I have an embarrassing confession: after loudly flouncing to protest the Musk takeover, I went crawling back to Twitter. None of the alternatives worked for me, and MLB Opening Day was the final straw. (Guess whose team is currently the only undefeated club in Major League Baseball? That would be MY Tampa Bay Rays!) Anyhoo, here’s a sweet bird vid from the bird app:
Spotted moments ago: Mama Limpkin teaching her chicks to find mollusks and snails. pic.twitter.com/RyUBvK17do
— Betty Cracker 🐊 (@bettycrackerfl) April 5, 2023
Also couldn’t help but notice that the user experience is significantly degraded — it took forever for a short video to load even though I was connected to the same blazing fast home WiFi where videos of similar length taken from the same camera loaded instantly on pre-Muskrat Twitter. But at least I can share videos here again — couldn’t figure out how to do that without Twitter.
Open thread!
PaulWartenberg
I’ve been watching the Rays from a distance this week, I’ve seen their batting improve. Scoring is up from last season! They’re averaging SEVEN runs a game instead of four. It’s awesome. Now all we need is a fat cat corporate CEO in Tampa willing to fund a bond issue to get a new stadium built in Ybor…
#RaysUp
RedDirtGirl
Escandolo!
Rob
I hope one of those Limpkins visits the greater Washington, DC area this summer.
Duke of Clay
I only ever signed up for Twitter to get timely updates when my college baseball team was in a weather delay. (As you know, this happens frequently in the Southeast.) I left when Musk took over and have avoided returning thus far. —- Thanks for the bird video.
Ohio Mom
I only visit (don’t post or comment on) Twitter. I don’t see much difference from my end, except for that annoying dog icon.
But I will not be surprised if one day it goes kablooey and is never seen again. I think the platform is at the point the Roadrunner is when he’s run past the cliff but hasn’t yet noticed there’s nothing under his feet. Momentum will only take things so far.
OzarkHillbilly
Fuzzy chicks story:
When I was up in Canada my cousin Bob and I took our cousin Brunch and his 3 kids fishing. While motoring down a channel we spotted 2 loons, a male and a female, behaving rather strangely. They were dancing on top of the water, slapping it with their webbed feet and giving their maniacal call at the top of their lungs. We slowed down and turned to make our way over to them at idle speed. When we got closer we could see that there were about a half dozen little puff balls popping up to the surface and diving again, every 5-10 seconds or so. It was funny as hell to watch those little chicks try to stay under as much as Mama and Papa wanted them too, but we could see they were all greatly distressed so we moved along rather quickly.
thruppence
@Ohio Mom: Ah, that’s Wile E. Coyote – the Roadrunner never makes that mistake!
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
As a non-Nazi bannee (I got blasted for making fun of Lee Zeldin right after the changeover), I don’t get to tweet. I do check, but spend no time there anymore.
pacem appellant
Sorry you had to use birdsite. I’m liking Mastodon (link in the nym). I actively block Twitter via different extensions, so I can’t see your video. I look forward to the day when Twitter becomes completely unusable. In the meantime, it would be nice if front pagers used screencaps with alt-text.
HumboldtBlue
The constitutional crisis is now fully aflame. The racists in the GOP legislature have expelled three Dem lawmakers from the body.
Almost Retired
Tennessee Republicans just voted to expel the brilliant, photogenic and media-savvy Representative Justin Jones — and just like that they have created a young media star! I hope this bites them very, very hard in their fat Waffle House fed asses.
twbrandt
Elon’s latest asshole move is to threaten to sue laid-off employees who “disparage” him or the company. He claims that a non-disparagement clause in the separation agreement covers this, even if the employee didn’t sign the agreement. That sound you hear is the sound of attorneys rubbing their hands together in glee.
Twitter can’t collapse soon enough.
Quinerly
@HumboldtBlue:
Listening to it now. Justin Jones gave a great speech.
Roger Moore
@Ohio Mom:
FWIW, Roadrunner is always able to keep on zipping even when he’s gone past the edge of the cliff; it’s the coyote who has problems. This actually makes sense, because despite the name, roadrunners are able to fly.
