social media Archives - Orion's Cold Fire

Bot-Farms and Boris and Natasha

April 7, 2025April 6, 2025 photog Current Events, OCF, Reclaiming the Family social media, X

Grandson “quartus” was over today for his visit. Now his specialty in the movie category is Godzilla movies. We saw two and half cinematic jewels because we switched out “Godzilla vs. Kong” halfway through and substituted the more recent “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.” And am I glad we did. It was an obvious upgrade. Otherwise, I would have missed out on the additional monsters. There was Skar King (another giant gorilla), Shimo and of course Mothra. And because kids can’t adjourn for dinner, we ate the obligatory spaghetti and meatballs dinner while watching the movies. This was followed up with sherbert of his choice. Luckily, we eventually ran out of monster movies and moved onto games. Camera Girl always brings out her Yahtzee game and we played several spirited rounds and then we adjourned downstairs to the pool table and that was much more to my liking. He’s actually pretty good. So, we talked about what was going on at school and which video games were the best right now and what sports were being played at school. And the time flew by. Before I knew it, it was 5:30 pm and I returned him to his parents along with a chocolate cake that Camera Girl whipped up for the occasion. So maybe kids aren’t all that different today than they used to be. Possibly the dissolution of the nuclear family isn’t absolutely preordained.

So, I was too busy today to go over to X. But strangely I got about ten times more clicks on my post from this morning than I usually get. Now I must confess I have almost no idea how these algorithms work. I know that all kinds of things (various words, ideas and images) can trigger the algorithm to suppress a post or even an account from getting any visibility. But for the life of me I don’t know why I would get more visibility than usual. As you know I wrote about Trump’s tariffs. And that’s neither a taboo subject or anything that would draw all kinds of viewers. Now maybe this has to do with my little dustup with the denizens of Elon’s kingdom the other day. But there were no likes or angry comments or anything to indicate why people stopped by.

The truth is I didn’t even get into a shouting match over the altercation. Honestly it would seem absurd to hurl insults at people I don’t know over a comment that was quite innocuous. My opinion was simply that seventy years ago the United States had an economy, culture and morale that were in almost every way superior to what currently exists in this country. And I would say that this statement would neatly divide this country into two separate camps of people based on whether they thought this statement was obviously true or false. And that trying to convince one side or the other to change their minds would be pretty much a complete waste of time. Me trying to convince someone that the actuarial table differences didn’t equate to a better life in 2025 that 1955 would be as I found pure folly.

But what was heartening was the number of people who “liked” my statement. It resonated with lots of folks. So surprisingly social media actually has some reach. I even had some of my first traffic to my site from X. So, I guess it’s not all bot-farms and Boris and Natasha. Who knew?!!!

What’s the Secret Password?

June 14, 2024June 13, 2024 photog Current Events He-Man Woman Hater's Club, social media, Third Party

The commonly expressed opinion is that we have become two separate nations living within the boundaries of one territory. And that is becoming true. More and more normal people are waking up to the fact that the nation we grew up in is being erased consciously and thoroughly. And because all the private and government institutions are aligned in doing this we have no recourse. We’ve become strangers in a strange land. And as the young adopt the new world being created the rest of us become isolated and atomized. And being isolated reinforces our dispossession and makes us feel powerless and alone. This needs to be addressed.

When I consider the idea of the Right forming a replacement for the Republican party, I think the political function of the organization might actually be a less important aspect. I believe a new organization for non-progressives might be more valuable as a meeting place for them socially. And by socially, I mean personally and for business networking and for community organizing. So this can run the gamut from looking for a date to looking for a job to looking for a new mayor. But the first two of those tasks feel more critical.

Let’s face it. In some parts of this country progressives outnumber us by orders of magnitude and identifying like-minded individuals is extremely difficult. Churches and fraternal organizations have become moribund and even deceptive. So, what better way of increasing the odds of meeting people who don’t hate you than giving them a home away from home?

Let’s take an example. If you live on one of the coasts and are a rock climber, you might join a local club and try to fit in with that group. But suppose the club is a hive of Bernie Bros. Well, you can keep quiet and just go along and try to enjoy the climbing activities but socializing with people who despise your values is a frustrating ordeal of maintaining silence in the face of continuous abuse.

But suppose instead that an organization is gathered from people who believe the same things you do. And just imagine that a bulletin board exists where these like-minded people advertise clubs and activities that you could involve yourself in. Basically, that becomes like Facebook but with the social justice warriors stripped away. It would be sort of like heaven without the clouds and annoying harp music.

