Facebook has a "Memories" section where you can take a look at what you were talking about on this date one year ago... five years ago... ten years ago... whatever. I mostly like this feature because I've done some cool stuff over the years, and it's nice to remember what it was like to travel the globe and live life outside my bubble. Good times.

On this date eight years ago, I was posting about how my mom had completely won over Jake. He was still wary of me but, because he was home with my mom all day, she managed to bond with him in the three months since he and Jenny had been adopted. Which was exactly what I was hoping would happen. I needed to be in the office as much as possible, and the cats were meant to be a distraction from the non-stop confusion that plagued her as the dementia took hold...

At that point, mom was unable to make any long-term memories. So to her, the cats were always something new. We'd be sitting in the living room watching television... one of the cats would walk by, and she'd immediately be walking up to it and asking "Where did you come from?" Then she'd tell me that she was keeping it. Not many cats have jobs, but Jake and Jenny performed theirs perfectly.

And that makes for a nice memory... with our without Facebook.

Honest to God I don't understand Facebook. They make billions of dollars off of their users, but actively hates them for using their platform. At least I'm assuming they do because I just got banned again.

And I'm not alone. I've recently seen a number of people saying that their Facebook account got banned. And almost all of them are saying that it's for bullshit reasons that they can't appeal to get their account reinstated. And sometimes they get their entire account deleted because some Artificial Intelligence Bot flags them for violating guidelines that they never violated.

I've been thrown in Facebook Jail multiple times for bullshit reasons. My favorite being "Displaying Graphic Nudity or Sexual Activity" which I was 1000% not doing. A guy had his shirt off in a photo and apparently that was enough of a trigger, despite the fact that he was wearing pants! I appealed... was told it had been looked at... but the ban was not overturned. Which leads me to believe that real people never look at these things because it was painfully fucking obvious that there was no "Displaying Graphic Nudity or Sexual Content" in my post. On top of that... THE FUCKING POST WAS FOR FRIENDS ONLY! LIKE 99% OF MY POSTS ARE!! I'd post a screen capture, but Facebook only lets you access a few of your most recent bans.

I've also been thrown in Facebook Jail for defending gay-parented families. The original post which had a photo attacking LGBTQ persons because "they can't have families" didn't get taken down, but calling out their bigotry by pointing out that gay couples can adopt a bunch of kids or have artificial insemination (or whatever) if they want to have kids... BANNED! Because that's "Nudity or Sexual Activity." Yes, adoption... which by definition is getting a kid without sexual activity is defined as sexual activity. And, again, an appeal did nothing.

And here's the original post, which never got taken down (that I know of)...

I was also thrown in Facebook Jail for honoring Thích Quảng Đức... a Buddhist monk who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War (which I wrote about here). And it's like... okay. I posted a photo that Facebook considers "graphic violence" (WHICH WAS THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT!) and they are a private company so they are within their right to take it down. But, on the other hand, fuck them for throwing me in Facebook Jail on top of removing it because there was context for the photo that should have been taken into account. I did not deserve to be thrown in jail for reminding people of our tragic history and honoring a man for demonstrating for peace. And yet I was... on two separate occasions... for the same fucking post. Two, two, two strikes for one!

And then I got thrown in jail again this morning.

For posting about buying allergy medication.

To my friends.

And of course I appealed it because there is fucking nothing about "guns, animals, and other regulated goods." But this is what I get every time I've tried throughout the day...

And, for the record, here is my full post... WHICH WAS RESTRICTED TO FRIENDS ONLY!...

