Recursive Words

I’m just wondering where the hell Sunday went.

(please excuse me while I rewind inside my head)

I vaguely remember waking up early this morning, and thinking “if I get up now, I’ll have hours before the rest of the family wake up”. And then of course I fell asleep – waking up a little after 8am. Oh – correction – 9am, because the clocks went forward overnight.

We’re now on “British Summer Time” – or “GMT+1” for the next six months – which seems to have been instituted during the first world war to help conserve energy, and give farmers more productive time in the fields.

Apparently there was a “British Double Summer Time” for a couple of years, and even a “British Summer Time All Year” as recently as fifty years ago. Who knew?

Anyway…

After scraping myself out of bed, having a shower, and throwing yesterday’s clothes back on I spent the majority of the morning helping a friend move her blog from LiveJournal to Substack. The move of all of her content was pretty straightforward – the arrival in the middle of a social network that probably now exceeds anything that existed in the late 2000s during the “Web 2.0” explosion was probably quite overwhelming.

I looked it up – Substack now has over thirty five million active users. It’s huge. No wonder the celebrities have started to arrive en-masse. Thankfully it’s algorithmic timeline is largely self-policing, meaning the usual chaos caused by the hate filled idiots that blight every other social network hasn’t happened yet. Give them time, I guess. Although saying that – given that Substack is designed for writers and readers to connect with each other, that’s kind of a spanner in the cogs of the most extreme idiots – because most of them can’t write any more than what they’ve been told to believe – and that gets cancelled pretty damn quickly these days.

“Threads” had the same thing happen – it was a veritable paradise for those leaving Twitter – until the idiots left Twitter and brought their misguided, misinformed hate to Threads too. It hasn’t happened at Substack yet, but I have no doubt it will – given time.

Oh, how thankful we are for the powers to ignore that which we would rather not see on the internet. While the algorithmic timeline has many problems, being able to filter out the hate isn’t one of them.

The real problem – no doubt – will be the marketers. While the celebrities have already begun to arrive at Substack en-masse, their agents, publishers, producers, and marketers will not be far behind. Of course then they’ll discover that the public are not actually interested in them so much as the people they either represent, or exploit – so won’t gain much traction. It’s funny how removing the layers between ourselves and those we wish to follow works.

ANYWAY.

I got my friend’s blog moved over from LiveJournal.

All it will take is one more argument between Russia and the west, and the entire existence of LiveJournal could well vanish between the waves – which will be a shame, because it really paved the way for “blogging” as we know it.

This afternoon I was in the middle of creating content for YouTube when I happened to look at the clock, and realise that if somebody didn’t get off their arse and start cooking dinner, none of us would be eating until very late indeed. Guess who that somebody was – go on – just guess.

Two and a half hours later we all sat down at the dinner table together, and ate a traditional roast dinner. Half an hour later, the plates were in the dishwasher. It never ceases to amaze me how long it takes to make a roast dinner (which isn’t difficult), versus how long it takes to eat it, and then wash up.

So.

It’s now 8pm on Sunday evening, and I find myself with nothing of consequence to get on with. I’m thinking perhaps a book, or some proper doom scrolling on the internet. Or perhaps email a few friends.

Perhaps I’ll finish this blog post first, and click the submit button.

Oh while I think of it – I finally lost my temper with WordPress earlier (again). While they might tout that much of the published internet relies upon them, it doesn’t take away from the fact that their user interface, and infrastructure is hopelessly out-dated and broken. The very fact that I have to lower the defences on my browser to click a like button is beyond belief really.

If you see a like or a comment from me at Substack over the next few days – you’ll know why.

Now please excuse me while I finish the remains of this bottle of red wine, and doom scroll for a bit.