Source: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/conceal/

Something that I always found funny is people’s dedication to going back and concealing stuff they’ve al­ready put on the Internet.

On multiple occasions, I’ve seen people I know apply for a job, and hide or delete as much content on their social medias as possible so their prospective employer can’t figure out information from their past. This prac­tice has become so common that I expect people with hidden social media histories to automatically have a disadvantage, simply because their employer would probably assume they went back and hid every­thing, because they had something to hide.

I’ve actually personally chosen not to hire people almost solely based off their lack of social media history. Not only is it a bit suspicious, but in the Internet and entertainment industry, a solid social media presence (or at least a solid understanding of social media) is pretty important.

I personally have never really had a problem with concealing stuff I’ve put on the Internet. Apart from going back and deleting accounts off gaming fansites that I made when I was 10 years old and acted like an imbecile, I’ve never really regretted anything I’ve posted, simply because I’m such a cautious and calculated person.

It might just be that I started taking the Internet very seriously starting from a very young age, and I became familiar with reputation management when I was first starting to produce content. Every time I post something online, I think about how people will react to it, and how I will react to it in a few years, and this process seemed to help me quite a bit.

The problem for me actually goes the other way around – I’m not trying to hide anything that I posted in the past, but rather, stuff that other people might post about me that is false or misleading. Although I haven’t really had this problem go out of control, there have still been multiple attempts in the past for people to make things up about me, or impersonate me and pretend like they’re me making a statement.

Having an official website as a central hub to all my content has helped mitigate any damage that might’ve possibly caused. I tag in the URL to my website pretty much everywhere I post, and it’s very clear that my own website is important enough to me that I would post anything important or official directly on here. This has also become clear to most of the people who know me, so if there’s anything with questionable validity, they usually come here to check for the facts.

Overall, reputation management can be a difficult thing, especially if you haven’t really been thinking about it, something bad already happened, and you’re trying to backtrack and fix things. However, if you always keep it in the back of your mind and change your approach to posting on the Internet, it really isn’t that difficult, and with time, it comes naturally.

Source: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/edge/

When I see the word “edge,” I think of “edgy,” which means to be uneasy or nervous about something.

Then, I think about how words change over the years, and how edgy is now used in pop culture to mean some­thing that is trendy or cool. I’ve seen it used more negatively than positively, where young children are edgy when they think they’re cool, but they’re actually not, and they’re just falling victim to marketing strat­e­gies that make them think they’re being cool.

Seeing as I’m pretty involved in the gaming culture, I most often hear this word being said by Twitch chat in the few moments I have to read it before I navigate through my settings to turn it off. I also hear other words, like “salty,” being used in ways the word was not intended.

Being salty, even in the informal sense, means to be tough and aggressive. Salty does not mean to be upset or resentful. There is another proper word for that, and that word is “sour.”

I absolutely hate that, for whatever reason, Twitch chat decided to change the meaning of a word to mean something it does not. It continues to boggle my mind that so little people know the true meaning of English words that everyone is willing to hop onto the bandwagon and say people are salty when they’re actually being sour.

Sure, I’m in support for the evolution of language. Words can change meaning over time, based off shifts in culture. But, when one word changes in meaning to mean something else – a “something else” that was already perfectly described by a different word – then we start having problems. That is no longer evolution of language, that is being stupid and not calling out other people who are being stupid.

Another thing that Twitch chat seems to have birthed is placing the United States dollar sign on the wrong side of the numeral. Monetary values are written $1.00, not 1.00$. Infants learn this in elementary school. It confuses me out of my mind that adults are getting this mixed up.

I’ve heard absurd arguments where the dollar sign was put at the end of the numeral because it prevents people from adding extra numbers to the end of your value to increase it. Take a few seconds to think about how stupid and invalid of an excuse that is.

If you write a check for 1.00$, I can change that to 11.00$, or if I’m infuriated at your stupidity and want to make you go bankrupt, 9,999,991.00$.

If you write a check for $1, then sure, I can add a bunch of zeroes at the end of the 1 and make myself a billionaire. That’s why you use both halves of your brain and write the check for $1.00, so any additional numbers I add at the end are fractions of a cent, and you don’t have to foreclose your house to pay me.

Yet, I’ve seen people continue to put the US dollar sign after the number. That is incorrect. Stop.

I continue to see people using the word “salty” to mean “sour.”

That is incorrect.

Stop.

And, because I know this is coming … no, I’m not being salty right now. I’m being sour.