I am all done with Facebook. As previously announced, I won’t be posting there any more, because it is a corrupt medium, managed by bad people for evil ends. I can no longer support the company with the tacit approval of my presence, so I am shutting down — my account is still there, and I’ve got a few people on an active project that I’ll still engage with on Messenger, but I won’t post anything new there, and as people forget I exist on Facebook, I’ll eventually kill those as well.

I’m not totally disappearing. I’ll still have an active presence in these places:

Pharyngula on Freethoughtblogs
@PZMyers on Twitter
@PZMyers@Octodon.social on Mastodon
PZMyers on MeWe
The Freethoughtblogs server on Discord
PZMyers on Instagram
The Pharyngula IRC channel

Before you tell me that those are flawed, imperfect media too, I agree — I’m just shedding the worst of the worst to start. Maybe eventually I’ll end up in a remote mountain cave, disconnected and unshackled from the bonds of the material world. But not yet!

I’m just now catching up with the news. Terry Jones has died? Now I feel like I’m on a deathwatch for Monty Python, because the world lost Graham Chapman 30 years ago, which is kind of unbelievable in itself.

Cleese, Idle, and Palin better hang in there, because the troupe is now at half-strength (Terry Gilliam was the third casualty, because he’s dead to me).

I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, and I have mixed feelings.

On the positive side, the humanism is just drooling out of the side of the box. He argues for saving all lives after the enemy’s star went nova, pushes for rescuing even the enemies of the federation, the Romulans, and there’s even some bit about synthetic humans (like Data) and their rights. I like the idea of a show that digs deep into ethical concerns.

On the negative side, there was the usual pointless Trekkie pseudoscience contrived on the spot. Data had a daughter? Who was synthetic, but biological? And the process always creates twins? And Data’s knowledge can be reconstructed from a single neuron? There are teleporting Romulans who want to kill one daughter, but there’s another on a Borg ship? It was too much. Now Picard is somehow getting back on a ship and soaring off to right some wrongs or something, or contrive excuses to bring back old Star Trek actors for guest spots. It’s the first episode, and it’s already too artificial and complicated.

I’ll probably check out a future episode to see how it shakes out, but it looks to me like the stuff I like about Star Trek is going to be overwhelmed by the stuff I detest about Star Trek.

I have been sent an attempt to unify my two obsessions: an octopus is just a wet spider.

No. No. NO. I was surprised at how strongly my brain rejected this proposition — my first reaction was to want to scream at the screen, that this is not correct, don’t you know anything about arachnids and cephalopods, my god, you fool, I need to set everything on fire, this is going to simmer in my brain like acid, aaaargh, do I have to write a whole book on this ridiculous idea, how dare you, now I’m going to have counter-arguments reverberating through my skull for at least a week!

It was objectively interesting how being close to something can trigger such a strong reaction to counter-factual nonsense. Sure, you can tell me that baseball is just football with sticks, and I’ll chuckle and move on and forget about it in minutes, but an inappropriate comparison of my two totally independent, incomparable, glorious organisms feels like you just stuck a hand-grenade in my eye socket. I am totally discombobulated.

I’m better now, though. I’ve calmed down. Just don’t say that phrase to me ever again, I might cry.

This letter is purportedly from Human Resources to an employee with an older, unsightly car. I don’t know if it’s genuine or not, but the attitude is certainly authentic — it’s just that usually they avoid making it quite so blatant.

We tend to drive our cars into the ground. My wife and I get the least expensive vehicle that has a good reliability rating, and then we drive it forever, or until it breaks down. We are not the types to buy a new car every year for the status (we can’t afford a new car every year, anyway), and I can’t imagine myself ever washing and polishing a utilitarian device like that, anyway.

Fortunately, we college professors can get away with a little slovenliness, but my wife did have at least one incident where she spotted her employer circling around her dinged-up car, scowling. You know there are lots of Americans who will judge you on the presumed prestige of your car, and that spending money on the right upscale things is an important aspect of performative capitalism.

It’s only surprising that, if this letter is genuine, anyone would make the superficiality of the attitude explicit.

I am organized! Now ready to face the spring semester, although I’ve also learned that I’m apparently up to be the biology discipline coordinator^*, so I may not be as ready as I think. I got a lot done today, at least, and will be able to walk brightly into my new classes, not looking at all like a pole-axed cow.

Tonight I’m going to take a deep breath and relax by going to the movie. Little Women is playing, which I hear is very good, and also Dr Doolittle, which is getting panned. I think I’ll go to the one that I might have a chance of enjoying.

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^*There are no perks at all associated with being the discipline coordinator, not even a fancy hat. Maybe my first agenda item as I rise to power is to propose the creation of a fancy hat, to make it all worthwhile.