2025-11-08

I volunteered for my local soup kitchen, which is supposed to be life-affirming or whatever. This locations's kitchen has been under renovation, so they've moved into a different building temporarily without any ovens or stoves. Breakfast was cold cereals and I helped assemble cold cuts on sandwiches for lunch. This is still nutritious food, so don't read me wrong, but nothing especially makes me feel great about seeing people on line for cereal. We're already sitting in a relative calm, as terrible of a status quo it is. I hate to imagine how this will degrade if SNAP remains perpetually gridlocked.

I've been thinking about dead socials again in a sort of nostalgia haze for what once was, but not the banner examples branded as Facebook killers (Ello, a good cautionary tale of taking VC as a PBC) or Twitter killers (FriendFeed, which I remember mostly as Leo Laporte's favorite). There was a time when I would frenetically sign up for every social beta announced on TechCrunch, so my data has probably been pawned off to a lot of different hedge funds in the last twenty years.

Diaspora technically exists, though I can't find any stats on how many pods are still up, so it's likely about as active as the average Apache project. 12seconds, Vine with double-header length in a Flash player, has come back from the dead to make stand-ups even more agonizing. Does Xanga still exist as a Wordpress site, or are they permanently about to launch? Periscope and Meerkat may be the last time I felt social media could accomplish anything cool. I've signed up now for a Digg invite so I can get mad about MrBabyMan or post HD-DVD encryption keys or do whatever it is you do on websites now. Maybe people really do only want four websites anymore, but I still like to throw the attempts pity where I can. Pommmu might have the right idea about what people care about: 2D ero with no notifications tab.

Will Once Upon a Katamari deliver? I'm really glad to see Bamco make such an aggressive push marketing it through the music, enough that they sell the full Katamari music catalog as DLC. Hopefully I'll have nice things to say about it in the next post.