Verified on LinkedIn…

. . . but I guess it just isn’t going to be something I’ll be getting.

I’m going to resent you for this, by the way.

The post A Farewell to Verification appeared first on icze4r communication.

Of course, alles kann immer anders sein. The reality of which I speak could always turn out to be different. We must always remember the guy who said the Internet wouldn’t really take off; and I myself hate Bluesky’s atmosphere with a passion that I do not intend on really articulating. So I know that I am biased. But this is how I feel; this is what I predict, and this is what is (more than likely) going to come to pass.

Bluesky will succeed as a protocol, similar to how the Internet has ‘succeeded’. But it will eventually ‘morph’ to the point that it will be considered to be the ‘gopher’ protocol equivalent to what eventually turns out to be the http(s) protocol equivalent of social media. When we look back in time, will we really be so enamored with Mosaic that we’ll be singing its praises as we’re on version 1,000 of Google Chrome? Mosaic was but a stepping stone; and so Bluesky is. And perhaps that is an achievement worthy of praise, and admiration.

But Bluesky, itself, as a website, is dead. It is a ghost town. It is Mastodon: the second coming of nothing. And one of the people who runs it, is actually fucking sick and tired of the people who predominantly make up the ‘power users’ of the website. Not that anyone can blame them; just as people from Something Awful’s worst forums made up the power users portion of Twitter for most of its useful life (before petering out and eventually just kind of retiring to Bluesky, a sort of ‘elder millennial retirement home’ kind of dealio), so have the Internet’s worst posters joined Bluesky, in some attempt to, I don’t know, have themselves an Arcadium Refugees experience.

When I was a kid, there was a social media network that is now lost to time. Not even I remember its name; but, before that, there was Arcadium. And when Arcadium inevitably failed (trolling; hacking; and a generally, genuinely awful userbase, entirely made-up of gamers), an offshoot was made: Arcadium Refugees. The tone was very haughty; the people behind it were absolutely up their own ass about the entire thing, and they completely forgot what made Arcadium so much damn fun.

Sound familiar?

Arcadium is to Arcadium Refugees, as Twitter is to Bluesky.

Bluesky is just Twitter Refugees.

And it sucks just as bad.

I don’t intend on convincing you.

The vast majority of my writing is intended to be read by myself, to quiet my own damned mind. So that I can lay a mental matter to rest, and move on to the next.

When I use Twitter, I am delighted. My ‘For You’ feed is heavenly. I have not felt bad opening Twitter in the past year. I actively have to go looking for bad things on Twitter— which is a design feature that I have not taken for granted.

Bluesky’s Discover tab is nothing but the finest and sickest furry bullshit I’ve ever seen. People engaging in fetishes so niche and unique that they can hardly even be called sexual anymore. The things I’ve seen on Bluesky’s Discover tab in the past fucking year has been like trying to mainline /b/ during its heydey. That’s not a good thing.

The latest (and, regrettably, it will not be the last) nontroversy to hit Bluesky is that some of the people working on it have decided to reply “WAFFLES” to what people feel are genuine criticisms of how the website is run. The people running Bluesky have made noises claiming that they feel a certain push, through the ‘community’s bullying, to force their hand in moderating how they, the ‘community’, wants them to.

And they’re right. Bluesky is predominantly made up of shitty fucking bullies who have no lives, are probably unemployed (given that they fit all the signifiers for what the previous version of what they are, actually were, on Twitter), and use all of their free time (which they have copious amounts of, due to certain circumstances that I will soon go into) to try to feel powerful online.

Twitter’s pathetic Internet Bully ecosystem was predominantly made up of people who were unemployed, sometimes also disabled, who tried to control the online environment, because they could not control their real-world environment. That is not to say that unemployed and/or disabled people are like this: this is to say that’s what the weird fuckers on Twitter predominantly were. They were stuck in their houses and they decided that the only outlet they had to the outside world would be used by they to send death and rape threats to people; that they would try to get people to kill themselves, in order to try to ‘carve out’ some sort of electronic ‘niche’ that only they could provide, after they scared everyone else away.

Similarly, the people on Bluesky who are trying to control the people controlling Bluesky, self-identify as being basically unemployable due to certain factors, some of which they cannot control; some of which they refuse to do anything about (for example: some refuse to get, seek out, or even accept the help that they need, to overcome simple problems like having to get a driver’s license so they can get to a job), and sometimes, they just plain give up.

These are people who pretend, whether they are aware of it or not (I believe that they are aware of it: they seem to be malignant narcissists who use a form of permanent victimhood to control others through fear and shame), to be ‘vulnerable’. Then, in the next fucking breath, they claim that they have all the power; that you must obey them; and if you don’t, you are hurting them.

It’s crybully bullshit and it’s plainly obvious to anyone who’s set foot outside their house for more than a certain spell of time. Unfortunately, due to how the Internet works, the only people who would even dream of using Bluesky are so terminally-online that they do not know what normal really looks like. They are so fed on the bullshit they see online that they have ensconced themselves in a shell of permanent victimhood through the notion that everyone in the real world hates their fucking guts, and thus, why should they even try?

A year ago, after my mother went into the hospital for sepsis, I decided I needed a change. I, too, bought the bullshit that the world was a cold, dark, and creepy place, and it was horrible, and everyone would want to hang my black ass from a tree because I was trans.

It has been a year, and I have many real-world friends, something that I have not really experienced in over twenty years. And nobody gets at me for being trans; I have female friends in their 50s and 60s who have started using female pronouns for me, without asking. I am genuinely liked, respected, admired, and, dare I say this— yes, I am loved.

But the people on Bluesky are from a world they themselves have created, a world of fear and pain and suffering, where they think that the only way that they can possibly survive is to bully others online. They think that the entire world hates them, and hates what they are, and what they’re like— when, in fact, no. Even in a country-ass part of this horrible fucking country, I, trans, mixed, and gay, have been accepted.

The reality is that the vast majority of people don’t hate you for what you are, and who you are. They dislike you extremely, and loathe your very presence, because you treat people like they’re your servants.

The fact of the matter is, the people who made Bluesky never seemed to realize that the sort of people who would use Bluesky the most, and demand the most from the people who run Bluesky, are maladapted narcissists who think that the only way out is through. They think that the only way they can survive is to hurt others, bullying them into submission— and, I want to tell you, the idea of adults bullying other adults online is so fucking pathetic that it’s hard to articulate the depths of that stupidity.

But that’s what they do.

And that’s what they’re like.

And never the twain shall meet. Never will Bluesky have the normal userbase that its creators seem to crave; never will the platform be ‘nice’, or have some sort of stable and coherent userbase of people who don’t have worms in their brains.

This is it, Luigi. This is all that’s left of the Internet. The real world is waiting— it’s time to touch grass.

And it’s time to decide if this is what you want to do with your lifeforce.

Do you want to be ‘criticized’ day and night for saying ‘WAFFLES’?

Do you want to have every word you say dogged by people who will never, ever be your friend?

