Twitter

Okay, I know that I’ve been promising to do a post about Reddit for a while now, and it keeps getting bumped for other stuff. But today, I’ve decided that I’m finally going to take some time and talk about… Twitter. (Sorry, Reddit. I’ll get to you someday. Probably.) 

[I’ll mention below that I started writing this post almost a week ago. But then I spent several days writing absolutely nothing and was once again looking at an unfinished post here on Sunday. Which is why this post says it should have been on time but was actually late.]

A Sinking Ship?

So, are any of the people reading this blog post on Twitter? Or I suppose the more accurate question would be are any of you still on Twitter?

Today is November 13^th, for those of you reading this. But for me, sitting here writing this, it’s only November 8^th. And I’m wondering if trying to write this post nearly a week ahead of its publication on the blog is wise. How much is Twitter going to change in the next week? Quite probably a lot.

Elon Musk has owned Twitter for thirteen days now, and the changes started almost immediately. The firing of the top three execs, followed by the firing of half of Twitter’s employees. Mass reinstatements of once permanently banned accounts. Mass exodus of pissed off users. Sizable uptick in hate speech. Institution of an $8.00 a month charge for identity verification. (That no longer actually verifies your identity.) A promise made to investors that the tweets of the unverified will be buried far beneath the tweets of the verified. Permanently banning people for making fun of him (after claiming to have purchased the site to guarantee free speech). Rumors about putting the entire site behind a paywall.

Okay. I’m just going to take a deep breath now and then write the post that I’d been planning to write before the whole Elon Musk takeover happened.

Twitter and I

I signed up for my Twitter account on February 4^th, 2009. My first tweet was: Sending out my first tweet to nobody in particular as it’s – you know – my first tweet and all. Yikes. I’m on twitter.

When I signed up, it was one of those periods of time when I had no actual internet access of my own. In order to go online I was walking up to the Mt. Angel Abbey several times a week and using the internet in their library. (Yes, using the internet in the library of a Catholic seminary to upload posts to my sex blog. That’s not strange, is it?) Anyway, I signed up for Twitter there, and then did the majority of my tweeting from my celphone at home.

Early on, I wasn’t following a lot of people. And the number of people following me was even less. But I still tended to tweet as if I had a large audience that was very interested in what I had to say.

In the beginning, my Twitter use was primarily just posting links to my current blog entry. Although about a month in, I attended a convention in Portland that I live-tweeted from a bunch.

It wasn’t very long after joining Twitter that my brother changed phone carriers and was no longer supplying me with my celphone. Which meant that going up to the Abbey library meant uploading a day’s worth of at-home tweets to the site all at once from my flash drive.

Eventually I got a new celphone, courtesy of my sister. And then came a day (a long time later) when I finally got internet again.

Currently, Twitter is where I get a lot of my news from. (Strange, but true. I don’t tend to read a lot of the usual news and information sites.) It’s a source of news, it’s a source of entertainment. It is many things to many people.

A Steady Flow of Nonsense

Aside from links to blog posts, you may be wondering what sort of things I tweet. So I have decided to include a sampling of my wit and wisdom from Twitter here for your amusement and/or sheer befuddlement.

Mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and undead lambs eat brai-ai-ai-ai-ains... brai-ai-ai-ai-ains...

I swear, I’d lose my hat if it wasn’t attached. Wait a minute . . . my hat isn’t attached. Where the—ohh!. I’ve lost my hat.

If I were to start writing reviews of restaurants & food products using an alias, would my by-line be an example of a nom nom nom de plume?

No fish in the pond, so I cast out a line over the other side of the fence & reeled in a horse. Cops got me for horsing w/out a license.

Why is it that we can put a man on the moon, but we can't put a lampshade on the sun?

Ooh ooh ooh ooh uh uhr uhr uhr uhr uhr uhr uhr aghr! aghr! aghr! (Practicing my 'monkey')

What the deuce? The goose is on the loose, shouting ‘Vamoose!’? And the moose is in the noose for drinking the juice? Oh, almighty Zeus!

((Oh, (no)! Someone (left (the (punctuation) cage) unlocked), and (now) all (of the) pare(nthes)es have escaped!))

Just received word that an imaginary friend died in a tragic paper airplane crash. Sad. :(

Does anyone else occasionally wonder what it sounds like when Tarzan gargles, or is it just me?

Much like the Sandpeople, I ride single file to hide my number.

I'm going to put chocolate coins on my eyes, so that Charon the Ferryman has to take me to Candyland.

What do you call a reptile that goes up and down? An elegator! (I swear, there's gotta be something wrong with my brain.)

If I had a tiny little horse, I would feed it bales of Shredded Wheat.

It's widely accepted that there's always room for Jello, but you rarely ever hear anyone state that there's room for a gelatinous cube.

