Category: administrivia

Update on the Facebook thing. It’s more like a 90/10 on interactions and maybe 80/20 on looking at it at all.

Predictably, the person who often chats with me on Messenger is still doing so and only one other person has reached out whatsoever. One.

We do understand that friendship is a basic human need, right? I’m not very clear on the thought process here. I just know what it looks like. I’m not a mind-reader, y’all.

Well, okay though. Survival is even more basic a need than friendship. (Though I could argue that friendship aids survival.) I suppose I had best get to work on that and maybe the rest of you will catch up and maybe you won’t.

I ought to quit Facebook for its “friend” designation alone. Intellectually we know it isn’t REALLY “adding a friend,” but that language still automatically triggers unconscious expectations and it can gum up the emotional works if you’re not careful. Or maybe that’s just me.

I was serious. If you want to keep me around then you want to start reaching out to me. I’m done with the passive consumerism masquerading as “social interaction.” It is nothing of the sort.

Though this isn’t just about Facebook. When you can interact with people in person and they still don’t give a shit about you, that’s pretty demoralizing after a while.

Okay. Enough drama on the “administrivia” category. Also, I tweaked a couple things here at the site. Nothing important or affecting functionality. The end.

This is a sort of “administrivia” for both here and my social media.

I am on a sort of hiatus with Facebook. I would say it’s about a 95/5 split of staying off Facebook vs occasionally liking or commenting, respectively, and I’ve written no new posts since the one about my old house in Columbus.

If you go to my profile and notice you can see maybe two posts (not counting announcements that a profile or cover photo has been changed) but you can also see we’re still Facebook friends, you went on the Restricted list. If you don’t know what that is, google “Facebook friend restricted list.” We’re still Facebook friends because I still like you and want to keep you around. However, apparently neither of us is getting much out of the interaction and I am at a stage of debating next steps with myself. Likely I will leave the status quo in place for now; I may even add more people to Restricted status. It is not a compelling enough decision that I have to settle on it right now.

There is a difference between friends and friend lists. I need friends, not friend lists. One can have mutual benefit without having friendship. That is an incredibly lonely way to live. I don’t know what to do from here. I can’t even ask, because people can’t have these conversations without flying off the handle and assuming the worst.

So, one criterion I’ll likely refer to, if I even stay on Facebook (more on that in a minute), in order to decide who to keep around is who starts conversations with me. I now have Messenger installed on my laptop and running even when I don’t have Facebook up in my browser. I’ve had it on my phone for ages. If you actually want to talk to me and not just react to shit that you get notifications for like you are getting a hit of heroin, you know where I am.

Because you can say “well, we can’t really be friends if we don’t know one another that well yet” all you like, and I will still point out to you that there ain’t no fucking way we’re ever going to get to know one another if I only ever hear from you when you want that mutual benefit. I’m not a fucking appliance. Figure it out or fuck off.

If you feel I haven’t made enough of an effort in your direction, you certainly have the right to criticize me in the same vein. That’s fair. And at least then it would be a real interaction and not that stupid haha react I’d love to shove up Mark Zuckerberg’s left nostril sideways.

(Does a round shape have a “sideways”? Do I fucking care? Just wondering.)

Now. As to whether I stay on Facebook. I have no idea. I’ve toyed around with alternatives like getting back on MeWe, but no one would go with me. You’d rather complain about Facebook than leave Facebook. I’m on Spinster, but most of you wouldn’t go there. I’m on X, but I don’t use it much. (The current 0 tweets are because I deleted what little there was.) You know what? I’d rather just hang out with people. Can I hang out with people? Can I have a real life again finally? Please?

I won’t even get drunk and flash my tits. You should be glad. My biopsy scars do nothing for my personal aesthetics.

Okay, everybody. We’re going to see some upset with some functionality for a bit. I am desperate to get my expenses down until I can get my income up, and probably even then because I have a LOT of economic recovery to be doing. So I am changing my website hosting service for the first time in five years.

