No Digs for Satan – Dickens of a Blog

Over the past month or so, Reddit has been “trying out” a push for mobile users to pick up the app:

And like…sure. Fine. Whatever. You have to love it when they make it easy to leave.

It’s helpful for Reddit to be so accommodating. Since I got that alert a couple of weeks ago, it has been very easy to not spend time just chunking through bot-driven doomscrolling where most of the good content is just reposts from years ago. The amount of books and long-form media I’ve been able to consume with the freed up time is not inconsequential.

There’s a longer rant, here, but I’ll just give a short taste.

It is absolutely criminal that “new media” has actively colluded into a universal state where websites, apps, and other services assume that the wholesale relinquishing of our personal data is a ready expectation for which we should thank them. Even apps/sites/services for which we pay money, sometimes a lot of money. Doesn’t matter. “Add more friends to make it more fun!” “Make sure your location tracking is on and we’ll give you five free gems!”

All the behavioral scientists and marketers pushing this should be outright ashamed.

AND, it should be illegal for those profiting off this new cold war to not have to give at least 80% of all user-stolen revenue back to the users. Either its worth something or it isn’t. “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,” bullshit has forgiven grave sins against privacy and helped pave the backbone of ecological collapse and city-sized datacenters paid for with our tax money.

Who gives a shit about Reddit’s claims that this is for the user experience? Of course it isn’t. At least not outside of addiction driven tribal-brain behavior and bright lights and stupid meme videos. The last time Reddit had a good user experience was back when it was a terrible website full of terrible people around whom you shouldn’t be. At least then it felt like a reflection of its actual target audience.

Hell, I’m not even blocking ads on the site so it’s not even about recouping lost ad revenue, at least not the direct ad revenue.

It’s so they can get more data from our phones and sell more information about their user. Because the entire economy is being entangled into datamining and AI training and selling user data to data brokerages who then sell it to dataminers, AI trainers, and law enforcement.

Up my butt, Reddit. Up. my. butt.

A couple of weeks ago, maybe, I took a screenshot from the top of a Reddit thread because I figured I’d get around to answering it:

“What’s something you’re pretty sure only you do?”

Now, here are two answers and one answer has two parts because I’m me.

FIRST ANSWER: We Do A Lot of Unique Things

Just a shout out to all us Space Pilgrims: when we look at specifics a lot of what we do is actually fairly unique. Absolutely no one else is in that cafe at that table and eating that donut but you. In cafes? Sure. At tables? Sure. Eating donuts? Sure.

And I suspect, but have no idea what kind of chaos computing super mainframe would be required to know, that it only takes a few facets of our activities before a significant number of everything we do is unique.

A lot of people might grow roses. A much smaller amount by specialize in a particular type of roses. Arranging them into patterns based on, I don’t know, famous Shakespeare plays?

I am deeply suspicious of a growing trend that tries to paint uniqueness as being cringe while also judging folks for being basic.

That being said, this is about me…

SECOND ANSWER: My “Unique” Stuff

To keep this lighter, let me say there are two things that come to mind.

“No Digs for Satan”

Not truly unique since both Kaz and I say this on a regular basis, and I think I got this from somewhere, but the phrase “No digs for Satan” shows up a lot in our household.

What does it mean? We generally use it to mean, “This topic is so off-the-table we won’t even consider it.” 0-stars is a review. “Did not like,” is an opinion. This is something below consideration.

As always when I think this hard about it, I try looking it up to see if there is any other references to it and got this from the “helpful” AI summary:

heh.

At any rate, I updated that older post today to point out it might have been, “No ribbits for Satan” but at any rate, I’m sticking to my own thing.

The Alabama Weird // GLOW // etc

Here’s one I’m more sure is definitely unique to me. Over on The Doug Alone, I play out multiple long-term solo RPGs set in alternate history Alabamas including a long running history of characters and locations cribbed from dozens of sources.

There are newspaper articles, fiction book series within the series, and multiple timelines that diverge depending on the campaign.

Some of those characters, like Amy Patel and Eustace Delmont, show up in different time lines as slightly different but interlinked characters. When stuff happens in a “future” timeline, it might get referenced and added to the lore to a “past” timeline, etc.

Eustace, by the way, is effectively a way for me to play a parody of myself and while in the cyberpunk-infused “The GLOW” version he is much more an angry, muscular guy, in the more “normal” Alabama Weird version, I simply just use my one photos modified in whatever style of art that fits that particular campaign arc:

He’s sort of like me if self-doubt was replaced with the simple bravado to fight all the strange things going on down in the swamps and small streets of lower Alabama.