Friday Waste Of Time
Right, so I know I said in another post somewhere else that I deleted a load of useless sites, sites that I once set up and subsequently never use? The sort of sites that just thinking about them makes you question your life decisions?
Well, one of those, in fact two of those, were Mastodon accounts. And in the spirit of this new blog, I thought I’d create a matching Mastodon account for reasons that now escape me.
I instantly regretted that decision.
The trouble with starting anything new, especially anything new on social media, is that when you first start you have zero followers, zero lists, zero hashtags, zero posts but a lot of enthusiasm to get started, to get established on a new site, to finally be seen, and heard.
I really don’t know why I bothered with it, to be honest, when i knew up front it was going to end in a tidal wave of apathy and disillusionment. I have two fairly established x.com accounts, my threads.com account is doing alright, so there really was no need to create another social media account on top of those. But I did it anyway.
Mastodon is particularly unforgiving. There's no lists like X, no communities like on Threads you can join, an no real place where you can find topics of interest, or people to follow. In other words, it's tough going - after about an hour of clicking and searching on Mastodon I have follow 17 people, 30 hashtags; I have zero posts and more importantly, now have zero enthusiasm for this plan.
In the end I dug up and an existing Bluesky account - I know, Bluesky, kill me - renamed it to match this site and let’s see how that goes.
A bit of waste of time, the whole thing, but it killed some time in an otherwise deeply dull day.
Tomorrow off to the garden center to chose some tiles and decking for the back garden, and then into town to meet up with the photography crowd. Who knows, I might actually take some photographs this time (we generally end up in a café and spend the rest of the afternoon there, especially as the weather doesn't look that great).
Music I Heard Today
- Bizarro, the 1989 album from The Wedding Present. The follow-up to “George Best”, it marked my introduction to the band thanks to John Peel playing the single “Kennedy” one evening on his show as I was driving down Union Street in Aberdeen. I’ve been a fan ever since, even though since 1991’s “Seamonsters” they’ve never been the same.
Podcasts I Listened To
- Hit Parade - “Country Roads and Summer Nights”. Another instalment of the excellent Hit Parade podcast; this one is about the parallel rise of two country-pop titans from the Rocky Mountains to Xanadu, John Denver and Olivia Newton-John respectively.
Videos I Watched
- Willem Verbeeck - “Why I Spent 4 Days Photographing the Same Racetrack”. I love Willem’s work, he’s one of the few photographers I follow on YouTube. In this one he’s at the Santa Anita Raceway in Los Angeles. As always, the images he, along with his friend Jimmy Mac comes out with are simply amazing.
Interesting Links I Found
- That 1980s Sports Blog - always a good read if you’re into vintage sport. Does the 1980’s count as “vintage” these days? I was born in 1970, what does that make me? Decrepit? Ancient?