Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 2nd of April in 2026 AD/CE, the 1st Thursday in April this year.  It has to be the first one.  Any date that is the 7th or lower has to be the first whatever day in a given month.

That’s probably fairly obvious, but I think it can be useful to review‒from time to time‒the patterns of things that are “obvious”.  It’s not likely that one will discover that these seemingly obvious things are oversimplified and not so obvious after all, but at least one will gain a slightly deeper feel for the things, rather than simply going through life with a bunch of predigested “facts” which one has never examined seriously.

That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  I don’t know if it’s deep or anything, but it’s at least a good-sounding excuse for me to overthink and overanalyze things as I am prone to do by nature.

I still have no indication that my Meta-based accounts are anything but permanently disabled.  Then again, I probably wouldn’t expect to have such an indication, since I haven’t even tried to use them.  I very quickly uninstalled the Meta-based apps I had on my phone (Threads and Instagram‒I did not have the Facebook app, because when I tried installing it once, it rapidly became very annoying, and I uninstalled it forthwith).

I miss some of the interactions on Threads a bit, but although I enjoyed following the exploits of some other people on there, no one actually paid any attention to me.  Even when I shared or posted words of distress and self-destructive feelings, almost no one even saw them, let alone providing any kind of support.

Not that this is an unusual situation, of course.  It certainly wasn’t unique to Threads, nor to Instagram*.  It’s not as though anyone on Bluesky or Substack has expressed any concern for my wellbeing.  So, I shouldn’t unfairly vilify the Z(f)uckerverse.  It is what it is.

But I came up with the term “metaverse” (dammit!) years and years ago, intending to use it to refer to the broader, connected reality of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, as well as other works of my fiction, going all the way back to Ends of the Maelstrom, the first sci-fi/fantasy (or any genre) novel I ever finished.

That novel, all handwritten, is now lost, of course, along with all but a smattering of everything I ever had up to 2012.  So, the loss of, for instance, Facebook, is really just more of the same, and not even very much of that.  What’s Facebook compared to the cello I’d had since high school, or the piano (an unused one they’d had for many years) I’d been given by my in-laws when I graduated medical school, or the thousands of books and comic books I’d accumulated since I was very young?

Okay, so, if it’s so relatively minor, this debacle regarding Facebook et al, why am I harping on about it?

Well, it has only been three or four days.  I’m sure I’ll get bored of it soon.  But I still hold a deep grudge against the Zuckster for “stealing” that term from me, though I do recognize that I had no actual, reasonable, proprietary right to it.  It’s just frustrating, and he is the source of that frustration, however unintentional it was with respect to me.

I don’t really hold too much against him for the foibles of his social media, and only feel slightly ill-used for having been kicked off them.  I can use my time in better ways.

However, I did not open Brilliant or Babbel yesterday, despite my wish to get more use out of them.  I didn’t even get on Arxiv to see what’s going on in physics/math/computer science papers lately, which can often be intriguing.  I once found a paper by David Deutsch on there, and I could even follow it, more or less, though the mathematical formalism was a bit outside my expertise.

No, I’m afraid I have not yet been able to turn my mind toward more long-term-interesting and beneficial matters.  But my life isn’t over yet, at least not as I write this.  I suppose, depending upon when you read this, my life may be over.  Indeed, I aspire to have the sort of durability in my writing such that, eventually, more people will have read my work after my death than before.  I would, in fact, prefer it to be orders of magnitude more.

I won’t be around to know it, of course, but no one ever is.  That doesn’t mean that hopes for things to happen after one has died are necessarily irrational.  We just need to recognize that it’s not our future selves that we’re actually serving.  We are serving the image of our future selves that we have in the present.  But that’s all we ever really do.  Despite the words of Ted Stryker in Airplane II (see 1:19) the future never arrives; everything is always the present.

TTFN

*Which, to be fair to it, has delivered several times a pop-up screen saying that “someone thinks you might need some help” or something, and gave me links to support ideas and the suicide crisis line.  Mind you, they were links to things I’ve tried before, multiple times**, and none have been terribly helpful, but at least Instagram’s “heart” was in the right place.

**Of course, even something that has never happened could technically be said to have happened “multiple times”; it’s simply that the multiple is zero, and anything but a gleeb*** multiplied by zero gives you zero.  But that’s not the spirit of the expression.

***A gleeb is a number (or concept, I suppose) that I invented long ago.  A gleeb multiplied by zero equals one.  I worked through some of the algebra of it while I was “up the road” and it’s rather interesting.  For instance, a gleeb taken to any positive power is still just a gleeb.