So after I somehow reactivated Facebook I looked at it for a little bit. It seemed sterile. It seemed like a place I had no reason to inhabit. I have far too many “friends”, having maxed out at 5,000 a long time ago. But it’s not the quantity of friends that overwhelms. It’s the banality of things. Everybody is trying to be like everybody else, making themselves look happier and more exciting they could possibly be, and using the platform for what it is: A way to make yourself think you are a celebrity in a world of microcelebrity, and a way to make people think your life is more awesome than it is.

I have always hated Twitter, even as it has helped bring my street theater to millions. I shouldn’t say hate. I don’t hate anything. But I find I just do not fit into that vessel, however it is supposed to work. Everybody is talking to everybody and that makes no sense to me. The same is true of Facebook but I felt at some point at least that I was in the right place. I don’t think that way anymore.

I should give up on the Payphone Project Facebook page, which has over 6,000 followers. I should unplug the content portion of the payphone website, which is read by virtually no one now except the people at Intersection, the company behind those stupidass smart city kiosks. I don’t know when or even if I’m going to connect with that Gothamist reporter but until then I’m laying off the street theater, this to avoid potential logistical snafus. Snafii? Snafæ? But the weather’s been sucking ass of late anyway, as per today’s rain and earlier cold.

I’ve taken a concrete step toward making the radio streams public. Or rather I’ve taken a better step in that direction. After deciding it was hopeless for me to try and parse Shoutcast headers and such I purchased an HTML5 Shoutcast/playlist player from a Romanian programmer. This was through Envato/Codecanyon after maybe a little too much comparison shopping. I’ve come to distrust the world of WordPress premium plugin and themes, or standalone programs like the one I just bought. So many of them simply do not do what their programmers say they will do, or else they do them so poorly as to be worthless. The reviews are frequently suspicious, sometimes almost certainly fake. But I had enough confidence in this Romanian dude to go ahead with it. It was only $19 but it’s not about the money, it’s about the time spent wrestling with these fucking things to make them work. So far I got it to at least play my main Shoutcast stream, so there’s a win, and it looks like I’ll be able to put all my stations onto one page, should I so desire. I should be able to encrypt the URL of the stream, which I did not expect.