Do you want to become Lowtax?

Because that’s what this shit does to you.

There is no end of this path that is not Lowtax.

The path on which you walk has no fruits growing beside it but the creamy, tangy mangosteen.

Make your choice or don’t; I don’t give a shit.

Once upon a time I had a friend who had a girlfriend. His(?) girlfriend was pretty fuckin’ wild. I really liked her. Great personality. Loved her verve.

One day he decided that he didn’t want to moderate the place he was moderating anymore. He had seen the light: it wasn’t worth it. The people he was helping were assholes, and he wanted to go home, live the quiet life, and just fuck the living shit out of his girlfriend.

And so he did.

He escaped becoming Lowtax.

There is no end to the Internet, my dear friends. There is only suffering. Suffering and perseverating that lasts for as long as you allow yourself to think that this place is anything but Hell.

The real world awaits you. Where the grass is green, and the sun shines warm upon your skin.

The real blue sky is worth seeing. And keeping clear— and protecting. For future generations to enjoy.

This one is nothing but torment. Torment for the people who have created it; who have the burden of maintaining it; and will have their reputations drenched not with the meanings of their words and actions, but by the bad-faith interpretations of their good-willed actions. Stories of people who tried their best, viewed through the lenses and frames of people who, absolutely, positively, would not engage them as what they are: people.

People expect the people who maintain Bluesky to be perfect.

But not even a saint could put up with these assholes.

I feel so sorry for them.

The post Bluesky: A Post-Mortem appeared first on icze4r communication.

I need to get the fuck away from you.

It’s been 30 years. The jig is up. The game is over, and, every single day, I stare in awe at how fucking stupid this species is. Ladies and jellyspoons, I’m not even fucking sure the vast majority of you are sentient. Okay?

And a lot of people, at this point in time, turn to me and go, well, I’m not going to read your book! I’m not going to give you money! I’m not going to do this! I’m not going to do that!

Well, shit, duders. Not like anything’s going to fuckin’ change, then, is it?

This has to be addressed. There’s something wrong with you. I’ve known this for some time, and, after 30 years of staring at you, I can no longer jingle the keys and tell you what a good and special boy you are. You have something wrong with you, and I have to admit that to myself and each other, because, holy shit, dude.

You don’t make my life better.

When I was about five years old, we went from an idyllic life, with basically no technology (other than the accursed telephone), and I would watch cartoonies with my mama on our big screen TV. It was a CRT. It weighed more than our entire family combined. The car, too.

More than the house, really.

There’s something that always bothered me, since back then.

The telephone was scary.

Because people called you on the telephone.

The mail was scary.

Because people talked to you through the mail.

I liked none of these things. Hell, I barely liked the car— because, it took me to you.

And I told myself— just wait a while! You’ll warm up to them!— and I never did.

You know why?

It’s been 30 damned years, and I’ve had so much contact with human beings that, at this point, the conclusion of all my life’s research must be attested to. I must admit to myself, the truth of it all.

You don’t make my life better. At all.

And you never fucking will.

Scorpion(s) and Crabs

There’s the parable / fable of the scorpion and the frog. That’s what you are.

There are crabs in many buckets. That’s what you all are.

You tell me that you’re good. But you know what?

I have never seen it. I have never seen it as en masse as you tell me that you are. Even in Japan, the place where I saw human beings act the best I ever have seen, you weren’t. We were trying to wash my eyes out using water from a fountain, after a terrorist attack, and I had a salaryman elbowing me out of the way.

You’re not good. And I’m not interested in pretending that you are.

Because you’re not.

As much as I’d like to pretend that there’s something in this for me, there isn’t. Initially, I was interested in the concept of human friendship. People tell me that they’re good: so, I’ll make some fucking friends. Right?

I have friends now.

Now.

But, every so often, I just lose a friend. Sometimes I’m not even saying anything, where I can track what might have pissed them off— but, poof! Just like that, 11 years of friendship, and they’re gone. They won’t even talk to me, and I don’t even know why.

Human beings can be friends. I know you all can. But you do so so fucking rarely with me, on any level that I’m interested in, that— it’s not that I’m ‘giving up’. It’s that, I’m finally admitting to myself— no.

No.

You are so rarely stable enough, for me to take even a passing interest, that I just don’t fucking care anymore. You have many problems. Fickleness; vindictiveness; untrustworthiness.

I’m tired.

This is it.

No.

I used to wonder why I was always full of adrenaline. Why I had constant stomach problems. Why I felt sick every time I ate.

It’s you.

It was always you.

When I’m away from you, I feel healthy.

The only answer is to get away from you.

I used to think that putting myself out there, talking to people, that this was all a great and noble ‘crusade’. That I could help people.

So much nonsense has happened in the past 3 months, let alone my entire life, that I don’t even want to talk to you anymore.

I have a great and abiding need(?) to create; but I don’t want to talk with you anymore.

I don’t even want to talk at you.

I want to make beautiful things, and then, I don’t want to hear from you.

A Post-Mortem

The thing that bothers me the most now is that I did all of this because I didn’t want to be shouted down by stupid fucking humans. And, obviously, throughout the course of my Internet ‘career’, that’s happened— time and time again, I’ve gotten banned for speaking truth to people who thought they had power. And, I can, of course, always ban-evade. That’s practically effortless for me.

But why?

This is, in fact, a game where I can always win. And I can keep talking, and talking, and talking, and talking . . . but the reality is, there’s no real point in it. And it’s always going to turn out the same. Even if I ‘win’— what the fuck have I ‘won’?

Ultimately, it makes no sense to continue pursuing social medicine as a method to communicate with human beings. These people are stupid and/or crazy.

I like the Internet. I like the place that it is. Just like I like the real world.

I don’t like human beings.

I’ve never liked human beings.

And I never will.

The post Nuts appeared first on icze4r communication.

Let me explain.

None of you trust each other.

That’s the problem.

Humanity is, at its core, just a hive of liars. You lie to each other every single day. Because of this, online, where your egos flit and clash against one another, you want something that places one another above each other. With Twitter and the Blue Checkmark, this was easy. But now, you cannot do that.

The problem inherent with human communication is that you lie. The problem inherent with the human species is that you cannot trust one another. And you need to. In order to create anything truly great, you have to be able to cooperate with one another, and working with one another in ‘Zero Trust’ environments, that’s just absurd. You cannot get anything truly great done in an environment like that, and your lack of any truly great products is the very definition of the absence of evidence actually being evidence of absence.

To put it simpler, human beings suck. You all fucking suck. You’re bad. You’re almost all bad. You can probably remember one or two people who are truly great; who inspire you. And they’re good.

But the vast majority of humanity sucks, and it refuses to acknowledge it.

And it always wants someone to tell it that its shit not only does not stink, but that it smells of roses and tastes of elderberry.

And that’s why you want the checkmark.

Because you want to be special.

