Historically, when people have directed the word "why" at me, the word has been immediately followed with the words, "in the name of God", as in, "Greg, why in the name of God did you put all of my toilet seats in the back yard?" This, of course, would have been a question from back in the day when my diet was mostly liquid and also delivered by a guy in a truck with a large beer logo on the side. (The answer to the question, by the way, was, "Beats the fuck out of me!" When you enjoy drinking as much as I did back then, you don't have time for trivial shit like memory formation.)
Time and a dislike for multi-day hangovers have put an end to that kind of thing, so I have to put a little more thought into my answers when questioned. For instance, the question, "Why does this website exist?" requires the type of response that is difficult to come up with when taking a power tool to a bunch of toilet seats.
Back around the time my eldest son was born, I'd put a lot of effort into a family website. I forget which CMS (content management system) I'd used (Joomla?), but it was a complex endeavour. When it was complete, everyone agreed that I'd knocked it out of the park. Everyone in the extended family had a login, posts were commented on, family calendars in place, photo albums existed along with links to order prints... Like I said, I knocked it out of the park.
Which was why it was so frustrating that within a week, I was the only one using it. Why? Fucking Facebook.
There's a lot not to like about Facebook. They shit all over your privacy, make it damn near impossible to do anything about it, and generally don't give a fuck about anything other than acting on the whim of their Aspergerrific leader, Mark Zuckerberg.
An aside about Mark Zuckerberg: Why does anyone think Mark Zuckerberg knows what he's talking about? He had one good (albeit stolen) idea about a quarter of a century ago, and since then his track record has been spotty, at best, resulting in little more than the laughable Facebook Phone, and his most recent "achievement", spending $36,000,000,000.00 (yes, $36 billion) on the meta-verse app, Horizon Worlds. Spending $36 billion on a single app is mind-bendingly stoopid if it's a good application, but Horizon Worlds is not a good application. As VR experiences go, Horizon Worlds is like walking through a simulation of a casino that closed a year ago. It's gaudy, largely unnecessary, and everyone has long since left.
Anyway, my web site had been in use for about a week before family members discovered Facebook, and, well, that was the end of my website. I don't need technology to talk to myself, thank you very much, so I shuttered it and let everyone else "LOL on Facebook".
And of course it turned out that it is a Very Bad Idea to use "free" software provided to you by what is essentially an advertising firm. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. all make their scratch via advertising, and users are little more than currency. Your privacy gets tossed in the name of "customized advertising", and it's only a matter of time before someone realises that they can "purchase" a demographic prone to believing fantastical bullshit and hijack their semi-dormant frontal lobes for fun and profit!
There are a lot of problems inherent in social media, and I can (and will) froth at the keyboard about them in the future. But the biggest thing that jumped out at me when everyone left the world of sanity for Facebook is how much it dumbs people down. I mean, IQ points flaking right off the tops of heads, and you can practically see it all in real time. Normally you have to tune into Fox News for that kind of thing.
And needless to say, once "social media" had gotten its hooks into people, not many users felt like engaging in well thought out debate, or even having their own opinions, for that matter. Their lives had been reduced to LOLs and Likes, and if you had a problem with that then you could just check back when a faceless corporation had told everyone what their opinion about it is.
Why? Remember that question, up at the top? Now I can answer it: I became fed up with social media, and decided I would no longer play along. I shuttered the one social media account I used (Twitter, thanks for the push, Elon!), and am in the process of disentangling myself from all 3rd party services with terms and conditions I dislike, which is to say 99% of them. Get thee behind me, Twitter.
Page statistics of no interest to anyone, including myself
- Favorite word to type: Aspergerrific
- Best sentence: "When you enjoy drinking as much as I did back then, you don't have time for trivial shit like memory formation."
- Still frame from kick-ass movie: Yes
- Closeup portraits of an alien: 1
- Number of times I felt like giving Mark Zuckerberg a wedgie while writing this: 142