How I feel about the TT ban.

Also, did you know Richard Bachman was Stephen King?

I signed into TikTok like majority of America this morning and realized that the TikTok ban was in fact real. (I forgot to take a screenshot of it before I deleted the app so I google searched what it looked like when you tried accessing the app)

Source Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/91263621/tiktok-ban-in-effect-the-app-goes-dark-for-millions-in-the-u-s-and-removed-from-app-stores

I’m not writing this as if I’m surprised. They’ve been announcing it for the last year that it was going to happen. What made it a “surprise” is the wishy-washy headlines from the last from days.

Some headlines were saying that it (the ban) for sure was going to happen on the 19th (today) while some were saying (and had proof, verbatim, people in office saying…) that after careful consideration ( realizing Americans were jumping ship to an even more obvious Chinese TikTok clone named RedNote [or little red book]) that the ban will be postponed for an extra 270 days.

This last week has been very confusing to say the least.

But it happened and here we are today.

Why was it being banned?

In short - Money.

In slightly more words - Money money money money money

Money the government couldn’t take from their people themselves, anyway. They (The Gov) said it was for the “safety” of Americans and their privacy. They didn’t want foreign nations to have such important, sensitive, valuable, thicc, delicious data. They didn’t want the “enemy” to use that data for nefarious purposes; so to combat that, they told the owners of TT to sell to an American company so that all that data stealing can at least happen on good ol’ yeehaw soil.

How Do I feel about it?

I’m sad to see it go (for the moment, it could pop back up within the week). I’m sad only because I was making a descent following on the platform. Unlike other platforms, IG or Youtube, growing organically came semi-easy on TT. IG is soft core porn at this point and Youtube, as much as they try isn’t great to grow on.

Anyway, I hate to see TT go but I’m kinda of happy as well. TT is a great platform for Content creation but at the same time - it’s too good and you’ll (me) get sucked into the algorithm and 2, 3, 10 scrolls become 100 without realizing. I’ll lose hours by accident on that thing. So, it being gone forces me to focus on my non-social media goals finally. I know, pretty pathetic that I can’t just simply use self-discipline and not get sucked into it but HEY what can you do.

I read through 7 books in 2024 but they were all on my kindle. For some reason I can’t as an adult get through a physical book BUT if I buy the kindle version, I fly through it. I like to think It has something to do with the endless scrolling I do.

So, one of my goals this year is to tackle at least 3 physical books….so why not attack a book that’s damn near 900 pages as my first one (Dune)?

(End of post, I’m just yapping now)

I learned yesterday while I was at Half Priced Books that Richard Bachman is Stephen King.

I own and half way read through “The regulators”. I’m enjoying it. When I first picked it up I had no knowledge of either the story or the author. If I remember correctly, in the beginning of “The regulators” It said something like Richard was dead and his wife wrote it using a manuscript AND I BELIEVED IT LIKE A FOOL. I was like ‘oh, I like his writing style….too bad he’s dead’ just to find out yesterday, while looking through horror I see the spine of the book “Desperation” and it has the same font as Regulators “Weird” I thought. When I picked it up and look at the back, the back of “desperation” had a cut out that had the exact same cover as “Regulators” and Vice-versa with the “regulators” back cover having the cover for “Desperation” (Side note: I’ve never read any Stephen King books so I wasn’t aware of his Mirror universe storytelling).

One google search later, ITS THE SAME DOGGONE PERSON.

Why do I feel kind of betrayed? lol

Pretty cool thing to find out but according to reddit I started the “bad” one first. Oh well.