#AGAIN: HE'S THE WORST MOST BASIC TWITTER USER ALIVE

[downspiral]

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DAMON’S TWITTER MEME. / with this generator

[sole-cuore-amore-e-droga]

Tel Aviv 2019: Straight outta Estonia to Eurovision with a lowkey tribute to Avicii soundwise I guess

I’m not one of those people to go all their way out to overdefend Eesti Laul as “THE most diverse NF to ever exist songwise”, but even I was disappointed in this sudden rush of radiofriendly pop music that I would rather refuse to describe if I had to endure any of them ever again all at once this year. Remember - Netta won with being CRAZY! Why can’t Estonia be CRAZY even more! Was this secretly a bigger demand from the new producers or so that Estonia would need to out-radiofriendly the Latvians whose goal actually was to find a good radiofriendly song that’s enough for qualification????

Also, I kind of wanted to watch Eesti Laul, but I haven’t really settled with it, as I didn’t have enough patience to watch it one time it wasn’t on Saturday (!!). Even with Eesti Laul usually taking the live tweets from foreign fans into account and displaying some of them on the national Estonian television for good measure. And often showcasing their weirdness through crude animations every so often. But I already saw my Twitter timeline being full of that stuff, and for that I’m happy.

I did have some favourites despite being tired of all this pop stuff, and one of them was the ever-so-gender-ambiguous INGER (I say so cuz I thought it was a guy, turns out it’s a she, yeah), and I kind of wanted to see her win after the lowkey last minute interest towards her? But the televote didn’t seem to want any of it during the final public say, and didn’t even want Kerli (not the Spirit Animal Kerli) through despite of her being “hot” (are we now choosing ESC NF winners based on their looks??? tighten up ffs). Instead the final’s televote thought it’d be a good idea to fuck up the international jury’s expectations by putting through an act that got 2(!!!!!) finalised points from them jurors overall and making it win the superfinal. That televote 12 the act got beforehand was just enough for the guy to last-minute qualify over another act of 14 overall points, and who knows, maybe if it wasn’t for that 12, the winner would’ve been someone else. But it didn’t and we have a last minute qualifier victory because televote superfinal is a thing.

And in the literal sense of the way Estonian minds thought their victor that was unfairly treated by the juries was a Swedish singer Victor Crone and his song “Storm”, which was written by the one and only Stig Rastafarian~ err I mean Rästa. Stig is one mythical human creature that never rests a minute without really wanting to appear in the Estonian delegation somewhere every year - whether as all by himself, with someone else, as a songwriter for someone else, or even as part of a band (remember Traffic, anyone? Now that I think of it, the whole band looks like a puppet-act just for Stig to get to Eurovision and the other band members didn’t even want any of it in the first place). Just exactly what is Stig’s aim here? To "take it back to Tallinn”? To meet new people in Europe because he’s too lazy to travel otherwise? To boast about the many Estonian entries he contributed to? Beats me.

That and Victor Crone being Swedish, therefore a man more suited to Melodifestivalen (where he actually once participated in) and only on Eesti Laul because Stig really wanted to save his voice for this one and tag some randomer along with him just for the sake of yearly input to Eesti Laul. Well, at least Victor is historically joining Sahlene and Sandra Oxenryd as “a Swede represending Estonia for a year because what do we know for the Estonians that weren’t chosen instead”. Let’s check his song out.

First and foremost, as the title obviously states, the song reminds me of the late Avicii’s music style, especially around 2012-2013, when he was just starting to get bigger post-”Levels”-release. Just with a bit more singing surrounding the song because... well, maybe to fill up the song some more in order to not look awkward on stage during an instrumental part of the drop being as long as would be one you hear on the radio.

Then he has this easy-listening generic male radio voice that the audiences can not necessarily reasonate with, but it’s memorable, together with the chorus, whose purpose is to be memorable - you don’t need no message that’s special, you just need a melody to hum in your head for the next few weeks, and that’s basically what Stig was able to achieve with this little ditty. Then there’s the amazingly easy song structure: verse - chorus - verse - (extended) chorus - bridge - chorus (+ song ending). That’s a structure that works on basic songs to make them more user-consumption-friendly and not too overbearingly dragged out. And I enjoy it, just like I did “Light Me Up” last year, which was also sung by a mediocre-live-vocalist-Swede that could have easily ended up 6th in Melodifestivalen edition with such song, sadly. I do acknowledge that it’s basic, but I enjoy it.

The problem the Eurofandom finds with this song is that it’s too basic of a song from Eesti, Victor’s proven himself to be a dull live singer, and the chorus rhymes “like this” with “like this”, and all the self-rhymes are automatically shite. And it’s fine if a song I like has its flaws, but it automatically worries me that its live potential is automatically down the drain because of the singer’s lack of vocal compassion or strenght. That begs the question, why choosing THAT kind of song if it’s totally going to underperform live in Eurovision if the singer wasn’t sick in the NF at the time???