Alison Rose
The Giants will be 3-3 after this game ends. Not great, but not awful. I’m still happy enough over Newcastle’s win yesterday, anyway.
Almost Retired
@Quinerly: He’s amazing. And these idiots just elevated his profile!
Kay
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Badge Of Honor
Kay
I had my nails done a super-pale lavender for Easter. “For Easter” – well, sort of.
I love spring.
HumboldtBlue
Betty Cracker
@pacem appellant: Tried Mastodon and it didn’t take for me — glad it works for you! I’m curious about what you mean when you say “it would be nice if front pagers used screencaps with alt-text.”
If I’m posting an image on this site, there’s a field I can use in the back room to include a description for the visually impaired, which I always try to remember to do. There’s no similar field when embedding Twitter video, though I suppose I could include a description in the body of the post, like this:
Is that what you mean?
Ruckus
@Ohio Mom:
I think the platform is at the point the Roadrunner is when he’s run past the cliff but hasn’t yet noticed there’s nothing under his feet. Momentum will only take things so far.
I still on rare occasion comment there but not anywhere near as often as I used to. I’ve tried the other places, have accounts and neither Mastodon nor Spoutible seem to have really taken off.
PaulWartenberg
Twitter is now annoying me by having the DogeCoin logo staring back at me in the corner of the screen.
HE WON’T STOP STARING.
HE’S JUDGING ME.
MAKE HIM STOP, MOM. MAKE HIM STOP…………
Alison Rose
@PaulWartenberg: I wonder if Muskrat is gonna keep going and change “tweet” to “bark”
Whereaway
@Alison Rose: Another Giant’s Fan!
One of my earlier memories is watching the Giants play at Candlestick Park when it had wooden bleachers at ground level behind right field. I was perhaps 5 or 6, but had the pleasure of watching Willie Mays play center field, with McCovey in right and Marichal on the mound ….
That was ’59 or ’60, and I’m still a Giants fan.
Roger Moore
@PaulWartenberg:
Much judge. Very stare. So tweet. Wow!
pacem appellant
@Betty Cracker: That’s pretty much what a mean. For a video, that would be enough. For memes and pictures, it would be nice if they were hosted on balloon-juice.com and not Twitter. Basically, I just have strong opinions about the use of Twitter in general, but it irks me when an entire post is just links to Twitter. I understand that my opinion may be in the minority, so please don’t go changing behavior just because one dumb user doesn’t want to throw any traffic Elon’s way for any reason.
different-church-lady
Did YouTube go bankrupt while I wasn’t looking?
Alison Rose
@Whereaway: Well, that was a wee bit before my time, though I did go to a few Candlestick games in their last few years there. Actually, when I was a kid in the 80s, we were A’s fans first and foremost. Would of course root for the Giants if they were in the postseason and the A’s weren’t. But around the mid 90s or so, as a family we sort of made an unspoken shift to being primarily Giants fans. I lived in the City in 2010 and went to the parade with some coworkers (our office was just a couple blocks from the route) after they won the Series, which was a ton of fun. And while I have only been to a handful of others, I maintain that their stadium is the best in the league. Just wish it was still called Pacific Bell, because at least that’s a corporate name that sounds nice.
Baud
It was the dog that brought you back, wasn’t it?
scav
So, is TN for or against cancelling? It’s getting soooo hard to keep up.
Calvinball —> Cancelball
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
They will forever be the Devil Rays to me.
Roger Moore
@pacem appellant:
Even before the Musk takeover, I prefered a post not have a ton of links to Twitter in it. It always takes forever for the tweets to load, which means the screen shifts around for a while after clicking refresh. It is much faster if you screenshot them; even if the images take time to load, they have size information so the layout engine can set aside the right amount of space and things don’t move. Screenshots also prevent the record of what people are talking about from disappearing if the tweet is deleted or Twitter is offline.
