I've been blaming Elon Musk as the primary aetiology of the need for my prescription to blood pressure medication for a good while now, less in jest than many who know me well would assume, I think. pjvogt.substack.com/p/whats-going-on-with-elon-musk
(Usually when I say shit like that, it's a sort of melodrama designed unconsciously to entertain - I can also thank Melon Man for my newfound clarity regarding this dynamic.)
I've repeated it enough that I absolutely should have a far more thoroughly refined monologue by now. This production - thanks once again to Casey Newton's special thoughts about the internet, no doubt - was especially resonant/validating re: this Melon Man Agitation of Mine Own.
From the onset, thank you PJ so much for dwelling on what I, too, have never been able to ignore: the evolution of the Melon Man Ideology illustrated so aptly in the ..."development"... of the Melon Man Aesthetic.
I, too, often reflect on the very different Melon Motherfucker I first encountered via Jay Leno's Garage circa 2008: then (as he always will be, to me,) as simply the dude who somehow managed to misunderstand existence, physics, and the Lotus Elise so profoundly...
...as to build a whole company (which he - to no small offense against the whole history of the human intellect - would call Tesla Motorcars)...
...whose sole fucking product was a heartbreakingly molested, grotesquely engorged bastardization of that adorable, elemental, absolutely crucial little sports car which they called the Tesla Roadster.
(Lotus is a very, very small company... the Elise is an extremely low volume product... so every single Roadster represents a worse-than-death happening...in a way, I do feel each one to be a theft from me, personally of an opportunity to ever own the most desirable driving car.)
to witness said video yourself, navigate to davidblue.wtf/idiot
Without allowing this to grow much bigger...
I'd been engaged in an intermittently public diatribe throughout the acquisition - somewhat constructively, I hope - as comes naturally to me,...
...but it wasn't until I opened fuckin TweetDeck on my iPad a few weeks ago to four empty columns and just ... started bawling... that I realized it's probably okay to let myself acknowledge what Elon Musk has directly taken from me. (Yes, that specific language, unqualified.)
For my whole adult life and then some, the first of those columns has been set to a private Twitter List, which has grown over some 13 years to almost 300 accounts, representing the whole of my social existence, basically.
If you hadn't noticed, I have invested a LOT of my time and energy over the past 5 years, especially, in trying to figure out how to liberate myself and my friends from this dangerous, far too absolute dependence on a single, unbelivably incompetent organization.
Ultimately, though, I don't think that part of my life actually had anything to do with my tears from a goddamned broken website - I really REALLY just miss my fucking friends, bro.