One of those was the only Twitter meme I've ever participated in. And very successfully!
I continue to fail to see the appeal of Twitter.
There was an unfogged thread that could have been a twitter meme. Actually, I'm not twitter-involved enough to have seen a twitter meme.
Then you probably wouldn't be amused by history's greatest lexicographer either.
Why call yourself by an 18th century person's real name when all you do is try to imitate the spelling? Also, there's the one letter movie meme. Tristam Shanty.
It's true that the twitter-Johnson isn't well done.
Actually, I'm not twitter-involved enough to have seen a twitter meme.
Apparently we don't know what we're missing.
#Oneletteroffmovies remind me of my college improv group's fake movie posters, my favorite of which was "Stench and Stenchibility".
Twitter-Johnson is silly, not least because Johnson was almost single-handedly responsible for the regularization of spelling toward current norms. He certainly did not employ that Zippy-like th'.
I endorse comment 3. Seems like the medium for people who find Facebook status updates to be overly heavy reading.
{dramatic swell of music} Twitter.... is made of STUPID.
max
['Morrrrrreeeee brrrraaaaaiiiiinnnnnsssss. Wwwwwaaaaiiiittttt. Noooooo bbbbbrrrraaaaaiiiiinnnnns!']
Oh wow. Page after page of people changing "day" to "gay" and thinking it's hilarious.
people changing "day" "gay" to "gay"
AH HA HA HA HA HA!
4 cracked me up - possibly the first thing I've seen on Twitter that caused me to think there might be something worthwhile about that medium.
My favorite was "Se8en". Retweeted by John Hodgman, which is like getting a link from a major blogger. "Planet of the Apus", sadly, did not make that grade.
14: But with the added intellectual challenge of figuring out what # and @ are supposed to mean. What do # and @ mean in Twitterland?
From the link in 4, a few days back:
Omt ndlss vwls.
That one got a laugh out of me.
The '#' is a convention used to create "hashtags". There are at least two categories: the ones for these silly games, and more logical ones such as #[yoursportsteam]. Once you know about a given hashtag, you can run a search of that, and keep updating, and then you're following a conversation -- sort of like an ad-hoc chat room. This relies on people putting those hashtags in their tweets. The silly ones you'll only see if you're following someone who's involved in one -- I have Hodgman and a couple of other comedy writers on my list, so that's how I've been seeing these the last couple of days. (Or you can ask Twitter for "trending topics" and the currently-popular ones will show up.)
The '@' is a way to reply to a particular tweet by someone who doesn't follow you. The expectation is that the other person will search for their own user id in the tweet-stream (ugh), which all clients make easy. Frankly, I've never answered one like that so I may be bullshitting here.
23: Ah, thanks. Various of my FB friends crosspost (?) their tweets as status updates. Now I understand the code!
The truth is, the memes and thread topics are only as good as the people participating in them. One letter off movies would be a good unfogged thread because we are all so smart, and is a lousy twitter thread, because you are following dumb people on twitter.
All my smart twitter friends have been doing well with one letter off movies. It helps that I mostly follow TV writers, rather than actors.
The expectation is that the other person will search for their own user id in the tweet-stream (ugh), which all clients make easy.
A lot of clients automatically find these and display them for you. (Tweetie, e.g.)
You know, before 1995, when I got my first e-mail account, I always read @ as "about" or "around". I feel like that makes more sense, because the circle is going about the letter a. It didn't come up very often, though.
The '@' is a way to reply to a particular tweet by someone who doesn't follow you.
Or to someone who does follow you -- it makes it clear that you're responding to them, and also in many clients means that only people who follow both of you will automatically see it.
28: I didn't know that about it being semi-private. Thanks.
One more obvious and trite lament about attention span. Some of my favorite books are written after an author spent years researching and considering something, and then had a sustained opportunity to write. There are people who reliably write well on blogs, or who have broad knowledge that gets shared well in a blog, but not many.
The irony is that the carefully written books being inacessible even though google has digitized them, while petabytes of telephone jots are blindly archived and indexed.
You should pitch this post's idea to Slate.
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Mad Men trolling
I now believe entirely that Don/Dick as a man, husband and Creative Director at Sterling Cooper can be redeemed. We all knew, underneath that remote and sometimes cold Don Draper personae, that the real man -- Dick Whitman, a kind, sincere and genuinely good man -- was there.