MattF
I like Mastodon, but mainly to view posts on mathstodon.xyz, a mathematics-oriented instance. If you’ve got some special or local interest, and there’s a server that covers it, Mastodon is good for that. More general stuff, including current events or politics, not so much, IMO.
Betty Cracker
@different-church-lady: No, but I personally find the YouTube video upload process clunkier, and also people kvetch if you forget to record in landscape mode, and that annoys me.
Redshift
Testing a Mastodon embed…
Redshift
@Redshift:
Dang, it looked really nice in preview…
oldster
Copy of a note I just sent to the White House:
Dear Mr. President,
I have news of great concern:
Tennessee has now ceased to have a republican form of government. The Federal Government has a constitutional obligation to intervene.
Article IV, Section 4 reads as follows:
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government….”
By expelling members of its legislature on clearly false and pretextual grounds, the current majority in the legislature has overridden the will of the citizens of Tennessee. Those American citizens now lack the keystone of republican government: effective representation in their legislative assembly.
We cannot allow a state to slip into non-democratic rule by a junta. We cannot sit idly by and watch democracy destroyed. The Constitution itself demands that the United States, i.e. the Federal govt, restore to the state of Tennessee the Republican form of government, of which a lawless assembly has temporarily deprived it.
This is a crisis. But it is a crisis of exactly the kind that the Constitution foresaw. The Constitution made provisions for it. Now it is up the the Federal government to act on those provisions.
Thank you for your help.
best wishes, oldster
Gary Zirkle (Nug)
Apparently, we’ll all just have to feel shame on these right-wing cretin’s behalf because they’re not capable of it themselves. My guess is that if Clarence Thomas ever encountered integrity his knee-jerk reaction would be to strangle it out of fear and disgust; the only good virtue being a dead virtue.
PS—it doesn’t bode well for me that I posted this comment in the wrong thread. lol.
Sister Golden Bear
Popping in, so I don’t know if this was mentioned downstairs…
It’s a “shadow docket” win — but it’s still a major win. The SCOTUS ruled 7-2 to uphold a lower court ruling that a trans girl can run girls track in West Virginia. Honestly, I’m shocked not only at the decision, but the margin of the decision.
The Court provided no justification for its decision, but unsurprisingly, Alito and “Fly me & Ginni around the world” Thomas dissented and would’ve upheld WV’s ban on trans athletes.
different-church-lady
@Almost Retired:
They’ve gone full “Boot stomping on human face, FOREVER!” But I don’t think they’ve yet reached the point where the boot is so strong that the human faces aren’t going to fight back.
Roger Moore
@Alison Rose:
I just don’t want the stadium names to change every few years when the previous sponsor goes out of business or gets bought up or something. I’ve gotten over my rejection of corporate names on stadiums, but I do prefer it when the name stays consistent.
Michael Bersin
I left that social media platform – in doing so it became instantly apparent to me what a huge time suck it was for me. I won’t be going back as a registered user.
I had used the platform to help drive traffic to Show Me Progress. It turns out that that the platform never accounted for anything over 1% of our total daily traffic. This clean, well lit place did and does a whole lot better than that one ever did.
Still, I monitor individual right wingnut Missouri pols’ accounts on that platform and use their posts and the usually hysterical responses to create mocking content. I think of it as enjoying dessert and never having to wash the dishes…
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Sadly, the only viable solution to the TN and WI leges isn’t possible.
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker: As someone who works in the film biz, it annoys me when people think we ought to accommodate how we hold our phones more than the fact that the landscape we inhabit is mostly horizontal. Nothing personal, just a increasing bug-up-my-ass.
Old School
@Redshift:
Get Cole to make you a frontpager. It would look better when you posted.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore:
Oh don’t worry, I’m sure at some point they’ll figure out a way to change the names on a weekly basis.
Alison Rose
@Sister Golden Bear: Yeah, I’m shocked too. Not Roberts, so much, since every once in a while he shows a modicum of awareness. But Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett voted in favor?? Wild.
pacem appellant
@Roger Moore: I heartily agree. Screen redrawing as Twitter resizes its presence on the page is very annoying. When I disabled Twitter, that problem has gone away (at the cost of not seeing some embedded content, but c’est la vie).