During allergy season, I take one-and-a-half Benadryl so I don’t drown in my sleep. I buy a large bottle at Walgreens that lasts me over a year. Today I went to buy more. Walgreen no longer offers large bottles of the tablets, only the capsules. WHICH YOU CAN’T CUT IN HALF!! So to save money I bought a bottle of 600 capsules and three boxes of 100 tablets. This giving me 600 doses total. — EXCEPT, guess what, Walgreens will only sell me two bottles total because it can be used for self-harm, I guess. But this is where it gets so fucking stupid. I can buy two bottles of 600 capsules for 1200 total pills. But can’t buy four bottles total for 1000 pills. This is the stupidest fucking shit I’ve ever heard of. All I’m asking for is some common fucking sense. But no. AND THEN… Walgreens wants you to buy more, so they have a buy one, get one 50% off… which means to get the discount I have to buy two boxes of 100 and skip the 600 entirely?? My God. The insanity is fucking insane.

And then this nonsense gets particularly unhinged. Because a local friend in the comments told me that she gets her solid-pill, off-brand Benadryl from Costco in a 600-count bottle. She even volunteered to grab me a bottle the next time she's shopping there! And it's like, yes! Thank you! Things like this are the entire reason I am on Facebook in the first place!

It's things like this (and whatever the fuck is happening over on Twitter) that makes me even more sad that social media has replaced blogging as a way of interacting with friends and family. You will always... always... be under the thumb of others when you're interacting with people. Sure these companies are just trying to remove harmful content, which is fine. Bravo. But it's not working. Content which is actually endangering lives, persecuting and threatening people, and promoting stalking and harassment is still there.

As for me?

I could lose my entire Facebook account because of graphic nudity I didn't post. Sexual activity I didn't post. And "guns, animals, and other regulated goods" I didn't post (BENADRYL IS OVER-THE COUNTER YOU FUCKING DUMBASSES!).

So I guess it's pictures of my cats and what I had for dinner from here on out.

EXCEPT, OH NO...

Though I suppose I could always just post more innocent images... like when Tony Bennett's death was announced. EXCEPT ON NO...

Oh well. I'll always have blogging.

Maybe.

It's uncanny how often I Google something... then come to Facebook and see an ad for what I Googled pop up first thing.

What's bizarre is that most of the time the ads I'm served are useless. I Googled to find local landscapers. As predicted, Facebook has an ad for landscaping services as the second thing in my feed. But it's for a company 3-1/2 hours away? That company just wasted their ad dollars because Facebook apparently can't tell my location... despite them having my address.

We're told all the time that we should welcome being tracked because it allows companies to serve us information that benefits us. But the only beneficiary in this case is Facebook, who gets paid for serving a useless ad. Neither me nor the advertiser benefits at all. But, yeah, you keep selling that utopia, Facebook.

Lord. So a person can have a fake profile with NO posts that they use to spam comments about "witch doctors" casting spells... but when you report the profile as being OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND ABUSIVE, Facebook treats you like you're lying. I mean, hey, you can spam comments everywhere using a fake profile and technology doesn't exist to combat it? That's just way out of Facebook's capabilities?

Unreal.

Facebook is toxic AF and they just don't give a shit.

I don't do Twitter or Instagram. I mean, I have accounts, but I look at them rarely and hardly ever post. TikTok is something I actually enjoy, but I never post there. I'm merely a voyeur. The only social media I'm involved in is Facebook and I hate it. They can randomly ban you for arbitrary reasons that make no sense. I once got a three day ban for posting "sexual content." There was nothing remotely sexual about it. I don't even understand how they came to that conclusion. I appealed, but nothing came of it. Meanwhile, friends have been targeted with threats of violence and reporting it only gets them ignored. Needless to say, if you're popular enough, powerful enough, or rich enough, you get to post whatever the fuck you want. Including hate and misinformation which is literally killing people.

But, alas, Facebook is a necessary evil because friends from around the world are there and it's the only way to easily keep in contact with them.

And then there's Blogography.

Blogging isn't the social platform it once was. It used to be that everybody had a blog and you kept in touch by reading and commenting back and forth around the blogging community. Now only the tiniest fraction of my blogging friends are still at it. Bloggers who were only in it to keep in touch moved to social media platforms because it was so much easier. Bloggers who were in it for the money left when the money dried up. Bloggers who were in it for fame abandoned it when the fame never came.

Those of us who remain each have our own reasons.

