OK, which one of you is @BARTSIMSON_REAL?

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/

yeah but i was already following it before the SA article so that can't have been it

oh well i will let it remain a mystery

according to this, initial spike came in May 2011
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=horse_ebooks

ok yeah it was the SA article then probably - makes sense

But is @fart the guy who first noticed the twitter account, or just the guy who wrote the article about it.

alright i think it was this tweet https://twitter.com/fart/status/44315613941866496 plus a retweet of the horse_ebooks tweet i linked upthread that started it all

not to discount @fart, but i feel like a counterfactual universe without something awful would still have seen the rise of horse_ebooks and who is to say it wouldn't have been for the better?

these questions are too big for me to answer

can we get a new board called "weird ilx"? normal ilx is just too 'square' for me

feel like 'weird twitter' is a v fine offhanded condescension, like theres this thing many people are way too into and then this uncool guy comes along looks at it for a second and goes oh i get it youre being weird and everyone instantly feels lame

the ph.d effect

twitter is weird twitter, weird twitter is twitter, dont u get it

i have a less condescending but way worse word for it if you want: slipstream twitter

i don't like 'weird twitter' because it implies that twitter isn't already weird

Twitter user @hell_homer (whose avatar depicts the popular Simpsons character, Homer, in hell) appears to not appreciate the irony that by reaching out to the people who might be concerned about the ‘weird twitter’ label, he is symbolically constructing the weird twitter community within the digital social space. @hell_homer autoreifies ‘weird twitter’ through his very acts of resistance.

graduate school makes people stupid