November 13-15: Lyric trains me, deleting old tweets, and writing. Always writing.

 For years, if I'm sitting or lying down, Lyric has been trying to convince me to let her outside by snuggling up next to me, or lying on top of me and purring. As a human might imagine, it is totally counterproductive. Instead of going "ah, you are snuggling me, you must want to get up so that you can leave the house", which is probably her intent two-thirds of the time, I go "ah, you are snuggling me, I can never move again until you get tired of this." The only thing it has going for it as a tactic is that, when I inevitably do move because I need to go to the bathroom or something, Lyric is right there, knows that I am moving, and therefore can follow me and stand next to doors to signal that she wants to go outside. She knows that "standing next to a door" works as a signal if I'm upright, or even if I'm sitting where I can see her and the door. But if I'm not, she's had no good ideas on how to communicate her desire.

One thing she does on rare occasion is hop onto the set of drawers next to my side of the loveseat, and from there jump onto the drawers next to the long table for my computer. After that, she jumps on top of my desktop tower, and then usually hops behind the monitors. This behavior annoyed Lut tremendously: he hated having her behind the monitors because he thought she'd knock something over or unplug it or whatever. She never knocked anything over or unplugged anything back there, but he would yell at her and have me fish her out from back there whenever it happened.

I'm not nearly as irritated by it as he was, but I still don't like having her walk around back there. It's distracting, even though I've no reason to think she'll mess with anything. I do worry a little that her jumping onto the desktop tower from the inside could knock the tower over, even though it never has; she's heavy and sometimes her leaps will knock off something that's more precarious than she realized.  When my work laptop lived atop the drawers beside the desktop, there were a few times that she jumped on top of it and it fell off as a result, because she thought it was a stable surface and was Very Mistaken. 

A week or two ago when she did this, I got up and left the room, because she often follows me if I leave the room and I figured this would be less traumatic for both of us than me picking her up to move her. There are places where she's fine with being picked up. The kitchen and living room are both designated You May Pick Up the Kitty Here zones, perhaps because I've often picked her up in those places so I can put her on the kitty perch and give her kitty treats.  The office, however, is a You May Not Pick Up Kitty Here zone and she will yowl in protest if I attempt to move her anyway. Although she is only angry about being moved if I touch her with part of my body to do so. Lifting her or nudging her with a foot or leg: UNACCEPTABLE. Moving the blanket or pillow that she's on so that she is forced to move: perplexing but not otherwise upsetting, as long as I'm doing it at a distance and don't have a body part in contact with her through the blanket/pillow/whatever.

Anyway, she hopped down from the drawers to follow me when I left the room, and then moved to a door, so I let her outside.

A few days ago, she did the same thing. Again, she got as far as the drawers beside the table before I left the room, and then followed me and asked to go outside so I let her.

Today, she hopped onto my desktop instead of following me when I left the room. I came in and out of the room a few times, trying to lure her away. At length, I found the bell toy she'd been playing with lately and shook it. (I do not know where this toy came from. It's a hollow pink plastic ball with slatted sides and a jingling bell inside. Lyric found it in the kitchen one day and batted it so that it skittered across the floor, then pursued it gleefully. I have used it to play with her since she likes it more than any of the other toys. But I don't know how she found it. If you had asked me "are there any objects on the kitchen floor?'" on the day she produced it, I would have said, "no, and if there were the, robot vacuum would've found them." Yet here we are. Mysterious pink ball and new favorite toy.) Lyric came in at the sound, chased the ball once or twice when I tossed it for her, then went to the door so I could let her outside.

Until now, it didn't occur to me that I was training Lyric to use a somewhat annoying behavior to get my attention so I'd let her outside. Or she's training me to respond to this annoying behavior by letting her outside. On the other hand, it doesn't annoy me that much and I do want her to communicate with me so I guess it's ... kind of progress? 

As for the rest of yesterday and today: I actually made it to 6278 words yesterday, much to my surprise. Another thing I did recently was, at long last, delete everything from my Twitter* account and then deactivated it. That was on the 13th but I didn't think to write about it yesterday. Twitter changed their ToS recently to say something on the lines of 'if you have content on our service after November 15, you have given us permission to scrape it and feed it LLMs or whatever else we want to do with it.'