...oh I get it now, you Estonians must have thought Stig deserves another year in the Estonian greenroom. Or you found Victor hot. Or you find it great that a song about a storm actually was originally staged to look like Victor’s in a storm. At least for the televiewers’ eye. Because all that they see in the real arenas is the singers’ backs if they don’t turn around in time.

With visuals like these, why even need a music video! (except that there already is one, look at the beginning of the review)

All in all, all condiments are there: just the sugar, spice and everything nice there’s needed for a song like this to break a fandom like this. You can practically smell the Hesburger grease from this song. I don’t care if that’s a bad thing - if you like the song, that’s fine, just shut up and enjoy... but if you dislike it, welp, there’s no way I can change your mind then.

And a random backing singer. Not that she’s helpful as the one for Ott Lepland or anything, she just strikes like thunder and leaves no lasting impact whatsoever.

Greta Salóme’s imaginary cousin, is that you????

Now excuse me while I contradict and repeat myself some more in the next few paragraphs:

Approval factor: As you might have seen me shading Elina a lot last year, I can safely say that at last I’m spared from her vocal practice entrapped in a porcelain-and-silk dressing!!! I like “Storm” myself so I’ll sheepishly approve the hell out of it, lolol. :-)

Follow-up factor: I would be lying if I didn’t say that after a risky-ish way to get all out opera and then coming back to a safe song after doing well with that opera number weren’t a complete nosedive into an empty pool. Subjectively it flows way better for me, but objectively, and the same could be, once again, said for Eesti Lawl [sic] 2019, it is rather interesting of a letdown? But hey, maybe it was finally time for the Estonians to chillax a bit and cave in to send an Estonian-Swedish pop number after the opera stuff, after the 80s synthpop stuff, after the smooth and slightly orchestrated and a little bluesy number, and heart-grabbing ballads... just so they could keep up their ‘variety’ in case Hungary runs out of ideas and starts sending cop-outs of themselves. They already did it with rehashing one artist and one lyrical idea already this year (the catch is that the father’s alive!), honestly. And oddly enough, they have yet to send something a little more modern/electro-influenced that appeals to the common crowd... (”Running” may not count because not everyone can relate, whereas there are more cases of broken-off love (as if in the other half being a heartbreaker or the first half missing the other half so much that they feel “incomplete” than abusive fathers. Just what I think there is? If I’m wrong I obviously expect to be @’ed in the replies section lol) For this conclusion though I’ll say that my opinion says it’s a ‘’’decent’’’ follow up, but for Eurofans, it’s not very much so of such, idk.

Qualification factor: you may think it’s dead while going to perform in between the more badass entries AND mediocre live vocals, but it won’t at least be the worst Stig entry to ever place - around 14th in the semi at the very worst and maybe in the lower half of top 10 at very best imo. Nothing more, nothing less.

NATIONAL FINAL BONUS

I actually barely even bother with Eesti Laul since they don’t accept my Twitter comments live on their television anyways. Say, were there any Twitter comments live on their television this year? No one on Twitter boasted about it if they saw theirs from what I’ve seen, but what I’ve definitely found from the eager Eesti Laul watchers were some casual and usual Estonian oddities thrown on the broadcast, such as:

• The soft and warm but also random and deranged yearly transitional postcard animations (that were refered to as “crude” earlier in this review), which I commonly know now as “my last two braincells”. Even if the graphical theme itself of this year’s Ee-Lawl were oddly-shaped birds coming out in forms of letters, they didn’t really show up much in the broadcast I suppose, and the best fuckery with my mind this year definitely happened when I saw some of THOSE pop up on my Twitter timeline:

We now return to your regularly scheduled news programm~ wait why are you saying that the scheduled programme should be Eesti Laul

• Even if the most acts themselves weren’t that kooky musically, they were obviously interesting performance-wise. We were greeted with an impulsively quirky crazy cat lady Kaia Tamm who bemoaned the absence of the fluffy creatures in German somehow (you know Germany’s a terrible track-record keeper when the only song in German this year featured on Estonia and the only German in Eurovision this year was gonna be sung by an Ukrainian entrant if she was alowed to), as if a song in full Italian from last year wasn’t enough. Not only did she dress up as Alice in Wonderland with kitty ears, but her costumed dancers were entertaining, the violinist was FIRE and a cute large teddy bear looked cute on stage. Not to mention, someone have rightfully noticed that some costumed felines in the audience looked like as if they were to kill someone:

• Lumevärv too is an interesting thing. Never forgetting Lumevärv. This Inga woman, the fiery orangehead she was, used her 3 minutes on stage the best possible way with dancing with her back turned on at the audience and only looking at the camera, while millions of lights (which is sadly not what the songtitle "Milline päev" means) shone in the audience, creating an amazing mood.

