OK, which one of you is @BARTSIMSON_REAL?

ban college kids from the internet

This is a blog about my technological, political, and academic interests. I am a PhD student at UC Berkeley School of Information. Since starting that program, this blog has turned into something of an open notebook.

i like "weird twitter" as a name

i mean its NOT a "community" its like a... network? a territory of twitter? "weird twitter" is a better name for those things that eg "twitcrew" or "jokemen" or whatever, which imply cliques or communities

reminds me of when music journalists, especially british ones a few years ago, called a bunch of music "new weird america"

well most of the original weird twitter people came from a defined community, the FYAD forum on somethingawful. since then it's obviously perpetuated into a much bigger thing though

'keep twitter weird' - me, when asked to comment on weird twitter

i just recoil at the the word weird tbh

for me it's more just a style of using twitter (abstract/nonsequitor/funny vs. hey check out this article on mashable)

people who post that way tend to want to follow people who do too, thus "crews" or networks or subcultures

well most of the original weird twitter people came from a defined community, the FYAD forum on somethingawful. since then it's obviously perpetuated into a much bigger thing though

― ciderpress, Wednesday, October 17, 2012 3:51 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right but "weird twitter" i would think also includes a bunch of new people + the dada stalinists + so many bots + like nancy grace

i'm so weird and random

like nancy grace is not part of "twitcrew" but she does exist in "weird twitter," thats why its more helpful to talk about it as a territory or attitude

she is a weird retwitter

weird twitter is usually only funny when its my friends doing it imo

stranger weird twitter is like w/e it's just a stranger spouting off

yeah anyway when you hand me a medium that forces such a tiny character limit my instinct is that its most fitting use is for jokes & nonsense - if i'm going to be saying serious stuff i want the option of having more space to elaborate

I just use twitter to find out and remind myself about shows that's p much it

now lets all go back to pasting tweets we like

sreegs ‏@ahuj9
[playing Guess Who] "Does your guy look like a fucking HIPSTER??" "Uh, no." *flips down every remaining character on the board*

Tech toys get played with and an academic finds significance in this shockah.

every ischool ph.d student has to write about something before they don't get a job.

aimless is not weird twitter

i still like the term better than "youtube poop"

regarding nancy grace and horse_ebooks, that stuff wouldn't have been considered weird until it was curated and recontextualized through RTs

horse_ebooks is pretty fucking strange regardless

if something is weird in the forest

horse_ebooks is curated by its creators now, or at least its algorithm is a lot more sophisticated at hitting funny/meaningful fragments than it was when i started following it a couple years ago

i dont think most would have given horse_ebooks a second thought unless it had been framed as random absurdist poetry

like it used to actually just be random sentences from horse-related ebooks

ebook descriptions, rather

xp the way horse_ebooks is now, they would!

though in the past, yeah it was just your typical spambot that occasionally had funny horse-related tweets. I wonder what really happened there

seems like he's now generating the tweets from all sorts of ebooks but now there's someone at the helm who maybe keeps cycling through them until he finds one bizarre enough to actually tweet out?

yeah there are definitely different heuristics generating/selecting tweets now.. probably also involving human interaction

right, but i'm still convinced they're auto generated. i can't see a human coming up with some of this stuff.

wrong

I made an Andrew WK generator awhile ago, but it never said anything more ridiculous than real Andrew WK.

my bad. guess elmo knows what's really up

this is the oldest one i have favorited https://twitter.com/Horse_ebooks/status/44114266613231616

aleksy argonov

i wish there was a way to search individual users' twitter accounts, or jump to a certain past date

Twitter, Inc. doesn't want you to use their service that way: it's all about the NOW

yeah i understand that, but why even give the option of scrolling down forever then rather than just cutting it off after 500 tweets or whatnot

http://www.allmytweets.net/

i wish there was a way to search individual users' twitter accounts, or jump to a certain past date

― ciderpress, Wednesday, October 17, 2012 4:31 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

topsy.com's advanced search is pretty good

favstar works for some stuff

awesome thanks

i figured these things existed third-party but never actually got around to looking before complaining. so i apologize for that

apology rejected

this still isn't helping me find what i wwas looking for though which is the genesis of horse_ebooks's following

fart wrote an article for sa im pretty sure

this is a decent if incomplete history/summary http://splitsider.com/2012/01/the-ballad-of-horse_ebooks/