At this point, blogging is a habit for me. But I do like being able to go back through old posts and remember stuff I was doing my life. Next year I'll have 20 years worth, which is a big chunk of my time on this earth.

Although...

From a historical perspective, I sure wish that blogging existed in the 1980's.

That's when my life just started getting interesting, and all I have are random memories from 1985 through 2003. That was college. That was time with the best friends I'll ever have. That was when I first started traveling. Sure I have photos, but they're just snapshots. What happened in-between is a messy blur that's mostly lost because alcohol might have been involved. Had I written things down, I'd be able to remember them too.

What triggered this post was my struggling to remember details of my first trip to Japan in 1996. I had found a journal where I wrote out single sentences with a bunch of space between them. I had always intended to go back and expand on what I had seen and done so it would be documented and I wouldn't forget. Well, that was over 25 years ago now, so there will be no filling in anything. Half of the sentences are meaningless to me. Take this one, for example...

"I hear it is a custom over there, to exchange cigarettes as a form of greeting..."

All I know is that it was a tag line written in English on a cigarette vending machine in the lobby of my hotel (which I was able to find thanks to some Google sleuthing back in 2014). I guess I wrote it down because I thought it was funny. But four pages later I wrote...

"Lonely night in Akihabara. Was happy to get back to my hotel where my best friend Fred was waiting to exchange cigarettes with me again."

And I'm like WTF? Because I have no clue what that means. If I were to venture a guess, there was probably an illustration or a photo of a guy holding out a pack of cigarettes next to that tagline on the cigarette machine. And I guess I named him Fred. Or something. I haven't a clue. And there's no way I'll ever know. Unless they invent time travel. Or I invest in hypnotherapy... maybe.

If this trip had happened any time after 2003, it would have been documented here. If it had happened any time after 2007, it would have been photographed multiple times and posted. But oh well.

There's still 20 years sitting here for me.

I watched the last episode of 60 Minutes about the Facebook whistleblower because I was expecting some serious dirt. Some people were saying that the Facebook outage was intentional so that people on Facebook wouldn't be discussing the 60 minutes interview, so it must be juicy, right?

Turns out that it was not.

It was the opposite of juicy. Which, according to the listed antonyms of the word, means it was dull, bland, juiceless, moral, withered, sere, desiccated, boring, dehydrated, unfavorable, shriveled, unexciting, disadvantageous, clean, unsexy, uninteresting, and dry.

The story was all those things because all the allegations were just so fucking obvious. Facebook puts profits above its users? ZOMFG! I may die of un-shock.

Facebook is a piece of shit company. They put users like me in Facebook jail for the stupidest crap so they can say "SEE! WE ARE DOING SOMETHING!"... yet some people can say whatever the fuck they want, and spouting COVID misinformation (which is LITERALLY KILLING PEOPLE) is perfectly okay. I can't joke "all men are pigs" when I am, in fact, a man and am clearly joking... THAT will get deleted... yet a man can threaten to beat up a woman and there are ZERO consequences on Facebook, even if you report it.

So, yeah. What a waste of my fucking time. If I didn't have so many people important to me which I only have contact with on Facebook, I'd have ditched them long ago.

What was not a waste of my time was the the story after the whistleblower non-story about Tony Bennet preparing for his final concerts amidst him having alzheimers. It was absolutely fascinating. And heartbreaking. Especially if you've had to go through it with somebody you care about.

Cannot possibly recommend watching this highly enough. Worth your valuable time...

The reaction by Lady Gaga at the end when Tony knows her name... it's like... all the feels. I've been there. And you feel exactly like that. And when it happens less and less, you are hit by it harder and harder. I still remember the last time my mom remember who I am, even as I am forgetting all the less happy times around it.

But that's how it works, right? That's how we cope? Cling to the good things and let go of the bad?

It's how I cope, anyway.

ZOMFG! FACEBOOK IS DOWN! FACEBOOK IS DOWN! Everywhere you look in the news today, it's the same story and the same headline... Facebook is indeed down. What a tragedy (insert eyeroll).