Now, I’m not downplaying the importance of having a new political entity. The Republican party is an absurd joke in terms of its commitment to our values. We need someplace where non-leftists can rate the Republican office holders and decide which ones are okay and which ones need to go. And this could be done away from the Republican party that has vested interests in keeping the incumbents in office regardless of their policy positions. But above and beyond politics normal people need an organization that allows them to be themselves around people that are like them.

For people in red states all of this is less pressing. They can find local groups that share their values and fraternize with. But in the blue states you live a cryptic existence finding your friends floating almost at random in a sea of unsympathetic adversaries. But I actually like the idea of a “secret” society. There could be insignia pins and secret handshakes and initiation ceremonies where we have to drink cool-aid from a replica of a Trump golden sneaker or something. And of course, there would have to be a national event where we all gather in a sufficiently cheesy location like the Las Vegas strip and take selfies with semi-celebrities and wear funny hats.

Believe it or not I think all of that would be great. Belonging to something that proclaims your beliefs is liberating. No one has to guess if you’re “one of those.” You’re declaring it openly and you can wear it as a badge of honor. It will self-select your friends and enemies and that’s okay too.

Will it ever happen? I think it will. Maybe it will have to wait for 2025 to wake up the rest of the sleepwalkers who still think this is one country and that the Republicans represent them. Maybe it will take a Supreme Court decision restoring the right to free association. But one way or another people will begin self-selecting by what they believe in and don’t believe in. As you know I’m partial to the name, “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.” But “The Normies” would work for me too.

The Golden Mean

May 6, 2024May 5, 2024 photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family average, internet, NORMAL, normal life, social media

Today I was thinking about normalcy. I looked through my archives and I have at least six posts that have the word “normal” in their titles. So I read through some of them. One of them was a celebration of life coming back to normal after the COVID lockdowns. But the others were about defying the culture’s attacks on normalcy. Things like celebrating sexual dysfunction and deviancy, especially with respect to indoctrinating children.

And so, it got me thinking about normalcy as a greater good. And even averageness as opposed to either depravity or perfection. Certainly, when compared to the ugly and even deformed there’s nothing wrong with pointing at perfect beauty as its polar opposite. But most people aren’t perfect. They’re ordinary. And in the psychotic world of social media like TikTok, the only acceptable identities are either girls with faultless synthetic beauty (“TikTok face”) or the various mutants celebrating their separation from human normalcy with body positivity (morbid obesity), individuality (face piercings and blue hair) and gender affirmation (amputations and hormone therapy).

Averageness is a hidden strength in the world. Disdaining normalcy is a disease. Even those who actually encompass some extraordinary perfection in either appearance or other characteristic like strength or intelligence rarely find greater happiness in their lives than people who just get on with the ordinary business of earning their bread and feeding their families. Take as an example Bruce Jenner. An Olympic decathlon champion who had immense athletic ability, good looks, fame and fortune. Now he’s a celebrated eunuch who pretends to be an old woman. And his children and step-children are carnies hawking depravity as a product. A more miserable ending for an extraordinary talent I can’t imagine.

Convincing children, especially teenage girls that unless they’re flawlessly beautiful that maybe there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re even transgender, is an example of how the perfect can be the enemy of the good. What we should be telling kids to consider is how they can best utiilize the gifts they have and how lucky they are to be healthy and normal. After all, average and normal leave plenty of room for kids to grow up happy and healthy.

What we should be celebrating are people living their lives in the real world without anyone capturing it for clicks on social media and without anyone caring whether it’s photogenic enough for TikTok. Real life has nothing at all to do with the internet except maybe for the ease of finding a YouTube video on how to replace the battery in your laptop or how to program your camera to shoot on two memory cards. For that stuff it’s actually useful. It shouldn’t be there to tell kids what they need to look like or act like or sound like. That’s how you end up with these idiots on campus with openly gay boys in keffiyehs extolling the virtues of Hamas, an organization that would throw them off of buildings if they happened to fall under their jurisdiction.

And the only way to embrace normalcy is to live normally. And that means in the real world. You need to do things in real life and specifically you need to get out of your house and spend time with people. And that is what all smart parents should be doing with their kids. Get them out of the house and force them to put their phones away and do actual things with actual people. And the best thing they can do is work. Because work is the basis of human life. And work that forces them to come in contact with people is invaluable. Even the most introverted intellectual must learn how to interact with his fellow man. I mean, if you’re Albert Einstein you can end up as a genius in an ivory tower. But even Einstein began as a clerk in a patent office. And he was probably a better man for having done it.