*I know it's not branded as Twitter anymore, but I don't care. It was still Twitter the last time I actually used it.

Of course, pretty much everything on the web has already been scraped and fed to LLMs, including every Dreamwidth post and every tweet. But I never signed a ToS that said "yes, you have permission to do this thing." It's a minor distinction with no likely practical effect; I am not about to sue ChatGPT or anyone else for scraping my copyrighted works to feed to their plagiarism engines. Nonetheless: I hadn't posted to my Twitter account in almost 2 years and it'd been even longer since I checked Twitter on anything like a regular basis. I wasn't getting any benefit from having content hosted on Twitter.

There are a multitude of bad ways to delete everything from your Twitter account, and no good ways. You can't use Twitter's front end to actually delete your account: you are only "deactivating" it. IIRC, Twitter says you can reactivate it up to 30 days after deactivating, if you change your mind. It does not say it purges your data at any point. 

On the 12th, I told Twitter to generate my archive, because various sources said you needed info from the archive file for mass deletion to work. On the 13th, I downloaded a program, Redact, that said it would do unlimited deletes of tweets for free.  When I ran Redact, it said I had more than 2000 tweets and therefore I should use "delete from file", a premium feature. Redact charges on an annual basis and wanted $95-ish for a year subscription that would unlock the premium features. I looked for another twitter-deletion service and found one that would charge per month and cost $7. Fine. I signed up for it, uploaded my archive file, and at around 1PM on the 13th, I told it to delete everything. It started churning away and said I had 37,000-ish tweets to delete and the request delivery time would be around 11PM. Okay, 10 hours is a while, but I've got until the 15th.

I checked it a few times to see how it was doing. Slowly. Very slowly. After 30 minutes in which it'd deleted like 100 tweets, I realized that the delivery time was 11PM but the delivery date was 11/24/2024.

...back to the drawing board.

I'd been chatting with Tuftears and Emery on Discord, who were also trying to delete all their tweets. Tuftears had some luck with modifying a script that you run on the Twitter page through the developer window in your browser. He pointed me to a couple of links and I tried one of them. In his case, he'd had to restart it a few times and tweak it to get it to finish. In my case, I just got a series of failure messages and eventually a maximum-retries reached error message. Emery had used Redact, not uploading a file but just selecting the "delete without preview" box. She'd gotten it through two of her accounts. I tried Redact.

Redact went much faster, deleting 1 tweet in a little under a second. I left it running in the background for an hour or two. When I checked back on it, the UI had crashed and it displayed only a blank white window. I shut it down, restarted it, and told it to delete. It deleted 200-ish items from 2021 and said "All done!"

My account had tweets spanning from 2009 to 2023. This seemed suspicious. I started it again. 30 tweets deleted. "All done!" Again. 9 tweets deleted. "All done!"

"Okay," I thought, "I guess I needed to use the delete-from-file option after all. I'll try the script again." I went to Twitter to check my account.

...and it was empty.

No tweets, no replies, no likes, no faves, no media, no bookmarks. Everything Redact had said it would delete was gone.

I found it hard to believe, given the weird behavior towards the end of my attempts with Redact. I tried running Redact a few more times, but it ended each run immediately, with nothing deleted because, apparently, there was nothing left to delete.

On the 14th, I checked my Twitter account again. Still empty. I contemplated whether I wanted to deactivate it or not. Deactivating it meant some squatter could come along and take my account name, which is Not Great. I knew MicroSFF had changed his Twitter account name, made a new one under the old name to keep it from squatters, and then deactivated the original account. The advantage to this, over keeping your old account, is that the new account has less information attached to it--no follows or followers or blocklists or whatever other metadata Twitter might keep. I waffled over doing the same, and finally decided I didn't want to give Twitter another +1 to their accounts-created stats, and just deactivated my old account. 

Overall, just glad to be done with it. 

