The social media for dinosaurs

I am announcing a new social media site called Pterodactyl. It’s for the dinosaurs among us who wish our words could fly.

I am a technology dinosaur. If you can remember your password, this site is not for you. Passwords will be required to be a combination of abcdefg, 1234567, or password.

Instead of “tweets,” Pterodactyl will have “yacks.” Yack makes more sense than a tweet — people and pterodactyls yack, birds tweet. Actually, we don’t know if pterodactyls yack, but I invite any fact-checks.

The maximum number of characters in a yack will be 317. They are all prime numbers. They add up to a prime number, so that’s easy to remember.

Yacks will not be for marketing, they will be anti-marketing. They will promote Whirled Peas and Living in Virtual Communes. Pterodactyl will be run by an Editorial Cooperative which requires consensus on punctuation and the Oxford comma. Yacks will be approved for publication in a minimum of ten days, which is about six months faster than a literary journal. Haiku and short political poems are encouraged.

You can de-monetize your Yacks by getting paid in Virtual Commune Trading Bucks, which are only good for handmade homegrown whole food, pottery, and wall hangings woven or knotted in your Virtual Commune.

Yacks must be funny, but funny is open to interpretation since 1980, the beginning of the Reagan years. When it was morning in America. And communes IRL were dying.

Before recent Republicans sucked all the air out of the room, Reagan was the Big Tent happy uncle guy we thought about nostalgically as a B actor with a role that required real stretching.

Links are allowed to disco music.

A flying pterodactyl will need its own emojis. For example, if a flying pterodactyl must release excrement, it would bury your car, not be a white splotch in the middle of the windshield. Emoji creators, start your engines.

Virtual communes and spelling are the heart of Pterodactyl. You have to spell Pterodactyl correctly without spellcheck to be a member. You also have to find your tribe.

Unabashed capitalists who want to make a lot of money in four hours a day will find each other easily. Think Survivor teams on the island, with cut-throat partnerships based on pretending to get along. The unabashed make-money-fast entrepreneurs could call it the Shutdown, Slapdown, or Machiavelli 2.0. Pterodactyl, however, will not support links to coaching sites, newsletters, or guidebooks for Pterodactyl.

The Doobie-Doobie-Doo Virtual Commune is for social justice potheads who would be activists except the pot is so much better than it was a few decades ago. They can also have virtual sing-a-longs to American standards or the singer-songwriter songbook of the 70s. Their yacks might sound like a Cheech-and-Chong routine gone bad.

There will be a tribe for Parenting. You are barred if you know the difference between Dr. Spock and Mr. Spock. The emoji for the Parenting Tribe will be a Little Helicopter, with a companion children’s book.

A silhouetted stick figure shaking a cane will identify the Geezer site. The boomers will reminisce and join hands. Although joining hands might be seen as solidarity, it’s necessary to stand up from a sitting position.