The show is astonishing me. I view it as in part allegory, but as a Joycean, I view the rocks and trees around me as in part symbol and allegory.
Don Draper/Dick Whitman (et al) is America ca 1963.
If the 60s were a watershed for the country, it is when America lost some of its false pride and exceptionalism, confronted its past sins and errors and present structural weaknesses and gained...what?
A process yet and forever incomplete to be sure.
And of course Dick Whitman isn't the "Real" America, what we will end with is some merge between Dick and Don. But part of what Weiner is dealing with is the costs and consequences of American rapacious meritocracy.
Not allegory, symbolism.
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"Rocks and trees as allegory and symbol"
Joyce as modernist was in part neo-pagan and motivated to re-sacralize the quotidian. This is serious hard fucking work.
Just last week, I read another scholar trying to sell Ulysses as a "father and son finding each other."
Fuck me. The schema and experiments are the front, top, and center of the work, and are the options Joyce was offering to modern humans to find new religions...ahh, sorry.
(Oh, I forgot to mention Dreiser and Fitzgerald in 33. Mad Men is better, more positive)
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I'm motivated to re-sacralize the quotidian, too, laydeeze.
Also, this made me chuckle: Rand Paul intones the lyrics to Rush's "The Trees" during a campaign speech. There is no report yet on how many bongs, fedoras, or long swords were in the room.
Uncle William dawdling around Notre Damein search of whatever
paused to admire the symbol
with Notre Dame standing inside it
Pound on Yeats, Pisan Cantos
I didn't mean to kill the thread.
[There is no report yet on how many bongs, fedoras, or long swords were in the room.]
I was there-rest assured, there were none. Fear and Loathing.
I think another important reason why such things are annoying on Twitter but fun on Unfogged is that a thread is a mostly contained phenomenon. If one doesn't like reading about swimming, one goes and reads a non-swimming thread and for the most part it really is that simple. Twitter itself, at least in the limited capacity in which I've tried it, seems to be much less organized and organizable and it invades other social media. If I tire of reading some ass-clown's lame swapping of "gay" and "day" then I cannot go read a different Twitter and if I switch to Facebook, oh, they've set Facebook to update their status automatically every time they "tweet." RAR SMASH. At least, that's my usual response.
Note that I did, in real life, pause to make derisive air quotes around "tweet" after typing it. Stupidest word ever.
"tweet" [...] Stupidest word ever.
The title is still up for grabs, mister!
Ha heebie! I got e-mail in 93. This just shows that I'm 2 years older than you (so,kind of depressing. First was in college). My Dad always said that @ meant "at the rate of" or something like that.
Also, while Planet of the Apus was a failure, Planet of the Apos was a huge hit in certain niche markets.
45: I had never heard that story. Fascinating, and the fact that it was Jerry Lewis is perfect (although maybe Sammy Davis Jr. would have been even better).
My feeble offering is Groundhog Gay.
Dog Gay Afternoon! Like the original, but more gay!
Gay it Forward. #1 It has to be something that really helps people. #2 Something they can't do by themselves. #3 I do it for them, they do it for three other people.
Is it possible for one idea to change the world?
One small cadre of Unfogged: Proving essear right and Becks wrong since early this morning.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water... JEWS.
Dog Gay Afternoon! Like the original, but more gay Santorum-y*!
Fixed.
* In the "man-on-dog" way, not in the Dan Savage "santorum" way, or maybe it is, I don't really want to know.
I see that one of my students proffered "Sour Rapes" and "Mouse Cunt." Oh my!
The difference is that the people on Unfogged are much funnier than the people on Twitter. Dog Gay Afternoon? Very funny.
one letter off movie titles, failed children's books, etc.
How about a one-letter-off children's book? This morning I glanced at the spine of Madeline Says Merci (a lame-o book about politeness featuring little Madeline, by Bemelmans' grandson), and read it as Madeline Sans Merci. That could have been awesome.
28: Actually, in an appallingly enormous piece of fuckupery on Twitter's part, the @username is *not* what makes a reply private. There's a hidden flag on the message that marks it as a private reply. Most clients including the web interface set that flag and insert the @username when you hit the reply button. However, Twitter used to *not* make replies private, so people who wanted the old behavior, to wit: "I am replying to @redfoxtailshrub but my other readers might want to see it also", have to manually do the @ bit.
