Adventures in Twitterland

Hello reader!

It’s been a while since last I troubled the keys of the old laptop. However, I have been gifted over two weeks off from work for the Christmas holidays. I was meant to finish tomorrow, but thanks to this dreaded lurgy, it appears my last day at work was in fact last Friday. Which in essence sounds wonderful, but the truth is, I’d have rather stuck with the original plan and not spend four solid days being felled by a nefarious virus.

The missus has been crocked by a virus too, amid a plethora of other lady related infections and so forth… I haven’t pried too much, as is the case with most chaps, a woman’s plumbing is entirely her own business I’m sure. Despite my diseased state, I am on hand to assist my good lady in getting better.

Still, the missus’s illness woes have meant that for the first time in aaages, I have managed to get direct access to the laptop. So, ‘every silver cloud…’ as they say.

Last night, whilst pissing about on Twitter @profanityswan was keeping me entertained with his #MiracleTrain3 tweets. During which he was followed by another Tweetbot @Potato1, to which he announced ‘ALL OF HER TWEETS ARE AMAZING’.

Needless to say, I was simultaneously amused and intrigued, so I popped over to see what @Potato1 had been Tweeting about. There were two tweets. Painfully generic in nature, as most Tweetbot Tweets tend to, be in the interest of purporting to be an actual person.

What also struck me about this two tweet tweetbot, was that it had over 500 followers. I couldn’t quite get my head around this and assumed that most of the numbers were likely to be made up of other tweetbots and the like. However, as I trawled through the list of followers, it soon became apparent that real people were on there.

I couldn’t quite get my head around why anyone wants to follow someone/thing on Twitter that has Tweeted twice with a three month gap between each Tweet. I decided that the people upon this list must have been easy pray for follower desperate Twittery types. So, being a kick up the arse from that magic 100 followers figure, I decided to take matters into my own hands (rather than tweeting at a celebrity for help in this regard) and went on a #FollowBack Frenzy. I think I may have doubled the number of people I followed in the space of twenty minutes.

When I returned to Twitter today, I was surprised to discover that I’d had a one in four success rate in relation to the follows I’d set up last night. My Twitter feed was a nightmare, largely composed of all the strangers I’d followed from the night before. It really is beyond my comprehension as to how people cope with feeds that go beyond 100 let alone thousands plus.

I’ve suffered the pain of being exposed to terrible grammar, awful spelling and worse, txt spk. If I want that kind of thing, I’ll pop across to Facebook. There’s now a rich mixture of all sorts of shit in my feed that I wouldn’t have willingly selected to be there. Much of it appears to be racist, sexist or just plain stupid (but not stupid in a good way). Many of my favourite Twittists were lost in the melee, so I was forced to create a list to keep my favourites close to hand.

I don’t know if it’s a British thing, or just a personal preference, but after having indiscriminately followed all these people, I feel a little obliged to wait for at least seven days before dropping them. I think it’s because I’ve seen this tactic deployed on me and because I never bite and #FollowBack they’ve usually disappeared the next day.

I think my difficulty is that I want Twitter to be a personal experience. I’ve been signed up to Twitter for over two years, but only really started using it six months ago. In those six months I had largely, carefully selected around 75 Twittists to follow, many of whom appealed to my values, beliefs and most importantly, my sense of humour. I like to interact and to banter with people.

What I discovered, and really, I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, is that some people actually collect followers and hitting number of follower targets is seemingly their sole purpose for being on there. To me, this seems to defeat the very purpose of what Twitter is for and is just a little more than distasteful. Each to their own I suppose.

However, from this random act of buggering about following people, I appear to have inadvertently made some new friends to play with, so it’s not all bad. Perhaps I’ll just go on a #FollowBackFrenzy on the lists of people I know and get on well with and see what occurs from there.

Then again, perhaps I’ll just go back to my tried and tested method of gradually gathering in like minded people and just enjoying the craic. Playing the numbers game is quite frankly for sheeple.

Friday Night Neighbourly Nonsense

Here’s one I’ve dragged from the old MySpace blogging archives, to provide something to read for World of Sheds, as she was so kind to dish out props earlier on Twitter and comment on my other offering earlier in the week. x

It was one of my neighbours, Ken’s 30 th Birthday and consequently the need had arisen for them to hold a party. I really don’t know why they bother to actually hold parties in these homes/glorified shoe boxes in which we live? So many people crammed into such a confined space with a surplus to requirements level of alcohol really is simply a recipe for disaster.

Dave next door seems to be wracking up a house party per month as of late. We have been invited on a number of occasions to join them and have conceivably declined more often than we’ve been offered. I suspect that the invitation is just a token gesture and just a cheeky way of letting us know that we are to be subjected to five to six hours of rowdy housebound rabble rousing and drunken singalongs of (usually) Queen songs.

Last night however, presumably due to the 30 th Birthday occasion, they had decided to amplify the rabble rousing and singalongs, literally. Yes, some genius had taken it upon themselves to bring along a Karaoke machine, so we had all the usual shouting x10.

Things started off badly. After four successive songs on the trot, I had to be restrained from heading next to put an end to the hideous caterwauling of what sounded like a pre-pubescent girl murdering a handful of already awful songs. I could only presume that the encouragement she may have been receiving to continue would only result in yet another tuneless, exploitative and humiliating audition for X-factor somewhere down the line. If I had gone round there and told her exactly how fucking awful she was, I’d have been doing her a favour really.

Olivia looked genuinely terrified by the continuing awful racket as we attempted to put her to bed. Luckily she was absolutely knackered and went over sooner than expected. With the child asleep, I attempted to acclimatise my self to the noise, looking to block it out by the consumption of my own alcoholic stash.

