Another Friday dawns and lo, this newsletter pops up in your inbox.

Thank you for your time and attention. I hope your week has gone well and that cats respect your need to sleep while they are awake and stalking prey.

These Days …

On Sunday I was exiled from Facebook for “violating community standards”. I have a tendency to use violent rhetoric when I snark. That rhetoric is usually focused on folks who advocate beliefs and policies that make the world a worse place. To me, it’s punching Nazis without having to bruise my knuckles. This isn’t the first time. I was exiled for two days earlier this year. This time my exile is for seven days. I’ll be able to post and comment again this coming Sunday. The most annoying thing about this, to me, is that I can’t wish folks happy birthday. I’ve been using FB as my birthday reminder calendar.

As far as I can tell Facebook doesn’t publish the rules to their “community standards”. My snark suggested killing someone and setting some else on fire but it’s hard to tell what actually triggered the ban. “kill” and “fire” are awfully general terms to ban. “Kill” isn’t just a verb, it’s also a noun. And “fire”? Where is civilization without fire? I suspect that my account is more closely bot watched than others because of my previous lack of decorum.

I don’t feel like my right to free speech has been curtailed. I’ve never felt like that right was every as sancrosant as some folks do. Our culture shuts down certain subjects of conversation on a regular basis. We might have the right to say whatever we want but you’ll still want to be careful what you say and where you say it. Nazis punch back. Facebook is not the public square. It’s a business. One that I both appreciate and despise.

The great thing about this exile is that I end up doing something else with my time other than scrolling my Facebook feed. I’m not going to claim that I’m being more productive with the “extra” time but I am finding myself less annoyed. I’m reading fewer ill thought out political memes and that really improves my mood.

I’m continuing to work half days at USPS. I organize my route, divide it in thirds (or fourths on a good day) and deliver one of those thirds. Some days I run over my allotted 4 hours because the mail volume is greater than the time expected for delivery. I have to be careful about that. Management and workman’s comp don’t like it if someone does more than they say they can. To them it means that the person should be working more time all the time. It doesn’t occur to them that the person has made an extra effort in order to make sure the rest of the already overburdened team doesn’t have to do one more damned thing.

I know. I know. I need to take care of myself first. I’m working on it.

Mugshots

This week’s process gif features a few of the folks who survived and thrived after an apocalypse (or three), I’ve had a version of this illustration in my head for years now. My friends Jarred Wallace and Adam Scott Glancy used to do a video blog called Podcast at Ground Zero in which they discussed various End of the World books, films, tv shows and games. Jarred had asked me to do a banner illustration for their page – sometime, whenever I got around to it.

I finally got around to it.

This image is available on a mug in my Zazzle store and all kinds of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

This is my 3rd mug design of 2022. 49 to go!

Have a good week. Take care of yourself (even if it means being less of a team player). See you next Friday!