Behold, my witty banter! (Insert witty banter here)

I just sneezed so hard my skeleton flew out my nose. Now it's dancing around 'outside' while the rest of my bulk collapses in on itself.

I was in the produce dept of the grocery store today when i realized that carrots don't have nostrils. How the heck do snowmen breathe?

The turkey is the evolutionary missing link between the turtle and the monkey.

How many nuns could a nunchuck chuck if a nunchuck could chuck nuns?

Man vs can of soup. A fight to the death. The winner gets to feast upon the corpse of the loser. Wish me luck.

THREW MY BACK OUT. STOP. STUCK WITH ONLY WESTERNS TO READ. STOP. GENRE COLORING PERCEPTIONS. STOP. HAVE MISTAKEN TWITTER FOR TELEGRAPH. END.

Why is the spokesperson for Cheetos a cartoon cheetah and not a fat guy with orange fingertips?

Half-full? Half-empty? Fuck. My glass is half missing. And, of course, it's the useful bottom half that's gone.

If i've got 2 slices of bread, then anything is a potential sandwich. That's right. Anything.

If they start making blubber flavor Skittles, will the ad campaign be "Taste the Walrus!"?

Goldilocks became a cardiologist, and she operated on the Grinch 2x. Once she said his heart was 'too small', later, 'too big'. Picky bitch.

Someone should do some fan-art merging the classic TV series "M*A*S*H" with Pixar's "Up". Just so that there exists a M*A*S*H/Up Mash-up.

Are the bricks used to build 'a brick shithouse' the same as the ones produced when you 'shit a brick'?

You know what would make William Shatner 100% better? If his hairpiece was made out of the trimmings from Jonathan Frakes' beard.

Skeleton, how are you sitting down? Skeletons don't have butts!

"Raygun Battle" (a haiku) - Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew! | Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew! | Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew!

If I know I'm about to die, and have my wits about me, I think I want my final words to be: "Stay tuned for scenes from our next episode."

Crazy honking monkeys are the honkingest of all the crazy monkeys

I wonder if the e-books that I'm reading are made from virtual trees, or virtual hemp?

If you aren't rich and successful, and your wife is kind of plain looking, can you refer to her as a participation trophy wife? Just curious.

Inside of you are two wolves. And you're now looking to eat a third. When are you going to admit to yourself that you have a problem?

My most profound tweet ever was: Honesty is NOT the best policy. The best policy is free shipping. (I've seen them both in action, and free shipping beats honesty easily.)

Since it is currently mid-November, this story seems somewhat appropriate. On Thanksgiving of 2010, I sent the following tweets from my phone:

Happy Thanksgiving, Twitterverse!

Or happy turkey day, if you prefer. (Happy Thursgiving?)

Quoth my brother, "Happy Smallpox-Infected Blanket Day!"

And, of course, happy birthday to @pepper_darling & johnny dirtnap (not his real name)

Happy spanksgiving to everyone who thinks the proper anatomical term for the buttocks is 'gluteous masochist'

Happy planksgiving to all the insubordinate pirates out there. Arr!

Happy wanksgiving to all the chronic and/or compulsive masturbators! (hey, that's me!)

Happy clanksgiving to all the robots! "Beep, whirr, click! GRIND!!"

Happy ranksgiving to everyone currently sitting on a military promotions board!

Happy tanksgiving to anyone driving an armored battle vehicle! (also to tropical fish)

Happy Franksgiving to all the shambling abominations constructed from dead body parts!

Happy shanksgiving to everyone armed with improvised stabbers!

Happy yanksgiving to the civil war era northerners!

Happy Hanksgiving to Tom Hanks and his fans

Happy tranqsgiving to everyone doped up on tranquilisers! (i wonder if tryptophan counts?)

Happy flanksgiving to everyone attacking the side from behind

Happy banksgiving to our nation's financial institutions!

Happy stanksgiving to...wait-what is that smell? Ew!

Happy pranksgiving! (no, wait, thats april 1st. Never mind.)

(Believe it or not, i've actually got more of this stuff. But my fingertips hurt from all this tweeting, so i'm done now.)

(which is probably what you're thankful for)

I’ve also tweeted about stuff like medical mishaps and hospitalizations (my own and those of other people), karaoke episodes, trips to and from Portland, and other miscellaneous things.

There was an ongoing series of tweets about me receiving calls and texts for a woman named Ashley who apparently had my current phone number before I did. This started back in 2010 and continues to this day. I strongly suspect that she’s giving her old number out to people she doesn’t want to hear from.