A rendition of My Way was butchered by presumably all the male attendees, leading me think the unthinkable “come back Ray Quinn, all is forgiven, there’s nothing abhorrently mawkish about a 17 year old singing My Way at all if you ask me now” and to wishing that Sid Vicious was still alive today so that I could kill him all over again myself for paving the way for idiots to have a stab at mob singalongs.

As I became wrapped in my comfortable whisky fug, my tolerance of next door’s nonsense grew, and despite having a quiet night ruined I managed to enjoy the highlights of yesterday’s Reading Festival highlights courtesy of auntie beeb.

As I stood brushing my teeth just before hitting the hay I became vaguely aware of raised voices coming from next door’s back garden. Seemingly, two of the female guests were sparring over the reputed looseness of one or the others morals and underwear. A strong defence was put forward by the accused who categorically stated she hadn’t been putting it about at all over the past six years since her daughters were born. This is a lie, as we know for a fact that there has been at least three “suitors” in as many weeks. Still, I had to admire the sheer brass neck of her to stand in front of a crowd of people and execute such a lie with platinum coated conviction.

Voices were raised further, and by this time I was joined in the bathroom by my good lady for a good old fashioned piece of ear wigging. Ken, the Birthday protagonist and skilled diplomat attempted to douse the flames of fury by laying claim to the idea that “all women are sluts, every last one of them!” I’m not sure what it was that he was hoping to achieve with his mind bogglingly offensive, sweeping statement. Perhaps in his beer addled mind he’d imagined that everyone, including the womenfolk there would turn to one another in communal harmony and agree that Ken the wise sage was in fact right “all women are sluts” and that would be an end to it.

As it was, Mrs Ken was curious to know if she was included in her husband’s branding of the fairer sex. “The lot of ye’s, ye’s are all the same” came the reply along with some other drunken nonsense about split arses and such like. Well, needless to say, the blue touch paper had been well and truly lit at this point. A grapple between Ken and his stepson (clearly defending his mother’s honour) ensued, along with a whole host of shouting and shrieking.

Fearful of this fracas disturbing the bairn, I headed downstairs to try and bring them to a sobering stop. I opened the back door and stepped out. My presence was not registered by the drunken throng; however, it seemed to be simmering a bit so I held back from making my objections to the rowing crowd known. Meanwhile, the missus was already on the phone to the boys in blue, which I felt was unnecessary but the damage was done; a squad car was to be sent to “check things out.”

I should like to bring to your attention that all of this took place in front of five or so children all under the age of six. It really beggars belief that children were a) even allowed to be there and b) that as grown adults they couldn’t have found the common sense to stop the arguments in front of the children before they became so heated.

I had always previously held back from making any outright judgements against any of my neighbours but simultaneously have always kept myself at arms length, suspecting that they were always knuckle dragging Neanderthals at their core. Friday night’s escapades have only served to prove my suspicions right. I know that it is blatant snobbery but it has made me realise that I really need to find a better paid job and look to move to a better area.

These incidents may be very few and far between but it is the mindset of the people I am surrounded by that I want no part of and I worry about the possible outcomes that remaining here may have on Olivia’s development.

At least now I have the ammunition on my side to warrant blatant neighbourly ignorance and can now avoid those stilted, polite exchanges with the fuckers.

Making the Breast of it

This morning, bereft of any entertaining reading material to help reduce the monotony of my daily commute, I decided to put this time to good use. Choosing to indulge in a bit of mobilular phonical housekeeping (yup, them’s proper words thems are) having noticed that the scrolling bar on my sent and received text messages was minute to the point of being infinitesimally small.

I find it can be quite interesting, trawling through old text messages, as they tend to provide a wee textual snapshot of where I was and what I was up to, and in some cases, how drunk I was at the time of sending each text.

So I found I rather enjoyed my administratively minded walk down this textual memory-lane, having forgotten exactly when, many of the various exchanges relating to social gatherings, gigs and beer festivals had taken place across the course of the year so far. It may not surprise you to learn that my verbosity cannot be confined by the limitations of space allotted to SMS messaging. Indeed, I seem to relish the challenge of filling up as much space as is possible to ensure value for money is gained… although admittedly, I will on occasion, sink as low as to use the mangled bastardisation of our language that is TXT spk … I never feel good about this, but sometimes that message just isn’t worth spending an extra ten pence upon.

Where was I?…

Oh yes, texting and that… ahem…

During the dredging of my text messages, I happened to notice a particularly alarming trend. Sprinkled intermittently amongst my more frivolously friend based forays in textuality were a good number of messages sent to my good lady wife… Now you! Texts to the wife wasn’t the alarming aspect! But rather, the content of these messages. You could be forgiven for imagining that these were heartfelt personal paeans, declaring my undying love for the darling dearest mother of my beautiful child. Or even that they were saucily centred, sensuously sexy, suggestions of lascivious seduction, you could be forgiven for imagining that, but you’d be wrong…

Depressingly, more often than not, they were largely comprised of discussions
concerning food, usually about what would be for that coming night’s
tea-time. And an unhealthy amount of them related to my apparent obsession with chicken breasts, and in particular, their subsequent placement either in or out of the freezer, depending upon the position of the aforementioned chicken breasts in relation to either their levels of frozenness or their approaching of a best before date.

Clearly, this is yet another dizzying milestone in a life that squarely refuses to accept the imposing boundaries of its own mundanity , seeking to leap ever grander heights of banality with each passing year…

Chicken breasts?! Bloody chicken breasts!