I don’t know if anybody else has this feeling. When you’re walking down the street and you catch your reflection in something like a car window or a shop window and you see your face and you think, ‘Who’s that?’. You know: ‘That’s not me, that doesn’t represent who I am’. And I think I’ve recently discovered what the problem is and it’s a feeling that essentially you’re just in a room full of mirrors. You can shoot at all the reflections, but basically it’s all meaningless because you’re just trapped and you put yourself there. I’ve realised recently that it’s actually worrying about it that’s the fucking problem. It’s actually saying, ‘No, this is me, that’s not me’, and being precious about who you are, because I believe now that everyone changes all the time. I think the most unhealthy thing for a human being is to feel that they have to behave in a certain way because other people expect them to behave like that, or to feel they have to think in a certain way because what happens then is basically your mind goes round in circles.
Thom Yorke (via s0litudeisbliss)

Reasons I Won’t Join Pheed

Pheed is all over my Twitter feeds this morning and I considered joining, but decided not to because:

  1. They autopost to Twitter, without giving the option to opt out.
  2. They ask for your full birth date (day, month, year) and I refuse to join any social network that asks for this identifying info (that’s why I’m not on Facebook). I don’t mind if my human audience knows who I really am, but I don’t want companies, robots, governments, and other snoops to be able to easily track, identify, and profile me.
  3. The username must be a “Minimum 3 characters, must start with a letter. You can use letters, numbers, underscores, hyphens and one dot (.).” This means that I can’t use nm as my Pheed username, which is what I use on Twitter and on Identi.ca. It also means that no one with a 1- or 2-character Twitter username will be able to get that username on Pheed and, if they are like me, won’t join.

They’ve just exploded onto the scene, so bravo to their marketers, but I predict they won’t last long. For more info, see: