Oh Twitter Bots. Oh Twitter Bots. How stupid.

 Late last night, I tabbed back into Firefox and looked at my twitter page. When I did so, I found that my twitter account, @tzed928 had been locked, because of a post I made which the Twitter bots decided was a suggestion to self-harm or suicide. My twitter handle is a name I made up as something short and relatively anonymous back when I was playing World of Warcraft to allow me to tweet images and text out of the game. From there, my participation grew until I was tweeting regularly out of that account. Well, that is now coming to a close. Earlier that night, someone with the handle @jtrebach posted a tweet of a then-unknown root and then asked if anyone would eat it if they were hungry. the captioned tweet below is the reply I made. A relatively sensible suggestion slice off a small piece of the root and rub it on the web between your finger and thumb. If you fee a burning or tingling sensation, discard the root and do not eat. read the survival guide. According to the almighty Twitter Bots, this is a suggestion to self-harm or suicide. In Fact, it is entirely the opposite. The picture was, as I later found out, that of a mandrake root. Mandrake  root is dangerous and can be harmful or fatal if swallowed. It contains datura. The procedure that I suggested would have saved unknown numbers of people from a fairly horrible death by poison. The irony is not lost on me.

Notes:

 Twitter is a registered trademark of Twitter inc and used under the fair use exception, to wit: "purpose of research, private study, criticism, review, news reporting, education, satire or parody"

World of Warcraft is trademark Activision Blizzard and used without permission under the fair use exception, for : "purpose of research, private study, criticism, review, news reporting, education, satire or parody 

Note: As if it needed saying : I do not condone, endorse or recommend self harm of any kind.  

Note: I will not relent on this. I was not and am not wrong. My tweet violated no terms of service. It's intent is crystal clear to anyone who is not a moron or a robot. 

Note: The irony is not lost on me that you can demand the head of the President of the United States on a platter, cheer on the nazi party, use whatever racist slurs you want, but mention "take your knife and slice . . . " and you get banned. I'm lookin at you, Jack Dorsey.  

A Beginning . . .

Inaugural Post : In which I introduce myself and give a brief look at who I am and what I'm doing.

Well, I am your host, known elsewhere by my (and the blog's) Initials -- DLC.
I am not the Democratic Leadership Committee, or Downloadable Content.
I am a man of middle age and some education, much of it acquired  on my own. Like everyone, I have things I like and things I do not like, and so those things are likely going to be frequent topics here.
Some of those things I write about are (in no particular order) :

• Current Events  -- news and political items worth noting.
• Science -- scientific developments, discoveries and related material.
• Sport -- Auto Racing, Baseball, Football, Shooting sports and others.
• Computers -- Computer technology, programming and related stories.
• Writing -- I try to write fiction. Short stories mainly but there is a novel in progress. I may publish some of that here.
• Skepticism  -- I like to say I have an open mind, but a hard nose. If you want me to believe something, offer me some proof, either empirical or logical, but preferably both. I may from time to time deconstruct various bits of nonsense, woo, conspiracy theories or whatnot in these pages. 
• Gaming. I play World of Warcraft, including the Legion Beta. So you might see Beta reports here, time permitting. I also play D&D and similar roleplaying games, as well as some board games and tabletop miniatures games, any or all of which may be written about in these pages.

 I look forward to writing more and hope that people like what they read here.
As I am broke (at this writing, it is not known if I will even have an internet connection tomorrow, let alone electrical power to use one with ) any financial contributions you care to make are welcome. If all you have to donate is your time, feel free to link back here to any story you find worth sharing. Comments and suggestions are accepted, but I reserve the right to block and or delete any comments I find unacceptable or offensive to the general public.
Thanks for stopping by, hope to see you again!


Sincerely
      DLC.

Apropos of nothing, a picture of my cat, Witchcraft.

and also, in case anyone wanted to donate to keeping me out of the streets, here's this thingy.
paypal.me/DarinCochran