Social Media

It was a day of pondering. There were various platforms where Undefined Label and the brains could be announced, but they had already been announced on them when the site was in its infancy. I had an ace up my sleeve, however. It was something unique that had not been done to my knowledge, and that was Undefined Linux, an entire operating system I had derived from Debian 11 which could be run on a virtual machine on a computer or booted from a USB thumb drive.

It may seem like a novelty, but it was an aesthetic experience of schizophrenia, noise music, drone music, and Crystalbrain's visual art, along with an insane background developed by one of the brains. It had a minimal set of software for experiencing the content, and an outdated Wikipedia page on schizophrenia. The operating system was distributed as an ISO image file. It used only free, open source software, and had all of the music we had created. It was a little scrappy but I was still impressed by it.

I frowned at the idea of announcing it on Twitter. Twitter was definitely the place to go if I wanted to announce it to the most people, but it was not a place I liked. For one, it was run by the completely tone-deaf Elon Musk, who was as pretentious and deplorable as he was bad in his business decisions. It was a wonder to me that the richest man on Earth could so utterly mismanage a company, but it was indeed possible, because he did. While droves of people were leaving Twitter, it was still being used by many. I winced at the idea of using the platform.

There was always Tumblr, the blogging platform which seemed to cater to a more educated clientele than myself. I already had a Tumblr page, and I logged into it.

"You better make damn sure you play up the fact that you're in a disadvantaged group," said Crystalbrain.

"Why is that?" I asked.

"Tumblr people like disadvantaged groups. They form little cliques based on them and use academic neologisms to defend them. It's OK, it's needed," Crystalbrain said.

"Why is it needed?" I asked.

"Because we rolled back social progress quite a bit, Reagan and I. Yes, he had a hard, hard, hard-on for that kind of thing. Draining money from social programs, increasing militarization. Letting the CIA smuggle cocaine where it would be sold in ghettos, and it hasn't gotten much better since," said Crystalbrain.

"OK, I get the picture. I'll be sure to play to my audience," I said.

"You might really want to consider Twitter," said Crystalbrain.

"I...hate Twitter," I replied.

"Yes, but there's so many people for us brains to sink our teeth into. It could be a neat venue to spread the word about Undefined Linux, you know," he said.

"It would leave a really bad taste in my mouth," I said.

"Yes, maybe it would," said Crystalbrain.

He continued, "You know, it would leave you wondering what could have been if you don't utilize it, though."

"OK, I suppose you're right. But wait a minute. You have a Twitter account, but Undefined Label does not. It took a lot of finagling to get that account for you. Do I really have to go through the shit where I get the anonymous phone number again? That cost money, you know, and I don't know if my phone can be reactivated. It was quite the pain in the neck. Hopefully, it just requires me to get a new card from the store and put some time into it," I said.

"Yes, maybe that's all there is to it. Or maybe there's more. I won't tell," Crystalbrain said.

"You won't tell?" I said.

"Nope, I won't tell," said Crystalbrain.