Check

Twitter appears to be doing that "I hate to see you go but I love watching you leave" thang.

Kevin O'Neill 1953 - 2022

Pain

My favourite Jerry Lee Lewis story, probably apocryphal -

Lewis is in court for drug possession and explaining to the judge that he needs to take these drugs "for the pain".

"What pain is that, Mr Lewis?" asks the judge.

"Well, your honour, it's the pain of knowing I'm going to Hell for playing the devil's music."

Product

I haven't had a "blindingly obvious" cite for a while, so here's Jon Schwarz:

Twitter currently makes 90 percent of its revenue from advertising... This means that you, the Twitter user, are not Twitter’s customers. You are its product. Its customers are corporate advertisers and, as every businessperson knows, the customer is always right. Grocery stores care about the people shopping for Cheetos, not about the feelings of the Cheetos themselves.

Twitter’s content moderation has sometimes been heavy-handed... But this is not because Twitter is run by a woke mob. It’s because Twitter needs to keep advertisers happy — and their top priority is a certain kind of environment for their ads.

...

Twitter is also, speaking just in financial terms, a crummy business. It’s only been profitable for two years of its existence, 2018 and 2019. In 2020 it lost over $1 billion, rebounding to lose a mere $222 million in 2021.

To make matters worse, Musk’s deal to buy Twitter involved taking out $12.5 billion in loans. This means that Twitter will have to come up with an additional $1 billion a year to service this debt.

Thus if Twitter simply continues on its current path, it will lose huge amounts of money indefinitely. But if advertisers get nervous about Musk’s management and flee the platform, it could see losses every year in the multiple billions of dollars.

...

This is why Musk hit the ground running with a groveling attempt to propitiate advertisers. He absolutely must keep them happy. As he put it, “Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.”

And that’s where the hilarity begins. Musk has engaged in endless paeans to the glory of free speech and the need to end Twitter’s invidious censorship... [This has] given him a legion of right-wing acolytes who feel they’ve been ill-treated by Twitter.

But they are not Musk’s constituency now. Advertisers are.

Samhain

We Australians can't be adopting Hallowe'en, All Saints Day or Dia de los Muertos as holidays; it would detract from the seasonal religious festival where we sacrifice horses. (Apparently I've decided to start posting jokes on this unpopulated platform to commemorate the death of Twitter.)

Requiescat

I almost never tweet, but I spend so much time there my reaction, like, I suspect, many other users, to Musk destroyng that hellsite will be like Patrick MacNee's when he gets shot in The Howling. Or, if you need another reference, like the old guy inside the oil tanker in Waterworld.

Mike Davis: 1946–2022

I’ve always been influenced by the poems Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the second world war, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages?

What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.

Unbiblical

The 2022 State of Theology survey reveals that Americans increasingly reject the divine origin and complete accuracy of the Bible. With no enduring plumb line of absolute truth to conform to, U.S. adults are also increasingly holding to unbiblical worldviews related to human sexuality. In the evangelical sphere, doctrines including the deity and exclusivity of Jesus Christ, as well as the inspiration and authority of the Bible, are increasingly being rejected. While positive trends are present, including evangelicals’ views on abortion and sex outside of marriage, an inconsistent biblical ethic is also evident, with more evangelicals embracing a secular worldview in the areas of homosexuality and gender identity.

These findings on the current beliefs of US evangelicals can be relied on because the source does not approve.

Cobayes Silencieux

Commemoration

Eight hours later, back to business.

Laughing

During my childhood, my family lived for most of a year in the US, and, one night, sneaking out to watch TV past my bedtime, I saw, live, for the only time in my life, Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, who, by an odd coincidence, was telling a story about my favourite British comedy show. Now, thanks to this tviit, I finally have credible evidence (at Wikipedia) that the story was true (although I falsely remember it as being about an American who was watching the show on PBS).

On 24 March 1975, Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King's Lynn, literally died laughing while watching an episode of The Goodies. According to his wife, who was a witness, Mitchell was unable to stop laughing whilst watching a sketch in the episode "Kung Fu Kapers" in which Tim Brooke-Taylor, dressed as a kilted Scotsman, used a set of bagpipes to defend himself from a black pudding-wielding Bill Oddie (master of the ancient Lancastrian martial art "Ecky-Thump") in a demonstration of the Scottish martial art of "Hoots-Toot-ochaye." After twenty-five minutes of continuous laughter Mitchell finally slumped on the settee and died from heart failure. His widow later sent the Goodies a letter thanking them for making Mitchell's final moments so pleasant.

Numerous

The Wikipedia entry on John Cusack (I just watched him as the villain in Never Grow Old, one of those modern Westerns that are grimy underlit horror-tragedy from start to finish) was apparently written by an experimental AI.