Which struck me funny because I recently re-read Watership Down... a beautiful story about rabbits which is surprisingly deep and smart for something meant to be a children's tale. If you haven't read it yet, I can't recommend it highly enough.

So every time I see "FACEBOOK IS DOWN!" I'm thinking "WATERSHIP DOWN!" which is a far more important thing to focus on.

And so I shall.

So I shall.

For the first time in over a month, I was able to get through all the "to-dos" due on my list before leaving work. I celebrated by ordering a pound of fries at the local drive-thru for my dinner. I was going to make spicy black bean soup... but this was easier. Less chopping and cooking and dirty dishes and such. Oh well.

What I should have done after consuming a pound of potatoes and grease is catch up on all the sleep I have been missing because I'm staying up late working. What I actually did was a bunch of housekeeping on my work files while watching the What If... T'Challa was Star Lord episode of Marvel Studio's What If... cartoon anthology...

This is my third time watching it. And every time gets harder as it sinks in that this is the last time we'll be blessed with Chadwick Boseman starring as Black Panther. And it's absolutly gutting. He was taken from us far too early, and it just seems impossible that he's gone.

In other news... I'm in Facebook Jail. Again.

The previous time I was jailed was just plain stupid and ridiculous. This time is monumentally stupid.

I was watching a Hallmark movie last night when I saw an actor who looked familiar. So I Googled him to see what I might be recognizing him from. The first photo that popped up was the actor with one of his hands partly in his pants, but it wasn’t sexual. He wasn’t grabbing his junk. You couldn't see his junk. He wasn't even licking his lips. Nothing even suggestive... unless you call having his shirt off "suggestive."

I dropped the image in a CLOSE FRIENDS ONLY POST and asked the question "Why would an actor promote himself with a photo that looked like he has jock itch?" Within minutes... REMOVED FOR EXPLICIT SEXUAL CONTENT! Three days in jail.

It’s just the most insane thing.

People regularly post music videos that are actually sexually suggestive and absolutely nothing happens. And then there's me.

I would love to tell Facebook to go fuck themselves, but a huge chunk of my friends are on the platform. And since they're scattered around the globe, this is what I got. And so... I'll probably just take a step back. Not devote so much of my time to Facebook, who can pull the rug out from under me over idiotic shit I have zero control over.

Tonight I was finally let out of Facebook prison. I guess 24 hours was all it took to be rehabilitated from stupid shit that should have never got me banned in the first place. But, hey, it's not my world... I just give up my privacy and time to play in it.

I did finally end up doing what most every person who regularly gets hit with the ban-hammer does on Facebook... create an alternate account.

Meet John Baron II...

Obviously I can't let my cats on Facebook without a disguise as well... meet Bubair and JennAir...

And now that Fake Jake is back, it's time to meet Faker Jake...

Yes, it's childish and juvenile... but so is stupid Facebook and their inconsistent and absurd policies for banning general statements out of context while ignoring direct threats to specific people.

Facebook is the craziest thing.

I just got banned... again... for suggesting that anybody committing violence against airline cabin crew who are just trying to do their job by enforcing mask requirements deserves to get shot. I made no threat against any specific person, just commented on a scenario figuratively speaking. The result? Banned for 24 hours. Meanwhile, there's a guy I know who routinely gets highly specific threats of death or bodily harm... not to mention a woman I know who has received multiple rape threats... and Facebook is all "nothing to see here... business as usual... carry on!"

Fortunately on my blog I can say whatever the heck I want.

So I can make my feelings very clear here... people know that masks are required by airlines. So if you're reminded of that fact by a flight attendant and rather than obey their rules you instead assault other passengers or the cabin crew then, yes, absolutely, you should probably shot. There's simply no excuse.

Consequences and all that.

There's good news to be had, however, I've finally figured out how to fix my blog. What else could I do if I wasn't wasting time on Facebook with this stupid crap?