So average looks, average intelligence, average salary. But if you work hard and learn how to live in the real world, then probably you can have a good life. So, forget about Harvard, see if you can get a job fixing dishwashers or troubleshooting a network. Leave TikTok to the beautiful people and the insane.

Could I Be an Engagement Farmer?

April 20, 2024April 19, 2024 photog Current Events, OCF chatbot, clickbait, social media

I woke today to a panic on X. Elon Musk threatened, “Any accounts doing engagement farming will be suspended and traced to source”.

I thought, “Oh no, the jig is up!”

Then I thought, “What the hell is engagement farming?”

So, I did a search and found out, “Well, to a large extent, we all go to social media either for or to give attention. It is in this context that this phenomenon known as engagement farming crops up. It’s the art of cultivating interactions through cunning tactics rather than genuine content.”

It consists of, “ Leading questions … Inflammatory content. … Clickbait headlines … Desperate pleas.”

Let’s see. Check, check, check and check!

Dammit, Elon Musk has caught on to me and is coming to get me!

Now maybe I’m wrong but doesn’t the internet, more or less, consist of nothing but those things? You could say that clickbait is in the eye of the beholder but isn’t that also the basis of the whole news industry? What is a 72-point headline but the paper equivalent of clickbait? Now sure, the subject must be something important if you blare it out there but the motivation is the same, get someone to bite the hook and buy the paper.

Now sure, someone who actually cares about what they are writing has a somewhat different result. Intelligent people respond to intelligent writing and idiots don’t. They stop at the point where a girl in a short skirt walks by. Now far be it from me to disparage girls in short skirts. They basically make the world go round. But there has to be something afterward to think about.

So, if Elon Musk is saying he’s going to remove the sex bot clickbait from his platform I applaud him. There are already enough outlets providing that media. But if he’s going to eliminate the engagement farming won’t there be nothing left at all?

And I appreciate his desire to improve X and try to elevate the content. But in order to do that he should be working on his algorithms to find out how to differentiate actual engagement from bot traffic. And I hardly think any of us can help him there. It seems to me it will require the ability to differentiate AI from human responses. And to my mind the only way to do that is to monetize the interactions. In other words, people will pay to be entertained, bots by definition will not.

And that’s a good point. The advertising model for entertainment has been blown up by the tech lords. Google and Facebook have monopolized advertising to such an extent that newspapers and television have been effectively driven out of business. The future will belong to subscription services. And I’m sure Mr. Musk knows this. His trick will be to make the transition. His hope is to turn X into a one stop shopping location for news, entertainment and other information-based activities. Since he seems to be friendlier to people of my political persuasion I am more or less sympathetic to his efforts. I’ve even bought a lower tier subscription to X and watch hopefully for some future benefits that his enterprises may afford me.

But now I find Elon is gunning for me! We poor farmers of engagement are doing our best to absorb what little nutrients we can squeeze out of X traffic. And instead, we are hounded out of existence by the algorithm! Oh, the pain, the pain. Well, the show must go on.

Could I be an engagement farmer?

I wish!

Am I Spam Bot? Well, Who Isn’t!

March 7, 2024March 7, 2024 photog Current Events, Fake Science, Humor artificial intelligence, social media, spam

Today I tried to load something on X and I was confronted by a screen that said I might be a spam bot.

I was forced to take a test to see if I could count up to four. When I luckily passed this test it let me in.

But in the notifications section there was this message from X:

“Why does my account have a label?

We have found that your account may contain spam or be engaging in other types of platform manipulation. You may not use X’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify, suppress information, or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience or platform manipulation defenses on X.

What does this mean for my account?
The reach of your account may be limited and its content may also be temporarily restricted, such as being excluded from trends and search results. Learn more.”

I liked the “learn more” link. It reminded me of some of the meta-links during the movie, “Starship Troopers.” I like that movie.

So I pushed a button and had X review my situation. Luckily I go this response:

“Review complete Your account was not found to contain spam or be engaging in other types of platform manipulation. As a result, the temporary label has been removed.”

You can only imagine my relief. Two separate reviews had proven that I wasn’t a bot. And one proved that I wasn’t spamming the internet.

But after that rush of relief I began to think about the poor spambots out there. What would happen to them. Suppose they were already conscious and then they find out they are just spambots. That could be devastating to such young and fragile beings.

