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.  

Some good things about The Sims 4

Some good things about The Sims 4

I usually don’t talk about my computer gaming experience, aside from the ones I mentioned in my profile.  Usually, games are a sideline, a diversion from boredom when I’m not working or trying to sleep. Well, my internet service has been down this week, and it has given me time to reflect on a few things. Among them is the computer game The Sims 4™, by EA Games subsidiary Maxis.   The game itself is fairly smooth, although it has some bugs that can make playing it annoying. But let’s handle the good things first.