I'm up and I'm grumpy on a Sunday night. My new kitten (shout out to Romeo, his first in a Ratfarts! Column), wouldn't let me sleep again and I'm up with an hour an a half to go until a single hour shift and then I can go back to sleep. Maybe. If he and his sister Grey Grey don't conspire to be insane again.

I share things like this because I've always shared on the internet. I'm used to it by now. I've been writing Ratfarts! off and on since 2001 and there are thousands of words and thoughts and badly formed columns floating around in internet archives from the past 10 years or so if you really want to hunt them down.

I used to try to do these under the pen name James Knine because I didn't want work to read them and misunderstand my mood swings and muddled thoughts and musings and ultimately use them against me. These days? I'm much more guarded with my whines but I tend to jump for joy if someone from work is actually reading them because that means I have an actual READER!

I share a lot on Facebook, but that too is guarded. At least on Facebook you know someone read it because every time I get a response my phone dings and my android tablet chimes and I get a pop up alert here notifying me that I have new mail in Thunderbird. It used to be followed by a friend immediately calling or texting but I put a stop to that.

I'm pretty sure that 99.9% of the purpose of social sites is to whine. The other .1% is to post dumb chain status updates. My current favorite is the one demanding drug tests for anyone on welfare that are usually posted by the same people who insist that the country is broke and there's no money for things like welfare and social security. So applying the logic here... if we're broke, where are we going to get the money to come up with the drug tests?

It's pointless to point out the faulty logic because that just pisses them off and ultimately they unfriend you. This gets especially messy if they're a contact on your resume and you're in the mood to find a new job to get away from all the people who would spend time reposting chain status updates. But again, that's digressing and no, I'm not planning on going anywhere right now.

Some people point out that there should be percentages involving games and game invites and how Sondra Dee's fake internet Horoscope says she's going to get some from the man of her dreams tonight or that Juniper Lee sent you a hug or a candy or a "thinking of you" heart that's an advertisement for an app on the service they're sending to you not because they actually CARE but because they need 20 people to get spammed so they unlock an achievement. To this I say "Hogwash!" because I learned to block every one of THOSE things years ago.

It's not that I'm not social, or that I don't care that you need to spam people to get ahead in a pointless Facebook thingie or that I'm just a heartless bastard, but then again, maybe I am.

And now I'm whining.

And that's the point of social networking! :)

--Jim

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