Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 49. Sunrise is 7:18 and sunset 4:21 for 9h 02m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1791, the United States Bill of Rights becomes law when ratified by the Virginia General Assembly.
In his Platformer newsletter, Casey Newton makes predictions for 2024. He’s bolder than I am; I’ve no predictions for 2024 in Whitewater or anywhere else. Newton’s, however, seem sound, and here’s his view of Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter, X, or whatever Musk decides to call his short-form platform next:
Threads overtakes X in daily users and becomes the leading text-based social network. It’s hard to imagine how Threads could have had a better launch than it did. After its initial record growth tapered off, the app settled at close to 100 million monthly users. But Meta continued to push at an impressive pace; as of today, the company is both beginning to make good on its promise of linking Threads to the Fediverse and opening its doors to the European Union.
Over the next year, expect Meta to continue pushing Threads heavily in Instagram, leveraging the massive audience of its parent app to drive more daily usage of both. The arrival of an API will entice more publishers, public officials, emergency services, sports fans, and other holdouts to begin using the app more heavily. Threads won’t be feature-compete by next December, but it will be the social network that feels like home to most of the US media.
Bonus prediction: With Threads ascendant, Bluesky begins to wither as its development team prioritizes building its underlying protocol over growth, community management, and making improvements to the user experience.
This seems right about Threads nationally and globally. Musk’s repeated mistakes with X have pushed that platform into a long-term decline. It’s a free market, and Musk’s loss will likely prove Zuckerberg’s gain.
And look, and look: Twitter in its prime was a useful site for following journalists and newsmakers, but it had almost no influence in small towns like Whitewater. Perhaps Threads, with Facebook’s parent company Meta behind it, will develop a bigger reach into small places (as Facebook has done). Perhaps.
In the meantime, Threads looks like a solid bet for those looking for a short-form platform with a promising future.
The Original Warrior Energy Bar:
Churchkhela has been a favored snack in many countries for thousands of years. However, despite this, it is still relatively unknown to the wider world. People not familiar with the food often mistake its appearance for a whole number of things ranging from sausages to sticks of dynamite!
Naili Basiladze shows us how to make a traditional Georgian churchkhela with grapes harvested from her own vineyard. Strings of nuts are repeatedly dipped in a mixture of grape juice and flour. Once dry, the finished result is a deliciously sweet stick of churchkhela.
Churchkhela’s extremely long shelf life is a testament to its historical use. Being naturally rich in the calories found within the grape juice, it provided sustenance to Georgian soldiers who would often need to travel long distances.