• Hey everyone, the 10 years challenge is back! This time it’s with the violin virtuousess(???) Sandra Nurmsalu, the lead of Urban Symphony, who deserved much more than a 3rd place. Unfortunately the Estonians did not bring her back to get her desired revenge, which meant that they thought that they woodn’t need no magic tale fairy that’d grant them tree wishes and let her magic wand our out the wondrous [sic] sawdust. I’m already seeing myself out for how terrible this sounded. And it’s a bit saddening about this not doing as well as some hoped, considering she would have brough out the new and the better Jacques Houdek teas:

• Other favourite act of mine from this year, besides the aforementioned “ever-so-gender-ambiguous-looking INGER” with her indie-folk jingle “Coming Home”, was the charming disco-haired Sissi Nylia Benita with a wholesomely radio bop “Strong”, and they both actually looked like they stood a chance in the superfinal vote-up now that the actual Eesti Laul fan favourites, pretty cute pop boys like piano-indie-pop-driven Stefan and electro-pop-and-Kirkorov-driven Uku Suviste, were not receiving enough support by the juries I guess??? I’ll show a video to INGER if anything and link you all to the rest so you could judge these young and beautiful souls to yourselves in a way!

• Other note-worthy acts include another song about the notorious instrument horsefly in Ee-Lawl’s history that stood even less chance than “Parmupillihullus” but is still fun regardless, and the united forces of Tanja (EE 2014) and Birgit (EE 2013) trying to compose a bigband talk show anthem and dedicating the lyrics for them being ladies with their high heels out on. And honestly, that’s all I’m gonna talk of acts-wise because most other songs were THAT of a radiofriendly-radio-filler that they don’t warrant anything else exciting for me to say.

• No but for real, the voting to the superfinal was completely off-rails. Instead of Victor, juries were there to support that Kerli woman that wasn’t from 2017 (and her soft acoustic song too), as well as Sissi and INGER (but you already know that because I barely read my write-ups before I finish them, hence lots of redundancy). At least that’s all to my knowledge. But everything definitely changed when the televote attacked! And turned the top 3 all male, lol. This voting was rather random simply because the juries didn’t really love Victor, but it definitely took the televote to convince them that “lol Victor is definitely worth of Eurovision!!! screw that he’s non-Estonian!!!” (the difference is that Victor doesn’t have a big social media following unlike Bilal and didn’t win an obnoxiously people-powered talent show unlike USNK from A Dal 2018 - it’s just that he’s more backed by Stig Rästa, and Stig is love, Stig is life.) Honestly, I am all up for unpredictable voting, but if it looks unpleasant to me, then I feel like tuning out.

We’re over with this write-up, thank-fuck-fully, so that you won’t need to hear me lamenting how supposedly cheap “Storm” is ever again. But before that I will have to leave you with some Eurovision 2019 facts coming on: Estonian delegation can be lucky for once - instead of having had to panic for spending an egregious amount of money for a staging detail, this year they don’t have to worry, as the organizers were so shook by Victor’s stormy sky effect, they offered to pay for it themselves!!! Crazy, huh??? (reported for favouritism)

And now I’m done. And we’re moving on to another review and I end up wishing Victor Crone the every best of luck out there. Storm out with a good time well spent! (Whatever that might mean.)

[daylflay]

Gen-Z

Biters’ Remorse (Or Lack Thereof)

Most good horror movies have something to say, some social commentary to thrust upon attentive and thoughtful viewers, especially zombie movies. George A. Romero was perhaps the most prominent director of zombie movies in cinematic history, and that’s because he basically invented the modern, flesh-eating, slow-moving, undead variety of zombie that contemporary audiences hunger for (forgive the quip). With Night of the Living Dead, Romero’s first, and arguably most seminal, foray into the genre, he used imagery such as that of hordes of white people attempting to kill a black protagonist in order to comment on the racism endemic in America circa the 1960s. Ten years later, In Dawn of the Dead, Romero once again used zombies as a vehicle for criticism, but this time he set the action in a mall in order to tackle the issue of consumerism. The latter portion of Romero’s zombie oeuvre features a couple of entries, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, whose messages would undoubtedly resonate with modern audiences even though the two films were released almost fifteen years ago: The former features a fortified city separating the entitled from the rest of the embattled world, commenting upon the xenophobia and nationalism engendered by a post-September 11th America; the latter features individuals recording the horrors of the apocalypse with handheld cameras, an obvious allusion to the advent of YouTube (Diary of the Dead was released in 2007). If Romero were still alive, then I’m certain that he would still be making zombie movies, and furthermore I’m pretty sure that the criticisms he’d be levying would be directed at misinformation and its propagation on the web, among a plethora of other subjects (recent events would’ve given him plenty to work with, to say the least). The world is currently facing a real-life pandemic, COVID-19, and its spread is attributable to many factors, such as lack of hygiene, large gatherings of people, etc., but I’d argue that misinformation has also played an inordinate role in this crisis. In Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology And The Law To Lock Down Culture And Control Creativity, Lawrence Lessig states that “the internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility…to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries.” Lessig isn’t criticizing the internet with his statement, but I’m indeed doing so with my quotation. That “reach” that Lessig referred to, it’s what ultimately makes it difficult to quarantine those infected by misinformation, and it in turn makes life more difficult for those trying to survive in the web’s hordes of misinformation/misinformed people. 

