Social Media Slapstick, July 2018 Edition

Minds losing their minds, but still doing better than Google Plus. A shame we can’t let a thousand flowers bloom, but in some things there can be only the One.

I still don’t have much to do with Minds.com but check the feed from time to time. As I still have no idea what to say with their oft-touted freedom of speech to all these strangers, I make no posts. I’m counting on that to change once the publication of my third and last book in my zombie post-apocalypse adventure series is in sight. 

So far, so good. Last week, I almost gave it up.

It turns out that Minds.com somehow won permission to operate within Vietnam. Hooray for everybody, except that my timeline was flooded with posts in Vietnamese, by Vietnamese, and no doubt interesting to the Vietnamese, but nothing but the Vietnamese. I can’t have been the only Anglosphere lurker wondering what on earth happened to the one and only video guy he was following, now buried beneath pages upon pages of posts in Vietnamese I could neither comprehend, nor care to.

This is what I like to call a “sacred and profane” scene. A big Colorado sky and those gorgeous Sangre de Cristo Mountains serve as a majestic backdrop for these tokens of human settlement and commerce. No, I’m not using any screenshots from Minds because those Vietnamese posts went on forever. I’d rather look at this.

This went on for days. I had to scroll for pages before I found anything in English, and, more often than not, it was that same note from Minds congratulating itself on breaking into the Vietnamese market. 

One day, I clicked on with the idea of wiping my profile and ghosting out when I see my timeline loaded floor to ceiling with back videos of the one guy I follow. As per usual, the timeline would lead with something by someone else that I find interesting that I’ll instinctively start reading before it disappears seconds in, buried under post after repeated post of something else. Although the Old Stupid is preferable to the Recent Stupid, I’ll call this a draw, because it’s still stupid.

On one hand, I can’t help wondering how many members Minds lost to the Great Vietnamese Timeline Flood. On the other hand, as with everything else about this platform, I can’t work up the drive to find out.

I thought this a nice mise en scène de chats. Not that you can stage cats. More like a lucky shot, really.

All that said, it’s still doing better than Google Plus. Remember that? It’s still around, if barely. It was never so bad as there was simply no real reason for anyone to go there.

Another sweet arrangement I was lucky to catch.

Social media tends towards monopoly for the same reason most people in the world use Windows as an operating system—there are times when everyone needs to be on the same page. It’s easier to network and keep up with people when they’re in one place. And if they’re already in one place, they need a really good reason to move. Most people never get that reason. They don’t post anything more controversial than the mildest political meme among the photos of pets and food and travel locales. Getting “zucc’d,” i.e., banned, isn’t an issue.

If more people are migrating over to Instagram, that’s because most people interface with the Internet via their smartphones, and Instagram is darn convenient for those whose primary camera is their phone. Fortunately, the powers that be at Facebook recognized this early on, and purchased Instagram before it could become a direct threat. 

That said, I don’t see Facebook going away anytime soon, or even a few years down the road. From what I’ve observed, younger people and others whose smartphones are an indispensable tool have moved to Instagram. It’s too convenient for smartphone users to ignore. Likewise Still, Facebook is convenient for older folks and those of us who spend their days at regular, honest-to-Babbage computer stations. Instagram users can share their captioned photos to Facebook, so Grandma and Grandpa can still follow their family. 

It’s such a rare and wonderful thing to behold something that actually works. 

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.

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All photographs Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

More Fun with Cancer

My Accelerated Apocalypse, Part 2
(Part 1 here.)

The doctor wanted to schedule a meeting for us to talk about “going forward” with the diagnosis. I say, well, we’re here now, why not talk now? Unfortunately, the in-person meeting was required, part of the process and all that. So I’m told, and what am I going to do? All I can think is, now begins a bunch of three-hour drives across a mountain pass that are sure to kill me before the cancer has a chance.

The appointment was five weeks down the calendar. “Don’t worry, this is a slow cancer,” says the doctor. “We’ll make sure sure to get everything on time.” All I could think was at least I had a while before I had to go over La Veta Pass again. Besides, the Gleeson Scale numbers weren’t that bad. Just bad enough to have to do something about it.

