Who I am

John Lusk, cranky, sheltered, middle-class, middle-aged, white, suburban man in North Carolina (in the U.S.). Got me pegged now? (See? Cranky.)

Also, if you’re coming here from Twitter: yes, I’m kind of a reply guy.

Tilting at windmills

I do that sometimes.

Here’s an example of Twitter being stupid: Twitter blocked me. I’m probably going to remove the “offending” tweet so I can go back to using Twitter as another news source (very few people follow me there (or anywhere else, for that matter); I just read stuff there).

Why this blog when I was perfectly happy being snarky on Google+ and a suggestion for how you might read it without going through Twitter

So, I used to post on Google+ and use Magenta River to cross-post to both Twitter (since nobody’s on G+ any more) and Facebook (where most of the people I personally know (or have met) are).

Sadly, Google decided to bork the goo.gl short links that Magenta River automatically generates, and I can’t seem to control which short-link service gets used. By “bork”, I mean that goo.gl has decided that my short links violate their Terms of Service (I guess they think a link to Google+ is spam? Or maybe I got flagged by somebody as a spammer? I dunno.). Google has decided to kill Google+.

Also, somewhat less sadly, Facebook has tightened up their API so bots such as the scripts the Russian Internet Research Agency writes, and the applets at https://ifttt.com that I use for cross-posting no longer work to cross-post directly to my Facebook page.

So, here we are, my “true” POSSE solution (until I come up with something else, because UNDER CONSTRUCTION).

(By the way, Twitter chops most of my posts off because 280 characters is a stupid limit, and I refuse to conform. Nobody can put a good thought down on Twitter with composing a thread, breaking their text up by sentence, basically.)

The Suggestion

If you use https://newsblur.com/ (or any other RSS feed reader), you can add this blog’s RSS feed (and any other website’s RSS feed) and see the full text of each post without having to click around to various blogs and websites.

If you really just want to stay on Facebook

Follow or like this page: https://www.facebook.com/John-Lusks-Very-Own-Bloggy-Page-On-This-Sketchy-Social-Media-Channel-1860519107388258/

“Pinned” posts

Other sites let you “pin” things so they’re always visible to users. Google+ did it. Twitter lets you do it. I decided to give myself the ability to pin multiple posts, so I could look them up faster when I wanted to refer back to them, or because I thought they were important, or useful to give people a picture into who I am. So, I created a “Pinned” tag, and when I say I’m going to pin a post, I really mean I’m going to tag it “Pinned”.

A little technical note on weird formatting

I do a lot of posting from my Android tablet using the WordPress app. Frequently, pasted text includes formatting but the app doesn’t have a “remove formatting” operation (as far as I can tell), so you might wind up seeing some bizarre formatting. Yay, apps. Maybe WordPress will write a Progressive Web App and Everything Will Be Better.

“Here, read this.”

…is what my dad used to say to my mom with a fair degree of frequency. He was always highlighting articles (mostly in the Wall Street Journal because he was your standard Greatest Generation conservative (we’re all standard, really; just little cardboard cutouts bouncing through life)), and handing them to her. “Here, read this.”

Anyway, now I’m doing it.