Maybe I would care more about Twitter suspending me over a tweet about fictional characters if other social media platforms didn’t exist. But they do and honestly I’m on pretty much all of them. I’ll miss getting followed by The Last Drive In crew and Sam Neil, yet the former are heavily on Instagram anyways. This also comes at a time when I’m trying to dodge Spider-Man movie spoilers and Twitter is rifled with those.
Also they fail to crack down on bots, obvious trolls and people who definitely give off the alt right Nazi vibe. Facebook sucks at that also and they’ve suspended me a couple times for jokes about white people. Hello, I’m white. Whatever. Sure I’ve filed multiple appeals that didn’t work and even had some crypto person tell me they could restore my account for a fee (um no I’m good). I did keep the backup account which Twitter forgot about even though it has my real name as my username for that one haha.
Maybe I’ll restart again but I spent 10 years on that site and didn’t even get past more than 1500 or 1600 followers. That’s pretty pathetic. Sorry to those who relied on me for likes and comments, yet I’m sure they’ll be fine. Anyways they can find me on five other apps so I think it’ll work out alright. Plus maybe I’ll actually use the time I would waste tweeting to focus on that giant movie backlog of mine. Which I’ll probably Instagram about.
Look I get that people have to make a living, yet there are better ways than writing obvious click bait articles. Especially since most of them have awful headlines that literally scream “PLEASE CLICK ON ME!!!!” and cause most of us to roll our eyes. What is even worse is that to avoid being called out on not reading the article, all too many read the article only to discover that it does not tell them anything they could not have inferred from the headline alone. Political articles sense people often find them boring do this a lot, but the worst offenders are entertainment sites and social media feeds desperate to satisfy their advertisers. Eyeballs=dollars, yet do we have to all engage in such behavior to get someone to read what we right?
Am I doing this right now? I threw up that crappy headline just to see if anyone would bother reading this lame rant, so I guess I am an equal opportunity offender. “Equal Opportunity Offender” would make for a great band name, by the way. Hey read this article about my new band, Equal Opportunity Offender! Playing soon in, well, I somewhere, and featuring music that sounds like, well, ska? Jazz rock R&B fusion? I have no idea, so stay tuned! For the next article that grabs your eyeballs and forces them to suffer through another bullshit article penned by a person who needs to pay rent in two days. Perhaps it has always been this way and I just prefer to ignore that, as does most Internet users. Looking at you, BuzzFeed…
Maybe its because I am now in my 30’s but I notice more things people do that get on my nerves. Known as “Pet Peeves,” they cause me to create a list of items that annoy me and many other people. Such things come to mind as chewing gum too loud, leaving gum on the sidewalk for people to step in, leaving gum on the bottom of seats and chairs, blowing gum bubbles that pop and leave a mess, gum in general. Gum is one of the most pointless inventions of all time: if you want to make your breath smell better, get a mint. If you are trying to quit smoking, good for you but do you have to choose something else that is equally annoying and messy? I guess gum doesn’t smell bad, yet it still is awful and of course people think its rude if you refuse an offer of gum but I don’t want your stupid gum. Also people who cannot be quiet in a library, its not hard and its a requirement. I guess I type too loud and that gets on people’s nerves too, and I am typing this very loudly in a public setting so I am also part of the problem.
I abide slow walkers to a point, then I wonder why they can’t move faster if they either my age or younger, or are clearly not old people hobbled by life. I also loathe those who drag their feet, especially if they wear flip flops. Flip flops are okay, however if you are too tired to avoid clomping around loudly then go home. No one wants to hear you making a loud dragging noise in public, or anywhere for that matter. This brings me to people loudly talking on their phones or using those stupid hands free devices that make them look as if they are talking to themselves. I actually like people who use headphones until they can’t hear me asking them if they need help finding something at my store, then its annoying. At least they are not those people who come in blasting loud music and not caring if everyone can hear it, which makes it harder to ring people out at the register. Its a pretty douche bag thing to do, as is abusing speakers on cars that make it so I can hear your music all the way inside. No one wants to be subjected to your shitty taste in music.
Maybe…
Oh and I am guilty of this one too but everyone being on their phones while eating out with others is rude, and screams “I can’t pull away from social media for five seconds to talk to you.” Perhaps you should hang out with more interesting people, or go somewhere better, or maybe you shouldn’t be so dull. Also no one cares if you post pictures of your food, everyone else does this and its really lame. Which brings me also to smoking, a habit that is thankfully being stamped out everyone, and also being too impatient to wait in line, or bringing way too many items to the express lane. I also roll my eyes when I find carts left right in front of the door of my store, which means those people were too lazy to even bring it back inside or put it in the cart wrangler outside. Not to mention the customers who leave products all over the store, particularly ones that need to be refrigerated and thus go bad. I could pen an entire column about my work pet peeves, yet I choose to save that for another time. The human race is mostly annoying, I wonder when we are going to Mars…
This is overdue, but I am posting about it, anyways. Months ago, Rotten Tomatoes decided, just like IMDB.com did, to kill off their message boards. However unlike IMDB, RT decided not to warn the users, and closed the boards for good, making it impossible for users to recover anything they wanted to save. I keep forgetting to make backups of certain things I want to save or preserve, and every time I regret doing so. This is not why I am angry, though-no, I am upset that after years of giving the site eyeball traffic along with others, RT decided to can a feature that is responsible for them existing in the first place. Too bad, since I think the forums were experiencing sort of a resurgence, and people still posted there, although I will admit things were never the same after 2011 or 2012, I guess. Maybe it was time. I have been a member of numerous sites, and I always departed before they went under, although there were a few that I hung around at long after someone turned off the lights. No apology has been posted, and I feel worse for the user mods, several of whom I am friends with on Facebook. They should have at least received something for their troubles, or some kind of heads up, but the RT higher ups, probably embarrassed by some high profile incidents (thanks insane DC fanboys for making things worse, not better-and yes I blame you, too) that occurred on the site, although those were not related to the actual forums themselves, decided to call it quits. There were some good jokes made in OT that the forums were the dark side of the site, chained up in the basement, hidden from view, which was not wrong considering that RT made it hard to find the forum link around 2008, or 2009.