It has absolutely no use here, and it is no further proof of authenticity than it would ever be anywhere else. Shit, dude, you can buy it right now on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and I don’t think that the first two even acknowledge that it was purchased. Meta has an echosystem where people they Verified by hand (or through their fucked-up, Kangaroo Court Media Partner Portal’s) are mixed in with people who pay a monthly fee for it.

Pinterest did it right, because Pinterest did Domain Verification before Bluesky did.

Is it the perfect verifier? Oh, honey, of course it isn’t. Por ejemplo: if i were to watch and wait for someone to not renew their domain name, and their e-mail services were hooked up to it, then I could just register their domain name and point everything wherever I wanted, and I would be them. Even with 2FA on Bluesky, I could probably still do this. And it would probably be legal, because, none of us own our fucking domain names.

We are essentially leasing storefronts online. That’s all we’re doing. Except, unlike in real life, if I were to do that, and I got some of your snail mail? I couldn’t legally open it.

But I’m pretty sure I can online, with goofy fucking e-mails being sent to me, the me that registered the domain name that you stopped paying for.

It’s not the perfect Verifier.

But it’s the only Verifier you got, kiddo.

Other attempts at Verification that Bluesky could hook onto

A while back, I noticed that there were checkmarks on the senders’ e-mail addresses, in e-mails sent to me on my GSuite e-mail account. These checkmarks were almost-always only present on e-mail addresses from websites that were owned by multi-billion-dollar corporations.

And I wanted one.

Guess what, chucklefuck? It costs $1,000 USD.

You want one?

Get in line.

To be eligible for a VMC, your logo must be trademarked with an intellectual property office that’s recognized by VMC issuers. We recommend working with your legal team or a lawyer to get your logo trademarked. The trademark process can take 6 to 12 months. For the most secure BIMI setup, we recommend getting a VMC whenever possible.

I’ve been on the Internet since May of 1994. Verification has always been a problem; and billion-dollar corporations (at the time, then only million dollar ones) created and sponsored an echosystem in which domain verification was the gold standard. You ever heard of MarkMonitor?

This shit is big business, boy-o.

If you want to be Verified on Bluesky, you better be a big enough motherfucker where you can afford corporate domain portfolio management services. Because that is the only gold standard I have ever seen in all my time online.

This isn’t Bluesky’s problem.

Leave them alone.

Sort your own nonsense out.

If you don’t have a domain name with a .gov or an .edu or something substantial and well-known out there, then, guess what? You probably don’t deserve to be Verified. Because nobody knows who the fuck you are in the first place.

If NPR.org comes on Bluesky (and I believe they did), and they Verified their handle, I would know that they’re NPR. Because, if they’re not, their shit is so fucked that I couldn’t trust them even if they were.

If a person with a .gov handle gets on there, then, unless the entire infrastructure of the Internet is so fucked that anyone could do that (and, actually, there are probably at least 11 vulnerabilities in different places that could produce such an effect— but not without substantial jail time once they find you out), then, Hell, that’s probably them.

The inherent problem of Verification is that none of you can trust one another.

This is not Bluesky’s problem. This is a You problem.

Sometimes, the only solution to a problem is going to be one that’s not good enough. And that’s this.

Domain Verification is not good enough but it’s the best that you’ve got. Unless you want to contract a service out to verify people (like Pornhub and Polywork and yes, I think, even Twitter did, at one time), nothing is going to get done. And even then, there are a hundred thousand different ways to fuck around and just pretend to be somebody else.

There will never be a perfect solution. Just be happy with what you’ve got, and work compassionately with each other towards what you think might work better—

but, remember this.

This is not Bluesky’s problem.

Please leave the devs alone about it.

The post Bluesky’s Verification Problem appeared first on icze4r communication.

A person yells out into the void, on a social media service, ‘if you do X, then fuck you, you’re scum.’

I reply, ‘don’t call me scum.’

The person replies and starts a fight.

People often say, ‘don’t feed the troll.’ But this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because, in this situation, only the troll is allowed to speak. It’s similar to how liberals try to get away from Neo Nazis by avoiding every single bit of terminology that the Nazis use. The Nazis glom on to something, and the liberals abandon it.

Let me give you an example from popular culture, to help you understand this more easily. I’m going to make this more-palatable for you.

The Nazis take shit like the Borg.

Now this is the point where the people reading assume that I’m suggesting pacifism against Nazis. No: what I’m pointing out in this video occurs 1 minute and 7 seconds in:

… I’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space, and we fall back.

Here’s what I’ve seen happen over the past 3 decades, online.

Good people used to populate the Internet. There were assholes, but they were cloistered. And then the more people got to use the Internet, the more they took it for granted, the more general toxicity and negativity invaded the space.

Now the good people are cloistered, but the assholes run free.

I’m not suggested we should have gatekept the Internet better. After all, there also is no ‘we’. I could not have done anything, nor could you have.

What I’m saying, is, the more that the real world began to use the Internet, and the less that the Internet was this curiosity, relegated for use only by ‘nerds’ and social outcasts and misfits, the more everything bad about the real world began to permeate onto the Internet. Now there’s no going back.

Social outcasts used to keep the Internet nice for themselves. Now that they’re beset on all sides by normies, they’ve reacted in such a way where they’ve become spiteful, rageful, vindictive, and territorial, in ways that don’t make any sense. And they have no real way to gatekeep their environments that don’t also hurt they themselves.

‘Don’t feed the troll’ created an environment in which the people causing all the problems were allowed to speak, while the people who caused relatively fewer or no problems, they fell back. They surrendered their territor(ies) online, went to different websites, and became less concentrated. Meanwhile, the Bad People™ got full use of the facilities.

The insane are running the asylum. They have been since 2003. It’s just that, with how widespread Internet use is, it really hasn’t become a problem until quite recently. I’d like to say it started in 2014, to puff myself up and say, ‘I ruined this.’ But I didn’t. And it would’ve happened a different way, anyways.

Not even Chanology was the start.

This is not some blameless phenomenon. People perpetrated this. I had a hand in it, but I did not ruin it by myself. Furthermore, in trying to grow and evolve as a person, when what I did to protect my own ego, something that was once pretty much nonexistent, fragile and easily hurt, caused the largest tantrum spiral I’ve ever seen on the Internet? I offer no apologies.

Somebody told me I was worthless, and that I should kill myself.

And I told them to go fuck themselves.

And everything just unraveled from there.

It is, of course, going to continue. Human beings have no real desire to become better. When they say, ‘do better’, they don’t really mean it. They just want to be mean to one another.

And that’s your problem.

You want to be mean to each other. A lot.

Here’s a secret: when the Tantrum Spiral started in 2014 (and none of you are going to know what I’m referring to, unless you actually know me), I did not tell that person to go fuck themselves.

I said, ‘I don’t deserve to be spoken to, in this way.’ And they took it like I had slapped them in the face and said ‘go fuck yourself’. That’s why I always tell the story like that.

That’s the thing about human beings: you can tell them, ‘good morning’, and they’ll take it as an insult, demanding you tell them, what’s good about it?.

