why i'm leaving twitter

Yes, indeed, it's a new year's resolution ("dear journal, i never thought this would happen to me...").  Reasons follow:

• It's a distraction.  This is gonna be the year i improve my focus and discipline.  Twitter actively harms that goal.
• It's full of garbage.  It's easy to be a shitbag when you only have 140 characters.  It's easy to pass for a shitbag because 140 characters often isn't enough to convey nuance.  The brevity of the medium combined with the instant gratification leads to all manner of reflexive, lazy expression.  It's basically a shared network of comments sections.  I don't need that agita in my life.
• It enables abuse. Twitter doesn't give a shit about controlling actual, verifiable abuse (as opposed to garden-variety invective).  In addition, there are scads of profiles that have pictures of pretty young women, share the same trite bios, post the same trite things, and have done so for years, and you'd think this sort of thing should be easily detectable, so either Twitter knows and does nothing, or doesn't know because they're don't care to know.  In sum, they're useless when it comes to keeping a house clean of filth.

So what am i going to do with the free-floating invective that needs to be blurted out onto the interwebs?  I'd tried to spare this site of it because i wanted to write longer-form stuff here, but i'm clearly not doing that now.  So i'll start using this more.  Facebook is probably also going to get severely curtailed at some point, but that's more complicated.  Google+ is fairly high-signal and low-traffic, like LJ, so i'll keep that for now, too.  The actual goal will be setting up my own site so that my words aren't going to be held hostage by some faceless corporation (or, in Facebook's case, a face that needs punching).

So there you go, wah wah wah, all the drama you've been craving.  This is being crossposted to Twitter, where i'll pin it for whoever actually reads pinned posts.  I'll probably check DMs there for a while, but really, send me email instead.  If you can't figure out my address, ask.