It’s light years ahead of any other platform for storytelling. Mixing videos together. Allowing conversations via stitching.
I will miss 8 musicians coming together to play a single song from their own rooms.
I will miss the absolutely unhinged skits. I will miss the funny stories, stupid trends and the general positive vibes of every comment section.
And for all the selling, a relative lack of ads.
TikTok was a platform of “dancing girls” until you sign up and create an account.
I watched the service try out content on me to see what I responded to.
It learned quickly and served me what I can only call a truly “for you” page that I built brick by brick.
On the best of days it was like attending a live screening of your favorite podcast over and over.
A comedy show. A Moth Radio Hour. A poetry slam. And a thousand views of The Eras Tour. And I watched them all.
I never posted I only consumed. But there is nothing out there like it.
This week has been like watching the series finale of your favorite TV show.
It was the most fun social network. The comments were full of support and jokes and positivity.
I never saw spam comments. I rarely saw mean comments. The ability to respond to a comment with a video and to shame the trolls into deleting their accounts and slithering back under their rocks likely helped
YouTube is informative. But it’s not fun.
Instagrams Reels… are reruns of TikTok’s.
And the comments are mean and rude and often trying to tear the creator down instead of being in on the joke, they’re just mean.
Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are as different as LinkedIn and Facebook. The vibe is just off. Hostile and cruel.
And the ads. The amount of garbage ads I see and the “recommended” content.
For all of Meta’s collected data on me, why do you offer garbage? Same to YouTube. I’ve given you far more hours and years of data.
Why does TikTok outperform you with showing me what I want?
If you’re going to slurp up every last byte of data on me, at least do a good job giving me what I want.
But I know it’s not about me. It’s about you. Trying to push me towards what you want to show me. It was never about what I want to see.
Tiktok served the viewer. TikTok learned what I wanted to see and pushed me to people and content I enjoyed.
Instagram serves AI slop and ads.
YouTube serves you pizza after you order pizza.
Twitter doesnt deserve a mention.
I’ll miss my friends on TikTok. Their stories. The snippets of their lives.
It’s been a fun ride. Maybe the US can create something fun that won’t be bought, ruined or both.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Today has been a rough day. Birds help to brighten it.
It’s hard to find songs from snippets in TikTok when you wake up with them in your head. But I did and it’s this chorus.
🎶 I’ve got a tight grip on reality
But I can’t
Let go what’s in front of me here
I know you’re leaving in the morning when you wake up
Leave me with some proof it’s not a dream
🎶
The more AI startups I start to see trickling into my work email with their breathless hype-riddled emails, the more I fear that if using Ctrl+F or CMD+F was more widely used, they wouldn’t be in business.
I don’t need to chat with my document or my tabs when I can search them. Then read them.
We got our first bit of snow today that stuck.
Home Screen going into 2025.
I’ve been putting off making changes to the apps I don’t use anymore. The muscle memory was stronger than desire for change.
Both photos are my own. My wife sitting in a rose garden in New York and a sunset from Hawaii.
Decided to try dark mode icons. Onward!
Visited the National Gallery of Art’s Impressionist exhibit. I quite enjoyed the faces of these two paintings.
You simply just don’t have to figure out how to fit the newest global crisis into your creator niche. It’s alright to sit one out.
You don’t have to have an opinion on everything. You don’t have to figure out where you stand on every single issue in the world. You can be silent.
This is even more important going into 2025. There’s going to be so many things to have an opinion about. Or not. By the time you form an opinion on in the latest outrage, there will be a new one.
Visited the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC for a Basquiat x Banksy exhibit. But fell madly in love with the Laurie Anderson room and the work of Flora Yukhnovich.
Install Rosetta for people with Apple Silicon computers.
It will prevent so many questions and so much confusion about what Rosetta is and why I need to install it. Providing a choice is not empowering if the maker of the choice does not understand what they’re choosing.
If you insist on asking people, as if they can make an informed choice, then provide them context written in plain English, what Rosetta is and why you need it. And I mean very basic, easy to understand language that doesn’t rely on other technical knowledge. If you can’t, then install it.
For those curious, Rosetta will let your printer driver or older versions of software work with your new Apple computer.
Rosetta works automatically in the background whenever you use an app that was built only for Mac computers with an Intel processor. It translates the app for use with Apple silicon.
But if you have to ask the user to install it, they may never benefit from it.
Keeping on brand as I have opened an Extremely Accurate Bird calendar and a Birds in Shoes calendar.
A Red Shouldered Hawk caught my eye across the street in a neighbor’s tree then fence. It was hopping down into their yard then back to the fence like it was hunting a mouse or something tasty.
Christmas movie plots of the 80s/90s rely on “the big promotion” or “the big bonus”. Then the inevitable loss of the expected money.
What is the modern day equivalent?
Is it all big city woman returns home to small town for Christmas?
Visited Brookside Gardens for their Gardens of Light for my wife’s birthday. The lights were beautiful. But the attraction that made me gasp was the bubbles sticking to the tree branches from the children’s area. Magical little bulbs in the night. Some of them were filled with mist that puffed out a tiny cloud when popped. 🫧
If you are a child of Looney Tunes or Monty Python please enjoy Hundreds of Beavers.
Finally installed my in-window bird feeder. Added to a second story window to hopefully prevent the squirrels fromm parkouring into it.
Will it work? Only time will telll tell.
“I can’t keep loving the potential of a thing when the actual thing is making me miserable most of the time.” - a video about a video game
This line has stuck with me. It’s a good reminder to stop loving things for what they could be and start loving what is worth it today. Potential isn’t reality.
Taylor Swift is having the absolute most fun clowning with her fandom and Reputation (Taylor’s Version).
And it’s hilarious and awesome. And I’m here for it. 🤡
It snowed* today.
*flurries, but it counts
So I’ve been in the head space of SNOW DAY! I want my cereal, a warm blanket and air for Price is Right.
Between two three hour meetings I found this leaf on my short walk.
After learning about Michelle Kingdom’s work from an artist talk my wife does, we saw she had some work in a show at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA.
We knew we had to see The Never-Ending Thread. An Embroidery Exhibition. Photos do not do it justice (says the man sharing photos). The storytelling and the stitch work are equally transcendent. This piece has remained with me since I saw a photo of it weeks ago.
Getting to experience it in person, in a dead quiet gallery with just my wife and I, was more than I could have hoped for.
All photos of Michelle Kingdom’s Willful Rhymes, 2023, Square on vintage textile