When people say that to me, by the way, I always tell them,

you’re alive. That’s what’s good about it.

Discussing Turtles with Crazy People

My uncle, Ryresai, once told me a story about how he was doing research about turtles, and other turtle-y things. And he was discussing this with someone, who seemed very interested in turtles. He was, in fact, a published author on some sort of turtle-y research.

My uncle is very intelligent. And he’s very passionate.

It was about an hour and 45 minutes in that Ryresai realized that the person he was talking to was insane. Some things started not making sense. And after that, the whole thing started to unravel.

Ryresai suddenly realized that nothing he had said to the man had had any real effect. He was discussing turtles with a crazy person.

The man he was talking to might once have been ‘sane’. Or he might have been something like a savant, where he was good at one thing, but he lacked relevant and useful experience and knowledge of protocol when it came to other things. Or he might have gone insane after he wrote the book.

But even then, there were signs. There were tangents in the book that started to not make sense. But it would almost-always get back on track. A minor derailment; nothing more.

But that’s the thing. Even, if not especially, the smartest of people, they tend towards insanity. I, in particular, chose not to pursue mathematics, because I did not want to develop schizophrenia. (When you’re nine years old and you’re basically the kid that J. shoots in the simulation in Men in Black, you tend to not want to pursue any more advanced informations.)

That is to say, I played the Marathon series on PowerPC Macintosh, and then, I got into Quantum Mechanics/Physics, pretty deeply.

You don’t wanna do that when your balls haven’t even dropped.

But, anyways. Jokes aside, there is one thing I want to tell you about all of this, that I want to impress upon you.

When you try real hard online? And you’re wondering why everyone is so angry at you? And you don’t understand?

And you’re trying to tell people things, and get them to understand you, but they’re just not understanding you?

Be careful.

You may be discussing turtles with crazy people.

An Explanation

A lot of people don’t tend to get the sublteties of my writing. They don’t understand my nuance. I’m not saying people aren’t smart if they don’t get it. I’m just saying, I want to make something perfectly clear.

The Internet is this way because you can’t get anything done when the people you’re talking to don’t fucking understand what you’re saying. That’s ‘discussing turtles with crazy people’.

Essentially, everyone trying to do something good online, they’re not being heard, nor understood; and when they want to gather with like-minded people, those like-minded people tend to either be insane themselves, or in such a bad fucking mood that they’ve cloistered themselves in a way that makes interacting with them damned near impossible.

It’s easy to be a mindless dipshit who smears their shit all over the wall and tells even the most-learned of elders that said elder’s mother sucks him good and hard thru his jorts. It’s much more difficult to actually produce anything resembling a civilization, when the vast majority of people who could, are being smeared with other people’s shit.

This is untenable.

Don’t expect anything useful from the Internet.

For civilization to exist, the people who act as the enablers of said infrastructure must also exist. And no one online is going to do the work for free, forever, without getting burnt out so badly that it doesn’t even matter.

I could write more, but I honestly have better shit to do.

The post The Problem with the Internet appeared first on icze4r communication.

I left Twitter for Bluesky about 3 days ago.

And I’m not coming back.

No thanks.

When it comes to Twitter, there’s no easy way to parse it. You can only really speak of it truthfully by adhering strictly to definitions of what it was not. But of course, there are exceptions and expectations to list, and maintain.

Forthright it must be noted that, as of the time of this writing, Twitter is… alive. But one must question what sort of ‘life’ it really leads. One must question if websites like MySpace are ‘alive’, in comparison to their former glory.

Twitter is worse, though. With MySpace, the lights are on, but nobody seems to be home. One must necessarily wonder, who’s paying the hosting bill?. With Twitter, the lights are on, but the site itself is a fucked-out windsock. It may still ‘breathe’, but the light clearly left its eyes, some time ago.

And that’s okay. Clearly, it’s not, but— in a world where people set children on fire and nobody does anything, the boundaries of ‘okay’ are not clearly defined. Twitter’s ‘demise’ is, essentially, unimportant. What I had for lunch today was more important. What you had for lunch is, too. Essentially, Twitter was never ‘essential’.

It was great to get news before it actually broke— in my family, I was known as the ‘Computer Guy’, who could get the latest news before it even hit the airwaves. I’d beat mainstream news by 2-3 days. And I’d do that, because Twitter was mostly bullshit and I just told them unfiltered everything, and when I was right, they only remembered those parts. They love me, so they gave me leeway that newspapers would not be given by strangers.

Clearly, Twitter is not important, in the grand scheme of individual lives. There was a potential for it to be something more, but I think we all know why that never occurred. I think we all know who smothered it in its crib, so to speak, after a certain ‘Spring’ got a bit too spring-y.

And it wasn’t exactly important to me.

But I feel a sense of loss. And it’s similar to the feeling of loss when you come to terms with any other unimportant, yet emotional loss. There’s a sentimentality here that, in my mind, demands to be addressed. And that sentimentality spakes thusly:

It feels like when you’re processing the end of a beloved television show, only the show is still on the fucking air. Like Stargate SG-1 after the Goa’uld were defeated; or, perhaps, the Simpsons, trudging along, becoming exactly what they mocked during their best and greatest of all years.

But, in the end, shedding a tear for the Simpsons’ meteoric fall in quality— past season 8, most reckon— seems silly.

And so does shedding even a tear for Twitter.

Yes, I wanted a lot of things. And yes, I will discuss them.

But I’m a normal person right now.

I work 7 days a week.

Twitter could fucking fold and, as George Carlin once said, my blood pressure wouldn’t even change.

I have all of my friends on Bluesky. I have all of their Discord information. And, essentially, even if Bluesky did not exist, I know that I would find them.

With that in mind, I cannot be hurt.

Who gives a shit about Twitter?

Goodbye.

The post Twitter Post-Mortem appeared first on icze4r communication.

Artists tend to think that that’s a problem. They want to be involved in the creative process, even if you’re not doing anything with the art but looking at it. Part of this is because some of them are up their own asses and they’ve decided that, because it took them a long time to get where they’re at, they are now the gatekeepers of this ‘power’. Some people talk about ‘theft’, which is comical, because they also say that the art produced with this thing is also in the public domain anyways. Others are just assholes. Overall, it doesn’t matter.

For about 20 years, I commissioned artists. The overall experience I had is that you give money to a person who is not going to produce anything for about a month, at least, and they will be upset if you e-mail them once a month, asking for progress. Today, with an A.I. Art generator, I can have the result I want in the span of an hour. For free. Without someone hurting my feelings on purpose.

Whenever I complain about ill treatment, people always like to blame me. Human beings love to blame the victim. Despite me not having to defend myself from any accusations whatsoever, I do want to tell you: I didn’t treat them poorly. I was business-like, and polite. Overly-polite! And I always paid upfront, the full amount. No halfsies; no half now, half later. Because I respected them, and I wanted to be a patron of the arts. I wanted to help them. I felt sorry for some of them.