The Survivors

Not all of the individuals I’m tracking carry pretensions of professional journalism, some are simply trying to live their lives as normally as possible during this national emergency. Having said that, considering the prominence of the novel coronavirus currently present in practically all matters of public discourse, much talk of the epidemic is present in almost everyone’s tweets to some degree. Of the individuals of my blog’s focus, Kashana Cauley and Patti Harrison are easily the least politically active and journalistically inclined. The Twitter accounts of both women have been producing a minor amount of content as of late, which makes sense considering they, like everyone, are likely dealing with the coronavirus situation and all of its associated complications upon quotidian life. Cauley’s only tweet from 3/12/20: In response to a quoted tweet from CNN journalist Ana Cabrera that read, “McConnell ally says Senate won't take up House #coronavirus bill until after recess. ‘The Senate will act when we come back and we have a clearer idea of what extra steps we need to take,’ Sen. Lamar Alexander told reporters.”, Cauley tweeted, “I don’t know why, but I think if the rest of us rolled into work & said ‘let people die until March 23rd’ we might get fired.” Cauley is obviously paying attention to the news, but not necessarily engaging with it in any major way. Harrison only tweeted twice on 3/12/20, and one of the tweets read: “Lying in bed bottomless, legs spread, patting my mound, my phone 2 inches from my face, arching my back and moaning with SINFUL anticipation for all of the front-facing character videos we are about to see when all these comedians get quarantined inside our houses…mmmm fuck!”. Harrison is responding to the news, but not intimating at criticism of said news like Cauley did in her aforementioned tweet, instead vying for the use of apolitical humor in order to entertain her followers. 

Rick Wilson spends a lot of his time on Twitter attacking Donald Trump and the Republican party, and that hasn’t changed, as evidenced by his activity from 3/12/20: In response to a quoted Trump tweet that read, “Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record. Our response is one of the best, with fast action of border closings & a 78% Approval Rating, the highest on record. His was lowest!”, Wilson tweeted, “So this is how you want to play it?”. Wilson has never claimed to be a journalist, but he provides a lot of commentary on the news, especially news of a political variety, so it’s no surprise that a lot of his current tweeting pertains to the coronavirus considering its proximity to politics. Despite lacking in professional ties to the journalistic industry, Wilson is still playing an important role in the fight against misinformation by fact-checking and pushing against sophistic Trump/Republican narratives being circulated (https://www.vox.com/2020/3/12/21176750/trump-coronavirus-response-disaster).

The Quarantine

For all of the responsible web users who aren’t contributing to the spread of misinformation, there are of course those who need to be quarantined due to their being carriers and deliberate disseminators of said misinformation. Candace Owens is one of those individuals who needs to be quarantined, immediately. Twitter is by no means a newspaper, but it’s nonetheless a source of news for some, and when one has a following the size of Owens (2 million as of 3/12/20), then one has a responsibility to at least attempt to promulgate accurate information, especially when one likes to play at being a journalist. Owens has always fancied herself a journalist of sorts, but if she hadn’t dropped out of the University of Rhode Island while attempting to acquire a degree in journalism (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youtube-tested-trump-approved-how-candace-owens-suddenly-became-loudest-n885166), then perhaps she’d understand that the journalistic institution has a code of ethics. One of the most basic aspects of journalism, an aspect that’s tragically being undercut in the modern era by irresponsible fools such as Owens, is so simple that a child could ascertain it: Get the basic facts straight. This is one of Owens’ tweets from 3/10/20: “One day, we will look back and study the impact of the coronavirus…Not the virus itself of course, but the mass global mental breakdown that it inspired…Because people think it’s novel that 80 year olds are dying at a high rate from a flu…This tweet will age well.” Not only is the information contained in her tweet plainly incorrect, but it’s dangerous. First of all, there’s a big difference between coronavirus and the flu (https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-vs-flu-which-virus-is-deadlier-11583856879), evidenced not only by the disparate terms, but by the simple fact that the flu doesn’t lead the World Health Organization to declare the presence of a pandemic every flu season (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51839944). Secondly, while it’s been reported that it’s primarily older people dying from COVID-19, youth doesn’t preclude one from catching coronavirus and spreading it to those older people; not to mention those of varying ages with underlying conditions such as autoimmune diseases who could easily die via coronavirus (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/health/coronavirus-midlife-conditions.html). Owens is just an extension of a type web-user Christian Fuchs refers to in Social Media: A Critical Introduction: “Cultural communities are not automatically politically progressive...Facebook group[s] [exist]…for Norwegian right-wing extremists…[like]the fascist terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in the Norwegian terror attacks on July 22, 2011”. Owens isn’t a violent terrorist (that I know of), but the misinformation she’s spreading could nonetheless be responsible for far more deaths than that of Breivik. It’s no wonder that Owens is a pariah to the vast majority of professional news outlets and can’t find columnist work outside of conservative propaganda-peddlers such as Fox News.