For a long (long, long) while I would post every night before I went to sleep, usually a really weird sleep-related post that ended with “Zzzzz…”

And, of course, there was the night (that horrible, horrible night) where I decided to tweet the lyrics to 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. One verse per tweet. I stopped at 49 bottles because my fingers were cramped up from all the tweeting. Nobody ever mentioned it, but I suspect that the people following me might have been irked that night.

An On-Again / Off-Again Relationship

My Twitter use hasn’t been consistent since signing up. I tend to read and/or post there in stretches. There will be long periods of time where I’m on Twitter multiple times a day. Other times I’ll go weeks or months (or in one case, several years) where I’ll completely ignore/forget the fact that I’m even on Twitter.

Twitter tends to be a huge part of my life during the times that I’m actively using it. And when I’m not, it simply isn’t. How I can go from not being able to even imagine not using it to simply not using it, I do not understand.

Blogvertising

Currently, in addition to the normal steady flow of nonsense, I’m using Twitter a lot for posting links to this blog. Every time I post a new piece to the blog, I post a link to it here. (Also over on Facebook.) And in the beginning, that’s pretty much all of the Blogvertising that I’d do.

Occasionally, I’d post links at other places. If it was a LEGO-oriented post, I’d put a link in the PortLUG message group. I’ve had mixed success dropping links to specific posts in what seem like they would be topic-receptive subreddits.

But recently, I have found the twitter writer’s community. And the subset of that community that sponsors the #writerslift. Writer’s lifts are posts where you comment a link to your book or website or (in my case) current blog post. Then you repost the original post you commented on (which I have been sadly remiss in doing as often as I should be, something I hope to rectify in the future), to help spread the word. Post your link in enough writer’s lifts each day, and suddenly you get a lot more people looking at your product.

Since I’ve started participating in writer’s lifts (which has been a couple of weeks now) the number of views that the blog gets has jumped substantially. I’ve been getting anywhere from 150 to 300 views per post. Might not seem like much compared to the numbers generated by bigger name bloggers, but considering that my estimate is that I have between 12 and 20 regular readers (and that number includes both my sister and my aunt), that many extra views are substantial.

[While I’m thinking about it… If you read this post or indeed any of my posts and enjoy them, please feel free to spread the word about Writer’s Blo(g/ck) to any of your friends you think might be interested in reading what I write. Friends, relatives, heck even your enemies. I’m not picky right now.]

Unused (By Me, Anyway) Potential

I’m sure that there are a lot of possible uses for Twitter that I’ve never gotten around to. But I know there is one in particular that I probably should have fiddled around with, and just never have.

Twitterature. Works of original fiction where Twitter is the medium.

Either very, very, very short stories (originally 140, currently 280 characters long – not words, characters), or longer stories (novels, even) that are serialized in tweet-sized chunks.

As somebody with a (currently twenty-five year old) writer’s block, it surprises me that Twitterature isn’t something that I’ve attempted yet. It’s not something I ever think about, and when outlining this post I had to stop and think, “Oh yeah, that exists, doesn’t it? Huh.”

Assuming that Twitter survives its current change-of-ownership ordeal, this is something that I may have to make an attempt at soon.

Who I Follow

Right now, I’m following just under 300 people. (And being followed by just over 300 people. I’ve never really sought out followers just for the sake of having a high follower count before, but now that I’m using Twitter for blogvertising, I may have to change my thinking on that.)

The first person I ever followed on Twitter was my friend Theresa Reed, aka “Darklady”. I have other friends, acquaintances and family members that I follow, but most of them post hardly ever, if at all.

I follow the official LEGO account, along with a bunch of LEGO fan groups, conventions, and news accounts.

I follow several members of the (now apparently defunct) C-Team streamed D&D game set in the Acquisitions Incorporated Universe. I also follow most of the players from another streamed D&D game from that same universe that my brother-in-law played in.

There are, of course, several Muppets that I follow. Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster, and the Electric Mayhem. Also the Jim Henson Company (yeah, I know they aren’t Muppets, but I felt like they should be listed in this same category).

As I was putting this section together, I realized that I’m following surprisingly few musicians/groups. The only ones I noticed in my ‘following’ list were They Might Be Giants and “Weird Al” Yankovic. May have to add some more soon.

Once the news about the Max Headroom revival broke (which, coincidentally, I initially learned about on Twitter), I immediately started following the creative entities involved: Christopher Cantwell, Elijah Wood, SpectreVision, and AMC-TV.

I’ve been starting to follow some people in the chronic illness/disabled community. Partly because I’m one of them, partly because (as is the case for a lot of my more recent follows) I’m planning to write a blog post that could use their input.

I’ve started following a lot of artists who do work on commission. (Starting with Clau, who has drawn two pieces for me, one of which I’ve already included in a blog post, the other of which is scheduled for a blog post coming up in December.)

