How did elections go in your state?
I was desperately hoping for at least some small change here, but despite the tribes uniting against him and a couple of pretty ugly scandals, Kevin Stitt looks to have been reelected as governor. I wasn’t expecting the Libertarian candidates to do very well, and they didn’t. Lib and independent gubernatorial candidates together pulled about 2.7% of the votes. We did better in the lieutenant governor race, getting 4.12%. Interesting that the party did better in the Lt Governor race than the main race. We broke 26% in a two-way race for attorney general, which was kind of nice to see. We held about 4.5 % in the other races.
I was prepared to be disappointed by the overall voter turnout, but I was kind of surprised. 50.35 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot—about half. That’s a little off from the last midterm election in 2018, where they had just over 56% turnout. Seems high overall though.
Social Media
I spent Monday afternoon putting down stakes at Mastodon. I’m not sure what’s going to happen at Twitter, but I felt like of the various new social media sites, Mastodon was likely closer to my target audience than Truth Social, Gab, or Parler. We’ll see. I’m not going to leave Facebook or Twitter. They’re still useful when it comes to advertising, I think, and Mastodon doesn’t do ads.
The thing that took me so long was figuring out what instance or server I wanted to sign up at. You can still view the entire timeline from any server, but that server is your home base, for lack of a better term. Quite a few servers are closed or set to invite-only right now, due apparently to the surge of new users emigrating from Twitter. Writing.exchange was my first choice, though it’s a fairly small community right now, about 2.5k users. It’s one of the invite-only servers though, so I settled in at mastodon.world/@bobmueller. By the end of the day, I was following three people and had one follower.
I’ve been curious to see how the Twitter exodus might affect me, though my follower count was already pretty low to begin with. I know I’ve lost one follower and one followed account, which is likely the same person, though I don’t know who it was. I looked at Twitter Analytics to get an idea of how that compared with previous months. I learned I’d lost 87 followers since January 2021, an average of about three per month. Some of that may have been caused by my culling my followed accounts and moving a lot of those people to Lists, though. Analytics also tells me I’ve already lost 13 followers this month.
I went through a phase on Twitter where I followed anyone who followed me, and followed a lot of other authors during follow-back events. It turns out though that other authors aren’t really my audience, because I’m not into sharing a bunch of content for other writers. I share stuff that interests me, like wrongful convictions and prison reform, Michigan football, fountain pens, and genealogy. I should be following more accounts like that, rather than following another writer just because they’re a writer. So it’s been an interesting few days at Mastodon as my timeline there looks drastically different from Twitter.
And at the moment, I’m interacting more on Mastodon than I think I ever did on Twitter. I’m not sure why that is. That’s actual replies, not just liking and retweeting/boosting a post.
Wakanda Forever
We went to see this Thursday night, courtesy of Middle Son again. Not going to lie: I like that he’s such a big MCU fan that he treats us to most of the premieres.
My verdict: Good Flick.
It’s no secret that Chadwick Boseman died or that Marvel had decided to not recast anyone as T’Challa, so his death in the movie was no surprise. I thought they handled it well. Shuri had to deal with not being able to save her brother’s life despite her genius and her tech, and that was a hard thing for her to deal with. The theater was completely silent for the opening theme, the announcement of his death, and the closing credit to Chadwick Boseman.
The other antagonist in the movie was a new character to me, and I thought it/he/they were pretty interesting. The post-credit scene (there’s only one) should not shock or surprise anyone either, but it’s a very nice segue. There’s a scene in the epilogue that kind of threw me, though.
My only complaint about the movie, and it’s a very minor complaint, stems from the climactic battle. There were a couple of shots on the ship where you could tell they were CGI, like the blending was off by just that much. Usually, the CGI effects are much better than this one was. It didn’t pull me out of the movie, but it was enough that I noticed it.
Still, a good movie.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share a thought in the comments. Sign up for my infrequent newsletter here. Find some of my other writing at The Good Men Project, too. Subscribe to the blog via the link in the right sidebar so you never miss an update here, either. You can also add my RSS feed to your favorite reader.
Share your thoughts!