Yes, this is an intervention a.k.a. another one of these obligatory reader bashing posts. Because most of you still suck so bad at this. I shouldn't have to be telling you this anymore and you're making me so very sad. And no, i won't stop nagging about it anytime soon.
So here goes… Please, please, pretty please, for fucking fuck's sake please stop using these things:
Facebook
Twitter
Join the fediverse instead. As a starting point for my fellow music lovers: How about getting an account at linernotes.club? And when you've done that, tell me about it.
If you're using twitter or facebook to publish and/or curate stuff in a regular manner, how about starting your own blog instead? When you've done that, tell me about it.
If you totally can't lay off your bad internet habits for now, at least make yourself familiar with the alternatives and start using them.
Google Chrome
You have no fucking excuse. There are several equally good alternatives out there doing exactly the same thing. Some of them are basically just Chrome with all the evil parts removed. Firefox is way more sexy though.
Google Analytics
Aaarght! Bloggers and webmasters, cut that shit out for crying out loud. If you need statistics, you might wanna take a look at Matomo. It's free and easy to set up. Also looking at you, Bandcamp!!! I like you, but you're helping Google track your users. And you're doing it with your embedded player, on every fucking music blog in the world!!!
Share- and like-buttons provided by Facebook or Twitter
These are just another means of tracking users. If you can't live without that sweet little dopamine boost every share or like provides… take a look at Shariff. WordPress users: There's a plugin for that.
Everybody, please start doing this:
Use a decent ad-blocker plugin in your web browser.
This protects you from the bulk of trackers, all of the ad-industry brainfuck and it helps starve out said industry. If your browser doesn't allow it: Use a different browser! How hard can it be?
Bloggers and Webmasters take notice: Google wants to roll out its FLoC programme in the near future to enable tracking of Chrome users even in a world where cookie-based tracking becomes less and less effective. Please do this:
Learn how to prevent the FLoC functionality from being enabled on your website (for now at least).
Chrome users: Here's another reason for you to look for a different browser.
Please, folks, please start taking these things seriously. Please stop sucking so hard at every fucking thing involving computers and the internet. Please stop feeding the machine creating all these problems. Instead do the little things that help make the web more open, democratic and less reliant on major evil corporations. How many more crappy stunts and dirty tricks do Facebook, Google, etc. have to pull on you before you even consider pulling the plug? Are you a punk? Do a punk thing. Participate in some punk web shit. Thanx a lot in advance.
Don't expect anything huge. It's just a little zero-effort extension to this blog where i'm posting some links, podcasts, videos i find worthwhile, random brain farts, what films i've been watching and some rather nerdy stuff largely unrelated to the main blog. Just click on Dump in the menu.
As i'm trying to get a bit more invested in the fediverse anyway (as well as coax other people in that direction, away from corporate social media), i've simply made it another Pleroma/Mastodon (etc…) handle you can easily follow on the fediverse.
Be aware though that the stuff on there may occasionally be of a rather personal nature or might touch on subjects such as (leftist) politics and atheism (as am currently still grappling with my own deconversion from religion over the past few years). Just in case that kind of stuff is problematic to you, be warned.
Also, as quite a few people are quitting facebook and twitter in favor of open and decentral alternatives right now, i wanna encourage you to do the same and join the decentral fediverse. I'm not feeling confindent enough in maintaining my own pleroma instance to open it up for registration just yet - it will stay my own single-user instance at least for the time being. However, there are tons ofpublicinstances out there open for registration. For my fellow music nerds, i recommend taking a look at linernotes.club.
A good time to finally delete all accounts. Twitter.inc must suffer. For that to happen, us and everybody we know needs to GTFO. Same goes for facebook, btw. There have been better, decentral, noncommercial alternatives for quite some time now. We just need to start using them.
Just a quick announcement: Instead of taking care of this blog as i should, i recently procrastinated my own mastodon instance into existence. Or more specifically, it's actually a pleroma instance. Or for those who still don't get what the fuck all that gibberish is supposed to mean: Mastodon and Pleroma are two compatible server implementations of the ActivityPub protocol, which quite a few decentral social platforms are based on, mastodon being the most popular of those at this moment.
Also in the works is a Hubzilla instance, which is supposed to bridge the gap for me between Mastodon/ActivityPub and the incompatible Diaspora network. In the long term, my aim is to go fully independent of the big commercial platforms. I'd be delighted if a few of you dip their toes in the warm fediverse waters too, simply because the corporate web sucks so hard at this point anyway and i'd like to accelerate its death a little bit.
If you want a user account on elefant.onetwoxu.de, just tell me via the contact form… but be aware that this piece of shit might not be 100% stable yet, definitely needs a bit of fine tuning and you're basically becoming my guinea pig if you dare to register. That thing could explode at any moment. Thus, until i have that stuff under control, i'd rather recommend you register an account on the music-themed linernotes.club instance - or anyother inctance whose user base, themes and policies appeal to you. Mastodon allows you to move your account somewhere else at any point, just in case stuff didn't work out for you.
Arrived at my new cave, retained most of my sanity. Finally able to relax. Ass on my couch and music's running again, too. This week i'm plowing through all the good noise i've missed in recent weeks. Probably way to much to post here, so what i don't manage to get crammed in here will probably end up on a new Verspannungskassette-Mixtape. The blog machine should be rolling again by next week.
…12XU is taking a break right now and will continue to do so for another 2-3 weeks. This is for the simple reason that i'm relocating to some small and cozy shack just across the Rhine river, a few miles deeper inside the busy Ruhr area. Now i need to get some shit done and since getting shit done ain't exactly my forte (and also to protect my own mental health, which has become a rather fragile motherfucker in recent times), i'll take all the time i need and let this blog hibernate for the time being. To satisfy your addiction, you might wanna check out someotherhiglyrecommendedplaces in the meantime. 12XU will resume regular activity sometime around late February, or early March at the very latest. See you noise cowboy!
The old 12XU spotify playlist is long dead, so now i'm undertaking a second, more serious attempt with songs roughly divided into three playlists of new shit, older crap and classic diarrhea. Since the spotify catalogue appears to improve over time - more than half the songs i imported were available this time, hurrah! - this might even start to make a bit of sense.
To start with, this is based on an automatic import of 12XU Radio's playlists, which i then tried to purge of false matches. So please be prepared for a few duplicates, redundancies and other scary stuff i might have missed.