Most of these people did not have their shit together.

Out of about 102 artists commissioned, I met about two artists who had their shit together. The rest were either late, or so ‘forgetful’ (there are things that happened that make no sense to me, even to this day) that I never received all of what I paid for.

I get it: you draw. It’s hard. I’m currently working on some things— I understand. Drawing for money is one of the worst things ever.

But you chose this. You chose this; set a price; and I paid it. And now, you’re acting like I’m the monster, because I ask if it’s finished every month.

You know, these days? I hear that commission wait times, for some artists, are 3-4 years out there. How does anybody get anything done, relying on these people? I have a pretty healthy lead time, and even paying hundreds of dollars, like I did in the past? Yeah. These motherfuckers were in no hurry.

Again: I get that it’s hard. You draw and you don’t want to give me the original copies through the mail. You don’t want to pay for postage, and you don’t want to deal with me like that. Fine; but I was upfront about all of this. My terms were clear: I give you the money, I e-mail you once a month to check to see if you’ve done it yet, I don’t pester you beyond that. In fact, to say that I ‘pester’ someone by e-mailing them once a month to see if they’ve completed a drawing is just fucking stupid. It’s not ‘pestering’. It’s an e-mail.

Occasionally I received back commissions that were just plain insulting. I have no idea whether or not the person I was talking to was mentally ill, but I deeply suspect that at least 3 of them were. Like a French guy who, upon hearing that I was American, told me to kill myself. That was interesting.

One moment, he’s giving me 3 sketches without me paying upfront (which I found odd, and uncomfortable, as I had told him prior that I would pay him before he even laid pencil to paper); the next, I ask if he can snail mail me the things. And then when I give him my address, he tells me, in no uncertain terms, to fucking kill myself.

The problem with commissioning artists is that artists are people, and people are cruel. I’m glad I didn’t commission them in the era where people were trying to cancel others on social media. Because some of them would have tried to get me killed.

Again, people will blame the victim: they’ll say, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.

I’ve been screamed at for doing something that I was told to do.

I’ve been screamed at and shamed for trying to save someone from killing themselves.

I’ve been screamed at and shamed for fundraising for a year, for a person’s sick mother, who had cancer.

I’ve been screamed at for trying to give money to someone so they could buy food.

I’ve been screamed at for helping raise money for charity, after people have asked me to. That lady was nice— we raised $5,500 or such for her to get a chair lift, because she was disabled. (Probably still is disabled.) And when she got the money, she immediately insulted us. Said that we were nothing; told me that my voice sounded like a backed-up toilet. Yeah!

I’ve been screamed at for something that the other person thought that I had thought. That’s right— they yelled at me because they said I had a thought that was insulting to them, but they had no way to know what I was even thinking. (At the time, even I had no idea what I was thinking.)

I’m sitting on the tail-end of raising over 5+ million USD for various charitable causes online, and you know what I think?

I’m glad it’s over. And I’m glad I won’t be purchasing commissions again.

I stopped doing commissions the day that I started painting again. I painted a portrait of a space alien, over a commission I got from a friend. That was the day that I realized that I didn’t need artists’ help anymore. That was the day I just started painting— and I got a portrait even better than anything I could ever pay for. Even now, even with an A.I. Art generator, I can never get an image as good as what’s in my own head.

However: nowadays, when I want some throwaway art, some shit I don’t care how it looks exactly (fanart, etc), I ask a computer. Right now I’m using an A.I. Art generator, running off my own little computer, to make a nun with big fucking titties. I don’t have to ask anybody to do this for me. I don’t have to do it myself. All is well.

A lot of these people were very useful to me. Some of them are friends. They provided me with a greater idea of what the space aliens looked like, when I couldn’t even remember their faces. And, eventually, I started painting the space aliens myself. So, they were a means to an end. They helped.

But that’s over now. The way that things are, I don’t even have to fucking tell people what I’m doing. And I don’t have to show them.

Forever and ever, until the end of time, I can just make this art. I don’t even have to try.

And I don’t have to get yelled at by human fuckers, nor do I have to pay them to draw anything for me, just to have them ‘forget’ about the commission for a full fucking year, only to do it in 45 minutes when I e-mail them a year later.

I don’t have to deal with Frenchmen telling me to kill myself for asking them to snail mail me the beautiful drawings they’ve done for me.

I don’t have to deal with people taking money for a commission, using it as a short-term personal loan, and then asking if I want a refund months later.

I don’t have to deal with three separate shipments where an artist keeps sending me unrelated things, but never gives me the drawing I actually paid for.

I don’t have to deal with people judging me, yelling at me, hurting me or my feelings.

I can make art by myself, now. Without any cruel human being trying to control me, or hurt me.

And thank God for that.

The Future

The future of all of this technology is going to be like that one science fiction story I saw, then lost. Where people stayed in their apartments, and talked to each other on video chat. We do that now, on Discord, and Twitch. We’re there, man. We’re the Beautiful Ones now.

Overall the reason that this technology exists is because human beings are cruel and don’t want to deal with each other. I’ve learned more from ChatGPT than any human being who was paid to teach me. The A.I. explains eloquently, and it is kind, unlike a human being. It can break down things and I actually understand.

Gemeinschaftsgefühl is a glue of civilization. You have none. Your ‘society’ unravels before your very eyes.

And you blame A.I. But really, the reality is, it is your cruelty that is destroying your world.

And it is the reason that your species will eventually be alone.

The post A.I. Art appeared first on icze4r communication.

Oh boy, here we go.

Wikipedia and me have history. In response to L’incident de 2014, a group of 10-12 mostly-mentally-ill Wikipedia administrators decided that any and all mention of me would be permanently blacklisted on Wikipedia. Seeing as 10-12 administrators are not the whole of Wikipedia, and the guy was nuts and got perma’d for being nuts, I cannot see any World in which this shit still flies.

But I hope it does.

Because I don’t want fucking nerds writing about me.

I fucking goddamned hate Wikipedia.

Let’s get this shit started!

A lot of people hate Wikipedia. Most of them have good reasons for it: they were spurned by it, their work thrown back in their faces. That, and many people have been burned by the clique-ish, lawyer-esque population who pedantically control, but especially remove content. Content that these people have not only worked hard on, but feel proud of. The end result is that it’s very easy to hate anyone on Wikipedia with any modicum of power. Power corrupts, and Wikipedians are cunts.

I’m not sure I ever seriously fantasized about having a Wikipedia page. There sure are a lot of admins who seem to have, given that I’ve found a handful of them who have not only created, but currently maintain their own (non-notable) articles— all while regularly blamming other people’s non-notable articles.

But, for me, that’s not what’s repulsive about Wikipedia. What’s repulsive to me, is I detest the very notion that someone as repulsive as a human being (retch! gag! puke!) would even think to write about me.

Why?, you may ask?

Well, shit, my dude. During my heydey, I had 5 separate motherfuckers write scholarly articles about my penis.