Now I had all this time to walk around with this cancer inside of me to think about it.

No cats, just cars this time. This vehicle and others were racing along the dirt track at Movie Manor just west of town the first weekend in June. On Saturday evening you saw them parked all over as the owners/drivers partook of the Monte Vista restaurant scene.

We were going out to our favorite restaurant in town anyway. Now we had something to celebrate, sort of. My wife nudged me into pulling the trigger on the rib-eye platter. It had been on my bucket list for a while. Now, why not?

Actual photo of the rib eye platter I consumed that evening at the Mountain View in Monte. Yes, it was everything I dreamed of.

So began a series of nights drinking and thinking about my mortality. I’d already been through this once throughout Thanksgiving and Christmas after my friend Steven took ill and died, so I bored quickly. I was assiduous about throwing stuff out and burning off loose ends, but that spasm of activity lasted maybe three days before I gave up. I’d already taken care of more than most. Everyone knows where the will is. (My wife and I had our wills, medical powers-of-attorney, and all that jazz drawn up in the wake of singer/ songwriter/ performer Prince dying in 2016. “My God, he’s as old as we are! We gotta take care of this!” So we did.)

I was somewhat disappointed in myself for how quickly apathetic I became towards so many things. Here in the face of oblivion, and I’m saying, eh, whatever, won’t be my problem anymore, will it? I had to really work for that slight twinge of guilt, too.

Across the street from the first photo. I thought it funny how the drivers parked their cars in the striped, no-parking zones, but then these things are already running around without plates, so why not distance themselves from the common idiots and their careless employment of car doors? So far as I could tell the Monte Vista police essentially shrugged off this potential fine/rent-collecting, much to their credit.

It’s funny. I got the news of my enlarged prostate in January, went up to see the urologist for the first time in March, got news of my cancer in mid-April, and I think I did that follow-up for the going forward or whatever in late April. I know I had another long while until the actual operation in June. It’s just strange to me how quickly the seasons and months of half a year have slid past me. For the longest time, I used to annoy people around me by noting the dates of the most trivial things. Here I am with cancer, and the only dates I can give you are 16 April, the day I learned I had cancer, and 5 June, when I underwent the five-hour operation to have my prostate cut out.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. First, the “going forward” meeting:

The best-looking one of all the ones I saw in town that Saturday. Ironically, it has plates, but is being towed on a flatbed. The rest drove away under their own power.

The urologist spent an inordinate amount of time explaining radiation therapy to us, and the more I heard, the less I liked about it. “You really, really ought to give these people a chance,” he kept saying. And I’m thinking, What part of “three hour ride one-way” are you missing, son? One six-hour round-trip a week for six weeks, and my wife and I would be filing for divorce three weeks in. 

That was not even the worst of it. Basically, my groin area— “They’re very precise with the beams these days” was repeated—would be subjected to doses of radiation until my prostate was essentially killed. The idea of walking around with a dead, irradiated organ wrapped around my urethra just to avoid surgery seemed to be the most insane thing I’d ever heard. I’ll take the surgery, thank you. I’m pretty sure I repeated that more than twice.

“Well, the surgery does leave a door open. If it doesn’t get all the cancer out, you can do the radiation. If you do the radiation first, getting the prostate out will be impossible due to keloid scarring.”

Now we bring this up. Fine. Like it wasn’t already settled.

So when’s my surgery? What do I have to do?

The earliest they could do was 5 June, a Tuesday. Tuesday was Robot-Assisted Surgery Day, a very good day.

Six weeks away. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about making the three-hour ride through the pass again for a while. This is, after all, a slow cancer. Right?

I’m out of cars. We’re back to cats. Hey, I needed a kitty break after that last part.

To be continued on a later post....
Any contributions towards insurance co-pays, incidental expenses (those three hour drive to Colorado Springs), or maybe just a margarita for my long-suffering wife will be greatly appreciated. (Yes, that preceding block of text is the link.)

Meanwhile, I’ll throw in some unrelated, and far more entertaining stuff while I write out the rest of this. I honestly have to fight with myself to even talk about it. Which, I suppose, is something else I’ll have to talk about. Sometime....