Oh internets, you never fail to disappoint

Okay, so I've abandoned Livejournal for the most part. I still check in and see what my friends are up to but I doubt I'll ever make a post there again - aside from linking to this. The reason for the switch is that LJ quit taking posts from other sites, most notably ping.fm and blip.fm. I don't know the technical term what that service is but I like being able to text a little post to ping and then have them send it to my various social media and my blog. Maybe there's a site that LJ will accept posts from but I can't be bothered with all that research.

For a while now all of my internet activities have been letting me down. Twitter used to be a fun place to see random things from various people but now that retweeting is so easy to do I have to weed through all the stuff other people think I should see. Somedays I have to sift through pages of retwees now. And Facebook is such a toilet. It seems like every time the seasons change you can expect FB to completely screw up their site even further. The newest change over there has pretty much wiped out the filtering I did. Now I'm back to seeing everybody's damn vampire mafia farms and having to re-hide and delete them. If it weren't for the few people I've reconnected with that I actually wanted to reconnect with I'd frag my account there and never look back.

And speaking of connecting with people, trying to meet people online has been completely fruitless. Well, not completely, I have three prospective meet ups - I see no point in calling then dates at this juncture - in the works but trying to arrange things with all the shitty weather and job schedules (yes I have one, a really good one, no I won't discuss it) has been nearly impossible. But three out of dozens is not a good average. It's not like I'm super picky. I was just trying to find people with mutual interests who didn't think I was awful and maybe wanted to meet up and just hang out. With our clothes on. Turns out if you try to steer things away from the sex talk then you're a jerk who's not interested or thinks he's too good for them, but if you engage in any flirty banter then you're a jerk who's leading them on when you don't run right out at 2am to meet them for sex. For the record, I've done that before. I have no problem with sleazy fun hook ups but I also have obligations and things I gotta do.

But really, the main fault lies with me. It's not so much that the places I go to on the web are a let down but I can't figure out how to get the best use of them. I look over FAQs and how-tos but it all just makes no sense any more. I read about various apps and widgets and they either make zero sense or seem like they'd be no use to me, like the streamer things you put on your bicycle handlebars. They look nice but are of no real benefit. Then somebody comes along and explains it to me and oh, I think I might actually need it after all. For the record again, I never learned how to ride a bike. One of my friends got me a Wordpress account and domain name and all I was ever able to do was change the back ground color. I couldn't even find the place where you drop in HTML tags to make changes to the layout. Not that I'm an HTML whiz by any means but I do know a little bit and how to play around with it.

At this point I need to point out that I'm not going for a woe-is-me tone with this post. I'm just kvetching. I'm not feeling sorry for myself at all. At the very least I possess above average intelligence. And I'm handsome. I am, however, worried about my light bulb moment taking longer to happen than it used to. And not just with tech stuff, in a recent training class for the new job there were several moments when I couldn't grasp the variables and procedures for how to fill out a certain form. A very easy form. We didn't get any hands-on follow up, just had to read about it, but still... It's something I used to be able to snooze through. And yeah, I'm 40 now, my body and brain aren't gonna work like they did when I was 20. I get that. They didn't work that well when I was 20 but I was definitely a bit quicker on the uptake than I seem to be now.

Aw dammit, does this mean I'm gonna have to start working harder at things and putting effort into learning stuff? Now I am feeling sorry for myself.