Greek Ruin
Week from Monday 24th July 2023 - I think it would be true to say that EVERYTHING that I treasured and loved about this planet when I was an idealistic, freedom-loving YOUNG PERSON has now been fucked over by greedy selfish bastards.
#FortyYearsAgo this month, I was once again living the BEACH BUM life in the Greek Islands.
I made this particular trip with my girlfriend of the time, so we stayed in one place, LINDOS on the island of Rhodes. If I had to pick somewhere in the archipelago to 'settle' for a month, that was the place closest to my heart and where I felt most comfortable. My previous 'solo' sojourns had often involved a lot of ISLAND-HOPPING, 'freedom of movement' long before anybody spoke of such things. But for me, Greece was somewhere to go for PEACE AND QUIET. In the summer of eighty-three, we had quite a nice little 'colony' thriving behind the olive trees, where a Swedish lad had built a complete set of furniture out of driftwood, and a couple of Aussie girls augmented their traveller's cheques by cutting hair for all the other bums. As long as you had brought enough drachmas for a month's worth of beer and fags, canned orange juice and souvlaki, everything was COOO-OOOL!
But Hellas has been ruined. Recently on the SOSHUL MEEJER, somebody posted some pictures of three massive CRUISE SHIPS simultaneously docking at Mykanos and pouring boatloads of tourists onto the streets of what used to be a picturesque little town. I found these images extremely unsettling.
Now I see pictures on the news of my beloved Rodos being evacuated of tourists and locals.
Because it is now literally ON FIRE.
The media being what the media is (i.e. 'THE VOICE OF THE AFOREMENTIONED GREEDY SELFISH BASTARDS'), the story of the fire has mainly focussed on entitled tourists complaining about having their holidays disrupted. Because those in power don't want you to consider the REAL story here, that we have gone past the tipping point of being able to stop the planet turn to ash. This country's media analysis is allowed to go no deeper than "Phew! What A Scorcher!".
We's fucked, people! NOBODY is DOING anything about the climate emergency, just making vague promises about meeting 'targets' decades from now. They're preferring to bury their heads into some very hot sandpits and carry on with the much more important business of hoovering up all the petro-dollars for themselves and building monstrous ivory towers that only those who are able to SPEND their way out of the shit will ever enjoy.
Meanwhile, a little bit lower on the food chain, the thickies of Uxbridge & Ruislip have just voted in a TORY once again, because they were duped into believing that there was a left-wing threat against their God-given right to drive 4x4 gas-guzzlers and operate diesel-powered White Vans. ("Tories retreat from green policies to woo voters" as The Times puts it.)
It's now forty years since I last visited Lindos. At an earlier point in my life, I'd even harboured dreams about being able to return and see out my days there. Economics, health, this government and the B'WORD have put the kybosh on that idea. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's now completely unrecognisable, with a couple of big-assed hotels where our olive groves used to be...
This week's passing whim from Melon Husk - I'm taking bets on whether it will last no longer than the picture of the little brown doggy we had before! - is to suddenly, almost without warning, remame TWITTER as 'X'. We all know that he's been inexplicably obsessed with the letter 'X' from the get go, hence "SPACE-X" and TESLA-X" and all the other stuff that crashes. He seems oblivious to a fact that ALMOST EVERYBODY has pointed out, from the lowliest twitterclown to the bosses at PayPal, which is that many people will suppose that [anything]-X looks like a provider of pornography.
As usual, they haven't thought it through. All the 'X' domain names are already taken (either by sex clubs, M****soft or Zuckerberg), so handles, hashtags, hyperlinks and search engine listings still says 'Twitter' until they accidentally stumble over a way to change 'em all. They have replaced the little blue bird with the sinister looking cross on the desktop site itself, but anything EXTERNAL like desktop shortcuts or app icons still look the same.
And it's not as if it's a major leap forward in terms of a CORPORATE LOGO either. Even if you leave aside all of the "We Did Nazi That Coming!" connotations of its sinister, geometrical starkness, it's still a HALF-ASSED JOB. Somebody has merely set the letter 'X' in a pre-existing typeface (freely available on Googlefonts and all those "TWITTER FONT GENERATOR" cut'n'paste websites) and left it at that. Even if they then converted it to a Scaleable Vector Graphic for general use, it's still only a couple of minutes' work. Whoever Musky is paying to do his "GRAPHIC DESIGN" is having a proper larf at his expense! (By now, the last remaining employees at Twitter are probably trying to outdo each other to see what they can get away with!)
From my point of view, I haven't seen any change AT ALL to the ANDROID APP (yet). My DESKTOP APP has been messed about with though. It now requires that I log in everytime I want to use it, instead of staying just as I left it on the previous visit. Not much good having a stand-alone app in that case! But I'd guessed previously that it wouldn't last long as a functioning solution and I was right.
If I can't run it in its own window, I might just as well go back to accessing Xitter via Firefox (where I also have to remember to LOG OUT as well, lest I get all that "Whoops! something went wrong!" nonsense.)
Meanwhile, I thought I'd avail myself of Xitter's "DOWNLOAD YOUR ARCHIVE" feature at this point in time, if only to look at a few numbers and pick apart a few JSON or XML files, to see what I've been up to!
I am FOLLOWING 945 people and being FOLLOWED by 383. Fair enough, that sounds about right, I don't think that's changed much since the last time I checked.
But more telling are the numbers for 'people' (bots! ads!) that I've BLOCKED and MUTED. These are the figures that have REALLY added up over the last few months, making me wonder just how long we'll be able to get away with it! I have blocked 817 and muted 1640 accounts (and counting!). Just for the record, my all-time total number of TWEETS as of this morning is 24.2k. What a windbag!
