The Week In A Bad Education Towers #44

Hello you! This week I have been mainly refreshing the Steam Deck store page trying to buy one of the damn things. Have I been successful? Find out later in the newsletter! But you can probably already guess the answer.

Not been to the cinema this week, but thats fine because next week is my birthday week and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE DEAD RECKONING comes out on that very day.

I am vibrating.

So if you're someone with any kind of social media profile you're probably bored of all this by now; Meta aka Facebook aka Zuck's Piggy Bank launched Threads, its conversation app linked to Instagram. And, Twitter currently having levelled up from a dumpster fire to one of those terrible Christmas fairs that wants you to pay to see the dumpster fire, people flocked to it.

I mean, there are reasons for that, the reason being if you had an Instagram profile then you already had a Threads profile so theres a head start right there. And I do have an Instagram, not that I use it that much at the moment because of how annoying the timeline is.

Bodes well for Threads then! But I tried it anyway, and you know what? So far its not bad.

Its a bit barebones at the moment; there's no hashtags, no DM system, you can't even search for a thread or a tweet or whatever they're called on there. The timeline looks chronological but its full of suggested threads, which initially was a big turn off. But, once I followed more people that improved. And it helped that a chunk of of folks from Twitter made the jump as well. Thats always been the problem, if people have moved then its only been a few so you always had to keep one foot in the Twitter swamp.

This feels like it might actually be the one; with the Instagram connection Threads can scale up to a large number of profiles quickly which none of the other competitors have been able to do: Hive seemed like a good bet, but then they had to close down for several months which chopped the legs off it; Mastadon was the other option and had a spike at the end of last year but the onboarding is so bad that it wasn't able to retain in most of those users; if Bluesky had opened the doors last weekend rather than closing down invites then who knows what would have happened.

Yes, its swapping one billionaire's plaything for another but so far its a much better place to be. It needs a lot of work to get things where they need to be (third party apps would be amazing but doubt they'll happen any time soon) but anything that makes Musk look bad is a good thing, right?

A Steam Deck sale! It ends just before my next payday which isn't ideal but there's enough I've saved up to get the model I want; finally settled on the 64gb version, then at some point I'll buy a new SSD, like a 1tb model, and stick that in the Deck so will get double the storage of the highest cost version for under the price of the middle tier version. A fine plan!

Not in stock.

From all accounts in was in stock when the sale first dropped but quickly ran dry and has been out of stock for the majority of the time since. Allegedly it comes into stock every now and then but vanished before people can finish their purchase so clearly there's scalpers armed with a fistful of bots that are hoovering up all the stock.

Very annoying. Especially as there's no pre-order option, so its out of stock with a big AHM ON SALE sign above it which just magnifies the frustration.

Well done Steam, well done.

Just the one video this week:

Now, I wasn't sure about the shorter scripted videos so went back to the longer shoot from the hip style but now I'm not so sure? Shorter videos do help with engagement in the old algorithm so might go back to those, maybe? Who knows. Have a few in the bag queued up so have a bit more time to think.

And the next Conquistabores will be recorded this week, so that'll be a fun post birthday treat.

I think we're done for this week, going to go sort out lunch for the youngest and then who knows? Maybe play some video games, but I'll probably end up hoovering or something. A fine sunday!

Anyways, bye!