Monday, November 26, 2012

I'm Twitter-Famous

Ian Can Read: Twitter Fame

Something pretty cool/terrifying happened yesterday; it doesn't have anything at all to do with books, but it was pretty neat and frankly I can write whatever I want on this thing -- this is not a democracy,[1] is what I'm saying -- so I'm going to go ahead and write it all out now. If nothing else, the True Story will be revealed.

I'm gonna start at the beginning. Paul Ryan is a health nut frat bro with an expenditure-slashing addiction[2] and Mitt Romney decided he wanted to have him as his Vice President. For the longest time, Mr. Ryan's Twitter handle was @PaulRyanVP. After he lost, he kept it for a while; too long, really. Joe Biden's[3] Twitter handle is @JoeBiden. Do you see the problem?

Shortly after the election, I changed my Twitter name to @IanDonovanVP in mockery of Ryan. Hell, if we're all appointing ourselves titles, I may as well do the same. I'm no less the Vice President than he is! How could I not mock him? Look at him. Dude needs to be knocked down a peg.[4]

RUN, GRANDMA, HE'S GOT A BOW
He's listening to Kenny Loggins 

So on Saturday, I went to check if Mr. Ryan had changed his name back. On my phone, I searched for "Paul Ryan" and saw that the Verified Account at the top was named @RepPaulRyan. I figured, "Oh, he changed his name back," and looked at his Tweets. Weirdly, he only follows one account -- The National Debt, which has a Twitter, apparently -- and all of his Tweets were from before the election. I thought, "Oh, that's weird; his campaign must've scrubbed up his account, deleting all of the election stuff . . . AND UNFOLLOWING MITT ROMNEY OH MY GOD AHHHHH" and I sent out this bad boy:

As you should expect from a nobody like me with so few followers, nothing happened. I think two of my friends[5] favorited it. Basically no reaction; my poop jokes usually garner the same amount of activity. I moved on, sort of. The next day -- so, yesterday -- I tried again. My goal was to have more people see it. It was a Funny Thing I Found On The Internet.

The world exploded.[6] I don't know who, but somebody with a decent following decided to re-tweet[7] my update. After that, it snowballed. People kept on passing it along. "Look at this," they said. "This kid wrote a thing." Eventually, it was shared by Mia Farrow, some dude from CNBC, and Chris Hayes of MSNBC. Shit blew up, is what I'm trying to say.

I was on the train back to Boston from NJ after Thanksgiving before it got truly big. I looked at the Twitter app on my phone and saw a Favstar[8] notification about "Congrats on your 100-star Tweet!" and I said, "Oh no, something terrible has happened." I checked the Interactions and that "This bears repeating" Tweet had around 300 retweets. For the next few hours, the app was constantly showing new activity. Every time I checked the Interactions tab, I'd see, "So-and-so and 15 other people retweeted . . ." I was jazzed.

I wrote more jokes about it during the day. I was excited; my Tweet was trending,[9] for chrissakes. Justin Bieber trends.

Then came the haters. I don't remember the exact like timeline of when these guys started coming out of the woodwork, but people started replying to my Tweets in a pretty haterish manner. Some of my favorites:

This woman apparently dislikes Mia Farrow:

Belinda, I make an ass out of myself literally all of the time on Twitter. Like 90% of what I post is about how I love such-and-such Taylor Swift song or "Hey, guys, I farted just now. Isn't that something." Why you gotta be so mean?

Around 10:00 PM, this article was posted on the Web. It is not inaccurate in that everything they posted, well, I said all those things. They cut some things out, though, to better fit the narrative they wanted,[10] which was really interesting. I had never been the subject of a story before. I know the entire tale of what happened, so it's neat to see those events shaped into a Piece Of Journalism.

Speaking of journalism, Buzzfeed can go fuck itself.[11] Once my Tweet hit its apex (give or take), a Buzzfeed journo named Micah Grimes mentioned me and how what I said actually wasn't true.[12] I chimed in, crediting them and explaining exactly what my motives were:

Then I wrote a joke to Alex Prewitt, my friend -- in a Tweet not directed at Mr. Grimes, mind you -- about how I was rolling in a pit of Twitter fame:

For which I was called a "tool."

The state of online journalism:

I just saw this one now, and it's actually hysterical. This person called me ugly and then favorited his own Tweet.

Anyway, yeah. Oh, and here are some more Tweets I wrote about this whole thing:[13]

And lastly:

No response yet from The Donald himself, but someone else chimed in:




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[1] I wish my name were something like Rick so I could be all, "This is a Rick-tatorship!"↩

[2] He knows how senior citizens love coupons, so he was gonna replace Medicare with vouchers. EXTREME!↩

[3] Who is aka the ACTUAL Vice President.↩

[4] And if anyone is to do it, it's me, a snarky college graduate.↩

[5] AFM and JH, I think.↩

[6] This is untrue. A figure of speech.↩

[7] This is like "Sharing" a Facebook update. The idea is that this person showed my tweet to his or her (almost certainly many) followers.↩

[8] A series of bots to tell you when your Tweets reach various numbers of favorites: 50, 100, 250, 500, etc.↩

[9] "Trending" is when a phrase becomes popular on Twitter. In this case, it was "Paul Ryan unfollowed Mitt Romney." Twitter keeps a list of its currently-trending phrases, only adding to their popularity.↩

[10] This, I think, is that a Crazed Idiot Liberal Tweets Lie, Brainless Morons Believe It. The goofy part is that nothing about my Tweets indicated that I was liberal. I could've voted for Romney -- stop laughing! -- and still written those things. Regardless of my allegiance, Paul Ryan unfollowing his old running mate on Twitter is funny. I wonder what their breakup song would be?↩

[11] Earmuffs, Grandma.↩

[12] This, to his credit, is absolutely right. The @PaulRyanVP account is separate from @RepPaulRyan, though both are verified. Can one person have two verified accounts? Is that allowed? Huh. Anyway, the VP one still exists and it still follows Mitt. The Rep one never followed Mitt.↩

[13] Really all of this is an excuse to pimp my faux-wit.↩

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1 comment:

  1. The Galloping PenguinNovember 26, 2012 at 9:19 PM

    I need to find my ass. I just laughed it off so hard it flew across the room somewhere.

    ReplyDelete

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