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Just want to say I wish I could exalt this entire cathartic thread. Well said all of you, and highly entertaining to boot. I've learned a lot, too; I had no idea that "bramble" had sexual connotations in British English.

Regarding FB, I currently only have a pseudonymous account which I occasionally use to follow miniature-related things. I keep family / friend related stuff to emails, forums, and offline communications. (Speaking of emails, as of a few months ago, you now have to "opt out" to prevent Google from automatically scraping all your gmail emails and attachments to train their rapacious A.I. beast. Google that and you'll find plenty of articles about it, but Google somehow managed not to publicly announce the change to their gmail users. Whether or not you should care that Google is doing this I leave entirely up to you. I myself think it's just about the best thing that ever happened anywhere.)

Anyhow, I've stayed off FB for months now as my miniature fixation has waned as it periodically does according to the waxing and waning of the moon or somesuch. I'm starting to feel the old miniatures itch to see what my favorite sculptors, painters, and companies are up to again (which brought me here,) but I'm really loathe to go back to Facebook again. Unfortunately, as great as Dakka is, if I want to see what's happening lately with a bunch of smaller companies like Star Schlock, Diehard Miniatures, Bad Squiddo, Satyr Art Studio, and Crooked Dice without going to all of their individual company websites and looking for "what's new" headings, Facebook still seems like my only one-stop option. (Fortunately I can always count on Dakka to keep me well informed about Maelstrom's Edge for some strange reason that I've never been able to put my finger on. )

My family is very screen addicted, myself very much included, so we recently started a nightly one-hour "family time / no screen time" period to start trying to become human again. Going in my daughter was dead set against it, but it immediately worked wonders for all of us in ways that aren't supposed to happen outside of lame Hallmark movies. I'm strongly reminded of a South Park episode where Stan visits a Mormon kid's home (not Butters) and sees the whole family having an anachronistically pleasant time playing boardgames together. Last night me and my kids had a great game of Settlers of Catan (which had been gathering dust on the shelf for years) which wasn't livestreamed, tracked, overloaded with advertisements and bot comments, or sullied with A.I. slop. Incredible.

While I presume many of you already have healthier offline lives with your families - after all, if you're here, you're probably into tabletop games - if any of you and yours are suffering from excessive screen zombification like me and mine, I highly recommend giving a nightly shared no-screen hour a go.

I just fired off this anatomy of a facebook / youtube post and thought you folks might appreciate it. (Note: I did this independently of the current FB advertising discussion and this is not intended as some sort of oblique commentary on preceding posts here.)



I consider this the !!!! school of graphic design.

General rule of thumb: the more exclamation points, the less sincere.