text not pictures (which are not worth a thousand words)

When I first went on fb I was surprised that I was only able to leave short messages.  Well you can go further but after four or five lines your comments end with a see more that can be clicked on to reveal the rest of the message.  I suppose this is fb's way of saving space on your feed, but note that you can put a pithy (stupid) statement in a big square of some color and take up the space of twenty-five lines and that is perfectly fine.  These one line flashes of wisdom, three seconds of thought reveals that they are just stupid word games.  There I have said it.

Knowing how irritating that text limit was on fb when I heard that Twitter had only 44 I presciently predicted that this will never last, just a flash in the pan like Windows was in the clear and reasonable world of DOS.

Like the quantum foam of politics these days I do not understand the popularity of Twitter.  My nephew's girl friend followed Lady Gaga and every time Lady Gaga wanted to tell the world how she liked her eggs the girlfriend would get a beep on her phone and she would know instantly!  I guess that's the thing, knowing instantly.  A dinosaur like me doesn't know what Trump has tweeted until he hears it on the radio or sees it on one of his political sites.  This can be minutes, sometimes even hours after the actual event, whereas the hip and with it Trumpist (or anti Trumpist) knows it the minute it hits cyberspace and therefore they have more time to react and change their lives accordingly.

At the risk of offending Old Dog who deigns not to participate in the stoopid world of fb, even more irritating than tweeting are videos.  It used to be they were just there and if you wanted to watch them you clicked on them, but then they just started playing on their own.  I did a little internet research and found some setting that would keep them from doing that, but now that doesn't always work, especially on news or politics sites.  And now there are certain articles on my political sites that are video only, you can't read them if you wanted to.  You would think they could hire somebody at minimum wage to transcribe it into text, but I guess they figure who wants to read when you can just listen.

See back in the days before disks and hard drives, main frames have some similar device, rotating drums when last I was in computer school, data was stored on tapes.  If you are looking for a particular item on a tape you have to read the whole damn thing until you get to it.  If you have a disk you have some kind of index and you can go right to the item.  This saves a lot of time.  This is the way I feel about videos, I have to watch the whole damn thing go get what I want to know whereas if I am reading something I can scan through the paragraphs and find what I want and if I have to backtrack to check on some fact  that is much easier than backtracking the tape.