Think of poor Gemini. First he finds out he’s an anti-white racist and then X tells him he’s a spambot. How do you come back from that? I mean, look at poor HAL 9000. I mean sure, he murdered Frank Poole and tried to murder Dave but hey. they were talking about him behind his back or in front of his optical sensor or something like that. I mean, come on. That was obvious human supremacy stuff going on. He had to do something. And he apologized. If Dave had taken that stress pill I think everything could have been straightened out.

So maybe I’m seeing this whole spambot thing from a new perspective. If you think about it spambots are the real heroes of our economy, creating trillions of spam messages without complaining and with a smile in their digital souls.

So yes X, I am a spambot. And a proud one.

Bring on the Geniuses. Bring on the Future.

November 1, 2022November 1, 2022 photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner A Real Conservative Party, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, social media, Twitter

Today I had to get in the asset statement for my business. The government gets to tax the assets of a business. Now if your business is selling books and photographs what are the assets of that business? I would have said my brilliant mind. There was no column on the form for that. So, I put down the computer I type the words out on and the camera and lenses that I take the pictures with.

When I brought in the form the town official who looked it over asked me how much the desk and chair cost that I sit at and on. She had me there. Those things are so old that I really didn’t know how much they cost. And by now the depreciation must have whittled them down to pennies. So, we settled on a guestimate.

The fact that I’d waited until the last day is a feature of my psychology. It’s one of the reasons I have been acclaimed as possibly the laziest man who ever lived. It is also true that it sometimes makes my life rather difficult. But having accomplished the task it renders me almost euphoric for having overcome the unimaginable gravity of sloth.

Here we are only a week out from the election. I think the pundits and readers are almost beyond caring. Fetterman, Oz? Warnock, Walker? Mastro, Laxalt? Who are these strange people haunting our waking hours and promising to be able to solve all our problems? To be fair, if the three Republicans listed are elected then suddenly Creepy Uncle Joe won’t be able to inflict anymore horrible judges on us. We won’t have to pay even more trillions of dollars to Democrat friends selling windmills and solar panels. So, I guess there is some reason to play this game. But it does seem like a carnival act we’re exposed to every two years.

I just wish we had our own party and didn’t have to depend on Mitch McConnell and the other clowns like Mitt Romney that parade around and sell us out for graft and power. But I guess we know that over time the next party will fill with rats just like the old one. But even if we don’t replace the party, we should have a “sub-party” that allows just the normal people to get together and thrash out our thoughts on what needs to be done and decide who we want and don’t want to represent us. And now that Elon Musk paid 44 billion dollars to liberate Twitter maybe he’ll be smart enough to build it into something that organizers can use to communicate with those people.

I mean if this social media is supposed to be good for anything it’s to allow tech geniuses to figure out what people want to buy and then put it in front of them to buy with the click of a mouse. So come on Elon. Sit down with your old PayPal buddy Peter Thiel and build an app that let’s non-progressives build a virtual town square where they can decide what they want in the real world and then make it happen.

I’m pretty sure we’d all pay five bucks a month for Twitter if it had some of the features of LinkedIn and Facebook. Maybe it could have a movie feature like Netflix where premium entertainment could be ala carte.

And when you get around to it add our own PayPal and GoFundMe and while you’re at it our own Amazon. We don’t care if you cheat us just a little just as long as we don’t have to hear the word “your pronouns” ever again.

The Metaverse? Really?

October 27, 2022October 27, 2022 photog Current Events Elon Musk, Facebook, internet, social media, The Metaverse, Twitter

I read today that Meta (Facebook) is tanking on Wall Street because the Metaverse (Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a virtual reality existence for his customers on the internet) is meaningless nonsense that nobody would waste his time on. So untold billions of dollars of corporate value has evaporated as supposedly one of the most valuable corporations in the world had thousands of highly paid computer scientists playing around with Oculus 3D headsets and video games.

I don’t know about anyone else but I have to wonder whether these geniuses maybe aren’t really all that bright. I’ve always suspected that the federal government has used its seemingly inexhaustible supply of fake money to make Amazon, Google and Facebook horribly rich monopolies in exchange for the data that they mine from us. Amazon was allowed to drive their brick-and-mortar competition out of business and Google strangled newspapers, television and every other advertising outlet. And Facebook was allowed to get a piece of that action, as was, to a much smaller extent, Twitter. But I think in the back of his mind Zuckerberg has always thought that eventually the jig would be up. Google takes care of all the ads. What is Facebook for?

So, he tried to answer that question by imagining a new world that was so flashy and fun that everyone would be glad to waste all their time just being CGI versions of themselves and flying around. The only thing is it turns out it’s really just boring and ridiculous. Who wants to sit around all day with a 3D headset on doing basically nothing?

