We’ve all made sweeping pronouncements about what we’re going to do when Kid Emerald himself finally makes Twitter completely unusable for anyone who is not one of his weird little sycophants. We’re going to Mastodon! We’re going to try out Substack’s weird notes thing! We’re going to…buh-buh-buh-blog again? Maybe?

I guess I’m going to try A and C, and look at B with a little askance because frankly, I just don’t like Substack that much, both as a company and as a whole…thing. I’m sure I’ll get into it sometime.

Okay, so this is what happened to my Twitter account.

I made a joke. An extremely dark, made-for-an-audience-of-one kind of thing that is the kind of humor that is very easy for an algorithm to misinterpret.

My friend and former collaborator Birdie’s dad died a couple of weeks ago. It sucks shit, and it means he’s been down in Florida helping his mom move through the pain and onto the next phase of her life. While there, he discovered this:

1. This is very sweet and I absolutely love it.
2. I was absolutely not going to pass on this opportunity to be a dick.

I replied:

Forgive the inconsistency in formatting; this is from the email that Twitter sent me telling me that they didn’t tolerate threats of any kind and that my account was now suspended permanently.

I did what anyone with a crippling addiction to a social media site would do; I filed an appeal. I said it was a joke. That if you saw how long that Birdie and I were connected on the site, that it was obvious that we were old friends. Was it in extremely dubious taste? Oh, fuck yes, and I’d be happy to delete it and even apologize for being a little dark on a site that seems perfectly fine with misogynistic chuds like Matt Walsh and Andrew Tate because their engagement is through the roof.

20 minutes later, a big fat no.

I tried a couple more times.

Again and again, a near-instant denial. It was almost like my account had been flagged and they were just looking for a reason to shut me down forever.

It was then I remembered just how much time I’d spent ragging on Musk. I really don’t like that fucking guy. My theory is that they have some sort of sentiment checker that they run as part of their review process that had me tagged as someone with an insufficient number of followers¹Over 5000 until the number started plummeting with Musk’s takeover, which was kind of curious to be worth the trouble of treating like a Valued Content Creator who had been giving the site free nonsense to monetize since 2008.

To be honest, I’m kind of glad this has happened, even if I miss a lot of folks.

The main thing I like about Twitter is the ability to get a quick vibe check on a lot of people that I actually give a damn about. I’m part of that Gen X cohort that really embraced the internet²From BBSes to Blogs to Social Media, you’ve not been able to get rid of me., and a lot of the people I follow have been on my radar since the mid 90s. Unless a bunch of folks move to Mastodon³It’s gotten a lot easier to embrace in the last few months, I promise.or start blogging again (did you know RSS readers still exist), I’m going to have to…write emails? Text? Send postcards? Spam their LinkedIn comments?

I’m going to miss the thousands of little dopamine hits every day that Twitter provided me. However, my ADHD-having ass⁴Yes, I’ve been diagnosed. No, I won’t get a prescription. Yes, I know I should. really has started to calm down a little bit. That instinct to reach for my phone when I’m bored is very slowly being replaced by a desire to enjoy the quiet moment, maybe go read another comic or a chapter of a book. Maybe I could try…writing again? Like, for more than three sentences? This certainly seems to have gone on a bit, huh?

Anyway, I have a blog again. It’ll probably be a diary of my media consumption to some extent, maybe some talk about my industry and how I do what I do. We’ll see. I probably won’t be doing daily posts but I am going to try to give you guys a place you’ll stick in your bookmarks accidentally click on sometimes. I survived the “Let’s laugh at Joker talking about boners” phase of the internet, I survived Web 2.0, so I’m pretty sure I can handle whatever this next thing is.⁵No, it’s not Web3. Shut up.

Anyway, there’s lots of ways to contact me. If you go to beaucoupkevin.com, they’re right there.