The only thing I am nostalgic about is that The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince had a link to the micro-story that inspired it, originally posted by MicroSFF. And also to the chain of tweets where MuppetK asked me to write a book about it and I said "heehee, but it's MicroSFF's story" and then MicroSFF replied, very graciously, that while he doesn't want anyone reprinting his work word-for-word, he's happy to inspire other people to create stories and any novel inspired by a toot story was fine by him and would belong to its author. 

Of course, this conversation was mostly gone already because MicroSFF deleted all his tweets before I did mine. I follow MicroSFF on fediverse now, where he's still active, and I am half-tempted to ask if he'll do a Dramatic Re-enactment of the exchange with me. Heh. More likely, I'll just ask if he's got the original story anywhere that I can link to. I've already paraphrased the exchange in the Acknowledgements section of the book.

After I posted yesterday's entry, I wrote a few thousand words of Be That Way and went to bed, falling asleep around midnight like usual.

Last night, I woke up at 4AM, and struggled to get back to sleep until 6AM, alternating between "lying with my eyes closed while I try to fall asleep" and "playing with phone." Oh, and petting Lyric. She was inside and she will often come snuggle me when she sees I'm awake. I think she's trying to get me up so I'll let her outside. It doesn't work. Around 7:30AM, I woke again, played with my phone for a while, and finally got up to make breakfast around 8AM.

I resolved to be more prompt about getting to writing today, so that I wouldn't have to frantically try to reach 6100 words during Coffee's stream. 

I completely failed at this.

I opened the file for Be That Way, looked at it for a bit, didn't write anything, and then opened the notes file for what I've been calling Koysko and the Witch. This is such a terrible name that I'm changing it to The Secret Dragon which is not great either, but I hate it less. I crawled to 800 words or so. At 1PM, I thought, "I should take a nap." I crawled on a little further, because I'd started a big monster and while the timer ran until 6PM and I could easily finish it post-nap, I wanted to finish it before napping. At 3PM, I finally defeated it, having crept to 1200 words. I am brainstorming somewhat wordily in the notes file, but making notes and an outline are not, by their nature, a very wordy process for me. 

I took a nap, woke at 4:30PM, crawled blearily from bed, made a Coke float, and sat down to wait for Coffee's stream to start, battling tiny monsters in a desultory fashion, so I could use the words towards a monster without having to worry I'd be in the middle of fighting something when the stream started. I hopped into Coffee's battle room as soon as it opened, and went back to making notes for The Secret Dragon. After two hours, I had the escapade with Lyric that began this entry, and I decided to write a blog post about it. And then kept writing the blog post because I thought of more things I wanted to add. 

I'm very pleased with the progress I've made on The Secret Dragon notes today. Having to clean up and flesh out the outline probably means I won't reach my goal of "100,000 words of fiction written in November". But to be honest, if the only things I do in the rest of November are finish the draft of Be That Way and get the outline for The Secret Dragon in good shape, I will be delighted. Doubling my normal fiction output for the month was very much a stretch goal.

Also, I only have five illustrated Apothecaria entries left in the buffer, so I will need to take a break from Headlong Plunge Into Writing at some point and do that thing.

I skipped exercise today. I will probably get to it tomorrow, because I also skipped showering today and if I have to shower anyway, I might as well do some exercise first. (Skipping a shower for one day doesn't bother me too much but more than that is ugh. Actually, I am starting to feel grungy already and might shower anyway. It's 9:30PM and I dislike showering this late at night because my hair will still be wet (blow-drying it is WAY too tedious) when I go to bed and if it's still wet when I go to bed then it'll also still be went when I wake up. Bleh.

After Coffee's stream ended at 9PM, I kept writing this entry, fighting a slew of little monsters to finish a quest. Then I optimistically started a big monster. I've made good progress on it already and only need another 550-ish words to defeat it, in the next 90 minutes. No problem. I'll work on Be That Way next just so I get a little writing done for it.

...after I shower. Sigh. Wet hair here I come. (Sometimes I skip washing my hair -- it really doesn't need to be done daily -- but today it's annoying me).