Rumors of My Suspension

… have been greatly exaggerated.

A couple days ago, I found myself starting to spiral a little after the shutdown capitulation and some mounting frustration with local government, and realized that I’ve been spending too much time doomscrolling and screen-screaming at Bluesky in particular, and need to take a little bit of time to figure out what it is I actually want out of social media — what I value in it, how to use it more effectively for things I enjoy, how to avoid making a corncob out of myself.

So, that’s what I’m doing. I’m still around, I still have shows to promote — including what’s likely to be our biggest ever this Friday, Nov. 14th — and still like following plenty of you weirdos, but definitely have found diminishing returns as of late, and intend to be a little less active and a little less vocal online, both for my sake and, if you’re reading this, for yours, too.

Offline While Online

I want to try to use this website more often to communicate in blocks larger than a few hundred characters; some day, I hope to get back to Work is Four Letters, though I need to rethink my approach to it because the labor involved just isn’t really sustainable with work days that approach 11 hours (with commute), a band that practices a couple times a week and plays shows often, a pretty active social life, and a long-suffering partner who somehow doesn’t murder me in my sleep for all of my extracurricular efforts. Ideally, I think I want to restart it as a monthly feature, and need to think more carefully about who I interview — while I like the idea of modeling after Studs Terkel’s Working, and love interviewing random people about normal jobs, I know from the metrics that this isn’t what people read, and, while I’m not monetizing any of this, I would like people to read it if I’m going to ask for someone’s time and then commit my own effort.

I also, if only for my own sanity, need to think about, write about, and engage with topics other than politics, which, I would hope, needs no further explanation.

Off-Topic

We watched Death by Lightning last night (all four hours), and I thought it was a fun, if somewhat flawed miniseries. All hail the miniseries! Michael Shannon is, for once, maybe a little understated, Matthew Macfadyen is delightfully deranged, and I would watch another four-hour miniseries starring Nick Offerman as the drunk, bare-knuckled brawling Chester Arthur. Shea Wigham as Roscoe Conkling was excellent, even if the show is unfair to Conkling, who was more interesting (and more progressive) than the show portrays. This is a pretty even-handed review that points out what the series gets right (and what it doesn’t). My least favorite part is the absolutely terrible intro sequence; fortunately, Netflix abbreviates it after the first episode.

So, that’s it. No big, explosive reveals, no intra-website parasocial drama, nothing particularly exciting at all, I’m just having the very small-stakes individual internal crisis that everyone who has spent several years on social media eventually has (sometimes with frequent regularity), and figuring out how to sort it out for myself.