#FortyYearsAgo this month, I was once again living the BEACH BUM life in the Greek Islands.
I made this particular trip with my girlfriend of the time, so we stayed in one place, LINDOS on the island of Rhodes. If I had to pick somewhere in the archipelago to 'settle' for a month, that was the place closest to my heart and where I felt most comfortable. My previous 'solo' sojourns had often involved a lot of ISLAND-HOPPING, 'freedom of movement' long before anybody spoke of such things. But for me, Greece was somewhere to go for PEACE AND QUIET. In the summer of eighty-three, we had quite a nice little 'colony' thriving behind the olive trees, where a Swedish lad had built a complete set of furniture out of driftwood, and a couple of Aussie girls augmented their traveller's cheques by cutting hair for all the other bums. As long as you had brought enough drachmas for a month's worth of beer and fags, canned orange juice and souvlaki, everything was COOO-OOOL!
But Hellas has been ruined. Recently on the SOSHUL MEEJER, somebody posted some pictures of three massive CRUISE SHIPS simultaneously docking at Mykanos and pouring boatloads of tourists onto the streets of what used to be a picturesque little town. I found these images extremely unsettling.
Now I see pictures on the news of my beloved Rodos being evacuated of tourists and locals.
Because it is now literally ON FIRE.
The media being what the media is (i.e. 'THE VOICE OF THE AFOREMENTIONED GREEDY SELFISH BASTARDS'), the story of the fire has mainly focussed on entitled tourists complaining about having their holidays disrupted. Because those in power don't want you to consider the REAL story here, that we have gone past the tipping point of being able to stop the planet turn to ash. This country's media analysis is allowed to go no deeper than "Phew! What A Scorcher!".
We's fucked, people! NOBODY is DOING anything about the climate emergency, just making vague promises about meeting 'targets' decades from now. They're preferring to bury their heads into some very hot sandpits and carry on with the much more important business of hoovering up all the petro-dollars for themselves and building monstrous ivory towers that only those who are able to SPEND their way out of the shit will ever enjoy.
Meanwhile, a little bit lower on the food chain, the thickies of Uxbridge & Ruislip have just voted in a TORY once again, because they were duped into believing that there was a left-wing threat against their God-given right to drive 4x4 gas-guzzlers and operate diesel-powered White Vans. ("Tories retreat from green policies to woo voters" as The Times puts it.)
It's now forty years since I last visited Lindos. At an earlier point in my life, I'd even harboured dreams about being able to return and see out my days there. Economics, health, this government and the B'WORD have put the kybosh on that idea. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's now completely unrecognisable, with a couple of big-assed hotels where our olive groves used to be...
This week's passing whim from Melon Husk - I'm taking bets on whether it will last no longer than the picture of the little brown doggy we had before! - is to suddenly, almost without warning, remame TWITTER as 'X'. We all know that he's been inexplicably obsessed with the letter 'X' from the get go, hence "SPACE-X" and TESLA-X" and all the other stuff that crashes. He seems oblivious to a fact that ALMOST EVERYBODY has pointed out, from the lowliest twitterclown to the bosses at PayPal, which is that many people will suppose that [anything]-X looks like a provider of pornography.
As usual, they haven't thought it through. All the 'X' domain names are already taken (either by sex clubs, M****soft or Zuckerberg), so handles, hashtags, hyperlinks and search engine listings still says 'Twitter' until they accidentally stumble over a way to change 'em all. They have replaced the little blue bird with the sinister looking cross on the desktop site itself, but anything EXTERNAL like desktop shortcuts or app icons still look the same.
And it's not as if it's a major leap forward in terms of a CORPORATE LOGO either. Even if you leave aside all of the "We Did Nazi That Coming!" connotations of its sinister, geometrical starkness, it's still a HALF-ASSED JOB. Somebody has merely set the letter 'X' in a pre-existing typeface (freely available on Googlefonts and all those "TWITTER FONT GENERATOR" cut'n'paste websites) and left it at that. Even if they then converted it to a Scaleable Vector Graphic for general use, it's still only a couple of minutes' work. Whoever Musky is paying to do his "GRAPHIC DESIGN" is having a proper larf at his expense! (By now, the last remaining employees at Twitter are probably trying to outdo each other to see what they can get away with!)
From my point of view, I haven't seen any change AT ALL to the ANDROID APP (yet). My DESKTOP APP has been messed about with though. It now requires that I log in everytime I want to use it, instead of staying just as I left it on the previous visit. Not much good having a stand-alone app in that case! But I'd guessed previously that it wouldn't last long as a functioning solution and I was right.
If I can't run it in its own window, I might just as well go back to accessing Xitter via Firefox (where I also have to remember to LOG OUT as well, lest I get all that "Whoops! something went wrong!" nonsense.)
Meanwhile, I thought I'd avail myself of Xitter's "DOWNLOAD YOUR ARCHIVE" feature at this point in time, if only to look at a few numbers and pick apart a few JSON or XML files, to see what I've been up to!
I am FOLLOWING 945 people and being FOLLOWED by 383. Fair enough, that sounds about right, I don't think that's changed much since the last time I checked.
But more telling are the numbers for 'people' (bots! ads!) that I've BLOCKED and MUTED. These are the figures that have REALLY added up over the last few months, making me wonder just how long we'll be able to get away with it! I have blocked 817 and muted 1640 accounts (and counting!). Just for the record, my all-time total number of TWEETS as of this morning is 24.2k. What a windbag!
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