The Anti-Quarantine

Graduate of the University of Oxford, host of UpFront on the Al Jazeera network, writer/podcaster for investigative journalism outlet The Intercept, frequent commentator on networks such as CNN, Mehdi Hasan is essentially the diametric opposite of Owens (https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/14/18678698/mehdi-hasan-intercept-impeachment-donald-trump-pelosi-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast-interview). Hasan is a serious, passionate journalist who takes the dissemination of information/news very seriously, whether it be on Twitter or otherwise. Hasan has been absolutely restless on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic, reporting on germane news as it breaks and fact-checking those who attempt to misinform. Here’s Hasan challenging NBC columnist Richard Engel on 3/12/20, less than an hour after Engel posted his tweet: Engel tweeted, “The reaction/overreaction in the US to the virus seems largely political. Trump’s critics have no confidence in him, so they panic. Others defend Trump no matter what he does and don’t listen to anyone else. Not a recipe for keep calm and carry on. When broken you can’t be strong”; Hasan quoted Engel’s tweet and responded with, “Please don’t ‘both sides’ the anti-science, failed-on-testing, pandemic-minimizing conspiracy theorist in the White House.” Hasan is the antidote to the infection being spread by individuals such as Owens; whatever the opposite of a quarantine is, that’s what we need to do to Hasan. 

The Line

The line between amateur and professional may be blurred in some cases due to the rise of social media and the power of web-based technologies such as smartphones, yet in a lot of cases that blurring isn’t relatively important, but in the case of a pandemic such as COVID-19 and the blurring between amateur and professional journalism, the difference between an amateur like Owens and a professional like Hasan is of the utmost importance. Owens’ misinformation-spewing may well contribute to the deaths of actual people, and furthermore disrupt the important work of good-faith journalists like Hasan. What’s at stake here is clear: life and death. 

Life and death were subjects very much on George A. Romero’s mind during his filmmaking career, e.g.: Romero’s cinematic universe, a patchwork of films loosely connected to each other by an overarching narrative a la the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was kicked off by Night of the Living Dead; the concept of the living dead of course remained a linchpin of Romero’s work until the end. Unfortunately, like the namesake of so many of his films, Romero himself is now dead, so I have taken it upon myself to propose the concept for the next film in his cinematic universe of the living dead. In Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins talks about “the story of American arts in the twenty-first century [and how it] might be told in terms of the public reemergence of grassroots creativity as everyday people take advantage of new technologies that enable them to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content.” If I had more time, I’d certainly attempt to contribute to Jenkins’ perception of “twenty-first century” art via a short Romero-inspired film uploaded to YouTube or some similar platform, but I’ll settle for this faux-blurb instead: The year is 2020, and the world has rarely been more divided and vulnerable. Catastrophic weather events have ravaged the globe and displaced millions, spurred by a rapidly changing climate and subsequently decaying ecosystem. Political divisiveness has led to international protests and civil unrest with heretofore unparalleled levels of fervor. A highly contagious virus has begun spreading inexorably from country to country, slowly but surely infecting and killing an increasing number of people. Misinformation is running rampant on the web, leading to mass confusion and extreme skepticism of any and all information being disseminated. At the Biology department of a university in Fullerton, California, an accident is about to take place that will blur the lines between the living and the dead. For some, it’s felt like the end of the world for a long time, but those feelings are about to validated, and the world will be too distracted warring with itself, and the truth, for anyone to do anything about it. When the world already feels like hell, the living dead will feel right at home. Welcome to the world of…Gen-Z. Like those selfies while you still can. Coming to a theater near you…NOW! It’s already happening, so stock up on toilet paper…          

[t4b5-blog1]

2. mar - dec 2016

By now I was thinking there was something much more sinister behind the pains I was experiencing, maybe even being ‘given’ some sort of disease or something.

Straight after my last tweet (above), I follow it up with a search (heart) and these are tweets that follow.

First tweet I see is about ‘lying on social media’,

the tweet/account is deleted,

and ‘crying on social media’ tweet.

a tweet about heart pain with my initial and name

one of my bro's birthdays as the username

'don't break my heart' tweet I was seeing a lot more as soon as I'd go on twitter

me replying to a tweet and then some of the usual tweets straight after using family members initials/names/nicknames as/in the user/@names

a tweet replying to my previous tweet (above), this was after I tweeted then doing a twitter search of the word 'heart' and this was the one of the first tweets posted. This is how I was/am being communicated to, not at my actual @ name, but via the search engine using multiple accounts. This is just to show/prove whoever this person is/are knows EXACTLY what I'm doing and when I'm doing it

the 'fcbyh' too tweet and bro's initial in @ name

another tweet/threat using bro's initial in username

By this point I had been experiencing head pains, chest/heart pains and now I had started getting pains in the abdomen/lower abdomen/groin areas. Something else I had noticed was most of these tweets were being either deleted or completely vanishing, account suspended, tweets protected, the username and @ names changed, sometimes even being blocked without even tweeting the account. So after I'd do a twitter search (always the word 'heart'), there would be so many of these tweets/accounts that by the time I'd check one out, the rest or a lot would go missing, too many to keep track of. So I started taking screenshots of the actual search results and then go through each tweet/account. Another thing I noticed was the majority of these tweets were from foreign accounts, mainly Asian and Arabic (as I'll explain/show as I go along).

