Twitter Meltdown. Free-Speech Phony.

When I wrote about Elon Musk's controversial plan to charge users $8/month for Twitter Verified accounts 11 days ago I was quietly thinking to myself, "I wonder if this is the start of a Twitter meltdown." Already Twitter users were up in arms about it, with many talking about leaving the platform. But users grumbling about any social media platforms is almost as old as said social media platform. "Twitter can easily pull out of this tailspin," I told myself. "They just need to make some reasonable decisions." Then the next 11 days of ridiculous decisions happened.

• Twitter laid off half its (permanent) workforce, several thousand people


• Twitter tried to hire back critical staff it "oops" fired in its haste


• Twitter slowed or blocked access to accounts of people critical of Musk's actions, including US Representative Alexandria Occasio-Cortez


• Twitter laid off most of its considerable contractor workforce, another several thousand people


• Twitter's pay-for-checkmark implementation was so poor that it enabled a surge of fake accounts, some of which caused significant financial harm to other companies (expect lawsuits from this!)


• Musk canceled the pay-for-checkmark program


• Musk publicly fired at least one employee for publicly disagreeing with him on a factual matter


• Dozens of other employees have been fired for criticizing Musk's actions, either on public Twitter or in internal Twitter forums.

Specifically with respect to the AOC situation and firings, Musk, who's prided himself a "Free speech absolutist", is proving what a transparent lie that is. He's a thin-skinned tyrant.

Taken altogether these missteps show an enormous breach of trust— with advertisers, who are the source of revenue; with users, whom those advertisers pay for; and with employees, who develop, operate, and maintain the platform. Twitter appears to be in full meltdown right now.

Got S8E3: The Long Night, The Big Battle

In Game of Thrones S8E3, "The Long Night", we see the battle for the world. The surviving members of most of the northern houses, allied with Queen Daenerys and her Dothraki horde and Unsullied troops, assemble at Winterfell to meet the onslaught of the Night King's army of the dead, possibly 1,00,000 strong.



Seeing how season 7 ended with two major battles to resolve— the battle against the dead, and the battle against Cersei for control of Westeros— I knew that series 8, with just 6 episodes, would have to move quickly to finish the series. Thus I wasn't surprised that this climactic battle arrived in just the 3rd episode.

On the whole I really liked this episode. It's the longest of the series with a run time of 82 minutes, and it's pretty much all battle. That's long. Even epic movie battles are half that. For example, the Battle at Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the longest set-piece battle in movie history, clocked in at just 40 minutes. The showrunners of Game of Thrones keep it from dragging by focusing on the the experiences of a limited number of characters such as Jon Snow, Arya Stark, and Bran Stark. We see threads of the story more or less through their eyes. While there are a lot of other first-person characters in the episode (Danerys, Tyrion, Sansa, Brienne, Jaime, Sam, Sandor, et. al.) they have short viewpoint scenes. We mostly see them as they intersect with the episode's main through-lines.

While this episode had the highest viewership ratings of the series and also the HBO network as a whole when it aired in 2019, with nearly 18 million overnight viewers, it also attracted a lot of fan criticism. It seems fans were unhappy primarily with two things. One was a technical matter: the visuals are very dark, making it hard to see what's happening in action sequences.



The fans are right... though I'll note that this was not a new problem with this particular episode. It's been a problem across many episodes of Game of Thrones that critical scenes are under-lit, rendering the visuals murky and confusing as to what's happening. As a note, I've adjusted the levels and contrast in the pictures above to make them more vivid. (Do you see how the Night King's eyes really "pop"? Simple Photoshop trick.)

In other productions, particularly in movies, filmmakers use extra lighting in low-light scenes so the visuals show better. There's a story— and perhaps it's apocryphal— that one of the lead actors in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers challenged a director on where all the light at the Battle of Helm's Deep (mentioned above) was supposed to be coming from, as the battle took place in the dark and rain. The director shot back, "The light comes from the same place as the theme music."

The second major fan frustration involves who defeats the Night King. This is a major episode spoiler; find it after the cut.

( How the battle is won— and why I liked it )