Also, private here is a misnomer. Marked replies are, I believe, searchable. Use a twitter direct message if you want more privacy than that.
Another enormous Twitter fuckup: deleted messages are searchable.
Also, private here is a misnomer.
Yes, I wouldn't call it private at all -- it's just that most clients don't show it to people who don't follow you both in their normal default stream. Utterly visible via a number of other methods.
I'm pretty sure 58.1 is wrong. They just stopped showing messages starting with @ a few months back, but that's all.
How about a one-letter-off children's book? This morning I glanced at the spine of Madeline Says Merci (a lame-o book about politeness featuring little Madeline, by Bemelmans' grandson), and read it as Madeline Sans Merci. That could have been awesome.
The Berenstain Bears and the Wild, Wild Honky
The Berenstain Bears Got Camp
The Berenstain Bears' Rouble with Money
The Berenstain Bears and the Big Erection
The Berenstain Bears' Mate and Do Book
The Berenstain Bears: I Love Coors
The Berenstain Bears: Too Small for the Teat
The Berenstain Bears and the Jew Girl in Town
The Berenstain Bears: We Like Kikes
60: What part are you disputing?
Actually, I just now tested, and both reply-to @name and manual @name are visible to third parties, like they used to be back in the old days. That's comforting, only not.
I never had any reason to think the @ sign was supposed to indicate privateness. Why would it be? Wouldn't that make it exactly the same as "direct message"?
Basically all of it.
There's no separately-set flag, it's just that messages that both start with @ and name a valid user don't appear in the timelines and device subscriptions. Nothing is ever private.
@ replies aren't private and never have been. It used to be that if you "followed" someone you could choose to receive every public message (i.e. non-direct message) they sent, including messages beginning with @[username]. Call this following setting A. Or you could choose to receive only regular updates (i.e. non-direct message and non-@[username] messages). Call this following setting B.
Twitter took the choice away, giving people only following setting B, with one change noted below. They claimed that very few people chose setting A, and that it taxed their resources to sort it all out (not a surprise since their system doesn't seem to have been designed very well at the start). However, they also claimed that because @[username] messages are replies in conversations, most people didn't want them anyway, even those who chose following setting A.
Following that claim to its logical conclusion, they did set things so that @ replies between people you follow will show up in your subscribed stream (i.e. if you follow @someone and @someoneelse, you will see replies that begin @someone or @someoneelse if they are posted by @someone or @someoneelse in reply to each other). So you get both sides of the "conversation."
@ replies still show up in the so-called public timeline you see when you click on someone's username on twitter.com itself, unless that person has "protected" their updates. This is true even if you're not logged in.
I'm sure everyone was dying to know this and that my inconsistent use of quotation marks can be ignored.
64: No, there is a separately set flag, and at one time a message that started with @username was treated differently than a message that started with @username and had the (mostly invisible) "in_reply_to_status_id" flag set. I can't find a good reference to the behavior, but the flag is mentioned on this page.
See here and here. The first link shows I misremembered what I called following setting B: it was always just the same as the way it works now.
There's definitely a field for the message that it responds to. It's not a flag though, it's an integer ID. You can use it for threading*, and they still show up in the "in response to ..." links.
I still don't think 58.1 describes my understanding of how it does or did work, but I may be reading more into it than I should have. The word "private" threw me at least. And they have certainly changed the behaviour suddenly and stupidly in the past.
For me it's mostly a convenient way of routing automatic text messages to my phone.
* I should say that I used to program on a tool that used that API, and I did that much more than I have ever used the system to say anything, so I may have an odd perspective on which parts of its behaviour are important. All the data is visible in the API responses.
As long as we can agree that Twitter's technical management is stupid, we're cool.
Technical and communications management. Dramatic changes without warning or feedback are a fantastically stupid idea.
But I will also plug StatusNet/Laconica for people who do feel like they have things to say or want to read those who do. Who doesn't like federation and the open web?
Someone should create Loquaci.ta, with a strictly enforced 140 sentence limit.
When I first read the title in 61, I originally read it as "Madeline Sans Merci", and couldn't figure out how you were misreading it.
A Fight in the Attic
Where the Sidewall Ends
Fear Mr. Henshaw
The Loon, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Wasting Game
Goodnight Moan
Little Souse on the Prairie
Make War for Ducklings
Harriet the Spry