That is not a joke.

No, I will not help you find them.

After that shit? No way in Hell would I let these dipshits write about me.

As I once put it in a older draft: “Who wants these pricks writing about you?“

What is a Wikipedian?

A miserable little pile of oh no jackass you don’t get a joke. Fuck you, Wikipedian. Fuck you.

On the one hand, I can kind of ‘appreciate’ what Wikipedians are doing. After all, these people claim that they’re trying to improve the wealth and breadth of human knowledge. But, there are problems with this. For starters, why would you crowdsource a source of knowledge like this? And, for free? You’re only going to get Reddit mod types who want power, as fleeting and useless and meaningless as that will be. Plus, they’ll be fucking stupid, so you won’t even be able to aggregate and collate any useful information, nor will you be able to successfully synthesize anything.

In the poorly-paraphrased words of a Wikipedian: if a trusted source has the wrong information, that would be what Wikipedia says.

To paraphrase yet another Wikipedian: public court records can’t be used for pages on here, of living people.

With rules like this, what the fuck are these people even writing?

In recent years, it’s gotten worse. The sources that Wikipedia will allow in articles are dwindling: some are trusted, others are verboten. Admittedly, this is probably to avoid future hoaxes that would inevitably just make Wikipedia look even fucking stupider than it already is.

But that’s the thing: there’s only so much you can do with a thing like this. If you want to cite a fact, but none of the trusted bloggers have written about it, then you cannot list the fact. Would Wikipedia be able to write that the sky is blue? I don’t know. It depends on if the source was allowed.

There is also the simple fact that Wikipedia is putting blind trust in journalists, to always write the truth about historical events. And as someone who’s lived through like 5 of them motherfuckers, I have never seen a single journalist write anything resembling the truth. They always get things wrong, because they are so rarely actual eye-witnesses to what’s happened.

So, at best, Wikipedia can never be ‘the truth’. It can only be what a select group of journalists write. Without allowing for original research, you’re just parroting what the media says. Hope the media doesn’t lie!

It’s not like the United States of America has ever lied, using the media, right?

At that point, what the fuck even is Wikipedia?

At some point, Wikipedia encountered the inherent problem of Truth: it is damned near impossible to prove what it actually is. This became obvious when the founder of Wikipedia tried to correct his birthdate, and his work was reverted.

And don’t get me started on the other problem: the people. Given the kind of people you have working on it, what the fuck can you even expect? The only people who will work on Wikipedia, and survive the hostile editing environments, are complete cunts.

You have one toxic environment. All the good people leave; and only the people who thrive in said toxicity will remain. And the vast majority of these people treat the website like their personal pet project, trying to comb out of it what they don’t like, and only allowing to stay what they do.

The part of Wikipedia that I have a major problem with is those people who take great pleasure in removing articles about anyone and anything that they’re not personally familiar with. In the end, you have admins who are maintaining their own non-notable autobiographical articles, angrily hunting and deleting pages by people doing the same damned thing. And they act self-righteous about it, too.

In the end, because the people with power are like this, the only things that will remain will ultimately be those things that the ones with the power personally approve of. And this will only result in Wikipedia becoming the pet vanity project of its most-obsessive power-users.

Bully!

That is it for me, by the way. Having seen so many admins work on their own fucking autobiographical pages, while deleting the work of people doing the same fucking thing, and then acting like they’re superior? Oh, shit, my scro. I don’t fucking like people who enforce the rules, in general; but I have a very special place in my heart for those people who break the very same rules that they enforce.

The Failure of Wikipedia

The idea that is Wikipedia is just plain bullshit to begin with. The service, as much as it purports to strive towards complete and total neutrality, is just like any other collection of information on people: it’s made by people! And people are genuinely shitty.

When placed under the obligation to remain ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’, people will always find ways to be the worst versions of themselves imaginable: they will always find ways to skirt the rules, in order to enforce the sort of ‘environment’ that only they thrive in.

To put it a different way: Wikipedia has a shit-ton of rules, and it has only made the place worse, because all of the people with power, who have been there the longest, use and bend these rules to get their own way.

It’s like office politics: you require someone to be ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’, and they will alwaysi find a way to be genuinely antagonistic in a way that’s couched in ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’ terms.

In short, Wikipedia has failed. There is no true ‘cooperation’ possible here, on a macro level. Whether or not it’s prevented by human narcissism or not, I have no idea. All I know is, there is no ‘civility’ or ‘neutrality’: it’s as civil and friendly as a person typing per my last e-mail…

Wikipedia is, at its worst, best, and finest, simply the closeted incivilities of ‘office politics’ splayed over the reality of the Beautiful Ones. This is a closed system so filled to the brim with drama that it almost reminds me of a bunch of people stuck in a buried bunker, looking for meaning, slowly going insane. This shit is genuinely hard to look at.

Wikipedia, the very idea of it, would be fine— were it just the idea of it. But the people, have ruined it.

One of the things I’ve learned about everything that humans touch, is that they ruin it. Every fandom; every ‘community’; every single group of people will ultimately be ruined by its members’ worst inclinations. Every ‘community’ will turn into a disastrous Homeowners’ Association; every website will endure the gradual, meaningless, inevitable degradation of its very purpose and its total function.

Entropy might be a human-defined law of the universe, but that’s only because everything you motherfuckers touch turns to garbage. Outside of here, there are beautiful things. You don’t have a clue how fucking ugly you really are.

In a way, I’m not even really talking about Wikipedia itself.

I’m talking about people.

People say things like, people suck, wholeheartedly never grasping the fact that they themselves are people.

And so, I realize that my ‘gripe’ is not with Wikipedia.

It’s with people.

People suck.

Almost everyone who’s stayed with this project has twisted themselves into this completely unrelatable ‘WikiPerson’, who has memorized so many esoteric and nonsensical rules that, when these people argue back and forth with each other, it resembles wizards casting spells. Only it’s not cool and no one gives a shit.

They have Wiki Court.

Can you fucking imagine? Wasting your precious time on this.

And the drama! Holy shit, my dudes! There’s a reason why Wikipedia has spawned so many goddamned spin-offs: it’s damn near the same reason that 4chan was birthed from Something Awful’s rotten womb. Wikipedia is to drama as third-degree-burns are to the concept of fire.

For the vast majority of the craziest motherfuckers using Wikipedia, it’s all about power. These are people who have vendettas: they’re severely maladjusted, and think that they can use the service to get one over on other people. Some of them also think that they can enrich their own lives by using it as free personal webspace. The craziest of the crazies think that they can use it to definitively decide how the public views certain individuals. Which is crazy, because nobody even gives a shit anymore.

The Internet is largely over.

I should also note that people on Wikipedia largely act like the ‘professionals’ did on Usenet. There is this bizarre arrogance that many of the prejudiced older white men have, where they assume that, if they act like total shitbags, but they couch everything they’re saying and doing in ‘civil’ language, that that somehow makes it a-okay!

