Twitter Archive
In mid July 2023, I retired my Twitter account @__MoBlack in favor of working on building connections on the Fediverse (check the links section above). I left Twitter for reasons that I am realizing now I've only spelled out on my now-dead Twitter or on Discord. I reproduce my concerns here:
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From a practical, "content creator" point of view, Twitter no longer served my needs.
- I had no guarantee that whatever I posted would end up in front of my followers.
- To clarify, this is 90-95% of the point of having an online presence.
- Twitter de-prioritized the posts of non-paying members. Since neither I nor anyone in my small community is stupid enough to pay for a service that used to be free, the algorithm separated me from the people who cared about my work.
- Due to the above, engagement was getting worse, fast. It got to the point where it was at times on par with my then-Mastodon account, despite having around a seventh of the following.
- Twitter's increasingly precarious financial situation meant it would be prime to sell user data to shadier and shadier advertisers.
- I don't want my writing in whatever weird, exploitative, job-degrading, capitalist-serving AI Elon Musk and his Effective Altruist doomsday cult friends are cooking up over at xAI.
- I became miserable on Twitter. I hated how every stupid person with a stupid opinion was on my feed because the algorithm saw people calling them stupid as a sign that more people needed to see the stupid thing the stupid person wrote. I hated how the culture basically meant that if I wanted to stay relevant I needed to comment on the stupid things stupid people said, instead of doing my own thing.
This experience has given me a huge interest in divesting from corporate social media silos, their algorithms, and their tendency to collapse all at once, destroying my hard work in the process. I think the Fediverse is the most established platform to decouple my work from these platforms. It has its flaws, especially around content moderation, but I've made it work for me and I like the new people I've been meeting over on Mastodon (links at the top). I will probably still post to Medium and YouTube, as they would allow me to easily monetize select pieces of mine. However, with a bit more Patreon funding, I would love to host my own WriteFreely and PeerTube instances to mirror both, respectively. I'd also like to host more independent projects on my own. The Twitter Archive is just a sample of what I can do with the entire platform under my control. I'd love to host web fiction on my own, in any weird format I want, unrestricted by the limitations of any particular platform, like Medium. The freedom of being totally unconcerned by censorship, algorithms, something breaking, or the site's owner randomly deciding to rename the whole thing "γ", causing the servers to shit themselves so hard the computer assholes turn inside out and the entire system bloops out of existence.
We need to bring back the old, independent web, where your stuff goes in places on domains you actually control. I think that's the lesson from Twitter.
Uh, anyway, sorry for rambling. All my old Tweets can be found in the Twitter Archive section above. I'd recommend starting by searching for any one of the following terms: Code Geass, High Guardian Spice, Squid Game, Franxx, Blacktober, Darling in the Booba, Abolition.
top.Where does the Patreon money go?
If you donate to my Patreon (check the links section above), the money primarily goes to the following, in roughly the order of cost:
- My membership to the International Workers of the World.
- Hosting for the podcast I co-host, Critical Weeb Theory.
- Hosting fees for this website.
- Supporting other accounts on Patreon, including Mastodon.
- My own Medium Membership to access all the features of my blog.
- Boosting my own Discord server to keep our emojis.
Anytime I don't have enough Patrons to cover these, I backfill it with my own paycheck from my job.
My immediate goal is to get consistent enough to break even on the above expenses, then start funding more self-hosting efforts and creative projects through the Patreon funds.
I am bad at providing consistently finished products or even updates. It is a combination of ADHD, not having a place of my own to record or edit in, working both a full-time job and a part-time gig at a research lab, and being unable to scope large projects. Until I dig deep and address these, I can't guarantee that subscribing to the Patreon will be worth it for you. But, if you do like what I do and want to support me, that is the way to do it.
top.Are you a Gamer?
I am not really a gamer and have historically been Bad At Video Games™. But, I do play competitive Pokemon and chess when I have the chance. My Elo rankings in both are abysmal, but it might be fun to post my highest achievements here and update them as I get better. .
| Game | Format | My Peak Elo | Top Player Elo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pokemon | Gen 9 OU | ~1620 | 2144 |
| Pokemon | Gen 4 OU | ~1340 | 1685 |
| Chess | Rapid | 423 | 2830 |
The Mo Black Anime Rating System
I made an anime scaling system because I hate rating things from 1-10. Rating anime from 1-10 is stupid. It literally doesn't make sense and it is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. And I hate even more how people throw numbers around to make their opinions seem objective.
How is, say, Legend of the Galactic Heroes a 10/10, and, say, My Hero Academia a 6/10, when the two shows are not even remotely trying to do anything in common? Also, how do you square a show like Sonny Boy, which tends to resonate deeply with a specific slice of viewers who "get it" while getting less of a reaction from others? If we both agree that Sonny Boy is good, and I give it an 8/10 because it spoke to me, and you give it a 5/10 because it did nothing for you, what is the rating actually measuring?
I wrote a document explaining my feelings here, as well as what I use as an alternative when I do proper reviews of anime. I haven't used the rating system in a while, but I will at some point in the future update it and give it its own page hosted on this site (again, self-hosting = good, relying on Google Docs = it'll get fed into an AI = the devil).
top.Academic Reading
I actually end up reading quite a number of textbooks, academic papers, political theory texts, and other books either for research for my blog posts or just because I like learning and I kind of miss university.
If I read something, I'll try to put it here, summarize it, and put some info on how you can read this book for free or cheap.
Stub.
top.