Good Night Tweet Prince

2023-07-31

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

The Ghost of the King Appearing to Hamlet, Horatio and Guards (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4)

The Ghost of the King Appearing to Hamlet, Horatio and Guards (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4) by Anonymous

I was pretty sure I wouldn't write a post here this month. It's been a hard week and it seemed like this little site and these little words might need to wait a while. But today I found myself wanting to write something here after all. Nothing big or important, just... something. I suppose writing here has become a comforting part of my routine.

And what's more routine these days than - you guessed it! - complaining about twitter dot com? (Now that's what I call a segue.)

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Well, it finally happened. I've decided to say goodbye to Twitter.

What was the last straw? Was it the annoying new name? The fact that tweets are apparently going to be the training data for a "politically incorrect" (read: racist) chatbot? Or just the fact that whenever I log on these days I end up spending most of my time blocking ads for cryptocurrency get-rich-quick schemes and reading about all the other websites people are moving to?

In any case, tonight I'm locking my account so that my tweets will no longer be publicly visible. If you're already following me, I'll continue to post the usual bitsy updates (and reminders to follow me elsewhere) for the next month or so. After that, I intend to delete my account permanently.

I won't deny there's a melancholy to all this. Yet another public space has been ruined by yet another billionaire. But now that it comes down to it, it's not proving too hard for me to move on. I'm having a great time posting on cohost and mastodon! (Hey, did I already mention you should follow me elsewhere?)

And as the old saw goes: Twitter may die, but the tweets live on. I've made a public archive of my tweets using Darius Kazemi's excellent archiving tool, in case you'd like to see anything I tweeted between when I joined in August 2011 and when I last downloaded my Twitter archive in November 2022 - that's over a decade of tweets! (Oh no.) I was never the cleverest or most insightful of tweeters, but maybe it will prove useful to someone. If nothing else, now you'll always be able to find my first tweet about bitsy.

If you'd like to stay in touch or keep up to date on my work, you've got a lot of options:

Playing & reading

So what I been playing and reading lately?

Well, I recently started playing BOSSGAME: The Final Boss Is My Heart and so far it's both difficult and delightful - I recommend it!

And Camille Butera's latest post over on Substack really hit home for me, especially this bit:

Something I say a lot is that the internet is a haunted house. The internet stores its dead, holds the history of the lives on it close. But the problem with haunted houses is that even they can be burnt to the ground. And what happens to the ghosts when that house is destroyed? Where can they go, holding all our memories, all of our ties, but into the ether?

(By the way, according to the end of that post, if you have a Neocities site she'd like to talk to you about it! So if that's you, maybe drop her a line?)

Well, that's all I've got for this post - until next time, stay well! <3

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