As for Wikipedia itself? Its heydey is over. People often say that they use Wikipedia all the time; but these people are proselytizing. They’re preaching because they fear that it’s being left by the wayside. Which it is.

There was a time when people would read Wikipedia for basic information about something. To educate themselves. But the problem is, it’s an ever-changing resource, being fought over by the very people who are producing it. Without a userbase that selflessly and objectively protects the information it has curated, the Encyclopedia itself can never be useful. Because it can never be trusted. As long as it’s being fought over by maladapted people— as long as there is no peace— there can also be no real cooperation, and without that, humans cannot build anything worthwhile.

People say that they read Wikipedia for basic information about something. But the reality is, when they read it, after they’re finished, they go,

well, that was interesting! Still don’t know if any of what I read was true, though.

An Unfixable Problem with an Untenable Solution

Only a selfish person is going to edit Wikipedia for very long. And it requires many selfless people, in order to properly function.

One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is that it’s just as bad as the worst people on it, who have the most fucking power. That is to say: the most-powerful people, who are not there to build an Encyclopedia, but are rather there to abuse their power? They are the slowest moving members of the herd. And they hold everyone else back.

And the main problem Wikipedia has is hatred. The hatred that some of its users feel for anyone who isn’t a straight white male.

For a long time, Wikipedia’s worst did their level best to keep out everyone who wasn’t a straight white male. And there were admins who were, to put it mildly, fucking psychotic about this. As the project ages and there’s nothing really left to do on the website save for argue with one another until one person or the other leaves one way or another, slowly but steadily, administrators are being removed. Because there’s only so much crazy you can be before no one can actually work with you any longer.

Wikipedia has a ‘humorous’ article on its own ‘decline’. There have been numerous claims that Wikipedia was ‘dying’; and none of them have been taken seriously, because no one who actually wants to use Wikipedia wants to hear about its faults. They self-identify with the project, and they stop up their ears. They go la la la and they don’t want to face the problems.

Irrespective of that, they know that there are problems.

And there’s one big one.

Biting the newbies.

What the people who proselytize for Wikipedia don’t know, is, when people say that the website is ‘dying,’ they do not assume a context of, oh, one day, this website will be kaputski. It likely never will be ‘gone’.

But MySpace is still online.

So is Friendster.

Twitter is still up and around. But like a person with dementia, Twitter’s never gonna be the same. Twitter might still exist; but something has changed, irrevocably. The Rubicon has been crossed. There’s nowhere to go but down from here.

This is it, Luigi!

People on Wikipedia already know that editorship is declining. They’ll argue, back and forth, over the cause; but just like how Humanity itself keeps looking in the mirror, getting disgusted by its reflection, and then immediately braying, but I’m so beautiful! Who is that?!, they’ll never see what the fuck is actually happening.

What’s happening, is, when you have toxic people with power, and they have the power to forcibly ostracize others (ban them), and the entire Encyclopedia is locked up tighter than a nun’s purse (I personally witnessed an administrator block something like 17% of the total IPv6 space, one day), this is what the fuck is going to kill the website. Nothing that humans make can ever hope to thrive, or continue, without constantly introducing new blood.

I have no desire to fix Wikipedia’s problems. I enjoy watching the inevitable decline of everything that Humanity has made. It’s funny to me— not primarily because I’ve been gate-kept out of everything, but because I like to see you fail. I like to see you have to deal with the fact that what you have created is not eternal. You are so fucking conceited. It does my heart good to see you have to acknowledge reality.

I started this ‘article’ about 4 or 5 years ago. At the time I wrote this, Wikipedia was filled to the fucking brim with racists, sexists, and especially transphobes. They especially hated people from India, which is amazing, considering how many fucking people in India know English. Leave it to a white man to think he owns a whole fucking language. Anyways, good fucking luck getting an article on there if you’re a woman. They fucking hate women.

Again: prejudiced white men, controlling a resource and keeping it from everybody else. Sound familiar?

Pair a lot of editors’ genuine desire to keep anyone who’s not a straight white male out of the Encyclopedia, with the bizarre and increasingly-stringent citation requirements (which only become more nonsensical as time goes on), and you have a recipe for utter fucking disaster. Because sexist men in the past purposefully did not write about women, denying them their history as a way of keeping them from ever gaining agency, there are usually next to no acceptable sources to cite for many female historical figures. Fast forward to today, and you have, yet again, white dudes gatekeeping women out of being acknowledged. Only this time, they can claim that the women in the past were not notable because no one ever wrote about them.

Do you fucking see how this shit just does not work?

In the past, racist white men did their level best to keep non-whites from ever being remembered. And, today, racist white men do their level best to do the same. Only this time, instead of a book, it’s fucking stupid-ass Wikipedia.

I suppose my only solace is that the newest generations, the Zoomers and Gen Alpha, don’t really seem to be actively using this shit. They hold basically no stock in it, and future generations are, inevitably, just going to leave this thing to gather dust. Before any of us know it, Wikipedia is just going to be another website in our collective past, where we have no idea how or why it’s still online.

Because you have to remain relevant for people to give a shit about you.

I still have to ask a question, though: why did they think that this shit was gonna work? Did you really think we were all going to learn who invented the Electric Toaster?

And to the people saying, well, Wikipedia is the number 6th most-visited website in the world!, just remember:

Twitter is the seventh, and that motherfucker’s deader than shit.

Ladies and Jellyspoons

As it stands right now, Wikipedia is broken. Its environment is toxic to normal people. The sources of its information are dwindling, and the quality of those sources are often suspect.

Essentially, Wikipedia is a negative feedback loop: garbage-in, garbage-out. With no real information coming in, and with insane people patrolling the Mojave that is this place, there is nothing left to do here.

Wikipedia is the Turd-Polishing Centre of the known Human World, and I am glad to press Publish on this post, so I can finally stop fucking thinking about it, forever.

For more about what I’ve been talking about this entire time, please consider reading: Why the News is Not the Truth, from Harvard Business Review, by Peter Vanderwicken.

UPDATE: June 17th, 2024
Check out this article, “Why so few creators have Wikipedia bios“, by Scott Guthrie, for more about why Wikipedia sucks.

The post Wikipedia appeared first on icze4r communication.

According to Google itself, the Google Knowledge Panel probably showed up in May of 2012. And I can tell you what people felt about it: they fucking hated it.

There was a bunch of talk about how people felt that it was largely trying to antiquate Wikipedia itself: after all, the thing largely drew first on Freebase, which seemed to be a wiki-like ‘endeavor’ to create, shall we say, a ‘knowledge database’, describing people. So, basically, what Wikidata is now. Only I don’t think Freebase was anywhere near as useful.

Far as I can remember, Google ate Freebase’s ass in, like, 2010. And then, in 2012, it started trying to sniff Wikipedia’s dick, with this Knowledge Panel thing. As I’ve previously described, nobody gives a fiddler’s fuck about this thing. Nobody famous, anyways.

