At $5 per month for a cozy social network and a static blog hosting service, micro.blog was already quite the bargain. This summer, $4 will get you four full months — an absolute steal.

With $10/month you also get podcast hosting, bookmark archives, and a newsletter, if you are so inclined. So you have to ask what exactly $8 per month give you at that other service. The freedom to see fewer adds, I suppose.

On the topic of firsts, here is my first Tweet, linking to a rather funny New Yorker article.

It garnered exactly one “like”, from — and this is where my trip to the archives took a dark turn — someone who is no longer with us. So it goes…

My decoupling from Twitter continues, with all of the 9K+ tweets now available on micro.blog. What use they could possibly have, I will leave as an exercise to the reader.

With Tweetbot and Twitterrific gone, and both the website and official app insistant on algorithmic timeline as the default, it is time to say goodbye.

Well, almost. For the few accounts that haven’t yet migrated and still have interesting things to say, there is NetNewsWire.

Let this unsolicited 2014 cartoon of me sipping coffee in Havana sit here for posterity as I replace it with an actual photo for my micro.blog avatar. Slash account photo slash profile pic. I can’t keep up with the nomenclature. Other than the hunched back, the often unkempt sideburns, and the cup of coffee that is always close by, it never truly was a good likeness, even for 2014.

The new photo is a cutout of this particular moment in time, as I browsed through used books in front of an Athens, OH bookstore during one of our first post-pandemic trips. Yes, that feral child doing God knows what on the sidewalk is ours, and obscured by the sign just enough to be included without a privacy blur.

Athens itself ⊕ And yes, having a photo from an institution unironically named the Athens Lunatic Asylum serve as my Twitter profile backdrop was a joke that up until now only I uderstood, but we are both in on it now, aren’t we, dear reader? was a delightful surprise, from the walkable downtown to its partially-abandoded Lunatic Asylum. The latter was the source of my Twitter cover photo, also saved here for posterity pending the site’s likely demise.

For those of you completely off Twitter, it is now in the impossible-to-avoid-Elon-Musk phase, where even if you block his account there will be people re-tweeting, quote-tweeting, subtweeting… if for nothing else then to complain.

Sadly, it is still the go-to place for medical conference updates, and right now there is a big one.

Found on Twitter: this photograph of the late, great architect Zaha Hadid. She is notable for squeezing some beauty out of brutalism. The photo is notable for the Iskra ETA 85 telephone resting on the coffee table — part of most Yugoslav households last century, including my childhood home.

“I rob banks because that’s where the money is.”

This is what the bank robber Willie Sutton may or may not have once said in an interview. Regardless of source, it applies equally well to social networks and people.

I consider myself a fairly rational creature, and yet…

• Mastodon out of the box: An eye sore! Unusable! What is this, Discord? Because I hate Discord!
• Mastodon with Light theme and advanced web interface on: Where have you been all my life?

Found on Mastodon via @m_clem@econtwitter.net, a passage from The Enchiridion by Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter in 1758.

What a lovely sentiment to have, and not only with regards to social media.