Bill Arnold
@pacem appellant:
The twitter embeds don’t just render as text for you? They pretty much are alt-text plus some javascript for rendering them in twitter style, or at least I thought so.
mrmoshpotato
@Alison Rose: I see the Giants came to town and slapped the White Sox.
Good on ya, Giants!
Cameron
@Alison Rose: I think Gorsuch is sort of a wild card. He seems to be somewhat more intelligent than some of his ideological brethren, so I expect some (not many) pleasant surprises from him. The other two, I dunno….
mrmoshpotato
@Alison Rose: Hehe, a lot of us here in the Windy City still call them the Sears Tower and Comiskey Park.
Alison Rose
@mrmoshpotato: Yeah, it wasn’t bad :) Honestly, they went into the bottom of the 9th up 16-3 and the closer gave up three runs, but…with that margin, I guess he can be forgiven, LOL.
Alison Rose
@Cameron: That’s true. He comes across as less strident than Barrett and less of just a general douchebag than Kegger Kavanaugh. Although, sometimes the more educated assholes are also more dangerous.
gene108
I got COVID a couple of weeks ago. Fever’s gone, but I have a persistent cough that still won’t go away.
Cousin’s daughter is getting married Saturday. They’re doing pre-wedding activities today, which I’m skipping because of the cough.
Coughing is also screwing up my ability to get work done, and I’ve fallen behind.
This is my first bout of COVID. It’s draining emotionally, because there’s no clear end in sight. Just slow improvements week over week, which feels different from other viral infections, because those usually had a point that once the virus ran its course the feeling of improvement was rapid.
Almost Retired
@Alison Rose: Pacific Bell is a way better stadium name, if one must tolerate corporate naming rights. I refuse to refer to the Lakers home by it’s wretched new name “Crypto.com Arena.”
HumboldtBlue
@Alison Rose:
He’s a fucking snake in the grass. He can’t be trusted as far as one can spit.
Another Scott
@gene108: We tested positive on March 11 and 14. Only had fevers (1-2 degrees) for a couple of days, then seemed to recover fairly well, then got sinus infections which lead to persistent coughs.
We’re about over the coughs and sinus issues now, but still aren’t 100% (my sleeping pulse rate was about 65 before, now it’s about 75 and drops a little every week).
It gets better. Hang in there and do what you can to minimize post nasal drip especially at night! Drinking hot water seemed to help me.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Alison Rose
@Almost Retired: Oh sweet Lord, that’s horrid. That makes the A’s “RingCentral Coliseum” sound a bit better. (It has a crappy naming history, which includes Network Associates Coliseum and Overstock.com Coliseum.)
mrmoshpotato
@PaulWartenberg: He knows what you did.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: I love the limpkin video!
zhena gogolia
@oldster: Good letter.
prostratedragon
@mrmoshpotato: Darn right, though I will also go with Sox Park. That thing just above the Water Tower is the Hancock building, too.
zhena gogolia
@gene108: I hope you get better speedily. I still haven’t gotten it, and am dreading it. But I will say that I have had viruses that are like that (usually coughing ones), that just seem to linger or go away and come back.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Why the WI ledge in this context?
oldster
@zhena gogolia:
Thanks!
Of course I realize that it is merely micturating into the prevailing westerlies, but sometimes you feel the need to speak up.
Delk
@prostratedragon: heh.. some guy at the Belmont stop this afternoon was asking which train to take to get to White Sox Stadium.
Roger Moore
@Cameron:
Yeah, this is my feeling as well. I dislike Gorsuch, and I think he’s scum of the earth for having accepted a tainted Supreme Court seat. He still seems to be a competent judge, though, and to have some independence of thought, which Kavanaugh and Barrett seem to lack.
