The Number of the Beast
In the Good Old Days success generally meant you had achieved something.
Nowadays it seems to be measured by the number of “likes” you get on Farcebook or the number of “followers” you have on Twitter.
Yes, I have a Farcebook page. In fact I have two of ’em. There’s my original one and there is one I set up in an idle moment of madness for this here site. To give you an idea how often I visit the latter, I just went into it [to see if it was still there] and it happily announced that I was a new visitor. A stranger in my own land, as it were.
The Rambles page has apparently got 98 “likes” which surprises me. Of course in the grand scheme of modernity you are no one unless you at least have a “k” after the number but that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
So then I toddled into my own Grandad page. Now that doesn’t have “likes” as far as I judge and the yardstick here is apparently the number of “friends” I have. 119. Again, I am a complete loser unless I have a number running into the tens of thousands, but just to twist the knife in myself I am happy to say I have considerably fewer than 119 friends. Those in Farcebook consist mainly of family and quite a few who are real people who I have met and some I meet reasonably regularly. However, I confess I haven’t a clue who most are and would probably [definitely] pass them in the street without even knowing they were a “friend”.
That paragraph above is going to see my number of Farcebook “friends” drop to single digits? Heh!
And then there is Twitter.
I rarely visit Twitter thee days. My only real use for it is to announce on an unsuspecting world that I have had another brainfart. The odd time I will get a mail to say someone has replied to one of my “tweets” and of course I then visit and reply. I’m quite polite in things like that. Then there is the little badge I have on the sidebar here – my little animated vulture friend Cedric – I’m quite proud of him and would be loath to condemn him to the bin.
Once again you are a person of no consequence on Twitter if you have less than a million “followers”. This apparently is so vital to people’s existence on the planet that they are prepared to actually pay for extra followers which baffles me.
I used to have a hundred or so “followers” on Twitter. The figure ebbed and flowed but I didn’t pay it much heed. Then something happened last year and I seemed to gather “followers” like rats to a swamp. The figures shot up, which I confess was mildly pleasing as it at the very least meant people knew I existed, and maybe even one or two of them might have a chuckle at my garbage.
The figures have stopped rising. For the last while they seem to have stuck at the same number, maybe varying up or dawn by one or two but the mean figure stays the same.
666.
Is there a significance here?
Footnote: I see this post is number 66656.
I’m getting worried.
It’s the numbers of comments your posts draw from interested readers that indicate how worthy people consider your website, Grandad. BTW 666 for Book of Revelation and Apocalypse fans is considered to be the sign of the beast i.e. a Bad Number. I wonder how Awfully Bad the upcoming post #66666 might be? If it were stretched out as 66-66-6 the potential awfulness might be mitigated. In Bingo, 66 on its own is called clickety-click, and 88 is called two fat women. That’s just clickbait of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_bingo_nicknames
Herself is of that mind too – the rare [and dangerous] times she visits the site she likes to chortle that I “only got” so many comments on a piece. I tend to disagree. Some of my efforts might attract a thousand visitors but only a few comments, whereas I write about toilets or something and I get loads of comments. I suppose it depends on many factors. I confess that I like to see a lot of visitors, not because it justifies my existence but more because it justifies my efforts. Earlier, one of my bits of software predicted that I was going to get 666 visitors today. Fortunately it decided it was being a bit optimistic and later dropped the figure a bit.
The Devil’s in the Detail.
Clickey-clickety-click.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EH1G4EwljM
‘Nuff said
😀
Twitter is a funny old business. I too have never understood why on earth anyone would pay to have 5000 followers or whatever, but I constantly get offers from people guaranteeing to deliver however many thousands for a small fee. WTF? Why would I want thousands of followers? What’s the point? To be honest, I don’t understand why I have the followers that I do, some four hundred odd. And some odd ones, too. For some reason I seem to have lots of gun totin’, God fearin’, Liberal hatin’ folk from Texas who follow me. Don’t ask me, mate, I haven’t got a clue. I also have loads of e-cig suppliers from both sides of the pond, which I can kind of understand, but only just, since I tend to be quite critical of vapers sometimes in my tweets – you know, the billion lives thing and similar.
Yes, a funny old business. I tend to be very sporadic in my use of twitter. I’ll go weeks and weeks not logging in, then have a flurry of action. It’s amusing sometimes, but certainly not an essential item in my life. But then nor is farcebook. I can’t remember the last time I went to the facebook page in my own name. Years ago. I have another one set up in a variation of my online username (Nisa Kiman – they wouldn’t let me set up a page as nisakiman – has to be a proper name, they said) which I use to access the CLASH (Audrey Silk) page, and other related smoker’s pages, but I really don’t like the facebook set up at all. It’s a bit too much like throwing your life open to the world, and I like my privacy.
That number of the beast is a bit worrying. Keep an eye over your shoulder, GD, just to make sure the grim reaper isn’t stalking you! 🙂 Still, it won’t be long before you hit 888, which is considered VERY lucky by the Chinese. They pay millions for 888 numberplates in Asia.
I haven’t a clue who my followers are on Twitter, though I too notice a lot of Vapers in there. I think Farcebook once complained about my name claiming I wasn’t “real” [if I’m not real than how the fuck did I type an application?] but they seem to have forgotten about me again. I once set up a Google+ account and they bitched that Grandad wasn’t a real name so I used Granclad instead. For some reason they accepted that! I haven’t been into the account since so maybe I have millions of friends in there?
Herself loves Farcebook and is forever forwarding stuff to me so I have to visit it from time to time but I never post anything remotely personal [that people couldn’t discover for themselves with a small search]. It’s a very dangerous place as it is easy to forget that the world and his taxman can see it all.
I have had 444 visitors here today so far, so I’m halfway to the 888 there. Half lucky?
In Chinese culture 444 is very unlucky because the character for 4 resembles the character for Death. Many hotels in China have a 3rd floor and the next one is the 5th. If you reach 999 hits you’ll hear ambulance, fire engine and police sirens outside the house. Have you a basement bunker to hide in?
Maybe they should just change the character for 4, or death?
That would be like asking Irish children to forget Halloween, ghosts and graveyards.
And now six replies, so I had to post something to save your soul!
Aw thanks, Dick! I seem to have survived somehow, though I still have 666 followers on Twitter. I just won’t go near that for a while. Just in case.
Dear Grandad,
Read somewhere that the number 666 was wrongly translated. Don’t know if it helps.
I never, ever, use farcebook, twitter or any other pile of utter garbage/self-proclaiming filth. It’s so much better to keep to clean sites such as yours.
Probably very wise. As GD points out, the taxman just lurves farcebook.
I hear that 666 (the beast) is supposed to represent Nero. The last I heard Nero was dead or at least not very well. Consequently Granddad I would worry, not at all.
What? Me worry? Anyway I can’t pay the fiddle so I’m not a reincarnation.
Okay let’s see now. I “friend-ed” and “liked” both your Farcebook pages a long time ago and I checked your Google+ page (which I also seemed to have “friend-ed” a long time ago) but it had no “+1s” or whatever since you’ve never posted anything on it. At least you have one friend there?
As far as Twitter is concerned I was never able to figure out how the damn thing worked in the first place and had even less desire to try to. Therefor I abandoned it quite awhile ago. I still get the odd email notifications from Twitter that I can’t unsubscribe to (you have to be logged in in order to do so) because I’ve long forgotten my username and password and I have no desire to try to recover them. Thank heavens for Thunderbird’s “junk” feature.