There’s also the expected group of clownettes/clown girls on my Twitter feed. Pretty much everyone that there were pictures of in my post on Coulrophilia, along with a handful of others.

Being a geek/nerd, I follow accounts (both official and fan-based) for Doctor Who, Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like.

I also follow a bunch of comic book people, both writers and artists. Mike Baron and Steve Rude were obvious choices because I’m a huge Nexus fan (Badger too). Dan Slott (longtime Spider-Man writer, among others). Kevin Maguire (who drew my all-time favorite Batgirl story). Fetish artist Scott Blair. I followed Warren Ellis, but he doesn’t seem to post on Twitter any more. Also Darrick Robertson (Ellis’ artist/collaborator on Transmetropolitan). Nicola Scott, who was one of the artists on Secret Six.

And speaking of Secret Six, I also follow Gail Simone…

Well Of Course Gail Simone Gets Her Own Subheading

Gail Simone. She’s one of my favorite comic book writers. (Definitely in the top five, but probably in a several-person-tie for first place.) Her Secret Six run (Villains United miniseries, Secret Six miniseries, a story-arc in Birds of Prey, and an ongoing Secret Six series, followed by another series after a DC Universe reboot) is one of my all-time favorite comic book series.

But in addition to writing for comics (and TV, movies, video games, and the like), she is also on Twitter. And when Gail Simone tweets, all Hell breaks loose.

Let me tell you a little bit about Gail Simone, the Queen of all Twitter. First of all, she’s a bear. (No, not a large hairy gay man. I’m talking about the actual animal.) The reason you can tell that she’s a bear is by how often she denies being a bear. (I have absolutely no idea why she’s so frequently accused of being a bear, and assume it was something that happened during one of my off-again periods of Twitter usage.)

She has a plethora of imaginary blood feuds with other people on Twitter. Sci-Fi author John Scalzi, Batman voice actor Diedrich Bader, WWE Superstar John Cena, several of her fellow comic writers, and who knows who all else. (Even she has admitted that she cannot keep track of all of her blood feuds.)

When she is unsure of the veracity of a claim, she asks her followers if that claim is “FAKEY OR A TRUE”.

She insists that the British make their tea using a microwave. That Australians drink nothing but Foster’s Beer. And that the products of Canadian donut merchant Tim Hortons are horrible. In other words, she trolls entire countries.

She also trolls things that aren’t countries. People, I guess you’d call them. She makes these claims about comic book characters that are blatantly untrue. (Most famously that Cyclops has heat vision instead of concussive blasts that come from his eyes.) Her followers know that she’s merely shitposting for reactions. But die-hard comic fanboys who are unfamiliar with her sense of humor immediately jump into the thread to A.) Correct her, and B.) Mock her for being a comic writer who doesn’t know these things already.

I started following Gail so that I could ask some of the questions I had about Secret Six. I stayed for the shitposting.

Earlier this year, I tweeted an accusation of her having gone down to Mexico to get black market butt implants from unethical surgeons who didn’t care that there were laws about putting those sorts of things into bears. And then a few days later, I made the accusation again. And I kept making that accusation. I still occasionally make that accusation, but she has yet to refute this claim. Which I take to mean that it’s a TRUE rather than a FAKEY.

And since she is a redhead who is always maligning the character of Cyclops (who is notedly attracted to redheads), I put two and two together one day and realized that her dislike of Cyclops is due to the fact that he is her ex-boyfriend. They used to date. I haven’t been able to get the hashtag #GailDatedCyclops trending yet, but I have faith that I someday will.

One day back in September, Gail tweeted out I really like you people. I tweeted back Even me?, expecting no reply. But she replied. Very much you. And then, later that afternoon, I got a notification that Gail Simone was now following me on Twitter. Which is, thus far, my greatest Twitter accomplishment.

My Most Popular Tweet

Comedienne Tig Notaro (who you might know better as Jett Reno from Star Trek—Discovery) has a Twitter account, although she herself isn’t the one who tweets from it. Unnamed friends of hers from the comedy community take turns tweeting on her behalf while she’s busy touring and whatnot.

Anyway, one day this is tweeted from Tig’s account: One time my gynecologist was like “you need to pee” and I was like “no I’m good” and he was like “I have a camera inside you and I can see that you need to pee” and it turns out he was right so that definitely feels like a step backwards for feminism.

Well, me being my usual smartass self, I hit reply and typed in: That’s a real weird story for you to be telling right now, because – and I’m sorry to have to tell you this – you have to pee again now.

That reply to Tig’s tweet got me 804 likes. (Again, not that many compared to larger name tweeters, but I was still impressed with the number.)

Anyway, this post is now five hours late (according to my obsessive-compulsive schedule), and I still have to proofread and upload the thing, so this is where I leave you.