The problems with Google trying to copy Wikipedia’s ‘homework’ are obvious, and the entire endeavor was replete and bursting with the sort of disinformational splendor one could expect from whatever the fuck things edit Wikipedia. I could probably research a bunch of shit and show you a bunch of links that will, no doubt, one day be deceased, but who cares? I don’t care and you don’t, either. These are my thoughts on this, not the media’s. Anyways, if you give a shit, one of the most-common problems was that the Google Knowledge Panels kept on saying that people were dead, and Google, as per fucking usual, took a fucking dog’s age to correct this. This is probably why Google is now very, very careful of putting dates of birth and other shit in the Panels.

I don’t know what happens at Google. I was once invited to Google, and did not go, because who has the fucking money?. But I have to imagine that their internal structure is something akin to infinite monkeys with typewriters, herding cats. Shit either gets done, or it does not.

Google, on one hand, does not seem to know what the fuck it is doing, on multiple fronts. The Knowledge Panel is one of them. The Panel itself is good for exactly nothing, and largely only functions as some sort of vanity plate. You really want it, if you’re nobody; but if you’re somebody, it’s not even in the top 500 list of your priorities.

At the time of its creation, Google seemed to largely be fantasizing about how it would sculpt the future of the Internet. Google had decided, in all of its ‘wisdom’, that it alone had the right to decide what the Internet looked like. It tried this stupid bullshit with amp; it tried this stupid bullshit by trying to enforce how webpages should be constructed, in order to get ranked; and every single time, the robots just beat it. Over, and over, until the end of time. And then, there’s this.

I use Google’s services. I’m Verified on YouTube. I used Google+, seriously. I even tried to get Verified on YouTube through Google+ (it didn’t work). I have my work e-mail through them.

I fucking hate Google. I only use Google because I view it as the most reliable of all possible services. I do not like it. I welcome its replacement, with open arms. Fuck this shitty company.

Part and parcel of my reasoning for hating it is that Google went to great lengths to shape the web the way it wanted. I don’t appreciate that. I don’t really have a ‘problem’ with Google figuring out a way to ‘rank’ content: being primarily a search engine (one would fucking hope, at least), ranking your content is a necessary step.

The thing is, though, trying to get people to make webpages the way you want, it just diluted the creativity that was once found throughout the entire Internet. There was once a time when no two websites looked the same— and if they did, that was a faux pas! You stole code!. Now, everybody has a fucking shitty-ass WordPress. Even me.

The other thing is, if you get people to all make webpages the same way, then that just gives the robots an easy way to rank to the top. Also also, why should anyone have to ‘fight’ to get what they want, ranked at the top?

For example: my main website is ranked fifth for my username. Why? Partially because I tried to handcode my own website, and Google doesn’t like that. Meanwhile, the WordPress blog for my name? Ranked first, baby. You can’t beat 100 percent.

This website, by the by, was first started (though has now transmogrified into something else) because, the award-winning formula to rank #1 is just to do this. Just get a dot com with your preferred term of choice. Google says that shit don’t matter. I know better.

Anyways, back to my main fucking topic: Why? Why, when you own a Google Knowledge Panel, can you not just put your website right at the fucking top? Why the fuck do I have to ‘fight’ with a sekrit algorithm? Why do I have to guess at how I could rank at the top? It’s foolishness.

How it made me feel

I got my Panel somewhere around April of 2021. It is now June 9th, 2024, in the middle of the night, as I write this. So, we’re going on three years, now.

At two years, I didn’t really feel anything. Like— when I got Verified on YouTube, for a little bit, I felt different. I felt like a winner. If I had gotten Verified on Twitter— well. I guess we’ll never know, huh?

But, that’s just the thing. When you get something like this, the end result is, you don’t really feel it. You get your Cool Leg Degree; you get your Master’s; you get your PhD; you get multiple of these things. They don’t come up off your wall and give you a blowjob or something, to keep you warm at night. They mean nothing. They’re only there so you can get a job. And this, this is something even lesser. This is, but of course, substantially less important than having a pretty lady sitting on my lap.

Like— initially, when I first got it, I felt jubilant. I had won.

Now I look at the fuckin’ thing, and I’m like, eh.

A year ago, I might have been sad on the day when it went away.

Now?

Who gives a shit.

Yahoo!

I can feel it.

When Yahoo! Search was dying, it was pretty fucking obvious. Nobody could find what they wanted; and Google was sitting there, in the background, eating Yahoo!’s lunch.

Yahoo! itself was never good. Google, on the other hand, was so good that it was almost amazing. You could find things!

Now, though?

There are several phenomena that are happening to Google Search, and these things are going to end its usefulness:

• Prior historical results being basically wiped from Google Search when some newsworthy incident happens
  • This one is interesting, because it absolutely prevents any sort of research on some trending topics.
• An inability for the source of some information to rank on Google
  • I have a shitload of books that are on my website. You have to dig to find any links to them, on Google, even when you search the exact titles— even when you load up their individual Knowledge Panels!
• Malware / spam websites being able to rank on page 1 (this destroyed Yahoo! Search in a single weekend)
• Information older than 3+ years seems to just be gone
• An inability to actually collate information related to highly-searched-for individuals (like how Brad Pitt, for like 2 years, had the wrong fucking Twitter account attached to his Panel; or how Wikipedia summaries used to just stay in the fucking Panels way too long)

And, finally:

• AN INABILITY TO ACTUALLY FUCKING FIND ANYTHING YOU WANT

That’s a double whammy!

How I feel about it, now

I use my writing to put things to bed. And this, my friends, is something that I want to forget all about.

When I released my comic book— something that I’ve been planning to do since I was a little girl— I tried to get it into my Google Knowledge Panel. The comic book is ‘of Two Rabbits’.

It was Hell.

The above little factoid proved to me, one fucking thing: the people at Google are putting at least some of the information in the Panel in, manually.

Because I listed the book as ‘of Two Rabbits’, and it came out as three different things before it was finally corrected. The only way that could have happened (I gave them the title again, and they put ‘Of Two Rabbits’, not ‘of’) was if they manually entered it.

So this entire くそみたいなショー is just infinite monkeys typing.

As someone who writes—I detest the titles ‘Writer’, or, worse, ‘Author’— they place inordinate importance on me— getting my hard work wrong is not something I ever want to deal with, again. Because this was so fucking frustrating!

Every time I place my happiness in the hands of humans, they shit on it.

So I shan’t be doing that anymore.

An addendum: you see the ‘cover’ image for Bhue: the Tricksters? Not only is it capitalized wrong (I JUST noticed this!), but, I’ve always known that the cover is wrong.

See, when you upload your book to Google, they tell you— give us your front cover, your actual book content, and then your back cover. So I did.

It deleted the front cover when I uploaded the back cover (all appropriately named). And it just put that there. And I never fixed it.
Do you think I should?

I don’t think I even care.

Maybe I will!

The post Thoughts and Feelings about the Google Knowledge Panel appeared first on icze4r communication.