This was when I first started experiencing the lower abdominal/groin pains, this was after I had just moved to a new address (this 'following/stalking' was happening at every address I was moving to, at least 10 separate properties over approx. 3 years).

A tweet about the north and falling in love with the south, referring to the new abdominal/groin pains. 

Blocked by account/user.

a taylor swift related tweet

An 'expect that broken heart soon' tweet, account blocked.

blocked

some 'advice'

some more 'advice'

Bro's 'name' in user/@name, sometimes it's the name outright, sometimes just the initial/nickname and sometimes a play on the name, either way it's enough for me to know

after a refresh or two of the (search result) page, 'screwing up everything' tweet,

'big mistake, impending hurt' tweet

Some stuff I was still using my email drafts for but come to realize this was compromised, these people knew/know everything I do on my phone. Here a draft about something I had noticed and a tweet from a twitter search (of the word 'heart') straight after 

this seems to be a response/reaction to my tweet, account blocked

blocked

This is where I started to take screenshots of the whole page after doing my twitter searches (always of just the word 'heart', keyword can be seen in bold),  and where I started learning more about the tweets/accounts etc.

Heat beats fast tweet, might not seem like anything but this tweets are posted at the EXACT time I'm feeling the EXACT same things.

'alive for a reason' tweet straight after previous

repairing heart tweet

bro's name. These are subtle little nudges, letting me know these people know exactly who my family are

bro’s initial in tweet, this bro was mentioned the most from the very beginning, simply cos he was the ‘next easiest’ out of the family to get to get to

same bro’s initial again next tweet

‘heart hurts’ straight after

older bro’s name/heart hurts tweet

‘didn’t destroy your heart’ tweet

bro’s initial and ‘dying’ capitalized, also my initial in bio

what’s wrong with heart tweet

later when on, bro’s name

my ‘name’ in @ name/ broke your heart tweet

After replying to this tweet, a tweet with mine and bro's initials in username

mine and bro's initials

bro's 'name' in username, my name in @ name

don't break my heart tweet

me replying to some nonsense and threat that follows

bullet to heart

'break my best friend's heart' tweet/threat

bro's name, walk away tweet

draft about what was going on

tweet straight after with bro's name in @ name

cause of death/DNR tweet

Bro's initial

tweet about someone being crossed

beware woman with broken heart

breaking heart tweet/threat bit later on

mine and bro's initials again

stay silent tweet

bro's name in username

my initial in username

two bro’s initials in username

every dog has it’s day tweet

my bro’s name

Another bro’s name. Also this tweet about heart pain was describing the pains I was about to experience to a tee and was the worst pain I’d felt to date. The following morning I had a very weak pulse, big chest pains and wasn’t feel good at all.

First tweet I saw after waking up feeling very poorly. Blocked by account.

Something about a possible mistake

Blocked.

This was the first (and not the last) time I saw this following tweet ‘writing murdering your family’, a threat basically considering how much family member’s name’s had been mentioned. Ever since this day things got worse and almost every family member has been mentioned, even children.

Writing murders your family tweet

focus on heart tweet

bro’s initial/heart fluttering tweet

creeping in your heart tweet

Payment in advance

‘Risk’ tweet

bro’s ‘name’ in username, pains tweet

my reply to this tweet about what was being done by my housemates followed by a ‘no shit sherlock’/@ hearthasgone and a ‘writing finally’ tweet

‘broke my heart’, tweet deleted

no shit sherlock/@ hearthasgone and ‘writing finally’ tweets

heart wants what the heart wants

An ariana grande related tweet

[maximumbandwidth-blog]

On Design

The Boeing 737 Max has been in the news lately. The designers of the new system made a basic error in building a user interface. A user interface is anything that humans use to interact with a machine or a tool of any sort. A dinner fork is a user interface between you and your food, a button on your iPhone lets a human interact with the supercomputer in their hand. There are probably billions of examples, but in all cases it lets us imperfect collections of meat and bone use the tools that we create.

In the case of airplanes, the pilot interacts with the plane using a stick. When the pilot pulls back on the stick, the plane’s nose should go up, and when they push it forward, it should go down. I think the designers forgot that basic tenet when designing a system that causes that very basic interaction do something different. I don’t know if Boeing can fix this system or if they should redesign the plane from the ground up, I am not qualified to make that decision.

People aren’t perfect, and the designer’s job is always to help people do things that are important, to make the easy things simple, and to keep people alive and safe when doing things that are hard.

Airplanes have been here before. Every airplane with retractable landing gear has two levers next to each other, one controls the flaps and the other lowers the landing gear. When landing a plane the pilot first extends the flaps and then just before landing drops the landing gear. There was a time when these two levers were the same shape, and several planes landed on their bellies when the pilot pulled the wrong lever in the heat of the moment. This problem was solved many years ago by making the landing gear lever in the shape of a wheel, and the flap lever in the shape of a flap. The FAA now requires that all airplanes use these shapes.