The way I’d put it is that Gorsuch seems to be someone who decided to join the Federalist Society because he agrees with them on enough issues that joining was in the best interest of his career. He’ll regularly rule their way because he agrees with them, but he arrived at some of his opinions independently and will rule according to his conscience when one of those issues comes up. In contrast, I think Kavanaugh and Barrett were more or less raised within the Federalist Society and had all their views shaped by it since before they ever went to law school. They don’t have the same kind of independent opinion that might make them occasional wildcards.
Manyakitty
@Kay: ooh, that sounds lovely 😍
Roger Moore
@Alison Rose:
A simple rule of thumb: if a venue has gone by enough names you need to look them up, at least some of them will be awful.
Betty Cracker
@different-church-lady: Valid POV!
Jackie
@HumboldtBlue: I hope there are lawsuits! And we need to find out if donations can be given to pay for their attorneys.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: The pavilion where they have rock shows on the Boston waterfront changes its name to a different bank so often that I don’t even remember what it’s called now.
Fake Irishman
@Alison Rose:
Gorsuch has been actually decent on trans rights so far. He was in the majority in Bostick in 2019 arguing a plain reading of the Civil Rights Act is protective of trans identity. In fact, there might —might, mind you *tosses salt over shoulder, spits, knocks on wood*— still be a fragile 5-4 majority on the court that sends at least some of these foul anti trans bills into the abyss.
(Insert appropriate Gandalf.gif here for effect)
Manyakitty
@Cameron: Gorsuch is also surprisingly pro-Native American interests.
FelonyGovt
@Almost Retired: I’ve been to that arena multiple times since the switchover (LA Kings fan) and still say I’m going to Staples Center.
And I miss NY Mets Twitter, especially how they would be melting down now that the Mets were swept by the Brewers… sigh…
persistentillusion
@mrmoshpotato: I’ve been gone from Chicago for nearly 30 years, but it’s the Sears Tower and Comiskey Park (which I attended in the dreadful 80s, so few fans that I got to be buds with the off-duty Chicago cops who provided security there. Ahh, memories. The cops came to my child’s christening. We then went to a bar.
ETA: the baby went home with the grandparents.
Fake Irishman
@Manyakitty:
yep.
Gorsuch’s opinions are like:
“hey federal/state government, a treaty is a treaty, fair is fair, now butt out and pay up”
Fake Irishman
@persistentillusion:
If you were a Brewers’ fan, the baby would have gone to the bar too. Wisconsin laws are pretty permissive.
persistentillusion
@Fake Irishman: I’ve been to plenty enough Wisco bars to agree. Got thrown out of one north of Rhinelander for blowing off a potato cannon. Good times, thankfully long past.
gene108
@zhena gogolia:
@Another Scott:
Thank you for the encouragement. It helps.
NotMax
FYI.
Quinerly
Now Nike and Jack Daniels are too Gay for MTG.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/04/marjorie-taylor-greene-rages-at-3-corporate-brands-for-lgbtq-ads/
Patricia Kayden
@pacem appellant: I love Mastodon and Post. I left Twitter the day before Musk Ox took over. I’ll go back when he’s forced to sell it at a steep loss.
He has turned it into 4chan.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, everyone I know just calls it “The big tent thing by the seaport.” I doubt I could find five people at random who know what the real name is.
Same with the pavilion that used to be Great Woods.
mrmoshpotato
@Delk:
LOL!
James E Powell
I’m watching a game on NBA League Pass app and I just saw an ad for Michael Bennett for Colorado Senate. Hey Mike! You won! Let it rest!
Reminded me of this from SNL.
Geminid
@NotMax: Mississippi has a lot of good days in April to celebrate Confederate Heritage Month. There’s the night of April 16, when Admiral David Porter ran a small fleet past the batteries at Vicksburg with minor losses. Reenactors could try the shot put against cotton bales like the ones Porter piled on his ships.
April 17 is the day Colonel Benjamin Grierson started out with 1300 Union cavalry and traversed Mississippi from Tennessee to Louisiana, destroying bridges, storehouses and locomotives as he made his way to Baton Rouge with the loss of less than 20 troopers. Communities could stage big bonfires along Grierson’s route for the next 13 nights.
