A Fateful Discovery

Audio version coming soon (I wrote this late).

Names are funny things. You can grow so used to them that you stop hearing them for what they are and just associate them with who or what they represent.

For instance, my middle name, Tadhg, is representative of my Irish heritage. I’m a quarter Irish on my mother’s side, and until today, it’s only ever come up as an interesting tidbit, and a “guess how you spell it” party game. (It’s pronounced like “tiger” without the r, by the way.) But today, when discussing it with a friend, she said, “I wonder what that means?”

Well, according to my dad, they picked Tadhg because it was listed as an Irish version of Timothy, which as it turns out isn’t strictly true but Wikipedia was harder to come by in the nineties. Anyway, they liked Timothy, they wanted Irish heritage in my name, bish bash bosh there’s your birth ceritifcate.

Only… looking into it now, the deeper meaning behind the name Tadhg is actually “poet, philosopher, or story-teller.”

In other words, I’ve been a writer for my entire life, and I’m just now learning that story telling is my literal middle name. That’s some prophecy shit right there!

In all seriousness, this discovery does hold a fairly special meaning to me. I know that naming me my future profession was more of a cosmic coincidence than anything, but all the same, it makes me feel that bit closer to my mum. I started writing early enough in life that she got to see my spark for it, and given that Tadhg is an homage to her side of the family and that my love for her and my nan is what inspires me to keep creating, this all feels like a poetically inspired gift from fate.

How’s that for a hug from beyond?

Twitter’s Dead, And That Sucks

Audio Version

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Elon Musk, in his infinite wealth I mean wisdom, has decided that non-paying Twitter users are only allowed to view 600 tweets per day. Hell, even paying Twitter users can only see 6000 tweets per day, which is also not nearly enough. This effectively kills Twitter.

We’re supposed to say, good riddance! That solves that! That’s one less distraction for my day! Or some variance of these words. Because that’s sticking it to the man. Good! I didn’t want your stupid website anyway, billionaire! And maybe some people legitimately feel this way. But I don’t. Well, apart from directing ire at the idiot billionaire, that is.

I joined Twitter nearly fifteen years ago, at the age of 13, which means I’ve been using the site for over half of my life. And as an introvert, it’s become my favourite way to keep up with my friends and people I admire. People often talk about what a toxic cesspit Twitter is, but it turns out that if you unfollow news sites and brands and toxic people, mute a bunch of depressing words, and block any assholes you come across, you can – could – make that site a far more pleasant experience. For me, Twitter is not this toxic cesspit which I’m finally free from being chained to. It’s a social media feed full of people I like talking to each other about things we all like. It’s been one of my primary ways of socialising for a good while now.

So for some idiot billionaire to come and take that away for idiot billionaire reasons is actually quite a blow. I’m not going to pretend to celebrate. It sucks! I already feel cut off from people who’s thoughts I enjoy reading on a daily basis. There’s other platforms but the vibe is different with every single one. YouTube and Twitch are less of an open two-way channel. Instagram is less immediate, or thought-focused. Facebook is… Facebook. And there’s no unified Twitter alternative that we’ve all decided to migrate to without incident. Twitter is a legitimate form of communication that an idiot billionaire has just stamped all over, and its absence is going to affect the way I perceive the world moving forwards.

Hopefully this post ages like milk and the change is reverted. But let’s be real, unless he’s even dumber than we all thought, he’s killing Twitter on purpose at this point.