Source: https://geremy.co.uk/GoFlight-Landing-Gear-Unit

When the pilot grasps this lever, they have multiple ways of ensuring it’s the right one, they can read the label, they can see where the lever is, and they can feel it by its shape.

When the Japanese were designing the bullet trains, they wanted to make sure that the trains were safe. All employees of the bullet trains are taught a simple system, called shisa kanko. Before performing any task every employee will first point at the thing they wish to do, then to say what they are doing, and finally to do the thing. Every employee, from the train operator to the toilet cleaner follow this procedure. The result is the best run train system in the world that has never had a fatal accident. There are certainly many other reasons the trains in the US seem to regularly kill people, but the point is that the designers of these trains understood that they were giving control of large, heavy, fast object to fallible humans and made every effort to ensure that at the end of the day, everyone gets home to their families.

Speaking of killing people, one of the most popular guns in the world, the AK-47 is designed from the ground up to ensure that when the operator pulls the trigger, the gun fires. The designer, Mikhail Kalashnikov knew that people are fallible. The gun has a lever that switches between safe, automatic, and single fire mode. When a soldier needs to fire their gun they are probably nervous and worried that they might get killed. The worst thing they can do is slam the gun into auto mode and waste all their bullets, but on this gun that setting is in the middle. If you slam the switch from safety as far as it will go, the gun goes into single fire mode, so every pull of the trigger will expend just one bullet. If you want to put the gun in auto mode, you have to think a bit more and carefully put it in the middle position. This ensures that when you really need to fire the gun, you won’t do something stupid.

I recently bought a new camera, the Canon 77D, and I suspect the designer of my camera has never fired an AK-47. It has a 3 position switch that goes from Off to Photo and then to Video. Most people are going to use this camera to take pictures, but I have to carefully move the lever to the middle position to do so. When I am in a hurry and just want to take a quick picture, the camera fails me.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cirSmff3WEs

Again, the principle here is that when you interact the machine, when you flip a switch or move a lever, the machine should do the thing that you want it to do. Designers need to put themselves in the users’ shoes and think, what do they need to do when they are under stress, or when they are in a hurry, or when they can do something that could kill people.

The world that people have created is wondrous, we have so many machines that can do amazing things, we can bring people together and we can help them achieve their dreams. The one thing no one can do is bring someone back after they are dead. This is something the designers of the Jeep should have thought of before they killed Anton Yelchin, the actor who played Chekov in the recent Star Trek movies.

Cars have been around for over 100 years and their controls are a marvel of design. Every car has a steering wheel that lets you turn right or left, a gas pedal, a brake that you can slam on to stop the car, and a way to shift gears. The brake is a vital safety device and is wonderfully simple, press it and the car slows down, slam on it and the car stops. Well, usually. There was a time when this didn’t work so well, if the road was wet and slippery, the car might keep going. Anti Lock brakes solved this problem brilliantly. No one changed the user interface, the same principle still works, push the pedal hard and the car stops, even in the snow.

If only we could say the same about the shift lever. In automatic cars, there are two basic positions, Park and Drive. Reverse and Neutral are in the middle, so when you really need to go, or really need to park, you can slam the lever into that position without looking. If you need to go in Neutral or Reverse, you probably aren’t in as much of a hurry. Same goes for other positions, D1 and D2 can only be accessed by moving the lever in another way. Whether the gear shift is on the column or on the floor, they all worked the same way, that is until technology intervened.

Shift levers are no longer connected directly to the transmission, they tell a computer to tell the transmission to do something. This mostly works well, engineers know how to make these systems reliable, but it gave designers the opportunity to play with the user interface. On Anton’s Jeep, you have to click the lever more than once to go from drive to park. A designer thought this would be simpler but didn’t understand the decades of history that went into the operation of this lever. Anton was in a hurry to get home and close the gate, and thought he slammed the lever into park. Unfortunately he only made it as far as Reverse and ended up getting killed by his Jeep.

Jeep never fixed this fundamental problem. They just patched it by adding a warning when you open the door when in reverse, and I believe this solution is inadequate. They need to recall every single one of these vehicles and put in a proper lever.

https://jalopnik.com/heres-the-problem-with-jeeps-recalled-gear-shifter-1782364420

Don’t kill people. Every designer should probably have those words printed right above their computer screens.

The rule applies to software just as much as hardware. Computer designers create buttons, switches, and levers on computer screens that emulate real buttons, and they have the freedom to create intricate interfaces that can control endless tasks. Send, Save, Delete, Quit. Basic operations that should simply do what they say they are going to do.

There was a time that when you deleted something in Microsoft Word, some of that text would stay in the file, many lives were ruined when people found text that people thought was deleted in their documents. Most people know now that once something is on the Internet, it never really goes away, and the Delete button is more useless than ever. Twitter made it difficult to tell if you are sending a public or private message and this has ruined many lives.

You may remember the case of the incoming missile warning in Hawaii.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/us/hawaii-missile.html

This was another case of a user interface problem. The system made it hard to determine if the operator was sending a live warning or a test. In this case, lots of people were frightened and inconvenienced, but what if the opposite happened? What if it was a real incoming missile and a test alert was sent out? Many people could have died.

The world is getting more complex all the time and we depend on many systems to help us run our lives. Our systems are increasingly capable and can do more, but the more they control the more likely it is that we can build systems that will cause people to die.

The examples in this story are from wildly different fields. You might think that airplanes and missile warning systems have nothing in common with each other, but user interface design touches every single system that we do every day.

Before creating a new system or modifying an existing one, a designer should think of all the failures and successes that came before, and build things that let us all come home safely at the end of the day.

[makingscipub]

Alternative facts: The good, the bad and the ugly

On 22 January “Senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press … and spoke to host Chuck Todd about a briefing the new press secretary, Sean Spicer, had held earlier in the weekend. Spicer claimed Donald Trump’s inauguration had attracted record numbers of spectators. Conway denied the statements were lies, instead branding them ‘alternative facts’” (see Guardian). This remark provoked a veritable avalanche of discussion on social media and beyond. In the following I’ll basically re-quote some thought-provoking quotes which I picked up from the flotsam and jetsam that washed up on my Twitter stream and that made me think about the use and abuse of ‘alternative facts’.

The bad

In these discussions one quote has come up again and again. It is taken from the 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. The story takes place in a ‘superstate’ that is under the control of a privileged elite called the Inner Party, which persecutes individualism and independent thinking as ‘thoughtcrime’ (see Wikipedia). The quote that circulated on the internet reads as follows – and I here use a version that is longer than 140 characters: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre.”

The good

This made me think. I know that the political spinning of alternative facts is bad and pernicious. However, I wondered whether in some sense alternative facts can also be good and instructive. 1984 is a novel filled with ‘alternative facts’ after all. Many seminal novels, be they traditional or science fiction ones, are based on exploring alternative worlds and provide us with alternative facts through which we can see the factual world that is emerging and floundering around us. It is important to cherish these alternative worlds and alternative facts, to read 1984 again and again, so that we don’t become blind to what’s happening in the real world where ‘alternative facts’ are use not to make us think but to prevent us from thinking, not to imagine different worlds but to prevent us from doing so. Such novels and their alternative worlds are also cautionary tales, warning us that such alternative fictional worlds and fictional facts can also become real worlds and real facts – and sometimes have done so in the past – unless we prevent this from happening.

The bad

Alternative facts in the spin and post-truth sense have a long tradition in politics, where most recently in the UK they were distributed by the bus-load in the context of Brexit. They also have well-established uses in the context of debates about climate change and, most importantly, in the context of ‘alternative medicine’, where ‘alternative facts’ (for example about vaccination) are widely accepted – and dangerous. While I was musing about this, I stumbled upon a question posed on Yahoo answers, following the media-reporting about Kellyanne Conway’s use of the phrase ‘alternative facts’. The question was: “Does ‘alternative facts’ have the same meaning as ‘alternative medicine’?” The answer provided by a user of Yahoo answers was: “Basically, YES. It just means that the [sic] are different choices that can be made, but not all of the ‘solutions’ are going to work in all cases.” There was however an important ‘Update’ underneath the question saying “Update: ‘alternative medicine’ is not medicine.”

The good

Just as alternative medicine is not medicine, so alternative facts are not facts. Facts can’t be ‘chosen’. What can be chosen, however, is how we deal with facts, how we value them and how we use them – and here we come back to alternative worlds and alternative facts in the good sense and also to the immense importance of science, literature, art, history and philosophy. These human and humane endeavours provide us with ways of exploring real and imagined worlds, of discussing past and future worlds, of acquiring knowledge and disputing knowledge, of establishing, testing and challenging evidence through agreed procedures, processes and shared practices. It is important that we keep these traditions of critical and creative thinking, of creating and discussing ‘facts’, alive in what one might call an increasingly ‘demon-haunted world’.

The ugly

Carl Sagan, American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator, issued a warning in his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, that echoes Orwell’s from 1949. The quote from 1984 above and the quote from The Demon-Haunted World below have now gone viral, which is a good thing. Sagan wrote: “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness… The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”.

One more quote appeared frequently in my twitter-stream when I was writing this post, but not quite as frequently as the 1984 one; this was a passage from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jewish American political theorist: “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

It’s worth re-reading these seminal texts – and of course disseminating and quoting them on social media! And perhaps, things are already changing a bit in response… or not.

Image: Pixabay

              1984 adapted radio starring David Niven

http://ift.tt/1MkcUmn

        Prof Saiful Islam ‏@SaifulChemistry  4m4 minutes ago

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If you’ve come across a claim & want to know more #AskForEvidence Good graphic @senseaboutsci

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