Last Spring, I entered into a pact with the local squirrels: I would give them peanuts and treats from my kitchen, and they would leave my garden alone. As the year unfolded, though, the pact became more of a protection racket that the squirrel mafia abandoned as soon as my pumpkins started to grow. They murdered all five of the best ones — and the little fuckers did it just a few bites in each one, just enough to let the mold and bullshit get in there and ruin them — leaving me with only one (a really fantastic, 28 pounder I still can’t bring myself to carve). Then they ate all the leaves off my parsley and cilantro, before I made an arrangement with the local Cooper’s Hawk, who is the guy you call when the Squirrel Mafia is getting out of hand.

That’s a lot of background to set this up:

My sister texted me earlier today and asked me if I was celebrating squirrel appreciation day with extra peanuts.

“I am now,” I replied, and there was much rejoicing (up in the oak tree).

This was funny to me, because even earlier today, before I knew that squirrel appreciation day was not only a thing but was also upon us today, I shared this photo on Bluesky:

I’m not sure who that is but it could be Cruise Director Julie or Alex P Keaton based on their size (yes, we have named several squirrels in the neighborhood and that isn’t weird at all why are you looking at me that way) but I am sure that they are enjoying what’s left of a very small late season pumpkin that came up after the rest of the vine had died off.

I mean, I could have put it inside to finish ripening, and it would have been ADORABLE as a little jack-o-lantern (which we can make whenever we want to, don’t let Big Halloween tell you when and how you can enjoy the spooky season). I could have done that. But I knew I’d get more joy if I set it out and waited for a picture like this to happen.

Which I didn’t intend to post on a day I didn’t know existed, but sometimes a plan just comes together.

So, uh … a happy squirrel appreciation day to all who celebrate! Get out there an appreciate some squirrels!

Note to self: before you make a post on Facebook about how you’re leaving Facebook on account of Zuckerberg is a piece of shit, and tell everyone who reads it that they can subscribe to your blog … ensure that WordPress didn’t change the theme on you when you weren’t looking, hiding the formerly obvious subscribe button.

Here’s what I wrote there:

As an OG blogger who did everything in html, I resisted Facebook for years. I didn’t like the idea of being inside someone else’s garden, where I didn’t own or control my writing, photos, and so on.

But I ended up here because it’s where the people were, and I stayed here to the detriment of my own writing and my own website (that I worked so hard to build on my own in the Before Times).

Over the years, I’ve been put into Facebook jail for absolute bullshit, usually because of bad faith reports from dickheads, but also because a machine did a comically bad parsing of something I said. (Hey, die in a fire, machine!) As a consequence, I have ended up self-censoring, or even writing and creating to serve whatever the fucking algorithm wants, instead of what I want. It’s always bothered me, but at like a 1 on a 10 point scale. I’ve lived with it, and I’ve accepted the compromise.

And it’s been so frustrating to contort myself into all sorts of non-euclidean shapes, while literally every single time I report someone for hate speech, impersonation, scamming, a different kind of hate speech, terrorist threats, even more hate speech, the machine waits for weeks before it tells me that all of that hate speech was just peachy with Facebook and the gigantic piece of dogshit who owns it.

I’ve had one foot out the door on this website for a couple months, and now that Meta will allow and encourage hate speech against marginalized and vulnerable people (obviously so that right wing fuckfaces can do the thing, officially, that they’ve been doing all along) I am leaving for good.

There’s no reason for me to be here. Whether it’s because I’m boring or the algorithm is squashing me or some combination of both, engagement is way, way down over the last half of last year. And there is just way too much harassment, noise, bots, scammers, and overt fucking Nazism all over the place. If I’m going to reach a smaller audience, anyway, I’m going to reach it via my own blog where I actually care to keep that dogshit in the trash where it belongs.

I’ll let my blog crosspost here for a couple of weeks, and then I’m just going to let this account go fallow.

I sincerely hope that, if you have enjoyed following me here, that you’ll come over to my blog. There’s a simple form there, so you can get my posts by email, probably more reliably than you ever saw things here.

I also have Bluesky, though I’m going to use it minimally — the fire hose of social media is extremely bad for my (and your) mental health — and even then, mostly to let folks know when something I made is out in the world.

The people who work for me are going to be unhappy about this. I have a major project coming out in March, and it’s not the best idea to walk away from an account with a few hundred thousand followers … but when I walked away from three million followers on Twitter when fuckface von nepobaby turned it into a fascist propaganda tool, absolutely nothing changed for me, from a business perspective.

Put another way, my experience over the last 25 years has shown me that there is a core of people out there, you are likely among them if you’re still reading this (hi, Aunt Dorothy!), who care enough to go where I am. I’m counting on that pattern holding as I leave what has become yet another tool for fascists, authoritarians, bigots, Nazis, and other disgusting and deplorable people to use in their efforts to hurt people I love.

I’ll keep my Instagram up a little longer, unless or until this Zuckerberg approved policy of hate and toxic masculinity (why is it always the weakest little men who are so toxic, he asked, rhetorically) metastasizes there, as well.

Please come with me, back to my blog, where it all began.

On another note, I’m sure that the block editor is great when you understand it, but I am entirely lost when I try to use it. Nothing makes sense or follows a logical flow (that’s obvious to me, anyway), and it makes me feel stupid.

So I appreciate all of you who came here from wherever you came here from, and I am doubly grateful to all of you who have actually looked for that subscribe option. Because if it was anything like my experience, it was a massive pain in the ass.

Of course, at this moment, I believe you get annoying SUBSCRIBE stuff all over the place, including something you had to click to even see this (I think? Again, the documentation is confusing to my dumb ass) … but at least you can see it. And the layout is going to change a whole lot over the next couple of hours, while I figure this thing out.

If I can wrap my head around this, someone reading this late today or tomorrow will hopefully have no idea what this is all about, and if you are that person, I encourage you to celebrate by subscribing to my blog, so you never miss a post.

Thanks for your patience and support, y’all.