And on April 29, Mississippi could celebrate Ulysses Grant crossing the Mississippi River by mustering Confederate reenactors in every part of the state except Bruinsburg, where Grant landed his army unopposed.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Quinerly:
There are plenty of reasons to avoid Jack Daniels – it is shit whisky, and that charcoal filtering process sucks ass. Am I going to have to buy a product I hate to show support?
Quinerly
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
The memes today are hilarious. There’s one with Jerry Seinfeld (the pic is from the show) doing just that. He’s buying Bud Light out of spite.
sdhays
@PaulWartenberg: That stunt should cost him lots of money since he’s in court over a pump and dump of Dogecoin. I’m not saying it will, just that he’s basically mooning the court, while also making his shitty website seem like it’s been hacked.
mrmoshpotato
@Quinerly: Doing the job she was elected for obviously. 🙄
Timill
@Almost Retired: You mean Emperor Norton I Field?
Sister Golden Bear
@Almost Retired:
You probably won’t have to wait too long until it changes.
buskertype
I don’t care if other people choose to use twitter, but I jumped to Mastodon and I like it. took a while to find people I wanted to follow, but they’re out there. I do miss the local/regional news I was able to follow on twitter, but I feel like its just a matter of time before I can get that happening on Mastodon too.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: I looked it up; it’s the Leader Bank Pavilion now. It had two different names the two times I saw shows there. Maybe we can just agree to call it Harbor Lights, which was its original name when it was where the courthouse is now.
piratedan
@buskertype: same…. I think its the reluctance of certain media professionals who have built up huge followings over on birdsite that have kept the death being a prolonged one. Those politics mavens are loathe to have to rebuild and the lack of tools to make it easier to have a multi-threaded conversation where everyone can follow and join in/pile on is a big deal.
The thing is, politics is not the only topic that drives folks and many of the other areas of interest are rebuilding their bridges, science, math, ethnic concerns, music, etc. I will say this, by building up who you choose to follow and determining what content and users to block is incredibly powerful and works really well. When I wish someone to the cornfield, they damn well stay there.
StringOnAStick
@gene108: Right there with you; I caught Covid the same time you did and have the same lingering cough and fatigue. I’ve tested negative twice in the last 3 days but I’m definitely not back to normal. There’s excellent skiing to be had still and I’m just not interested.
The Up and Up
Betty don’t beat yourself over being human and going back. I followed posters, bloggers, influencers, cool individuals, etc to other social media attempts at recreating. Some begged others to post, be active on those sites to thwart Elmo. Tweet, tweet. It’s an addiction. Elmo knows you might pay more for that fix you can’t quit.
Geminid
I still find a lot of good people to follow on Twitter: Cheryl Rofer. Laura Rozen. Mangy Jay, Many Worlds One Cat, Michael Paulauski and Ragnarok Lobster. I’m glad I can add Betty Cracker to the list again.
Darkrose
@Alison Rose: Craig Calceterra suggested calling them the San Francisco .500s this year, and much as I hate to admit it, he’s probably right. They needed someone that people would come out to see, and they didn’t get that person. Zaidi really seems to be GMing like he’s back with the A’s instead of the fifth-most valuable franchise in MLB.
Darkrose
@Whereaway: Wow. That is amazing.
I don’t have kids, and my nieces and their kids aren’t at all interested in baseball, but one day I’ll be able to tell the young’uns about seeing Posey and Bumgarner, and watching Matt Cain’s perfect game in 2012. Not the same as seeing the Willies live, though.
Darkrose
I’m still on the bird app. I tried Mastodon for a while, but too many of my communities like trans, Black, neurodivergent, baseball, library, and FFXIV Twitter haven’t moved, and Mastodon just felt lonely. I block almost all ads, and I have a 1-strike policy for wingnuts and TERFs, so my feed is pretty comfortable. Still, I’m finding that I engage less with Twitter overall. It feels like it takes more energy than it used to, and I get tired of it quickly.