I hate to leave Old Host because on the service side of things they’ve been good to me, but on the fiscal side of things they’ve been fucking awful. New Host is reputable (if I told you who they were and if you are at all familiar with hosting services, you’d probably recognize their name — they’ve been around for a good while) and currently holding a hosting sale where it’s around forty bucks for a year for me. Which is five dollars more than I was paying Old Host per month. Nope. I’m outta here.

So if for some bizarre reason you know my first name AT last name DOT net email address, that’s not going to work until at least the 27th. I have it all set up and I’ll know it’s working when Thunderbird stops whining at me about it.

This site may hiccup too because I’m not moving the domain name yet but will be migrating the site. I would just do it myself but I want to see if the official migration service with New Host will move the photos too. I’m currently testing this with another of my websites but I can’t remember if I have photos there or just links. We’ll see how that goes. Whee!

[edit] The site migration seems a mite complicated. Manual migration it is, then. Bleah.

Trip to California was supposed to run from Sunday to Wednesday. I got delayed two days, so I got here Friday. Stuff’s going okay. Part of me wants to write it all up and part of me’s still in sort of a daze.

Who on earth is now visiting me from Columbus, and who pops in from Dublin? Right, wait, I don’t know if I mentioned the visitor counter. There’s a visitor counter. Iiiiii seeeeeee yooooouuuuu. Sort of. Can’t see your name or home address. Definitely can see you’ve been by.

Not that the IP-parsing is always reliable about locations. I have not excluded my home IP address, so I can tell I’ve been here but… it thinks I’m in both Canada and in California. Make it make sense. I dunno. I don’t write these plugins.

[edit] Why the hell was my time set to Greenwich Mean? Ugh. Fixed it.

If you follow my personal blog or my social media then you know I’m about to relocate for the second time in less than a year. If I had to sum up my situation it would be “I need to stop associating with late-stage alcoholics.” I have been working on my exit from Louisiana for a little over two weeks, and I leave tomorrow night, heading for what sounds like a much happier or at least safer situation. “Safe” in the sense that I will have breathing room to improve my situation without being treated like a criminal. I already have a game plan for when I get where I’m going, and things should improve fairly quickly if it works out, but I count on nothing. That’s the game plan, anyway. Plans don’t mean squat when the universe has other ideas.

I mean, as it is I’ve done a 180 from two positions previously adopted: I didn’t want a roommate and I never wanted to move to California. But my prospective roommate seems relatively sane — by my standards, which are the only ones that really count here — and that particular area of California has much nicer weather than here in Louisiana. More important is the having breathing room. I haven’t had that in two years and it was really messing up my life. Now let’s see what I can do.

So at some point my contact info will change — I will not be keeping my Ohio number either, as I need a cheaper phone service and I will just get a new number rather than port mine — and you’ll see that at the bottom of the page here. I need to adjust some other information that’s already changed, too. I’ll get on that now.

Wish me luck.

I am not sure why it took me nearly a month to follow up on the Ubering, but I finally attempted that Friday. Result: I am underwhelmed. I do need money and so I will probably persist a little bit, unless I suddenly start making regular sales on the Etsy shop or something. (And I need to work on that too. I still have stock I haven’t listed!) But it’s never going to be what it was in Columbus. I was deleting a bunch of screenshots last night and mourning my big tips. We will never see their like again. And now their watch has ended.

I looked into possibly delivering for Domino’s, but I have reservations about going food industry. I’m not allergic to work, but that industry seems to attract a bunch of People Weirdness, and I am not good at People Weirdness. I just want something straightforward with little potential for drama that I can do every day and then just LEAVE IT AT WORK and go home. I have to believe this is still possible even now. Replacing paperwork jobs with computers was just cruel.

It’s looking like I may go back to Ubering a couple days a week. I would try to make it a four- or five-day-a-week job, but I have to think about my car’s longevity, and Dad has flat-out stated he will never ask me to pay rent. (It’s less than six hundred a month for a two-bedroom anyway. I mean.) I hadn’t been doing it up til now because of my problems with my car starting, but that’s now been fixed. I need to be able to earn just enough to cover my bills. If I can do that then everything else will be gravy.

