What To Share?

I could have also titled this post “Who Gives a Fuck?” I’ve been quieter on social media lately. I deleted Twitter months ago. I last posted on Instagram on December 8, and aside from cross-posting stuff from here and Insta there hasn’t been a post on Facebook since my European vacation. I have checked Facebook and kept up what my friends want to share with the world. But I’m getting more and more disillusioned with us giving our data away to be sold away all willy-nilly to advertisers. I guess a company could come here and grab all of my posts here to give information to advertisers, but damn it, at least it makes them work for it, put some sort of effort for it.

I’m well aware that I’m trying to bring back the experience of being online back in 2004, and I’m well aware of the dangers of falling into the romanticism of nostalgia. But I really hate that our lives and what we share on these social media sites have become a commodity that gives us NO PROFITS. It’s sort of like how in Berlin they prefer to use cash rather than cards because the specter of the Stasi and Berliner’s absolute priority for privacy. As annoying as it is when I travel there, I admire their determination.

I don’t do the new year, new me thing since it doesn’t matter what the fuck I do, I’ll always hate myself. But I went and got a new tattoo last weekend. It’s just paint splatter that frames my already existing leviathan cross tattoo. It’s only five days old hence the scabbiness, and I don’t know what itches more: the tattoo or the arm hair growing back. But me likey.

As for reading, I’ve already gone through Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Fernando A. Flores’s Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas. I’m on to Nicolai Gogol’s Dead Souls now.

Off to Vegas for the weekend for my cousin Gina’s birthday weekend. We’ll be hiding from the rain in Vdara. Maybe I’ll win big and be able to live a life of leisure that I was built for. One can wish.