Goodbye, RT OT. The political and sports talk were always fun, and I have good memories of posting during election time, when things were at their most heated and active. Goodbye, both RT chats, although the OT one was held off site and is still around, while GD’s was at its height when Yahoo hosted it until late 2007, or 2008-I do not recall. I managed to get booted from the OT one a bunch of times, for various reasons or another, heh. The Yahoo one had live cams, which was really cool, and ended up pulling users from different groups. Farewell, GD: Oscar season when Crash won is one of the site’s highlights, a real moment in time. I still have not seen that movie, and I probably never will. All of the neat thread groups departed to different sites, all which I post on, and maybe this is just another downside to the Internet: the fragmenting of people, divided up into sections and groups. There are different streaming services, different social media (Facebook and Twitter have literally killed the message boards, for better, or for worse), multiple entertainment options. A lot of memories, all gone forever, lost in time, quote that overused classic Blade Runner line, or the Children of Men one about the last one left turning out the light, auf wiedersehen even though I will never seen the site again.
I wish I could be really petty, yet I still follow RT on their twitter feed, mostly to lob meaningless “Bring back the forums” posts at them, a David throwing Internet stones at a Goliath that never cared in the first place. 20,000 some posts, well almost 21k, never to be recovered, along with everything else. Perhaps that is for the best, and there have been jokes about how now that RT’s forums are gone (the site still lives, of course, not that I care too much) they can run for office now, although I doubt anyone worried about that sort of thing. Thus ends a journey that began in 2003, and I imagine that my old posts were really awful, so hooray for them no longer existing, although knowing the Internet nothing is ever really gone, a fact that Donald Trump and others keep forgetting. On to the next phase, whatever that is; I myself hope for virtual reality, or space travel. Both would be nice. MadMan_731/MadMan (the site let me drop the numbers later on)/MadMan_7 and TheOmegaMan71 (aliases), signing out, for good.
The horrifying events of the past couple of days in Oklahoma have made me reflect on a few things. First that I’m lucky that all I suffered through on Monday was a power outage at my job. The death toll in Oklahoma is still rising last time I heard, and the pictures of the utter devastation are hard to look at. CNN featured video taken off the twister, and its astounding to witness the sky turning black and random objects being tossed around at lightening speeds. Reminds me of the movie Twister in fact, which bad dialogue aside did properly showcase what’s it like to be near or in the path of a massive storm system hell bent on wiping out everything in its wake.
Secondly the use of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook is interesting. When say, Katrina happened Facebook was still relatively young and Twitter wasn’t the force it is today, so being able to read the tweets of famous and not so famous posters reacting in real time puts a new focus on reacting to a natural disaster. Anyone can post real time video of what’s happening and it will be seen by tons of people on the Internet. Its how I found out about the Boston bombings-my Twitter feed was full of people talking about what was happening as it was happening.
I’m also hoping that the Internet can further lead to better rescue efforts, although with the power out and so many homes having been destroyed its probably not possible for people to be tweeting where they’re stuck at and if they need power restored. Better information though is always a good thing, and if it gets to people faster that’s a great thing, too.
Today I tried to access Rotten Tomatoes’ message boards. Well every attempt was met with one of those lame errors that you get when the site has gone to shit, only the main page is fine. What we have here is RT’s overlords trying to kill off the forums even though without the forums RT doesn’t even exist the way it does today. The users are what made it profitable enough for it to be bought up by IGN back in 2006, and they’ve made the site tick. Only during the past two-three years RT has been pretending the forums are hardly even on the site, hiding the forums and making it harder for new users to register. They also got rid of the journals, a feature that was actually decent and enabled users to communicate with one another because they were clearly too much of a good idea.
You now have mod approval for certain posts, gateway timeouts, and any other bugs that may pop up. RT’s new goal is to turn itself into a social media connected website, and while I cannot blame them for doing so its still terrible. They are lying to their users, or at least not being forthcoming with them, and I happen to be a long time poster there (10 years this month, in fact). That’s utterly ridiculous, not to mention anger inducing, and while I can see someone telling me not to bitch about a free message board I still think I’m inclined to. How would you like it if Facebook started charging its members, or if Twitter decided to phase out certain features or change things without even telling you? You would be angry, right, and those services are free.
I guess that the song “Video Killed The Radio Star” can indeed be amended to “Social Media Killed The Message Board.” Oh sure many other boards will continue on, but RT was the biggest and brightest of them at one point. Its really sad that a place I’ve spent countless hours on is going the way of the dinosaur, however perhaps its time to move on. I’ll admit that I kind of have, as I use Twitter a lot, blog almost every other day, and I have a Facebook account. Man does change sometimes have its casualties, one way or another.
Down The Rabbit Hole 
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