Part of me wants to set up a rigid schedule every week but that’s not going to be realistic. I’m fifty, suddenly I have all these medical appointments, and my dad’s 22 years older than me and has even more of them. Plus sometimes he wants to go to town or something else is going on. So I guess it will be catch as catch can.

I also want to spend more time at the library so that may mean more stuff going on with my stuff here and elsewhere. Oh, how specific. Anyway.

A note: You’ve noticed I title these posts “administrivia,” and if you’ve looked at the pages I have here you will see I’ve made up a blog category for each one. That does not mean I will title posts about those topics here in the same way. So there will be no “Nerd: Blog Title” nonsense going on. What a relief, right?

Another note: I have made a No Contact rule about exactly one person I’ve ever known, and that’s it. If he tries, he will be shut down. It is probably not who you think it is, but if I don’t answer you, there’s your answer. (If I say “fuck off,” it’s not you. No contact means no fuck off, either.) Everyone else out of touch with me, either I’m avoiding them or I have decided to stop doing all the work in maintaining contact or I have decided not to do any work in maintaining contact because it goes precisely nowhere. I don’t mean I have to get something physical or tangible out of it. I mean act like you have some idea of or interest in who I am as a person. Too many people I’ve known do not do that. It got tiresome a long time ago.

If you went NC on me and are now having second thoughts, we can try again if you can manage not to abuse me, gaslight me, or accuse me of things I’m not doing. If we’re going to have the same tired arguments again, I’m not fucking having it. You’re not evil, but you’re definitely on the wrong side of this one and until you can face that, we’ll go nowhere. Not because I want to go nowhere, but because that’s the natural consequence of this situation. I’m a human being, not a doormat. Until you understand that, we’re stuck.

Okay. Onward. See y’all later.

I corrected a minor thing on one page (it’s not important — I just got more repetitive than I wanted to, so I changed a couple words) and added some paragraphs to the [about] page.

Usually I don’t go into personal stuff, but this is important enough I’ll mention it here: We have passed mid-month, and things are going to start to get scary shortly. One thing I want to work on today is processing the new photos of those bracelets I have already listed on Etsy, as well as rewriting their descriptions. I am shit at marketing, but I should be able to produce something palatable and informative. I’m fighting with myself about going to my friend Carrie’s house when she’s out of town, which she will be this weekend, but I have blanket permission to do so, so I’ll likely go ahead. My ass is on the line. What can I say.

If I don’t photo-edit today, I’ll start work on a sample portrait. I can’t screw around with that anymore. Bracelets are nickel-diming, but I’m pretty sure with the size portrait I’m going to start with that I’ll be charging about $75 for that, postage-paid (fast shipping extra). It’s cheap for an original, but I don’t have time to deal with looky-loos who are disappointed I don’t have Walmart prices. This pretty much IS a Walmart price for what I can do. Also, I have envelopes I can actually ship them in. The portrait I did of Sandor “The Hound” Clegane is large enough that I had to go to the store and find a bigger envelope. I’m still going to be scared to ship him. Cardboard backing only goes so far. (He’s on Bristol board, so I can’t roll him up.)

[redacted]

(I have applied for work. I’m in the unenviable position of only having my phone catching signal less than one-tenth of the time that I’m home at Dad’s house. And that includes phone calls. And no one calls or, if they do, they don’t leave voicemail, which is annoying because right now it’s working. I can’t figure out if it’s my out-of-state phone number, or if they background-check people before they call and found me wanting somehow [I have zero criminal history, though], or if they saw me on social media and noped out. I’m not going to batten down the hatches just to kiss anyone’s ass. Mike Tyson still makes a living, for fuck’s sake. If you’re seriously going to argue I’m worse than he is, we have nothing left to discuss.)

Whine, bitch, moan, complain

Those of you who look in regularly are laughing at me now.

Hush.

Yes! This is my latest “first post.” Will it be the permanent one? It’s a mystery!

For an idea of what I’m now doing with the site, FINALLY, go to each individual page in the page menu. Hit about first. Navigation will make more sense.