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Saturday, February 2, 2019

Pierwalker Log: February 2, 2019

Writing start: 10:42 A.M.
Finish: 3:34 P.M.
Total new words (est.): 400
Edited (est.): 11700 + 6 poems + 2 blurbs
Tasks

1. Failure: Read-through of chapter twenty-four

2. Book Three Melody: Off till 2/16

3. Ant Story: 400 new words
Notes: I'm looking forward to getting this chapter on some faster tracks. Book Three (above) took away a lot of the time I needed to work on this project, and others. That's the way it goes.

4. Fractalverse V5: First tertiary edit of the sixth set of six poems

5. Cheapery St. Heroes: BII: Stage three edit of chapter four

6. Rapscallion: Off

7. T-Bag: Primary edit number four of chapter three

8. LOTR: Edit chapter five

Special Projects:  None

Extra notes: I was with Google Plus from its very beginning. I stayed there for something like five years, until my posts kept disappearing.

I tried contacting the admins. Days and days of that, to no avail.  Google, after all, is a Big Mighty Corporation (BMC), and we little amoebas don't get to talk to the exalted and holy admins inside.

I tried anyway.

I failed every single time.

My posts were disappearing because a stalker who lives in Colorado kept flagging them as spam. They weren't spam--they were my fractals and my rants and my stories and my poems. I wasn't spamming them at all. She just had a desire to make them, and me, disappear, to punish me for not paying attention to her. I tried explaining that to Google, but Google is, as I just mentioned, a BMC.

Outraged and frustrated, I deleted my G+ profile, and let that BMC know that G+ wouldn't survive, in my estimation, even to 2020.

Turns out I was right.

Google, like Amazon, like Facebook, like Apple, is far too large for its, or our, breeches. All of them are antithetical to anything remotely resembling democracy. They are planet-raping monsters with no care whatsoever for people, only for bigger and bigger profits. It is way past time to break them up under anti-trust laws.

I pulled all my published works from Amazon a few weeks ago. My prediction for that slobbering mutant corporate hell-beast is that a popular author revolt is going to be sparked on their platform within a year or two, and Big Bad Amazon is going to have to back down from treating authors ("content providers") like dogshit, as they have, increasingly so, for years now.

I wasn't content to wait, so I quit.

I haven't had a Facebook profile since 2010. Not, at least, a legit one. I found out last year that Russians were using an illegitimate profile of me to spread their fascistic hate, and had to jump through numerous hoops to get Facefuck to take that profile down, including "proving" that I was me and that I wasn't based in St. Petersburg. Very grudgingly, they finally took it down.

And Apple? I've never once owned an Apple product. I publish to Apple, that much is true. But that's all I do.

Good riddance, Google Plus. May your nameless, faceless, indifferent, soon-to-be-unemployed admins wake tomorrow with a scorching case of syphilitic nose hemorrhoids, and may your CEO fall prey to a roving band of leg-humping sand mutants who freeze-dry his carcass for use in toilet training their voracious larvae-children.

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Speaking of the dangers of Big Data (like Google), you must watch this excellent TedX video. If you are naive enough to think that you aren't being manipulated, second by second, by these BMCs, then you are just plain flat-out ignorant, and I pity you.

Watch the video, top to bottom, and then share it widely. The world needs to see it.

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Something else the world needs to see is this excellent rendition of Frozen's "Let It Go." I absolutely love it. I think I've watched it two dozen times now, and still can't get enough of it.

It's indie creators like Connor Engstrom who give me genuine hope for humanity. And yes, I count myself proudly in that group. We are the answer to the BMCs. We are the answer to the anti-democratic forces greedily burning down the planet as we speak. We are the answer to the sniffy motherfuckin' gatekeepers who want only to push their own agenda, not promote or help new artists.

We are.

Have a great Sunday, everyone.



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