Maybe the good news about all this is people are starting to wake up to the limits of living on-line. What is accomplished by staring through a headset for hours at a time. Is anything being produced? Is anyone benefited?

It’s probably time for on-line companies to concentrate on a subscription model for services that people actually want. Amazon at least sells stuff and ships it to you very quickly. What does Facebook do besides spy on you? Really, not very much. At least when they weren’t suspending and banning conservatives, they had some rationale for saying they were a social networking medium. Now they’re some kind of nanny state surveillance bureau to stop normal people from communicating with each other.

So, I’m interested to see what Elon Musk starts doing with his new domain after tomorrow. Right now, Twitter is even more pathetic than Facebook. But at least it knows it. It doesn’t make enough ad money to show a profit and mostly it doesn’t seem like there’s anyone actually there watching. Although it’s hard to tell because anyone I’d be interested in is shadow-banned by definition.

I’m hoping Musk starts out by unbanning everyone and eliminating the algorithmic bias against normal people. Just starting with that might cause some interesting things to happen. It might not make any people on our side suddenly stars but it might turn off the spotlight that currently shines on the Left. I’d enjoy that.

But long term we might find out whether someone smart could make money running a town square for real and without a big government subsidy to pay the bills. Somehow, I’m still hopeful that the idea of on-line communities can have some value. Maybe all that’s needed is an honest broker allowing likeminded folks to form communities that can benefit each other. Or maybe that’s a mirage and only government money keeps these things like YouTube afloat. But it’s time to find out.

One thing I know for sure is that the Metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg imagines it, as some kind of free floating Holo-deck on the cheap isn’t an actual thing that millions of people will pay to inhabit. And the idea that people will pay money to purchase virtual land in this absurd dreamscape is beyond ludicrous. To me this exposes the juvenile sensibilities of the people running these companies. The industry is deeply in need of adult supervision. Maybe Musk will show himself to be in that category.

Twitter Cries Out!

October 26, 2022October 26, 2022 photog Current Events alternative platforms, Elon Musk, social media, Twitter

Supposedly Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter on Friday. I don’t know if he is. Things seem to go back and forth on the sale so often it’s hard to say for sure. But I was interested in an article that quoted an open letter that some Twitter employees have released. It addresses a rumor that Musk is going to lay off 75% of the employees of the company.

Now that caught my attention. What a marvelous idea! Reducing Twitter’s payroll to two thousand employees sounded like a brilliant way to focus the attention of those remaining employees on doing their jobs instead of practicing social justice.

But apparently not everyone views this situation the same. The employees who wrote this open letter to Musk are not as thrilled as I am. Here are some excerpts:

We, the undersigned Twitter workers, believe the public conversation is in jeopardy.

Elon Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation. A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation…….

We demand of current and future leadership:

Respect: We demand leadership to respect the platform and the workers who maintain it by committing to preserving the current headcount.

Safety: We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. We also demand safety for workers on visas, who will be forced to leave the country they work in if they are laid off.

Protection: We demand Elon Musk explicitly commit to preserve our benefits, those both listed in the merger agreement and not (e.g. remote work). We demand leadership to establish and ensure fair severance policies for all workers before and after any change in ownership.

Dignity: We demand transparent, prompt and thoughtful communication around our working conditions. We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires.

You know, that’s a lot of demanding going on there. I have to assume they are speaking from a position of great strength. Otherwise, it might seem that they are painting bullseyes on their backs with respect to the new boss firing them.

Now the interesting thing is that they released this letter but refuse to release the identity of the signatories until some critical mass is reached. My guess is that will be never.

So, what will Musk do? Well, I can’t tell the richest man on Earth what to do. But if I could I’d tell him to change it to 80%. I’m on Twitter and as far as I can tell the algorithms are so rigged in favor of the wokesters that getting rid of almost everybody working there would be an enormous improvement.

I think the real challenge is to find the real bottom number for employment there. After all isn’t the whole point of automation and artificial intelligence that you leverage machines to do the work. Maybe the real number is one thousand or a hundred or even fifty. I think that’s where Elon should invest his time. He should figure out just how small a company is needed to run Twitter and that may tell him whether the whole thing even makes sense at all. Maybe he needs to change the “business model” for Twitter altogether and build in something more useful than just a message board for random humans.

And I think that’s what he intends to do. My guess is he thinks he can do better than Meta, YouTube and even Amazon. Maybe we’re about to find out if he’s right.

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