the only thing keeping me from leaving twitter and using bluesky exclusively is this site’s lack of advertising… it’s no fun scrolling the timeline without the danger and excitement of seeing ads like these

now he’s comfortable being president and has total control over the party; he just won an election saying whatever he wanted; the far right is much more organized, and they’ve helped cohere his beliefs into something even uglier. to me the question is how much rw craziness he personally wants to try

thinking about it, and to me it’s mostly a sign that he’s just going to (try to) do whatever he feels like this time. in 16/17 he didn’t feel emboldened to try, there was a sense that his being president was as weird to him as it was to us, and it was easier to be normal when possible than go all-in

yeah woolf is great. if you’re planning to read as i lay dying and light in august you should also read absalom absalom

are you planning on reading anything else of his

This app won’t be legit until I start seeing posts like this

when I was reading sound & fury someone underlined this and wrote BULLSHIT which i found highly amusing

but, scrolling my photos, i saw the answer… a picture of a miserable kyle shanahan. it’s impersonal, nonthreatening, and unpretentious. you can draw no negative (and maybe even a few positive) conclusions about a person from this selection. a man with this profile picture is a good friend to have.

some would pull too far in the opposite direction and use a too-serious profile picture, a favorite author sitting behind a desk. but who are we kidding, bluesky mutuals… that’s not me. a selfie, of course, is just as unthinkable. the available options are narrowing. are any paths left?

because the people i’m hoping to add (and the presence i’d like to cultivate) are serious, anything ironic is out. no avis like this account’s. and nothing goofy, either: no avis like my rizzler on jimmy fallon twitter pfp. my usual techniques just don’t apply in the strange world of goodreads.

the profile picture is the gateway to internet friendship. we have the opportunity to select the face we display to the internet, and the wrong choice can ruin everything. it’s a delicate game. especially on goodreads, where i have no social overlap with the people i want to add. so, what to do?

it turns out this is a difficult task. the reason to do more with goodreads is the chance to become mutuals with the interesting and knowledgeable people who use the site. but this requires a different method of relationship building from the one i use on other platforms and in real life.

i read a highlighted and written on copy of beckett’s trilogy recently, and whoever owned it before me gave up on annotating or (more likely) stopped reading halfway through the first book. i was sad when the highlighting went away

personal preference of course but i don’t understand why so many people online reading some famous piece of classic literature for the first time choose to annotate it to death with color-coded highlighting and tabs. how can that not disrupt your experience with the book

in addition to bluesky i may start using goodreads as more than a simple record of whether i’ve read a book. last year i took a major step: i started giving five stars to favorites. maybe next i should add a profile picture.

here on bluesky i intend to be serious and thoughtful, at least until more people leave twitter. and if elon starts charging, they will. will they leave for threads? i don’t think so. mastodon? that’s still around? truth social? a funny idea until you have to use it. no, no… they’ll come here.